Keeping this in mind, if God abhors sin, and lying is a sin (thou shalt not bear false witness) then God has contradicted himself. Therefore, God cannot lie - assuming we give benefit of the doubt to the credibility of the Bible and it's author (God Himself).
Well, here's the problem with that argument. First off, I'm not so sure that one could say that the Bible claims that God is the author. Rather, it is more that it is divinely inspired and that's a huge difference. Yes, I know there are sects which would claim that the Bible is what God wrote, but even Catholicism doesn't make that claim. After all, Catholics actually went through and hand picked which books belonged in the bible, and act, in and of itself, which claims human, rather than divine origin. I mean, if the bible was written by God, then, why leave the likes of the Gospel of Thomas on the table, or why have a lengthy and well documented argument that the Book of Revelation should perhaps NOT be included in the Bible because the spooky end of the world stuff might exclude God's message. Why have a Protestant Reformation that further excludes other books!
Secondly, the Bible is pretty clear that rules for God and the rules for men are two entirely different things. Fundamentally, I think this is where so many today's fundamentalists err when they go on their anti-gay and anti-promiscuity rampages. The Bible says that God's going to smite a bunch of people like that, and certainly, Paul has no love for homosexuals, but, its always in the context of, "God will do this or do that.". On the other hand, Christ commanded, "Judge not, lest ye be judged", and, "Let him without sin cast the first stone". So, its pretty clear that Jesus says to be cool with people, regardless of what you think of them, and, then, we have, after that, second hand divine "inspirations" promising that such sinners will be delt with by God. Therefor, there's no need for humans to butcher each other over things like race and gender and sexual orientation, because if God has a preference, its his job to deal with it, not man's. We're too stupid to do that, so we just have the Golden Rule.
Underlying the whole bible is the idea that God is a capricious master of ours. OF course, there is Christ's last words before his resurrection, and there are tales of God flooding, smashing and burning because of sin, or, abandoning Samson because he got a hair cut. But best of all is the book of Job, and I heard that book best explained, by, of all people, a Rabbi, who said that, really, at the end, God doesn't justify anything he allowed to happen to Job, except to say that "I'm God, and I can do what I want."
Sorry, you're just a slave to christian propaganda.
Not nearly as much as you are a slave to your bigotry. I mean, I could see hating christians if you were a faggit or something. So, you may as well get that out on the table. Are you gay?
You're absolutely right. However, so much of Christianity is built on the literal truth of the Bible, such that if you *can't* take it literally, then *everything* in the bible becomse suspect
Biblical inerracy is not the basis of religion. Christianity, Catholicism in particular, is an oral tradition religion that uses the bible as a common frame of spiritual reference..
The whole deal with the church wasn't so much as to say the bible was the sole truth, as it was to say that the church had the sole role in interpreting the bible. Nobody really had a problem with Galileo, in fact, he enjoyed the support of the Pope, until he started basically casting judgements about the bible itself, and that was a usurpation of the power of the church.
In other words, according to the Bible, 1000 Human Years is equal to 1 God Day
That's ridiculous. You are talking about a rhetorical point in Psalms that has absolutely nothing to do with setting up a scale of time in Genesis.
The book of Genesis is a good story with a moral point. The idea wasn't to say how the earth was made, it was to paint a backstory which illustrates that sin and temptation are as old as the earth itself, which is undeniably true.
Do you really think God would go to someone who barely had invented fire, and try and explain the ins and outs of big bang theory? I mean, what would be the point of the human experience if we couldn't discover it for ourselves, and learn for ourselves?
So God -lied-. Get over it. He is God and he can do what He wants.
God is an all powerful bastard that doesn't care about what you think. That's the beauty of being all powerful. He just doesn't have to care. Makes up the rules, and that's that.
When will people realize that it is okay to be a young earth Creationist and still believe in science. The Darwinists have things mostly right, it's just that God created the Universe 6000 years ago and made it APPEAR to be much older. Time, as we observe it, is directly controlled by God and as such he can manipulate it to be anything He wills.
We actually did not exist two seconds ago. Everything you believe in, even the continuity of your life, is a morality play created by God every two seconds. The entire universe, every living thing, is just the luminous beings of heaven arranging thesmelves across the multiverse in a number of beings... the real you, the you that exists for two seconds, might well spend its next as a frog or a bacteria.
The more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that life, far from being a unique or rare thing in the universe, is actually an inevitable natural process, and will consistently and repeatedly erupt under environmental conditions that are actually very common across the universe.
then, uh, where is it? That's the Fermi problem. If life would have erupted under all sorts of conditions in the universe, somebody smart should have evolved besides us by now. After all, the earth is only a 1/3 the age of the universe and theoretically there could be and should be civilizations out there that are literally thousands, millions and billions of years older than our own.
If fire fighters were more like some police officers they would wait for the building to burn down to look for survivors.
