2500 years prior art, but that shouldn't be an issue these days. 10 digits plus upper and lower case letters - leaving out I because it looks exactly like l in Microsoft font. One character each for degrees minutes and seconds.
Asking, "What is art", is really asking the question of intelligent design. In other words, is an object an "artifact" - directly or indirectly caused by an intelligence such as a human being, or is it the mechanical outworking of the laws of physics? If something is "artificial", it is designed rather than natural - although the word has taken on negative connotations in recent centuries.
Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. At the Smithsonian museum of natural history, there is a large rock intricately carved by water channels that could just as easily be displayed at the Hirshorn. Nevertheless, this is a question that can be objectively answered (in the case of the rock, it was not designed), and is answered every day as courts consider whether a death is really accidental and archaeologists consider whether a flat pointy rock is really an arrowhead.
Of course, if you are a philosophical naturalist, you believe that this universe is all there is, and every event is purely the outworking of the laws of physics. In you take that position, then nothing is art, and there is no true intelligence - just the appearance of it. For the word "intelligence" means to choose between - which can't happen when every action is determined by physical law (whether deterministic or stochastic).
While recognizing intelligent design is difficult for many, an even more difficult problem is recognizing beauty. After all, art can portray both beauty and ugliness: Tolkiens epic involves both Elves and Orcs. But is beauty subjective, as Voltaire proclaimed? Or is true beauty an objective reality, and differences in its perception due to variations in the loss of our faculties for perceiving it?
In case it isn't clear, based on my definitions, the typogenerator is obviously artificial, and hence it is objectively art. Perhaps what people are really unsure about is whether the pictures it generates are beautiful, ugly, or just random? I would give my opinion, but the site has been slashdotted.
They'll keep working through an EMP that would fry semiconductor electronics. You can reduce the size and MTBF of your glass envelope system by large scale integration of circuitry on the anode. Fewer glass envelopes means fewer failures. Ideally, you could get the whole system in one envelope. Then just keep some spares to replace as needed.
High performance processors read ahead in the instruction stream, so that multiple instructions can be processed simultaneously. When such a processor encounters a branch, and the branch condition is not yet known, what does it do?
Some designs guess which way the branch will go, and continue accordingly. When the branch condition becomes known, and it guessed wrong, it throws away all the work on that branch and starts over causing a pipeline stall. Often, extra bits are available in the branch instruction to provide hints on which branch decision is more likely. The processor may even keep stats on hot branches in a branch prediction cache.
Other designs work on both forks of a branch simultaneously. When the branch condition becomes known, the execution tree is pruned. A fork in an open source project effectively pursues both branches simultaneously. One difference is that while often one branch is discarded (e.g. what will probably happen with the XFree86 fork), but sometimes both become viable options (e.g. Gnome and KDE).
Slashdot had a story a while back about
a free certificate authority with identities assured by meeting personally with already assured members. It actually sounds like better assurance than what you get with Verisign.
The first kind sincerely believe that certain behaviours are good or bad, but personally find it extremely difficult to muster the willpower to live up to their own standard - and frequently fail. An example would be the doctor who is a chain smoker - but takes care not to smoke in the examining room, and can show you no end of pictures and statistics proving just how bad smoking is for your health.
The second kind of hypocrite does not actually believe his own propaganda, but merely uses it to manipulate others to his advantage. An example would be the Communist Party bosses in the old Sovient Union who would preach austerity and economic independence from the West by day, but buy Western luxuries in secret Party shops by night.
The Christian Church has always been full of the first type of hypocrite - and openly so. "I am come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance," said Jesus, and a modern bumper sticker says, "Please be patient, God is not finished with me yet."
Just as you should pay attention to the doctors advice about the dangers of smoking - even though the doctor fails miserably at taking his own advice, so you should take seriously warnings about the dangers of pornography - even if the preacher fails to take his own advice.
Perhaps you suspect that TV preachers are the second kind of hypocrite - not
actually believing what they preach, but cynically manipulating their audience
to keep sending in those donations. For the majority of TV preachers, I would
agree with you. Even then, however, to the extent that they accurately portray the message
they claim to represent, you should take the message seriously. As Paul said,
"The one preach Christ of contention, not sincerely... What then? not
withstanding,..., whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached; and I
therein do rejoice."
Unfortunately, while scientific measurements may be getting more accurate,
the accuracy of mass media preachers resembles the accuracy of
marketroids at a tech company. They tend to modify their message to tickle
the ears of the target audience. To see what a given Church teaches, take a
Church document with some history behind it, ignoring recent "innovations",
and then compare it with the sources (the Bible and history).
Porn is a difficult thing to define objectively. On the subject of defining pornography, an American Supreme Court justice said in frustration, "I know it when I see it, but I can't define it."
