Many people would pay for the advantages that loufoque is talking about. In fact, I know quite a few people that DO pay for them. And they think it's legal btw. While lot's of people want a free ride, there are also lots that don't. Most places around the world have stupid, industry-imposed restrictions on how, and more importantly when, they are allowed to consume content. The industry is still way too 20th century and until they wake up and smell the internet they deserve what they get.
With the rate of advances in gene/bio-tech it's not only stupid, it's meaningless. Hell, I'm pretty sure that in 30 years *I* won't have to worry about that sort of thing - people who are born today will almost certainly not have to. I have cousins who have haemophilia. I remember what they had to go through when they were kids - big bags of frozen blood factor every couple of days, so never far from a freezer (and hours wasted), to a few years ago when they just had dried up white stuff in tiny vials that they hydrate with some purified water and inject every week or so. The vials only need to be "kept cool" - so travel became much easier. I remember reading that they are trialling tech that will mean they only need a booster (little implant?) every six months or so in the near future. Apparently a complete cure is also in sight. Alzheimer's in 60 years? Please!
I'm not sure everyone would agree that Israel is a Western nation (not that there is anything wrong with not being Western!!!) but the brain drain in many, many places makes Israel's look pretty meagre. I once read that some of the top Indian publicly funded institutions had 90%+ emigration rates a few years after graduation. Coming from another brain-drain country (New Zealand), these facts ended up changing my view on publicly funded tertiary education - why should a plumber, who started working and paying taxes at 18, pay for me to get a high quality 6-year tertiary education if he is not going to see any benefit from that? Sure, were I to contribute back to society through higher (absolute) taxes, providing employment, leadership or even just being culturally more aware from my education, there is real justification... But I, like many others, simply left straight after 6 years at university to somewhere with more people, closer to "the action" (Europe/US/East Asia). Israel is certainly closer to Europe than NZ but political reasons make it even more isolated...
Why bother making Chromebooks, the market doesn't much seem to care for them. Instead they should be putting Android onto laptops since the market is already very familiar with Android and the marketplace is already well stocked with apps.
Because having to write fully functional webapps and *several* different smartdevice apps sucks. It costs money and takes energy away from developing kick-arse stuff because you have to simultaneously maintain and update several different, incompatible platforms. You should ideally also release all new features simultaneously - neither fun nor cheap. Or we could all just write responsive webapps when they can get the browser experience seamless across devices, and for that you need to keep some momentum up pushing web as a viable platform.
I'm about to start a company and I'll take a couple of those. Even here in France with "such a backward economy" (Ok, employment law and taxes are insane but there is some dynamism in spite of that), there are plenty of IT jobs. In fact, I know an online CV provider who gets a per user referral fee. It is a flat rate for all professions except IT... which nets them exactly twice what everything else goes for.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need
on
How BlackBerry Blew It
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· Score: 1
I know several people who had the 5S on the first or second day it was out here in France. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the reason they bought the device was not because it is "functional". Sure, Apple devices are generally well constructed and have a very solid user experience. That does not explain the quasi-religious fervour that takes hold of these people when it comes to Apple devices though. Waiting up to several DAYS outside a shop to purchase a device that allows you to copy-paste? Honestly! And nor are the new devices perfect - one friend has admitted that his 5S gets so hot he has to stop using it. "why don't you get something else?" was replied to simply with a silly grin.
Being able to charge your device with a generic cable from pretty much any old manufacturer is an example of "functional". Hey, has anyone got an iPhone 5 charger? No, an iPhone 4 cable doesn't work, thanks anyway...
Apple knows how to create a feeling of desire for its devices that no one else has yet managed. They do this through marketing and fantasy, by making owning a smartphone like "being in a Hollywood movie".
