Can I ask what would be wrong with Sam's Club saying "We personally do not approve of this, and we think it would offend the majority of our customer base, so we will not sell this product"?
I thought that was one of the benefits of being a business owner, that you could make decisions like that in line with your values and your bottom line.
In fact the majority of Christians accept evolution, effectively acknowledging the entirety of Genesis is fiction.
If they believe Genesis to be entirely fiction, then they are manifestly not christian-- not by current definitions, not by historical ones.
But then again, you clearly havent read Genesis, because even if we were to accept every last claim of the evolutionary theory, it would impact perhaps the first 3 chapters of a 40 chapter book. Im not seeing what it does for the history regarding Moses, and the egyptian captivity, for example.
I do like that apparently, on slashdot, if you spout factually incorrect (and trivially provable, too) anti-religion rhetoric, you can get modded to +5 for it.
So according to most of the planet, the bible is fiction.
If I could pull out a credible source which said that more than 70% of the planet believes atheism to be wrong, what would that do to your train of reasoning? Because it seems to me it would expose it for the appeal to authority that it is.
True religion is free of dogma and superstition and embraces all truth.
....That....kind of depends on what you believe to be truth, doesnt it? I thought that was the whole point?
Your post reads as if you are endorsing a soft religion which doesnt really believe anything at all, which would in the end be worthless. No thanks
But I believe He commanded us to embrace all truth,
And its OK for you to believe that, just as it would be OK for me to believe that I got all As in 12th grade English. But we would both be wrong, irrespective of our beliefs.
If I were to posit that all doors will open for you if you approach them at high speed, would that be an example of a truth you should embrace? Or is more selectivity in what you embrace in order?
Evidence is data which lends credence to a hypothesis. It does not have to be conclusive. You may want to break out that dictionary again, there is evidence for Christianity, as well as other religions. Some of it is just more compelling.
Is the Earth 7000 years old? Nope... there goes Christianity.
Oh hey, heres a belief which is neither central to christianity nor agreed upon by all christians. Lets attack that and then declare we have disproved christianity!
Seriously, how can people have the gall to ridicule christianity for being irrational and then try to prove their position with a fallacy?
Certainly you can, it is just a matter of definition. Say, trying to scare small kiddies with hell if they don't believe is "true evil" in my book.
And here is the grave error in your argument. True is a word that implies an objectivity; objectivity requires an absolute scale. But you are saying that evil is defined on a relative, subjective scale, and denying that there is any higher authority to which one could appeal for such an objective scale.
Ill answer your third point because I have heard it so often.
The Bible and basically every conservative denomination will affirm that men are basically bad-- even those who claim to follow christ. Further, they understand that not all who call upon the name of Christ are actually his followers (in fact its in the New Testament-- "Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you.')
Why then would it be hard to understand how people claiming the name of Christ can commit terrible deeds? For goodness sake, the Jews' greatest hero from the Old Testament-- David-- was not only an adulturer, but a murderer: he had Bathsheeba's husband murdered by sending him to the worst part of a battle and then withdrawing all support.
As for female genital mutilation and pedophile priests, you may want to look elsewhere than protestantism.
As for Intelligent design, are you saying that you dont find Christianity credible because people push to have it taught? What strange kind of logic is this?
Best is subjective. If there is no transcendence to the human existence and no purpose behind all that is, then everything is, in the end, of no meaning, of no relative worth; it simply is what it is.
You can try to build morality and meaning into that, but it is artificial.
I could just as easily ask anyone here how they know that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. Eventually, except for a very select few, they will fall back to "someone else told me so"; they simply happen to believe that source to be credible.
I think it is unfair to act like when it comes to mundane, natural facts, all athiests have all the evidence and have personally examined it-- thats just not accurate.
Overreporting their membership is different than skewed statistics. Membership has nothing to do with what a person believes in their heart, it has to do with who went through the membership process and is in regular attendence. That is rather easy to measure.
