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World's Oldest Book is GPLed
figlet writes "The Diamond Sutra is the 'World's Earliest Dated Printed Book.' It was discovered in China in 1907 and now resides at the British Library." The colophon reads: "Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong. (May 11, 868 A.D.)" Apparently this was version 0.001 of the
GPL.
Any copyrights on the original text(s) and many popular editions (eg. the KJV) have long since expired.
If I copyrighted the Original text(s) of the bible, EVERYTHING that has been taken from the Original text would be in fact voliating my copyright, if my copyright was restrictive.
Do a Microsoft style license agreement. I could stand to make millions.
Unless someone else beats me to it. Huh I shouldn't of said this on slashdot in front of a million people. Opps, oh well you will all be my slaves soon enough....
Note, however, that Revelations was written much later than everything else in the Bible, and not by the same author(s). Don't make the mistake of thinking that the Bible is the result of a single, internally consistent effort. What is said in Revelations, for example, may or may not fit with the intentions of the author(s) of Deuteronomy, or the Gospels, or what have you.
The Bible is not the word of God; it is the word of many, many different humans, who all believed they were writing in accordance with God's will. Whether or not they were right is an article of faith.
I could be wrong, but I believe that most Christian churches, including the Catholic Church, agree that this is true.
Actually, you can get the full text of the New International Version, as well as a number of other versions and languages, at: http://bible.gospelcom.net/
zantispam,
I realize you're not flaming here. You're questioning and debating, which are good things. I'm enjoying this conversation, other than the frustration from the feeling that we're talking past each other somewhat, and that I'm not sure how to understand your point better or make myself clearer.
A few answers to your questions:
Now, what do we mean by "fact"? I take "fact" to mean simply a statement about reality that is true. It is a "fact" that water molecules are composed of two hydrogen atoms plus one oxygen atom. It is not a "fact" that the moon is made of green cheese.
The Christian claim about the Bible is either true or false. If it's true, then it's a fact that the Bible is the word of God; if not, then not.
I don't think that this claim is falsifiable, in the scientific sense. That's why it requires faith (something I already admitted). But please remember that "non-falsifiable" is not the same thing as "false."
Does that clarify or muddy?
No one owns a copyright or trademark on the name "bible". There are many, many, versions (even a comic book based on it) out there and all it takes is a little imagination, a thirst for power, and GOD (or a big government and billy graham or king henry VIII) on your side for adoption. :)
Sound familiar?
-Erik-
Perhaps I should have stated my point better.
You can take a copy of aleister crowley's satanic bible, change 30% of it (to protect from copyright, which the satanic bible is AFAIK), and call it the christian bible and no one can touch you. In fact, you could call your church a christian one, sporting this bible, and STILL no one could touch you!
It takes a leader and 1 follower to start a religion in any given state after paying a said fee. Even less if you pay the $1 to be a licensed reverend in the universal life church, in las vegas, NV. They respect all forms of religion equally and yes, in the state of nevada (and several others too), you can perform marriages.
Why do I know this? Because religion and the figures involved in it are even funnier than the L.A. Improvisation on a friday night.
-Erik-
Because, I presume, it is a fact.
In the literal sense, the Bible is not the Word of God. God did not himself write it. God did not dictate all of the books to whomever wrote them.
Since the books were written physically by humans, and these humans believed that they were writing in accordance with God's Will, and none of them are around today to ask about the subject, it follows that to beleve that the authors were led by God to pen those words requires faith.
The above poster was simply stating a fact that is readily verifiable, as opposed to a fact that requires faith that the AC may not have (or want, for that matter).
A statement that can not be proven is not a fact. A Fact can be proven true or false. If I say to you 'God himself picked up a pen and wrote the exact words which dwell in the bible' you can not dissprove that. It is my opinion that this is true, and it would be your opinion that it is not. But since we can neither view the event, ask the participants, or check mutually agreed upon sources for confirmation or denial it is impossible to prove such a statement. Hence you can not say that the Bible is NOT the literal word of God without a leap of faith which is equal to that required to believe that the bible IS the literal word of God. Hence all of you atheists are in your own religion, the only truly unbiased are those who are truly agnostic.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
... and it's too bad they don't have a more recent version, they might actually release it, unlike certain other holders of it we know...
Who says religions are static? It's true they don't change as quickly as some other institutions, but if they were truly unchanging then the rise of Christianity would never have happened. Nor the Protestant Reformation, as well as the fracture of said Protestants into Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, etc. The same can be said for most other major religions.
So much for having a sense of humor I guess.
Shea and Wilson were making a point, just like I said in an earlier post - RELIGION IS HILARIOUS. If you look at it from a very distant perspective, taking a look at all the ritual and bullshit and sidestepping and modification that's performed over the years (remember, jesus was blue eyed and blonde-haired until people started wondering how he could be that and jewish at the same time), it's damn hilarious.
Morals can exist without religion. Marx and Nietzche (sp?) made some good points, albeit not complete ones.
23 | inv(666)
Hot Dogs | Prayer
Principia | Bible
Kalista | Cross
Do the math.
-Erik-
most translations are not exact as different interpretations are always used in translating phrases. i.e. was it lord, king, or leader? They all are close, and if the source or destination language doesn't make a distinction you can have very different views after twenty generations of copies by hand and three translations.
There are a few slashdot clients out there done in perl, it wouldn't take more than 3 or 4 lines of code to write a regex filter into it.
It's hilarious, I see more posts about how the quality of slashdot has degraded over the last few years, and with the exception of more people and a moderation system, I see the same bullshit, with the exception of more complaints from people who are used to living in a Burger King (have it your way) world.
Get over it. Start your own website. Write the perl filter that your probably going to sit and complain about until someone else does it, but please, don't waste my bandwidth and others bitching!
(note: the only reason I write these is because hopefully they will die down - obviously the web has disassociated people with the concept of an OPERATOR and a USER and what those differences are, despite corporate sponsorship)
-Erik-
Are you sure atheism is safe? hehe. And is it always a good idea to go with what appears to be safe?
counterrevolutionary propaganda! the state should control all information!
Oooooh! That was low! :) Besides, don't you know that the source code is covered by RATI regulations and can't be exported to non-Echelon members?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think Internet will change all this, a lot of the material is available from the Web now. One problem, though, is to find the right stuff from everything that is published, and in some cases, distorted information is distributed. --Kent
jesus christ i wish he did.
The legs of the symbol are faced the opposite direction from a Swastika. It was used as some middle eastern religious symbol of some sort.
Agnosticism is the most logical choice for someone who doesn't really believe in god.
The reason I say this, is if god really came down from the heavens and said "obey me", I'll poke fun and laugh at all the atheists who denied him.
There are too many rules and regulations in religions today, not to mention, that 99% of the most popular religions followers either follow a subset of the commandments and teachings, or don't follow them at all and tend to be a "social church goer". My in laws are catholic and always get a hoot out of the people they never see at church except for the holiday sessions.
Remember folks, love one another only applies if said another is white, christian, sober, and clean cut. Everyone else can go fuck themselves, right?
I'm sorry for all the rants, but living in a christian environment when I was young really shows you how hostile "good christians" are when you tell them you abide by a strict moral code that doesn't include god, but abides by most of the moral teachings of the bible.
