Really. When and what part of the Bible was changed? And WHO knows this? That's news to me. The AC above said that there are 1000 manuscripts of the NT, but that's inaccurate. there are ~25,000 manuscripts found to date of the NT. Except for some minor spelling errors, they're virtually totally identical. These manuscripts are found all over the world. If there was any error or change introduced in the past, that should have been reflected in some of the manuscripts, leaving the 25,000 manuscripts differing from each other. However, that's not the case. So it's one thing to say you don't believe the Bible was directly inspired by God, but it'd be disingenuous to believe that the Bible, especially the NT has been altered.
"The sources of the many differences between the Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate and the Masoretic text have long been discussed by scholars. Following the Renaissance, a common opinion among some humanists was that the LXX translators bungled the translation from the Hebrew and that the LXX became more corrupt with time. The most widely accepted view today is that the original Septuagint provided a reasonably accurate record of an early Hebrew textual variant that differed from the ancestor of the Masoretic text as well as those of the Latin Vulgate, where both of the latter seem to have a more similar textual heritage."
Note that the corrupted Vulgate was the version in use in the west during much of the christian era. The gist of it is that the bible is the result of copy of a copy of a copy... where scribes inserted errors, worked from incomplete manuscripts and misinterpreted margin notes as being part of the text as well as working from a translation of a translation of an original (with possibility for misinterpretation from the original as words were written without vowels as well as plain mistranslation) in first place.
Also, the so-called "Q source" is most likely nothing more than the gospel of Mark, which was the earliest gospel of the four. I'm sure that the gospel of Mark inspired the others ones. In fact, here's how the gospel of Luke begins "Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been fulfilled among us. They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples. Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write a careful account for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were taught." (Luke 1:1-4, NLT)
So please do your homework. I'm not sure a quick search in Wikipedia really counts:Q
I'm quoting wikipedia here, but I read this information in multiple sources as well as having been taught it in catholic school. Scholars who have done textual analysis of the bible disagree with your opinion on the Q source :
"The Q source (also Q document or Q) is a hypothetical written source for the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke. Q (short for the German Quelle, or "source") is defined as the "common" material found in Matthew and Luke but not in the Gospel of Mark. This ancient text supposedly contained the logia or quotations from Jesus"
Please do some homework before putting people down. The oldest fragment of the gospel of mark that archeologist's have found come from the late AD 30's. Do you believe what's written in Homer's Iliad? There are ~1000 times more manuscriptual evidence for Jesus than anybody in Illiad.
Wikipedia : "The earliest extant fragment of the New Testament is the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, a piece of the Gospel of John dated to the first half of the 2nd century."
Now there is a hypothetical "Q source" which would have been a document whose date is most often put around 40-50 AD which may have been used by later writers as a base for their gospels (along with oral tradition and copious amounts of "inspiration".)
The bible is a suspect source for several reasons. One is that is known to have been changed over the centuries, another is that reference to events in it aren't referenced in other historical works of the era, yet another that the events it contains are "fantastical" (break natural law), etc. So is the Iliad, which is why historians don't accept it as anything other than fiction that was possibly inspired by actual events lost to history.
Please read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible by Bart D. Ehrman on the problem of deriving any sort of historical truths from the bible or similar books. It's not a conspiracy, this is pretty uncontroversial stuff most of which I was taught in catholic school years ago but it doesn't seem to have reached the Americas yet.
No.... High margin income for Apple is lower user base for developers. So profit is meaningless beyond results of one company. Will it fuel further development in the product line? We just don't know. For all we know, Apple is making the next/next gen device now.
The size of the user base isn't that important, what is important is how many of those users you can activate. A lot of evidence points towards a higher activation rate for iOS users than Android users. In other words, more iOS users buy apps and they are willing to pay more while a lot of those Android users either aren't buying apps or are using their smartphone as a "dumb phone."
Last year, Apple had a meager 1 billion income from app sales(based on 4bn global market with Apple owning 100%)*. Their expenses for maintaining that thing are really considerable.