You are right however that polls can show wildly varying statistics on the number of Christians in an area. For instance, start your poll with "do you believe in Jesus", and you might get 80% yes. Continue on to "do you believe that Jesus saves" and you might get 70%. Finally ask "do you believe in a personal God who judges people for their sins", and watch that number plummet to about 40%.
Christianity has become very much a part of US culture to the extent where people will declare themselves christians simply because they try to live by some moral code and be nice to others. Im sure everyone who understands this-- athiest and christian alike-- would agree that it is not an ideal state of affairs, when 40-50% of your population doesnt know what they believe.
Your entire post presents a false dichotomy, and completely misunderstands what is meant by faith.
A) It IS possible to have faith and believe in facts at the same time. I am doing so right now-- I am a christian who factually believes, for one, that I am typing on a computer right now. I also believe that the geneologies presented in various places in the bible were meant to be read as factual. I also believe in the historical facthood of Jesus crucifixion.
B) Faith is described by the christian faith (I think in Hebrews) as a belief in things promised and things unseen. There are a great number of things in the bible which WERE seen by people who were nevertheless called to faith as well. For instance (and we're all going to assume that the bible is true for the moment), the apostles would have clearly seen Jesus post resurrection, and yet they were called to faith-- faith in something else, the things they had not seen, the promises to come. If you start with the bible's premises (which you must do if you are trying to argue against its chain of reasoning), you see that they had both faith and knowledge of facts.
C) Referencing...
and stupid people think they should have faith but call it fact because they don't have an inteligent grasp of ther language.
And ignorant people try to build an argument against a greek text based on english definitions, especially when said texts clearly define what they mean.
I would posit that you are building a strawman out of false assumptions and interpretations. Do you seriously think that noone who believes the bible has actually read the bible? Or are you suggesting that you somehow have a better grasp on it, its context and purpose, than those who study it daily?
Just as an example, if the bible's basic premise-- that there IS an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly just God who is responsible for all things-- were true, than it would manifestly not be unjust for him to enact penal justice on any one of his creations that acted against him. But of course you have decided to build this strawman based on attributing the status of a man to God, and then judging him from that position. Why certainly, a man doing some of the deeds that God has done would be evil-- precisely because he is NOT God and lacks the proper authority.
But I grow weary, I know a flamewar will likely result out of this, and though I felt it necessary to respond to such an absurd post, I really have no desire to argue ad naseum with people who will likely be more interested in attacking religion than in having a civil discussion.
Bhutan also has 1/20th the energy consumption PER CAPITA and 1/500th the population. It is also has a land area 1/200th of the US.
In other words, thats great for Bhutan, good luck scaling it to 10,000 times the energy consumption over a 200x larger land mass.
Incidentally, this (warning, PDF) indicates that you are incorrect-- it seems to say that a very large portion of the energy produced comes from firewood / biomass. This seems to indicate that their annual energy consumption is around 23,000 MW, and their hydro generation capacity is around 1,000 MW. So that really doesnt paint a good picture for hoping to scale hydro up to the US.
Wind is generated only in part by the earth's rotation. Some of it also comes from solar energy, which heats parts of the atmosphere, causing it to rise, which then causes a low pressure zone which causes inrushing air currents.
I dont believe thats accurate, the term you're looking for is perpendicular recording, and referred to the direction of the magnetic field-- where once it was longitudinal and took up a larger portion of the disk for each domain, they changed it to be vertical (perpendicular to the surface of the media) to take less space for the same capacity.
They did, $40. As others have said, the stipulations (3 days total to analyze the drive and pull the files, drive must be in same physical condition upon return, methods must be disclosed) and the prize were a joke.
I mean really, $40 sounds like a reward a college freshman might be able to pool together in a night, not a serious offer.
Er... if overwriting is not sufficient due to defective sectors, then how does encrypting the data deal with those defective sectors?
I think the suggestion was to use full disk encryption prior to putting classified data on it. At that point it would not matter if defective sectors came into play, as the data in them would be random garbage.
Make sure to wipe out the key afterwards, of course.
