The problem isnt the English language (which certainly does have problems), its the journalism tendency to leave out "irrelevant" glue words when crafting a headline.
Problem is, those words are required in english for a reason. The grammattically proper headline would be "A cash-poor Sharp mortgages their display factories", which is much less ambiguous.
You know, 5 years ago I might have been incredulous that slashdot would make this up: Apple has also said it may use 'licensing agreements and threats of lawsuits' Since theres basically no way to twist that-- they either said the quoted words or they didnt. But now? Yea, I can believe that the entire summary would be false.
The real fun is trying to piece together what the actual story is from the false, misleading, and inflamatory hints in every slashdot story. ONE day, I hope, they will discover what "accuracy" means.
You dont have a cellphone, do you? Or at the least, we would expect that it was a Palm Pre? (Of course, I might ask why on earth HP wasnt on that list;P )
Your opinion on this is based on....what? Idle speculation? What could well be coincidence? Forgive me if I say that such speculation isnt worth particularly much.
For the record, there was an amnesty program in 2009, yet LordLimecat STILL has not released his tax returns. Must be conspiracy.
You will find this guy has a lot of loopholes employed to circumvent taxes.
"Loopholes" is political speech for "intentional tax benefits to encourage certain behavior". Is it a tax loophole if they lower their tax burden by donating to goodwill? Or by installing energy efficient windows? What about investing in a retirement account-- is that a tax loophole?
If he wants to claim that he isn't robbing the poor blind and paying his fair share, then he should be prepared to show that he wasn't defrauding the government of money he owed.
Im going to go out on a limb here and say that the IRS-- particularly one under the control of the opposite party-- is going to be a much better judge of that than a bunch of armchair accountants.
Or is it your opinion that they are somehow in cahoots?
A task to examine a document that presupposes as true that people can rise from the grave, and presupposes that a human can drive demons out of the sick into pigs, is a waste of time.
You are begging the question. There is no point in discussing religion if you have presupposed the answer.
Otherwise you would turn water into wine on television, because that would obviously bring more people to believe that the Bible has some truth to it.
There is no claim anywhere in the bible that we see ANY of the things you mentioned; youve created a strawman. Just because the
But you can't do those things, because those acts are not possible in the reality that we live in.
To claim that our inability to do something makes it impossible is a bizarre claim indeed. Certainly that is neither supported by reason nor by science.
Homeopathy is not part of modern medicine because there is no science to support it, not because people draw faulty conclusions from the scientific method.
It is backed up by bad science in the same way that many religious claims are backed up by bad theology. In neither case is the bad usage a case against the good usage.
Are they not religious documents?
You ignored the several non-religious ones I listed, and your claim was quite specific about the christian text.
Only with the introduction of the sharing of information and the wholesale rejection of faith acts in favor of practical acts did we get increased yields in crops, or better medical outcomes.
Like in Soviet Russia! Oh wait.
You are doing a gross injustice to history if you want to pretend that Roman violence against christians was about religion. It was about culture and submission; the Romans did not like that Christians refused to bow to the Roman traditions, and that they set themselves apart. To call it a war about religious truth is utterly ridiculous.
Your view of history is grossly revisionistic if you want to lay all progress at the feet of the embrace of atheism and the rejection of faith. The official stance of Cuba, Soviet Russia, and China were / are all to reject faith like nowhere else, and it has not yielded the utopia your statements would lead us to expect.
You are arguing with yourself on that point.
Only if you are being willfully ignorant here. I am saying that those writings are generally agreed to have been inserted at a later time as they are not in the VAST majority of the scriptures we have, especially the best preserved / most reliable ones. This isnt arbitrary in the way the Jeffersonian Bible is; historians are generally agreed on this point, and while you can argue it, you would be wrong. Jefferson on the other hand ripped out any reference to the supernatural regardless of whether it made historical sense to do so.
In the two hundred and thirty odd years since that document was written, no one has claimed that a part of it was not a part of it.
This isnt true at all. At least once a week on slashdot I see people claiming "the bill of rights says this or that" when in fact it does not (ie, "the right to free speech", which isnt what it says). The Supreme Court came up with a "right to privacy" in the constitution, which is hotly debated as that simply isnt there.
Regardless of that the point stands, the Supreme Court is quite "picky" on the issue of "what is in the constitution"-- it is in fact their job. The fact that we have an entire branch of government devoted to being "picky" in that matter just backs my point up.
