For me the killer argument is not so much about the importance of getting as close to the original source as possible as it is about the original source for their infallible guide to life, the universe & everything not existing!
If it was *that* important that a divine being (TM) get his message across, and going on the assumption that the aforementioned divine being (TM) was omnipotent and omniscient and all those good things, it could surely not have been that hard to ensure the survival of the original manuscripts as well as a huge number of speakers of the languages it was written in, for posterity?
Perhaps I should have been a bit more explicit in what I meant. My experience of the religious fraternity in the American south is that by far the majority do not accept evolution because their bibles don't allow it, mostly because a literal interpretation of the creation myth in the bible does not allow for the mind-numbing amount of time it actually took for us to get to where we are today (young earth theology seems particularly prevalent)
In the UK, there are folk who believe this, but it tends, in my experience, to be limited to the lunatic fringe elements of fundamentalist evangelicalism.
Which effectively makes them less fundamentalist than they think they are. If you're a fundamentalist then you are going to have a hard time *not* being a young earth believer: remember that if you're a fundamentalist, then creation happened as per the Genesis account, and you can't go having all kinds of funky interpretations of what "day" means.
As for inerrant, if the bible is inerrant, then your deity of choice is one badly confused individual (or should,that be "trindividual"?) and was clearly smoking something strong when he was dictating his masterpiece. Maybe that's where Rastafarians have it right: you have to be stoned out of your mind for it to (a) make sense and (b) not see the glaring inadequacies of it in terms of consistency and accuracy.
Besides, if it was the inerrant word of your deity, and it was *that* important, why is it that we do not have the original documents to work from?
There are also probably a billion people on the planet who would agree that the Roman Catholic interpretation of scripture is, to put it politely, a little imaginative: immaculate conception, virgin birth conception, male only priesthood, celibacy, papal infallibility. Roman Catholic theology is based *as* much on tradition as it is on the bible, and they are the first to admit it, and actually are quite proud of it, and in the same way as Islam has done with the hadith, they too have referred back to interpretative works of early church fathers and indeed more modern papal brain-farts for inspiration.
And I'm afraid I just don't buy your excuse for the bible. The differences and inconsistencies go way beyond just different points of view - they are opposing points of view in many cases, sometimes within the same book, such as Job, nevermind between books.
Remember, you're supposed to believe in an omnipotent, omniscient deity: if it is as good as you fundamentalists make out it is, then surely it would be able to ensure that the bible accurately and consistently represented its views?
I think you'll find more of them than you suspect. That lot down in Texas who made the news recently were marrying and shagging their sisters and daughters! I'll bet I can find you a few who not only sacrificed their goats but probably also shagged them first. And as for rebuilding Solomon's temple, if it weren't for the political difficulties, I'd wager more than a fiver (£) that there are several people down in the American South with more money than sense that would contribute to a temple rebuilding fund given half a chance.
As for picking and choosing, I'm one of many who chose to not believe in any of it! An interesting literary work, but definitely not the in-errant word of an infanticidal deity.
You have to give our American evangelical fruitcake cousins credit though, for at least standing firm in what they believe in, even if they are completely and utterly batfuck crazy. They, at least, are biblical "literalists" (I use that word very very loosely), ie they believe in the entire contents of their bibles, from start to finish.
European, and especially UK "fundamentalist evangelicals" on the other hand are neither fundamentalist nor evangelical in the strict sense of the words, and don't have the strength of conviction to believe that their bibles are the inspired word of god. I've always found that stance more than a little perplexing: either your faith and beliefs are based on the bible or they're not. You can't choose to only believe certain chunks of it and not others, because that at once invalidates its authority.
"The main problem (as I see it) is that society seems to have a problem with people being sexually active - especially the women."
Urrr, not really. You want to be inserting "American" before the word "society". Over here on the part of the planet where real people live, no one gives a flying fuck about people being sexually active quite frankly. Conservatism in the US of A has a *lot* to answer for. My perception (hint hint: this is *my* perception so it will be subjective and is not a statement of fact, but rather a subjective generalisation) is that by far the majority of American couples end up getting married, whereas here in the UK and many parts of Europe, the norm is living together, and not generally bothering with the marriage bit.
