Oh, I don't think most Slashdot readers hate modern Macs. That'd be kind of dumb, after all.. most of us are pretty into Unix.
There are still quite a few, though. I'm thinking those are the people who haven't yet pulled their heads out and realized that OS X isn't the same thing as OS 9.
Being a Mac hater for most of my life, I can attest to the difficulty of pulling one's head out when it comes to the Mac. But with all the raving of fans (and $$$ pouring into the market) it became hard for me to ignore.
All I can say is, once you go Mac OS X, everything else seems inferior. And I mean EVERYTHING.:-)
Mormons accept that many do not view them as Christians. Who gets to decide who is Christian and who is not?
As you said, they generally accept themselves as separate. Most non-Mormons accept them as separate as well. So the majority of the vote is that they're separate. That's what defines it. That contrasts directly with situations like Lutherans and Catholics who accept each other as fellow Christians. Combining Christianity and Mormonism is usually only done for things like statistical purposes.
The Bible is a compliation of books. The condition in the last chapter of Revelations applies only to the Book of Revelations.
Your statement is not a statement. It's a theological argument. The general consensus among Christians (as defined to be separate from Mormons) is that the verses refer to the entire Bible.
Not to be rude, but I would be interested if you can show me proof of Moses. Or the even the exodus from Egypt.
While this webpage fails to do justice to the discovery, the Altar and the former Israeli camp near Mount Siani have been believed to be found. I imagine it will take quite a bit of archelogical work before it's "proven" beyond a doubt, but we definitely have a good start.
In 1993 the existence of King David was proven by an archelogical find. The Israeli geneolgy records are also extremely complete on the matter of their ancestors. (Which is really what the Bible is about. It tracks Jesus's lineage. Or if you're a Jew, it tracks the lineage of the coming savior.) As the Smithsonian stated in that link:
"Much of the Bible, in particular the historical books of the old testament, are as accurate historical documents as any that we have from antiquity and are in fact more accurate than many of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or Greek histories. These Biblical records can be and are used as are other ancient documents in archeological work. For the most part, historical events described took place and the peoples cited really existed. This is not to say that names of all peoples and places mentioned can be identified today, or that every event as reported in the historical books happened exactly as stated."
Polygamy is not contrary to the Christian Biblical view.
Jesus described the relationship between a man and his wife as the relationship between him and the Church. He only defined it as one Church. Not many.
Paul stated in Titus 1:6 "An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife."
Jesus also made clear that many things that were allowed by Moses' time were not the way things were intended. In the beginning, there was one man and one wife. This didn't change until much later.
Prophets of the Old Testament were polygamous.
Prophets generally didn't marry. In fact, I can think of one (Moses), if you consider him a prophet. I can't think of ANY that were polygamous. Plus, one MUST refer to the New Testament if one is considered a Christian. Paul was very specific about one man and one wife.
The LDS church, and virtually all Christian denominations, are harmonious with Galataions 1:6-8.
LDS is not harmonious if one accepts several of the problems presented above. Non-Mormons do not accept the Mormon interpretation, thus another point for them being considered separate. Unsurprisingly, Mormons don't see any problem.:-)
Re:Thats the whole point of the "puzzler"
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· Score: 1
And this differentiates char from short how, exactly?
That's a good point. I supposed I should have also mentioned that byte and short are really just for low-footprint memory storage. 'int' is the currency of choice in the Java language. Casting up to int ensures that all math happens in a byte aligned fashion, not to mention that reduces the amount of silicon required by an embedded Java processor.
Re:master of the obvious
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Java Puzzlers
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· Score: 1
Char is actually implicitly cast to 'int' to perform mathematical operations. The char type itself has no bytecode support for math.
In other words, char represents a Unicode value from '\u0 to \uffff'. The fact that it can be cast to a numerical value and operated on is secondary to the fact that it's not really a number and should not be treated as such.
Indeed... But why have the numeric equivalence in the programming language? 'A' is not equivalent to 65 except in the particular context of a character set that defines that equivalence. Keep characters characters and keep numbers numbers.
