They didn't try stopping Cisco's iPhone before they had their own product, and later made a deal to use the name in the US. I wish Apple would give up the "i" naming system though, it's starting to wear thin on me and strikes me as being unimaginative, lame and starting to feel stupid on an "Idiocracy" level.
See, but this is what's wrong with this whole picture. You admit that Cisco had the "iPhone" product first, presumably had some sort of registered trademark on it, etc. Along comes Apple and tries to steal their trademarks.
Mac's are cool and such but I would prefer to deal with more ethical companies.....
The news story says: "A joint resolution (DOC) has been tabled by the major EP parties that threatens to go to court unless things change. "
(Here in the US, "to table" means "to postpone, to shelve, to take off the table" while in the EU, "to table" means to make the motion, to propose, to put on the table.)
This is evidently an attempt to lull American corporations like Disney into a false sense of victory (after all, the motion was tabled, right) so that it can be passed;-) Yeah, but one can hope....
However, consider that revoking a card would be necessary but you can't necessarily revoke the information on the card, or if you do, you cause someone a great deal of grief. There are reasons why biometric data is considered to be the weakest form of strong security.
There is a great deal of potential for abuse here, just with the no-fly lists, etc, but this is worse because I can still drive my car across the country (I might not be able to if I didn't have income though). There is no life in prison for every crime, and our courts won't let that happen as long as they are open for business. However, I am concerned that someone might pull strings to get cards revoked in order to mess with political opponents (I seriously doubt Sen. Kennedy's inclusion on the No-Fly list was entirely accidental).
I have actually done some contract work for Microsoft after going into business for myself. I wrote the paper featured here on Slashdot a few years ago on running PostgreSQL on Windows, for example. While if I do business with a company I make sure I am protected, this project turned out extremely well.
Folks in the FOSS community love to hate Microsoft. While I am not someone who thinks that Microsoft is a perfect company, and the company usually does get whatever they are after, I don't think one can blame Novell's issues today with their open source collaboration efforts with Microsoft. If you are going to blame Microsoft, you have to go back at least a decade.
Novell's recent problems stem, IMO, from making some fundamental mistakes about open source models. This is their own fault, not anybody else's.
I know you meant it in jest, but there's a serious point there.
First, having written a number of small utilities, and some larger GUI-based tools, I have to say that web app design is fundamentally more difficult primarily because you have a number of specific challenges in this area that only apply to them.
Not only do you have to deal with all the usual problems, but you also have to deal with XSRF, XSS, and so forth. This is because you are you have a program which is generating HTML code as output, not merely a nice UI that is the product of the code, and this is happening in a stateless environment so information is somewhat limited in the interaction well beyond what it would be normally. Furthermore, authentication is more difficult in a stateless environment, especially where multi-tier systems are involved.
Most people don't appreciate how easy these are to mess up and how hard they are to fix when a developer creates a project without adequate thought to security in the first place.....
Let's face it. Most of the desktop users this guy is supporting are not comfortable with computers. They tone out technical jargon and are not going to remember something they can't understand. The other part is that error messages should be understandable and in plain English, and the plain English meaning should be what you want to communicate.
For example, "uninitialized data" just isn't meaningful to most users. Call it "Required input not provided."
On the other hand, "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" will be misunderstood as "You did something BAD and we're calling the cops to shut you down!" For all my ranting against Microsoft, they did learn from this, probably because of so many people calling for tech support asking if the police were being summoned. Now they say "this program has encountered a problem and needs to close." Much more friendly on the tech support people.
In this spirit, the logos are not a bad idea. However, getting understandable error messages should be an important goal also because the user may be more empowered to figure out what they did wrong if it is caused by them.
I always made people check, not because I figured they were lying but because I figured they were clueless.
However, because they are clueless, you have to given them very specific directions.
Your modem isn't working? Ok, I want you to look in the back of your computer for a place that looks like it has two phone jacks. Is there anything coming out of either of them? Ok, is it coming out of the one marked phone or the one marked line? Ok. Line? Let's follow that back to the wall. Is it plugged in?
In my >1 year doing consumer tech support I had a lot of folks with things not plugged in, or plugged in wrong, and none of them were knowingly lying about it. They just didn't necessarily understand what needed to be plugged in.