The basis of Christian (Catholic and Protestant) ethics concerning sexual behaviour is the concept of "defrauding". In this context, to defraud someone is to arouse desires that cannot be righteously (or practically, for you libertines) fulfilled. Pornography is the ultimate in sexual defrauding, hence it condemned. Solomon puts it more positively, "I adjour you, awake not my love till it pleases." In other words, don't arouse me until the time is right and we can enjoy it to the utmost. (We don't need to be reminded of how Solomon did not exactly set a good example of sexual restraint. He regretted it afterward.)
However, the precise stimuli which result in inappropriate arousal is very culturally relative. A Christian family I know was visited by a Christian family from Russia. They met them at the airport, and the American wife gave all of their visitors a big hug. Later, they discovered that this made the Russians very uncomfortable. (This may reflect a particular subculture in Russia, and not Russians in general.)
My sister spent some years in the jungle in Papua New Gunea. The Christian women there were very few clothes, often going topless due to the climate. This did not seem to provoke the wrong response in the men. (Although I've heard that it does for American boys reading National Geographic.) Strangely, the Papua women were shocked by magazine photos of American women in bikinis. Objectively, the bikinis represented more cloth than what the Papua women wore, but there was something about the facial expression and body language that said "come hither", and thus became pornography.
One more thing, Eros is exclusive and jealous by nature. Promiscuous behaviour does not contradict this. When that special someone says to us, "I love you!", we are thrilled. When we discover that they are saying the same thing to 10 other people, we are not so thrilled. Some people have expressed the idea that pornography might be appropriate within marriage (or whatever you libertines want to use as a substitute). However, because an image rather than the beloved becomes the source of arousal, it diminishes Eros and cheats both partners.
When I work from home, I tend to spend too much time on Slashdot. You see, at the office, if the boss and coworkers come in and see Slashdot up on the screen too often, I feel embarassed, even though nothing is said. At home, there is no such external restraint - only self discipline, which is not always up to the job.
Lent is coming up, and I will again be giving up Slashdot (among other things) for Lent. This was very successful last year. Productivity during Lent was several times what is what the rest of the year. There is work related news on Slashdot, but my coworkers keep me updated.
Sure, the response wasn't rational in the sense of cold logic. You want purely rational, party with your computer - or try to emmigrate to Vulcan. I actually tried to justify myself by saying essential what you said at the time. But I've since learned that if you want to make and keep friends among the mostly rational but often emotional species of Homo Sapiens (especially the female sex), you have to watch out for this sort of reaction.
It reminds me in a way of the vigilence needed to avoid stepping on the feet of my cat despite him being constantly underfoot and rubbing against my legs. If you want a warm purring comforter in your lap while you code, it takes a little bit of attention while he's underfoot.
Statistics, Schmatistics...
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Shortly after the Challenger disaster, I was at a party and told the following joke:
Q. Where did Christa McAuliffe go for her vacation?
A. All over Florida.
There were some smiles, but one woman became very angry. It turns out she was a school teacher - and the sister of a good friend, who became a little more distant after the incident.
On the other hand, I first learned about Pollock jokes from John Toplovski - he thought they were hillarious (he was Polish - and very intelligent as are most Poles).
So the moral is: avoid jokes about specific individuals or classes - unless you are very sure of your audience.
why in the world many SMTP servers allow a spammer to sign in with one name and send emails with a different "from" name?
The spammers run their own SMTP servers - usually on 100,000 or so Windoze Zombies that they control. Recipients that check SPF on the forged messages, however, can detect and reject them. Caveat, if the recipient uses forwarders, then either the recipient or the forwarder has to be technical enough to properly configure forwarding (like SRS for the forwarder or a trusted forwarder list for the recipient). If the spammer publishes SPF, then the domain can be safely blacklisted without worrying about an innocent party getting joe jobbed.
That is an interesting comment. Perhaps games that too closely resemble daily life are more dangerous than games that are largely fantasy. The reflexes and unconscious strategies learned in a fantasy game are unlikely to be triggered in real life. Games like GTA seem to be another story.
Games that are highly realistic, like high end flight simulators, can actually train reflexes and unconsious strategies that are effective in real life. The problem with GTA seems to be that it resembles real life visually and aurally, but not in terms of morality, risk assessment, or practical physics.
A lot of us are on assymetrical service. For instance, my cable is limited to 4Mb down and 500Kb up. The typical 56K dialup service has an upload rate of 28K or less. When I use torrent, I find that my down speed rarely exceeds about twice my up speed (i.e. 1Mb), which is quite reasonable given how torrent works. Out of fairness, I leave my torrents up after they finish until the total upload bytes exceed the total download bytes, but perhaps not enough people do that.
