How can you suggest such a thing? There's absolutely no evidence that Microsoft isn't just as well behaved as every other American corporation, such as Enron, WorldCom, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, etc.
> It is true that religion can be used to manipulate masses of people - however this speaks nothing as to whether any particular religion is "true" or not.
I don't offer it as an argument about religious truth. As I understand this thread, someone claimed that the Bible had been manipulated in order to manipulate people, someone else replied that such a claim was preposterous on the face of it, and I tried to show that such a claim was not preposterous.
What I find preposterous and somewhat irksome is that a politician would speak at the funeral of a soldier who died in a dubiously motivated war and make a bald-faced claim that the soldier is now enjoying a bit of R&R with his maker. Surely that's beyond the competence of judgement even for the president of a superpower, even if the Bible is true in every word?
It pays to consider why politicians would make such claims, so regularly.
Yes, to a big extent we are talking past each other.
> There's no question that the arrangement of the Bible has changed. It's well documented and most certainly admitted by any reputable biblical scholar. In fact, anyone suggesting otherwise is flat wrong, without question, and should be removed from your list of critical thinkers.
> However, the contents of the scripture, the individual lines of scripture and the message that the scripture conveys, is remarkably true to the original. You should check out Geisler's book "Christian Apologetics" for some interesting information on the reliability of scripture and for a comparison of how well the original manuscripts stack up against the commonly accepted translations of today.
I don't have any problem with that; I just think it's odd that you're focusing on the fact that the sentences haven't changed within such-and-such a book, but whole books have been swapped in and out of the canon.
What ultimately matters is that the canon was established by men by a combination of formal and informal negotiations that lasted over centuries. Is it really so hard to see that the end result represents "a change", and that the process was subject to the pressures of special interest groups?
E.g., some wanted to exclude St. John's Revelation, not because they didn't think it was inspired, but because they observed that it was a keystone of competing traditions.
> > And there's the difference between science in religion. Religion wants to preserve a tradition, so its adherents stick to their story regardless of what the evidence says. Science wants to understand the universe, so it goes whereever the evidence demands.
> While it's true that religions tend to stick to their stories regardless of the evidence, the same tendency has been observed among scientists as well. If you had asked Einstein about non-local effects in quantum physics, I imagine you'd have gotten the same kind of response you'd get by asking Jerry Falwell about evolution.
Yes, science is practiced by humans and therefore all the usual human follies can be observed among scientists.
However, scientists are well aware of that fact, so science as a "field" or "institution" is based on the notion of sanity checks and second opinions. The bad stuff like Piltdown Man and Cold Nuclear Fusion eventually get weeded out, because although they appeal strongly to individual's follies they can't stand up to the checks.
I.e., ultimately Einstein's personal opinion doesn't matter.
> As I understood it at least one of the skulls was found on the surface, so they could only verify the layer underneath and that it was not above the next dateable layer.
Yes, some of the material was exposed or partly exposed. However, as best I can tell from the press release, not all of it was completely exposed. For the stuff that's still completely or partially buried you can look to see whether the matrix is part of the natural layering or part of a backfill such as a burial pit. Hopefully the Nature article will have drawings or photos that give more details for the current find.
AFAIK you cannot use the layers to date something that is completely exposed.
> Now it appears you are talking about two different things. The assertion, at least as far as I understood it, was that some group was actually manipulating the source material, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I wouldn't know about that.
> This idea is obviously false.
It's obviously not obvious to everyone participating in this thread.
> People will always manipulate scripture to try and support their own desires. The scripture even predicts that very thing. But the scripture itself (speaking in terms of the source material) has not changed.
> The fact is that people in the Middle Ages believed in Christianity. Thousands of people devoted their lives to it, including rulers, which according to your theory should have known better.
Yes, just as these and these should have known better.
You can't justify religion by appeals to human rationality
> Sixth, the idea that the rulers wanted to "keep the people dumb" is just propaganda.
When you have a bit of idle time, visit the talk.origins newsgroup and ask about the role of religion in the Neocon "wedge document". As one guy puts it in his.sig there, for a certain branch of Neocons "religion is the opiate of the masses, and that's a good thing".
IIRC their philosophy goes at least back to Plato, who (IIRC) suggested a model state where the "guardians" knew religion was a hoax, but espoused it anyway in order to control the masses.
