MP matters to a point
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When you're dealing with digital you quite simply need pixels. You need to decide what size pictures you intend to print or whatnot and get an MP count to match. You can't get a 1.0MP camera and do large prints of any quality.
Of course you also need picture quality. But it really doesn't matter how good the colors are if you're only getting a postage stamp image.
I have a 2.0 megapixel camera which I intend to replace eventually. Not because of the pixel count, but because of the image quality. I have a few pictures where a small branch got just a bit into the frame. The camera focused on that little branch and blurred the rest of the picture. There's no manual focus so all I can do is watch what's in the view carefully.
It also doesn't react intelligently to low light. Although with a bit of modification I can turn that into a feature as I can take time lapse photos to get good pictures in very low light.
As with all things, you need to pick the versions with the features you need.
"People from the Free World where the DMCA does not apply can still access the information"
You may not beable to vote, speak your mind or any number of any other things but at least you can access information about hacking et al and that makes you free?
Nobody is stopping you from clicking on the forbidden links. It's a formal barrier. Google is quite simply spitting in the DMCA's face by using an apparent legal loophole. Google would be shut down in other "Free World" locations.
And unlike much of this other "Free World" you speak of, we can still vote.
And since we can vote, we can work to get rid of it. This other "Free World" would most likely be screwed and have no way to repeal it.
We had a prohibition of alchohol in the not so forgettable past. That has since went away. You can bitch and moan and pretend we're some kind of backwards country or you can vote and take an active role in educating people about unfair laws.
but people who really want to find that information will find it.
If one is interested in studying a "taboo" topic they'll join mailing lists as well. Especially in the case of religion and potential cults, nobody with any sense is going to just talk to one group. You're going to talk to members, ex members, and do your own studying.
You need to join message/news groups for that and the DMCA has no effect on those. The DMCA can't control what somebody sends to my e-mail account in response to a request for information.
Indie-Mail is up and running. No storage limits as long as you don't treat it like a file server. IMAP/POP3/Web access. SMTP has an alternate port for those using ISPs with port 25 blocked. You can also do a full text search on all your e-mails. All methods of access can be utilized with an SSL connection. And there are no ads.
Spam filtering is based on domains contained in the messages. You can view the current domain filter list at the site. And McAfee virus scan is running to ensure no virus infected e-mails make it to your inbox.
This service is however brought to you by the letters 'A' and 'D.' Icarus Independent offers lots more than just e-mail.
I'm working on my own web-mail (link in sig) with anything I can think of applied to it. It's very much functional and easy to use.
Google looks to be doing the same thing. They're not just emulating what's already out there but going way above and beyond. They've already got all the basic features that people expect implemented and a few toys. 6 Months gives them plenty of time to go further to give people that last push they needed to move over to GMail vs whatever they're currently using.
One can expect that MS is already at work figuring out a battle plan to counter this. Or maybe they're just expecting GMail to fail financially because they think they're overselling themselves into debt.
MS knows how much it costs to run their service which offers significantly less and has a number of caps in place. Not just storage but also the number of e-mails you can send per day. Hotmail is also ad supported.
I can imagine that MS has something cooking but they're not going to do anything until they see what happens to Google. If Google becomes too popular they may be forced to sell premium accounts that have the extra bells and whistles.
That's what Tillman did. We have parents complaining about their kids having to go fight when they only signed on to the service so they could get money for college.
Tillman cut out of a 3.6 million dollar contract to go fight a war for 18 thousand a year.
He was never over there for the money and no one can ever question he wanted to be there. That's what makes him a hero worth singling out.
Keep original copies on the Harddrive, Cassette, ect and then make copies as needed.
Tape isn't going to last forever. At least when it's digital you can easily transfer to new media without loss of quality.
If it's really important you just need to make sure you keep ahead of obsolecence. Transfer the stuff to the new standard before the old standard completely goes away. There's always a transition period.
"Gee, but what exactly stands between my email and anyone else's search?"
The directory structure. In my case the search script goes into exactly directory looking through e-mails; the user who requested the search. I don't know if you've ever written scripts but it's incredibly easy to tell a script exactly where to go based on information that the client has no control over. Scripts don't accidently go some place they shouldn't have gone.
"I like them but I fail to see how this is going to help them."
Ad revenue. I run Google Ads on my main site and they work really really well.