1. Input/Output. Since you only have numbers in computers, you have to transmit the characters somehow.
2. Logical operations. Character sets often have bit encodings or numerical spacings that easily allow for things like lower case to upper case.
But Unicode doesn't fit into 16 bits.
When the Java Langauge was created, it did. The Unicode spec has since change. A more complete answer can be found here. FYI, the class files encode strings in UTF-8 format for compactness, so they DO vary. However, the language itself works differently.
But in any case my point is simply that in international character sets the idea of what constitutes a "single character" is somewhat muddled, because what may be a single glyph may be multiple data characters
Java provides a large number of APIs (such as the Reader/Writer classes) that are intended for use rather than rolling your own. That way one can be certain that you are always correctly reading the textual data.
Re:master of the obvious (SPOILER)
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Java Puzzlers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hmmm, but proper (internationalized) case conversion is ridiculously more complicated than that.
Yes it is indeed.
The JavaDoc for the Character class actually bemoans this in detail. My only point was that the Java Language allowed the numerical operations for such purposes. Writing a proper Unicode case converter is something that Sun has already done for us. (Thank God.):-)
And yet it keeps lots of old C syntax which gives you plenty enough rope to hang yourself with (from which flows several of the puzzles).
That much is easy to answer. Java started its life as a new C++ compiler that didn't require a recompile of the entire project when just one class changed. To meet that goal, Gosling turned to using bytecode. That partly solved the problem, but he found he had to make several language changes to keep classes separate. By the time he was done, a new language had emerged.
Re:Thats the whole point of the "puzzler"
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· Score: 1
By definition, a char in Java is a 16-bit unsigned value. But, here, check the language spec. A char is just an unsigned short. That's it.
I think you misunderstand the spec. From your link:
For char, from '\u0000' to '\uffff' inclusive, that is, from 0 to 65535
Just because it's a numerical value doesn't mean that it's an actual number.
chars are treated just like numbers in Java. You can do numeric comparisons with them, you can add them, you can subtract them, they're just numbers.
This is incorrect. If you check the Java Virtual Machine Specification you'll find a distinct lack of numerical operations for the 'char' datatype. In order to provide you numerical functions for a char value, the value is treated as if it were an int. (i.e. An implicit cast.) From the spec:
Conditional branches on comparisons between data of types boolean, byte, char, and short are performed using int comparison instructions (3.11.1) Note that no operations exist in the bytecode to do math on chars. Thus to get the results, the char is implicitly casted to an int, processed, then cast back to a char as necessary.
Are you responding to the wrong comment? Your #2 talks about chars, but I said nothing about using chars as a datatype for numbers.
No, I'm responding to the right comment. I only mentioned chars in passing. I said ALL I/O uses Ints AND that this makes Unicode support easier.
But I will admit one point you have: reading in blocks of ints is another solution to my problem
Which was my point.:-)
, as you could AND out each 8-bit component of what you want into another int (then shift obviously), and get the same result, though that's uselessly complex, as you usually do "block" reads anyways, in my case into a byte array.
Java supports both cases. You can read arrays of values, OR you can read individual values. It all depends on what you're trying to do. Of course, usually you wouldn't want to bother with either. The I/O package contains the DataInput and DataOutput classes for easy binary I/O, and the Reader/Writer classes for easy character translation.
And add to that the fact that actually all java primitives EXCEPT chars are SIGNED
True. I was thinking of numerical types, as do most other people when they say that Java has no unsigned primitives.
FYI, I'm not trying to get on your case. I'm just trying to help you understand how it's done in Java. Sorry if my brevity confused you.:-)
Re:master of the obvious (SPOILER)
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Java Puzzlers
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· Score: 1
Well, maybe that's the intended purpose. But its semantics don't sit totally easy with that. What does this print? (from p.25)
System.out.println('H' + 'a');
It prints '169'. The book goes on:
The real problem is the overloading of the '+' sign. This is just more evidence that operator overloading is harmful in general purpose langauges. Sure, that '+' is convenient for putting strings together, but it does cost in clarity.
The reason for this behavior, BTW, is do you can do things like this:
char lowerCase = 'H' + ('a' - 'A');
Being able to obtain mathematical deltas is extremely important when you're changing the forms of letters. Gosling wasn't looking to change those sorts of features when he created the Java language.