Notice in passing how convenient it is for a government to send soldiers to their deaths and then assure the public that they have a secure spot in Heaven (as if the politicians would know!), or to shrug off "collateral damage" when everyone 'knows' that God won't let the innocent suffer in the afterlife.
> There's too many conclusions drived from too little facts. How can a conclusion be derived about wether they used plants if only the Volcanic Layers and fossils were tested for age? There's no mention of testing or even finding any sort of plant material.
Presumably that's because the link is a press release rather than a scientific publication. If you want more details you'll have to track down the June 12 Nature article.
> Geology researchers (about 98% of them anyways) are not going to know or care about testing for this sort of thing.
People get real interested in dating that sort of thing when they get a phone call from paleontologists working in the field.
> Is it me or is there something REALLY wrong in the fact that such a wide age range of fossils were found IN ONE STUDY AREA? I refuse to accept the fact that ALL of the fossils came from ONE area without some sort of assistance in reaching their final destination.
And the basis for your denial is...?
Face it, "people" have been living in Afar for a long time.
> What struck me was that the dating was done using layers of volcanic minerals. These folk may well have been ritually killed or buried, my question: How deep were they buried?
Competent archaeologists can see where holes have been dug, and report them regularly in their reports. When you dig a hole, put something in it, and fill it back up, the dirt doesn't go back in the same way it came out. So the lowest undisturbed layer above a grave gives a terminus ante quem for the date of the grave.
> As another poster here on slashdot (I wish I could remember who, giving him/her the credits..) pointed out about half a year ago in a similiar discussion, there is nothing in the bible saying the earth is flat. The closest thing you can get to this is the mentioning of the sun going up and going down, but then, we all see the mentioning of the sun going up and down in the morning newspaper.
But you rarely read claims that the sun stops in its path for a few hours as a result of sorcerous tricks.
> Don't you mean revise science, the Bible hasnt changed in thousands of years (note the dead sea scrolls which are the same as the current versions of the Bible). It is science that changes its mind everytime something new is discovered, cant they stick with one story.
And there's the difference between science in religion. Religion wants to preserve a tradition, so its adherents stick to their story regardless of what the evidence says. Science wants to understand the universe, so it goes whereever the evidence demands.
Of course... it only takes a casual familiarity with history to see that religion slowly changes its views over the generations as well, however much the practitioners want to pretend otherwise.
> > Hell, most of North America was populated with hunter/gatherers until Europeans came, and it's not like they weren't 'smart' enough or anything.
> Thats not true. Specific cases in North America include the Mississippians, the Anasazi and the Calusa. These were sophisticated societies. They had relatively complex economies, large cities consisting of thousands of people, organized religion, art and centralized government.
Still, much of the Americas still lived a Stone Age lifestyle when the Europeans came, and in fact the same could be said of parts of New Guinea at least until the middle of the Twentieth Century.
The bigger point is that being a modern human does not guarantee you a high-tech civilization within any bounded amount of time.
> Is that, Okay, Great^n Grandpawas around 160,000 years ago, complete with stone tools and burial practices. Yet Civilization only 'started 6-10,000 years ago.
Depends on what you mean by "civilization", of course.
> Why does this just not quite add up to me. I mean, our ancestors were not stupid, they posessed the same intuition and logic that we do today. Whay did it take so long to get where we are now though?
Because technology and social structures are cumulative inventions. I don't know how technology should be measured, but qualitatively speaking it appears to be growing at an exponential rate. And if you trace an exponential curve far out into the past it gets really flat.
That is to say, I don't think there's really any mystery here that needs explaining.
> The extent to which Neanderthals could speak was determined by their anatomy. The larynx was located high in the vocal tract and the oral cavity was significantly longer than in H. sapiens. This differently arranged vocal tract could not form the 'i', as in tea; 'u', as in too; and 'a', as in tall. Nor could it pronounce 'k' as in kite and 'g' as in god.
> However, as Steven Pinker put it: "In any case, e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve, so we cannot conclude that a [hominin] with a restricted vowel space had little language."
Notice that the modern Tashlhiyt Berber language is so stingy with vowels that stop consonants can serve as the nucleus of its syllables. There simply isn't any theory that tells us a minimum number of phonemes required for oral communication. Moreover, some linguists think sign language may have preceded oral language anyway.