The job of police is not to prevent crime or to rescue people as much as it is to contain it. Cops aren't there to keep one guy from getting murdered. They are there to try and keep a lot of people from getting murdered or to try and prevent civil unrest. In this, they do very well.
But people have this image of police as rescuers, and they simply aren't. Courts have held time and time again that police officers are not required to risk their lives to prevent someone else from getting killed. That's why you see, for example, situations like Columbine, where the cops surround the building - they contain the situation...
If you want to defend yourself and your property, that's your responsibility, not police.
Just where exactly did you learn about those Roman values that justify the extermination of our enemies? It seems to me that you don't know much - perhaps nothing - about Romans. If there was ever a civilization that was fair with the people it conquered, it was Roma.
You are a sucker for Roman propaganda. You believe that the Romans were fair with their enemies because the Romans said they were. But, what part of these highlights exemplify fairness?
a) siege of carthage. large city of ancient rival destroyed to the ground, earth salted, inhabitants sold into slavery... keep in mind that the Romans basically trumped up charges to start the final punic war... Carthage had already been bankrupted by the previous wars as was no longer really anything.
b) siege of jerusalem. local religious centers destroyed. inhabitants sold into slavery. plundered gold and silver bought coloseum.
c) conquest of gaul... that's caesar's biggy. he brags about killing tons of people.
But really, if you want to look at it, what was the justification for Roman expansion? With the Romans, they always had some high minded idea about civilization that they preached, but in the end, their soldiers always brought home plenty of captured gold and silver.
In fact, let's talk about Roman practices. Imagine if our army was like the Roman army. When Hannibal attacked Italy, at one battle, the Roman army -ran-. As a result, the man assigned to command the army actually ordered a round of by then ancient punishment (rome was already hundreds of years old), called decimation, and they walked along with swords and killed one in ten of their own men where they stood for cowardice of the entire unit. They didn't run again.
Here here let's return to Christianity's roots. Let's bring back the good old days of slavery, rape, sodomy, torture, and bigotry.
Julius Caesar got himself elected Consul of Rome partially on his own campaign book which extolled his achievements in killing a million people in Gaul.
If Caeser were alive today, there wouldn't be anyone in Iraq left, and, forget this whole mission of liberating the Iraqi people. He would have just said flat out that he was going to take the oil.
We didn't get started on Pharoahs.. They were always bragging about smiting their enemies. That's smiting, not just killing them, but smiting them.
You know, we should just screw the whole constitution and get a Pharoah.
I, personally, will not get over it. Too much progress has been made despite christianity's best efforts to hold it back, I refuse to let them regain any ground.
I agree. Were it not for christianity, we could have stronger, Roman values, and could merely justify the extermination of our enemies because they were weaker.
Look, you have all of these people arguing against the USA military actions around the world, as if, there was some sort of a cosmic judge that holds us wrong. This planet lives at the mercy of the USA and it is high time we make it pay for us.
The sooner we get rid of religion, and focus on survival of the fittest, we can eliminate the silly notions of the soul and with it the idea of fundamental rights. From there, we can proceed with the extermination of the third world, replacing weaker cultures with a stronger industrialized one, keeping the planet for those who have the values to use it, not merely subsistent parasites that besmirch the very name of humanity with their almost termite like existence.
My two biggest bugbears with Windows are The Registry and the fact it's not multiuser in the same way that UNIX/Linux are.
I agree with that completely.
I have never found a way yet with RDP that both of us can see the same screen simultaneously (even though I have remote control of the desktop) so I can show the person what I'm doing while talking to them on the telephone. With VNC, it's straightforward to do this.
There's a stupid utility in Windows XP that does kinda this. Unfortunately, in true MS dumbly integrated fashion, you have to get MS Messenger to use it. It's that "have a friend bail me out" service that the end user runs. They launch that service, and then, you can, using your MS Messenger, log into their desktop and both of you can talk and chat. It works pretty well actually, but, I would have preferred, as you perhaps do, to just have one remote desktop client that I can use for the task...
Other than that, Windows needs to get rid of the GUI when it's not needed on some server applications. GUI means third-party graphics drivers which add instability onto any server system, whether it's Windows or Linux. Not to mention the additional, possibly wasted overhead.
I agree there too.
I don't rate many of Microsoft's built in utilities like Notepad, IE and Windows Media Player but I strip those out with XPLite and just put on better free or Open Source equivalents.
So I'm sure the Earth (with it's atmosphere) is constantly producing new water.
If that were the case, then, human global warming wouldn't even matter, because, if you have a planet producing new water, then, there's going to be new water vapor, and water vapor does way more greenhouse effects than does CO2.
If all of these were true, the total amount of water on earth would be constantly decreasing, and would have been for billions of years. This is not the case - the amount of water on earth is relatively constant. As far as I remember from my university chemistry and biology classes, organics don't, for the most part, break down water ever.