So, you can't prove God exists, but that must be my assumption if I am to believe your supernaturalist nonsense.
If youre going to invalidate all of my points on the grounds that "but that cant be true because God doesnt exist,", then yes, I will cry "Circular logic!"
What kind of ridiculous non sequitur is this? Can we just agree that GPs post was ridiculous nonsense, that the rhetoric is uncalled for, and that the blackmail should be prosecuted?
I dont think it really matters WHAT is in the tax return TBQH-- maybe youre right that theres something sinister in there, but im sure that even if there were not a huge hullabaloo would be made of SOMETHING. A lunch with business partners labeled as a business expense, a car purchase, the size of his investments... people are happy to make a big deal out of anything regardless of accuracy.
Id rather stick with the principle "The IRS looks it over and its none of your business", honestly. The media makes everything so sensational these days its sickening; can we just focus on actual politics?
Im not saying all dems are democrats; Im boggling that someone had the audacity to label an entire party of republicans as the party of hate in a discussion on drowning the entire GOP, and when comments like GPs are what passes for "acceptable" here.
I have a friend who is a dem delegate of a state, and we manage to get on just fine without calling each other socialists or replutocrats or whatever (though truth be said we're not super close); Im just saddened that so many people on slashdot see fit to throw names around and then call everyone else the problem. I have no doubt that the AC above throws accusations of hate at the republican party.
Only someone one the C** would be arrogant enough to think they could keep this type of information a secret forever when you're that visible to the public and when you're decisions are going to have immediate and lasting consequences for the entire world.
I am unaware of any requirement that a presidential candidate reveal his tax return, or his will, or what he had to eat last thursday.
The IRS gets to look it over, so Im really not clear here what there is to gain anyways; maybe theres some benefit Im unaware of.
A mere one week ago there was a discussion about how the Republican party was the party of hate, vitriol, and all the rest. This, in a discussion started by someone saying that the entire GOP convention deserved to drown in a hurricane.
My mind is just boggling right now at the utter hypocrisy.
Privacy for all! Unless of course its someone we dont like.
Is that the mantra? Is there some reason we shouldnt be going after someone committing this kind of blackmail: "Give us money or we put your private info (potentially including SSN) out for the world to see?" Wow, what heroes.
to ignore those sort of activities for what they are, which is largely a waste of time and a waste of resources.
So it is your opinion that any task which requires literary interpretation / analysis is a waste of time? What about discussions, which similarly rest on biases and assumptions--certainly you do not seem to feel that THIS is a waste of time, or you would not be discussing at all.
You are essentially arguing about what the ultimate truth is that exists in God's consciousness.
I was not arguing that at all, but I DO believe that some portion of "the ultimate truth" has been made known through a book and that an informed reading of it will increase one's understanding of the truth; like with any reading material it is possible to misinterpret it of course. The fact that others will draw faulty conclusions from the book doesnt impact that in the least, any more than the existence of homeopathy supporters damages the credibility of modern medicine.
There are virtually no other arguments about historical documents that can lead to such consequences.
Baloney. Wars are fought over historical facts. You can try to phrase it in such a way to place the bible in some unique category in that regard, but its just not true. Wars have been fought over Torah vs Quran, the writings of Karl Marx, various Intolerable Acts issued by British Parliament, and one could even argue that the Civil War was partly about what a historical document (constitution) said about states rights.
People love to inflict their will on other people, and they love to use whatever they can as a justification for it. You can try to make this unique to religion, but you have to turn a blind eye to huge swaths of history to do so. For the record, for the first 400 years or so it was Romans killing Christians because of their beliefs (either in favor of paganism, or state worship-- not sure if it was ever in favor of atheism).
I have the same opinion as Thomas Jefferson: picking out the philosophical observations of Christ out of the supernatural nonsense of the Bible is like picking diamonds out of a dunghill.
Im not going to deny that Jefferson was a clever man, but this idea of his was utterly absurd. So you question the reliability of the document, but then decide for yourself that some of the bits are reliable based on.....what?
If you trust the historical records, and just think Christ was mistaken about his own deity, thats great, except what do you do with all of the places where the writers affirm his claims? And what do you do with this Christ who is now reduced to a delusional false prophet-- why are is philosophical teachings to be trusted? What on earth is left to study after you arbitrarily strip out the bits you dont like?