I worked for a few years early on in my career on VB6 + Access code (and actually an ERP to but that was VB6 + Oracle). There were several Daily WTF that could have come from that code too (one of the company's key production functions was 1k-odd lines with 17 levels of IF...). In general I completely agree with your recommendation that you should always think long and hard about throwing production code away, even if it creates a lot of maintenance and *particularly* if you are an SMB. However, I actually left that company many years ago because despite spending many non-paid hours coding away at home doing stuff, spending most of my day on VB6 + access was getting to be too much. You would have to pay me shitloads, really SHITLOADS to ever work with those technologies again. So you get to a point where a technology is completely obsolete and it's time to throw it away, even if it sort of works. We're not talking about a bank either with processes that could cost millions with the smallest error so the COBOL argument doesn't really fly here. There are plenty of cheap/free solutions out there, though the costs for rethinking processes and retraining would probably dwarf any acquisition costs anyway. But unless you are completely standing still as a company you *should* be rethinking processes and having a tool that can easily adapt to new needs is critical to that. Even SMBs need a bit of future-proofing and with the rate that technology is moving, unless you keep your tech moving along you risk being made obsolete by the next web startup, whatever you are doing (3d printing anyone?).
My 2c.
Rubbish. You have obviously not been paying attention to the advances in HCI tech. So unless you are saying that a "very VERY long time" is in the 15-30 year ballpark, you are quite simply wrong. Sure, 30 years IS a long time considering how long computers have been around but I certainly hope I'll still be around then. Just like fixed-line phones are quickly becoming a thing of the past, so too will other devices that don't move easily so a person can quickly be fully productive in any quiet, semi-private space they decide to work. There is still quite a bit of work to do, and the keyboard will certainly take a while to be unseated from its current productivity throne but it will happen without a shadow of a doubt, well before we hit the 100k year mark.
You use the "S" word and obviously know what you are talking about but I think you are glossing over quite a bit of the other amazing stuff that is being done. The picture you paint is certainly one possible future but only one of many (after all, that's the whole idea of the Singularity). Personally, with all the augmentation tech that is being developed, I think that humanity itself is going to evolve very rapidly (an evolution spurt on steroids and speed if you like). Whether the tech be carbon or silicon-based, we are going to be doing it anyway. Social media tech is already changing perceptions about being constantly connected to others, wherever they be on the planet and when HCI stuff starts getting even more powerful and more subtle the leap will merge into "just the next gadget". Also, I think it is naive to think that there will be just one machine, controlled by just one group, and that it will happen at a particular point of time (as opposed to over months or even a few years) - the "event" will be a "period" whereby there is a before, a during and an after. It is entirely possible that we develop tech that is able to substantially increase the brain inefficiencies you talk about as well as interfacing with much of this massive new computing power in an almost symbiotic way. If this does happen, many people (let's face it, the "rich and powerful", though that means millions in the developed world rather than just "the men behind the secret doors") will achieve fantastic new levels of inventive power. Probably enough to thwart any single devious DOD super-mind run amok...
Is it not entirely possible that there is not a monolithic "super intelligence" that lays in wait to kill all the humans but rather many different kinds of super intelligence, and that humans somehow merge with those? After all, our vision of human intelligence has been seriously corrupted by a particular view of knowledge, language and thinking that takes the individual as the sole unit of study. Humans are social beings and have been for millions of years (since before being "human"), and in a very real and demonstrable way there is no such thing as language, knowledge or even thinking that can be separated from human interactions within groups. We are already only nodes that have no real intelligence without the cluster. One can think of agriculture as a technology that has already enabled us to create super-computers - much larger groups of people able to specialise almost ad infinitum and change a world in ways we haven't yet seen anywhere else in the universe. Why should AI be any different? And if the tech is there to do it, what is stopping us from merging with it?
Is the "human race" doomed? If what you mean by that is what we have looked and behaved like until roughly now. Most definitely. But we already don't really live or die like we did even 10000 years ago and nobody denies that. Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens?
All they need to do is get Glass right quick and then basically make everything run through G+. Facebook problem solved. Sure there'll be plenty of "backlash"... just like everyone stopped using FB when they found out how ridiculous their fine print was. Or not...
While the article doesn't state that they are compiling profiles on people that have never signed up, it would be foolish not to. The expectation is surely that everyone will sign up at some stage, so why not get a head start and compile info now? In any case, it is only logical to attempt to aggregate data that you know is related to a person, even if you can't yet associate that to an "official" user now. And do you think they aren't doing it for people who have "closed" their accounts? When they come back they'll have all this lovely extra info!
So you are certainly right that the article doesn't say they are doing that but I'd wager a fair amount they are.
Ah... nice tangent you just went off on there... I was just saying that MS don't care that you don't like Win8 because you will install Win7, not something else. They are laughing all the way to the bank as long as it stays like that. You just agreed with me in a violent and aggressive fashion. This must be/.