At least the Krishna's and the Koresh-types out there have followers who abide to THE LETTER, whether or not I agree with their teachings.
-Erik-
I thought of that very verse as soon as I saw the question. You beat me to posting it. Oh well... :-)
I don't harp about any of that. I don't have a cadre of morons. You don't know me. But I do know you now.
But in the end, we agree: most of Slashdot is stupid, ignorant, and inane. Adding Fnord-isms to the already-low level of discourse here, however, is just about the last straw -- true proof of the decline and fall of the Slashdot Empire, the commoditization of the written word, the drowning of intelligent discourse in a sticky sea of off-topic postings about whatever happens to strike Joe Average's fancy.
What we need is a regex-based comment filter, so people like me didn't have to wade through all these insanely lame "illuminati chaos discord eris fnord bill sux hemos is a hamster zog zog zog" posts. Kind of a reverse Echelon....
Get some.
I propose that all these "differences" are correct ways of answering the same problem from different points of view. That's why I posted in the first place. Doesn't anyone try to apply careful abstraction and meticulous analysis to what all these saints said and wrote? Or will we always be forced to "respect each others' differences" (agree to disagree)?
My heart tells me that we are one in spirit. Why not one in mind, also?
I think that would be the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Not sure the date, but it'd be somewhere between 2000B.C. to 500B.C.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
The original texts (well, the canonical texts anyway - there are no original copies) were in circulation 1700 years ago. Copyright law allows at most 90 years after the authors' deaths. Even ignoring the pragmatic reasons, no it could never be copyrighted.
Translations are a whole different matter. The King James version is over 500 years old and thus in the public domain for the same reasons as the early texts. A number of other older Bibles are also in the public domain.
The NIV (the best of the contemporary English translations in my opinion) is copyrighted - every copy plainly states that it is licensed by The International Bible Society. The terms of use are more liberal than the standard fair use provisions (see the NIV copyright statement.)
Other modern translations have different requirements, but since Bible translators tend to do so out as a missionary calling rather than a source of income, the terms are often very liberal. A good comparison would be the World English Bible copyright or the New American Standard.
I believe there is a project to do a new, explicitly public domain translation, but I can't find their URL and I've forgotten the name.
I didn't have a lot of problems finding the texts translated, using for example the Excite search engine and typing Diamond Cutter Sutra. For example, see: http://www.io.com/~snewton/zen/diamond.html More info: This is one of the most important Buddhist texts in Asia. For example, every Mongolian home wants to have one of these available, it's considered to be that special that just having it is of utmost importance. The text deals with reality, in other words the core messages with how Buddhism relates to relativity being the key to understand how things work, and that there are no self-existing things. Speaking of GPL, in the Buddhist tradition it important to provide material free to anyone who wants it, but not push it down their throat, rather if someone is really interested and wants it, then the material is available. However, it's important ot preserve the original teachings in daily activities, there's the danger that texts become texts with no understanding. Speaking with various Buddhist teachers, they really like the free software movement, as this provides tools for people to use, and the action from this creates more resources for everyone in future. Anyway, the little I know. --Kent
Well considering the number of people who actually read the bible I would suspect that it would be easy to deceive them.
EX.
1. And the Great giant Gates strode onto the battle field followed by the damned.
2. Linus called to his people. "Verrily I say unto you his iniquity has made him lax we shall perservere over our mortal enemy".
3. And Linus stretched forth his holy staff and brought down the wrath of the one true god onto the evil one.
4. The evil one was wrought with the power of the source and was rendered onto the powers of his own hell and tormentors of his own creation.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
The Chinese block-printing technique is supposed to have originated around the 6th century A.D. Hand-copied books written on papyrus rolls or clay tablets date back to 3000 B.C. See the Britannica entry on books.
Even the earliest form of copyright law didn't exist until the 15th century A.D., so it's not exactly surprising that any book published before then would be freely distributable.
well it was moderated with a funny flag
I'm sadden by the fact Slashdot has choosen to corrupt popular opinion about the requirements of GPL. This text that Slashdot has dubbed GPL v0.001 misses all of the key points behind the spirit of copyleft. There seems to be several misconceptions about GPL as it is. It might be preferable if Slashdot would provide a pointer to a GPL FAQ instead of further promoting misconceptions.
Depends upon your definition of a book. Do inscribed deer femurs bound with hide constitute a book? If so, the divination records of the Shang and possibly Xia dynasties of China constitute the oldest of books, dating to the 2nd millenia BCE. The designation of this book as earliest probably presumes a printed work.
There are certainly discourses which date to prior to the publication of this version of the Diamond Sutra, including the Bible, the Hindi scriptures, the I Ching, the Quran, but the texts we have of these works are later productions, rescriptions of previous, now lost, works.
illegitimii non ingravare
I have some doubt unless you say "book" as something produced with "paper" as qualifiers.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
One wonders why, if the bible is so wonderful, there isn't a "Book of Jesus".
The Bible means "books". Oh man. Even the name is badly translated into english... Don't you think we'd be calling it 'the bibila' or 'the bibliae' if they meant for it to be plural? Or would you like to lend credence to the 'poorly translated and badly put together' argument?
:)
;) will already be visited upon you and your place from the tree of life has already been removed, and stuff for misquoting, quoting out of context, or otherwise mangling it?
;)
Or, rather: If indeed The Bible is meant to be interpreted a certain way, shouldn't it be *translated* to reflect that? And if not, why not? Either accept it as accurate and take the words as face-value, or realize that it has problems and retranslate it to reflect the times and preserve the original message. And if you can't do either one, shut up. (that is to say, if you don't know what the original message is, you're in good company, and your ego isn't too big yet.
And did you think that way when you were 10 or 11 because you realized what it might imply and don't think that way now because it seems too silly or massively stupid to interpret it that way, or did you change your mind because all the plagues in that book (whatever it may be, I argue that it isn't bound as a separate book
Boy I'm glad I'm an Atheist.
But the evolution comment was cute.
Oh, and for the dude talking about statistical arguments for/against God: that was really funny! It just goes to show you never to stick an infinity sign (lemniscate, that is) into a stats problem. Or, go get a burger, decide not to believe in god, and still have a possibility of infinite happiness. That's some burger!
---
pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0877730059/ o/qid=942906815/sr=2-2/102-99158 63-0257641 is where you can get it from amazon.com.
You can probably also get it from barnes & noble, but I'm lazy & didn't check.
Surely if it were GPL, I wouldn't be allowed to quote even a sentence from it without making my work GPL as well.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
I think it should be against the rules for anyone claiming first post to get moderated up at all. Especially if they claim first post _incorrectly._
No only a dozen OS, and at most 2 implementations of Perl. The club of such Open Source Project Leaders is rather elitist, isn't it ?
Nowhere in the article mentioned ANYTHING about GPL, nor Free Software Foundation had established back then. Furthermore, there aren't any copyright law back in 868 AD which GPL relies on. Why do the moderators even DARE to mention GPL when it has nothing to do with it?! Were the Slashdot editors get corrupted to spread misinformation, like one of those ZD columnists?!
this is going to give them more cannon fodder when they say "Linux is old technology!" Closed Source weenies are gonna FUD with this...