[Three refrigerators strapped together] sounds large, how many Burning Libraries Of Congress is that?
"Refrigerators" in this context is a measure of volume. BLOC is a measure of energy. There is no obvious conversion from energy to a volume unit. e =mc2 doesn't help without specifying a density.
A typical refrigerator is about 60x30x36 cubic inches. The transportation industry is interested in the volume, and in the largest dimension (or the largest dimension of a rectangular box that can contain the object). Assuming the refrigerators are strapped together on their smallest dimension, the resulting machine would be 60x90x36 inches, for a total volume of about 112.5 cubic ft and largest length of 7.5 ft.
The Java VM is already very secure from a code exploit standpoint. The machine model provides an unescapable environment which is equivalent to the hardware "user mode". It is straightforward to extend the API in pure Java to provide logically isolated "processes" and/or users, and many previous projects have done so, for example JDistro. All in all, Java provides excellent protectation against attackers executing arbitrary code and buggy programs corrupting memory.
However, the standard Java VM does not provide any way for a supervisory
process to limit two key resources: memory and CPU. The Thread.stop() call
is useless against a malicious DOS attack via Threads with infinite loops
since the attacker can simply provide a "finally" clause that perpetuates the
loop. Thread.stop() is even deprecated in later version of Java.
Furthermore, there is no way to limit the memory that malicious code can
allocate via new (unless I missed something in recent versions).
So crashing a JVM via malicious applets or servlets is trivial. This is
acceptable for a web browser (just restart the JVM), but not so good for
server side Java. Furthermore, infinite loops and data cancer (actual memory
leaks where the memory is allocated but not referenced anywhere are
impossible in pure Java) are common failure modes of honest but buggy
software, so JVMs too often crash due to either CPU or memory starvation even
when only trusted code is running.
The goal of the system described is to provide a way to limit CPU and Memory
consumption by leveraging the process model provided by the OS. Furthermore,
the hardware enforced user mode helps protect against JVM and JNI bugs that
might otherwise break the Java machine model (and allow memory
leaks/corruption or malicious native code execution). Having multiple layers
of protection is always good.
I am using Mozilla on RH9. But I usually have the mozilla User Agent Switcher set to IE6 on XP so that my bank's internet banking will deign to talk to me. Thanks to the large number of stupid sites like that, any non-Windows user agent is pretty much forced to lie on a regular basis. I hear FireFox lets you adjust how it lies about the User Agent based on the site hostname - an improvement.
I never understood the problem. Since I started in software in 1972, we've stored dates as 32 bit julian day numbers. A library routine converts to/from human readable format (including lots of those quirky shortcuts humans enjoy)- only slightly more complex than converting other binary numbers to decimal with fancy punctuation. For dealing with business logic like "first monday in november", there is another conversion to/from a month,day,year triple. Y2K was a non-issue.
When we went to unix, timestamps were already simple integers - easily convertable to/from human notation and to/from a tuple. With proper timezones, leap seconds and historical changes are all accounted for in the conversion.
Java extends the timestamp size to 64bits - avoiding the Y2.038K crash. The Java system is easily extended with a fully implemented Timezone class (leap seconds, historical changes, etc), but the standard GregorianCalendar text conversion routines don't provide a name for leap seconds (e.g. 02:59:60 am) and use only two timezone abbreviations (a problem with historical changes like EDT,EST,EWT).
One thing the Java system does right is convert timestamps to an arbitrary length tuple. The tuple length depends on the Calendar implementation. As a result, it works perfectly well for specialty calendars like Mayan - as well as commonly used calendars like Hebrew, Arabic, and Gregorian.
Guess which one has actually shown itself to be a reliable way to make sense of the universe?
If your goal is making sense of this universe, then science is the way to go. The information in the Bible is valuable because it addresses things not discernable via the scientific method. (Although it often mentions things in passing that can be checked historically, for example skeptics have pointed to a great many cities mentioned in the Bible that they claimed were made up - but archeologists eventually uncovered them.)
I think we may be in agreement that making the Bible a science textbook is a foolish endeavor. Even though you don't accept the premise of inerrancy, I hope I have helped clarify exactly what is inerrant. Perhaps you can now understand how theology can be a "science" for someone who does accept that premise.
P.S. On another thread, you mentioned that the Gospels were not actually written by Matthew, Mark, et al. I believe you are mistaken. A number of modern scholars have made that claim (e.g. the Jesus Seminar) - but their evidence doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and they are a small minority of textual critics. The major motivation for the claim seems to be a dislike of the implications of authenticity. Forget about inerrancy. If the gospels are authentic, they lead to some startling conclusions.
