The point was to distinguish infallibility from inerrancy. A discourse on exactly when the Pope is infallible would be far too long, and Catholics themselves are not in perfect agreement on the point. In fact, what you point out is *why* infallibility is a weaker property than inerrancy. Inerrancy is 100% all of the time. Infallibility basically means that the Pope might make mistakes or even be corrupt and wicked, but he won't lead you astray on doctrinal matters.
Entire books have been written by Protestants documenting case after case of errors and wicked action of Popes throughout history. In exasperation, they conclude, "so how can you believe in Papal Infallibility?" They miss the point of course, because they are confusing infallibility with inerrancy.
> The Bible is either the correctly transcribed, perfect word of God, or it is not.
Let me clear up some straw men. You may still snort at what's left, but the confusion will be lessened.
In Christian doctrine, the Bible is inerrant, which is a stronger form of infallible. The Pope is infallible according to Catholic doctrine, but not inerrant.
To be more precise, the Autographa of the Bible is inerrent. The Autographa is the original untranslated message before any copying or translation. (There is a "King James Only" cult that claims that certain translations are inerrant, but I will ignore them since they typically can't even tell you which edition of the Authorized Version they are talking about.)
As a consequence, investigating the transmission (copying) or translation of the text are legitimate theological pursuits. Textual criticism investigates the transmission, and is a very interesting subject. In general terms, the Hebrew texts are very accurate copies - the scribes employed checksums on every line, but we have relatively few of them. The Greek texts are rather sloppy copies, with errors introduced on nearly every copy. However, we have many thousands of these from which the original text can be deduced with high certainty by arranging them in a tree.
At this point, you may be wondering what good inerrancy is when you can't see the actual document that is supposed to be inerrant. But wait, we aren't done yet. Even if you were present when God spoke to Israel from the mountain, uncertainties will arise from imperfections in the listeners perception and understanding of the words.
If you think about it, human language does not enable perfectly error free transmission of thoughts and ideas from one person to another. Some people take this to an extreme, and pretend that nothing we say is ever really understood at all. This can be a quite humorous concept, as readers of Lemony Snicket can testify. It is equally foolish to pretend that our individual perception and understanding are perfect. The truth is, that we *do* understand each other - but sometimes there are misunderstandings. If we treat each other with humility, we can clear up the misunderstandings as we discover them.
The same thing happens with Scripture. The inerrancy of Scripture is important for the authority it confers, not because it turns every reader into a Delphic Oracle. When you are trying to improve your understanding of it, you might consider the translation, the transmission, or your own mental misinformation. However, all this is sourced in the Autographa. Simply writing your own version takes you out of the realm of orthodox Christianity (for instance, many current leaders in the Episcopal church are no longer orthodox because of their recent stance that "the Church wrote Scripture, the Church can rewrite Scripture").
The bottom line is, the Bible is inerrant, but quoting Scripture doesn't make your argument automatically true and correct.
I've had a good portion of my Windoze using friends and neighbors come up to me and ask if I have Firefox. Previously, these same people would glaze over when I attempted to explain why using IE wasn't a good idea. But now they feel "in the know", and are going around sharing their newfound knowledge with anyone who didn't see the ad. Far be it from me to rain on their parade:-)
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
on
Bad Science Awards
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· Score: 5, Insightful
> > Also compare with Psalms 90:4, and particularly the notation "A prayer of Moses" at the beginning of Psalms 90
> What exactly are you referring to here? I read the passage, and I don't see where it would contradict the view that a day in the Bible is 24 hours.
"A day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day." That's the same 'day' as in Genesis. And the author is explicitly given: Moses. The same author traditionally given for Genesis. (Although there is a good case to be made that Moses compiled, not authored Genesis.) Now try to justify the statement that "the Hebrew word for 'day' always refers to a 24 hour period."
Also compare the frequent phrase "the day of the LORD" - which clearly does not refer to a 24 hr day.
P.S. To get really nit picky, you'll also find a 48 hour day in Joshua (the sun stood still for 24 hours) and a 24 hr 20 min day in II Kings (the shadow on the sundial went backward 10 degrees - assuming 1 deg = 1 min).
Intelligent design gets to the heart of the real disagreement between origin of life theories. Was it purposeless and uncaused, or designed? We ask the same questions about murders, artifacts, turing tests, and radio signals from space. The same techniques can be used.
The Bible asserts that G-d created every living thing "after its kind". However, it was Aristotle, not the Bible, who declared that species (and the stars) were immutable and unchanging. The Church somehow became supporters of the scientific orthodoxy of the day (Aristotleanism) instead of sticking to the Bible and Apostolic Tradition - and has been tarred with that brush ever since.