Dan
The swastika is a sanskrit symbol, denoting "it
is well." Hitler adopted it for the 3rd reich.
one finds it with the spokes pointing both ways.
Patiently for ESR's comment on this....specially since it appears to be Chinese...GPL and the offical OS....
Agreed!
I suspect most religions see it as worse to worship a false god than no god at all, so if any of those religions is right, but you don't know which one, atheism (or agnosticism) is the safest choice. It's not necessarily the best choice, though (even if you're unsure which god to believe in). See a discussion of Pascal's Wager (which argues that believing in God is the rational thing to do) if you're interested and haven't already.
You can find one at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
You're wrong. Ever hear of burden of proof? Occam's Razor? A load of power-hungry cultists writing the bible is much simpler than invoking the ineffable. I'm much more likely to beleive quantum physics than christian/muslim/hindu etc. doctrine. I have faith in nothing. Faith is belief without justification. The essence of faith is giving up your questioning, doubt and reason. I believe in some things, but only if they are not disproved.
I find it incongruous in the extreme that you proclaim a belief in Quantum Physics in one breath, then invalidate every previous civilizations explanation for the effects which we use Quantum physics to explain. There is NOTHING which makes the theories involved in Quantum Physics any more valid than the theories involved in Christianity, OR the roman Pantheon.
You CAN NOT prove any of what you are saying one way or the other. I do not understand how you can assert a belief in something which is equally as vacuous as what you are denouncing and then turn around and claim you are doing so on some basis other than blind faith in what the priests (scientists) are telling you. I suggest you wake up for a moment and realize that your faith is no more or less valid than mine, or anyone elses, and has an equal chance of being correct. I happen to believe that my faith is correct in essence, you can believe that your faith is correct in essence, but stop trying to denegrate my faith simply because it is not yours.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
No, I'm sure that particular thing exists from its own side. :')
I'd never heard prajna paramita translated as heart of wisdom before, although that makes some sense. I'd thought that the translation was the ultimate wisdom, or perfection of wisdom. Sigh. So what's the word-for-word translation of Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya? The translation I have here says "The Lady of Conquest, the Exalted Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom."
BTW, if you're interested in english translations of the ACIP texts, you can find some of them, particularly including the Diamond Cutter Sutra, in the courses that are available at the ACI web site.
In the literal sense, the Bible is not the Word of God. God did not himself write it. God did not dictate all of the books to whomever wrote them.
.. that's right, the same Herman Melville that wrote Moby Dick. Nobody really remembers what happened to the old version of the story, or when it got replaced.
The origins of the Bible are an interesting thing to study. It's almost universally accepted that most of the New Testament was written by Edgar Allen Poe, but a good bit of it was also penned by Emily Dickenson. It's interesting to note that the Old Testament story of Jonah (who, as you will remember, was swallowed by a whale) has two versions. In the long-lost version, Jonah actually ends up killing the whale. But the interesting thing about that story is that it was originally written by Herman Melville
This is all interesting stuff. I wish I had more time to go into it.
are evident. Bastards are 1 step away from being hinayana.
Thank you. Reading your response made me realize that I was argueing the wrong battle. (I think my point still stands, but I'm not going to argue it any more).
(BTW, my Dharma name is Kongchong Thapkay which roughly translates as "Skillfull Means Of the Triple Gem." Guess I haven't been living up to it....)
Myddrin
would the christain bible be considered GPL?
Can I copyright the bible and sue everyone for roylaity fees?
Does it have a copy right on it, the bible that is?
So, that means Hitler is a Buddhist who preaches Nazism as a new form of Buddhism, right?
The Bible means "books". Oh man. Even the name is badly translated into english... Don't you think we'd be calling it 'the bibila' or 'the bibliae' if they meant for it to be plural? Or would you like to lend credence to the 'poorly translated and badly put together' argument?
;) will already be visited upon you and your place from the tree of life has already been removed, and stuff for misquoting, quoting out of context, or otherwise mangling it?
:) I just read the book of Revelation to find out how the world would end, reading it for the wrong reasons. As I matured I learned more about the history , culture, and meaning of the Bible. That's why I think I understand it better now than before. You see, the problem is not that it's badly translated, it's just that it's difficult to translate and difficult for a 20th (21st) century person to understand certain things.
Is this a surprise to you ? My first language is spanish so bible->books makes sense to me since library is "biblioteca" in spanish. I guess this word (Bible) doesn't make a lot of sense in non-latin languages like english and german.
And did you think that way when you were 10 or 11 because you realized what it might imply and don't think that way now because it seems too silly or massively stupid to interpret it that way, or did you change your mind because all the plagues in that book (whatever it may be, I argue that it isn't bound as a separate book
No. When I was 10/11 I did not have enough background to understand a lot of things
Anyways, this has gone way off topic. But it was interesting !!!
- sigs are for wimps.
It says that it is not the earliest book, just the earliest dated book.
When was the ealiest book, approximately?
Have you read my journal today?
The GPL is only the current incarnation of a spirit of openness, harmony, and cooperation which has existed since the beginning of the universe.
Therefore, Linux is a fundamental element of the universe.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
This is a straw man, as Christians do not generally mean that they believe God picked up a pen and wrote out the Bible in KJV English when they say that the Bible is the "word of God."
This is an an assertion; and one that I would be interesting in how you "know" this. It happens to be precisely what many Christians believe about the origin of the books of the Bible (although the exact means of inspiration is debatable; not all Christians hold this view).
Your unbelief hardly makes it a "fact that is readily verifiable." I'll happily admit that my belief that God inspired the human authors of the Bible is faith-based. But I'm boggled trying to imagine how I could prove that God didn't speak to John on the Isle of Patmos when he wrote down his vision.
The phenomon of "Hacker" is not a new.
Galileo, Newton were bona fide hackers. They could have been hackers themselves, if they were born in our ages. French mathmaticians like Pascal, Ferma et al, used to form math clubs and enjoying solve riddles together. That, is the earlist, and purest form of "hacking".
And according to Open Source historian, the idea of "Free ware" is not new. A copy of oldest freeware copyright can be found at the most unexpected place.
This buddasim bible is the earliest datable printed book. And on it's copyright notice it states: "on behalf of my parents, this book is provided for free distribution"
The link between free software movement and religion is not accidental...
Open Source: A Documentary is brought to you by:
"Microsoft, where do you want to go, today"
and Viewers like you.
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
"Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution...
Doesn't sound like the GPL to me--translators and commentators aren't required to distribute the original with their changes. More like a BSD-style or LGPL license.
--Tim
or it means you're an idiot.
I gues sthis shows that authors did have the idea of intellectual property a long time before western capitalism. It is a product of nature not money.
Yeah... Kind of. Many people feel that the Bible's exceptional unity (you try telling a story over two thousand years) is evidence of exceptional divine involvement in its creation. I tend to agree that this is the case.
Where I tend to disagree is that many people try to reduce the Bible to a single, monolithic, God-written textbook where God is considered to have literally written each and every word (this is called "verbal inspiration"). I disagree with this pretty stronly, mostly because there is no evidence of it.