If people insist on spending money for Windows, they can also spend money on programs for Windows - especially when relevant APIs are very different (MIDI and audio stuff). I've noticed a number of open source projects that provide the source for free (as in beer and freedom) but sell the (supported) Windows build. Sounds reasonable to me.
You're joking, right? RIGHT? Homer and Vergil are very detailed and precise.
So are Herodatus and Livy. So do you take the statements about Apollo fighting
for the Trojans literally? All of Herodatus' stories, as improbable as they
often are?
Tokein's The Lord of the Rings is incredibly detailed. And yet, it is
clearly not intended as literal history. Homers Illiad is a mythic retelling
of what was probably a historical battle that took place long enough ago to grow in the telling. I suspect it has both true and
make believe parts, just like our own mythic retellings of the founding of
America. (I should point out that we also have the original documents for
most of the important events in American history, and we have the original
autographa for most of the writings of our founding fathers. So much of the
historical revisionism that is popular today only fools the ignorant.)
When I read Herodatus, I am reminded of the National Enquirer. He clearly
intends to be factual, but gives priority to the sensational. However, many
of his matter of fact descriptions I think are wrongly dismissed. For
instance, when he describes the frankincense harvest in Egypt, he says that
the workers had to first use smoke to drive away the flying reptiles.
While we can sit in our armchairs and speculate about what he really meant,
I think there really were flying reptiles. He is not the only ancient
writer to mention them.
The point is that you need to treat each work of literature as the style
that was intended. While some parts of the Bible are written in mythic language, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings,
Chronicles, are all dry history. The Gospels are compilations of first and second hand eyewitness testimony.
Every interpretation we might have is liable to be flawed. As such, we're
better off skipping the whole thing (true or false as it may be) and working
with a system that allows us to verify or falisfy ideas directly.
And what system might that be? I presume you are talking about science.
Science is great, but it is subject to the exact same problems as
an inerrant Scripture. As a scientist, you assume that our universe is
subject to rational laws, and that its laws are the same everywhere within
it. You assume that our universe has an objective existence that does
not change just because your beliefs or perceptions change. This hard
objective existence is the Autographa of the scientific method. It is the
ultimate authority on how this universe works.
However, you can't actually see or know this Autographa directly. You
are dependent on fallible senses which are subject to illusion and
distortion and the health of your body. Most observations today are indirect
and based on the output of various intruments. Much of your background
knowledge is based on the testimony of others. And the raw observations are
subject to interpretation. Reputable scientists disagree on the
interpretation of the same exerimental result.
It sounds hopeless, but despite all these imperfections, we actually do gain
an ever improving understanding of how our universe works. While there are
plenty of disputes over interpretation, there is a vast body of theory that
is undisputed - except for a few crackpots.
It is the same with Scripture. The inerrant Autographa is there, hard and
objective. It is the ultimate authority on what God has said to man in
times past. But we can't actually see it directly. We are dependent on
copyists, translators, and our own imperfect understanding. Much of our
background knowledge of ancient cultures and customs is based on the testimony
of others. And raw text in your English Bible is subject to interpretation.
Reputable and orthodox scholars disagree on the interpretation of the
same passage.
It sounds hopeless, but despite the imperfections of our human faculties,
Christians actually do gain an ever improving understanding of Gods
message to mankind. While there are plenty of disputes over interpretation,
there is a vast body of doctrine that is undisputed - except for a few cults.
So what you're saying is... the Scriptures are true and we need to trust
then, except when we're wrong? What's the damn point of that?
Your summary is basically correct. But your conclusion doesn't quite follow.
Christianity asserts the "perspecuity of Scripture". This means that despite
the lack of ideal mathematical perfection in the transmission, translation,
perception, and understanding of Scripture, it is nevertheless clear and
understandable. Your writing skills and mine are far from perfect, yet we
understand each other. In the case of Scripture, God himself has engineered
it so that the message is understood well enough for us to come back to Him.
If we want to: as Jesus said many times, "He that has ears to hear, let him
hear." If you are determined to misunderstand the Bible, or another human
being, you will succeed.
You've just argued a case that can be used to destroy *any* argument based on
Scripture.
Semantic holism is the idea that the meaning of words is determined by the
unique context and life experiences of the speaker, and they mean something
different to another person. For instance, when Clinton made his famous
defence, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is," he was referring
to the concept of Semantic holism. He wasn't lying if you only understood
his words in the way he meant them at the time.
Taken to extremes, semantic holism can be used to destroy any argument based
on anything, not just Scripture. However, such arguments are no more
convincing to non-eggheads than that line of Clinton's defense. Common
sense tells us that despite the imperfection of human language, we *do*
manage to communicate with each other. We can usually tell when a
misunderstanding is unintentional, or a deliberate attempt to deceive
or provide "plausible deniability".