The scientific orthodoxy began to unravel with the appearance of two visible supernovas in the 15 and 16 hundreds (spectacular evidence that no, the stars are not immutable). But many were burned at the stake for stating the obvious conclusion from what they saw. Galileo got off easy because of the support of the Pope (who saw the moons of Jupiter through Galileos telescope with his own eyes - an Aristotelean impossibility). Galileo was foolishly undiplomatic, and his house arrest was needed to appease the insulted Aristoteleans.
Detractors of Intelligent design often proceed by showing mathematically that there can be no algorithm capable of classifying signal sources as "intelligent" or "not-intelligent" (for some definition of intelligent). This begs the question. The premise of the Christian supernatural is that this universe is embedded in a larger reality. This does not mean parallel universes or higher dimensions. The traditional metaphor was book and author. Good books like "Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter" are worlds created by their author. The author resides in a larger reality. A better metaphor in the computer age is a simulation or virtual world. Just as the existence of the virtual worlds we create depends on the continued functioning of the computer systems that house them, so our universe depends for its existence on whatever it is in the "more real" world that sustains it as computers sustain our virtual worlds. In turn, that world may be embedded in an even higher reality. Like a story within a story - to use the traditional metaphor. Where does it all end (or start)? The source of all realities and all worlds is God - like in Douglas Hofstadter's "Push and Pop" dialog in "Godel, Escher, Bach".
The "intelligence" of Intelligent Design is presumed to have its source outside of our universe - in the higher reality. A better model of the kind of experiment ID proposes can be illustrated by an online game. Suppose you are playing your favorite online game - which contains many AI players as well as human players. The game provides no explict indication of which avatars are human and which are machine driven. You have no contact with any of the human players except through the game. Would you be able to tell which avatars were controlled by human players, and which were artificial, using only the features of the virtual world and without resorting to any outside communication?
Gentoo is great for a single machine. But I want to install binary packages when they are available. You see, I have to manage 40 machines. Compiling from source on all those machines is not an option. Most don't have a compiler installed (more secure). I simply want to install a package on a prototype machine of a particular OS (AIX,Rh7.3,Rh9 currently), and when I am satisfied, build the SRPM on the other OSes and copy the RPMS to our own little yum update web site so all the other binary only machines can grab them.
I grab one source RPM, and "rpmbuild --rebuild" it on each platform as needed. For packages I maintain, I take care to make a single SRPM build on all the platforms I use. I can usually take an SRPM from Fedora, and build it on RH7.3 or RH9 with no problems - or maybe a few tweaks. (Unless you're talking latest Gnome GUI stuff.)
Also, what dependency hell? Sure, running the low level RPM command makes you fetch dependencies manually. But when running the high level systems like RedCarpet, Yum, Apt-RPM, etc, it is automatic. What *I* would like to see is for the high level manager to handle source RPMS automatically - downloading and rebuilding them when requested or when no binary is available, and handling build dependencies similarly to install dependencies.
That's what RedHat Enterprise gives you. Unfortunately, the price point is designed for... the enterprise. If you want a $70 pay once for x years updates, it looks like Suse is your best best. Or, go with Fedora Core for free, but be prepared to upgrade every year. There was also a company that sold RH7.x and RH9 updates for a few dollars a month - I can't remember the name. It was an example of a key business advantage of opensource. When the primary vendor abandons the product, another company can step up to the plate if there is a demand. A sibling post has a link to a volunteer update service for RH9.
I have had very bad experience with compact flourescents. In theory, they should last much longer than incandescant bulbs. In practice, they do - but the compact "ballast" that produces the high voltage for the flourescent bulb doesn't. Worse, you can't buy the base without a bulb. So I ended up with a shelf full of perfectly good flourescent bulbs with no fixtures to run them in. I did install some traditional ballast fixtures to use some of them, but overall it was a boondoggle.
I am very skeptical about these new screw in LED bulbs. I understand that the LED itself is very reliable - but what about the power supply?
The point I was trying to make in a funny way, but failed, is that making the statement, "there is nothing outside the universe" as if it were a scientific (observed and verified) fact, logically makes the speaker omniscient - an attribute of God. Only God can state a universal negative (e.g. there is no such thing as the tooth fairy) as fact. The rest of us can only get as far as, "based on what I do know of the world I live in, I consider it extremely unlikely that the tooth fairy exists anywhere".
However, after my post, I realized that you did not actually intend to state a universal negative. You were only trying to point out that a (hypothetical) viewpoint outside of the universe we live in is not the same kind of thing as an observer within our universe. It would not be subject to our natural laws, and therefore of limited use in understanding our laws. The source code to that giant simulation I mentioned could be enlightening - but we might not be capable of understanding it. One can certainly not assume that such an observer would be subject to our natural law as the original poster did.
For example, no observer could stand outside the universe, because there's nothing outside the universe.
You know this for a fact? You have directly observed that we are not, in fact, a giant simulation being carried out in a higher level of reality (the real, or more real world)? You can see that we are not 1 of zillions of parallel universes. (Oxymoron, I know.) That is awesome! Now I know there is a God - You! Only Deity could be so intimately aware of everything that is, was or ever will be. Only Deity could be so absolutely, perfectly, amazingly omniscient! Thank you for sharing with us your Divine knowlege, and telling us humble earth dwellers what we could never know for certain on our own.
