Linux doesn't have to beat proprietary software on the desktop any more, because the desktop has become largely irrelevant. "This thing you want to do only works on Windows/proprietary environment" has become almost anachronistic.
...if the IDC "study" takes into account the effect of the AT&T - T-Mobile merger. Because if that occurs and there isn't a deluge of customers from T-Mobile to Sprint as a result, then the iPhone would be available for... well, basically everyone except for Sprint customers in the USA, and you'd have to think that could only help the iPhone's market share.
Serious question here. Do people assigned to these re-education camps actually come out thinking that oh, they had it all wrong, and they'll be on the right path once again? Because I have a hard time believing, after nearly 40 years of dealing with people, that this is the result. If anything, I'd believe they come out even more convinced than ever that whatever got them in trouble was right, but more cautious about expressing it.
I'm talking about what happens in real life, not what happens in Orwell's absurd fantasies.
Seriously. I'll worry about Mac's graphics problems about the same time Steam fixes this completely unreasonable and ridiculous requirement that it be installed on a case-insensitive filesystem. I converted my HDD to case-sensitive and everything else seems to work just fine with it... what the hell, man?
Is the rush for performance and graphics killing the fun in video games?
I think so.
This argument has been made since 1992 and before. I should know; I actually made that claim in a USENET post in response to someone at Id software on the original comp.sys.ibm.pc.games board. Of course, that same company then came out with DOOM a few years later. I was wrong then, and you are wrong now. The rush for performance didn't kill the fun in video games.
What has happened, however, is diminishing returns. This used to be manifest in the size of the team and expense of the game. Now it's coming in the form of innovations that the average game-player just doesn't care about -- or worse, doesn't even notice. And this has been going on for a long time. It's why the Wii, despite no HD capabilities and slightly better than GameCube graphics, is able to outsell the living snot out of its current-generation competitors combined.
Nobody gives a damn any more about these graphical innovations. They haven't been important for a while. That's one of the underlying causes of consoles' popularity over the PC.
I don't think Bing will ever out-Google Google. So it's strange that they don't try to identify problems with Google and address them. They seem to start out with the assumption that Google is perfect, so the best path forward is to do everything just like Google, only more so.
But this is what Microsoft does, isn't it? It's what they've always done -- see what the competition does that works, then do the same thing and leverage their Windows monopoly to make it big. Even Windows itself borrowed heavily from Mac OS; DOS before it was a CP/M rip-off. (As an aside: I'm not the only person who noticed how much Windows 7 looks like KDE, am I?) Microsoft almost never the first-mover in anything, and they never were.
But people have recognized this now. It's no longer the cool place for the kids to go work after getting their degrees, so they're having a much more difficult time recruiting the best and the brightest. The people behind their successes have mostly left, and are elsewhere in the industry.
This isn't predicting the "death" of Microsoft -- rather, it's the fall into mediocrity that happens to all large, mature corporations. Microsoft will need a new CEO to break this pattern, and he will be a very different kind of CEO from the kind who got them here.
I'm leaving AT&T to go to cable based solutions for a dozen users in an office. I know the reliability will be only 99%, but my 99.99% SLA is useless, as they go down all the time (and compensating me, which is a joke since I need the service, not $50 credits).
Seriously... guess what happens to the flavor of beef when the cow has been wallowing in shit for most of its life? You end up with beef that smells and tastes like like cow shit, even after you cook it.
I had no idea that this would be a problem until I left Texas for Southern California. Have you seen those stockyards in the Inland Empire? Horrible.
It matters what KIND of music it is. For example, I couldn't possibly get any work done if Brahms or Stevie Ray Vaughn were playing. Put on some techno or Bach, on the other hand, and my productivity hits max.
Freedom of speech, in the United States at least, is not given to citizens so that they can harm other people's reputations or hold them accountable for their actions. It is there so that actions by the government can be openly criticized and constructive dialog be established between (and amongst) citizens and the government, without fear of reprisal. It is there for the betterment of everyone. If there is no benefit to society, no protection is granted.