Also, you said:
I would suggest that you take a look at Deuteronomy 4:2, and its cross-references in a good reference bible. Deut. 4:2 says, in part, "Do not go beyond what is written". I think there are enough incidents of this kind of language in the Bible that we can assume it is a general principle.-- Slashdot sucks.
A serious answer to a question posed in jest:
No. The Kama Sutra is an overhyped antique version of The Joy of Sex, whereas the Diamond Sutra is one of the chapters of the Prajnaparamita ("Sutras of Transcendental Wisdom"), one of the most important works in the Mahayana canon. For example, Zen thought is largely based on the Prajnaparamita sutras, with the Diamond Sutra in a special role.
The literal meaning of "sutra" is just "thread", essentially a recording of a line of thought, and not all that different from sutras on Slashdot. =)
Cheers,
-j.
To me, "universal free distribution" would seem like as loose a GPL as you can get. Basically, you are setting absolutely no limits on it's distribution.
Actually, it's so loose it can't even be likened to the GPL. It's in the public domain, which means anyone can do any kind of derivitave work from it and copyright the results if they care to.
#rit.. We put the script kiddie in hacker wannabe...
Go write your own orthogonally persistent OS (e.g. eros), or compiler/programming language (eg. gcc/perl), or something, if you want to be considered a hacker.
I don't care what you say about how much work it is to translate something. You didn't write it. Someone else wrote. Just cuz you translated it doesn't mean squat. I wish the courts held that opinion. Copyrighting something like the Bible is most idiotic thing I have ever seen done, yet the NIV (by the International Bible Society) has a copyright on it. Something that none of the people invloved wrote, came up with, "innovated" or anything else. All they did was translate it. Basically they copied the whole thing. Plagiarism plain and simple. If I took a book in Spanish by some modern author and translated it to English, I would get sued. Anyway, I'm done
I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if any one takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. - Revelation 22:18-19
Of course, there is no restriction at all on redistribution. :)
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
then is the Torah the first instance of quality control?
when you make a copy of the Torah (which is older than the Diamond Sutra), you have to make an IDENTICAL copy, no changes what so ever.
I have the same problem; /. doesn't like < -Lodro
I will note that my (intelligent, researched) response to the poster was marked as offtopice, but his post was not! Why? His is critical of Christianity, and mine defends it. This is a syndrome on /. -- people, get a clue.
-- Slashdot sucks.
I'm sorry, what was I talking about?
But it says free distribution... it can't be GPL without the tricks, traps, and legal red tape to make it as unfree as possible.
Well, this story is days old, now, and this will probably never get read, but...
I don't want to run a special "Slashdot client." That's what a _BROWSER_ is for, so we don't have to run a different application for every resource we wish to access.
And to point back at you, if you don't like my complaining about the decline of Slashdot, Get over it. Start your own website. Write a perl filter. Don't waste my bandwidth and others' bitching.
It cuts both ways. my friend.
"as Christians do not generally mean that they believe God picked up a pen and wrote out the Bible in KJV English when they say that the Bible is the "word of God.""
..."interesting in how you "know" this."
I understand that. My point was not to point out what most Christians generally believe. I was merely stating that, IIRC, the only thing that God did write were the Ten Commandments. Him, Himself, with His hand. He didn't write the books that became the Bible.
"It happens to be precisely what many Christians believe about the origin of the books of the Bible"
Again, you read too much into what I write. I was not stating what many Christians believe.
Going by what I've read of the Bible (almost all of it, though it's been a while), I do not remeber reading in every book where the author states something to the effect that, "God is speaking to me as I write this", or "By the Inspiration of the Holy Spirit do I write this" (though I agree that some books do have this). That was my point; that there is no evidence that all of the authors were so inspired. Thus, it takes faith for an individual to believe that all of the books of the Bible were inspired by God.
Note the word `all'. It is crucial to my point.
"Your unbelief hardly makes it a "fact that is readily verifiable.""
"it [the Bible] is the word of many, many different humans"
Tell me which part of that statement is false.
all believed they were writing in accordance with God's will"
Not a fact.
"The Bible is not the word of God;"
Ahhh, the clincher. This is a fact. If the AC would have said, The Bible is not the interpreted word of God, then I would agree with you.
"But I'm boggled trying to imagine how I could prove that God didn't speak to John on the Isle of Patmos when he wrote down his vision."
Does John say, "God spoke to me", or "Thus spoke God"?
I am truly trying not to flame here. But I believe that to get at facts(what?) facts(what?) facts, one must remove what a group of people believes to be true. If you take all of my statements at face value, they are, in fact, well, facts.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
Leave them hyena's alone.
**>>BELCH
It is not at all uncommon to find things similar to the one described at the beginning of Buddhist scriptures and suttas. It was considered a meritotious act to distribute copies of the scriptures; in China and Japan, the rich would donate to the temples and monestaries to have a copy of a particular sutta(e.g the diamond) or a set of suttas (e.g the Digha Nikaya, or Long Discourse) published. It was even considered the duty of monks to expound the teachings to anyone who asked(notice that this includes "anyone who asks", not prostelytizing to the uninterested or followers of other religions). So there is really nothing all that odd about the inscription on the inside of this particular book. Anyone familiar with this tradition could probably tell you about it and probably better than I. I really fail to see what it has to do with the GPL; to be honest, if I didn't know better I would call this a crosspost from segfault. If you wanna know a bit more about the suttas, check out Access to Insight, or Dharmanet.
PS- yes, I do know how to spell "sutra". It's Sanskrit, I use Pali. These things happen.
My point is - I AM OVER IT. I don't like everything, but I read what I like and discard the rest, only to stop and bitch at people who are bitching.
You've obviously never had rob's job before.
-Erik-
Now THAT's "Open Source!"
The project has people at several monasteries in South India currently inputting even more texts from the Tibetan canons, and in another forty or so years (at the current rate) ALL of the Tibetan texts which have been salvaged from Tibet (hand-carried by refugees), the Mongolian National Library, and the St. Petersburg Library in Russia will be available for free to anyone with a 'net connection and a browser.
I'd ask if anyone has any spare IPO change handy, to contribute to this project. Currently there are several hundred Tibetan refugee women and children, plus the most troublesome and unruly monks from Sera Mey and Sera Je monasteries inputting this stuff. Their dirt-cheap wages for inputting these texts go to support their entire families and their monastic educations (which are phenomenal compared to Western educational standards), plus they're learning computer skills to boot.
Just this past November my teacher (who's heading this project) gave the Dalai Lama a laptop with the full ACIP release on CD. This has already taken off in a big way with many other teachers, who now routinely use their computers to search up various references.
This is about one of the most worthwhile projects in the history of humanity, if you want my unbiased opinion (full disclosure: I've been active on this project for some time, so no bias, nope, none :) ), so any extra help would be greatly appreciated. The URL is http://www.asianclassics.org
A book of sutras bound in naugahide.
(drool)
**>>BELCH
> If I wrote a book, and marked it as "universal free distribution", could someone make a copy it, then copyright their copy, and possibly sue me for infringment?