Its actually not that much data, and that data rate will only ever be if you channelled all the data to a single point, which will almost certainly not happen. A lot of, if not all of, the network infrastructure already exists in one form or another, except in really rural locations, so its not really that much of a problem. The bigger problem is going to be the budget for all this, as UK government-type IT projects are notprious for running well over budget, and not delivering what was expected, mostly because a proper spec was never done, mostly because no one really understood what they wanted.
A point that has been made repeatedly here in the UK, which will hopefully sometime start to sink in, is that the effect static cameras actually have on fatality rates is to push them up, not down.
The excuse in the UK is that cameras are traditionally placed in accident blackspots. In most cases this could be true: two that I pass through on my commute are placed at places where you could easily cause a bad accident if you came down the road too fast, as you have cars exiting estates from behind houses and hedgerows, into a dual-carriageway.
Thing is though, the moment I come up to these cameras, my first reaction is to look down to check that I'm on or under the limit, and most of my concentration effort while I'm in the danger zone is on my speedometer. This is exactly what I shouldn't be doing: I should be watching the road for cars exiting the estate into my path! But the camera is on a downhill, so I ahve to stay on the brakes and watch my speed. So consequently the potential for an accident is even greater now!
A lesson for Londoners on Terrorism? Well excuse me, but haven't London and most of the UK been deeling with IRA attacks for many more years than people care to remember? Forgive us in the UK for reminding people that terrorism didn't originate with 911, despite what some people may think.
At least we're not likely to use this as an excuse to go bombing the crap out of some country to get control of its oil reserves under the pretence of securing democracy and freedom.
How long before people realise that its this entire arrogant western attitude which caused all this in the first place?
Chill out people: reacting the way the USA reacted to 911 is playing into their hands and doing exactly what they want you to do!
I agree with this entirely, but there's one thing missing from your response: the data. Despite all the data we have, these data have only been collected over what is an incredibly short period of time, even in terms of the 20 000 years human type creatures are alleged to have been wrecking the planet. Given a couple of million years that there has been life of some form or another on the planet, even 1000 years of data (which we don't nearly have) would be statistically insignificant, and certainly not enough to prove anything other than the exisence of the data.
What I'm getting at is that yeah, maybe we humans are having an effect on the earth's environment, and its probably a detrimental one, but at the same time we just have no idea whether these fluctuations we're seeing now have occurred before, and if they have what their effect has been on life on the planet in general. we just don't have the data to prove anything, and won't have for the next 100 000 years or so, if we haven't managed to engineer ourselves out of existence by then.
Putting the Windscreen washer fluid top-up near the petrol tank hole . . . hehehe - gonna be interesting if that gets muddled, especially when driving slowly past people smoking their ciggies and cleaning your windscreen after inadvertently filling up the washer bottle with petrol.
And we won't even go into the implications of filling your petrol tank with nice soapy water . ..
Trust the Beeb to totally and completely get all their wires crossed simultaneously. I'm surprised anyone in the organisation even knows what Linux is, let alone how to spell it!
Nah, leave them be - they're digging themselves into a very deep hole all by themselves. No point in offering to help when they're hell bent on hanging themselves with their own rope on their own gallows . . .
I must agree with you regarding the number of linux related security alerts there have been in the last 12 months, but, unless I'm gravely mistaken, 99% of them were POTENTIAL security flaws, and of this 99%. many of them were only theoretical and only exploited in lab situations. A lot of the "flaws" as you call them, were also going to be farking difficult to exploit, as many of them involved "standard" packages being run in "not-so-standard" configurations.
In M$'s case, most of the flaws were highly exploitable, and most of the time were exploited. And even worse was that the flaws appeared in apps/products/whatever in their standard default configs, which means that your average Winblows system was extremely vulnerable. I must agree that M$ seems to have finally cottoned onto the fact that your apps/server/whatever should be shipped in what I call "firewall mode" - ie, block EVERYTHING by default, but they've still got a lot of legacy impairing their efforts.