Well, first off, let's talk about where you're correct. You are correct that the First Amendment exists to allow us to criticize the government, and that it we're not to use it to harm other people's reputations.
Now on that latter point, you'll find that proving libel (written defamation) and slander (verbal defamation) is incredibly difficult in the USA. The accuser has the burden of proof, the accuser has to show that the person making the false statement knew it was false -- oh yes, and it has to be a false statement, too.
But on everything else, the exact opposite is true. The First Amendment DOES exist to explicitly protect speech which has "no betterment to society." Because the underlying philosophy behind that is that no one knows exactly what that is -- and no one, not even the government of a democracy, has the right to determine it.
The Bill of Rights in America exist as a kind of check against unfettered popular opinion. England was a constitutional democracy at the time the US broke off from it; we came from a democratic tradition, and had this experience that we had learned from. Many of the things listed in it are things that popular opinion has held should be illegal -- gun ownership, terrible and hateful speech, various religious practices. They are things that without them, the democratic process could easily be used to make them illegal.
They are, in a sense, the only things that are worthy of protection; otherwise, the protections have no legal "teeth," as it were.
As my wife says about China -- you have freedom of speech there; you can say anything you want. You just might not have freedom after speech.
I've spent most of my career working with Linux. I've also spent a good amount of time in Java. I regularly need more than a passing familiarity with Apache and how web services work. Sound familiar?
When I started school, none of these things existed. Even the WWW was little more than a proposal and a prototype.
By learning a broad variety of languages and focusing on the concepts, my education prepared me to adjust as technology changed. It's as simple as that. Once you've learned those, learning a new language, OS, protocol or library becomes a 2-week thing.
The submitter is probably going to hear from many who paid a lot of money for the former kind of education and will defend it, but the latter is the only kind worth paying for.
Actually, ever try programming in C on, say, an Apple//e?
You can try it right now. Go get Virtual II or some other emulator, grab a copy of Aztec C compiler, and try it yourself.
The reason BASIC was so popular back in the days of 8-bit PCs was because it was simpler than Assembly language, and the interpreter could easily fit in a very tiny amount of ROM; the programs themselves were efficiently-stored as well.
On the flip side, C requires a compiler, a linker, a decent library to take advantage of the system. Aztec C even came with a full-fledged C shell, two separate compilers -- the second compiler provided an interpreted bytecode-style object, just like BASIC, to keep the binary size from exceeding the 64KB page limit.
The problem with C at that time was that it was a 16-bit language in an 8-bit world.
So BASIC became something that shipped with nearly every PC in existence, and lots of people learned it. It stuck around because BASIC was, in a sense, something Microsoft was really attached to, but also you had these massive armies of people who'd only really learned BASIC as a language. When Microsoft became dominant, VB became important along with it.
My Mom worked for him briefly, and My Dad met him during his residency. And the moral of the story is, if you not only personally save countless lives but create techniques that allow countless others to save countless lives (thus revolutionizing not merely medical science but Mathematics, with this concept of "finite uncountability"), then you're allowed to be an asshole.
The rest of you are not quite so cool -- so be nice to each other.
Just last week, I was thinking about this. The University of Texas (where I went) had a similar philosophy when I was there as well; the goal was to teach the concepts and how to learn new languages. We groused about it incessantly at the time, but looking back over how my career has progressed and how I've been able to adapt to new technology, it was absolutely the right education.
Consider this: At the time I started my Freshman year in college, the Fall of 1991...
The Linux kernel had not yet been released by Linus Torvalds (v0.11, Dec. 1991)
The World Wide Web had not yet been released to the public (1993) -- NCSA Mosaic was not to even begin development for over a year (Late 1992)
Java had not yet been released to the public (1995)
The latest release of Windows, 3.0, was still a 16-bit shell launched (not by default) from DOS.