Something like that happeneng in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhikers" trilogy. (An essential work, if you haven't read it, you need to. And it's not a trilogy, it's really a five part series.) The authors of "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" patterned a section of it after the nutrition facts label on a box of breakfast serial. Then they sent it back in time and sued the cereal company for infringement, thus winning the money to build their huge twin-tower corporate headquarters.
Now whether or not someone can do this in real life without time travel, I don't know. I would date the book if I were you, just to be safe. They couldn't sue you if you could prove you wrote your copy before they did.
Shee wahn't boodge! I can'g get'er no loo-er!
She warn't built' fer this level of mod'ration!
I dan' knoo if she canna take much more!
-scotty out
Oh, lots of them. Here's one:
http://www.io.com/~snewton/zen/diamndi x.html
Cheers,
-j.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that's god speaking. Perhaps just someone itching for control. As the entire bible seems to be in one form or another.
The catholics chose what went into the bible and what didn't. They may have been closed-minded, but to pull off such a feat as they did, they weren't stupid. I'm willing to bet that the "self-consistency" you observe (which I don't) is just a result of that. Catholics trying to control people by pushing their view of theology.
GPL: You are encouraged to give copies to anyone and everyone. You are encouraged to make any changes you like, but you MUST make those changes available under the same terms.
BSD: You are encouraged to give copies to anyone and everyone. You can make any changes you like, and you can use any license you like for said changes.
Shareware: You are encouraged to give copies to anyone and everyone. DO NOT make any changes.
Since this book promises eternal damnation and hellfire if you add, subtract, or alter anything in it, I would call it the world's first piece of shareware.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
In other words, it's BSD-licensed.
This is truly hilarious; having a GPL vs. BSD argument over an 1100-year old book.
Priceless.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
If I wrote a book, and marked it as "universal free distribution", could someone make a copy it, then copyright their copy, and possibly sue me for infringment?
Actually, I think you are misunderstanding the copyright that is being applied. The information in the book, and the way that the information is being presented in the book is subject to the "universal free distribution" clause. The photographer/artist's picture of the book is in itself intellectual property, hence the copyright.
IANAL, but it follows that you are using a copyrighted photograph (regardless of what the picture is) on your website without the owner's, then you are breaking the law. If you simply were taking the text from the photograph of a non-copyrighted book, and posting that up then you would not be violating the law (both from the "universal free distribution" clause and the expiry of the copyright itself).
The board is claiming copyright of an image, not the book. (see later in the thread for postings about translations.)
Translation can easily become harder work than writing, and is certainly a creative endevour. It's not simply a matter of being hard, it does involve a lot beyond copying. A translation is a derivative work, not a copy. As such it requires the permission of the original author, if a valid copyright exists, but it is different from the original and as such embodies the creative labours of a translator.
Saying a translation can't enjoy a separate copyright is like saying any derivative work, like a commentary, can't have a separate copyright. That makes no sense at all.
Back in the late 1950's a bunch of rebels who worshiped the Greek Goddess of Chaos, Eris, put out their manifesto...it was called the Principia Discordia, and you can see an electronic version of it at Fnord.org. It's copyright means that you can reprint what you like...at tad bit more liberal than GPL...and it has been propagated by the Ancient Illuminati for thousands of years before this book. And it is endemic in the computer field too...ever wonder why telnet uses port 23? Why DNS and BIND are words that are also commonly used in the Bondage subculture? And why do computers do such a good job at running Chaos programs like Fractint? By consulting the Principia Discordia, you can find out why...and become illuminated yourself!
Kallisti!
Farrell
p.s. I have no connection to Fnord.org, other than a religion.
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
So, not only did the Chinese have an early version of the GPL, they also had the fabled version 0.1 of the Slash code, too.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
On a side note, has anyone every read Microsoft's licence agreements? Or does everyone just click the "Yes" button? Do you know anyone who actually read the whole agreement, every word?
I never bother reading any software licence agreements when installing for my own use. When I'm installing something for a client or for the company, I'll read the licence agreement-- quickly.
I swear, if commercial software comapnies really want people to read those things, they should include, along with the normal licence agreement, a condensed, point-form version which says something like this:
- You may not install the program on more than one computer at once.
- You are allowed only one backup copy of the program.
- You may not disassemble or reverse-engineer the software
etc., etc...For a more complete licence agreement text, and if there are any questions or legal issues, refer to the complete licence agreement. This condensed version is provided for convenience only.
Now, that stands a chance of being read!
Most ancient uses of the swastika were used to represent the rotation of the stars about the pole star. Hitler reversed it, of course, to be annoying. Little fucker.
**>>BELCH
LOL, I believe is the proper 'icy queue' terminology. Or perhaps, ROTFMAO, or some such.
Indeed.
Charming post, that.
Quite.
Well, this is getting more offtopic as we go.
... I thought like that when I read that verse at the age of 10(11?). I have evolved from that since :)
They should have thought about that before they stuck them together and made one book out of it. After all, they did have a few meetings, and did revise the books some, and didn't allow some of them in the finished work. So they should have caught that error, right?
What error ? The statement is there to be interpreted. No "error".
And the Bible was not stuck as one book per se, it was always clear from the beginning that it was a collection books, hence the word biblia meaning books.
And you'd better consider if, by quoting that verse out of context, your immortal soul is at risk. It might be safer to just not quote the Bible, and especially don't translate it. You might be damned for your good works. I'm going to stick to Atheism, where it's safe.
Heh
- sigs are for wimps.
You're wrong. Ever hear of burden of proof? Occam's Razor? A load of power-hungry cultists writing the bible is much simpler than invoking the ineffable. I'm much more likely to beleive quantum physics than christian/muslim/hindu etc. doctrine. I have faith in nothing. Faith is belief without justification. The essence of faith is giving up your questioning, doubt and reason. I believe in some things, but only if they are not disproved.
The leap of _belief_ required to say the bible is not the word of the christian/jewish god is much smaller than that required to believe the bible is the word of that god. The christian god is no more valid than the roman pantheon, the irish pagan gods and nonhuman races, the egyptian gods. The silliest thing is - you christians are not even worshipping your *own* god - you're worshipping the jew's god. Most people in america are of european descent. You should be worshipping the roman gods, the celtic gods, or the norse gods, not some random (and bloodthirsty) god from a group of sheep farmers from a fault valley who'd been out in the desert too long.
www.infidels.org
www.lucifer.com
virus.lucifer.com
Except that the brief mention you cite exhibits evidence of being forged in later, not actually appearing in the original text. For one thing, the statement itself does not fit the 'speaking' style of the rest of the text.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Rather, a true GPL'ed book would be... The Bible!
Think about it: at first, there was only a couple of books. Then, a lot of people made contributions. A commity (the Vatican) decides what goes in and what doesn't go into a "kernel", or approved dogma. Then they release the new version. People are free to branch the Bible, and indeed, we've seen a few kernel forks over the years. The most important was probably the "Kernel fork 1", where the Old Testament ('Torah' release) and the Old/New Testament forked and formed two separate developper's groups. A few developpers (called apocryphs) saw their contribution cut from the codebase.
Unfortunately, after the kernel fork, the source became closed and proprietary. There's been an attempt to rebuild the codebase by one Muhammed, but it was closed-source and a thousand years later, there's not even been a patch or a single Service Pack.