Scripture is God's message conveyed in human language. It needs to be
understood in the same way that you would understand any other person of
another culture. Arguments based on extreme literalism deserve to be
destroyed. For instance, a certain radio preacher told a story of how he was
hiking and his feet were cold. Then he remembered the passage from Psalm 119
that says "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." Also
remembering that in bible times lamps used flames, he took out his Bible
and held it near his feet to warm them up. Now if you had written a song on
a subject very dear to you, and someone abused the lyrics like that, you would
either be very offended or rolling on the floor laughing.
Unfortunately, Scripture is too often quoted in just such an abusive way, in
the hopes that it will magically provide authority for an argument. Scripture
is not the only authority to be abused. For example, a certain feminist wrote
that Thomas Aquinas said women were of an inferiour nature in his Summa
Theologica. Thomas wrote each article in Summa Theologica in three parts.
Part I states an opposing viewpoint in the best possible light. Part II
quotes Church authorities opposing Part I. Part III is Thomas' own arguments
against Part I. The feminist quoted Part I of an article dealing with the
Aristotelean claim that women are in fact inferior to men.
In most cases, the literary style of Bible literature is clear. The Psalms
are poetry (that rhymes ideas rather than sounds - fascinating), and when the
Psalmist says God "covers us with his wings", it doesn't mean God is a giant
chicken. On the other hand, in a historical journal like Joshua that goes
into such minutiae as troop counts, you have to take the journal entry
recording that the sun stood still in the sky for about 24 hours quite
literally.
The beginning of Genesis is told in mythic language. This does *not* mean
that it is not historically true. For instance, we have stories told in
mythic language of the founding of America. Some are historical (the winter
at Valley Forge, George Washington crossing the Deleware), some are likely not
(George Washington chopping down the cherry
Slashdot Mirror
2500 years prior art, but that shouldn't be an issue these days. 10 digits plus upper and lower case letters - leaving out I because it looks exactly like l in Microsoft font. One character each for degrees minutes and seconds.
Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. At the Smithsonian museum of natural history, there is a large rock intricately carved by water channels that could just as easily be displayed at the Hirshorn. Nevertheless, this is a question that can be objectively answered (in the case of the rock, it was not designed), and is answered every day as courts consider whether a death is really accidental and archaeologists consider whether a flat pointy rock is really an arrowhead.
Of course, if you are a philosophical naturalist, you believe that this universe is all there is, and every event is purely the outworking of the laws of physics. In you take that position, then nothing is art, and there is no true intelligence - just the appearance of it. For the word "intelligence" means to choose between - which can't happen when every action is determined by physical law (whether deterministic or stochastic).
While recognizing intelligent design is difficult for many, an even more difficult problem is recognizing beauty. After all, art can portray both beauty and ugliness: Tolkiens epic involves both Elves and Orcs. But is beauty subjective, as Voltaire proclaimed? Or is true beauty an objective reality, and differences in its perception due to variations in the loss of our faculties for perceiving it?
In case it isn't clear, based on my definitions, the typogenerator is obviously artificial, and hence it is objectively art. Perhaps what people are really unsure about is whether the pictures it generates are beautiful, ugly, or just random? I would give my opinion, but the site has been slashdotted.
They'll keep working through an EMP that would fry semiconductor electronics. You can reduce the size and MTBF of your glass envelope system by large scale integration of circuitry on the anode. Fewer glass envelopes means fewer failures. Ideally, you could get the whole system in one envelope. Then just keep some spares to replace as needed.
Some designs guess which way the branch will go, and continue accordingly. When the branch condition becomes known, and it guessed wrong, it throws away all the work on that branch and starts over causing a pipeline stall. Often, extra bits are available in the branch instruction to provide hints on which branch decision is more likely. The processor may even keep stats on hot branches in a branch prediction cache.
Other designs work on both forks of a branch simultaneously. When the branch condition becomes known, the execution tree is pruned. A fork in an open source project effectively pursues both branches simultaneously. One difference is that while often one branch is discarded (e.g. what will probably happen with the XFree86 fork), but sometimes both become viable options (e.g. Gnome and KDE).
Slashdot had a story a while back about a free certificate authority with identities assured by meeting personally with already assured members. It actually sounds like better assurance than what you get with Verisign.
The second kind of hypocrite does not actually believe his own propaganda, but merely uses it to manipulate others to his advantage. An example would be the Communist Party bosses in the old Sovient Union who would preach austerity and economic independence from the West by day, but buy Western luxuries in secret Party shops by night.
The Christian Church has always been full of the first type of hypocrite - and openly so. "I am come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance," said Jesus, and a modern bumper sticker says, "Please be patient, God is not finished with me yet."