(There was one case where a woman had been bounced around between Microsoft, AOL, and Compaq because she got no dialtone. As a gesture of good will, I decided to help get things figured out enough to make sure she could get them resolved by whoever she was willing to call and pay for support if she had to pay. Turned out, when she said it was "plugged in" she meant the computer was plugged in. Once I got her to check the modem, she realized the phone line was not plugged into the modem. She didn't feel comfortable plugging this in by herself, so I recommended that she ask a friend to come over and help plug in the modem.)
Folks don't lie when they call tech support. However a substantial section of those who call are clueless. Just remember, if the customer was right, the customer wouldn't be calling tech support. (The obvious answer here is to write error messages that users can understand. "Uninitiailized data" will not be understood by your end user. "The program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" will be understood as "We're calling the cops." (When I did consumer phone support at Microsoft we had a surprising number who asked if we were really calling police over that error message....)
IOW, have your error messages explain the problem in plain English. Instead of "uninitialized data" use something like "Required input not provided."
However, I have a funny story along the lines of not reading error messages when I was doing server support triage at Microsoft.
This guy called up and told me that they ran an NT4 master domain, and the PDC was behaving funny so they reformatted the hard drive and re-installed NT4. Of course, after this, nobody could log in. I asked if they had promoted a BDC and they said they had tried but were unable to do so. The guy put me on the phone with the senior network admin who repeated pretty much the same info. So I offered to stay on the phone with them while they tried (after charging for the support of course).
The error message they couldn't get around was the error about a PDC already being online for that domain.
"Umm... Turn off your old PDC first....."
"Now it worked!"
Now, I can understand users being confused, but the senior network admin?
I've had water problems on disk brakes but it is usually a bit more transient as a condition (issue being replaced the wheels of the car due to rust, and the new ones allowed a lot more water to hit the brake disk) than with shoe brakes, but it can happen. It's just annoying because it means the brake pads don't grip as well. Drying them is not strictly speaking necessary, but it can be nice sometimes.
A larger point though is that changing behavior of break + accelerator is asking for problems from folks who have built habits on other technologies. I wonder how many rear-end collisions will be caused by this change.
1) Engage clutch and brake 2) Engage emergency brake. (May need to shift into N first if e-brake is foot operated) 3) Disengage foot brake.
To start: 1) Shift into gear, keep clutch engaged. 2) Rev up engine and partially disengage clutch 3) Disengage e-brake.
In the alternative, you could use the foot brake and gas pedal with one foot and the clutch with the other, however. This takes a bit more practice but is much easier when the e-brake is foot-operated.
Sometimes folks step on both pedals to start up steep inclines. You can use the emergency brake as an alternative though.
Also sometimes folks step on both pedals to dry out brakes after driving through puddles. Granted this was more of an issue with shoe brakes than disk brakes, but folks get in the habit and the results could be unfortunate if the behavior is changed......
That's not how I read it. I suppose I could have missed something though.
I didn't see anything that countered the idea that emails are removed when the trash can is emptied. If you keep your emails in your box after 180 days they qualify for less protection by law anyway.
I saw things about sign-on records for MSN Messenger but nothing about content (which would probably require a search warrant anyway).
What did I miss? Can you point me to a page number?
Honestly, I read through the leaked document. I can't figure out why this wasn't just published on Microsoft's site. There isn't anything shocking in the document, just an overview of what US law (under the 9th circuit's interpretation) requires and what information is retained by Microsoft. If you look at page 22 of the document, they basically say "here's what the law says you have to do before we can turn this information over to you."
The document seems relatively tame and sane. I am not Microsoft's biggest friend here, and it seems they overreacted a great deal. It would be nice of other companies actually published such policies willingly instead of having them leaked.
First, Philo is an interesting source and I consider to be one important to the study of this topic. I would argue however that the trinity does derive (as was believed in the Renaissance) from Plato's works, in particular "Republic" and "Letters." However, the roots of the concept go even further back. In Republic you have Plato essentially arguing that a tripartite structure unites the human condition and society, and in Letters, this is applied to the structure of Godhead (though Plato only mentions two of the three components himself: Jupiter (The Shining Father) and the active principle, the son of Jupiter (Note that Jupiter, though the Latin name I have usually seen in translations was a word borrowed into Latin from Greek and seems etymologically related to Zeus but with -piter on the end signifying "father"). This Father/Son structure is particularly interesting here and worth coming back to.