Microsoft Office was just a bundle including Word, Excel and Powerpoint at a discount (vs. their separate costs) and had only existed for one year; it was generally an also-ran compared with Lotus SmartSuite and Wordperfect (e.g., Lotus Ami Pro 3.0 was ranked as the #1 word processor for Windows by PC Computing magazine at that time)
The C++ STL had yet to be developed (proposed 1993, released 1994).
The first GSM network ever was just being launched; IS-95 (Qualcomm CDMA) was not to be introduced for another 4 years.
The Eternal September had not yet occurred (1993)
IBM was still the dominant PC maker.
Design Patterns was 3 years from publication.
The most basic elements of what we develop with today didn't even exist, and those that did exist were in nascent forms that they today barely resemble. Even ANSI C got a major update 8 years afterwards with the C99 standard -- which is nine years ago.
But wait, there's more!!!
When I was in grad school at UCSD, I took a class on Software Evolution. The instructor would give us a project, and every couple of weeks ask us to make changes to the project as our next assignment, to expand the project's capabilities. We were given the freedom to choose whatever means we wanted to pursue this goal. The initial assignment was to generate a simple web page.
A friend of mine chose to use Perl. I asked him if he knew Perl, and he said, "No, but I can learn how in the time it takes to implement this in any other language, and with each new assignment I can just write a whole new script."
He was the only one in the class to finish every assignment.
The moral of the story is not that Perl is something wonderful, but rather that Perl was the appropriate tool for the job and that learning how to use the appropriate tool takes less time than using a tool you're familiar with that doesn't work so well. Consider chopping down an overgrown pine tree. If you know how to use a hand saw but not a chainsaw, the guy who uses a chainsaw is going to hack the tree down in less time regardless of whether he has to read the manual to learn how to use it. (And then after that, he'll know how to use a chainsaw on other trees, too.)
I hate to say it, but users like yourself make up an infinitesimally small fraction of total users. A company needs to market/design their products for the masses, not the outliers.
That's true. It's also true that this group is the group that ultimately defines what the rest of use, because they are the ones who produce the most documents, the most important documents, and use the high-end features that force the rest of us to use MS Office instead of, say, OpenOffice.org, for compatibility's sake.
Even ignoring the hyperbole, maybe they don't want to work for a group who's expressed purpose is to kill people.
My first job after graduate school was for a division of Northrop-Grumman, doing test software for NATO communications equipment. Now while the purpose of communications equipment is relatively benign, I was able to connect the dots between what I was doing and the ultimate goal: The ability to drop a bomb on anyone, anywhere, with little or no damage to our troops. What I realized was that we were heading towards a point where our military would become so powerful, the costs of military action so low relative to the amount of damage we could deal,... with such a cheap military option, why would a president even consider diplomatic options?
I don't think leaving that job will prevent this future from happening (if, indeed, it hasn't already). But I myself in the eyes in the mirror again, so that's nice.
Fundamentalists certainly do that, too; they've picked a certain set of beliefs, no more consistent with "what the Bible says" than any other interpretation, and claim it to be the One Truth of God.
What I believe is that learning what God is about is a journey, not a destination. It's a cliché, I know, but it's accurate. I don't presume to claim that what I believe is God's Truth. It's more accurately "What I know of God's Truth at this time, which will change as I learn more, and might be wholly inaccurate." What I'm picking and choosing from are the different human interpretations of God. That's not merely non-Fundamentalist; it's almost Rationalist, in the sense that I'm trusting in my reason above other things to sort out what's real and what isn't.
It's mere arrogance for a man to claim he knows exactly what God wants, unless God is whispering in the man's ear -- a difficult thing to prove, at best. And even if we trust that the authors of the Bible (and "Which Bible do you mean?" is a valid question -- is the Book of Mormon part of this? The New Testament? The Apocrypha?) had God whispering in their ears, they portray some vastly different and contradictory characteristics. There is no wholly consistent point of view based on a literal interpretation of the Bible! Thus the claim that any belief is NOT an attempt to "pick and choose the words of God" is nonsense.