Well, Apple does claim that their 30% on app sales is what they need to break even. So what does this mean for Android (or other platforms) app stores, where a lot more apps are "free" and get their revenue from in-app advertising ? Are those stores actually profitable and viable long term ?
Yeah, but it works for Apple because people are willing to overlook vendor lock-in for a variety of reasons (which I won't go into here). It's not going to work for Microsoft - at least not as well as they hope it is going to work.
This, it seems a little like "cargo-cult" thinking by Microsoft to me. Still, they might pull it off. I'm suspending judgement until they Actually ship Windows 8, god knows they've backpedaled on all kinds of features in their OS releases before.
Your beef here is with your carrier and to a lesser extent the phone manufacturer, not Google/Android
Sure it is, Google allows the carriers and manufacturers to lock down Android in this way. They could easily disallow this kind of lockdown in the Android Compatibility Definition Document and end it, but they won't because they are looking out for their customers' interests (those of the carriers and manufacturers) and not yours.
It's just a way of explaining that the iOS platform is vibrant and viable even if Android marketshare were increasing.
Lately you guys use Apple's insane profits (i.e. the fact they ruthlessly screw as many dollars out of you fans as possible) as a positive.
You misunderstand, profit for Apple = lots of apps sold = happy developers = continued development for us in future. I don't see where I am supposedly being screwed out of my money, when I compare phones at the store Androids that are comparable to the iPhone 4 in build quality (ie. not a creaking plastic pos) have a comparable price attached to them, and apps are dirt cheap (I figure I pay about EUR 2 or 3 on average.)
Some people have learned nothing from the last 25 years or so. The "fancy visuals" are everything. They key to successful personal computers lies in making the human-machine interface as natural as possible to make sure people can smoothly interact with their computer so they don't have to think about what they want to do, they can just go ahead and do it. All the technical things you talk about sound nice but they'll never be used without a well designed shell around them.
I think I remember seeing a few years ago that (total) taxes from the financial sector in the UK pay for nearly the entire education budget.
Considering financial services now make up 10% of UK GDP the taxes on it should be paying for more than just the education budget. Sounds like they are undertaxed compared with other industries.
That's the theory and yet all these major banks keep coming out with these rogue traders and that's only the losses big enough that the general public hears about them. Let's face out out on the terrain no-one is holding these guys accountable. IT may set up the system, Risk Management may generate the reports and they'll be either modified to say what management wants to say or just plain ignored because like all gamblers these guys think they have a system which lets them keep on winning even as they are betting their house (or in this case our houses.)
I think people do relish the opportunity to endulge in schadenfreude where banks are concerned though. People latch on to a phrase like "casino banking" and gleefully apply to everyone in the industry with the intent that we should shut it all down. By the same logic:
A police officer took a bribe, we should shut down the police. Well, there was teacher who was a paedophile once. We should shut down schools too. Look at that corrupt politcian, shut down the government while you're at it. The guy at Blockbuster charged me for bringing a DVD back 5 minutes late. Shut down them too!
The difference with the banks is that in the banks it is a structural problem with the behavior being so deeply ingrained in the culture it's difficult to see how it could be changed. Especially since they have the power to avoid outside pressure to reform.
You do have cases where the police have a structural corruption problem too, or where the government is corrupt to the point where it no longer functions. Just look at many third world nations. And yes, when that happens people need to intervene.
I hate to burst your bubble but all banks are like that. The only reason these stories are coming out now is because we're in a bear market and the incompetence of these assholes is being exposed, in a bull market where the rising tide lifts all boats these kind of guys were superstars because hey couldn't lose.
It makes little difference in either context... a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish; the flaw is that it's "self-described" hypersensitive people. What they need to do is filter out the ones who can't, and keep retesting the ones who can. All you need is ONE person that can do it a majority of the time.
From the wikipedia page :
"Seven studies were found which did report an association, while 24 could not find any association with electromagnetic fields. However, of the seven positive studies, two could not be replicated even by the original authors, three had serious methodological shortcomings, and the final two presented contradictory results."