There are many reasons why Linux has such terrible consumer driver support after all these years but I don't think many would argue that support is good. I (experienced admin and dev) spend less time maintaining my home computers if they are running Linux but the vast majority of people would be completely lost. If I am going to be without a power socket for several hours I still boot to Windows on my laptop because power management for my machine is a joke with Ubuntu.
You obviously haven't managed servers though, or you wanted to do very strange things with them indeed (like installing custom kernels on custom built hardware). Most server setups today are much, much, much less hassle running a decent Linux distro - and that includes driver issues. I have spent several years managing both Linux and Windows on servers and I have wasted FAR more time on Windows driver issues than Linux ones.
Get over it dude. If people, other than privacy nerds, were remotely concerned about this then we'd get Yahoo/MS/etc. promoting some sort of auto-reply system that sent back a "Sorry, the email service you have sent this email from scans replies for advertising purposes and, as such, is a danger to my privacy. Please send this email from an email service that does not scan my emails and I will reply to your message". Almost all email services, free or not, probably provide for this very easily. Then Gmail would then be faced with some hard choices... or maybe they wouldn't because no one cares. That's the problem here - almost no one who is not on/. cares. What is stopping you from doing this again and starting the movement?
NOTHING is forcing you to use Gmail, either to send from or to. There are literally thousands of free email providers and it is NOTHING like the postal service in that way.
Ok. Hours for Win7 and months for Win8. How long for Ubuntu? FreeBSD? While I'm sure you could probably get it out the door in seconds if you put an Apple sticker on it somewhere (with a skinned *nix of some sorts, hey, why not!), "people" still buy Microsoft which is why you didn't mention the other alternatives (and probably don't provide them). Microsoft doesn't care about the fact that you still install Win7. As long as you are not promoting options they are happy, and getting richer.
What people don't seem to realise is that only geeks seem to care about tech empires. Shareholders only care about profits. Why is it necessary for Microsoft to live forever again? As an investor, do I prefer $x/share/year for the next 10 years before management does a couple of rounds of firings to get the share price back up before I see, or the fact that the nerds like the company?
Microsoft are doing just fine.
They're supposed to be smaller, so presumably you can put lots more cores on a chip than you can now. So 400GHz AND lots of cores. Bring on the singularity!
Classic! I haven't lived in NZ for almost a decade now but that sort of thing makes me a bit nostalgic. It reminds me of a mate who was stopped walking home drunk and stoned one night in Wellington. The cops told him to empty out his pockets and, low and behold, he was forced to show his little baggie (he reckoned he had about a gram) of weed. "You know we should pick you up for that son?" "I'm really sorry officer, I won't do it again". "A likely story... Now, open up the bag and empty it onto the footpath". Obviously my mate, wasted and crapping his pants, didn't quite understand what was going on, but complied when he was told again. "Now jump up and down on it... now kick it around... more, it's all got to disappear". After doing this little dance for a minute or so, the cops were in such hysterics they could barely muster a "now piss off home before we change our minds".
You definitely get all sorts though - I personally heard an NZ cop reply "Don't tell me the law, I am the law" when he was being reminded of detainees' rights after a completely peaceful student protest back in the day. Still, a Kiwi cop is about the only kind I would ever risk trying to have a laugh with.
You just have to look at collision detection systems in cars to know that we have come to a point where statements like "we have neither the time, money, computing power, [n]or sensing technology" might be true today but they certainly won't be in 30 years. Moore's law applies roughly to these things - the first two going down in quantity and the last two up. We can now pretty reliably detect planets *light-years* away. It might take several massive super-computers to process the data today but today's supercomputers are tomorrow's watches (or more probably implants...).
I HATE how most time travel plots are done. It's sometimes enough for me to fast forward episodes... Fringe, which has unfortunately just finished, did it surprisingly well and actually tempered my feelings towards the plot device!
Sorry, no mod points here either, but +1 for you too - I learnt a word today that pretty accurately describes my views - Ignosticism. I wouldn't say that you knowing more about the historical context than many "Christians" is even slightly surprising though...