The whole endeavor is like rewriting the napoleonic wars in a way you find more exciting (adding and removing battles), and then asking "What can we learn from what I have written?" Nothing, is the answer, because what you have left is based on fantasy and speculation.
I can accept Newtonian physics and discard his belief that alchemy was possible.
Newton's belief in physics was not resting on his belief in alchemy. All of Christ's claims center on his own divinity and authority, so to discard them places all the rest in serious jeopardy.
Okay, where are the True Christians drinking poison, handling deadly snakes, and healing people with faith? How does one detect a demon? How does one drive a demon out?
See below. Also, the way those NON BIBLICAL sentences were written seems to hypothetically indicate an immediate audience-- this is something THEY would see. All irrelevant, because again, NON BIBLICAL.
If these claims weren't in the Bible, you wouldn't be wasting any time thinking about them.
My laptop has an SSD, and I reckon it is a far sight faster than a Macbook Air. My point stands; I dont think you realize how fast I can type an email on a candybar blackberry.
Just as a point of clarification: I am aware that A cause of much disease is bacterial. I dont believe things are as simple as a 1:1 relationship of cause to effect. Bacteria can cause sin, but the existence of malignant bacteria itself can be an effect of some prior cause (sin).
Again, you're side-stepping the meat of your own argument.
No, you simply misunderstood what my argument was. My argument was focused on the fact that you can be dealing with interpretation, and still judge whether someone gets it right or not.
If you want to focus on "is the book itself historically reliable", that is a longer conversation and not generally one Im going to discuss over the internet-- it just ends up being a waste of time if its not face to face.
There is every reason to treat it differently...
Regardless of the subject of the text you are looking at, you generally bring the same skills (critical thinking; deductive reasoning; context / audience / genre) to bear on it. I would hope you do not use rationality for one subject and irrationality for another; though the knowledge used may differ, the basic approach should not.
that does not mean that his teachings have moral value exceeding that of any other philosopher.
You here (and in the paragraph that followed) seemed to imply that we can know Jesus lived, but that his words are untrustworthy; and yet they are worth treating as philosophical truth. I have trouble reconciling those.
It also doesnt answer the question of why on earth you would take the words of a lunatic or liar as any kind of moral guide-- for that is what Jesus must be if not the Christ.
"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."
1) Disregarding the below, thats not an imperative statement (command) by any stretch of the imagination; its a "this is what you shall see". If we assume for the sake of argument that this was scriptural, a plain reading of the text is that "you will see various miracles accompanying believers." It doesnt specify which believers, whether all or some, when, etc. It CERTAINLY is not a command to try to realize those miracles as some way of demonstrating your faith-- which AFAICT is simply a way of testing God, which is to say sin.
Am I saying I think Appalachian Snake handlers are in gross error? Yes. Am I saying I think their testing God is sin? Yes. Does that passage say what you assert it says? Not without some severe twisting of the words, and ignoring grammatical syntax.
2) More to the point, basically every modern translation marks that as "We're pretty sure this isnt scriptural"; It is not in the most trustworthy and reliable manuscripts. Im not going to go into great detail here, but its pretty easy to look up if you need more information. The one other passage bearing that footnote is the passage in John were Jesus supposedly remarks "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Theyre both kept in, footnoted and offset, because whether they are or are not scriptural is more a matter of authorship / accuracy than one of doctrine-- nothing in them affects doctrine or the message of the bible in any appreciable way, and they are of interest as they certainly are historical writings from that period. The chapter numbers reference them because those were set quite some time ago, and renumbering everything would create more confusion than anything.
If God wanted to heal sick people, why didn't Jesus talk about germ theory instead of faith healing?
Because the POINT of Jesus ministry was not to heal sick people. He healed sick people as part of his ministry and out of compassion, but thats not what the incarnation was about.
Your question belies a biased attitude anyways: It regards sickness as some malevolent force inflicted on an innocent populace, which is directly counter to the message Jesus taught. Sickness is a symptom of a world that has rejected God; if
Laptops make awful phones, and TBQH the email, contact, and calendar access on a blackberry beats the pants off anything Outlook has to offer. Its always on me, it always has data, its always synced, and its always able to remind me of appointments. I can also whip it out, write a 2 paragraph email, and holster it again before youve even booted your laptop up.