At least that's a more realistic example, though.:-)
The fact that some Catholics happened to be wrong about some things doesn't mean that JPII and the Popes who followed haven't been making an honest effort to wrap their heads around modern scientific models of the universe, and ellucidate such information for their followers.
But in many ways they're making the exact opposite mistake as they made before. Since they're trying to make up for the whole persecution of scientists thing, they accept things as canon that really shouldn't be accepted as such. Evolution is a perfect example. Is the theory complete? (No.) Is it proven? (No.) Then HOW can you say that anything contrary is heresy?
The Catholic church would do best to *STOP* taking canon positions on things. I realize it simplifies the whole, "Well, what do you think of science?" question, but it tremendously complicates the whole, "How do we enforce canon?" problem. If the Catholic church wanted to say, "We believe that Evolution has merit. As such we will pursue it from a scientific standpoint and educationally teach it as a possibilty for Genesis until we can confirm or deny it."
You're making the same mistake that scientologists make about psychiatry.
1) I do not appreciate the comparison to Scientology.
2) Psychiatry is a field of scientific study. The Vatican is not a field of scientific study. The Vatican is an entity that should be treating ALL science with the appropriate amount of skepticism that the field requires.
3) I do NOT appreciate the comparison to Scientology.
I think the whole notion of a "character" type being assigned a numerical value is dubious in the first place.
Can't be helped. You have to give the computer a way of understanding characters. Array indexes are a natural way for computers to do that.
That's not to say the idea of a character coding that translates between characters and numbers isn't sensible, but the character itself is not a number - it's a character.
A character in Java *is* a character. Nothing more, nothing less. It's a character. What the author did was stupid. The only time you cast a character like that is when you're doing I/O. For example:
InputStream in = new FileInputStream("Text File.txt"); StringBuffer string = new StringBuffer(); int data;
Note that in.read() returns an Integer of byte data, so the sign problem never shows up.
I like Python's approach to the solution - there simply is no "atomic" character type (defining such a thing when character sets have characters that aren't uniform size is questionable anyway)
Java Characters *are* a uniform size. Every character is a 16 bit Unicode character. That's why you're not supposed to do what I just did in the example above (read in a byte at a time) because you may chop up the Unicode encoding. Instead you're supposed to use a Reader object, which will return 'char' values instead of 'int' values.
2. All Java I/O uses Integers instead of bytes to avoid the unsigned issue and better support Unicode.
Thus the example is a stupid thing to do. You read in a whole integer (32 bits) then cast it to a char (16 bits unsigned). The char is treated as a unicode character at all times.
Comsats are the big birds of the satellite world; they are power hungry and need huge solar arrays and a huge dish pointed with great accuracy at the surface. They also need something else - geosynchronous orbit.
I was thinking more along the lines of the Iridium Constellation as opposed to a traditional Comsat. i.e. A network of satellites in LEO, that could move your signal from sat to sat as they pass overhead.
Iridium wasn't all that bad of an idea, but it was a bit ahead of its time in Satellite technology.
Just as I shortened the explanation to "respect". The actual Jewish law is irrelevant to Hemos as it seems unlikely that he is a praticiing Jew. So as a gentile, "respect of Jewish tradition" is the best reason for him to observe the blotting out of the name.:-)
because I didn't think the grandparent poster would read it anyway.
No worries, I tend to read all the responses. I eventually may decide to stop responding if the discussion is beyond hope, but I do read everything.:-)
Stupid or not, it's common Jewish tradition. Pick up a Jewish paper sometime and you'll find the word "God" marked out as "G-d" everywhere. The name which we translate as "Jehovah" is almost never used.
Okay, I just reread the article and I think I get it now. The "Microsat" terminology had me thinking that this was for experiments and educational missions. I'm still not entirely clear on its use, but it seems that it's targetted at people with large budgets for space access. So one might send it up along with a Comsat, or send a bunch of these up *as* Comsats.