THe other factor to consider is that writing and fixing open source code is a matter of pride for most coders, whereas with the Beast, security, pride, accuracy and all those good things come a distant second to commercial considerations. This is the single biggest threat to M$'s security: as long as comercial concerns take precedence over writing proper code and actually implimenting proper software design, the whole "Trustworthy Computing" initiative is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
I somehow doubt that those 70+ countries independantly established the presence of WMD in Iraq and did so conclusively and unequivocally. If they had done so, they would have been found by now. The very fact that none have been found, and that the team looking for the weapons has been massively scaled back could indicate one of a number of things: - that they never existed in the first place which is why nothing has been found - George don't misunderestimate me Bush and Tony Blah knew darn well that their intelligence on the matter was shaky but did the Dog & Pony show routine to create FUD and so justify going into Iraq and are now quietly scaling the search for WMD's down now that the public is not focussing its attention there any more - Soddem Hussain had them buried very deep under the sand.
I think though, that on balance, the fact that no trace whatsoever has been found that would even remotely suggest that WMD's ever existed kinda speaks for itself, despite your 70+ countries. Here in the UK it is well known how unhappy the intelligence agencies were with the way in which the politicians used the information they were given. Dr David Kelly's death substantiates this. It has lead to a situation in the UK where i'd venture to say that the majority of the British public don't believe a word the government tells them anymore, and there is a stong concensus here that George Bush is the most dangerous man on the planet, and will say anything to justify his decision to invade Iraq.
Looking at all this ruckus about fingerprinter etc from a European (UK) perspective, and having spent 30 years of my life before that in South Africa, I think that all these measures are nothing more than a Dog & Pony show: smoke and mirrors ...
In the bad old days of South African Apartheid, the white government legislated all kinds of things, pumped millions into the security forces, and spent huge chunks of the budget on trying to prevent attacks by "terrorists" from the banned liberation organisations such as the ANC and PAC. What good did that do? Sweet blue blow-all. All it did was challenge those organisations to be more creative about infiltrating their cadre's and hitmen & women into society, and the bombings continued, as did the agitation. Leaders of these organisations were identified and incarcerated, to no avail. It just didn't work, despite the fact that it turned the country into a police state.
Likewise, there is SBFA that the American administration can do to prevent determined terrorists from getting into the country and committing acts of terrorism - nothing at all. Personally, if I were an American citizen, I'd be protesting about the pointless waste of my tax dollars.
The only way the USA can make itself less of a target, is to change its arrogant attitude toward the rest of the world: realise that not everyone wants to live like an average American, and not everyone defines freedom and democracy in the same way as the USA does. In the same way that the freedom movements in South Africa were rebelling against the arrogant tyrany of the white government, who considered its world-view to be normative, there are nations out there who see the USA's attitude in much the same light.
I don't in any way condone the use of violence as a means of protest, and what happenned on 911 was just not on, not for any reason, but once again drawing a parallel with what happened in apartheid South Africa: put yourself in the shoes of the average oppressed black man for just a moment. Your back is to the wall: there's no more room for manuever. What option do you have but to resort to violence? Especially if that is all the government understands?
In this respect the USA (and Tony Blah) is supremely guilty: the WMD ruse was just an excuse to use an option that should have been an absolute last resort. What options do those nations have where the USA and other western nations have interfered but to resort to violence?
Nice to see some number coming in on Linux stability, although, as someone once said: there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Anyone who has done any stats at University will know that you can prove anything from any result set. And as has already been pointed out by someone, the fact that it has been done by a company who has a not insubstantial vested interest in getting Linux into as many big companies as they can, it carries about as much credability as a Windoze security evaluation paper done by anyone other than Linus.
The very reason Linux has already made so many inroads into coporations in the first place is because of its reliability and stability, and not because some marketing campaign has churned out the words on header paper.
Another point is that I personally expect the sytems I administer to run for a darn side longer than 30, 60 or 90 days unless I need to restart them because of a kernel upgrade. When my last bunch I worked for went tits-up, our SAMBA file server had a 790 day uptime, and had run the SAMBA daemons reliably throughout, as well as doing internal DNS and DHCP. That's what your average Linux sysadmin expects from a Linux server box.
A Linux desktop being used for all manner of things though is completely another story: if I muck around with the Linux install on my laptop, as I do because that's what I do, then I expect to break it from time to time, and so "reliability" is not measured in the same way on a desktop/laptop system, IMHO.