At least a few of the issues you mentioned simply arent real problems blackberries have:
No terminal emulation-- I used a terminal emulator for years on my blackberry. BBTerm i think it was called, but cant recall of the top of my head.
*VPN problems-- All blackberries support a large number of VPN endpoints. It certainly supports IPsec, with profiles for the most popuilar vendors. Certainly its VPN support is vastly superior to that of IOS or Android.
*Troubleshooting wifi-- There were a number of wifi apps built in, like site survey, as well as ping, tracert, etc apps. It was generally more extensive than what a stock laptop comes with, and certainly my blackberry 3 years ago had more WiFi-troubleshooting tools than my current 2.3.7 android has.
* No voice control (hands-free dialing is recommended)-- This is not true: every blackberry Ive had since the 8300 series supported voice control; it was just vastly inferior to their keyboard shortcuts
Email attachments often can't be opened / viewed-- If youre using a proper BES, you generally get FAR better attachment support than you will get on IOS or android.
Apps, accessories, etc generally fits with what I was saying-- thats not why you get a blackberry, the "keep in contact on the go" is why you get a blackberry. Sounds like your MySQL admins should have gone with one of those Nokia Symbians. Sounds like the rest of your users were never interested in a business phone to begin with. And sounds like your IT team was never terribly interested in BES management.
Which all raises the question, why did you ever consider a BES?
No, self-signed is like a poor-mans version of symetrical encryption. Unless you remove all other trusted root authorities-- which Ive never heard of someone doing, but maybe Im wrong-- your device will happily accept a NON-self-signed cert in its place at any time. Which means that now youre trusting everyone-and-their-mother who has a root signing cert (includes several "interesting" countries), as well as trusting how your device handles recognizing that particular self-signed cert (will it simply ignore the signing status of that entire FQDN? Will it store the thumbprint and compare it against future certs? Will it simply store the CN of the signing authority and trust that CN?).
Plus, you have a single private key that can decrypt any communication to or from your server.
You want real security, do it the BES way-- per-device encryption symmetrical encryption. Allows easy revocation, and makes it super-hard to intercept any one device's communications. Even if you manage to get a hold of a specific device's encryption key, that compromises one device. Even if you get a hold of the master key, that doesnt include the entropy that was added to generate the per-device key.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isnt the English language (which certainly does have problems), its the journalism tendency to leave out "irrelevant" glue words when crafting a headline.
Problem is, those words are required in english for a reason. The grammattically proper headline would be "A cash-poor Sharp mortgages their display factories", which is much less ambiguous.
I thought that Apple was the boss, and Samsung was Leeroy Jenkins.
You know, 5 years ago I might have been incredulous that slashdot would make this up:
Apple has also said it may use 'licensing agreements and threats of lawsuits'
Since theres basically no way to twist that-- they either said the quoted words or they didnt. But now? Yea, I can believe that the entire summary would be false.
The real fun is trying to piece together what the actual story is from the false, misleading, and inflamatory hints in every slashdot story. ONE day, I hope, they will discover what "accuracy" means.
You dont have a cellphone, do you? Or at the least, we would expect that it was a Palm Pre? (Of course, I might ask why on earth HP wasnt on that list ;P )
Why? Its so much easier to just apologize and be regretful if / when you ever get caught.
Your opinion on this is based on....what? Idle speculation? What could well be coincidence? Forgive me if I say that such speculation isnt worth particularly much.
For the record, there was an amnesty program in 2009, yet LordLimecat STILL has not released his tax returns. Must be conspiracy.
You will find this guy has a lot of loopholes employed to circumvent taxes.
"Loopholes" is political speech for "intentional tax benefits to encourage certain behavior". Is it a tax loophole if they lower their tax burden by donating to goodwill? Or by installing energy efficient windows? What about investing in a retirement account-- is that a tax loophole?
If he wants to claim that he isn't robbing the poor blind and paying his fair share, then he should be prepared to show that he wasn't defrauding the government of money he owed.
Im going to go out on a limb here and say that the IRS-- particularly one under the control of the opposite party-- is going to be a much better judge of that than a bunch of armchair accountants.
Or is it your opinion that they are somehow in cahoots?
A task to examine a document that presupposes as true that people can rise from the grave, and presupposes that a human can drive demons out of the sick into pigs, is a waste of time.
You are begging the question. There is no point in discussing religion if you have presupposed the answer.