Of course, the third element was filled in by Plato's followers by adopting the World Soul discussed in Timaeus. So we have The Shining Father (or The Father Zeus, or some other interpretation), The Active Principle/Logos/Son, and The World Soul. That is not far at all from Father/Son/Holy Spirit.
However, as Georges Dumezil has shown, this structure was not entirely invented by Plato. Instead Dumezil places the structure into a larger context comparable to the Vedic formula of Mitra/Indra/Ashvins (and in some rituals these are further divided as Mitra/Varuna, Indra/Vayu, and the Ashvins or Horse-Twins). This would also make the structure comparable with the Three Great Gods of Uppsala mentioned by Adam of Bremen (Odin, Thorr, and Freyr), of the three gods mentioned for their treasures in the Battle of Magh Tuiredh (Lugh, Nuada, and In Dagda). Other comparable structures include the Old Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus), and the three offspring of Rig in Norse myth (Jarl/Earl, Karl/Freeman, and Thrall/Slave).
To these I would add the Three Gunas of the Bagavad Gita (Sattvas/Truth, Rajas/Kingship, and Tamas/Inertia), the three top varnas in Hindu society (Brahman/Priest, Kshatrya/warrior, Vasaya/Farmer-merchant), and the three top classes in post-Solon Athens (Elites, Horsemen, and men-of-yoke).
This suggests a very old pattern, the ancestor to which (I think which was a spacial/cosmic model roughly comparable to heaven/earth/hell) was dispersed as the Indo-European peoples expanded out from the Pontic-Caspian steppes. However to get into that is at least a 30-page paper!
Ah, but neither do we have convincing evidence that Plato ever existed. Or Lucan, Apuleis, or Horace. Or any other ancient or classical man.
Well, we have a lot more evidence for Plato's life than we do for Jesus's. Not only do we have works purporting to be by his authorship and institutions created by him (the Academy), but we have histories of philosophy written by individuals such as Aristotle. Now, Socrates seems to be more than just a literary device of Plato's because we have other references to him as well. However, we really can't be as sure there. If the only two major accounts of Socrates come from Plato and Aristophanes..... So we can't say for certain the character of Socrates could be more than a cultural construct or shared literary figure. This is different as it regards Plato or even Anaximander.
What makes Jesus different in this case is that most of the works written about him are inseparable from the mythologies that came before, and Tacitus's passage in particular contains other errors suggesting that he is repeating hearsay rather than writing from records. This poses specific problems. This makes it easier to compare the questions surrounding Jesus's alleged life with the questions surrounding Socrates (I love it when philosophers attempt to differentiate the philosophy of Socrates vs Plato. I maintain that this is entirely impossible).
Well, if you want to start alluding that things aren't real because they happen that way in stories, I submit that you have lost your mind completely. Many people have used exactly those supposed "standards" and have concluded that all sorts of people didn't exist.
Well, that misunderstands my point. If we remove from the New Testament elements which appear to be borrowed from earlier traditions, we have very little that is new, and what is left could reasonably be an invention.
As for what is "real" I think that is a far more interesting question than we are getting into here. I personally think that Odin is "real." So why would I think that Christ is not "real." I might only dispute the general historical assumptions and suggest that we have insufficient basis for concluding that Jesus lived a life around the time claimed or not, or what his life was anything like it was claimed to be.
Next, the "outside the Bible" thing is an odd criterion. The Bible is a disparate collection of books. There are 66 of them all told. They were collected that way because people made lists of the books they believed reliable and the consensus was adopted as cannon. So the "there's no evidence outside the Bible" only tells us that they were pretty thorough about collecting the reliable accounts.
A major part of the problem is that the Gospels actually arrived in their current form well into the second century. Some of our earliest references to Christ come from the Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri (and in these "Christos" and "Chrestos" seem to be used interchangeably, and invoked alongside various Greek and Egyptian gods).
Secondly there are a number of claims made in the Gospels of a historical nature which don't hold up. Herod's orders to the soldiers to go kill children for example would seem to be noteworthy enough to appear in other sources and we see instead a conspicuous absence of such a reference. For this reason I cannot really see the Gospels as a set of historical documents, and the other references to Christ in the Bible are based on them so that more or less ends that inquiry for me.