There have been way too many dogmatic claims of an absence of language in early hominids without any good supporting evidence. The very rudimentary linguistic skills of chimps and even gorillas suggests that linguistic ability has deep evolutionary roots.
>...because I'd wager that in most cases, people choosing to deploy open source solutions are driven, and do not accept failure. There have been plenty of times where I could have allowed an open source solution to fail, but persevered and eventually made it work the way I wanted. So while I've had plenty of setbacks, I've had precious few actual failures, if any.
OTOH, in my experience, techies who have a vested interest in the status quo have amazing abilities to "discover" that something new doesn't work right, and to go running to the boss to tell all about it.
I suspect that some of the 10,000-seat switchovers are going to encounter substantial resistance.
> Additionally, I've wondered if there is any social science thesis work behind the growth and evolution of the friends/foes dynamic of the Slashdot crowd.
I used to be flattered whenever someone signed me up as their friend... until I realized that they were just putting a watch on me to make sure none of my bullshit slipped by unremarked!
> > The real point is that LFSPs (Language for Smart People) have a much greater support for abstraction, and in particular for defining your own abstractions, than LFMs (Language for the Masses).
>...has anyone declared Perl *the* LFSP? I can't think of a more abstract and unreadable language off the top of my head
Maybe I don't grok what you're saying, but ISTM that "abstract" and "unreadable" are very different concepts. To me an "abstraction" is very readable, because the reader can focus on the concept rather than on the details.
> (Cobol doesn't count just because the younger generation has never used it).
I would say that Cobol is very readable - to the point of being tedious. (That's why we poke fun at it.)
And not very abstract at all, at least in my limited experience with the way it is used.
Slashdot Mirror
> If any of you thought for a second that Microsoft would actually abide by the settlement with the DOJ you are on crack.
Don't be so dogmatic. After my lombotomy I gave up crack for LSD, and I still thought the same thing for a second.
How can you suggest such a thing? There's absolutely no evidence that Microsoft isn't just as well behaved as every other American corporation, such as Enron, WorldCom, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, etc.
> It is true that religion can be used to manipulate masses of people - however this speaks nothing as to whether any particular religion is "true" or not.
I don't offer it as an argument about religious truth. As I understand this thread, someone claimed that the Bible had been manipulated in order to manipulate people, someone else replied that such a claim was preposterous on the face of it, and I tried to show that such a claim was not preposterous.
What I find preposterous and somewhat irksome is that a politician would speak at the funeral of a soldier who died in a dubiously motivated war and make a bald-faced claim that the soldier is now enjoying a bit of R&R with his maker. Surely that's beyond the competence of judgement even for the president of a superpower, even if the Bible is true in every word?
It pays to consider why politicians would make such claims, so regularly.
> We seem to be referring to do different things.
Yes, to a big extent we are talking past each other.
> There's no question that the arrangement of the Bible has changed. It's well documented and most certainly admitted by any reputable biblical scholar. In fact, anyone suggesting otherwise is flat wrong, without question, and should be removed from your list of critical thinkers.
> However, the contents of the scripture, the individual lines of scripture and the message that the scripture conveys, is remarkably true to the original. You should check out Geisler's book "Christian Apologetics" for some interesting information on the reliability of scripture and for a comparison of how well the original manuscripts stack up against the commonly accepted translations of today.
I don't have any problem with that; I just think it's odd that you're focusing on the fact that the sentences haven't changed within such-and-such a book, but whole books have been swapped in and out of the canon.
What ultimately matters is that the canon was established by men by a combination of formal and informal negotiations that lasted over centuries. Is it really so hard to see that the end result represents "a change", and that the process was subject to the pressures of special interest groups?
E.g., some wanted to exclude St. John's Revelation, not because they didn't think it was inspired, but because they observed that it was a keystone of competing traditions.
> > And there's the difference between science in religion. Religion wants to preserve a tradition, so its adherents stick to their story regardless of what the evidence says. Science wants to understand the universe, so it goes whereever the evidence demands.
> While it's true that religions tend to stick to their stories regardless of the evidence, the same tendency has been observed among scientists as well. If you had asked Einstein about non-local effects in quantum physics, I imagine you'd have gotten the same kind of response you'd get by asking Jerry Falwell about evolution.