It's amazing what they can do with SoC's these days, isn't it? The only part I don't understand is, how are they expecting that these sats going to fly? AFAIK, NASA stopped flying PongSats on the Space Shuttle after the Challenger incident. (aka, "The Get Away Special") Are they planning to pool these sats together to pay for a booster? Or do you have to get your own? Where is that $10 million going? (For the cost of a couple of these, I could buy a Delta II and send 100-200 desktop towers into space! And that would be assuming I used Car Batteries to power them!)
Re:master of the obvious
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Amen. The Java Language Specification states that char IS NOT A NUMBER. It's a character representation and should be treated as such. Thus the entire example is contrived, and makes no sense. It *might* be interesting from the perspective of loading a file (e.g. buffer.append((char)in.read());), except that the IO streams provide Integers to get around the sign problem.
This is why in computer science they have a term for supposed "idiosyncracies" like this: "Garbage In Garbage Out" (GIGO)
Um, Mormons view themselves as Christians, so how can they confuse themselves?
Other Christians, however, do not view them as such. The last chapter of Revelations has this to say:
"18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: 19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book."
The Mormons have added to the Bible with their Book of Mormon, and thus are considered separate, just as the Jews consider Christians to be separate. In any case, the non-Mormon Christians don't accept Joseph Smith's claims of "finding the book" anyway. All other books in the Bible were written by verifiable, living people who were accepted to be given a divine right to add their books to the Bible. (Though I have to say, having that many authors makes for a very interesting book. On one hand you have commandments "Thou shalt not kill," while on the other hand you have erotic poetry. One has to be concious of the author of each book if one is to understand the Bible. Even if you're only interested in it as literature, and don't believe in it.) AFAIK, no one has ever verified the existence of the authors of Smith's gold plates, nor does anyone other than the Mormons accept that Smith was a prophet. Not to mention that there are problems with the technology of known history vs. the records in those plates.
The Bible tells Christians that "Many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many." (Matthew 24:5, also Luke 21:8) Also, many of the points (e.g. Polygamy) are contrary to the Christian Biblical view. This makes them in violation of Galations 1:6-8: "I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel; which is really not another; only there are some who are disturbing you, and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we have preached to you, let him be accursed."
I'm actually speaking figuratively. Not "Other > Catholic", but as in "Catholics are not representative as a whole. There are a lot more Christians out there." I don't have any clue as to the worldwide figures.
However, the U.S. figures are here. It's difficult to state that these figures are anything more than a reasonable approximation, but they do show that other churches combined outnumber the Catholic church in the U.S. It's quite likely that the spread is greater than those numbers would have you believe, as it doesn't include a large number of community churches that have no denominational affiliation.
1. Considering Genisis is a Jewish text I think it is perfectly fair to get a Rabbi's viewpoint on this.
The New Testament is also a Jewish text. Those of the Jewish faith don't believe it, nor do Christians fully accept the Jewish position on the old Testament. QED.
2. a. It was John Paul II
Indeed. My typing is getting pretty terrible these days. But it's fast!;-)
b. They do not still hold with the geocentic view of the universe; they also believed the earth was flat once. c. Only an idiot discounts another persons point of view because of who they are.
The point is that the Vatican's credibility is pretty much shot based on historical experience. Since their credibility is shot, many Christians tend to ignore their position on scientific matters.
4. My right to reply; not a flame, objective criticism.
Which is why you're receiving a reply. Slashdot tends to be very anti-Christian, regardless of the truth of the post. This tends to come out in hateful flame posts. If you had flamed me, you would have been ignored. Since you chose the path of discussion, I'm actually replying.:-)
Thank you for that correction. It seems Hemos was correct in this case (though others have pointed out that most Jews much prefer to use the term 'G-d'), so I withdraw that particular point.:-)
Hemos, if you're reading this, my apologies. However, I would still ask that you stop confusing things by pulling different religions into the mix.
2.) This claim comes from up top, so its basically the view of the vatican unless Pope Benedict contradicts it
That is the view of the Vatican. However, Christians don't necessiarly take their beliefs from the Vatican. Once it was heresy to disagree with the Vatican on such matters. Today, the Vatican doesn't have any power in such matters, and there are far more Christians than just Catholics. All the Vatican can do is state the position of the Catholic Church.
