A lot depends on the airport. At my home airport, RNH, I payed $53 an hour for a 172 this summer. It's a '67, but I know the guy I'm renting it from (he was my CFI, also the airport manager out there, among other things) and that the airplane is in good condition. It's flown mostly by him, and students doing supervised solos. On the other hand, at the airport near where I'm going to school, SGF, I pay $65 for a slightly newer 172 at the FBO. Of course, it's at a bigger airport with higher fuel prices, landing fees, etc. I guess all of which is to say that it's still possible to find a low price on a decent rental, you just have to look in the right spots. And yes, you do get what you pay for. The 150s at the FBO are $47.50/hr, and I sometimes wonder how they manage to keep them in the air for so little...
...and my opinion is that you should be punished for what you have done.
So we say that you are entitled to that opinion, and I'm entitled to hold the exact opposite opinion. After that, the outcome depends solely upon which of us is more willing and able to make his opinion become reality. Ergo, if you can get away with it, go for it.
Scary.
Following your logic, I would posit that we both live in a make-believe world. My belief in worldsystem A is no more valid than your belief in worldsystem B, and therefore each of us is exactly as right as the other. Am I missing something?
I hope that you're trolling. I fear that you're serious.
The practical consequences of this kind of thinking are astouding. Taking your argument to its logical consequence, I can say that there is nothing wrong with stealing your identity, depleting your bank accounts, kidnapping and murdering your family, burning down your house, stealing your car, amputating your appendages, and escaping to some random country that harbors criminals and doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US, without any consequence to me, as long as that is what I was raised to do. All negative aspects of that action would simply be in your head.
The fact that there are different quantities of good or evil in different acts does not mean there is not a starting point for determining the goodness or evilness of an action.
This discussion really gets into worldview and where you place the origin of the universe.
Quoth the poster:
Even if I give you absolute co-ordinates, they are really relative to an origin.
...
For something to be absolute, it must be derived from an origin.
Granted most heartily. So, the question becomes, what is the origin? There are essentially two alternatives that shake out:
The universe is self-existent and did not come from anything, has always been, and will always be.
The universe was put here by someone/something, and stems from that origin.
The first alternative has some unpleasant consequences. First, you must simply accept the universe as a brute fact. More pertinent to this case, you are left with the conclusion that there is no intrinsic evil in the world, and that all moral decisions are completely relative. Therefore, there is nothing ultimately "wrong" with any decision any of us makes, as long as the person is willing to put up with anything that society may do to them as a result. I'll refrain from drawing the direct parallel in relation to the current happenings lest I be inflammatory.
The second alternative also has some consequences that some would find unpleasant. Specifically, if something made the thing, something also wrote the rules for it, however vague or specific those rules may be. Further, we as part of the system are subject to those rules. However, most of us logical programmer types know that a system with rules is much easier to work in than a system without rules.
People get killed at abortion clinics by those on both sides. (Please, believe me, I'm not trying to be flamebait). The fact remains, Falwell is encouraging the murder of no one.
The question of fanaticism is not whether one has it, but what one does with it. Are not 90% of the/. readers fanatical about Linux/Open Source/Free software? Do many of us not trash M$ on a regular basis? Yet, in our fanaticism, we don't kill anybody; we simply advocate ideas. Some may think them absurd, still we press on. The same thing is true for Jerry Falwell. He has a lot of ideas that are unpopular, yet he presses on. He doesn't kill people, or encourage the killing of people, he simply speaks out. If you choose not to listen, that's your freedom. In some respects, I would say that he has even more responsibility to speak out for what he believes, since the matters he deals with are life and death, and possibly beyond, rather than just the ordering of bits, and who gets to do what with them.