The ideal environment for Linux is as a networked server, where it can get on with doing what it was setup to do, and will continue doing so until someone pulls the power plug on it. In that context, there are few OS's playing on the same field that can rival it for reliability and stability.
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For me the killer argument is not so much about the importance of getting as close to the original source as possible as it is about the original source for their infallible guide to life, the universe & everything not existing!
If it was *that* important that a divine being (TM) get his message across, and going on the assumption that the aforementioned divine being (TM) was omnipotent and omniscient and all those good things, it could surely not have been that hard to ensure the survival of the original manuscripts as well as a huge number of speakers of the languages it was written in, for posterity?
Perhaps I should have been a bit more explicit in what I meant. My experience of the religious fraternity in the American south is that by far the majority do not accept evolution because their bibles don't allow it, mostly because a literal interpretation of the creation myth in the bible does not allow for the mind-numbing amount of time it actually took for us to get to where we are today (young earth theology seems particularly prevalent)
In the UK, there are folk who believe this, but it tends, in my experience, to be limited to the lunatic fringe elements of fundamentalist evangelicalism.
Which effectively makes them less fundamentalist than they think they are. If you're a fundamentalist then you are going to have a hard time *not* being a young earth believer: remember that if you're a fundamentalist, then creation happened as per the Genesis account, and you can't go having all kinds of funky interpretations of what "day" means.
As for inerrant, if the bible is inerrant, then your deity of choice is one badly confused individual (or should,that be "trindividual"?) and was clearly smoking something strong when he was dictating his masterpiece. Maybe that's where Rastafarians have it right: you have to be stoned out of your mind for it to (a) make sense and (b) not see the glaring inadequacies of it in terms of consistency and accuracy.
Besides, if it was the inerrant word of your deity, and it was *that* important, why is it that we do not have the original documents to work from?
There are also probably a billion people on the planet who would agree that the Roman Catholic interpretation of scripture is, to put it politely, a little imaginative: immaculate conception, virgin birth conception, male only priesthood, celibacy, papal infallibility. Roman Catholic theology is based *as* much on tradition as it is on the bible, and they are the first to admit it, and actually are quite proud of it, and in the same way as Islam has done with the hadith, they too have referred back to interpretative works of early church fathers and indeed more modern papal brain-farts for inspiration.
And I'm afraid I just don't buy your excuse for the bible. The differences and inconsistencies go way beyond just different points of view - they are opposing points of view in many cases, sometimes within the same book, such as Job, nevermind between books.
Remember, you're supposed to believe in an omnipotent, omniscient deity: if it is as good as you fundamentalists make out it is, then surely it would be able to ensure that the bible accurately and consistently represented its views?
I think you'll find more of them than you suspect. That lot down in Texas who made the news recently were marrying and shagging their sisters and daughters! I'll bet I can find you a few who not only sacrificed their goats but probably also shagged them first. And as for rebuilding Solomon's temple, if it weren't for the political difficulties, I'd wager more than a fiver (£) that there are several people down in the American South with more money than sense that would contribute to a temple rebuilding fund given half a chance.
As for picking and choosing, I'm one of many who chose to not believe in any of it! An interesting literary work, but definitely not the in-errant word of an infanticidal deity.
You have to give our American evangelical fruitcake cousins credit though, for at least standing firm in what they believe in, even if they are completely and utterly batfuck crazy. They, at least, are biblical "literalists" (I use that word very very loosely), ie they believe in the entire contents of their bibles, from start to finish.
European, and especially UK "fundamentalist evangelicals" on the other hand are neither fundamentalist nor evangelical in the strict sense of the words, and don't have the strength of conviction to believe that their bibles are the inspired word of god. I've always found that stance more than a little perplexing: either your faith and beliefs are based on the bible or they're not. You can't choose to only believe certain chunks of it and not others, because that at once invalidates its authority.
"The main problem (as I see it) is that society seems to have a problem with people being sexually active - especially the women."
Urrr, not really. You want to be inserting "American" before the word "society". Over here on the part of the planet where real people live, no one gives a flying fuck about people being sexually active quite frankly. Conservatism in the US of A has a *lot* to answer for. My perception (hint hint: this is *my* perception so it will be subjective and is not a statement of fact, but rather a subjective generalisation) is that by far the majority of American couples end up getting married, whereas here in the UK and many parts of Europe, the norm is living together, and not generally bothering with the marriage bit.