Truecrypt stores its decryption key on the boot sector, IIRC. That key is itself encrypted by your passphrase, but could equally use a USB key.
Wiping out any link in that chain would make the whole disk unreadable, and doing several 7-pass DoD wipes on the boot sector shouldnt take more than about 60 seconds.
If you're encrypting just certain files, then empty sectors may still contain unencrypted data. If you're encrypting the whole drive with the intention that it's unrecoverable, then random passes are the same thing.
Thats not entirely accurate. The idea of data remenance is that some form of the data still resides on the disk, however difficult it might be to reconstruct. With encryption, it was never on the disk to begin with, unless you can guess the encryption key. How difficult it is to reconstruct data from a zero'd and one'd disk hasnt, to my knowledge, been quantified; bruteforcing AES-192 with a 30 character key HAS been quantified, and it is a negligible risk. Further, at least with truecrypt, the real decryption key resides on-disk, and is itself encrypted by your actual password. Securely erasing the disk would simply be a matter of killing that specific block of data, which could probably be hit with several passes in a relatively short time.
I would ask, however, if the data really is that sensitive, why you arent using disk encryption to begin with.
Its not a myth, its a theoretical possibility that either noone has the current capability to do, or they do and its simply too cost prohibitive, or else we simply dont know about it. Thats not terribly reassuring if youre dealing with data whose leak might cause jail time.
As for formatting, depending on how you format the drive, it may or may not overwrite the data at all and may leave it ripe for the picking.
Honestly, if youre dealing with government and they say "we want the drives shredded", DBAN set to a DoD approved setting MIGHT be a reasonable suggestion, as would encryption (as we can actually quantify the risk there, and it is vanishingly small), but saying "ah, just zero it once or format it, it doesnt make a difference" sounds incredibly foolhardy.
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Can I ask what would be wrong with Sam's Club saying "We personally do not approve of this, and we think it would offend the majority of our customer base, so we will not sell this product"?
I thought that was one of the benefits of being a business owner, that you could make decisions like that in line with your values and your bottom line.
In fact the majority of Christians accept evolution, effectively acknowledging the entirety of Genesis is fiction.
If they believe Genesis to be entirely fiction, then they are manifestly not christian-- not by current definitions, not by historical ones.
But then again, you clearly havent read Genesis, because even if we were to accept every last claim of the evolutionary theory, it would impact perhaps the first 3 chapters of a 40 chapter book. Im not seeing what it does for the history regarding Moses, and the egyptian captivity, for example.
I do like that apparently, on slashdot, if you spout factually incorrect (and trivially provable, too) anti-religion rhetoric, you can get modded to +5 for it.
So according to most of the planet, the bible is fiction.
If I could pull out a credible source which said that more than 70% of the planet believes atheism to be wrong, what would that do to your train of reasoning? Because it seems to me it would expose it for the appeal to authority that it is.
True religion is free of dogma and superstition and embraces all truth.
....That....kind of depends on what you believe to be truth, doesnt it? I thought that was the whole point?
Your post reads as if you are endorsing a soft religion which doesnt really believe anything at all, which would in the end be worthless. No thanks
But I believe He commanded us to embrace all truth,
And its OK for you to believe that, just as it would be OK for me to believe that I got all As in 12th grade English. But we would both be wrong, irrespective of our beliefs.
If I were to posit that all doors will open for you if you approach them at high speed, would that be an example of a truth you should embrace? Or is more selectivity in what you embrace in order?
I would wonder then what all our history books are based on. I had understand the large majority (names, places, etc) to come from written records.
Evidence is data which lends credence to a hypothesis. It does not have to be conclusive. You may want to break out that dictionary again, there is evidence for Christianity, as well as other religions. Some of it is just more compelling.
Is the Earth 7000 years old? Nope... there goes Christianity.
Oh hey, heres a belief which is neither central to christianity nor agreed upon by all christians. Lets attack that and then declare we have disproved christianity!
Seriously, how can people have the gall to ridicule christianity for being irrational and then try to prove their position with a fallacy?