What I see the Bible as offering is instead something very different. Instead of offering an historical record, I see it as offering, like any good mythology, a set of templates for living life. For example, you can try to look at the Fall from Eden as history (which doesn't work), or as a lesson about how knowledge of good and evil is evil (then why study the Bible? So that doesn't work), or you can see it for what it is: a mythological template for an experience every one of us goes through in growing up where we become independent and are no longer welcome living in our father's house. Thus we can replay the story at different times in our lives from different perspectives (as a young adult being adam or eve, as a parent of an adolescent, etc).
Now, regarding changing minds....
The issue here is that data does not imply a single correct theory. We can arrive at more data which causes us to change our minds. However, in general two of us will put that data together differently into different theories based on pre-existing notions. Data + pre-existing notions = theory. Multiple interpretations of any set of data is always possible.
So I don't think this is about changing minds so much as asking why this happens. Funny though, Werner Heisenberg wrote a whole book on the topic (and of that I am quite certain;-) )
One need but look to Philo to see the degree to which Judaism could be affected by its Hellenistic environment. I do not, however, see how this admission would speak in any way to the claim, "The only problem created is a doubt as to whether Christ actually existed". It does effect how he was, or is to be for that matter, interpreted, not whether he existed. I hope that clarifies matters, however.
Well, I have concluded that we mostly know of "Christ, the mythological figure." What this means is that any historical figure may have had absolutely nothing in common with the stories. Philo's an interesting writer too.
A couple asides though. As far as Paul's epistles incorporating Hellenistic elements, I would respond to this, perhaps, by saying that his epistles 'conform' to his 'cultural identity'.
I think Paul made his epistles conform to the cultural identities of the targets of the epistles. The frameworks he uses in different epistles draw from different Hellenistic traditions. It's as if he is trying to say "Christianity can incorporate your beliefs too."
I generally consider Heisenberg (author of "Physics and Philosophy") to be one of the finest scientists of the twentieth century. However, I am very much aware of how fast science is moving and so may be slightly unsure of my position on the matter at the moment.....
Seriously, Heisenberg's discussion of the process of formation scientific theory is the clearest work I have ever seen on the subject. The man was a real genius in this regard and certainly comparable to both Einstein and Feynman.
One of the clearest examples he makes in the book is the comparison between Heraclitus's selection of fire as the prima materia and Einstein's equation of E=mc^2. Einstein, Heisenberg tells us, basically took Heraclitus's statement and quantified it, telling us how much of Heraclitus's fire was used to make up the rest of matter.
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Is there a driver-accessible circuit-breaker or main fuse box available inside the cabin?
That's always a good fallback....
They didn't try stopping Cisco's iPhone before they had their own product, and later made a deal to use the name in the US. I wish Apple would give up the "i" naming system though, it's starting to wear thin on me and strikes me as being unimaginative, lame and starting to feel stupid on an "Idiocracy" level.
See, but this is what's wrong with this whole picture. You admit that Cisco had the "iPhone" product first, presumably had some sort of registered trademark on it, etc. Along comes Apple and tries to steal their trademarks.
Mac's are cool and such but I would prefer to deal with more ethical companies.....
Are they calling it art these days?
Because I don't think Potter Stewart would have used the term "art" when he coined the phrase....
The news story says:
"A joint resolution (DOC) has been tabled by the major EP parties that threatens to go to court unless things change. "
(Here in the US, "to table" means "to postpone, to shelve, to take off the table" while in the EU, "to table" means to make the motion, to propose, to put on the table.)
This is evidently an attempt to lull American corporations like Disney into a false sense of victory (after all, the motion was tabled, right) so that it can be passed ;-) Yeah, but one can hope....
As an American, I say, "Don't TABLE the discussion! Pass the resolution instead!"
(Yes, I am aware we Americans use "to table" the opposite way everyone else in the world does....)
However, consider that revoking a card would be necessary but you can't necessarily revoke the information on the card, or if you do, you cause someone a great deal of grief. There are reasons why biometric data is considered to be the weakest form of strong security.
There is a great deal of potential for abuse here, just with the no-fly lists, etc, but this is worse because I can still drive my car across the country (I might not be able to if I didn't have income though). There is no life in prison for every crime, and our courts won't let that happen as long as they are open for business. However, I am concerned that someone might pull strings to get cards revoked in order to mess with political opponents (I seriously doubt Sen. Kennedy's inclusion on the No-Fly list was entirely accidental).
I have actually done some contract work for Microsoft after going into business for myself. I wrote the paper featured here on Slashdot a few years ago on running PostgreSQL on Windows, for example. While if I do business with a company I make sure I am protected, this project turned out extremely well.