To my knowledge, only Catholics believe in the doctrine of Transsubstantiation, which states that during the Eucharist, the bread and wine become the physical body and blood of Jesus. I think Lutherans believe in some kind of consubstantiation, which is like a pseudo-transsubstatiation, IIRC. Most Evangelicals, which includes Falwell and Robertson, believe that the Eucharist (usually called Communion in Evanagelical circles) involves only a Symbolic representation of the Crucifixion. And yes, the Crucifixion was an extremely violent, inhumane, unthinkably cruel act. But what Christians celebrate isn't the morbid violence of the act, but the love that stood behind the act, and the restoration of relationship that it brought about. </pulpit>
Yikes. I would agree with most of your post, but I have to say that comparing Jerry Falwell with Osama bin Laden is incredibly irresponsible. I too am a white Christian, and while I don't agree with everything Jerry Falwell says and does, he has never done anything even CLOSE to what Osama bin Laden has done, even if bin Laden wasn't responsible for the destruction of the WTC. To my knowledge, Falwell isn't even responsible for one person having died, ever. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never heard anything to that effect. (And no, calling homosexuality a sin != creating a climate of hate != responsibility for someone getting killed). Falwell participates within the realm of ideas, and while you may vehemently disagree with his ideas, he stays within that realm. Osama bin Laden moves out of the realm of the ideas and murders those with whom he disagrees. There's absolutely no comparison.
I responded to a guy farther up the list of comments asking if they were needing any HF support. I was able to pass some health and welfare traffic on Tuesday for a student at our college, but that's all that I've been able to find to do on HF. If you find anything out, please let me know, as I and our entire club here would love to help.
Do you guys have any need for support on HF? Our club is located in Missouri, but we have a pretty good setup. I spent several hours down there on Tuesday tracking down some family members of students at our college, but the need for HF communications seemed to drop off after that. If there's any way I can help, please let me know, otherwise I'll just keep praying for you guys.
Oh, tell me about it. Both of my father's brothers have, at some point, worked outside of the country. While they were gone, they used my dad's address as their US mailing address. Notwithstanding, a large amount of their mail still comes to my dad's house.
What's even weirder is that when he came back, one of my uncles took a job teaching at a college. My brother and I both ended up going to that same college, and my uncle moved into a house right next to the college, so his address is only slightly different from the mail coming to our student mailboxes. Consequently, because of all the change-of-address forms, I regularly get mail at three different addresses; essentially, the whole family gets everybody elses mail. I dogsit for my uncle occasionally, and I'll have at least two pieces per week that come in for me.
I took Biblical Greek, which is a bit of a different animal from Attic Greek, though they're fairly similar, from what I understand. Personally, I'd recommend a university course, if you can find a good professor and a relatively intelligent class. If you've studied a foreign language, that will be very helpful, especially with the grammar. The function of Greek words is based mostly on morphology, rather than word order, so they pack a lot of info into the words. Consequently, they can get a little hairy to parse sometimes. It's not for the faint of heart, but I would assume since you're posting on Slashdot, you enjoy dealing with complex things, and you should have a lot of fun with it.
Anyway, Revelation was originally written in Koine Greek, and there were no punctuation marks in the original manuscript. Punctuation has been added by editors over the years, and is generally agreed upon based on context, sentence flow, etc. A rough Greek transliteration of verse 18 (from the Nestle-Aland 27th Edition) would be:
"Hwde he sophia estin. Ho echwv noun psefisatw ton arithmwn tou theriou, arithmos gar anthrwpou estin, kai ho arithmos autou exakosioi exekonta ex."
The RSV says this:
"This calls for wisdom; let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty-six.
The context would seem to indicate that the number referred to is, in fact, that of the beast. Only one number is referred to in the verse, and in the first part of the sentence is called "the nubmer of the beast" (ton arithmon tou theriou). In the second part of the sentence it is "its (or easily his, is entirely determined by the context) number" (ho arithmos autou). Therefore, I would submit that et numerus eius refers to bestiae/tou theriou.
If these blood cells, produced from embryonic stem cells, are identical to ones produced from human marrow, why couldn't we just culture these using human marrow? Yes, I realize the marrow extraction process might be a little painful, but it would eliminate any moral issues from the research. (Yes, yes, I know, flame away about being a reactionary conservative for even considering that there might be moral issues here and standing in the way of science. The fact remains, there are indeed some of us out here who worry about it.)