Yes, I got the Immaculate Conception completely wrong; I grew up in the Reformed tradition where we consider Original Sin completely bogus, anyway, so we don't need Mary to be "cleansed" in her mother's womb. The way we figure it, the sin you commit in your own life is what condemns you. So, please pardon my ignorance. The Immaculate Conception hasn't been relevant since the Reformation. I did mean to refer to the conception of Jesus.
Still, if you want to claim to be on the side of correct understanding, you could at least get what I said correctly.
I didn't say that the idea of the Immaculate Conception came about in the 1700s. I said that a lot of doctrines like it began to be questioned around the 1700s... give or take a couple of centuries, because this is part of the movement that eventually led up to the Reformation a couple of centuries earlier. The point is, it's all part of the intellectual shift that began with the printing press, more widespread literacy, and rediscovering ancient languages.
What good is a Reformation if we don't get to throw out bogus dogma in the first place?
The simple way is to look at the Bible for what it is: A collection of writings by different human beings at different points of time who all had different views of the world. That pretty much covers all of the conflicts. It does, however, require you to use your brain from time to time.
Hi! I'm a Christian, and I'd like to introduce you to a version of Christianity you might not have known existed: The kind that believes that if facts conflict with dogma, then facts win.
Rant follows:
There's an interesting history to Fundamentalism, and it (and the history of the Bible) is well-covered in the phenomenal book Whose Bible Is It?. But the short version is that at some point, along with all of the Scientific knowledge that was challenging a lot of how we understood how the world works, a lot of Biblical scholarship occurred since the Enlightenment that was challenging to some standard dogmas. For example, the original Hebrew prophecy of the Messiah spoke of a "young girl," which in the Greek Septuagint -- which was the most popular "Bible" back when the New Testament was being written -- translated into a word meaning "virgin." Well, this eventually snowballed into the Immaculate Conception, but starting from the 1700s or so Christians started to recognize that what really happened was that young teenage Mary got herself knocked up.
As people began to recognize these sorts of things, obviously there was some resistance from those who felt that commonly-held and well-treasured dogmas that had been held for nearly 15 centuries really weren't up for debate, and sometime in the early 20th century these "not up for debate" dogmas were published as pamphlets titled, "The Fundamentals." (From which we get the name, "Fundamentalism.")
Now the key thing to note about this is that this didn't begin as a war between Science and Religion. It started out as a conflict within Religion itself. And it's notable that the Fundamentalists were taking the view that tradition trumped whatever the Bible actually originally said, that mistranslations and misunderstandings of what was in the book that had become traditional -- such as Young Earth Creationism -- were really more important than what had actually been written. You'll note that this is a very different thing from believing in a "literal" interpretation of the Bible.
Well, what's happened is that the Fundamentalists won the war. There are some good churches out there left, but generally the populations in those churches are elderly and dying off; in the rest of the churches, intellectuals are ostracized. Young Christians today know little more than a dumbed-down version of Christianity that's based on living through certain traditions, rather than a "way" or a "walk" to try and understand and learn about God; they think they know all they need to about God, and are ready to show the rest of the world just how it is. (Get off my lawn.)
And this is the Christianity that they now inflict on the rest of the world. It is not my Christianity, not the Christianity I grew up with. But even that good old church was taken over by the Fundamentalists shortly after I left for college. And that war is over.
Oh, as for Genesis 1? When you look at the text repeated in the verses, you see the same things over and over: "And God created... and said it was good." I think the point here is that God created the universe and everything in it, and called it "good." Note how the sun was not created until the 4th day -- so how could there have been an evening and morning? The "days" are just a poetic device, part of the oral tradition, a (very effective) memory trick used to help people remember the story during the many centuries the story existed but hadn't yet been written.