Yes, science is practiced by humans and therefore all the usual human follies can be observed among scientists.
However, scientists are well aware of that fact, so science as a "field" or "institution" is based on the notion of sanity checks and second opinions. The bad stuff like Piltdown Man and Cold Nuclear Fusion eventually get weeded out, because although they appeal strongly to individual's follies they can't stand up to the checks.
I.e., ultimately Einstein's personal opinion doesn't matter.
> As I understood it at least one of the skulls was found on the surface, so they could only verify the layer underneath and that it was not above the next dateable layer.
Yes, some of the material was exposed or partly exposed. However, as best I can tell from the press release, not all of it was completely exposed. For the stuff that's still completely or partially buried you can look to see whether the matrix is part of the natural layering or part of a backfill such as a burial pit. Hopefully the Nature article will have drawings or photos that give more details for the current find.
AFAIK you cannot use the layers to date something that is completely exposed.
> Now it appears you are talking about two different things. The assertion, at least as far as I understood it, was that some group was actually manipulating the source material, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I wouldn't know about that.
> This idea is obviously false.
It's obviously not obvious to everyone participating in this thread.
> People will always manipulate scripture to try and support their own desires. The scripture even predicts that very thing. But the scripture itself (speaking in terms of the source material) has not changed.
Didn't read my history link, did you.
> The fact is that people in the Middle Ages believed in Christianity. Thousands of people devoted their lives to it, including rulers, which according to your theory should have known better.
Yes, just as these and these should have known better.
You can't justify religion by appeals to human rationality
> Sixth, the idea that the rulers wanted to "keep the people dumb" is just propaganda.
When you have a bit of idle time, visit the talk.origins newsgroup and ask about the role of religion in the Neocon "wedge document". As one guy puts it in his
IIRC their philosophy goes at least back to Plato, who (IIRC) suggested a model state where the "guardians" knew religion was a hoax, but espoused it anyway in order to control the masses.
Notice in passing how convenient it is for a government to send soldiers to their deaths and then assure the public that they have a secure spot in Heaven (as if the politicians would know!), or to shrug off "collateral damage" when everyone 'knows' that God won't let the innocent suffer in the afterlife.
> There's too many conclusions drived from too little facts. How can a conclusion be derived about wether they used plants if only the Volcanic Layers and fossils were tested for age? There's no mention of testing or even finding any sort of plant material.
Presumably that's because the link is a press release rather than a scientific publication. If you want more details you'll have to track down the June 12 Nature article.
> Geology researchers (about 98% of them anyways) are not going to know or care about testing for this sort of thing.
People get real interested in dating that sort of thing when they get a phone call from paleontologists working in the field.
> Is it me or is there something REALLY wrong in the fact that such a wide age range of fossils were found IN ONE STUDY AREA? I refuse to accept the fact that ALL of the fossils came from ONE area without some sort of assistance in reaching their final destination.
And the basis for your denial is...?
Face it, "people" have been living in Afar for a long time.
> What struck me was that the dating was done using layers of volcanic minerals. These folk may well have been ritually killed or buried, my question: How deep were they buried?
Competent archaeologists can see where holes have been dug, and report them regularly in their reports. When you dig a hole, put something in it, and fill it back up, the dirt doesn't go back in the same way it came out. So the lowest undisturbed layer above a grave gives a terminus ante quem for the date of the grave.
> As another poster here on slashdot (I wish I could remember who, giving him/her the credits..) pointed out about half a year ago in a similiar discussion, there is nothing in the bible saying the earth is flat. The closest thing you can get to this is the mentioning of the sun going up and going down, but then, we all see the mentioning of the sun going up and down in the morning newspaper.
But you rarely read claims that the sun stops in its path for a few hours as a result of sorcerous tricks.
> If they "don't even know anymore what parts were actually in the original scripture" they how do they know they have changed?
History.
> Do you have any proof of your assertion that people changed the Scriptures to fit their needs, and those changes have not been caught and reversed?
How about the fact that even today not all sects agree on the same canon, let alone on the translation and interpretation of its contents?
> Don't you mean revise science, the Bible hasnt changed in thousands of years (note the dead sea scrolls which are the same as the current versions of the Bible). It is science that changes its mind everytime something new is discovered, cant they stick with one story.