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Many people would pay for the advantages that loufoque is talking about. In fact, I know quite a few people that DO pay for them. And they think it's legal btw. While lot's of people want a free ride, there are also lots that don't. Most places around the world have stupid, industry-imposed restrictions on how, and more importantly when, they are allowed to consume content. The industry is still way too 20th century and until they wake up and smell the internet they deserve what they get.
Google to the rescue! Oh, hang on...
With the rate of advances in gene/bio-tech it's not only stupid, it's meaningless. Hell, I'm pretty sure that in 30 years *I* won't have to worry about that sort of thing - people who are born today will almost certainly not have to. I have cousins who have haemophilia. I remember what they had to go through when they were kids - big bags of frozen blood factor every couple of days, so never far from a freezer (and hours wasted), to a few years ago when they just had dried up white stuff in tiny vials that they hydrate with some purified water and inject every week or so. The vials only need to be "kept cool" - so travel became much easier. I remember reading that they are trialling tech that will mean they only need a booster (little implant?) every six months or so in the near future. Apparently a complete cure is also in sight. Alzheimer's in 60 years? Please!
You delivered books to Sydney university students from Italy? That's incredible!
I'm not sure everyone would agree that Israel is a Western nation (not that there is anything wrong with not being Western!!!) but the brain drain in many, many places makes Israel's look pretty meagre. I once read that some of the top Indian publicly funded institutions had 90%+ emigration rates a few years after graduation. Coming from another brain-drain country (New Zealand), these facts ended up changing my view on publicly funded tertiary education - why should a plumber, who started working and paying taxes at 18, pay for me to get a high quality 6-year tertiary education if he is not going to see any benefit from that? Sure, were I to contribute back to society through higher (absolute) taxes, providing employment, leadership or even just being culturally more aware from my education, there is real justification... But I, like many others, simply left straight after 6 years at university to somewhere with more people, closer to "the action" (Europe/US/East Asia). Israel is certainly closer to Europe than NZ but political reasons make it even more isolated...
Really? None of you who modded this actually got the joke? I'm not even American!
Why bother making Chromebooks, the market doesn't much seem to care for them. Instead they should be putting Android onto laptops since the market is already very familiar with Android and the marketplace is already well stocked with apps.
Because having to write fully functional webapps and *several* different smartdevice apps sucks. It costs money and takes energy away from developing kick-arse stuff because you have to simultaneously maintain and update several different, incompatible platforms. You should ideally also release all new features simultaneously - neither fun nor cheap. Or we could all just write responsive webapps when they can get the browser experience seamless across devices, and for that you need to keep some momentum up pushing web as a viable platform.
A few months back
I'm about to start a company and I'll take a couple of those. Even here in France with "such a backward economy" (Ok, employment law and taxes are insane but there is some dynamism in spite of that), there are plenty of IT jobs. In fact, I know an online CV provider who gets a per user referral fee. It is a flat rate for all professions except IT... which nets them exactly twice what everything else goes for.
I know several people who had the 5S on the first or second day it was out here in France. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the reason they bought the device was not because it is "functional". Sure, Apple devices are generally well constructed and have a very solid user experience. That does not explain the quasi-religious fervour that takes hold of these people when it comes to Apple devices though. Waiting up to several DAYS outside a shop to purchase a device that allows you to copy-paste? Honestly! And nor are the new devices perfect - one friend has admitted that his 5S gets so hot he has to stop using it. "why don't you get something else?" was replied to simply with a silly grin.
Being able to charge your device with a generic cable from pretty much any old manufacturer is an example of "functional". Hey, has anyone got an iPhone 5 charger? No, an iPhone 4 cable doesn't work, thanks anyway...
Apple knows how to create a feeling of desire for its devices that no one else has yet managed. They do this through marketing and fantasy, by making owning a smartphone like "being in a Hollywood movie".
I worked for a few years early on in my career on VB6 + Access code (and actually an ERP to but that was VB6 + Oracle). There were several Daily WTF that could have come from that code too (one of the company's key production functions was 1k-odd lines with 17 levels of IF...). In general I completely agree with your recommendation that you should always think long and hard about throwing production code away, even if it creates a lot of maintenance and *particularly* if you are an SMB. However, I actually left that company many years ago because despite spending many non-paid hours coding away at home doing stuff, spending most of my day on VB6 + access was getting to be too much. You would have to pay me shitloads, really SHITLOADS to ever work with those technologies again. So you get to a point where a technology is completely obsolete and it's time to throw it away, even if it sort of works. We're not talking about a bank either with processes that could cost millions with the smallest error so the COBOL argument doesn't really fly here. There are plenty of cheap/free solutions out there, though the costs for rethinking processes and retraining would probably dwarf any acquisition costs anyway. But unless you are completely standing still as a company you *should* be rethinking processes and having a tool that can easily adapt to new needs is critical to that. Even SMBs need a bit of future-proofing and with the rate that technology is moving, unless you keep your tech moving along you risk being made obsolete by the next web startup, whatever you are doing (3d printing anyone?). My 2c.