"I can't see what kind of retard would want or need a GB for email no one ever looks at anyway"
I have a CD full of discussion group e-mails that cover over a year during a very life changing time in my life. Being able to search them would be handy. It's already public information so who cares if it's stored on a nonsecure server?
"You'd probably be better off and with a more secure solution with them."
You're making the mistake that everyone cares about (is as paranoid about) security as much as you. Some people prefer convienence and most aren't paranoid.
For my own service I offer security to and from the mail server for those who want to utilize it. Google will most likely do the same. If that's not good enough, oh well. That's the service that's offered. Take it or leave it. If you want a Fort Knox, ad free e-mail account you're going to have to cough up some money.
Nobody is stopping you from running your own secure mail server with all the features you want. That's exactly what I'm doing. I'm implementing features I want and since I have them, I make them available to other people as well.
"frankly I think it's a shameful bore"
Noted and dismissed. If it weren't for Google's prompting, my sig wouldn't have nearly as many adjectives to describe my e-mail service.
"Looks like you're trying to launder money. Would you like to open a bank account in Cuba?"
"Somebody thinks you're not much of a man. Would you like buy some pills?"
"If Gmail is launched, people will flock to it in droves."
No. Normal people get very attached to their e-mail accounts. I have and still use the same Hotmail account I've had for years. Of course I also use my own e-mail service but it's business. Normal people aren't going to see a need for 1GB of storage. Looks of geeks are going to want it because of the geek factor of owning such an address.
Even by Mills Voluntary Slavery argument you have exactly no argument against GMail. GMail undoubtedly requires an existing e-mail account which means you don't have to send your e-mail to the user's GMail account. Just send it to their alternate account.
If people want to sacrifice some liberty, privacy, whatever for a little usefulness, that's their business.
If you're worried about private information being stolen, don't send an e-mail. Write a letter or only devulge such information in person.
There are two ways to be anonymous. By hiding in the shadows or by hiding in the crowd. GMail is going to have waaaay too many people using it to worry about anyone looking at you.
The people who are worried about GMail are the same people who think everyone is looking at them when they walk down the street. Behind Google is a handful of people and an army of benevolent computers who don't talk around the water cooler. Guess which group is going to be watching your e-mail.
someone connecting through the proxy. And that proxy having the private key.
The private key is never given out so yes, this does prevent man in the middle attacks. You can't use the key given to clients to decrypt the data stream.
Not requiring an existing e-mail account, the domain name and the features are what define an e-mail service. I've seen people try to offer hosting packages with gobs of storage space and a tiny amount of alloted transfer. The alloted transfer is what makes a hosting solution worthwhile.
You also can't have 1GB of storage without a reasonably sized attachment limit of at least several MB. 1GB storage isn't a big deal.
Anybody who wants to, can offer that. Hotmail et al don't because they see it as more profitable not to. It's a business model not some breakthru in e-mail services. I've been offering e-mail service with unlimited storage and 15MB attachments for a couple years now. I just recently overhauled it to Indie-Mail.
It's in the TOS. "Unless required by law, nobody is getting your information." And since I don't require personal information to get an account, there's not much I can give up.
And the SSL isn't to protect the users from me. E-mail doesn't get stored encrypted. The SSL is for securing the transmission so nobody can snoop on your e-mail while it's being recieved or sent.
There is no point in paying for a certificate. Who is it protecting and how? The self signed certificate protects the users in every needed way. Namely by encrypting the connection.
Hotmail has McAfee, Indie-Mail has McAfee. GMail will no doubt have something similar. However when MyDoom came out my e-mail server was deleting those virus e-mails before the virus scanner was. If you look in the filter list on the Indie-Mail web-site one of the entries is a long string of letters and numbers. That's the signiture I found and used to kill off MyDoom before the VirusScan was updated and took care of it, itself.
The problem with spam protection is that you can't be overly agressive when you're dealing with other people's e-mail. That's why I only use URL filtering. It's very effective and inflicts no collateral damage. The downside is that it has to be manually maintained. But I have enough of the process automated that it's not that big of a deal. It's about 15 minutes of my time every few days to update the filter.
GMail will no doubt be utilizing it's search technology to analyze e-mails reported as spam to make it's system more effective and more automated.