This could be nifty, but one of the great parts of modern technology is being able to use different means of access to regulate people's contact with you. The easiest example, of course, is spam. I have about six different email addresses that I use on a regular basis, and the email address I give to a person or website is based on how I want them to be able to contact me. I have a Hotmail box entirely for the purpose of collecting spam (and boy, does it do a good job). That's the only thing it does, and that's the address that I give out on any website (and any other spam-generating contexts), so I know that anything that comes into there was not requested.
I also have a cell phone, and I'm very careful with whom I give that number. There are some people that I absolutely want to have it; there are other people that, under no circumstances, would I want them to have it. It's the same at work. I give some people my direct desk extension, and I send some people through the secretary. Having a universal access number like that could cause no end of grief for people, and eliminate one of the great ways of escaping contact when that's necessary.
Also, IIRC (and I'm sorry, but I don't feel like checking this out), I thought that originally it was illegal to use a SSN to track anything other than Social Security. Of course, people use it for everything now, but I'm not so sure that's a good idea.
is the SnapStream PVR software. The demo version is free, and the only practical limitation is a 2GB storage limit. But, if you move stuff out of it's directory, it doesn't know to add it into the 2GB quota. I've been using it for a few weeks now with a Hauppauge TV card, and it works great. My TV gets recorded, and I watch it whenever I want. The only bummer is that it currently only records in ASF. They once had an AVI recording feature in Beta, but I don't know what happened to that.
Actually, that sounds a lot like Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor. IIRC (and it was a while ago when I read it), somebody made the right anouncement somewhere and started a trend, which all the expert systems picked up and sent the market into a terminal plummet. The guy had also put some code into the main trading system that kept track of the actual transactions that caused the system to stop logging the transactions, and succeeded in screwing up the entire NYSE really bad, to the point where they had to backtrack and pretend that several days never happened.
I remember working you guys. I remember last year working like a 26A or 24A, I think it might have been you. So, this year when I heard "N1FD, 24A", I wasn't surprised, but was still quite impressed. I hope you guys had a good time, I worked about 16 hours straight, was very glad to go home after that.
Um, yes, I know. I submitted the story Friday night, it got posted Saturday morning, but nobody saw it because of the router meltdown.
I too had dreams of working the whole 24 hours, but I only made it until 6 am. What you really need to do is work out a couple shifts, and that makes it a lot more bearable. We thought we had the shifts worked out better than we actually did, but even so, it was a good learning experience for all.
Because I like talking to people more than saving resources, and because I know a variety of people, I have (for now) conceded the fight of getting everybody on one system, and consequently run three IM clients: MSN, AIM, and ICQ.
For the record, here's the breakdown of my lists:
MSN: 26 people
AOL: 10 people
ICQ: 4 people
Oddly enough, three of the people on my ICQ list also run another IM client, but I keep it because the remaining guy only runs ICQ, and I haven't yet convinced him to switch.
I installed Jabber last week, been playing with it, as it could replace my MSN and ICQ, not sure if I'm going to stick with it.
There is a special event station operating in honor of Gagarin's flight. The call is R40G, and I worked him on 14.194 MHz a couple of nights ago. I don't know if they're putting out a special QSL card or something, but it was pretty neat anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot depends on the airport. At my home airport, RNH, I payed $53 an hour for a 172 this summer. It's a '67, but I know the guy I'm renting it from (he was my CFI, also the airport manager out there, among other things) and that the airplane is in good condition. It's flown mostly by him, and students doing supervised solos. On the other hand, at the airport near where I'm going to school, SGF, I pay $65 for a slightly newer 172 at the FBO. Of course, it's at a bigger airport with higher fuel prices, landing fees, etc. I guess all of which is to say that it's still possible to find a low price on a decent rental, you just have to look in the right spots. And yes, you do get what you pay for. The 150s at the FBO are $47.50/hr, and I sometimes wonder how they manage to keep them in the air for so little...