The problem is that the Earth doesn't have sufficient gravity to hold free hydrogen. Free hydrogen on earth goes by by into space. So that almost automatically rules out any free hydrogen / oxygen hypothesis... or at least renders it less likely.
Now, so, maybe there is some sort of hydrogen compound and some sort of oxygen compound that could react on earth to form water. Well, then, you'd have to ask, where's the traces of those reactions occuring, and, are there any minerals out there today that support those conclusions. Right now, you can find oxygen in just about any good old mineral, but hydrogen, I think that's an entirely different mater. I'm not a geologist, but I'm pretty sure that the only hydrogens we find on earth are from organic compounds, and they get it from a reaction that ultimately originates with water as one of the reagents.
Now, that is of course based on a geological understanding that goes maybe at most a mile or two into the earth's crust. There could be some sort of something in the mantle where, ahah, there is a ton of hydrogen... you know, like water is formed from some hydrogen bearing rock mixing with some oxygen bearing rock inside the earth and shoots up out of a volcano. IF you could somehow find a set of candidate rocks and then make a good case for it, inside the earth, consistent with what we already know from the geological record about how the earth was formed, then yeah, you'd probably refute the underlying assumption of these japanese scientists and be some kind of a hero.
But you'd be a bigger hero than that... because, if you actually could find a non-organic source of hydrogen on the earth you'd be a huge hero, because you would have discovered a fairly green non-fossil fuel. Good luck with that!
When you understand what the true motive of an entity is you can better understand their actions in the future. It should come as no surprise that they would try to support studies that would favor their product and the continued use of it. That is a corruption of the system.
So does this mean that we can disregard global warming because the people that advocate addressing it are linked to left wing causes?
I mean, advertising can only do so much, and at some point, the product ultimately has to sell itself. Taser sells itself. They come out, show a guy getting tasered, giving the cops a few seconds to restrain him without harm to themselves and even to the victim. On the other hand, if you shoot someone, a lot of times, they die. That's a pretty big difference.
I do prefer Linux because well, I do... but, honesty demands a few good look at everything.
If we're going to get into, yet again, a tired debate about Windows vs Linux, let's challenge some basic "truths" about Windows circulated in the Linux community. A lot of these basic "truths" are circulated about older versions of Windows...
1. Windows is unreliable. Not true. Any more, Windows Server is very reliable. IT departments in a number of my clients run Windows Server 2003 and can keep it up for years, if they want. I think it has been about five years since any Windows server I have seen has ever crashed.
2. Windows isn't multiuser friendly. Not true. I know one guy who started an ISP, threw up a bunch of Windows servers and gave all of his customers unfettered access to their own SQL Server databases. I thought he was crazy. But, now he's a millionaire and his business is well regarded. In the enterprise scale, I've got multiple people connecting to Windows databases via RDP, and honestly, this setup makes VNC look like crap. Windows terminal services works so extraordinarily well that outsourced development teams in India are using RDP to run Visual Studio on US hosted boxes.
3. SQL Server sucks. Not True. I think that was a pretty accurate claim up till around 7.0, but starting around SQL Server 2000, you could make a pretty good case for SQL Server 2000 for a lot of medium sized businesses and medium sized datasets. I've seen SQL Server instances running with terabytes of real row data (not just tons of images) and it holds up like a champ. Law firms, power companies, people that have big data, are using SQL Server and it works for them pretty well.
4. IIS Sucks. Not true. I'm not a real big fan of ASP.NET, but, its working pretty well for a lot of people and keeps me employed. It has its hiccups, but, for the most part, if you build an application in ASP.NET and know -something-, the IIS/SQL Server/Windows Server stack is actually going to be there for your more than it will let you down.
Of course, that's not to say Microsoft is perfect. They aren't. Internet Explorer STILL sucks, Word sucks (but MS Office still blows Open Office out of the water), the help in Visual Studio is just terrible any more, and there's a lot to not like about how Visual Studio manages projects and solutions. But, going around and saying that "everything Microsoft makes sucks", isn't true, and honestly, it never has been. For a lot of customers, a lot of the time, they have actually succeeded because they offer a better product.
In quite a few cases it has been shown to be the *first* thing the officer does when encountering resistance. If you're equating tasering someone with shooting them, I sincerely do hope shooting people have never been the first reaction to resistance where you live.
Yeah, what happens is that cops get the shit kicked out of them, or, have to hang back and wait for backup, when you have, trailer park dudes drunk and waving a knife.
Tasers should be outlawed; they do not do anything you couldn't do before with a gun or a truncheon
Tasers should not be outlawed and I might actually buy one myself. If someone is tazered, 99 times out of 100, they get up and walk away. If someone is shot, at best, you are looking at a visit to the ER, weeks, if not months of healing. There is no comparison. So, before Taser, all you had was the option to either shoot the suspect, or risk your own life. Taser gives police the option to quickly disarm a potential suspect and get him behind bars, without harm to police. I think that's worthwhile.