I built Indie-Mail so that it would be at least somewhat comparable feature wise to what GMail was advertising. The main thing was the ability to search your e-mails. I'm not aware of any other free services besides Indie-Mail and GMail that have that and GMail isn't out yet. There's also one graphic on the entire site: the logo. Everything else is text. The interface is very intuitive and fast. Google doesn't have the market cornered in that area.
I also don't know if GMail requires an existing e-mail account to sign up. Mine doesn't. I don't require any personal information.
But, I'm waiting for them to go public so I can sign up and compare features to see where mine needs some work.
is that since now you can send larger attachments, you'll tell your friends to sign up so they can recieve them. It's an easy way to encourage existing users to advertise your service.
Except this isn't really a battle. The Iraqi web-portal isn't giving people an @google.com or @gmail.com account. Much of the reason people sign up for an e-mail service is the domain name. It really doesn't matter how great the offering is, not too many people are going to get an @goat[...].cx e-mail account.
When Google announced its GMail on April 1st I took it seriously and decided to improve my e-mail service offering. It's now accessible over the web, SSL secured, fully text searchable and free. Before it was POP3 only, not secured and not free. I'm going to look into adding IMAP access as well. 15,000KB attachment limit and no storage limits as long as you don't try to use it as a remote harddrive.
You also don't need an existing e-mail account to sign up. Which is nice if you need to sign up for a service and really don't care to give them any real information.
I recently converted a C implementation of Quadpak to C# (not hard really) and the C version uses function pointers while I had to change it over to function delegates for C#.
For my purposes I didn't notice any glaring difference. It's functionally the same.
Is there some feature of delegates that isn't available using a straight pointer?
Link in sig. If you need a quick and easy disposable e-mail address, you can sign up for an Indie-Mail account without the need for an existing e-mail account. And with web-based access you don't even need to configure a client to use the account for taking care of registration confirmations.
And since web based access is text only, you don't have to worry about bugs imbedded in e-mails.
I was talking to one of the guys at my ISP and he was telling me that most of the people running such businesses don't have degrees. They don't need them. They taught themselves.
The computer industry is changing so rapidly that your compsci degree is obsolete right after you get your diploma. There's nothing you learn in Computer Science that you can't teach yourself.
And if you can't teach yourself, then you shouldn't be doing computer science because you're constantly learning with nothing more than books to teach you. I havn't even finished Linear Algebra yet and I'm writting a very advanced statistics tool. In some respects, I'm actually ahead of my college education.
Some industries like the auto industry just change at a slower pace. No matter what industry you're in, if you don't have the ability to teach yourself, you'll become obsolete along with the things you used to fix.
If you want to be successful you need to find what you really want to do early on and focus on getting part time jobs that deal directly with your desired profession. You get paid to be educated. And then once the time comes to go to college you can deside whether or not you really need to spend the money or if you're already in a position to keep moving up in the field.
Personally I wouldn't give up college. It's expensive but the social aspect of it is very nice. And it's structured which is good for learning how to organize time and whatnot.
An alledged pastor accuses his church of being judgemental towards it's members. And now you want me to stop "judging" him?
Who did Jesus hang around with? He hung around the poor and downtrodden. The only people who complained were the Pharisees. And Jesus had nothing nice to say to them. All this pastor needs to do, is recognize that his Church is in deep sin and get up in front of the congregation and point their sin out, tell them they need to repent and remind them of Christ. The problem with this pastor is that the only people judging are the members and they do it falsly based on people's appearances. There is no sin in righteous judgement. In fact, it's exactly the pastor's job.
I can be like this pastor and just ignore the fact that his church is falling away or I can point him back to God's word and what he says so he can work to better the situation.
Telling me to just stop judging him is just as bad as him throwing up his hands in the air and not chastizing his congregation as he should be doing as a pastor.
His church is in sin. And he's apparently doing nothing about it as he claims it's normal. It's sin. It doesn't matter how common the sin is, it's still sin.
It's about time he was judged by God's word and hopefully he'll get his act together. If you think judging churches is a new concept I think you need to read the New Testament a few dozen more times. Paul quite often wrote letters chastizing churches for allowing their members to sin while the leaders just ignored it and even encouraged it in some cases.
His church is corrupt. It's turned into a fashion show and a vocal contest. It's not wrong because I say so. It's wrong because God says so. And it's the pastor's job to steer the congregation away from sin. Again, not because I say so, but because God says so.
going again this Monday since they have an evening service for college students.