Oh, did I mention there's also a distro war going on?
"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."
This is similar to when the City of Los Angeles start charging cars $1.00 for the "priveledge" of driving through Griffith Park. Well, someone dug through the old realestate records and brought into THE LIGHT the fact that the original land owner (Mr. Griffith) donated the land to the city in 190x "ON THE CONDITION THAT IT REMAIN FREE FOR ALL TO USE AND ENJOY". So he sued the city and won and traveling the road became free again. Of course, those who were previously charged the fee didn't get their dollar(s) back since no receipts were ever issued. How convenient.
So no one can ever charge for copies of the Diamond Sutra either. Nyaaa!
The photographer/artist's picture of the book is in itself property, hence the copyright You see, while some people may find this perfectly fine, I'm one to wonder how this "I'm not copyrighting the work, I'm copyrighting my copy of the work" could be abused in the real world. Basically, are screenshots of copyrighted computer programs in themselves under the same copyright? If I took a photograph of a printed sheet of code, do I then own my photograph, with full rights of copyright? If I take a picture (or photocopy, of which there is no difference) a book, do I then own full rights to the picture? And even further, if I use a microphone connected to my computer to record a copyrighted song being played on the air, do I then have full rights to my recording? Do you see where the role of original copyright falls into play?
Many people feel that the Bible's exceptional unity (you try telling a story over two thousand years) is evidence of exceptional divine involvement in its creation. I tend to agree that this is the case.
Why? There are some bits which get repeated. But presumably the later authors were sometimes just a bit familiar with what the previous ones had written, so maybe a hint of plagiarism crept in? At least subconsciously since they all believed roughly the same thing.
And there are lots of bits that are different too.
axolotl
Most Christians, in my experience, are quite aware that the books we now bundle as "Scripture" were composed by various human authors, at various times, and consist of various styles and genres of writing. Even the fundamentalist literalist inerrantists understand this point. :^)
[Which I've always thought had interesting implications for the "no tampering" clause at the end of Revelation. Is the scope supposed to be Revelation only, or the entire canon ... ?]
If it's such an article of faith, why do you state the negative as such a fact?
Agree that what is true? That the Bible had many different human writers? Sure, everybody knows and agrees on that point. That the Bible is not "the word of God"? I don't think so.
While the exact relationship of "word of God" and "Scripture" is ... somewhat nuanced and open to debate amongst Christians (I know, I've been in some of those debates), in general, every Christian group accepts that the Bible (with some disputes over exactly which writings make it up) is authoritative in matters of faith and morals, and is generally accurate if not inerrant/infallible/whatever.
Minor history lesson -- the Catholics did not formally define what books make up the Bible until the (post-Reformation) Council of Trent in 1546. There is no "official" Protestant list (how could there be, we're so bloody disorganized :^) but the general consensus is the list from Trent, minus the books of the "Deuterocanon/Apocrypha," for a total of 66 books. Trent was also well after the Great Schism of 1054, so it is not accepted by the Orthodox either, and I have no idea how they define the canon.
This is all just a little too strange for me... but I like it!
Time for another blunt, methinks
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Copyright applies to any organised data, and is copyrighted by the person doing the organising. Thus, the photograph is copyright to the photographer, and the book to the author.
(This is notwithstanding that the author has been dead over 50/70 years, and so copyright would have expired, even if the author had not GPLed it.)
It also means that you would be on -very- shaky ground, if you were to take a photograph of the same book, under identical viewing conditions, with an identical camera, at an identical angle. My understanding is that that would be a breach of copyright, even though you did not technically copy the original photograph. Any other photograph, taken under any other condition, would almost certainly be a-ok.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
the GPL is not the beginning, nor the end of public domain/free access licensing of intellectual property
The contents of the Bible were ostensibly chosen from a variety of material in circulation in the fourth century (roughly 320 a.D. IIRC) at a coucil of bishops, shortly after Constantine converted to Christianity and theoretically abolish state religions in the Empire.
/. Please consider this a disclaimer distancing myself from any arguments for or against the existence of God, the Virgin birth or the merits of Christianity, Catholocism or any other religion.
The church as it existed then bore little resemblance to modern Catholicism or any other modern sect of Christianity - blaming the Catholics isn't very accurate.
The story as I recall it is that no one could agree which books ought to be considered sacred, and which ought to be rejected. So, a whole bunch were left on a table in a closed room, and they figured God would remove those books that weren't right. Sometime later, the room was reopened and only some of the books were still on the table (the other ones being on the floor, I think) and that's how the New Testament was made.
Yeah, I have a hard time believing the story too. Certainly its remarkable how the New Testament corresponded neatly with Constantine's own theology.
But the New Testament is mostly internally consistent, and only mildly inconsistent with external information. Certainly Josephus brief mention of Christ in the Annals (although not by name) makes it hard to reject his existence outright.
As for the rest, I have no desire to debate theology on
My cat (the older one) hacks fairly regularly. I'm a little worried that the hairball medicine I give her doesn't help her cough anything out. I hope it isn't something more serious.
The younger cat is more of a free spirit. She never hacks at all. Walks on the table once in awhile, but usually knows better.
Yep. That's what the bigger kiddies do. That's why there are 10,000 OSes out there, and 13,458 implementations of Perl.
Right, the traditional maintenance of the teachings is by monks, who have their own organization for providence of food, clothing and shelter. Moving into the modern world is smoother if books are printed and distributed by us householders, so instead of giving the books away and begging for their personal upkeep, they just sell the books. Only a minor adjustment!
The Hebrew phrase, more accurately translated as "thou shalt not murder" somehow got revised to "thou shalt not kill". The difference in meaning between these two phrases is vast. Fucking revisionists.
Got any way to prove that God did speak to John on the Isle of Patmos?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Biblical diddling's been going on for millenia.
Hebrews seem to have bundled V1.0. Then Irenius collected the first Christian edition. The Muslems made one. Jefferson made one. Elizabeth Stanton made one. Several popes each made one. Catholics and Protestants have different book lists. The Mormons made amendments.
Frankly, the only thing that leaves me as puzzled about where Waldo is, is Linux.
Look up 2 Tim 3:16, it says "All Scripture is God-breathed..." ('Scripture' referring to the Bible)
Of course, I'm a big old dork replying to a joke article as if it were serious, but...
If you look at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html you'll read:
As a general rule, I don't believe that it is essential for people to have permission to modify all sorts of articles and books. The issues for writings are not necessarily the same as those for software. For example, I don't think you or I are obliged to give permission to modify articles like this one, which describe our actions and our views.
The GPL was specifically designed for information which is itself, in essence, a tool. Information which expresses ideas, philosophies, religious views, and so on, ought to be modifiable and copiable, but under distinctly different terms and conditions, to avoid misrepresenting the originaly author.
Don't get me wrong, the over-abundance of broad copyright laws is a big problem in non-technical writing, too. (It slows down the evolution of our culture, in my opinion.) It's just that the GPL isn't the right fix.