Tazer's role is to subdue people resisting arresting without resorting to violence that risks life or injury to the officer, or risks getting shot. Your odds of getting killed by a Tazer are remarkably low, so low, in fact, that people do taze each other in training with it. Yeah, anything might kill you, and tazer isn't perfect, but overall, tazer is better than being shot or having a cop getting his ear bitten off.
There's a lot about this fabled US vs Iran rivalry that does not add up and it almost makes me think that to a large degree the Bush Administration is covertly fostering the rise of Iran as a middle eastern superpower.
Motive 1. Geopolitically, US foreign policy is to create regional checks around the globe so that she can use her weight so swing a balance of power one way or the other but without having to be overtly committed. A strong Iran creates enormous problems for Russia and China both. China has no domestic oil whatsoever, and Russia is well within range of Iranian missiles.
2. Money. We often talk about the US petrodollar as a product of Saudi Arabia, but what's often overlooked is that the USA still possesses a fairly sizable proved reserve of oil in her own right. In essence, the dollar is not just backed by US influence in the middle east but also by the USA's own oil reserves. Yes, the USA does not pump enough of its own oil, but, if we were to throw the environment into the dumper, we could drill Alaska, drill offshore, grind up all the shale in Colorado, convert to coal to liquids, drill the Bakken, and we'd wind up with trillions of barrels of the stuff. So, in the long run, high oil prices benefit the United States, because ultimately, the USA has that money in the bank. Let's put it this way: ANWR alone is worth a trillion dollars.
Supporting Evidence 1. Whose benefited. Everything the Bush Administration has done has benefited Iran from a security perspective. The Iranian foreign minister even pointed this out on NPR. Bush knocked off Iraq and Afghanistan both, and neither regime supported the USA. On the flipside, the high oil prices that exist partially because of the war in Iraq and the bellicosity with Iran actually are proving to be lucrative for nearly every traditionally Republican constituency. Oil men, miners, agribusiness, chemical, even US manufacturers have all benefited from rising oil prices and a devalued dollar. If Iran and the USA are enemies, both sides are laughing all the way to the bank.
2. History. Republicans, in particular, despite their bellicosity with Iran, have a long and fabled history of actually dealing with the Iran in pragmatic terms "behind the scenes". Ronald Reagan was nearly brought down because of a complicated deal which actually saw the USA supply weapons to Iran during the Iran - Iraq war. I mean, while Democrats talked rapproachment with Iran, Republicans were already making deals with them and hiding it.
Later on, administration officials from both Reagan and Bush I would both admit that they did, in fact, have a back door in communications to Iran. It's reasonable to think that a Dick Cheney who was an integral part of all of those administrations might actually have a back door to Iran himself. We do know, right away, that the government we work with in Iraq travels to Iran rather frequently. It's almost inconceivable that the USA would not be using the Iraqi leadership as the most covert sort of conduit.
3. Careful rules of engagement. The USA rightfully complains about the Iranians funding and helping anti-American insurgents in Iraq, but at the same time, the USA is also helping anti-Iranian insurgents in Iran. This is a sort of a standoff. Despite proclamations against Iranian leadership, the Administration has bent out of its way to say, for the most part, that Iranian leaders are not directly implicated in this and they actually might not be.
4. A total pass on WMD proves cooperation. The USA had absolutely no problem launching a unilateral war on Iraq because of WMD that didn't even exist, but Iran has 9000 centrifuges spinning and there's not been a shot fired. Even the claim that the Iraqi invasion has weakened the USA abilities to conduct airstrikes doesn't wash. The Navy and Air Force are certainly not tied down. The USA has, since the invasion of Iraq, conducted airstrikes in Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan... rumoured to have conducted airstrikes in Oma
The academic world certainly agrees, and given the widespread (nearly universal) proliferation of technology, I'd daresay that he's more or less got the right idea.
If the academic world agreed so much, they would not be filing nearly as many patents as they do, professor's books would not be copyrighted, and you wouldn't have to pay to read extracts online in scientific journals. In fact, really, when it comes right down to it, you shouldn't even have to pay for an online degree at all, because that's just information, and it wants to be free.
If computer programmers should be required to give up their "intellectual property" for free, then so too should too every professor in any every university or college.
RMS believes that software is one such area in which we can greatly benefit from having it as a free/public resource
Nothing is free, but, in fairness to RMS, and I can defend him on this, the world where hardware manufacturers sold hardware and let the software be moved around freely had its advantages. Even MS played more or less that way in the good old days. I don't remember DOS even being copy protected, and DOS itself was $10 at some point.
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I think that's very well said.
Keeping this in mind, if God abhors sin, and lying is a sin (thou shalt not bear false witness) then God has contradicted himself. Therefore, God cannot lie - assuming we give benefit of the doubt to the credibility of the Bible and it's author (God Himself).