Certainly you can, it is just a matter of definition. Say, trying to scare small kiddies with hell if they don't believe is "true evil" in my book.
And here is the grave error in your argument. True is a word that implies an objectivity; objectivity requires an absolute scale. But you are saying that evil is defined on a relative, subjective scale, and denying that there is any higher authority to which one could appeal for such an objective scale.
Care to clarify how this all works out?
Ill answer your third point because I have heard it so often.
The Bible and basically every conservative denomination will affirm that men are basically bad-- even those who claim to follow christ. Further, they understand that not all who call upon the name of Christ are actually his followers (in fact its in the New Testament-- "Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you.')
Why then would it be hard to understand how people claiming the name of Christ can commit terrible deeds? For goodness sake, the Jews' greatest hero from the Old Testament-- David-- was not only an adulturer, but a murderer: he had Bathsheeba's husband murdered by sending him to the worst part of a battle and then withdrawing all support.
As for female genital mutilation and pedophile priests, you may want to look elsewhere than protestantism.
As for Intelligent design, are you saying that you dont find Christianity credible because people push to have it taught? What strange kind of logic is this?
Best is subjective. If there is no transcendence to the human existence and no purpose behind all that is, then everything is, in the end, of no meaning, of no relative worth; it simply is what it is.
You can try to build morality and meaning into that, but it is artificial.
I could just as easily ask anyone here how they know that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. Eventually, except for a very select few, they will fall back to "someone else told me so"; they simply happen to believe that source to be credible.
I think it is unfair to act like when it comes to mundane, natural facts, all athiests have all the evidence and have personally examined it-- thats just not accurate.
Overreporting their membership is different than skewed statistics. Membership has nothing to do with what a person believes in their heart, it has to do with who went through the membership process and is in regular attendence. That is rather easy to measure.
You are right however that polls can show wildly varying statistics on the number of Christians in an area. For instance, start your poll with "do you believe in Jesus", and you might get 80% yes. Continue on to "do you believe that Jesus saves" and you might get 70%. Finally ask "do you believe in a personal God who judges people for their sins", and watch that number plummet to about 40%.
Christianity has become very much a part of US culture to the extent where people will declare themselves christians simply because they try to live by some moral code and be nice to others. Im sure everyone who understands this-- athiest and christian alike-- would agree that it is not an ideal state of affairs, when 40-50% of your population doesnt know what they believe.
And more people believe in christianity than in any other belief system, if all this is true.
Its still not terribly relevant to the question "what is true", unless you want to ground your beliefs in crowdsourced wisdom.
They canot have faith and facts at the same time;
Your entire post presents a false dichotomy, and completely misunderstands what is meant by faith.
A) It IS possible to have faith and believe in facts at the same time. I am doing so right now-- I am a christian who factually believes, for one, that I am typing on a computer right now. I also believe that the geneologies presented in various places in the bible were meant to be read as factual. I also believe in the historical facthood of Jesus crucifixion.
B) Faith is described by the christian faith (I think in Hebrews) as a belief in things promised and things unseen. There are a great number of things in the bible which WERE seen by people who were nevertheless called to faith as well. For instance (and we're all going to assume that the bible is true for the moment), the apostles would have clearly seen Jesus post resurrection, and yet they were called to faith-- faith in something else, the things they had not seen, the promises to come. If you start with the bible's premises (which you must do if you are trying to argue against its chain of reasoning), you see that they had both faith and knowledge of facts.
C) Referencing...
and stupid people think they should have faith but call it fact because they don't have an inteligent grasp of ther language.
And ignorant people try to build an argument against a greek text based on english definitions, especially when said texts clearly define what they mean.
I would posit that you are building a strawman out of false assumptions and interpretations. Do you seriously think that noone who believes the bible has actually read the bible? Or are you suggesting that you somehow have a better grasp on it, its context and purpose, than those who study it daily?