So the evidence overwhelmingly points to the fact this is nonsense. The "all it takes is one counterexample" attitude is counter productive, it is so unlikely you can exclude the possibility. This is the same grasping at straws the "parapsychology" people do, waiting for their one golden child who'll sweep away decades of precedents.
That's true. Maybe they do this to avoid sending you an email every time you buy a track/app which could get annoying if you buy a lot of single track songs for example ? I don't know, it should probably be a user definable option.
Why make things difficult for me because of a few hundred dumbasses ? Apple should just eat the (relatively low) cost, refund people and turn over any relevant information to the authorities.
Anyone who runs a remotely popular service should enforce a minimum security standard on passwords, and have a system in place to keep outside parties from hijacking people's accounts. Stop making excuses for a multi-billion dollar company. They really don't need people to carry water for them.
"When changing your password, your new Apple ID password should:
Be at least eight characters. Contain at least one number (0-9). Contain at least one uppercase letter (A-Z). Contain at least one lowercase letter (a-z). Not contain three consecutive identical characters. Not have been used in the past year. Not be the same as your Apple ID username."
That's also what is shown when trying to change your iTunes password (just tried it.) I know for fact though that it hasn't always been this strict because my password (that I've had for years now) doesn't conform to the policy.
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Really. When and what part of the Bible was changed? And WHO knows this? That's news to me. The AC above said that there are 1000 manuscripts of the NT, but that's inaccurate. there are ~25,000 manuscripts found to date of the NT. Except for some minor spelling errors, they're virtually totally identical. These manuscripts are found all over the world. If there was any error or change introduced in the past, that should have been reflected in some of the manuscripts, leaving the 25,000 manuscripts differing from each other. However, that's not the case. So it's one thing to say you don't believe the Bible was directly inspired by God, but it'd be disingenuous to believe that the Bible, especially the NT has been altered.
Read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, (or similar book) it's a large topic.
If you want something to read in the meantime find some information on differences between the Suptuagint and the Latin Vulgate :
"The sources of the many differences between the Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate and the Masoretic text have long been discussed by scholars. Following the Renaissance, a common opinion among some humanists was that the LXX translators bungled the translation from the Hebrew and that the LXX became more corrupt with time. The most widely accepted view today is that the original Septuagint provided a reasonably accurate record of an early Hebrew textual variant that differed from the ancestor of the Masoretic text as well as those of the Latin Vulgate, where both of the latter seem to have a more similar textual heritage."
Note that the corrupted Vulgate was the version in use in the west during much of the christian era. The gist of it is that the bible is the result of copy of a copy of a copy ... where scribes inserted errors, worked from incomplete manuscripts and misinterpreted margin notes as being part of the text as well as working from a translation of a translation of an original (with possibility for misinterpretation from the original as words were written without vowels as well as plain mistranslation) in first place.
Also, the so-called "Q source" is most likely nothing more than the gospel of Mark, which was the earliest gospel of the four. I'm sure that the gospel of Mark inspired the others ones. In fact, here's how the gospel of Luke begins "Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been fulfilled among us. They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples. Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write a careful account for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were taught." (Luke 1:1-4, NLT)
So please do your homework. I'm not sure a quick search in Wikipedia really counts :Q
I'm quoting wikipedia here, but I read this information in multiple sources as well as having been taught it in catholic school. Scholars who have done textual analysis of the bible disagree with your opinion on the Q source :
"The Q source (also Q document or Q) is a hypothetical written source for the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke. Q (short for the German Quelle, or "source") is defined as the "common" material found in Matthew and Luke but not in the Gospel of Mark. This ancient text supposedly contained the logia or quotations from Jesus"
I don't think I really need to into how unreliable eyewitness testimony is even right after the fact, let alone a generation later after the story has been told, retold and reinterpreted in the light of tradition and custom.