I know, I know... it was a joke. :)
In my humble opinion, this is because religion encompasses the most challenging topics. Just answering the eternal questions for oneself is challenging. Developing a credible and scrupulous new religion is damn hard. Yet, I don't think it's impossible and I encourage everyone to try. Who knows, you might be the next Buddha or Mohammed or Christ.
I used to be an anonymous coward but then God spoke to me and I saw the truth. Nothing was ever the same after that. Wow, man, what a rush. :-)
Of course, by "this book", John means the book of Revelation, the one he was writting.
:)
The Bible didn't exists in John's time.
This verse always get misinterpreted.
- sigs are for wimps.
depends...
are you arguing over the translation or the original document?
if it's the translation, that could be construed as an original piece due to liberties that the translator took in bringing the diamond sutra over to another language (a port if you will). However, it's not truly a port in the strictest sense since "poetic license" could have been taken on the wording of passages.
in this case, it becomes an open-source model, but not GPL? correct me if I've come to some bad conclusions here.
I dunno, I don't really want to be part of your elite group.
John was only referring to that specific book.
:-)
Keep in mind that the New Testament as we know it wouldn't be assembled for years to come.
Don't feel bad; everybody reads that and immediately leaps to the same conclusion.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
It's fairly common for various "movements" to claim lineage to ye olde ways. New age types (Wiccans, etc.) claim it all the time (real Pagans from the Middle Ages would drive them all outta the cottage, with all their 'enlightened' clap-trap eclecticism). Renaissance Fest(tm) is lots of fun, though.
The philosophers of the early Middle Ages tried it too. Everybody wanted to embrace the Greek and Roman philosophies and claim lineage to them.
People just feel a need to ground themselves in a (usually made up) past. In particular this is important for Americans, and we have convenient freedom to do so, because we tear down our 'ruins' every other decade, and never, ever have anything real to look back on.
It's listed as humor. Lighten up.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
You can't really say "the Catholics" in this case, at least as separate from the rest of Christianity. The Councils which canonized the Bible (except for leaving the status of the Old Testament Apocrypha / Deuterocanonicals up in the air) were held c. 400 AD, well before the Great Schism and over a millennium before the Reformation. The Church which held said councils was the only Christianity there was at the time; that is why all Christian religions share the same Bible, more or less.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
What exactly are you talking about?
All present philosophies are developed by man, and therefore have been influenced by human experience and ideas that have come before.
Nothing is created in a vacuum.
Fnord!
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
...removed a lot of text (of course). It also omitted _that_ clause. Take three steps away from the editor and then...run.
i was
It doesn't seem to give permission to modify the book and pass it along, but also isn't being placed in the public domain, so I'd say it's more accurately labeled as the first instance of freeware.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I fail to see how it is interesting that the world's oldest dated book was intended for free distribution.
It would be interesting if it included a GPL-like license, but while the GPL includes a great deal of verbiage to prevent others from restricting the freedom of the work, this just says it was made for free distribution.
can we buy it on the Web? :)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
So if the Kama sutra is for what you pleasing the wife, is the Diamond sutra what you need to read to get her to be your wife? :)
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
After another 43 days and it will be Y2K compliant :)
This is tangental, and it's been quite a while since I've done any significant religious reading, but IIRC it's good to note that God is not above revising his own writing. The current ten commandments are the second draft - Moses smashed up the first, and there were revisions made. (on a related note, someone once told me that the reason there are two tablets is b/c each is a copy of the other - it's a contract, though God's copy was also kept in the ark)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
while the "diamond sutra" is free for distribution, the author goes to no lengths to say that you have to distribute it unmodified, or include the source code. which is pretty obvious, seeing as how that derivative and highly popular "kama sutra" book seems to have diverted all the attention.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
The most common Bible today is the King James version, which was given the British version of the GPL by King James.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I looked at almost everything that was on the linked site. Not only does there not appear a translated version of the text (Really haven't reveived my copy of Ancient Religious Chinese For Dummies(tm) yet). Why is this that interesting? The bible, the Koran, and other publications are usually published for the "good of the people" and "free".
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
A lot of every kind of material is available from the Web now, and books aren't obsolete just yet. And with all the work that's gone into ensuring fidelity of transmission over the centuries, the Net would indeed seem a great peril; perhaps modern methods could be adopted for that as well (#insert vision of pgp-signed commentaries...) X-(: (-- sitting smilie, eh)
Dammit! Put in <, watch it preview correctly, and previewing *makes it wrong*! Grr!
X<-(: (<-- the real sitting smilie)
It's impossible for this to be GPL: it specifically says: for "FREE" distribution, it says nothing about infecting derived works.
The clause in Revelation is just for Revelation.
Because it just mentioned "this book".
Of course that's not saying that we can go tamper with the other books...
I'm only slightly surprised to find another ACI person here - it makes sense to me that Mahayana Buddhists would tend to be attracted to Open Source!
VATICAN CITY, Rome: The Pope announced today that work on Bible 1.9a has been progressing smoothly and that the church is now accepting beta tester appliations for the new version 2.0 Bible. Prospective beta testers may sign up at www.bible2.com and must agree to abide by the church's NDA.
Open source advocates voiced concern over the new Bible 2.0. "We're concerned that it illegaly uses licensed scripture from previous versions of Bible ", said Linux Stallman, who has been accused of heresy for distributing free bibles under the Gideons Public License (GPL). "It will be plain to see if they've vilolated the GPL when Bible 2.0 beta is released next month."
Sources inside the Vatican indicated that Bible 1.9a is based upon the Bible Scripture Distribution (BSD), which allows for-profit congregations to incorporate passages without having to return their modifications to the community.
Actually, all they have done is copyrighted the actual graphic file. I believe that you would need to goto the actual book itself and take your own picture if you wanted to place it on your homepage. Patrick Carroll flipper9@gte.net
You can't copyright something that is in itself a violation of someone else's copyright, so in that sense the answer to many of you hypotheticals is "no".
however, if you take a photo of someone's code, yes, you'll own the copyright on the photo, but you have no more right to the code itself than you did before the photo was taken.
As another example, if you take a photo of a random woman on the street, you own the copyright for that photograph, BUT -- you can't distribute or sell that photograph or copies without gaining legel right to distribute her likeness. Her right to control the use of her likeness prohibits your exercise of copyright until you can work out a deal, see?
Of course, if she later shoots someone, then it's an image of a "newsworthy" person, and you can do a lot more with it. That's where fair use comes into play at the same time as her right to protect her likeness begins to diminish (as she is now "a celebrity" and less protected). And you can enforce your copyright on that now-valuable image to prevent others from making money off of what you created...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Haha ! That's a classic one. I've heard it before too.
Another variation is pre vatican II Catholics saying "If Latin was good enough for Jesus...".
It's amazing how the world view for some people is centered around their country and their era.
- sigs are for wimps.
"If it's such an article of faith, why do you state the negative as such a fact?"
Because, I presume, it is a fact.
In the literal sense, the Bible is not the Word of God. God did not himself write it. God did not dictate all of the books to whomever wrote them.
Since the books were written physically by humans, and these humans believed that they were writing in accordance with God's Will, and none of them are around today to ask about the subject, it follows that to beleve that the authors were led by God to pen those words requires faith.