Rubbish. You have obviously not been paying attention to the advances in HCI tech. So unless you are saying that a "very VERY long time" is in the 15-30 year ballpark, you are quite simply wrong. Sure, 30 years IS a long time considering how long computers have been around but I certainly hope I'll still be around then. Just like fixed-line phones are quickly becoming a thing of the past, so too will other devices that don't move easily so a person can quickly be fully productive in any quiet, semi-private space they decide to work. There is still quite a bit of work to do, and the keyboard will certainly take a while to be unseated from its current productivity throne but it will happen without a shadow of a doubt, well before we hit the 100k year mark.
You use the "S" word and obviously know what you are talking about but I think you are glossing over quite a bit of the other amazing stuff that is being done. The picture you paint is certainly one possible future but only one of many (after all, that's the whole idea of the Singularity). Personally, with all the augmentation tech that is being developed, I think that humanity itself is going to evolve very rapidly (an evolution spurt on steroids and speed if you like). Whether the tech be carbon or silicon-based, we are going to be doing it anyway. Social media tech is already changing perceptions about being constantly connected to others, wherever they be on the planet and when HCI stuff starts getting even more powerful and more subtle the leap will merge into "just the next gadget". Also, I think it is naive to think that there will be just one machine, controlled by just one group, and that it will happen at a particular point of time (as opposed to over months or even a few years) - the "event" will be a "period" whereby there is a before, a during and an after. It is entirely possible that we develop tech that is able to substantially increase the brain inefficiencies you talk about as well as interfacing with much of this massive new computing power in an almost symbiotic way. If this does happen, many people (let's face it, the "rich and powerful", though that means millions in the developed world rather than just "the men behind the secret doors") will achieve fantastic new levels of inventive power. Probably enough to thwart any single devious DOD super-mind run amok...
Is it not entirely possible that there is not a monolithic "super intelligence" that lays in wait to kill all the humans but rather many different kinds of super intelligence, and that humans somehow merge with those? After all, our vision of human intelligence has been seriously corrupted by a particular view of knowledge, language and thinking that takes the individual as the sole unit of study. Humans are social beings and have been for millions of years (since before being "human"), and in a very real and demonstrable way there is no such thing as language, knowledge or even thinking that can be separated from human interactions within groups. We are already only nodes that have no real intelligence without the cluster. One can think of agriculture as a technology that has already enabled us to create super-computers - much larger groups of people able to specialise almost ad infinitum and change a world in ways we haven't yet seen anywhere else in the universe. Why should AI be any different? And if the tech is there to do it, what is stopping us from merging with it?
Is the "human race" doomed? If what you mean by that is what we have looked and behaved like until roughly now. Most definitely. But we already don't really live or die like we did even 10000 years ago and nobody denies that. Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens?
All they need to do is get Glass right quick and then basically make everything run through G+. Facebook problem solved. Sure there'll be plenty of "backlash"... just like everyone stopped using FB when they found out how ridiculous their fine print was. Or not...
While the article doesn't state that they are compiling profiles on people that have never signed up, it would be foolish not to. The expectation is surely that everyone will sign up at some stage, so why not get a head start and compile info now? In any case, it is only logical to attempt to aggregate data that you know is related to a person, even if you can't yet associate that to an "official" user now. And do you think they aren't doing it for people who have "closed" their accounts? When they come back they'll have all this lovely extra info!
So you are certainly right that the article doesn't say they are doing that but I'd wager a fair amount they are.
Ah... nice tangent you just went off on there... I was just saying that MS don't care that you don't like Win8 because you will install Win7, not something else. They are laughing all the way to the bank as long as it stays like that. You just agreed with me in a violent and aggressive fashion. This must be /.