Just as an example, if the bible's basic premise-- that there IS an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly just God who is responsible for all things-- were true, than it would manifestly not be unjust for him to enact penal justice on any one of his creations that acted against him. But of course you have decided to build this strawman based on attributing the status of a man to God, and then judging him from that position. Why certainly, a man doing some of the deeds that God has done would be evil-- precisely because he is NOT God and lacks the proper authority.
But I grow weary, I know a flamewar will likely result out of this, and though I felt it necessary to respond to such an absurd post, I really have no desire to argue ad naseum with people who will likely be more interested in attacking religion than in having a civil discussion.
So would a thorough history book, for basically the same reasons.
History isnt exactly squeeky clean no matter where you look.
Bhutan also has 1/20th the energy consumption PER CAPITA and 1/500th the population. It is also has a land area 1/200th of the US.
In other words, thats great for Bhutan, good luck scaling it to 10,000 times the energy consumption over a 200x larger land mass.
Incidentally, this (warning, PDF) indicates that you are incorrect-- it seems to say that a very large portion of the energy produced comes from firewood / biomass. This seems to indicate that their annual energy consumption is around 23,000 MW, and their hydro generation capacity is around 1,000 MW. So that really doesnt paint a good picture for hoping to scale hydro up to the US.
Wind is generated only in part by the earth's rotation. Some of it also comes from solar energy, which heats parts of the atmosphere, causing it to rise, which then causes a low pressure zone which causes inrushing air currents.
I dont believe thats accurate, the term you're looking for is perpendicular recording, and referred to the direction of the magnetic field-- where once it was longitudinal and took up a larger portion of the disk for each domain, they changed it to be vertical (perpendicular to the surface of the media) to take less space for the same capacity.
They did, $40. As others have said, the stipulations (3 days total to analyze the drive and pull the files, drive must be in same physical condition upon return, methods must be disclosed) and the prize were a joke.
I mean really, $40 sounds like a reward a college freshman might be able to pool together in a night, not a serious offer.
Er... if overwriting is not sufficient due to defective sectors, then how does encrypting the data deal with those defective sectors?
I think the suggestion was to use full disk encryption prior to putting classified data on it. At that point it would not matter if defective sectors came into play, as the data in them would be random garbage.
Make sure to wipe out the key afterwards, of course.
Truecrypt stores its decryption key on the boot sector, IIRC. That key is itself encrypted by your passphrase, but could equally use a USB key.
Wiping out any link in that chain would make the whole disk unreadable, and doing several 7-pass DoD wipes on the boot sector shouldnt take more than about 60 seconds.
If you're encrypting just certain files, then empty sectors may still contain unencrypted data. If you're encrypting the whole drive with the intention that it's unrecoverable, then random passes are the same thing.
Thats not entirely accurate. The idea of data remenance is that some form of the data still resides on the disk, however difficult it might be to reconstruct. With encryption, it was never on the disk to begin with, unless you can guess the encryption key. How difficult it is to reconstruct data from a zero'd and one'd disk hasnt, to my knowledge, been quantified; bruteforcing AES-192 with a 30 character key HAS been quantified, and it is a negligible risk. Further, at least with truecrypt, the real decryption key resides on-disk, and is itself encrypted by your actual password. Securely erasing the disk would simply be a matter of killing that specific block of data, which could probably be hit with several passes in a relatively short time.
I would ask, however, if the data really is that sensitive, why you arent using disk encryption to begin with.
Its not a myth, its a theoretical possibility that either noone has the current capability to do, or they do and its simply too cost prohibitive, or else we simply dont know about it. Thats not terribly reassuring if youre dealing with data whose leak might cause jail time.
As for formatting, depending on how you format the drive, it may or may not overwrite the data at all and may leave it ripe for the picking.
Honestly, if youre dealing with government and they say "we want the drives shredded", DBAN set to a DoD approved setting MIGHT be a reasonable suggestion, as would encryption (as we can actually quantify the risk there, and it is vanishingly small), but saying "ah, just zero it once or format it, it doesnt make a difference" sounds incredibly foolhardy.
It IS quantifiable if you can get a promotion due to it, or when you interview, or go for a certification.