Otherwise you would turn water into wine on television, because that would obviously bring more people to believe that the Bible has some truth to it.
There is no claim anywhere in the bible that we see ANY of the things you mentioned; youve created a strawman. Just because the
But you can't do those things, because those acts are not possible in the reality that we live in.
To claim that our inability to do something makes it impossible is a bizarre claim indeed. Certainly that is neither supported by reason nor by science.
Homeopathy is not part of modern medicine because there is no science to support it, not because people draw faulty conclusions from the scientific method.
It is backed up by bad science in the same way that many religious claims are backed up by bad theology. In neither case is the bad usage a case against the good usage.
Are they not religious documents?
You ignored the several non-religious ones I listed, and your claim was quite specific about the christian text.
Only with the introduction of the sharing of information and the wholesale rejection of faith acts in favor of practical acts did we get increased yields in crops, or better medical outcomes.
Like in Soviet Russia! Oh wait.
You are doing a gross injustice to history if you want to pretend that Roman violence against christians was about religion. It was about culture and submission; the Romans did not like that Christians refused to bow to the Roman traditions, and that they set themselves apart. To call it a war about religious truth is utterly ridiculous.
Your view of history is grossly revisionistic if you want to lay all progress at the feet of the embrace of atheism and the rejection of faith. The official stance of Cuba, Soviet Russia, and China were / are all to reject faith like nowhere else, and it has not yielded the utopia your statements would lead us to expect.
You are arguing with yourself on that point.
Only if you are being willfully ignorant here. I am saying that those writings are generally agreed to have been inserted at a later time as they are not in the VAST majority of the scriptures we have, especially the best preserved / most reliable ones. This isnt arbitrary in the way the Jeffersonian Bible is; historians are generally agreed on this point, and while you can argue it, you would be wrong. Jefferson on the other hand ripped out any reference to the supernatural regardless of whether it made historical sense to do so.
In the two hundred and thirty odd years since that document was written, no one has claimed that a part of it was not a part of it.
This isnt true at all. At least once a week on slashdot I see people claiming "the bill of rights says this or that" when in fact it does not (ie, "the right to free speech", which isnt what it says). The Supreme Court came up with a "right to privacy" in the constitution, which is hotly debated as that simply isnt there.
Regardless of that the point stands, the Supreme Court is quite "picky" on the issue of "what is in the constitution"-- it is in fact their job. The fact that we have an entire branch of government devoted to being "picky" in that matter just backs my point up.
So, you can't prove God exists, but that must be my assumption if I am to believe your supernaturalist nonsense.
If youre going to invalidate all of my points on the grounds that "but that cant be true because God doesnt exist,", then yes, I will cry "Circular logic!"
So are you opposed to demands for financial disclosure when there may be a conflict of interest
Someone else's tax return is none of your business. Get over it.
The SSN was never intended to be a secret number, just unique.
Reality intrudes. Regardless of how dumb of an idea it is to have SSNs be treated as secret, you would be silly to give yours out.
Why should this information be excluded from transparency rules regarding government sources of income
Because its personal income; when Romney files a tax return, he does so as a private citizen.
What kind of ridiculous non sequitur is this? Can we just agree that GPs post was ridiculous nonsense, that the rhetoric is uncalled for, and that the blackmail should be prosecuted?
I dont think it really matters WHAT is in the tax return TBQH-- maybe youre right that theres something sinister in there, but im sure that even if there were not a huge hullabaloo would be made of SOMETHING. A lunch with business partners labeled as a business expense, a car purchase, the size of his investments... people are happy to make a big deal out of anything regardless of accuracy.
Id rather stick with the principle "The IRS looks it over and its none of your business", honestly. The media makes everything so sensational these days its sickening; can we just focus on actual politics?
Im not saying all dems are HYPOCRITES
WHoops. I think "all dems are democrats" is a tautology, and certainly I agree with it.
Im not saying all dems are democrats; Im boggling that someone had the audacity to label an entire party of republicans as the party of hate in a discussion on drowning the entire GOP, and when comments like GPs are what passes for "acceptable" here.
I have a friend who is a dem delegate of a state, and we manage to get on just fine without calling each other socialists or replutocrats or whatever (though truth be said we're not super close); Im just saddened that so many people on slashdot see fit to throw names around and then call everyone else the problem. I have no doubt that the AC above throws accusations of hate at the republican party.