"But let's not try to pretend that churches are non-threatening."
Churches are as non threatening as Pastors allow them to be. I havn't dressed up for church in a very long time. Years. In fact every monday there's a very rugged looking guy who comes in who knows pretty much everybody.
"Where else do you go where, when you come in, you're asked to stand up in front of a couple of hundred people so they can all get a good look at you?"
At church, the only one you should be paying attention to is God and His Word. If all you're interested in is the fashion show and vocals of the people around you, you might as well just stay home.
Sounds like you're working for and attend a very hyporitical church that's more worried about looks than spirituality.
So yes, Church is the most non-threatening social environment there is. If a church isn't, then it isn't a church you should be going to.
"as soon as God forces me to give up my rather nice salary in tech in order to serve his people full-time"
So, as soon as he forces you to stop being greedy?
God's not in the habit of forcing people not to do things. Sounds like your church has a lot of serious issues that need to be dealt with and you're more interested in a good pay check and denying serious problems exist playing it off like they're normal, than dealing with them.
Your church is not normal. It's broken. I can't believe you're a pastor even part time if you can't see this and see what's wrong with it.
Maybe everyone would be better off if you weren't the pastor so that someone else with better bearings on what a church should be can run the place and fix it.
Instead of putting up a virtual church, Jesus would go to those people's houses who couldn't otherwise go to church, and personally worship with them.
That's What Jesus Would Do.
Of all the non threatening social situations, I can't imagine a less threatening atmosphere than a church.
But who knows, maybe this will find it's niche.
As long as they don't junk it up with ads and demand membership fees or whatnot the only problem I see with it is that the internet is a wire monkey. It's bad to depend on the internet for your social fix. Real life person to person interaction is necessary. And of all the places to avoid it, church isn't it.
I also have to wonder how they're going to deal with trolls.
Slashdot Mirror
When you're dealing with digital you quite simply need pixels. You need to decide what size pictures you intend to print or whatnot and get an MP count to match. You can't get a 1.0MP camera and do large prints of any quality.
Of course you also need picture quality. But it really doesn't matter how good the colors are if you're only getting a postage stamp image.
I have a 2.0 megapixel camera which I intend to replace eventually. Not because of the pixel count, but because of the image quality. I have a few pictures where a small branch got just a bit into the frame. The camera focused on that little branch and blurred the rest of the picture. There's no manual focus so all I can do is watch what's in the view carefully.
It also doesn't react intelligently to low light. Although with a bit of modification I can turn that into a feature as I can take time lapse photos to get good pictures in very low light.
As with all things, you need to pick the versions with the features you need.
Ben
"People from the Free World where the DMCA does not apply can still access the information"
You may not beable to vote, speak your mind or any number of any other things but at least you can access information about hacking et al and that makes you free?
Nobody is stopping you from clicking on the forbidden links. It's a formal barrier. Google is quite simply spitting in the DMCA's face by using an apparent legal loophole. Google would be shut down in other "Free World" locations.
And unlike much of this other "Free World" you speak of, we can still vote.
And since we can vote, we can work to get rid of it. This other "Free World" would most likely be screwed and have no way to repeal it.
We had a prohibition of alchohol in the not so forgettable past. That has since went away. You can bitch and moan and pretend we're some kind of backwards country or you can vote and take an active role in educating people about unfair laws.
Ben
but people who really want to find that information will find it.
If one is interested in studying a "taboo" topic they'll join mailing lists as well. Especially in the case of religion and potential cults, nobody with any sense is going to just talk to one group. You're going to talk to members, ex members, and do your own studying.
You need to join message/news groups for that and the DMCA has no effect on those. The DMCA can't control what somebody sends to my e-mail account in response to a request for information.
Ben
Indie-Mail is up and running. No storage limits as long as you don't treat it like a file server. IMAP/POP3/Web access. SMTP has an alternate port for those using ISPs with port 25 blocked. You can also do a full text search on all your e-mails. All methods of access can be utilized with an SSL connection. And there are no ads.
Spam filtering is based on domains contained in the messages. You can view the current domain filter list at the site. And McAfee virus scan is running to ensure no virus infected e-mails make it to your inbox.
This service is however brought to you by the letters 'A' and 'D.' Icarus Independent offers lots more than just e-mail.