Folks in the FOSS community love to hate Microsoft. While I am not someone who thinks that Microsoft is a perfect company, and the company usually does get whatever they are after, I don't think one can blame Novell's issues today with their open source collaboration efforts with Microsoft. If you are going to blame Microsoft, you have to go back at least a decade.
Novell's recent problems stem, IMO, from making some fundamental mistakes about open source models. This is their own fault, not anybody else's.
I know you meant it in jest, but there's a serious point there.
First, having written a number of small utilities, and some larger GUI-based tools, I have to say that web app design is fundamentally more difficult primarily because you have a number of specific challenges in this area that only apply to them.
Not only do you have to deal with all the usual problems, but you also have to deal with XSRF, XSS, and so forth. This is because you are you have a program which is generating HTML code as output, not merely a nice UI that is the product of the code, and this is happening in a stateless environment so information is somewhat limited in the interaction well beyond what it would be normally. Furthermore, authentication is more difficult in a stateless environment, especially where multi-tier systems are involved.
Most people don't appreciate how easy these are to mess up and how hard they are to fix when a developer creates a project without adequate thought to security in the first place.....
Your restaurant performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. (Health department officials on their way....)
Part of the problem is that you aren't helping the customer out.
A better way to handle it is "Please call back if this ever happens again, and make sure you have the error message in front of you."
Mantra of the day: "If the customers were right, they wouldn't be calling tech support!"
Let's face it. Most of the desktop users this guy is supporting are not comfortable with computers. They tone out technical jargon and are not going to remember something they can't understand. The other part is that error messages should be understandable and in plain English, and the plain English meaning should be what you want to communicate.
For example, "uninitialized data" just isn't meaningful to most users. Call it "Required input not provided."
On the other hand, "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" will be misunderstood as "You did something BAD and we're calling the cops to shut you down!" For all my ranting against Microsoft, they did learn from this, probably because of so many people calling for tech support asking if the police were being summoned. Now they say "this program has encountered a problem and needs to close." Much more friendly on the tech support people.
In this spirit, the logos are not a bad idea. However, getting understandable error messages should be an important goal also because the user may be more empowered to figure out what they did wrong if it is caused by them.
I always made people check, not because I figured they were lying but because I figured they were clueless.
However, because they are clueless, you have to given them very specific directions.
Your modem isn't working? Ok, I want you to look in the back of your computer for a place that looks like it has two phone jacks. Is there anything coming out of either of them? Ok, is it coming out of the one marked phone or the one marked line? Ok. Line? Let's follow that back to the wall. Is it plugged in?
In my >1 year doing consumer tech support I had a lot of folks with things not plugged in, or plugged in wrong, and none of them were knowingly lying about it. They just didn't necessarily understand what needed to be plugged in.
(There was one case where a woman had been bounced around between Microsoft, AOL, and Compaq because she got no dialtone. As a gesture of good will, I decided to help get things figured out enough to make sure she could get them resolved by whoever she was willing to call and pay for support if she had to pay. Turned out, when she said it was "plugged in" she meant the computer was plugged in. Once I got her to check the modem, she realized the phone line was not plugged into the modem. She didn't feel comfortable plugging this in by herself, so I recommended that she ask a friend to come over and help plug in the modem.)
Folks don't lie when they call tech support. However a substantial section of those who call are clueless. Just remember, if the customer was right, the customer wouldn't be calling tech support. (The obvious answer here is to write error messages that users can understand. "Uninitiailized data" will not be understood by your end user. "The program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" will be understood as "We're calling the cops." (When I did consumer phone support at Microsoft we had a surprising number who asked if we were really calling police over that error message....)
IOW, have your error messages explain the problem in plain English. Instead of "uninitialized data" use something like "Required input not provided."
However, I have a funny story along the lines of not reading error messages when I was doing server support triage at Microsoft.
This guy called up and told me that they ran an NT4 master domain, and the PDC was behaving funny so they reformatted the hard drive and re-installed NT4. Of course, after this, nobody could log in. I asked if they had promoted a BDC and they said they had tried but were unable to do so. The guy put me on the phone with the senior network admin who repeated pretty much the same info. So I offered to stay on the phone with them while they tried (after charging for the support of course).
The error message they couldn't get around was the error about a PDC already being online for that domain.
"Umm... Turn off your old PDC first....."