Its actually not that much data, and that data rate will only ever be if you channelled all the data to a single point, which will almost certainly not happen. A lot of, if not all of, the network infrastructure already exists in one form or another, except in really rural locations, so its not really that much of a problem. The bigger problem is going to be the budget for all this, as UK government-type IT projects are notprious for running well over budget, and not delivering what was expected, mostly because a proper spec was never done, mostly because no one really understood what they wanted.
Works for me! FF on FC4 ....
A point that has been made repeatedly here in the UK, which will hopefully sometime start to sink in, is that the effect static cameras actually have on fatality rates is to push them up, not down.
The excuse in the UK is that cameras are traditionally placed in accident blackspots. In most cases this could be true: two that I pass through on my commute are placed at places where you could easily cause a bad accident if you came down the road too fast, as you have cars exiting estates from behind houses and hedgerows, into a dual-carriageway.
Thing is though, the moment I come up to these cameras, my first reaction is to look down to check that I'm on or under the limit, and most of my concentration effort while I'm in the danger zone is on my speedometer. This is exactly what I shouldn't be doing: I should be watching the road for cars exiting the estate into my path! But the camera is on a downhill, so I ahve to stay on the brakes and watch my speed. So consequently the potential for an accident is even greater now!
A lesson for Londoners on Terrorism? Well excuse me, but haven't London and most of the UK been deeling with IRA attacks for many more years than people care to remember? Forgive us in the UK for reminding people that terrorism didn't originate with 911, despite what some people may think.
At least we're not likely to use this as an excuse to go bombing the crap out of some country to get control of its oil reserves under the pretence of securing democracy and freedom.
How long before people realise that its this entire arrogant western attitude which caused all this in the first place?
Chill out people: reacting the way the USA reacted to 911 is playing into their hands and doing exactly what they want you to do!
I agree with this entirely, but there's one thing missing from your response: the data. Despite all the data we have, these data have only been collected over what is an incredibly short period of time, even in terms of the 20 000 years human type creatures are alleged to have been wrecking the planet. Given a couple of million years that there has been life of some form or another on the planet, even 1000 years of data (which we don't nearly have) would be statistically insignificant, and certainly not enough to prove anything other than the exisence of the data.
What I'm getting at is that yeah, maybe we humans are having an effect on the earth's environment, and its probably a detrimental one, but at the same time we just have no idea whether these fluctuations we're seeing now have occurred before, and if they have what their effect has been on life on the planet in general. we just don't have the data to prove anything, and won't have for the next 100 000 years or so, if we haven't managed to engineer ourselves out of existence by then.
Putting the Windscreen washer fluid top-up near the petrol tank hole . . . hehehe - gonna be interesting if that gets muddled, especially when driving slowly past people smoking their ciggies and cleaning your windscreen after inadvertently filling up the washer bottle with petrol.
.
And we won't even go into the implications of filling your petrol tank with nice soapy water . .
Trust the Beeb to totally and completely get all their wires crossed simultaneously. I'm surprised anyone in the organisation even knows what Linux is, let alone how to spell it!
Nah, leave them be - they're digging themselves into a very deep hole all by themselves. No point in offering to help when they're hell bent on hanging themselves with their own rope on their own gallows . . .
I must agree with you regarding the number of linux related security alerts there have been in the last 12 months, but, unless I'm gravely mistaken, 99% of them were POTENTIAL security flaws, and of this 99%. many of them were only theoretical and only exploited in lab situations. A lot of the "flaws" as you call them, were also going to be farking difficult to exploit, as many of them involved "standard" packages being run in "not-so-standard" configurations.
In M$'s case, most of the flaws were highly exploitable, and most of the time were exploited. And even worse was that the flaws appeared in apps/products/whatever in their standard default configs, which means that your average Winblows system was extremely vulnerable. I must agree that M$ seems to have finally cottoned onto the fact that your apps/server/whatever should be shipped in what I call "firewall mode" - ie, block EVERYTHING by default, but they've still got a lot of legacy impairing their efforts.