Ben
I'm working on my own web-mail (link in sig) with anything I can think of applied to it. It's very much functional and easy to use.
Google looks to be doing the same thing. They're not just emulating what's already out there but going way above and beyond. They've already got all the basic features that people expect implemented and a few toys. 6 Months gives them plenty of time to go further to give people that last push they needed to move over to GMail vs whatever they're currently using.
One can expect that MS is already at work figuring out a battle plan to counter this. Or maybe they're just expecting GMail to fail financially because they think they're overselling themselves into debt.
MS knows how much it costs to run their service which offers significantly less and has a number of caps in place. Not just storage but also the number of e-mails you can send per day. Hotmail is also ad supported.
I can imagine that MS has something cooking but they're not going to do anything until they see what happens to Google. If Google becomes too popular they may be forced to sell premium accounts that have the extra bells and whistles.
Ben
That's what Tillman did. We have parents complaining about their kids having to go fight when they only signed on to the service so they could get money for college.
Tillman cut out of a 3.6 million dollar contract to go fight a war for 18 thousand a year.
He was never over there for the money and no one can ever question he wanted to be there. That's what makes him a hero worth singling out.
Ben
Keep original copies on the Harddrive, Cassette, ect and then make copies as needed.
Tape isn't going to last forever. At least when it's digital you can easily transfer to new media without loss of quality.
If it's really important you just need to make sure you keep ahead of obsolecence. Transfer the stuff to the new standard before the old standard completely goes away. There's always a transition period.
Ben
why I'm getting a lot of ads for Ovaltine.
Ben
"Gee, but what exactly stands between my email and anyone else's search?"
The directory structure. In my case the search script goes into exactly directory looking through e-mails; the user who requested the search. I don't know if you've ever written scripts but it's incredibly easy to tell a script exactly where to go based on information that the client has no control over. Scripts don't accidently go some place they shouldn't have gone.
"I like them but I fail to see how this is going to help them."
Ad revenue. I run Google Ads on my main site and they work really really well.
"I can't see what kind of retard would want or need a GB for email no one ever looks at anyway"
I have a CD full of discussion group e-mails that cover over a year during a very life changing time in my life. Being able to search them would be handy. It's already public information so who cares if it's stored on a nonsecure server?
"You'd probably be better off and with a more secure solution with them."
You're making the mistake that everyone cares about (is as paranoid about) security as much as you. Some people prefer convienence and most aren't paranoid.
For my own service I offer security to and from the mail server for those who want to utilize it. Google will most likely do the same. If that's not good enough, oh well. That's the service that's offered. Take it or leave it. If you want a Fort Knox, ad free e-mail account you're going to have to cough up some money.
Nobody is stopping you from running your own secure mail server with all the features you want. That's exactly what I'm doing. I'm implementing features I want and since I have them, I make them available to other people as well.
"frankly I think it's a shameful bore"
Noted and dismissed. If it weren't for Google's prompting, my sig wouldn't have nearly as many adjectives to describe my e-mail service.
Ben
"Looks like you're trying to launder money. Would you like to open a bank account in Cuba?"
"Somebody thinks you're not much of a man. Would you like buy some pills?"
"If Gmail is launched, people will flock to it in droves."
No. Normal people get very attached to their e-mail accounts. I have and still use the same Hotmail account I've had for years. Of course I also use my own e-mail service but it's business. Normal people aren't going to see a need for 1GB of storage. Looks of geeks are going to want it because of the geek factor of owning such an address.
Even by Mills Voluntary Slavery argument you have exactly no argument against GMail. GMail undoubtedly requires an existing e-mail account which means you don't have to send your e-mail to the user's GMail account. Just send it to their alternate account.
If people want to sacrifice some liberty, privacy, whatever for a little usefulness, that's their business.
If you're worried about private information being stolen, don't send an e-mail. Write a letter or only devulge such information in person.
There are two ways to be anonymous. By hiding in the shadows or by hiding in the crowd. GMail is going to have waaaay too many people using it to worry about anyone looking at you.
The people who are worried about GMail are the same people who think everyone is looking at them when they walk down the street. Behind Google is a handful of people and an army of benevolent computers who don't talk around the water cooler. Guess which group is going to be watching your e-mail.
Ben
You can also connect to SMTP through port 28 since my ISP also blocks port 25.