(But if you are one of those Christians who needs the Bible to say something before you believe it, just take a peek at Psalm 90:4; given that Genesis is "The Fir
"I'm not sure the amount of independent artists that Apple has but a few years ago they signed some major indie labels."
Independent artists get what their distributor gives them. If you go through CD Baby, which anyone can do and is non-exclusive, you get about $0.63 per download.
iTunes sales through CD Baby are very, very favorable to the artist. But then, that's just the way CD Baby's always been.
Actually, it is almost identical, in a "Vivendi Universal is totally going to sue" sort of way, to the old Sierra On-Line network / Imagination Network.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux doesn't have to beat proprietary software on the desktop any more, because the desktop has become largely irrelevant. "This thing you want to do only works on Windows/proprietary environment" has become almost anachronistic.
...if the IDC "study" takes into account the effect of the AT&T - T-Mobile merger. Because if that occurs and there isn't a deluge of customers from T-Mobile to Sprint as a result, then the iPhone would be available for ... well, basically everyone except for Sprint customers in the USA, and you'd have to think that could only help the iPhone's market share.
Serious question here. Do people assigned to these re-education camps actually come out thinking that oh, they had it all wrong, and they'll be on the right path once again? Because I have a hard time believing, after nearly 40 years of dealing with people, that this is the result. If anything, I'd believe they come out even more convinced than ever that whatever got them in trouble was right, but more cautious about expressing it.
I'm talking about what happens in real life, not what happens in Orwell's absurd fantasies.
Seriously. I'll worry about Mac's graphics problems about the same time Steam fixes this completely unreasonable and ridiculous requirement that it be installed on a case-insensitive filesystem. I converted my HDD to case-sensitive and everything else seems to work just fine with it... what the hell, man?
Yes, it is. If for nothing else, to see that there are folks in Hollywood for whom the pull of Scientology is ... nonexistent. ;)
The real question is:
Is the rush for performance and graphics killing the fun in video games?
I think so.
This argument has been made since 1992 and before. I should know; I actually made that claim in a USENET post in response to someone at Id software on the original comp.sys.ibm.pc.games board. Of course, that same company then came out with DOOM a few years later. I was wrong then, and you are wrong now. The rush for performance didn't kill the fun in video games.
What has happened, however, is diminishing returns. This used to be manifest in the size of the team and expense of the game. Now it's coming in the form of innovations that the average game-player just doesn't care about -- or worse, doesn't even notice. And this has been going on for a long time. It's why the Wii, despite no HD capabilities and slightly better than GameCube graphics, is able to outsell the living snot out of its current-generation competitors combined.
Nobody gives a damn any more about these graphical innovations. They haven't been important for a while. That's one of the underlying causes of consoles' popularity over the PC.
I don't think Bing will ever out-Google Google. So it's strange that they don't try to identify problems with Google and address them. They seem to start out with the assumption that Google is perfect, so the best path forward is to do everything just like Google, only more so.
But this is what Microsoft does, isn't it? It's what they've always done -- see what the competition does that works, then do the same thing and leverage their Windows monopoly to make it big. Even Windows itself borrowed heavily from Mac OS; DOS before it was a CP/M rip-off. (As an aside: I'm not the only person who noticed how much Windows 7 looks like KDE, am I?) Microsoft almost never the first-mover in anything, and they never were.
But people have recognized this now. It's no longer the cool place for the kids to go work after getting their degrees, so they're having a much more difficult time recruiting the best and the brightest. The people behind their successes have mostly left, and are elsewhere in the industry.
This isn't predicting the "death" of Microsoft -- rather, it's the fall into mediocrity that happens to all large, mature corporations. Microsoft will need a new CEO to break this pattern, and he will be a very different kind of CEO from the kind who got them here.
I'm leaving AT&T to go to cable based solutions for a dozen users in an office. I know the reliability will be only 99%, but my 99.99% SLA is useless, as they go down all the time (and compensating me, which is a joke since I need the service, not $50 credits).