So we say that you are entitled to that opinion, and I'm entitled to hold the exact opposite opinion. After that, the outcome depends solely upon which of us is more willing and able to make his opinion become reality. Ergo, if you can get away with it, go for it.
Scary.
Following your logic, I would posit that we both live in a make-believe world. My belief in worldsystem A is no more valid than your belief in worldsystem B, and therefore each of us is exactly as right as the other. Am I missing something?
The practical consequences of this kind of thinking are astouding. Taking your argument to its logical consequence, I can say that there is nothing wrong with stealing your identity, depleting your bank accounts, kidnapping and murdering your family, burning down your house, stealing your car, amputating your appendages, and escaping to some random country that harbors criminals and doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US, without any consequence to me, as long as that is what I was raised to do. All negative aspects of that action would simply be in your head.
Does this bother you in the slightest?
The fact that there are different quantities of good or evil in different acts does not mean there is not a starting point for determining the goodness or evilness of an action.
Quoth the poster:
Granted most heartily. So, the question becomes, what is the origin? There are essentially two alternatives that shake out:
The universe is self-existent and did not come from anything, has always been, and will always be.
The universe was put here by someone/something, and stems from that origin.
The first alternative has some unpleasant consequences. First, you must simply accept the universe as a brute fact. More pertinent to this case, you are left with the conclusion that there is no intrinsic evil in the world, and that all moral decisions are completely relative. Therefore, there is nothing ultimately "wrong" with any decision any of us makes, as long as the person is willing to put up with anything that society may do to them as a result. I'll refrain from drawing the direct parallel in relation to the current happenings lest I be inflammatory.
The second alternative also has some consequences that some would find unpleasant. Specifically, if something made the thing, something also wrote the rules for it, however vague or specific those rules may be. Further, we as part of the system are subject to those rules. However, most of us logical programmer types know that a system with rules is much easier to work in than a system without rules.
How, pray tell, do you propose that we respond?
Quite true.
The question of fanaticism is not whether one has it, but what one does with it. Are not 90% of the /. readers fanatical about Linux/Open Source/Free software? Do many of us not trash M$ on a regular basis? Yet, in our fanaticism, we don't kill anybody; we simply advocate ideas. Some may think them absurd, still we press on. The same thing is true for Jerry Falwell. He has a lot of ideas that are unpopular, yet he presses on. He doesn't kill people, or encourage the killing of people, he simply speaks out. If you choose not to listen, that's your freedom. In some respects, I would say that he has even more responsibility to speak out for what he believes, since the matters he deals with are life and death, and possibly beyond, rather than just the ordering of bits, and who gets to do what with them.
As I said before, there goes my karma.
To my knowledge, only Catholics believe in the doctrine of Transsubstantiation, which states that during the Eucharist, the bread and wine become the physical body and blood of Jesus. I think Lutherans believe in some kind of consubstantiation, which is like a pseudo-transsubstatiation, IIRC. Most Evangelicals, which includes Falwell and Robertson, believe that the Eucharist (usually called Communion in Evanagelical circles) involves only a Symbolic representation of the Crucifixion. And yes, the Crucifixion was an extremely violent, inhumane, unthinkably cruel act. But what Christians celebrate isn't the morbid violence of the act, but the love that stood behind the act, and the restoration of relationship that it brought about. </pulpit>
Well, there goes all my karma.
73,
Matthew Thomassen, N9ZT
73,
Matthew Thomassen - N9ZT
What's even weirder is that when he came back, one of my uncles took a job teaching at a college. My brother and I both ended up going to that same college, and my uncle moved into a house right next to the college, so his address is only slightly different from the mail coming to our student mailboxes. Consequently, because of all the change-of-address forms, I regularly get mail at three different addresses; essentially, the whole family gets everybody elses mail. I dogsit for my uncle occasionally, and I'll have at least two pieces per week that come in for me.