I should probably post that info publically since it is a selling point for the service as most e-mail servers don't run on alternate ports.
Ben
someone connecting through the proxy. And that proxy having the private key.
The private key is never given out so yes, this does prevent man in the middle attacks. You can't use the key given to clients to decrypt the data stream.
Ben
Not requiring an existing e-mail account, the domain name and the features are what define an e-mail service. I've seen people try to offer hosting packages with gobs of storage space and a tiny amount of alloted transfer. The alloted transfer is what makes a hosting solution worthwhile.
You also can't have 1GB of storage without a reasonably sized attachment limit of at least several MB. 1GB storage isn't a big deal.
Anybody who wants to, can offer that. Hotmail et al don't because they see it as more profitable not to. It's a business model not some breakthru in e-mail services. I've been offering e-mail service with unlimited storage and 15MB attachments for a couple years now. I just recently overhauled it to Indie-Mail.
Ben
It's in the TOS. "Unless required by law, nobody is getting your information." And since I don't require personal information to get an account, there's not much I can give up.
And the SSL isn't to protect the users from me. E-mail doesn't get stored encrypted. The SSL is for securing the transmission so nobody can snoop on your e-mail while it's being recieved or sent.
There is no point in paying for a certificate. Who is it protecting and how? The self signed certificate protects the users in every needed way. Namely by encrypting the connection.
Ben
Hotmail has McAfee, Indie-Mail has McAfee. GMail will no doubt have something similar. However when MyDoom came out my e-mail server was deleting those virus e-mails before the virus scanner was. If you look in the filter list on the Indie-Mail web-site one of the entries is a long string of letters and numbers. That's the signiture I found and used to kill off MyDoom before the VirusScan was updated and took care of it, itself.
The problem with spam protection is that you can't be overly agressive when you're dealing with other people's e-mail. That's why I only use URL filtering. It's very effective and inflicts no collateral damage. The downside is that it has to be manually maintained. But I have enough of the process automated that it's not that big of a deal. It's about 15 minutes of my time every few days to update the filter.
GMail will no doubt be utilizing it's search technology to analyze e-mails reported as spam to make it's system more effective and more automated.
Ben
I built Indie-Mail so that it would be at least somewhat comparable feature wise to what GMail was advertising. The main thing was the ability to search your e-mails. I'm not aware of any other free services besides Indie-Mail and GMail that have that and GMail isn't out yet. There's also one graphic on the entire site: the logo. Everything else is text. The interface is very intuitive and fast. Google doesn't have the market cornered in that area.
I also don't know if GMail requires an existing e-mail account to sign up. Mine doesn't. I don't require any personal information.
But, I'm waiting for them to go public so I can sign up and compare features to see where mine needs some work.
Ben
is that since now you can send larger attachments, you'll tell your friends to sign up so they can recieve them. It's an easy way to encourage existing users to advertise your service.
Ben
Except this isn't really a battle. The Iraqi web-portal isn't giving people an @google.com or @gmail.com account. Much of the reason people sign up for an e-mail service is the domain name. It really doesn't matter how great the offering is, not too many people are going to get an @goat[...].cx e-mail account.
When Google announced its GMail on April 1st I took it seriously and decided to improve my e-mail service offering. It's now accessible over the web, SSL secured, fully text searchable and free. Before it was POP3 only, not secured and not free. I'm going to look into adding IMAP access as well. 15,000KB attachment limit and no storage limits as long as you don't try to use it as a remote harddrive.
You also don't need an existing e-mail account to sign up. Which is nice if you need to sign up for a service and really don't care to give them any real information.
Also, when you delete a message, it's gone.
Ben
before Slashdot got to it.
Ben
what's the difference?
I recently converted a C implementation of Quadpak to C# (not hard really) and the C version uses function pointers while I had to change it over to function delegates for C#.
For my purposes I didn't notice any glaring difference. It's functionally the same.
Is there some feature of delegates that isn't available using a straight pointer?
Ben
Link in sig. If you need a quick and easy disposable e-mail address, you can sign up for an Indie-Mail account without the need for an existing e-mail account. And with web-based access you don't even need to configure a client to use the account for taking care of registration confirmations.
And since web based access is text only, you don't have to worry about bugs imbedded in e-mails.
Ben
I was talking to one of the guys at my ISP and he was telling me that most of the people running such businesses don't have degrees. They don't need them. They taught themselves.