2.5) JPII pardoned Galileo
Correct. As I said, the Pope and Galileo knew each other. The heresy charges levied against him were more because the Pope felt he was required to file them, not because he wanted to.
(Yes, I'm registered member of the Catholic faith)
You'll have to forgive me if I see things from a different perspective. I'm non-denominational, but I do occasionally enjoy a Pentecostal services, and visit a local Lutheran church regularly.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I don't think most Slashdot readers hate modern Macs. That'd be kind of dumb, after all.. most of us are pretty into Unix.
:-)
There are still quite a few, though. I'm thinking those are the people who haven't yet pulled their heads out and realized that OS X isn't the same thing as OS 9.
Being a Mac hater for most of my life, I can attest to the difficulty of pulling one's head out when it comes to the Mac. But with all the raving of fans (and $$$ pouring into the market) it became hard for me to ignore.
All I can say is, once you go Mac OS X, everything else seems inferior. And I mean EVERYTHING.
As you said, they generally accept themselves as separate. Most non-Mormons accept them as separate as well. So the majority of the vote is that they're separate. That's what defines it. That contrasts directly with situations like Lutherans and Catholics who accept each other as fellow Christians. Combining Christianity and Mormonism is usually only done for things like statistical purposes.
The Bible is a compliation of books. The condition in the last chapter of Revelations applies only to the Book of Revelations.
Your statement is not a statement. It's a theological argument. The general consensus among Christians (as defined to be separate from Mormons) is that the verses refer to the entire Bible.
Not to be rude, but I would be interested if you can show me proof of Moses. Or the even the exodus from Egypt.
While this webpage fails to do justice to the discovery, the Altar and the former Israeli camp near Mount Siani have been believed to be found. I imagine it will take quite a bit of archelogical work before it's "proven" beyond a doubt, but we definitely have a good start.
In 1993 the existence of King David was proven by an archelogical find. The Israeli geneolgy records are also extremely complete on the matter of their ancestors. (Which is really what the Bible is about. It tracks Jesus's lineage. Or if you're a Jew, it tracks the lineage of the coming savior.) As the Smithsonian stated in that link:
Polygamy is not contrary to the Christian Biblical view.
Jesus described the relationship between a man and his wife as the relationship between him and the Church. He only defined it as one Church. Not many.
Paul stated in Titus 1:6 "An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife."
Jesus also made clear that many things that were allowed by Moses' time were not the way things were intended. In the beginning, there was one man and one wife. This didn't change until much later.
Prophets of the Old Testament were polygamous.
Prophets generally didn't marry. In fact, I can think of one (Moses), if you consider him a prophet. I can't think of ANY that were polygamous. Plus, one MUST refer to the New Testament if one is considered a Christian. Paul was very specific about one man and one wife.
The LDS church, and virtually all Christian denominations, are harmonious with Galataions 1:6-8.
LDS is not harmonious if one accepts several of the problems presented above. Non-Mormons do not accept the Mormon interpretation, thus another point for them being considered separate. Unsurprisingly, Mormons don't see any problem.
And this differentiates char from short how, exactly?
That's a good point. I supposed I should have also mentioned that byte and short are really just for low-footprint memory storage. 'int' is the currency of choice in the Java language. Casting up to int ensures that all math happens in a byte aligned fashion, not to mention that reduces the amount of silicon required by an embedded Java processor.
Char is actually implicitly cast to 'int' to perform mathematical operations. The char type itself has no bytecode support for math.
In other words, char represents a Unicode value from '\u0 to \uffff'. The fact that it can be cast to a numerical value and operated on is secondary to the fact that it's not really a number and should not be treated as such.
Indeed... But why have the numeric equivalence in the programming language? 'A' is not equivalent to 65 except in the particular context of a character set that defines that equivalence. Keep characters characters and keep numbers numbers.
1. Input/Output. Since you only have numbers in computers, you have to transmit the characters somehow.
2. Logical operations. Character sets often have bit encodings or numerical spacings that easily allow for things like lower case to upper case.
But Unicode doesn't fit into 16 bits.