There are many reasons why Linux has such terrible consumer driver support after all these years but I don't think many would argue that support is good. I (experienced admin and dev) spend less time maintaining my home computers if they are running Linux but the vast majority of people would be completely lost. If I am going to be without a power socket for several hours I still boot to Windows on my laptop because power management for my machine is a joke with Ubuntu.
You obviously haven't managed servers though, or you wanted to do very strange things with them indeed (like installing custom kernels on custom built hardware). Most server setups today are much, much, much less hassle running a decent Linux distro - and that includes driver issues. I have spent several years managing both Linux and Windows on servers and I have wasted FAR more time on Windows driver issues than Linux ones.
Get over it dude. If people, other than privacy nerds, were remotely concerned about this then we'd get Yahoo/MS/etc. promoting some sort of auto-reply system that sent back a "Sorry, the email service you have sent this email from scans replies for advertising purposes and, as such, is a danger to my privacy. Please send this email from an email service that does not scan my emails and I will reply to your message". Almost all email services, free or not, probably provide for this very easily. Then Gmail would then be faced with some hard choices... or maybe they wouldn't because no one cares. That's the problem here - almost no one who is not on /. cares. What is stopping you from doing this again and starting the movement?
NOTHING is forcing you to use Gmail, either to send from or to. There are literally thousands of free email providers and it is NOTHING like the postal service in that way.
Ok. Hours for Win7 and months for Win8. How long for Ubuntu? FreeBSD? While I'm sure you could probably get it out the door in seconds if you put an Apple sticker on it somewhere (with a skinned *nix of some sorts, hey, why not!), "people" still buy Microsoft which is why you didn't mention the other alternatives (and probably don't provide them). Microsoft doesn't care about the fact that you still install Win7. As long as you are not promoting options they are happy, and getting richer. What people don't seem to realise is that only geeks seem to care about tech empires. Shareholders only care about profits. Why is it necessary for Microsoft to live forever again? As an investor, do I prefer $x/share/year for the next 10 years before management does a couple of rounds of firings to get the share price back up before I see, or the fact that the nerds like the company? Microsoft are doing just fine.
They're supposed to be smaller, so presumably you can put lots more cores on a chip than you can now. So 400GHz AND lots of cores. Bring on the singularity!
Sorry, no mod points but +1 anyway!
YYMV refers to "Your Yodeling May Vary". It is used in reference to deals at high altitudes (especially those in the Alps) where the changes in air thickness and the respective region of the deal may cause some variation in the type and duration of your yodeling.
Classic! I haven't lived in NZ for almost a decade now but that sort of thing makes me a bit nostalgic. It reminds me of a mate who was stopped walking home drunk and stoned one night in Wellington. The cops told him to empty out his pockets and, low and behold, he was forced to show his little baggie (he reckoned he had about a gram) of weed. "You know we should pick you up for that son?" "I'm really sorry officer, I won't do it again". "A likely story... Now, open up the bag and empty it onto the footpath". Obviously my mate, wasted and crapping his pants, didn't quite understand what was going on, but complied when he was told again. "Now jump up and down on it... now kick it around... more, it's all got to disappear". After doing this little dance for a minute or so, the cops were in such hysterics they could barely muster a "now piss off home before we change our minds". You definitely get all sorts though - I personally heard an NZ cop reply "Don't tell me the law, I am the law" when he was being reminded of detainees' rights after a completely peaceful student protest back in the day. Still, a Kiwi cop is about the only kind I would ever risk trying to have a laugh with.
You just have to look at collision detection systems in cars to know that we have come to a point where statements like "we have neither the time, money, computing power, [n]or sensing technology" might be true today but they certainly won't be in 30 years. Moore's law applies roughly to these things - the first two going down in quantity and the last two up. We can now pretty reliably detect planets *light-years* away. It might take several massive super-computers to process the data today but today's supercomputers are tomorrow's watches (or more probably implants...).
I HATE how most time travel plots are done. It's sometimes enough for me to fast forward episodes... Fringe, which has unfortunately just finished, did it surprisingly well and actually tempered my feelings towards the plot device!
Sorry, no mod points here either, but +1 for you too - I learnt a word today that pretty accurately describes my views - Ignosticism. I wouldn't say that you knowing more about the historical context than many "Christians" is even slightly surprising though...