I took Biblical Greek, which is a bit of a different animal from Attic Greek, though they're fairly similar, from what I understand. Personally, I'd recommend a university course, if you can find a good professor and a relatively intelligent class. If you've studied a foreign language, that will be very helpful, especially with the grammar. The function of Greek words is based mostly on morphology, rather than word order, so they pack a lot of info into the words. Consequently, they can get a little hairy to parse sometimes. It's not for the faint of heart, but I would assume since you're posting on Slashdot, you enjoy dealing with complex things, and you should have a lot of fun with it.
Anyway, Revelation was originally written in Koine Greek, and there were no punctuation marks in the original manuscript. Punctuation has been added by editors over the years, and is generally agreed upon based on context, sentence flow, etc. A rough Greek transliteration of verse 18 (from the Nestle-Aland 27th Edition) would be:
The RSV says this:The context would seem to indicate that the number referred to is, in fact, that of the beast. Only one number is referred to in the verse, and in the first part of the sentence is called "the nubmer of the beast" (ton arithmon tou theriou). In the second part of the sentence it is "its (or easily his, is entirely determined by the context) number" (ho arithmos autou). Therefore, I would submit that et numerus eius refers to bestiae/tou theriou.
If these blood cells, produced from embryonic stem cells, are identical to ones produced from human marrow, why couldn't we just culture these using human marrow? Yes, I realize the marrow extraction process might be a little painful, but it would eliminate any moral issues from the research. (Yes, yes, I know, flame away about being a reactionary conservative for even considering that there might be moral issues here and standing in the way of science. The fact remains, there are indeed some of us out here who worry about it.)
I also have a cell phone, and I'm very careful with whom I give that number. There are some people that I absolutely want to have it; there are other people that, under no circumstances, would I want them to have it. It's the same at work. I give some people my direct desk extension, and I send some people through the secretary. Having a universal access number like that could cause no end of grief for people, and eliminate one of the great ways of escaping contact when that's necessary.
Also, IIRC (and I'm sorry, but I don't feel like checking this out), I thought that originally it was illegal to use a SSN to track anything other than Social Security. Of course, people use it for everything now, but I'm not so sure that's a good idea.
My $.02
is the SnapStream PVR software. The demo version is free, and the only practical limitation is a 2GB storage limit. But, if you move stuff out of it's directory, it doesn't know to add it into the 2GB quota. I've been using it for a few weeks now with a Hauppauge TV card, and it works great. My TV gets recorded, and I watch it whenever I want. The only bummer is that it currently only records in ASF. They once had an AVI recording feature in Beta, but I don't know what happened to that.
Actually, that sounds a lot like Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor. IIRC (and it was a while ago when I read it), somebody made the right anouncement somewhere and started a trend, which all the expert systems picked up and sent the market into a terminal plummet. The guy had also put some code into the main trading system that kept track of the actual transactions that caused the system to stop logging the transactions, and succeeded in screwing up the entire NYSE really bad, to the point where they had to backtrack and pretend that several days never happened.
But what if I really am a an albino nepalese scotsgaelic neanderthal from northern Peru?
73,
Matt
N9ZT (part of W5CBC for FD)
I too had dreams of working the whole 24 hours, but I only made it until 6 am. What you really need to do is work out a couple shifts, and that makes it a lot more bearable. We thought we had the shifts worked out better than we actually did, but even so, it was a good learning experience for all.
73,
Matt
N9ZT
For the record, here's the breakdown of my lists:
MSN: 26 people
AOL: 10 people
ICQ: 4 people
Oddly enough, three of the people on my ICQ list also run another IM client, but I keep it because the remaining guy only runs ICQ, and I haven't yet convinced him to switch.
I installed Jabber last week, been playing with it, as it could replace my MSN and ICQ, not sure if I'm going to stick with it.
My $.02
There is a special event station operating in honor of Gagarin's flight. The call is R40G, and I worked him on 14.194 MHz a couple of nights ago. I don't know if they're putting out a special QSL card or something, but it was pretty neat anyway.
73 and good DX,
Matt
N9ZT
I have a friend who goes by his initials "G.L". Is he going to have to change his name, or make it "G.L.(tm)"?