Only someone one the C** would be arrogant enough to think they could keep this type of information a secret forever when you're that visible to the public and when you're decisions are going to have immediate and lasting consequences for the entire world.
I am unaware of any requirement that a presidential candidate reveal his tax return, or his will, or what he had to eat last thursday.
The IRS gets to look it over, so Im really not clear here what there is to gain anyways; maybe theres some benefit Im unaware of.
A mere one week ago there was a discussion about how the Republican party was the party of hate, vitriol, and all the rest. This, in a discussion started by someone saying that the entire GOP convention deserved to drown in a hurricane.
My mind is just boggling right now at the utter hypocrisy.
Privacy for all! Unless of course its someone we dont like.
Is that the mantra? Is there some reason we shouldnt be going after someone committing this kind of blackmail: "Give us money or we put your private info (potentially including SSN) out for the world to see?" Wow, what heroes.
to ignore those sort of activities for what they are, which is largely a waste of time and a waste of resources.
So it is your opinion that any task which requires literary interpretation / analysis is a waste of time? What about discussions, which similarly rest on biases and assumptions--certainly you do not seem to feel that THIS is a waste of time, or you would not be discussing at all.
You are essentially arguing about what the ultimate truth is that exists in God's consciousness.
I was not arguing that at all, but I DO believe that some portion of "the ultimate truth" has been made known through a book and that an informed reading of it will increase one's understanding of the truth; like with any reading material it is possible to misinterpret it of course. The fact that others will draw faulty conclusions from the book doesnt impact that in the least, any more than the existence of homeopathy supporters damages the credibility of modern medicine.
There are virtually no other arguments about historical documents that can lead to such consequences.
Baloney. Wars are fought over historical facts. You can try to phrase it in such a way to place the bible in some unique category in that regard, but its just not true. Wars have been fought over Torah vs Quran, the writings of Karl Marx, various Intolerable Acts issued by British Parliament, and one could even argue that the Civil War was partly about what a historical document (constitution) said about states rights.
People love to inflict their will on other people, and they love to use whatever they can as a justification for it. You can try to make this unique to religion, but you have to turn a blind eye to huge swaths of history to do so. For the record, for the first 400 years or so it was Romans killing Christians because of their beliefs (either in favor of paganism, or state worship-- not sure if it was ever in favor of atheism).
I have the same opinion as Thomas Jefferson: picking out the philosophical observations of Christ out of the supernatural nonsense of the Bible is like picking diamonds out of a dunghill.
Im not going to deny that Jefferson was a clever man, but this idea of his was utterly absurd. So you question the reliability of the document, but then decide for yourself that some of the bits are reliable based on.....what?
If you trust the historical records, and just think Christ was mistaken about his own deity, thats great, except what do you do with all of the places where the writers affirm his claims? And what do you do with this Christ who is now reduced to a delusional false prophet-- why are is philosophical teachings to be trusted? What on earth is left to study after you arbitrarily strip out the bits you dont like?
The whole endeavor is like rewriting the napoleonic wars in a way you find more exciting (adding and removing battles), and then asking "What can we learn from what I have written?" Nothing, is the answer, because what you have left is based on fantasy and speculation.
I can accept Newtonian physics and discard his belief that alchemy was possible.
Newton's belief in physics was not resting on his belief in alchemy. All of Christ's claims center on his own divinity and authority, so to discard them places all the rest in serious jeopardy.
Okay, where are the True Christians drinking poison, handling deadly snakes, and healing people with faith? How does one detect a demon? How does one drive a demon out?
See below. Also, the way those NON BIBLICAL sentences were written seems to hypothetically indicate an immediate audience-- this is something THEY would see. All irrelevant, because again, NON BIBLICAL.
If these claims weren't in the Bible, you wouldn't be wasting any time thinking about them.
Theyre not, and I d
My laptop has an SSD, and I reckon it is a far sight faster than a Macbook Air. My point stands; I dont think you realize how fast I can type an email on a candybar blackberry.
Just as a point of clarification: I am aware that A cause of much disease is bacterial. I dont believe things are as simple as a 1:1 relationship of cause to effect. Bacteria can cause sin, but the existence of malignant bacteria itself can be an effect of some prior cause (sin).
Again, you're side-stepping the meat of your own argument.