Well, here's the problem with that argument. First off, I'm not so sure that one could say that the Bible claims that God is the author. Rather, it is more that it is divinely inspired and that's a huge difference. Yes, I know there are sects which would claim that the Bible is what God wrote, but even Catholicism doesn't make that claim. After all, Catholics actually went through and hand picked which books belonged in the bible, and act, in and of itself, which claims human, rather than divine origin. I mean, if the bible was written by God, then, why leave the likes of the Gospel of Thomas on the table, or why have a lengthy and well documented argument that the Book of Revelation should perhaps NOT be included in the Bible because the spooky end of the world stuff might exclude God's message. Why have a Protestant Reformation that further excludes other books!
Secondly, the Bible is pretty clear that rules for God and the rules for men are two entirely different things. Fundamentally, I think this is where so many today's fundamentalists err when they go on their anti-gay and anti-promiscuity rampages. The Bible says that God's going to smite a bunch of people like that, and certainly, Paul has no love for homosexuals, but, its always in the context of, "God will do this or do that.". On the other hand, Christ commanded, "Judge not, lest ye be judged", and, "Let him without sin cast the first stone". So, its pretty clear that Jesus says to be cool with people, regardless of what you think of them, and, then, we have, after that, second hand divine "inspirations" promising that such sinners will be delt with by God. Therefor, there's no need for humans to butcher each other over things like race and gender and sexual orientation, because if God has a preference, its his job to deal with it, not man's. We're too stupid to do that, so we just have the Golden Rule.
Underlying the whole bible is the idea that God is a capricious master of ours. OF course, there is Christ's last words before his resurrection, and there are tales of God flooding, smashing and burning because of sin, or, abandoning Samson because he got a hair cut. But best of all is the book of Job, and I heard that book best explained, by, of all people, a Rabbi, who said that, really, at the end, God doesn't justify anything he allowed to happen to Job, except to say that "I'm God, and I can do what I want."
Sorry, you're just a slave to christian propaganda.
Not nearly as much as you are a slave to your bigotry. I mean, I could see hating christians if you were a faggit or something. So, you may as well get that out on the table. Are you gay?
You're absolutely right. However, so much of Christianity is built on the literal truth of the Bible, such that if you *can't* take it literally, then *everything* in the bible becomse suspect
Biblical inerracy is not the basis of religion. Christianity, Catholicism in particular, is an oral tradition religion that uses the bible as a common frame of spiritual reference..
The whole deal with the church wasn't so much as to say the bible was the sole truth, as it was to say that the church had the sole role in interpreting the bible. Nobody really had a problem with Galileo, in fact, he enjoyed the support of the Pope, until he started basically casting judgements about the bible itself, and that was a usurpation of the power of the church.
In other words, according to the Bible, 1000 Human Years is equal to 1 God Day
That's ridiculous. You are talking about a rhetorical point in Psalms that has absolutely nothing to do with setting up a scale of time in Genesis.
The book of Genesis is a good story with a moral point. The idea wasn't to say how the earth was made, it was to paint a backstory which illustrates that sin and temptation are as old as the earth itself, which is undeniably true.
Do you really think God would go to someone who barely had invented fire, and try and explain the ins and outs of big bang theory? I mean, what would be the point of the human experience if we couldn't discover it for ourselves, and learn for ourselves?
So God -lied-. Get over it. He is God and he can do what He wants.
worship a sick son of a bitch like that
God is an all powerful bastard that doesn't care about what you think. That's the beauty of being all powerful. He just doesn't have to care. Makes up the rules, and that's that.
When will people realize that it is okay to be a young earth Creationist and still believe in science. The Darwinists have things mostly right, it's just that God created the Universe 6000 years ago and made it APPEAR to be much older. Time, as we observe it, is directly controlled by God and as such he can manipulate it to be anything He wills.
We actually did not exist two seconds ago. Everything you believe in, even the continuity of your life, is a morality play created by God every two seconds. The entire universe, every living thing, is just the luminous beings of heaven arranging thesmelves across the multiverse in a number of beings... the real you, the you that exists for two seconds, might well spend its next as a frog or a bacteria.
The more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that life, far from being a unique or rare thing in the universe, is actually an inevitable natural process, and will consistently and repeatedly erupt under environmental conditions that are actually very common across the universe.
then, uh, where is it? That's the Fermi problem. If life would have erupted under all sorts of conditions in the universe, somebody smart should have evolved besides us by now. After all, the earth is only a 1/3 the age of the universe and theoretically there could be and should be civilizations out there that are literally thousands, millions and billions of years older than our own.
But we have seen -nothing-.
If fire fighters were more like some police officers they would wait for the building to burn down to look for survivors.
The job of police is not to prevent crime or to rescue people as much as it is to contain it. Cops aren't there to keep one guy from getting murdered. They are there to try and keep a lot of people from getting murdered or to try and prevent civil unrest. In this, they do very well.
But people have this image of police as rescuers, and they simply aren't. Courts have held time and time again that police officers are not required to risk their lives to prevent someone else from getting killed. That's why you see, for example, situations like Columbine, where the cops surround the building - they contain the situation...