"Now it worked!"
Now, I can understand users being confused, but the senior network admin?
I've had water problems on disk brakes but it is usually a bit more transient as a condition (issue being replaced the wheels of the car due to rust, and the new ones allowed a lot more water to hit the brake disk) than with shoe brakes, but it can happen. It's just annoying because it means the brake pads don't grip as well. Drying them is not strictly speaking necessary, but it can be nice sometimes.
A larger point though is that changing behavior of break + accelerator is asking for problems from folks who have built habits on other technologies. I wonder how many rear-end collisions will be caused by this change.
When I drive a manual, process is:
1) Engage clutch and brake
2) Engage emergency brake. (May need to shift into N first if e-brake is foot operated)
3) Disengage foot brake.
To start:
1) Shift into gear, keep clutch engaged.
2) Rev up engine and partially disengage clutch
3) Disengage e-brake.
In the alternative, you could use the foot brake and gas pedal with one foot and the clutch with the other, however. This takes a bit more practice but is much easier when the e-brake is foot-operated.
Sometimes folks step on both pedals to start up steep inclines. You can use the emergency brake as an alternative though.
Also sometimes folks step on both pedals to dry out brakes after driving through puddles. Granted this was more of an issue with shoe brakes than disk brakes, but folks get in the habit and the results could be unfortunate if the behavior is changed......
That's not how I read it. I suppose I could have missed something though.
I didn't see anything that countered the idea that emails are removed when the trash can is emptied. If you keep your emails in your box after 180 days they qualify for less protection by law anyway.
I saw things about sign-on records for MSN Messenger but nothing about content (which would probably require a search warrant anyway).
What did I miss? Can you point me to a page number?
Honestly, I read through the leaked document. I can't figure out why this wasn't just published on Microsoft's site. There isn't anything shocking in the document, just an overview of what US law (under the 9th circuit's interpretation) requires and what information is retained by Microsoft. If you look at page 22 of the document, they basically say "here's what the law says you have to do before we can turn this information over to you."
The document seems relatively tame and sane. I am not Microsoft's biggest friend here, and it seems they overreacted a great deal. It would be nice of other companies actually published such policies willingly instead of having them leaked.
First, Philo is an interesting source and I consider to be one important to the study of this topic. I would argue however that the trinity does derive (as was believed in the Renaissance) from Plato's works, in particular "Republic" and "Letters." However, the roots of the concept go even further back. In Republic you have Plato essentially arguing that a tripartite structure unites the human condition and society, and in Letters, this is applied to the structure of Godhead (though Plato only mentions two of the three components himself: Jupiter (The Shining Father) and the active principle, the son of Jupiter (Note that Jupiter, though the Latin name I have usually seen in translations was a word borrowed into Latin from Greek and seems etymologically related to Zeus but with -piter on the end signifying "father"). This Father/Son structure is particularly interesting here and worth coming back to.
Of course, the third element was filled in by Plato's followers by adopting the World Soul discussed in Timaeus. So we have The Shining Father (or The Father Zeus, or some other interpretation), The Active Principle/Logos/Son, and The World Soul. That is not far at all from Father/Son/Holy Spirit.
However, as Georges Dumezil has shown, this structure was not entirely invented by Plato. Instead Dumezil places the structure into a larger context comparable to the Vedic formula of Mitra/Indra/Ashvins (and in some rituals these are further divided as Mitra/Varuna, Indra/Vayu, and the Ashvins or Horse-Twins). This would also make the structure comparable with the Three Great Gods of Uppsala mentioned by Adam of Bremen (Odin, Thorr, and Freyr), of the three gods mentioned for their treasures in the Battle of Magh Tuiredh (Lugh, Nuada, and In Dagda). Other comparable structures include the Old Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus), and the three offspring of Rig in Norse myth (Jarl/Earl, Karl/Freeman, and Thrall/Slave).
To these I would add the Three Gunas of the Bagavad Gita (Sattvas/Truth, Rajas/Kingship, and Tamas/Inertia), the three top varnas in Hindu society (Brahman/Priest, Kshatrya/warrior, Vasaya/Farmer-merchant), and the three top classes in post-Solon Athens (Elites, Horsemen, and men-of-yoke).
This suggests a very old pattern, the ancestor to which (I think which was a spacial/cosmic model roughly comparable to heaven/earth/hell) was dispersed as the Indo-European peoples expanded out from the Pontic-Caspian steppes. However to get into that is at least a 30-page paper!