Just as you should pay attention to the doctors advice about the dangers of smoking - even though the doctor fails miserably at taking his own advice, so you should take seriously warnings about the dangers of pornography - even if the preacher fails to take his own advice.
Perhaps you suspect that TV preachers are the second kind of hypocrite - not actually believing what they preach, but cynically manipulating their audience to keep sending in those donations. For the majority of TV preachers, I would agree with you. Even then, however, to the extent that they accurately portray the message they claim to represent, you should take the message seriously. As Paul said, "The one preach Christ of contention, not sincerely ... What then? not
withstanding, ..., whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached; and I
therein do rejoice."
Unfortunately, while scientific measurements may be getting more accurate, the accuracy of mass media preachers resembles the accuracy of marketroids at a tech company. They tend to modify their message to tickle the ears of the target audience. To see what a given Church teaches, take a Church document with some history behind it, ignoring recent "innovations", and then compare it with the sources (the Bible and history).
The basis of Christian (Catholic and Protestant) ethics concerning sexual behaviour is the concept of "defrauding". In this context, to defraud someone is to arouse desires that cannot be righteously (or practically, for you libertines) fulfilled. Pornography is the ultimate in sexual defrauding, hence it condemned. Solomon puts it more positively, "I adjour you, awake not my love till it pleases." In other words, don't arouse me until the time is right and we can enjoy it to the utmost. (We don't need to be reminded of how Solomon did not exactly set a good example of sexual restraint. He regretted it afterward.)
However, the precise stimuli which result in inappropriate arousal is very culturally relative. A Christian family I know was visited by a Christian family from Russia. They met them at the airport, and the American wife gave all of their visitors a big hug. Later, they discovered that this made the Russians very uncomfortable. (This may reflect a particular subculture in Russia, and not Russians in general.)
My sister spent some years in the jungle in Papua New Gunea. The Christian women there were very few clothes, often going topless due to the climate. This did not seem to provoke the wrong response in the men. (Although I've heard that it does for American boys reading National Geographic.) Strangely, the Papua women were shocked by magazine photos of American women in bikinis. Objectively, the bikinis represented more cloth than what the Papua women wore, but there was something about the facial expression and body language that said "come hither", and thus became pornography.
One more thing, Eros is exclusive and jealous by nature. Promiscuous behaviour does not contradict this. When that special someone says to us, "I love you!", we are thrilled. When we discover that they are saying the same thing to 10 other people, we are not so thrilled. Some people have expressed the idea that pornography might be appropriate within marriage (or whatever you libertines want to use as a substitute). However, because an image rather than the beloved becomes the source of arousal, it diminishes Eros and cheats both partners.
Lent is coming up, and I will again be giving up Slashdot (among other things) for Lent. This was very successful last year. Productivity during Lent was several times what is what the rest of the year. There is work related news on Slashdot, but my coworkers keep me updated.
It reminds me in a way of the vigilence needed to avoid stepping on the feet of my cat despite him being constantly underfoot and rubbing against my legs. If you want a warm purring comforter in your lap while you code, it takes a little bit of attention while he's underfoot.
97% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Actually, while by definition half of all people are below median intelligence, it is not true in general that half are below average intelligence.
A pair is arrested for telling bomb jokes at the airport.
Q. Where did Christa McAuliffe go for her vacation?
A. All over Florida.
There were some smiles, but one woman became very angry. It turns out she was a school teacher - and the sister of a good friend, who became a little more distant after the incident.
On the other hand, I first learned about Pollock jokes from John Toplovski - he thought they were hillarious (he was Polish - and very intelligent as are most Poles).
So the moral is: avoid jokes about specific individuals or classes - unless you are very sure of your audience.
The spammers run their own SMTP servers - usually on 100,000 or so Windoze Zombies that they control. Recipients that check SPF on the forged messages, however, can detect and reject them. Caveat, if the recipient uses forwarders, then either the recipient or the forwarder has to be technical enough to properly configure forwarding (like SRS for the forwarder or a trusted forwarder list for the recipient). If the spammer publishes SPF, then the domain can be safely blacklisted without worrying about an innocent party getting joe jobbed.
Games that are highly realistic, like high end flight simulators, can actually train reflexes and unconsious strategies that are effective in real life. The problem with GTA seems to be that it resembles real life visually and aurally, but not in terms of morality, risk assessment, or practical physics.
A lot of us are on assymetrical service. For instance, my cable is limited to 4Mb down and 500Kb up. The typical 56K dialup service has an upload rate of 28K or less. When I use torrent, I find that my down speed rarely exceeds about twice my up speed (i.e. 1Mb), which is quite reasonable given how torrent works. Out of fairness, I leave my torrents up after they finish until the total upload bytes exceed the total download bytes, but perhaps not enough people do that.