No, you simply misunderstood what my argument was. My argument was focused on the fact that you can be dealing with interpretation, and still judge whether someone gets it right or not.
If you want to focus on "is the book itself historically reliable", that is a longer conversation and not generally one Im going to discuss over the internet-- it just ends up being a waste of time if its not face to face.
There is every reason to treat it differently...
Regardless of the subject of the text you are looking at, you generally bring the same skills (critical thinking; deductive reasoning; context / audience / genre) to bear on it. I would hope you do not use rationality for one subject and irrationality for another; though the knowledge used may differ, the basic approach should not.
that does not mean that his teachings have moral value exceeding that of any other philosopher.
You here (and in the paragraph that followed) seemed to imply that we can know Jesus lived, but that his words are untrustworthy; and yet they are worth treating as philosophical truth. I have trouble reconciling those.
It also doesnt answer the question of why on earth you would take the words of a lunatic or liar as any kind of moral guide-- for that is what Jesus must be if not the Christ.
"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."
1) Disregarding the below, thats not an imperative statement (command) by any stretch of the imagination; its a "this is what you shall see". If we assume for the sake of argument that this was scriptural, a plain reading of the text is that "you will see various miracles accompanying believers." It doesnt specify which believers, whether all or some, when, etc. It CERTAINLY is not a command to try to realize those miracles as some way of demonstrating your faith-- which AFAICT is simply a way of testing God, which is to say sin.
Am I saying I think Appalachian Snake handlers are in gross error? Yes. Am I saying I think their testing God is sin? Yes. Does that passage say what you assert it says? Not without some severe twisting of the words, and ignoring grammatical syntax.
2) More to the point, basically every modern translation marks that as "We're pretty sure this isnt scriptural"; It is not in the most trustworthy and reliable manuscripts. Im not going to go into great detail here, but its pretty easy to look up if you need more information. The one other passage bearing that footnote is the passage in John were Jesus supposedly remarks "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Theyre both kept in, footnoted and offset, because whether they are or are not scriptural is more a matter of authorship / accuracy than one of doctrine-- nothing in them affects doctrine or the message of the bible in any appreciable way, and they are of interest as they certainly are historical writings from that period. The chapter numbers reference them because those were set quite some time ago, and renumbering everything would create more confusion than anything.
If God wanted to heal sick people, why didn't Jesus talk about germ theory instead of faith healing?
Because the POINT of Jesus ministry was not to heal sick people. He healed sick people as part of his ministry and out of compassion, but thats not what the incarnation was about.
Your question belies a biased attitude anyways: It regards sickness as some malevolent force inflicted on an innocent populace, which is directly counter to the message Jesus taught. Sickness is a symptom of a world that has rejected God; if
Laptops make awful phones, and TBQH the email, contact, and calendar access on a blackberry beats the pants off anything Outlook has to offer. Its always on me, it always has data, its always synced, and its always able to remind me of appointments. I can also whip it out, write a 2 paragraph email, and holster it again before youve even booted your laptop up.
At least a few of the issues you mentioned simply arent real problems blackberries have:
Apps, accessories, etc generally fits with what I was saying-- thats not why you get a blackberry, the "keep in contact on the go" is why you get a blackberry. Sounds like your MySQL admins should have gone with one of those Nokia Symbians. Sounds like the rest of your users were never interested in a business phone to begin with. And sounds like your IT team was never terribly interested in BES management.
Which all raises the question, why did you ever consider a BES?
No, self-signed is like a poor-mans version of symetrical encryption. Unless you remove all other trusted root authorities-- which Ive never heard of someone doing, but maybe Im wrong-- your device will happily accept a NON-self-signed cert in its place at any time. Which means that now youre trusting everyone-and-their-mother who has a root signing cert (includes several "interesting" countries), as well as trusting how your device handles recognizing that particular self-signed cert (will it simply ignore the signing status of that entire FQDN? Will it store the thumbprint and compare it against future certs? Will it simply store the CN of the signing authority and trust that CN?).
Plus, you have a single private key that can decrypt any communication to or from your server.
You want real security, do it the BES way-- per-device encryption symmetrical encryption. Allows easy revocation, and makes it super-hard to intercept any one device's communications. Even if you manage to get a hold of a specific device's encryption key, that compromises one device. Even if you get a hold of the master key, that doesnt include the entropy that was added to generate the per-device key.