Slashdot Mirror
Secret Codes Protect Ancient Torahs
An anonymous reader writes "A story on Wired News reports the problems Jewish synagogues have protecting their Torahs from theft. The Torah scrolls, containing the five books of Moses, are hand lettered over the course of a year, are often hundreds of years old, and can sell for $50,000 or more. But Judaic law "dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text", which makes them untraceable and easily sold on the black market. Rabbinic authorities have recently approved two computer-based systems to make the scrolls traceable: one takes a digital fingerprint of a Torah, a second makes microperforations in the parchment that yield a unique identifier."
I wonder if Open Source Software is going to be used for the security measures. I'm sure the thieves will want to know if they have the real thing instead of a cheap copy left lying about to be stolen. I'm sure the price for an authentic copy will just go up in value now.
Jews have laws this tough on protecting their culture, yet they bomb the palestinans without mercy, often killing innocent bystanders and not giving a crap. Sure, they say "it is just payback", but who exactly are they paying back? Screw it... they all look alike.
Is is like the "special" law Jews have. No matter how bad the crime, they can never give the death penalty to another Jew. But they can slaughter non-jews at will.
Look at the guy who killed Rabin, he got a jail sentance because he was Jewish. BTW, the reason Rabin was assasinated was because he was close to peace, he was ready to make peace.
What makes Jews so special?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
That's fine. I'll take my hedge fund money to Canada and let you pay my social security checks you uneducated little worm.
And tell your little pathetic god to solve that problem.
he can kiss my rich royal ass and so can you.
Ta ta. Dipshit.
Since we're on the topic of races, I thought I'd point out a few things (these are very offtopic, but when I learned them I found them interesting):
1) the original concept of races was what we would presently consider cultures -- the Irish race, the French race, etc.
2) the evolutionists were the primary ones who taught race as a biological concept. The Origin of the Species was subtitled something likeThe Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for life.
3) eventually Darwin and others classified a few major "races" of man: australoid, mongoloid, negroid, and caucasoid, each being a varied amount of evolved from our simian ancestors, with the australoids most like animals and caucasoid being the highest evolved creature.
4) The law which was in contest during the scopes monkey trial DID NOT outlaw teaching evolution. The only thing it outlawed was teaching the evolution OF MAN (which was, as you can see, very racist). The specific book that was in contention taught those races, AND taught that white people (caucasoids) were the highest evolved of them.
5) If you ever wonder why our parents and especially our grandparent's generations were so entrenched in racism, it was it was taught as part of evolution in their biology textbooks. In fact, the Bronx zoo even had a Pygmy from Africa on display in a cage with a monkey to demonstrate "primitive" ancestry. Likewise, Australian aborigines were often hunted for their skulls to be sold to museums.
6) It turns out that the Bible is right, and that human ancestry can be traced back to a biological bottleneck about 6,000 years ago, known as mitochondrial Eve.
It's too bad that many people, including many in the Church, decided to believe man over the Bible in this area (which teaches we are all relatives), and to see how much destruction this has caused to lives worldwide.
On the subject of Torah's, I always thought that the way that they were made was cool -- you often had three different people writing it: one writes the consonants, one writes the vowels, and a third writes the margin notes (called the masura). Sometimes this is done by one individual, but I just think it's interesting how the different layers are laid down.
Engineering and the Ultimate
So, you have to belive in non existant deities and follow the rest of the sheep to be educated?
Moron.
---- Booth was a patriot ----