Well, we have a lot more evidence for Plato's life than we do for Jesus's. Not only do we have works purporting to be by his authorship and institutions created by him (the Academy), but we have histories of philosophy written by individuals such as Aristotle. Now, Socrates seems to be more than just a literary device of Plato's because we have other references to him as well. However, we really can't be as sure there. If the only two major accounts of Socrates come from Plato and Aristophanes..... So we can't say for certain the character of Socrates could be more than a cultural construct or shared literary figure. This is different as it regards Plato or even Anaximander.
What makes Jesus different in this case is that most of the works written about him are inseparable from the mythologies that came before, and Tacitus's passage in particular contains other errors suggesting that he is repeating hearsay rather than writing from records. This poses specific problems. This makes it easier to compare the questions surrounding Jesus's alleged life with the questions surrounding Socrates (I love it when philosophers attempt to differentiate the philosophy of Socrates vs Plato. I maintain that this is entirely impossible).
Well, that misunderstands my point. If we remove from the New Testament elements which appear to be borrowed from earlier traditions, we have very little that is new, and what is left could reasonably be an invention.
As for what is "real" I think that is a far more interesting question than we are getting into here. I personally think that Odin is "real." So why would I think that Christ is not "real." I might only dispute the general historical assumptions and suggest that we have insufficient basis for concluding that Jesus lived a life around the time claimed or not, or what his life was anything like it was claimed to be.
A major part of the problem is that the Gospels actually arrived in their current form well into the second century. Some of our earliest references to Christ come from the Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri (and in these "Christos" and "Chrestos" seem to be used interchangeably, and invoked alongside various Greek and Egyptian gods).
Secondly there are a number of claims made in the Gospels of a historical nature which don't hold up. Herod's orders to the soldiers to go kill children for example would seem to be noteworthy enough to appear in other sources and we see instead a conspicuous absence of such a reference. For this reason I cannot really see the Gospels as a set of historical documents, and the other references to Christ in the Bible are based on them so that more or less ends that inquiry for me.
What I see the Bible as offering is instead something very different. Instead of offering an historical record, I see it as offering, like any good mythology, a set of templates for living life. For example, you can try to look at the Fall from Eden as history (which doesn't work), or as a lesson about how knowledge of good and evil is evil (then why study the Bible? So that doesn't work), or you can see it for what it is: a mythological template for an experience every one of us goes through in growing up where we become independent and are no longer welcome living in our father's house. Thus we can replay the story at different times in our lives from different perspectives (as a young adult being adam or eve, as a parent of an adolescent, etc).
Now, regarding changing minds....
The issue here is that data does not imply a single correct theory. We can arrive at more data which causes us to change our minds. However, in general two of us will put that data together differently into different theories based on pre-existing notions. Data + pre-existing notions = theory. Multiple interpretations of any set of data is always possible.
So I don't think this is about changing minds so much as asking why this happens. Funny though, Werner Heisenberg wrote a whole book on the topic (and of that I am quite certain ;-) )
Well, I have concluded that we mostly know of "Christ, the mythological figure." What this means is that any historical figure may have had absolutely nothing in common with the stories. Philo's an interesting writer too.
I think Paul made his epistles conform to the cultural identities of the targets of the epistles. The frameworks he uses in different epistles draw from different Hellenistic traditions. It's as if he is trying to say "Christianity can incorporate your beliefs too."
Definitely going on my (long) list of books to read. (Sorry, at this rate it will be 2-3 years)
I generally consider Heisenberg (author of "Physics and Philosophy") to be one of the finest scientists of the twentieth century. However, I am very much aware of how fast science is moving and so may be slightly unsure of my position on the matter at the moment.....
Seriously, Heisenberg's discussion of the process of formation scientific theory is the clearest work I have ever seen on the subject. The man was a real genius in this regard and certainly comparable to both Einstein and Feynman.
One of the clearest examples he makes in the book is the comparison between Heraclitus's selection of fire as the prima materia and Einstein's equation of E=mc^2. Einstein, Heisenberg tells us, basically took Heraclitus's statement and quantified it, telling us how much of Heraclitus's fire was used to make up the rest of matter.
So are you saying that Werner Heisenberg was a poor scientist and a great philosopher?
Are you at all uncertain about the value of his uncertainty principle?