Lemme guess... ...Assassin's Creed 2? ;)
It also tastes better.
Seriously... guess what happens to the flavor of beef when the cow has been wallowing in shit for most of its life? You end up with beef that smells and tastes like like cow shit, even after you cook it.
I had no idea that this would be a problem until I left Texas for Southern California. Have you seen those stockyards in the Inland Empire? Horrible.
It matters what KIND of music it is. For example, I couldn't possibly get any work done if Brahms or Stevie Ray Vaughn were playing. Put on some techno or Bach, on the other hand, and my productivity hits max.
Well, first off, let's talk about where you're correct. You are correct that the First Amendment exists to allow us to criticize the government, and that it we're not to use it to harm other people's reputations.
Now on that latter point, you'll find that proving libel (written defamation) and slander (verbal defamation) is incredibly difficult in the USA. The accuser has the burden of proof, the accuser has to show that the person making the false statement knew it was false -- oh yes, and it has to be a false statement, too.
But on everything else, the exact opposite is true. The First Amendment DOES exist to explicitly protect speech which has "no betterment to society." Because the underlying philosophy behind that is that no one knows exactly what that is -- and no one, not even the government of a democracy, has the right to determine it.
The Bill of Rights in America exist as a kind of check against unfettered popular opinion. England was a constitutional democracy at the time the US broke off from it; we came from a democratic tradition, and had this experience that we had learned from. Many of the things listed in it are things that popular opinion has held should be illegal -- gun ownership, terrible and hateful speech, various religious practices. They are things that without them, the democratic process could easily be used to make them illegal.
They are, in a sense, the only things that are worthy of protection; otherwise, the protections have no legal "teeth," as it were.
As my wife says about China -- you have freedom of speech there; you can say anything you want. You just might not have freedom after speech.
I've spent most of my career working with Linux. I've also spent a good amount of time in Java. I regularly need more than a passing familiarity with Apache and how web services work. Sound familiar?
When I started school, none of these things existed. Even the WWW was little more than a proposal and a prototype.
By learning a broad variety of languages and focusing on the concepts, my education prepared me to adjust as technology changed. It's as simple as that. Once you've learned those, learning a new language, OS, protocol or library becomes a 2-week thing.
The submitter is probably going to hear from many who paid a lot of money for the former kind of education and will defend it, but the latter is the only kind worth paying for.
Actually, ever try programming in C on, say, an Apple //e?
You can try it right now. Go get Virtual II or some other emulator, grab a copy of Aztec C compiler, and try it yourself.
The reason BASIC was so popular back in the days of 8-bit PCs was because it was simpler than Assembly language, and the interpreter could easily fit in a very tiny amount of ROM; the programs themselves were efficiently-stored as well.
On the flip side, C requires a compiler, a linker, a decent library to take advantage of the system. Aztec C even came with a full-fledged C shell, two separate compilers -- the second compiler provided an interpreted bytecode-style object, just like BASIC, to keep the binary size from exceeding the 64KB page limit.
The problem with C at that time was that it was a 16-bit language in an 8-bit world.
So BASIC became something that shipped with nearly every PC in existence, and lots of people learned it. It stuck around because BASIC was, in a sense, something Microsoft was really attached to, but also you had these massive armies of people who'd only really learned BASIC as a language. When Microsoft became dominant, VB became important along with it.
Most farmers in the USA are massive agricultural corporations nowadays, anyhow.
My Mom worked for him briefly, and My Dad met him during his residency. And the moral of the story is, if you not only personally save countless lives but create techniques that allow countless others to save countless lives (thus revolutionizing not merely medical science but Mathematics, with this concept of "finite uncountability"), then you're allowed to be an asshole.
The rest of you are not quite so cool -- so be nice to each other.
Sounds like Stanford taught things the right way.