If you want to defend yourself and your property, that's your responsibility, not police.
Just where exactly did you learn about those Roman values that justify the extermination of our enemies? It seems to me that you don't know much - perhaps nothing - about Romans. If there was ever a civilization that was fair with the people it conquered, it was Roma.
You are a sucker for Roman propaganda. You believe that the Romans were fair with their enemies because the Romans said they were. But, what part of these highlights exemplify fairness?
a) siege of carthage. large city of ancient rival destroyed to the ground, earth salted, inhabitants sold into slavery... keep in mind that the Romans basically trumped up charges to start the final punic war... Carthage had already been bankrupted by the previous wars as was no longer really anything.
b) siege of jerusalem. local religious centers destroyed. inhabitants sold into slavery. plundered gold and silver bought coloseum.
c) conquest of gaul... that's caesar's biggy. he brags about killing tons of people.
But really, if you want to look at it, what was the justification for Roman expansion? With the Romans, they always had some high minded idea about civilization that they preached, but in the end, their soldiers always brought home plenty of captured gold and silver.
In fact, let's talk about Roman practices. Imagine if our army was like the Roman army. When Hannibal attacked Italy, at one battle, the Roman army -ran-. As a result, the man assigned to command the army actually ordered a round of by then ancient punishment (rome was already hundreds of years old), called decimation, and they walked along with swords and killed one in ten of their own men where they stood for cowardice of the entire unit. They didn't run again.
Here here let's return to Christianity's roots. Let's bring back the good old days of slavery, rape, sodomy, torture, and bigotry.
Julius Caesar got himself elected Consul of Rome partially on his own campaign book which extolled his achievements in killing a million people in Gaul.
If Caeser were alive today, there wouldn't be anyone in Iraq left, and, forget this whole mission of liberating the Iraqi people. He would have just said flat out that he was going to take the oil.
We didn't get started on Pharoahs.. They were always bragging about smiting their enemies. That's smiting, not just killing them, but smiting them.
You know, we should just screw the whole constitution and get a Pharoah.
I, personally, will not get over it. Too much progress has been made despite christianity's best efforts to hold it back, I refuse to let them regain any ground.
I agree. Were it not for christianity, we could have stronger, Roman values, and could merely justify the extermination of our enemies because they were weaker.
Look, you have all of these people arguing against the USA military actions around the world, as if, there was some sort of a cosmic judge that holds us wrong. This planet lives at the mercy of the USA and it is high time we make it pay for us.
The sooner we get rid of religion, and focus on survival of the fittest, we can eliminate the silly notions of the soul and with it the idea of fundamental rights. From there, we can proceed with the extermination of the third world, replacing weaker cultures with a stronger industrialized one, keeping the planet for those who have the values to use it, not merely subsistent parasites that besmirch the very name of humanity with their almost termite like existence.
My two biggest bugbears with Windows are The Registry and the fact it's not multiuser in the same way that UNIX/Linux are.
I agree with that completely.
I have never found a way yet with RDP that both of us can see the same screen simultaneously (even though I have remote control of the desktop) so I can show the person what I'm doing while talking to them on the telephone. With VNC, it's straightforward to do this.
There's a stupid utility in Windows XP that does kinda this. Unfortunately, in true MS dumbly integrated fashion, you have to get MS Messenger to use it. It's that "have a friend bail me out" service that the end user runs. They launch that service, and then, you can, using your MS Messenger, log into their desktop and both of you can talk and chat. It works pretty well actually, but, I would have preferred, as you perhaps do, to just have one remote desktop client that I can use for the task...
Other than that, Windows needs to get rid of the GUI when it's not needed on some server applications. GUI means third-party graphics drivers which add instability onto any server system, whether it's Windows or Linux. Not to mention the additional, possibly wasted overhead.
I agree there too.
I don't rate many of Microsoft's built in utilities like Notepad, IE and Windows Media Player but I strip those out with XPLite and just put on better free or Open Source equivalents.
Notepad is the root of all evil.
So I'm sure the Earth (with it's atmosphere) is constantly producing new water.
If that were the case, then, human global warming wouldn't even matter, because, if you have a planet producing new water, then, there's going to be new water vapor, and water vapor does way more greenhouse effects than does CO2.
If all of these were true, the total amount of water on earth would be constantly decreasing, and would have been for billions of years. This is not the case - the amount of water on earth is relatively constant. As far as I remember from my university chemistry and biology classes, organics don't, for the most part, break down water ever.
:-)
Some biology class!
Photosynthesis:
6H2O + 6CO2 ----------> C6H12O6+ 6O2
http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/BIOBK/BioBookPS.html
If all of these were true, the total amount of water on earth would be constantly decreasing, and would have been for billions of years.
Perhaps there's not much life relative to the vast amounts of water on the earth.
Why must it? Could you justify that statement?