The computer industry is changing so rapidly that your compsci degree is obsolete right after you get your diploma. There's nothing you learn in Computer Science that you can't teach yourself.
And if you can't teach yourself, then you shouldn't be doing computer science because you're constantly learning with nothing more than books to teach you. I havn't even finished Linear Algebra yet and I'm writting a very advanced statistics tool. In some respects, I'm actually ahead of my college education.
Some industries like the auto industry just change at a slower pace. No matter what industry you're in, if you don't have the ability to teach yourself, you'll become obsolete along with the things you used to fix.
If you want to be successful you need to find what you really want to do early on and focus on getting part time jobs that deal directly with your desired profession. You get paid to be educated. And then once the time comes to go to college you can deside whether or not you really need to spend the money or if you're already in a position to keep moving up in the field.
Personally I wouldn't give up college. It's expensive but the social aspect of it is very nice. And it's structured which is good for learning how to organize time and whatnot.
Ben
God is. And I just happen to agree with Him.
An alledged pastor accuses his church of being judgemental towards it's members. And now you want me to stop "judging" him?
Who did Jesus hang around with? He hung around the poor and downtrodden. The only people who complained were the Pharisees. And Jesus had nothing nice to say to them. All this pastor needs to do, is recognize that his Church is in deep sin and get up in front of the congregation and point their sin out, tell them they need to repent and remind them of Christ. The problem with this pastor is that the only people judging are the members and they do it falsly based on people's appearances. There is no sin in righteous judgement. In fact, it's exactly the pastor's job.
I can be like this pastor and just ignore the fact that his church is falling away or I can point him back to God's word and what he says so he can work to better the situation.
Telling me to just stop judging him is just as bad as him throwing up his hands in the air and not chastizing his congregation as he should be doing as a pastor.
His church is in sin. And he's apparently doing nothing about it as he claims it's normal. It's sin. It doesn't matter how common the sin is, it's still sin.
It's about time he was judged by God's word and hopefully he'll get his act together. If you think judging churches is a new concept I think you need to read the New Testament a few dozen more times. Paul quite often wrote letters chastizing churches for allowing their members to sin while the leaders just ignored it and even encouraged it in some cases.
His church is corrupt. It's turned into a fashion show and a vocal contest. It's not wrong because I say so. It's wrong because God says so. And it's the pastor's job to steer the congregation away from sin. Again, not because I say so, but because God says so.
Ben
going again this Monday since they have an evening service for college students.
"But let's not try to pretend that churches are non-threatening."
Churches are as non threatening as Pastors allow them to be. I havn't dressed up for church in a very long time. Years. In fact every monday there's a very rugged looking guy who comes in who knows pretty much everybody.
"Where else do you go where, when you come in, you're asked to stand up in front of a couple of hundred people so they can all get a good look at you?"
At church, the only one you should be paying attention to is God and His Word. If all you're interested in is the fashion show and vocals of the people around you, you might as well just stay home.
Sounds like you're working for and attend a very hyporitical church that's more worried about looks than spirituality.
So yes, Church is the most non-threatening social environment there is. If a church isn't, then it isn't a church you should be going to.
"as soon as God forces me to give up my rather nice salary in tech in order to serve his people full-time"
So, as soon as he forces you to stop being greedy?
God's not in the habit of forcing people not to do things. Sounds like your church has a lot of serious issues that need to be dealt with and you're more interested in a good pay check and denying serious problems exist playing it off like they're normal, than dealing with them.
Your church is not normal. It's broken. I can't believe you're a pastor even part time if you can't see this and see what's wrong with it.
Maybe everyone would be better off if you weren't the pastor so that someone else with better bearings on what a church should be can run the place and fix it.
Ben
Instead of putting up a virtual church, Jesus would go to those people's houses who couldn't otherwise go to church, and personally worship with them.
That's What Jesus Would Do.
Of all the non threatening social situations, I can't imagine a less threatening atmosphere than a church.
But who knows, maybe this will find it's niche.
As long as they don't junk it up with ads and demand membership fees or whatnot the only problem I see with it is that the internet is a wire monkey. It's bad to depend on the internet for your social fix. Real life person to person interaction is necessary. And of all the places to avoid it, church isn't it.
I also have to wonder how they're going to deal with trolls.
Ben