"Refrigerators" in this context is a measure of volume. BLOC is a measure of energy. There is no obvious conversion from energy to a volume unit. e =mc2 doesn't help without specifying a density.
A typical refrigerator is about 60x30x36 cubic inches. The transportation industry is interested in the volume, and in the largest dimension (or the largest dimension of a rectangular box that can contain the object). Assuming the refrigerators are strapped together on their smallest dimension, the resulting machine would be 60x90x36 inches, for a total volume of about 112.5 cubic ft and largest length of 7.5 ft.
However, the standard Java VM does not provide any way for a supervisory process to limit two key resources: memory and CPU. The Thread.stop() call is useless against a malicious DOS attack via Threads with infinite loops since the attacker can simply provide a "finally" clause that perpetuates the loop. Thread.stop() is even deprecated in later version of Java. Furthermore, there is no way to limit the memory that malicious code can allocate via new (unless I missed something in recent versions). So crashing a JVM via malicious applets or servlets is trivial. This is acceptable for a web browser (just restart the JVM), but not so good for server side Java. Furthermore, infinite loops and data cancer (actual memory leaks where the memory is allocated but not referenced anywhere are impossible in pure Java) are common failure modes of honest but buggy software, so JVMs too often crash due to either CPU or memory starvation even when only trusted code is running.
The goal of the system described is to provide a way to limit CPU and Memory consumption by leveraging the process model provided by the OS. Furthermore, the hardware enforced user mode helps protect against JVM and JNI bugs that might otherwise break the Java machine model (and allow memory leaks/corruption or malicious native code execution). Having multiple layers of protection is always good.
I am using Mozilla on RH9. But I usually have the mozilla User Agent Switcher set to IE6 on XP so that my bank's internet banking will deign to talk to me. Thanks to the large number of stupid sites like that, any non-Windows user agent is pretty much forced to lie on a regular basis. I hear FireFox lets you adjust how it lies about the User Agent based on the site hostname - an improvement.
When we went to unix, timestamps were already simple integers - easily convertable to/from human notation and to/from a tuple. With proper timezones, leap seconds and historical changes are all accounted for in the conversion.
Java extends the timestamp size to 64bits - avoiding the Y2.038K crash. The Java system is easily extended with a fully implemented Timezone class (leap seconds, historical changes, etc), but the standard GregorianCalendar text conversion routines don't provide a name for leap seconds (e.g. 02:59:60 am) and use only two timezone abbreviations (a problem with historical changes like EDT,EST,EWT).
One thing the Java system does right is convert timestamps to an arbitrary length tuple. The tuple length depends on the Calendar implementation. As a result, it works perfectly well for specialty calendars like Mayan - as well as commonly used calendars like Hebrew, Arabic, and Gregorian.
If your goal is making sense of this universe, then science is the way to go. The information in the Bible is valuable because it addresses things not discernable via the scientific method. (Although it often mentions things in passing that can be checked historically, for example skeptics have pointed to a great many cities mentioned in the Bible that they claimed were made up - but archeologists eventually uncovered them.)
I think we may be in agreement that making the Bible a science textbook is a foolish endeavor. Even though you don't accept the premise of inerrancy, I hope I have helped clarify exactly what is inerrant. Perhaps you can now understand how theology can be a "science" for someone who does accept that premise.
P.S. On another thread, you mentioned that the Gospels were not actually written by Matthew, Mark, et al. I believe you are mistaken. A number of modern scholars have made that claim (e.g. the Jesus Seminar) - but their evidence doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and they are a small minority of textual critics. The major motivation for the claim seems to be a dislike of the implications of authenticity. Forget about inerrancy. If the gospels are authentic, they lead to some startling conclusions.
If people insist on spending money for Windows, they can also spend money on programs for Windows - especially when relevant APIs are very different (MIDI and audio stuff). I've noticed a number of open source projects that provide the source for free (as in beer and freedom) but sell the (supported) Windows build. Sounds reasonable to me.
Tokein's The Lord of the Rings is incredibly detailed. And yet, it is clearly not intended as literal history. Homers Illiad is a mythic retelling of what was probably a historical battle that took place long enough ago to grow in the telling. I suspect it has both true and make believe parts, just like our own mythic retellings of the founding of America. (I should point out that we also have the original documents for most of the important events in American history, and we have the original autographa for most of the writings of our founding fathers. So much of the historical revisionism that is popular today only fools the ignorant.)
When I read Herodatus, I am reminded of the National Enquirer. He clearly intends to be factual, but gives priority to the sensational. However, many of his matter of fact descriptions I think are wrongly dismissed. For instance, when he describes the frankincense harvest in Egypt, he says that the workers had to first use smoke to drive away the flying reptiles. While we can sit in our armchairs and speculate about what he really meant, I think there really were flying reptiles. He is not the only ancient writer to mention them.