When the Java Langauge was created, it did. The Unicode spec has since change. A more complete answer can be found here. FYI, the class files encode strings in UTF-8 format for compactness, so they DO vary. However, the language itself works differently.
But in any case my point is simply that in international character sets the idea of what constitutes a "single character" is somewhat muddled, because what may be a single glyph may be multiple data characters
Java provides a large number of APIs (such as the Reader/Writer classes) that are intended for use rather than rolling your own. That way one can be certain that you are always correctly reading the textual data.
Hmmm, but proper (internationalized) case conversion is ridiculously more complicated than that.
:-)
Yes it is indeed.
The JavaDoc for the Character class actually bemoans this in detail. My only point was that the Java Language allowed the numerical operations for such purposes. Writing a proper Unicode case converter is something that Sun has already done for us. (Thank God.)
And yet it keeps lots of old C syntax which gives you plenty enough rope to hang yourself with (from which flows several of the puzzles).
That much is easy to answer. Java started its life as a new C++ compiler that didn't require a recompile of the entire project when just one class changed. To meet that goal, Gosling turned to using bytecode. That partly solved the problem, but he found he had to make several language changes to keep classes separate. By the time he was done, a new language had emerged.
By definition, a char in Java is a 16-bit unsigned value. But, here, check the language spec. A char is just an unsigned short. That's it.
I think you misunderstand the spec. From your link:
For char, from '\u0000' to '\uffff' inclusive, that is, from 0 to 65535
Just because it's a numerical value doesn't mean that it's an actual number.
chars are treated just like numbers in Java. You can do numeric comparisons with them, you can add them, you can subtract them, they're just numbers.
This is incorrect. If you check the Java Virtual Machine Specification you'll find a distinct lack of numerical operations for the 'char' datatype. In order to provide you numerical functions for a char value, the value is treated as if it were an int. (i.e. An implicit cast.) From the spec:
Conditional branches on comparisons between data of types boolean, byte, char, and short are performed using int comparison instructions (3.11.1) Note that no operations exist in the bytecode to do math on chars. Thus to get the results, the char is implicitly casted to an int, processed, then cast back to a char as necessary.
Are you responding to the wrong comment? Your #2 talks about chars, but I said nothing about using chars as a datatype for numbers.
:-)
:-)
No, I'm responding to the right comment. I only mentioned chars in passing. I said ALL I/O uses Ints AND that this makes Unicode support easier.
But I will admit one point you have: reading in blocks of ints is another solution to my problem
Which was my point.
, as you could AND out each 8-bit component of what you want into another int (then shift obviously), and get the same result, though that's uselessly complex, as you usually do "block" reads anyways, in my case into a byte array.
Java supports both cases. You can read arrays of values, OR you can read individual values. It all depends on what you're trying to do. Of course, usually you wouldn't want to bother with either. The I/O package contains the DataInput and DataOutput classes for easy binary I/O, and the Reader/Writer classes for easy character translation.
And add to that the fact that actually all java primitives EXCEPT chars are SIGNED
True. I was thinking of numerical types, as do most other people when they say that Java has no unsigned primitives.
FYI, I'm not trying to get on your case. I'm just trying to help you understand how it's done in Java. Sorry if my brevity confused you.
System.out.println('H' + 'a');
It prints '169'. The book goes on:
The real problem is the overloading of the '+' sign. This is just more evidence that operator overloading is harmful in general purpose langauges. Sure, that '+' is convenient for putting strings together, but it does cost in clarity.
The reason for this behavior, BTW, is do you can do things like this:Being able to obtain mathematical deltas is extremely important when you're changing the forms of letters. Gosling wasn't looking to change those sorts of features when he created the Java language.
At least that's a more realistic example, though.
The fact that some Catholics happened to be wrong about some things doesn't mean that JPII and the Popes who followed haven't been making an honest effort to wrap their heads around modern scientific models of the universe, and ellucidate such information for their followers.
But in many ways they're making the exact opposite mistake as they made before. Since they're trying to make up for the whole persecution of scientists thing, they accept things as canon that really shouldn't be accepted as such. Evolution is a perfect example. Is the theory complete? (No.) Is it proven? (No.) Then HOW can you say that anything contrary is heresy?