Please do some homework before putting people down. The oldest fragment of the gospel of mark that archeologist's have found come from the late AD 30's. Do you believe what's written in Homer's Iliad? There are ~1000 times more manuscriptual evidence for Jesus than anybody in Illiad.
Wikipedia : "The earliest extant fragment of the New Testament is the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, a piece of the Gospel of John dated to the first half of the 2nd century."
Now there is a hypothetical "Q source" which would have been a document whose date is most often put around 40-50 AD which may have been used by later writers as a base for their gospels (along with oral tradition and copious amounts of "inspiration".)
The bible is a suspect source for several reasons. One is that is known to have been changed over the centuries, another is that reference to events in it aren't referenced in other historical works of the era, yet another that the events it contains are "fantastical" (break natural law), etc. So is the Iliad, which is why historians don't accept it as anything other than fiction that was possibly inspired by actual events lost to history.
Please read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible by Bart D. Ehrman on the problem of deriving any sort of historical truths from the bible or similar books. It's not a conspiracy, this is pretty uncontroversial stuff most of which I was taught in catholic school years ago but it doesn't seem to have reached the Americas yet.
Just think of the tens of books they'd have been able to sell to the ancient Aramaic speaking community.
You realize that OS X is a certified Unix ?
Fast typing is a menace on critical servers.
That's strange, I don't remember eating any sexy beasts.
SO! lesson learned if your going to start a hissy with someone while posting as AC, be sure to log out first
You learned the wrong lesson.
That doesn't matter. Google could say "As per spec, only these system apps are allowed on the root fs all the rest must be installed on a rw fs."
No.... High margin income for Apple is lower user base for developers. So profit is meaningless beyond results of one company. Will it fuel further development in the product line? We just don't know. For all we know, Apple is making the next/next gen device now.
The size of the user base isn't that important, what is important is how many of those users you can activate. A lot of evidence points towards a higher activation rate for iOS users than Android users. In other words, more iOS users buy apps and they are willing to pay more while a lot of those Android users either aren't buying apps or are using their smartphone as a "dumb phone."
Last year, Apple had a meager 1 billion income from app sales(based on 4bn global market with Apple owning 100%)*. Their expenses for maintaining that thing are really considerable.
Well, Apple does claim that their 30% on app sales is what they need to break even. So what does this mean for Android (or other platforms) app stores, where a lot more apps are "free" and get their revenue from in-app advertising ? Are those stores actually profitable and viable long term ?
Yeah, but it works for Apple because people are willing to overlook vendor lock-in for a variety of reasons (which I won't go into here). It's not going to work for Microsoft - at least not as well as they hope it is going to work.
This, it seems a little like "cargo-cult" thinking by Microsoft to me. Still, they might pull it off. I'm suspending judgement until they Actually ship Windows 8, god knows they've backpedaled on all kinds of features in their OS releases before.
Your beef here is with your carrier and to a lesser extent the phone manufacturer, not Google/Android
Sure it is, Google allows the carriers and manufacturers to lock down Android in this way. They could easily disallow this kind of lockdown in the Android Compatibility Definition Document and end it, but they won't because they are looking out for their customers' interests (those of the carriers and manufacturers) and not yours.
It's just a way of explaining that the iOS platform is vibrant and viable even if Android marketshare were increasing.
Lately you guys use Apple's insane profits (i.e. the fact they ruthlessly screw as many dollars out of you fans as possible) as a positive.
You misunderstand, profit for Apple = lots of apps sold = happy developers = continued development for us in future.
I don't see where I am supposedly being screwed out of my money, when I compare phones at the store Androids that are comparable to the iPhone 4 in build quality (ie. not a creaking plastic pos) have a comparable price attached to them, and apps are dirt cheap (I figure I pay about EUR 2 or 3 on average.)
Fuck fancy visuals.
Some people have learned nothing from the last 25 years or so. The "fancy visuals" are everything. They key to successful personal computers lies in making the human-machine interface as natural as possible to make sure people can smoothly interact with their computer so they don't have to think about what they want to do, they can just go ahead and do it. All the technical things you talk about sound nice but they'll never be used without a well designed shell around them.