The above poster was simply stating a fact that is readily verifiable, as opposed to a fact that requires faith that the AC may not have (or want, for that matter).
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
And the Bible has been changing and changing for a very long time now. After taking a Classics course (god what a waste of time) you can see just how things like old texts change. The KJ bible is close, but noone can say that it is a truly perfect translation of the original texts.
The king james version of the bible was written at the behest and under the scrutiny of king james, a corrupt old ~16th century monarch. It was translated from the septuagint, IIRC, a latin translation of older (no originals remain) texts. While usable, it is far the inferior of most modern english translations in terms of accuracy. (NRSV is best for truth to actual translations, while NIV is pretty good for capturing the spirit of the original text, or so I've been told.)
Modern translations tend to be closer to the oldest and most reliable manuscripts than the KJV, the opposite of what you suggest. Unlike the KJV, newer translations are typically translated from the oldest and most accurate manuscipts, not from the last version of the bible some guy made 5 months ago. There are other reasons for increased accuracy -- there are simply more manuscripts, (the dead sea scrolls, for example) there is greater (free beer) access to them -- you just have the files on your computer -- and we don't believe that the (already once-translated) latin is for some reason more accurate than the older greek and hebrew.
Translations are more accurate because of other reasons, like we don't believe that women are evil or should be suppressed any more, and translators these days (www.wycliffe.org, although I don't see much meat on their site) tend to have hardcore computational linguistics tools that really weren't available 500 years ago.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
This liscense is much more like the open content liscense than like the GPL. The colophon says that redistribution is allowed, but doesn't speak of modifications. Therefore, any modifications of his text would have to be distinguished from the original (which is how the open content liscense works), which is contrary to the GPL (which forbids authors from requiring credit be due to them or the distinguishing of derived content from the original content).
;)
Of course, after a eleven-hundred years, it's all public domain, although with the rate at which Disney and the late Rep. Sonny Bono were conspiring to extend the duration of copyrights, such an assumption might soon be invalid.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Can you teach me to Hack? Isn't hacking illegal?
If you follow that link, you'll find that whoever took the photo of the book (The British Library Board), has slapped a 1997 copyright on it. This in itself brings up an interesting question.
If I wrote a book, and marked it as "universal free distribution", could someone make a copy it, then copyright their copy, and possibly sue me for infringment?
To me, "universal free distribution" would seem like as loose a GPL as you can get. Basically, you are setting absolutely no limits on it's distribution.
So here come the brits (no offense), who reproduce Mr. Wang Jie's (if that's a female name, forgive me) work. And they copyright their work?
Either way this could be good or bad. If you had some copyrighted software you wanted to use, you can just copy it, and copyright your copy.
When it comes down to it, I honestly believe that the original copyright stands. Thus, the British Library Board's claim at copyright is invalid, and I can copy this picture and put it up on my homepage.
Traditionally the dharma [Buddhist understanding] and teachings about the dharma should not be sold. In fact IIRC, in the past it was considered a really bad move to sell liturgies.
Of course, in the modern world, where most ideas are conveyed through books, and it would be almost impossible to convey the dharma without having people sell books, its no longer considered a problem. There are many very good Dharma book publishers who have contributed greatly to the spread of Buddhism and made a good living at the same time.
Before one of the /. blowhards starts up: open source or what have you works because it /can/ be improved on by man. If you believe what the bible says, then it can only be improved on by God. So it wouldn't work well at all as open source.
Of course, the decision of what to include in the Bible was kind of a meritcocracy: those books which were considered by everyone to be divinely inspired were included. There were many that didn't quite make it. Kind of like the "Cathedral-style" free software, (e.g. BSD, Apache, even the kernel for that matter) where a board of "wise men" determines what goes in the official release.
-- Slashdot sucks.
the author destroyed all copies of his previous book, "The Big Wu" ...
GPL consuming everything in its path as usual.
Or is that just its advocates ?
I've only studied Tibetan Buddhism seriously, so I don't really know what non-Tibetan lineages call the Sutra. However, I do know how my lineage represents the history of the Sutra, and that's what I'm talking about here.
BTW, bear in mind that there are actually quite a few Tibetan lineages, not just one. My teacher's lineage is Gelugpa, which is the same lineage that His Holiness the Dalai Lama comes from. The other lineages, Tibetan or otherwise, aren't "wrong" - they just have different approaches to Buddhism that work well for different practitioners.
The idea of a prejudiced Buddhist is kind of sad - one of the first things we're taught is how utterly stupid it is to ever judge someone else. I wish I were better able to take this lesson to heart, but regardless of my success at avoiding judging others, I think it's something that all Buddhists of all lineages should keep in mind with respect to other lineages, Buddhist or not.
...think about it...
After over 1000 years or so, you can still read the thing since Chinese is still essentially unchanged.
I guess it was Y1K compliant afterall...
Of course, the title is empty of any nature of its own, so maybe I shouldn't be making corrections... :')
And is not making corrections likewise void of self-nature?
That's "Diamond *Cutter* Sutra."
Maybe, but it's usually just known as the Diamond Sutra. Is it not the case that "Vajracchedika-prajnaparamitasutra" can
be translated as:
Vajra diamond
chedika cutter
prajna wisdom
paramita heart
So it actually comes out like
"Diamond Cutting Heart of Wisdom Sutra"?
Great link you posted. Thanks.
If you want to be considered human stop writing such stupid shit to counter stupid shit.
I'm smarter than you. Come on you say that you are older ACT OLDER!!!!!!!!!!1
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
(The Talmud is, umm, sort of like the 2,500-year-old archives of soc.culture.jewish, back when you had to be a rabbi to get on the Net.)
As I was saying, there's a story in the Talmud about a little crisis the Jewish sages faced, when there were only three Torah scrolls left in the world. (A "Torah scroll" is a single scroll containing the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy, in the original Hebrew.) All three scrolls had slight variations in the text, and the sages had no way of knowing which variation was more likely to be correct. Since the sages believed that every word of the Torah is from God, and sometimes a single word had vast legal consequences, this was a problem.
So they copied out a new scroll based on the other three, as follows: Whenever the old scrolls disagreed about a certain verse, the new scroll would follow the "majority opinion" of the old scrolls. After the transcription was complete, they declared the new scroll to be The Canonical Sacred Text, and the old scrolls were declared Unfit For Ritual Use.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Except that 2 Tim. 3:16 is of no use in discerning exactly which writings constitute Scripture in the first place ...
... and at this point, we get deep enough into the development of the canon that I think we are now "news for theology nerds -- stuff that really matters" ...
The must be the earliest example of a swastika printed on a non-white chest... I hope those evil SOB's don't see it.
The Diamond Cutter Sutra is one of the main Buddhist teachings on Emptiness. You can get it in Tibetan, along with a lot of other Buddhist texts in Tibetan at The Asian Classics Input Project. Yes, that's right, it's available on the web, and also in CD form. Ain't technology wonderful?
Just pick up and axe, machate, sword, or blunt butter knife; choose a suitable victim who dosn't even consider you a threat and has no ability to retaliate; then start to puncture their epidermis with swift brutal strokes of said object.
------------Excerpt from "Hacking the Easy Way, by A. Coward