The Catholic church would do best to *STOP* taking canon positions on things. I realize it simplifies the whole, "Well, what do you think of science?" question, but it tremendously complicates the whole, "How do we enforce canon?" problem. If the Catholic church wanted to say, "We believe that Evolution has merit. As such we will pursue it from a scientific standpoint and educationally teach it as a possibilty for Genesis until we can confirm or deny it."
You're making the same mistake that scientologists make about psychiatry.
1) I do not appreciate the comparison to Scientology.
2) Psychiatry is a field of scientific study. The Vatican is not a field of scientific study. The Vatican is an entity that should be treating ALL science with the appropriate amount of skepticism that the field requires.
3) I do NOT appreciate the comparison to Scientology.
Can't be helped. You have to give the computer a way of understanding characters. Array indexes are a natural way for computers to do that.
That's not to say the idea of a character coding that translates between characters and numbers isn't sensible, but the character itself is not a number - it's a character.
A character in Java *is* a character. Nothing more, nothing less. It's a character. What the author did was stupid. The only time you cast a character like that is when you're doing I/O. For example:Note that in.read() returns an Integer of byte data, so the sign problem never shows up.
I like Python's approach to the solution - there simply is no "atomic" character type (defining such a thing when character sets have characters that aren't uniform size is questionable anyway)
Java Characters *are* a uniform size. Every character is a 16 bit Unicode character. That's why you're not supposed to do what I just did in the example above (read in a byte at a time) because you may chop up the Unicode encoding. Instead you're supposed to use a Reader object, which will return 'char' values instead of 'int' values.
#$@#%@#$%@#$!!! Number 1 should be:
1. All Java primitives are signed.
I *really* need to start proofreading. This is getting crazy.
1. All Java primitives are unsigned.
2. All Java I/O uses Integers instead of bytes to avoid the unsigned issue and better support Unicode.
Thus the example is a stupid thing to do. You read in a whole integer (32 bits) then cast it to a char (16 bits unsigned). The char is treated as a unicode character at all times.
Comsats are the big birds of the satellite world; they are power hungry and need huge solar arrays and a huge dish pointed with great accuracy at the surface. They also need something else - geosynchronous orbit.
I was thinking more along the lines of the Iridium Constellation as opposed to a traditional Comsat. i.e. A network of satellites in LEO, that could move your signal from sat to sat as they pass overhead.
Iridium wasn't all that bad of an idea, but it was a bit ahead of its time in Satellite technology.
I didn't want to get into all that
:-)
:-)
Just as I shortened the explanation to "respect". The actual Jewish law is irrelevant to Hemos as it seems unlikely that he is a praticiing Jew. So as a gentile, "respect of Jewish tradition" is the best reason for him to observe the blotting out of the name.
because I didn't think the grandparent poster would read it anyway.
No worries, I tend to read all the responses. I eventually may decide to stop responding if the discussion is beyond hope, but I do read everything.
Stupid or not, it's common Jewish tradition. Pick up a Jewish paper sometime and you'll find the word "God" marked out as "G-d" everywhere. The name which we translate as "Jehovah" is almost never used.
Okay, I just reread the article and I think I get it now. The "Microsat" terminology had me thinking that this was for experiments and educational missions. I'm still not entirely clear on its use, but it seems that it's targetted at people with large budgets for space access. So one might send it up along with a Comsat, or send a bunch of these up *as* Comsats.
It's amazing what they can do with SoC's these days, isn't it? The only part I don't understand is, how are they expecting that these sats going to fly? AFAIK, NASA stopped flying PongSats on the Space Shuttle after the Challenger incident. (aka, "The Get Away Special") Are they planning to pool these sats together to pay for a booster? Or do you have to get your own? Where is that $10 million going? (For the cost of a couple of these, I could buy a Delta II and send 100-200 desktop towers into space! And that would be assuming I used Car Batteries to power them!)
Amen. The Java Language Specification states that char IS NOT A NUMBER. It's a character representation and should be treated as such. Thus the entire example is contrived, and makes no sense. It *might* be interesting from the perspective of loading a file (e.g. buffer.append((char)in.read());), except that the IO streams provide Integers to get around the sign problem.