It may still be cruel but it's no longer unusual.
And the apple was a new variety, the result of a proprietary process, and therefor carries unique and invaluable IP. It's literally priceless.
I think I remember seeing a few years ago that (total) taxes from the financial sector in the UK pay for nearly the entire education budget.
Considering financial services now make up 10% of UK GDP the taxes on it should be paying for more than just the education budget. Sounds like they are undertaxed compared with other industries.
That's the theory and yet all these major banks keep coming out with these rogue traders and that's only the losses big enough that the general public hears about them. Let's face out out on the terrain no-one is holding these guys accountable. IT may set up the system, Risk Management may generate the reports and they'll be either modified to say what management wants to say or just plain ignored because like all gamblers these guys think they have a system which lets them keep on winning even as they are betting their house (or in this case our houses.)
I think people do relish the opportunity to endulge in schadenfreude where banks are concerned though. People latch on to a phrase like "casino banking" and gleefully apply to everyone in the industry with the intent that we should shut it all down. By the same logic:
A police officer took a bribe, we should shut down the police.
Well, there was teacher who was a paedophile once. We should shut down schools too.
Look at that corrupt politcian, shut down the government while you're at it.
The guy at Blockbuster charged me for bringing a DVD back 5 minutes late. Shut down them too!
The difference with the banks is that in the banks it is a structural problem with the behavior being so deeply ingrained in the culture it's difficult to see how it could be changed. Especially since they have the power to avoid outside pressure to reform.
You do have cases where the police have a structural corruption problem too, or where the government is corrupt to the point where it no longer functions. Just look at many third world nations. And yes, when that happens people need to intervene.
I hate to burst your bubble but all banks are like that. The only reason these stories are coming out now is because we're in a bear market and the incompetence of these assholes is being exposed, in a bull market where the rising tide lifts all boats these kind of guys were superstars because hey couldn't lose.
It makes little difference in either context... a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish; the flaw is that it's "self-described" hypersensitive people. What they need to do is filter out the ones who can't, and keep retesting the ones who can. All you need is ONE person that can do it a majority of the time.
From the wikipedia page :
"Seven studies were found which did report an association, while 24 could not find any association with electromagnetic fields. However, of the seven positive studies, two could not be replicated even by the original authors, three had serious methodological shortcomings, and the final two presented contradictory results."
So the evidence overwhelmingly points to the fact this is nonsense. The "all it takes is one counterexample" attitude is counter productive, it is so unlikely you can exclude the possibility. This is the same grasping at straws the "parapsychology" people do, waiting for their one golden child who'll sweep away decades of precedents.
That's true. Maybe they do this to avoid sending you an email every time you buy a track/app which could get annoying if you buy a lot of single track songs for example ? I don't know, it should probably be a user definable option.
Why make things difficult for me because of a few hundred dumbasses ? Apple should just eat the (relatively low) cost, refund people and turn over any relevant information to the authorities.
Anyone who runs a remotely popular service should enforce a minimum security standard on passwords, and have a system in place to keep outside parties from hijacking people's accounts. Stop making excuses for a multi-billion dollar company. They really don't need people to carry water for them.
This is the password policy, pretty standard stuff :
"When changing your password, your new Apple ID password should:
Be at least eight characters.
Contain at least one number (0-9).
Contain at least one uppercase letter (A-Z).
Contain at least one lowercase letter (a-z).
Not contain three consecutive identical characters.
Not have been used in the past year.
Not be the same as your Apple ID username."
That's also what is shown when trying to change your iTunes password (just tried it.) I know for fact though that it hasn't always been this strict because my password (that I've had for years now) doesn't conform to the policy.
This is critical. I bet the actual number of affected accounts is 100-10000x higher than the number who post about it on the forum.
That's a pretty impressive number you just pulled out of your ass, this must be a serious problem.