And there's the difference between science in religion. Religion wants to preserve a tradition, so its adherents stick to their story regardless of what the evidence says. Science wants to understand the universe, so it goes whereever the evidence demands.
Of course... it only takes a casual familiarity with history to see that religion slowly changes its views over the generations as well, however much the practitioners want to pretend otherwise.
> Yeah, like I'm going to choose to believe some nerdy anthropologist who would rather dig with his tiny shovel out in the desert than be with a girl.
That's rich, coming from a Slashdotter.
> > Hell, most of North America was populated with hunter/gatherers until Europeans came, and it's not like they weren't 'smart' enough or anything.
> Thats not true. Specific cases in North America include the Mississippians, the Anasazi and the Calusa. These were sophisticated societies. They had relatively complex economies, large cities consisting of thousands of people, organized religion, art and centralized government.
Still, much of the Americas still lived a Stone Age lifestyle when the Europeans came, and in fact the same could be said of parts of New Guinea at least until the middle of the Twentieth Century.
The bigger point is that being a modern human does not guarantee you a high-tech civilization within any bounded amount of time.
> Is that, Okay, Great^n Grandpawas around 160,000 years ago, complete with stone tools and burial practices. Yet Civilization only 'started 6-10,000 years ago.
Depends on what you mean by "civilization", of course.
> Why does this just not quite add up to me. I mean, our ancestors were not stupid, they posessed the same intuition and logic that we do today. Whay did it take so long to get where we are now though?
Because technology and social structures are cumulative inventions. I don't know how technology should be measured, but qualitatively speaking it appears to be growing at an exponential rate. And if you trace an exponential curve far out into the past it gets really flat.
That is to say, I don't think there's really any mystery here that needs explaining.
> The extent to which Neanderthals could speak was determined by their anatomy. The larynx was located high in the vocal tract and the oral cavity was significantly longer than in H. sapiens. This differently arranged vocal tract could not form the 'i', as in tea; 'u', as in too; and 'a', as in tall. Nor could it pronounce 'k' as in kite and 'g' as in god.
> However, as Steven Pinker put it: "In any case, e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve, so we cannot conclude that a [hominin] with a restricted vowel space had little language."
Notice that the modern Tashlhiyt Berber language is so stingy with vowels that stop consonants can serve as the nucleus of its syllables. There simply isn't any theory that tells us a minimum number of phonemes required for oral communication. Moreover, some linguists think sign language may have preceded oral language anyway.
There have been way too many dogmatic claims of an absence of language in early hominids without any good supporting evidence. The very rudimentary linguistic skills of chimps and even gorillas suggests that linguistic ability has deep evolutionary roots.
>
OTOH, in my experience, techies who have a vested interest in the status quo have amazing abilities to "discover" that something new doesn't work right, and to go running to the boss to tell all about it.
I suspect that some of the 10,000-seat switchovers are going to encounter substantial resistance.
> "Somebody cracked into my front door."
"And I didn't even know I had a back door!"
does everyone else leave instead?> Leave if You are getting bored:
> part <#channel>
If you're a crummy typist and accidentally type -
> Additionally, I've wondered if there is any social science thesis work behind the growth and evolution of the friends/foes dynamic of the Slashdot crowd.
I used to be flattered whenever someone signed me up as their friend... until I realized that they were just putting a watch on me to make sure none of my bullshit slipped by unremarked!
> you meant "Staff that mutters"
I first started reading Slashdot because I thought they were going to have "Nudes for Nerds".
> The editors are posting bogus news stories, then retracting them themselves before someone points it out.
Sounds like this is going to be the slow news day from hell.
> > The real point is that LFSPs (Language for Smart People) have a much greater support for abstraction, and in particular for defining your own abstractions, than LFMs (Language for the Masses).
>
Maybe I don't grok what you're saying, but ISTM that "abstract" and "unreadable" are very different concepts. To me an "abstraction" is very readable, because the reader can focus on the concept rather than on the details.
> (Cobol doesn't count just because the younger generation has never used it).
I would say that Cobol is very readable - to the point of being tedious. (That's why we poke fun at it.)
And not very abstract at all, at least in my limited experience with the way it is used.