This is why in computer science they have a term for supposed "idiosyncracies" like this: "Garbage In Garbage Out" (GIGO)
Um, Mormons view themselves as Christians, so how can they confuse themselves?
Other Christians, however, do not view them as such. The last chapter of Revelations has this to say:
"18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: 19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book."
The Mormons have added to the Bible with their Book of Mormon, and thus are considered separate, just as the Jews consider Christians to be separate. In any case, the non-Mormon Christians don't accept Joseph Smith's claims of "finding the book" anyway. All other books in the Bible were written by verifiable, living people who were accepted to be given a divine right to add their books to the Bible. (Though I have to say, having that many authors makes for a very interesting book. On one hand you have commandments "Thou shalt not kill," while on the other hand you have erotic poetry. One has to be concious of the author of each book if one is to understand the Bible. Even if you're only interested in it as literature, and don't believe in it.) AFAIK, no one has ever verified the existence of the authors of Smith's gold plates, nor does anyone other than the Mormons accept that Smith was a prophet. Not to mention that there are problems with the technology of known history vs. the records in those plates.
The Bible tells Christians that "Many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many." (Matthew 24:5, also Luke 21:8) Also, many of the points (e.g. Polygamy) are contrary to the Christian Biblical view. This makes them in violation of Galations 1:6-8: "I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel; which is really not another; only there are some who are disturbing you, and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we have preached to you, let him be accursed."
I'm actually speaking figuratively. Not "Other > Catholic", but as in "Catholics are not representative as a whole. There are a lot more Christians out there." I don't have any clue as to the worldwide figures.
However, the U.S. figures are here. It's difficult to state that these figures are anything more than a reasonable approximation, but they do show that other churches combined outnumber the Catholic church in the U.S. It's quite likely that the spread is greater than those numbers would have you believe, as it doesn't include a large number of community churches that have no denominational affiliation.
1. Considering Genisis is a Jewish text I think it is perfectly fair to get a Rabbi's viewpoint on this.
;-)
:-)
The New Testament is also a Jewish text. Those of the Jewish faith don't believe it, nor do Christians fully accept the Jewish position on the old Testament. QED.
2. a. It was John Paul II
Indeed. My typing is getting pretty terrible these days. But it's fast!
b. They do not still hold with the geocentic view of the universe; they also believed the earth was flat once.
c. Only an idiot discounts another persons point of view because of who they are.
The point is that the Vatican's credibility is pretty much shot based on historical experience. Since their credibility is shot, many Christians tend to ignore their position on scientific matters.
4. My right to reply; not a flame, objective criticism.
Which is why you're receiving a reply. Slashdot tends to be very anti-Christian, regardless of the truth of the post. This tends to come out in hateful flame posts. If you had flamed me, you would have been ignored. Since you chose the path of discussion, I'm actually replying.
Thank you for that correction. It seems Hemos was correct in this case (though others have pointed out that most Jews much prefer to use the term 'G-d'), so I withdraw that particular point. :-)
Hemos, if you're reading this, my apologies. However, I would still ask that you stop confusing things by pulling different religions into the mix.
1.) You mean JP II (there is no JPIII, yet).
Indeed. The extra 'I' was unintentional.
2.) This claim comes from up top, so its basically the view of the vatican unless Pope Benedict contradicts it
That is the view of the Vatican. However, Christians don't necessiarly take their beliefs from the Vatican. Once it was heresy to disagree with the Vatican on such matters. Today, the Vatican doesn't have any power in such matters, and there are far more Christians than just Catholics. All the Vatican can do is state the position of the Catholic Church.
2.5) JPII pardoned Galileo
Correct. As I said, the Pope and Galileo knew each other. The heresy charges levied against him were more because the Pope felt he was required to file them, not because he wanted to.
(Yes, I'm registered member of the Catholic faith)
You'll have to forgive me if I see things from a different perspective. I'm non-denominational, but I do occasionally enjoy a Pentecostal services, and visit a local Lutheran church regularly.
Sorry, I misremembered. It's not Wells' theory, it's Ernst Haeckels. His theory was referred to as Recapitualation.