THe other factor to consider is that writing and fixing open source code is a matter of pride for most coders, whereas with the Beast, security, pride, accuracy and all those good things come a distant second to commercial considerations. This is the single biggest threat to M$'s security: as long as comercial concerns take precedence over writing proper code and actually implimenting proper software design, the whole "Trustworthy Computing" initiative is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
I somehow doubt that those 70+ countries independantly established the presence of WMD in Iraq and did so conclusively and unequivocally. If they had done so, they would have been found by now. The very fact that none have been found, and that the team looking for the weapons has been massively scaled back could indicate one of a number of things:
- that they never existed in the first place which is why nothing has been found
- George don't misunderestimate me Bush and Tony Blah knew darn well that their intelligence on the matter was shaky but did the Dog & Pony show routine to create FUD and so justify going into Iraq and are now quietly scaling the search for WMD's down now that the public is not focussing its attention there any more
- Soddem Hussain had them buried very deep under the sand.
I think though, that on balance, the fact that no trace whatsoever has been found that would even remotely suggest that WMD's ever existed kinda speaks for itself, despite your 70+ countries. Here in the UK it is well known how unhappy the intelligence agencies were with the way in which the politicians used the information they were given. Dr David Kelly's death substantiates this. It has lead to a situation in the UK where i'd venture to say that the majority of the British public don't believe a word the government tells them anymore, and there is a stong concensus here that George Bush is the most dangerous man on the planet, and will say anything to justify his decision to invade Iraq.
Looking at all this ruckus about fingerprinter etc from a European (UK) perspective, and having spent 30 years of my life before that in South Africa, I think that all these measures are nothing more than a Dog & Pony show: smoke and mirrors . ..
In the bad old days of South African Apartheid, the white government legislated all kinds of things, pumped millions into the security forces, and spent huge chunks of the budget on trying to prevent attacks by "terrorists" from the banned liberation organisations such as the ANC and PAC. What good did that do? Sweet blue blow-all. All it did was challenge those organisations to be more creative about infiltrating their cadre's and hitmen & women into society, and the bombings continued, as did the agitation. Leaders of these organisations were identified and incarcerated, to no avail. It just didn't work, despite the fact that it turned the country into a police state.
Likewise, there is SBFA that the American administration can do to prevent determined terrorists from getting into the country and committing acts of terrorism - nothing at all. Personally, if I were an American citizen, I'd be protesting about the pointless waste of my tax dollars.
The only way the USA can make itself less of a target, is to change its arrogant attitude toward the rest of the world: realise that not everyone wants to live like an average American, and not everyone defines freedom and democracy in the same way as the USA does. In the same way that the freedom movements in South Africa were rebelling against the arrogant tyrany of the white government, who considered its world-view to be normative, there are nations out there who see the USA's attitude in much the same light.
I don't in any way condone the use of violence as a means of protest, and what happenned on 911 was just not on, not for any reason, but once again drawing a parallel with what happened in apartheid South Africa: put yourself in the shoes of the average oppressed black man for just a moment. Your back is to the wall: there's no more room for manuever. What option do you have but to resort to violence? Especially if that is all the government understands?
In this respect the USA (and Tony Blah) is supremely guilty: the WMD ruse was just an excuse to use an option that should have been an absolute last resort. What options do those nations have where the USA and other western nations have interfered but to resort to violence?
The very reason Linux has already made so many inroads into coporations in the first place is because of its reliability and stability, and not because some marketing campaign has churned out the words on header paper.
Another point is that I personally expect the sytems I administer to run for a darn side longer than 30, 60 or 90 days unless I need to restart them because of a kernel upgrade. When my last bunch I worked for went tits-up, our SAMBA file server had a 790 day uptime, and had run the SAMBA daemons reliably throughout, as well as doing internal DNS and DHCP. That's what your average Linux sysadmin expects from a Linux server box.
A Linux desktop being used for all manner of things though is completely another story: if I muck around with the Linux install on my laptop, as I do because that's what I do, then I expect to break it from time to time, and so "reliability" is not measured in the same way on a desktop/laptop system, IMHO.
The ideal environment for Linux is as a networked server, where it can get on with doing what it was setup to do, and will continue doing so until someone pulls the power plug on it. In that context, there are few OS's playing on the same field that can rival it for reliability and stability.