Just last week, I was thinking about this. The University of Texas (where I went) had a similar philosophy when I was there as well; the goal was to teach the concepts and how to learn new languages. We groused about it incessantly at the time, but looking back over how my career has progressed and how I've been able to adapt to new technology, it was absolutely the right education.
Consider this: At the time I started my Freshman year in college, the Fall of 1991...
The most basic elements of what we develop with today didn't even exist, and those that did exist were in nascent forms that they today barely resemble. Even ANSI C got a major update 8 years afterwards with the C99 standard -- which is nine years ago.
But wait, there's more!!!
When I was in grad school at UCSD, I took a class on Software Evolution. The instructor would give us a project, and every couple of weeks ask us to make changes to the project as our next assignment, to expand the project's capabilities. We were given the freedom to choose whatever means we wanted to pursue this goal. The initial assignment was to generate a simple web page.
A friend of mine chose to use Perl. I asked him if he knew Perl, and he said, "No, but I can learn how in the time it takes to implement this in any other language, and with each new assignment I can just write a whole new script."
He was the only one in the class to finish every assignment.
The moral of the story is not that Perl is something wonderful, but rather that Perl was the appropriate tool for the job and that learning how to use the appropriate tool takes less time than using a tool you're familiar with that doesn't work so well. Consider chopping down an overgrown pine tree. If you know how to use a hand saw but not a chainsaw, the guy who uses a chainsaw is going to hack the tree down in less time regardless of whether he has to read the manual to learn how to use it. (And then after that, he'll know how to use a chainsaw on other trees, too.)
So... yeah.
And the original Xbox.
That's true. It's also true that this group is the group that ultimately defines what the rest of use, because they are the ones who produce the most documents, the most important documents, and use the high-end features that force the rest of us to use MS Office instead of, say, OpenOffice.org, for compatibility's sake.
My first job after graduate school was for a division of Northrop-Grumman, doing test software for NATO communications equipment. Now while the purpose of communications equipment is relatively benign, I was able to connect the dots between what I was doing and the ultimate goal: The ability to drop a bomb on anyone, anywhere, with little or no damage to our troops. What I realized was that we were heading towards a point where our military would become so powerful, the costs of military action so low relative to the amount of damage we could deal,
I don't think leaving that job will prevent this future from happening (if, indeed, it hasn't already). But I myself in the eyes in the mirror again, so that's nice.
Fundamentalists certainly do that, too; they've picked a certain set of beliefs, no more consistent with "what the Bible says" than any other interpretation, and claim it to be the One Truth of God.
What I believe is that learning what God is about is a journey, not a destination. It's a cliché, I know, but it's accurate. I don't presume to claim that what I believe is God's Truth. It's more accurately "What I know of God's Truth at this time, which will change as I learn more, and might be wholly inaccurate." What I'm picking and choosing from are the different human interpretations of God. That's not merely non-Fundamentalist; it's almost Rationalist, in the sense that I'm trusting in my reason above other things to sort out what's real and what isn't.
It's mere arrogance for a man to claim he knows exactly what God wants, unless God is whispering in the man's ear -- a difficult thing to prove, at best. And even if we trust that the authors of the Bible (and "Which Bible do you mean?" is a valid question -- is the Book of Mormon part of this? The New Testament? The Apocrypha?) had God whispering in their ears, they portray some vastly different and contradictory characteristics. There is no wholly consistent point of view based on a literal interpretation of the Bible! Thus the claim that any belief is NOT an attempt to "pick and choose the words of God" is nonsense.
Yes, I got the Immaculate Conception completely wrong; I grew up in the Reformed tradition where we consider Original Sin completely bogus, anyway, so we don't need Mary to be "cleansed" in her mother's womb. The way we figure it, the sin you commit in your own life is what condemns you. So, please pardon my ignorance. The Immaculate Conception hasn't been relevant since the Reformation. I did mean to refer to the conception of Jesus.
Still, if you want to claim to be on the side of correct understanding, you could at least get what I said correctly.