The point is that you need to treat each work of literature as the style that was intended. While some parts of the Bible are written in mythic language, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, are all dry history. The Gospels are compilations of first and second hand eyewitness testimony.
And what system might that be? I presume you are talking about science. Science is great, but it is subject to the exact same problems as an inerrant Scripture. As a scientist, you assume that our universe is subject to rational laws, and that its laws are the same everywhere within it. You assume that our universe has an objective existence that does not change just because your beliefs or perceptions change. This hard objective existence is the Autographa of the scientific method. It is the ultimate authority on how this universe works.
However, you can't actually see or know this Autographa directly. You are dependent on fallible senses which are subject to illusion and distortion and the health of your body. Most observations today are indirect and based on the output of various intruments. Much of your background knowledge is based on the testimony of others. And the raw observations are subject to interpretation. Reputable scientists disagree on the interpretation of the same exerimental result.
It sounds hopeless, but despite all these imperfections, we actually do gain an ever improving understanding of how our universe works. While there are plenty of disputes over interpretation, there is a vast body of theory that is undisputed - except for a few crackpots.
It is the same with Scripture. The inerrant Autographa is there, hard and objective. It is the ultimate authority on what God has said to man in times past. But we can't actually see it directly. We are dependent on copyists, translators, and our own imperfect understanding. Much of our background knowledge of ancient cultures and customs is based on the testimony of others. And raw text in your English Bible is subject to interpretation. Reputable and orthodox scholars disagree on the interpretation of the same passage.
It sounds hopeless, but despite the imperfections of our human faculties, Christians actually do gain an ever improving understanding of Gods message to mankind. While there are plenty of disputes over interpretation, there is a vast body of doctrine that is undisputed - except for a few cults.
Your summary is basically correct. But your conclusion doesn't quite follow. Christianity asserts the "perspecuity of Scripture". This means that despite the lack of ideal mathematical perfection in the transmission, translation, perception, and understanding of Scripture, it is nevertheless clear and understandable. Your writing skills and mine are far from perfect, yet we understand each other. In the case of Scripture, God himself has engineered it so that the message is understood well enough for us to come back to Him. If we want to: as Jesus said many times, "He that has ears to hear, let him hear." If you are determined to misunderstand the Bible, or another human being, you will succeed.
You've just argued a case that can be used to destroy *any* argument based on Scripture.
Semantic holism is the idea that the meaning of words is determined by the unique context and life experiences of the speaker, and they mean something different to another person. For instance, when Clinton made his famous defence, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is," he was referring to the concept of Semantic holism. He wasn't lying if you only understood his words in the way he meant them at the time.
Taken to extremes, semantic holism can be used to destroy any argument based on anything, not just Scripture. However, such arguments are no more convincing to non-eggheads than that line of Clinton's defense. Common sense tells us that despite the imperfection of human language, we *do* manage to communicate with each other. We can usually tell when a misunderstanding is unintentional, or a deliberate attempt to deceive or provide "plausible deniability".
Scripture is God's message conveyed in human language. It needs to be understood in the same way that you would understand any other person of another culture. Arguments based on extreme literalism deserve to be destroyed. For instance, a certain radio preacher told a story of how he was hiking and his feet were cold. Then he remembered the passage from Psalm 119 that says "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." Also remembering that in bible times lamps used flames, he took out his Bible and held it near his feet to warm them up. Now if you had written a song on a subject very dear to you, and someone abused the lyrics like that, you would either be very offended or rolling on the floor laughing.
Unfortunately, Scripture is too often quoted in just such an abusive way, in the hopes that it will magically provide authority for an argument. Scripture is not the only authority to be abused. For example, a certain feminist wrote that Thomas Aquinas said women were of an inferiour nature in his Summa Theologica. Thomas wrote each article in Summa Theologica in three parts. Part I states an opposing viewpoint in the best possible light. Part II quotes Church authorities opposing Part I. Part III is Thomas' own arguments against Part I. The feminist quoted Part I of an article dealing with the Aristotelean claim that women are in fact inferior to men.
In most cases, the literary style of Bible literature is clear. The Psalms are poetry (that rhymes ideas rather than sounds - fascinating), and when the Psalmist says God "covers us with his wings", it doesn't mean God is a giant chicken. On the other hand, in a historical journal like Joshua that goes into such minutiae as troop counts, you have to take the journal entry recording that the sun stood still in the sky for about 24 hours quite literally.
The beginning of Genesis is told in mythic language. This does *not* mean that it is not historically true. For instance, we have stories told in mythic language of the founding of America. Some are historical (the winter at Valley Forge, George Washington crossing the Deleware), some are likely not (George Washington chopping down the cherry