The problem is that the Earth doesn't have sufficient gravity to hold free hydrogen. Free hydrogen on earth goes by by into space. So that almost automatically rules out any free hydrogen / oxygen hypothesis... or at least renders it less likely.
Now, so, maybe there is some sort of hydrogen compound and some sort of oxygen compound that could react on earth to form water. Well, then, you'd have to ask, where's the traces of those reactions occuring, and, are there any minerals out there today that support those conclusions. Right now, you can find oxygen in just about any good old mineral, but hydrogen, I think that's an entirely different mater. I'm not a geologist, but I'm pretty sure that the only hydrogens we find on earth are from organic compounds, and they get it from a reaction that ultimately originates with water as one of the reagents.
Now, that is of course based on a geological understanding that goes maybe at most a mile or two into the earth's crust. There could be some sort of something in the mantle where, ahah, there is a ton of hydrogen... you know, like water is formed from some hydrogen bearing rock mixing with some oxygen bearing rock inside the earth and shoots up out of a volcano. IF you could somehow find a set of candidate rocks and then make a good case for it, inside the earth, consistent with what we already know from the geological record about how the earth was formed, then yeah, you'd probably refute the underlying assumption of these japanese scientists and be some kind of a hero.
But you'd be a bigger hero than that... because, if you actually could find a non-organic source of hydrogen on the earth you'd be a huge hero, because you would have discovered a fairly green non-fossil fuel. Good luck with that!
When you understand what the true motive of an entity is you can better understand their actions in the future. It should come as no surprise that they would try to support studies that would favor their product and the continued use of it. That is a corruption of the system.
So does this mean that we can disregard global warming because the people that advocate addressing it are linked to left wing causes?
I mean, advertising can only do so much, and at some point, the product ultimately has to sell itself. Taser sells itself. They come out, show a guy getting tasered, giving the cops a few seconds to restrain him without harm to themselves and even to the victim. On the other hand, if you shoot someone, a lot of times, they die. That's a pretty big difference.
I do prefer Linux because well, I do... but, honesty demands a few good look at everything.
If we're going to get into, yet again, a tired debate about Windows vs Linux, let's challenge some basic "truths" about Windows circulated in the Linux community. A lot of these basic "truths" are circulated about older versions of Windows...
1. Windows is unreliable. Not true. Any more, Windows Server is very reliable. IT departments in a number of my clients run Windows Server 2003 and can keep it up for years, if they want. I think it has been about five years since any Windows server I have seen has ever crashed.
2. Windows isn't multiuser friendly. Not true. I know one guy who started an ISP, threw up a bunch of Windows servers and gave all of his customers unfettered access to their own SQL Server databases. I thought he was crazy. But, now he's a millionaire and his business is well regarded. In the enterprise scale, I've got multiple people connecting to Windows databases via RDP, and honestly, this setup makes VNC look like crap. Windows terminal services works so extraordinarily well that outsourced development teams in India are using RDP to run Visual Studio on US hosted boxes.
3. SQL Server sucks. Not True. I think that was a pretty accurate claim up till around 7.0, but starting around SQL Server 2000, you could make a pretty good case for SQL Server 2000 for a lot of medium sized businesses and medium sized datasets. I've seen SQL Server instances running with terabytes of real row data (not just tons of images) and it holds up like a champ. Law firms, power companies, people that have big data, are using SQL Server and it works for them pretty well.
4. IIS Sucks. Not true. I'm not a real big fan of ASP.NET, but, its working pretty well for a lot of people and keeps me employed. It has its hiccups, but, for the most part, if you build an application in ASP.NET and know -something-, the IIS/SQL Server/Windows Server stack is actually going to be there for your more than it will let you down.
Of course, that's not to say Microsoft is perfect. They aren't. Internet Explorer STILL sucks, Word sucks (but MS Office still blows Open Office out of the water), the help in Visual Studio is just terrible any more, and there's a lot to not like about how Visual Studio manages projects and solutions. But, going around and saying that "everything Microsoft makes sucks", isn't true, and honestly, it never has been. For a lot of customers, a lot of the time, they have actually succeeded because they offer a better product.
Tazer is a For Profit company their role is to market
Yeah, and the people who oppose Taser are a bunch of for profit lawyers.... so, how does the profitability of taser mean anything?
In quite a few cases it has been shown to be the *first* thing the officer does when encountering resistance. If you're equating tasering someone with shooting them, I sincerely do hope shooting people have never been the first reaction to resistance where you live.
Yeah, what happens is that cops get the shit kicked out of them, or, have to hang back and wait for backup, when you have, trailer park dudes drunk and waving a knife.
Tasers should be outlawed; they do not do anything you couldn't do before with a gun or a truncheon
Tasers should not be outlawed and I might actually buy one myself. If someone is tazered, 99 times out of 100, they get up and walk away. If someone is shot, at best, you are looking at a visit to the ER, weeks, if not months of healing. There is no comparison. So, before Taser, all you had was the option to either shoot the suspect, or risk your own life. Taser gives police the option to quickly disarm a potential suspect and get him behind bars, without harm to police. I think that's worthwhile.