I didn't say that the idea of the Immaculate Conception came about in the 1700s. I said that a lot of doctrines like it began to be questioned around the 1700s... give or take a couple of centuries, because this is part of the movement that eventually led up to the Reformation a couple of centuries earlier. The point is, it's all part of the intellectual shift that began with the printing press, more widespread literacy, and rediscovering ancient languages.
What good is a Reformation if we don't get to throw out bogus dogma in the first place?
The simple way is to look at the Bible for what it is: A collection of writings by different human beings at different points of time who all had different views of the world. That pretty much covers all of the conflicts. It does, however, require you to use your brain from time to time.
Hi! I'm a Christian, and I'd like to introduce you to a version of Christianity you might not have known existed: The kind that believes that if facts conflict with dogma, then facts win.
Rant follows:
There's an interesting history to Fundamentalism, and it (and the history of the Bible) is well-covered in the phenomenal book Whose Bible Is It?. But the short version is that at some point, along with all of the Scientific knowledge that was challenging a lot of how we understood how the world works, a lot of Biblical scholarship occurred since the Enlightenment that was challenging to some standard dogmas. For example, the original Hebrew prophecy of the Messiah spoke of a "young girl," which in the Greek Septuagint -- which was the most popular "Bible" back when the New Testament was being written -- translated into a word meaning "virgin." Well, this eventually snowballed into the Immaculate Conception, but starting from the 1700s or so Christians started to recognize that what really happened was that young teenage Mary got herself knocked up.
As people began to recognize these sorts of things, obviously there was some resistance from those who felt that commonly-held and well-treasured dogmas that had been held for nearly 15 centuries really weren't up for debate, and sometime in the early 20th century these "not up for debate" dogmas were published as pamphlets titled, "The Fundamentals." (From which we get the name, "Fundamentalism.")
Now the key thing to note about this is that this didn't begin as a war between Science and Religion. It started out as a conflict within Religion itself. And it's notable that the Fundamentalists were taking the view that tradition trumped whatever the Bible actually originally said, that mistranslations and misunderstandings of what was in the book that had become traditional -- such as Young Earth Creationism -- were really more important than what had actually been written. You'll note that this is a very different thing from believing in a "literal" interpretation of the Bible.
Well, what's happened is that the Fundamentalists won the war. There are some good churches out there left, but generally the populations in those churches are elderly and dying off; in the rest of the churches, intellectuals are ostracized. Young Christians today know little more than a dumbed-down version of Christianity that's based on living through certain traditions, rather than a "way" or a "walk" to try and understand and learn about God; they think they know all they need to about God, and are ready to show the rest of the world just how it is. (Get off my lawn.)
And this is the Christianity that they now inflict on the rest of the world. It is not my Christianity, not the Christianity I grew up with. But even that good old church was taken over by the Fundamentalists shortly after I left for college. And that war is over.
Oh, as for Genesis 1? When you look at the text repeated in the verses, you see the same things over and over: "And God created... and said it was good." I think the point here is that God created the universe and everything in it, and called it "good." Note how the sun was not created until the 4th day -- so how could there have been an evening and morning? The "days" are just a poetic device, part of the oral tradition, a (very effective) memory trick used to help people remember the story during the many centuries the story existed but hadn't yet been written.
(But if you are one of those Christians who needs the Bible to say something before you believe it, just take a peek at Psalm 90:4; given that Genesis is "The Fir
Duke 3D predates the original 3dfx Voodoo card. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Independent artists get what their distributor gives them. If you go through CD Baby, which anyone can do and is non-exclusive, you get about $0.63 per download.
iTunes sales through CD Baby are very, very favorable to the artist. But then, that's just the way CD Baby's always been.
Actually, it is almost identical, in a "Vivendi Universal is totally going to sue" sort of way, to the old Sierra On-Line network / Imagination Network.
Imagination network screenshot
MyTopia Screenshot