Tazer's role is to subdue people resisting arresting without resorting to violence that risks life or injury to the officer, or risks getting shot. Your odds of getting killed by a Tazer are remarkably low, so low, in fact, that people do taze each other in training with it. Yeah, anything might kill you, and tazer isn't perfect, but overall, tazer is better than being shot or having a cop getting his ear bitten off.
I'm not sure who has the best bargaining chips, but I don't think it will be the US.
Iranians need food.
There's a lot about this fabled US vs Iran rivalry that does not add up and it almost makes me think that to a large degree the Bush Administration is covertly fostering the rise of Iran as a middle eastern superpower.
Motive
1. Geopolitically, US foreign policy is to create regional checks around the globe so that she can use her weight so swing a balance of power one way or the other but without having to be overtly committed. A strong Iran creates enormous problems for Russia and China both. China has no domestic oil whatsoever, and Russia is well within range of Iranian missiles.
2. Money. We often talk about the US petrodollar as a product of Saudi Arabia, but what's often overlooked is that the USA still possesses a fairly sizable proved reserve of oil in her own right. In essence, the dollar is not just backed by US influence in the middle east but also by the USA's own oil reserves. Yes, the USA does not pump enough of its own oil, but, if we were to throw the environment into the dumper, we could drill Alaska, drill offshore, grind up all the shale in Colorado, convert to coal to liquids, drill the Bakken, and we'd wind up with trillions of barrels of the stuff. So, in the long run, high oil prices benefit the United States, because ultimately, the USA has that money in the bank. Let's put it this way: ANWR alone is worth a trillion dollars.
Supporting Evidence
1. Whose benefited. Everything the Bush Administration has done has benefited Iran from a security perspective. The Iranian foreign minister even pointed this out on NPR. Bush knocked off Iraq and Afghanistan both, and neither regime supported the USA. On the flipside, the high oil prices that exist partially because of the war in Iraq and the bellicosity with Iran actually are proving to be lucrative for nearly every traditionally Republican constituency. Oil men, miners, agribusiness, chemical, even US manufacturers have all benefited from rising oil prices and a devalued dollar. If Iran and the USA are enemies, both sides are laughing all the way to the bank.
2. History. Republicans, in particular, despite their bellicosity with Iran, have a long and fabled history of actually dealing with the Iran in pragmatic terms "behind the scenes". Ronald Reagan was nearly brought down because of a complicated deal which actually saw the USA supply weapons to Iran during the Iran - Iraq war. I mean, while Democrats talked rapproachment with Iran, Republicans were already making deals with them and hiding it.
Later on, administration officials from both Reagan and Bush I would both admit that they did, in fact, have a back door in communications to Iran. It's reasonable to think that a Dick Cheney who was an integral part of all of those administrations might actually have a back door to Iran himself. We do know, right away, that the government we work with in Iraq travels to Iran rather frequently. It's almost inconceivable that the USA would not be using the Iraqi leadership as the most covert sort of conduit.
3. Careful rules of engagement. The USA rightfully complains about the Iranians funding and helping anti-American insurgents in Iraq, but at the same time, the USA is also helping anti-Iranian insurgents in Iran. This is a sort of a standoff. Despite proclamations against Iranian leadership, the Administration has bent out of its way to say, for the most part, that Iranian leaders are not directly implicated in this and they actually might not be.
4. A total pass on WMD proves cooperation. The USA had absolutely no problem launching a unilateral war on Iraq because of WMD that didn't even exist, but Iran has 9000 centrifuges spinning and there's not been a shot fired. Even the claim that the Iraqi invasion has weakened the USA abilities to conduct airstrikes doesn't wash. The Navy and Air Force are certainly not tied down. The USA has, since the invasion of Iraq, conducted airstrikes in Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan... rumoured to have conducted airstrikes in Oma
The academic world certainly agrees, and given the widespread (nearly universal) proliferation of technology, I'd daresay that he's more or less got the right idea.
If the academic world agreed so much, they would not be filing nearly as many patents as they do, professor's books would not be copyrighted, and you wouldn't have to pay to read extracts online in scientific journals. In fact, really, when it comes right down to it, you shouldn't even have to pay for an online degree at all, because that's just information, and it wants to be free.
If computer programmers should be required to give up their "intellectual property" for free, then so too should too every professor in any every university or college.
RMS believes that software is one such area in which we can greatly benefit from having it as a free/public resource
Nothing is free, but, in fairness to RMS, and I can defend him on this, the world where hardware manufacturers sold hardware and let the software be moved around freely had its advantages. Even MS played more or less that way in the good old days. I don't remember DOS even being copy protected, and DOS itself was $10 at some point.
That's fine, as long as access to the source code, and authorization to freely modify and distribute is one of the requirements.
why?