[... but some other guy says he's God, and disagrees! Hush! Have faith...the universe is all there is. The universe is all there is. The universe is all there is...]
One idea that doesn't violate the freedoms of the new technology is watermarking authorized copies with a signed serial number. That helps the copyright holder identify actual abuses. That approach is problematic when users compress a watermarked file to MP3, however.
The goal should be to enable paying customers to backup their copies, transform their copies to new media, play it on their home network, car stereo, car network, etc, and let friends listen to a song they love - even if that friend is remote. All this while enabling copyright holders to track down big abusers.
To bring this about, the **AA needs to stop suing their customers, and concentrate for the time being on the big pirates selling $1 professionally stamped DVDs. (Harder than going after the little guys, I know.) At the same time, they need to repair relations with the technical community - so that the technical community is motivated to find technical solutions to common goals - such as those suggested above.
The first step is to have a realistic statement of what they want from the new media - and make sure everyone understands it. When your expectations are realistic, people are more likely to feel guilty when they violate them.
Realistic means that legitimate end users have all the freedoms that digital media can provide. For instance, some DVDs come with software to make a limited number of backup copies. This is helpful - but it addresses only one aspect. The end user might also want to copy the movie he bought to a compressed format for his PDA.
Ultimately, the technical problem is one of tracing authorized copies. We can trace mass produced bullets to box lots to help catch murderers without taking bullets away from legitimate users. We ought to be able to come up with ways to trace digital media copies to track down violators without infringing the freedoms of legitimate users.
Wouldn't a terrorist love to modify the flight program of the unmanned craft to turn it into a cruise missile. No payload required, hitting something at Mach 10 will be quite catastrophic enough. The coexistence of terrorism and increasingly powerful commercial technology is scary.
Suppose I want to be sure to get purchase orders from joe@example.com. I add his domain to my whitelist so it doesn't go through my bayesian filter (in my real life experience, POs tend to look like spam to filters). Unfortunately, I now get 6 spams claiming to be from joe@example.com for every real message from joe@example.com.
So I ask Joe which IP addresses he normally sends mail from, and whitelist his domain only when it comes from those IP addresses. This is really what AOL used to do with high volume mailers (not necessarily spam - think mailing lists). Now I reliably get Joe's POs without all the forgeries.
Now Joe gets a great deal at a new ISP, and all his email IP addresses change. Drat! I missed one of his POs! So Joe and I decide we need an automatic way for him to keep me up to date on which IP addresses are authorized to send his mail. After a handful of false starts and as many months, we come up with.... SPF. (Well, actually some other guys came up with it - I just use it.)
Since SPF is published on DNS, people getting spams claiming to be from me can now check my SPF record and REJECT them - instead of sending me death threats (yes, I really get death threats from irate recipients of spam forged in my name).
This also cuts down on bounces from spammers forging my email and trying to send to non-existent targets. The bounces I still get, I can ignore because I sign my outgoing MAIL FROM with SES (Signed Envelope Sender).
Now, most of the spam I still have to deal with is not from spammers (who are mostly blacklisted now), but from idiots who send replies (instead of a DSN) when they detect a virus that forged my email. Some ninkompoops even send replies for non-existent email targets - usually with some stupid message about how they had to change their email address because of spam.
The cable at ground level needs to be as light as possible to minimize stress at the Clarke point. At the Clarke point, stress is highest, but weight is negligible. Could the problem be solved with a cable that changes its composition? At ground level, the cable would be built from a very light weight material - just strong enough to keep it tethered. At the Clarke point, the cable would be extremely strong - but heavy. Would an optimized tapered cable of this sort do the job without nanotubes?
I hate functional websites covered with art. (Websites designed to display or market art, movies, video games, etc are another matter.) IMO, the best functional web applications use simple color schemes to look professional. They use background colors (colored text rarely looks good) to visually distinguish functional groups on screen. Pastels seem to work best. The general principles are similar to painting the walls in your office.
Our company evaluated the Micro Vax. We all loved it, but our boss felt that DEC was not serious about marketing it, and that we would be stuck with an orphan. Turns out he was right - but I felt like it was a self fulfilling prophecy at the time.
[This is intended to be "funny" or "food for thought". It is not at all clear, to say the least, that the Flood and the Extinction were the same event - even if you believe in the Flood as I do.]
Big difference. VMWare is about virtualising a foreign OS. Since VMWare abstracts at the BIOS and hardware level it can run almost all OSes the CPU will support but it takes a large performance hit.
Xen is a VM platform, i.e. it lets you set up multiple virtual machines that run with very little extra overhead. A lot like User Mode Linux, except easier to configure and install.
Win4Lin is a commercial product with similar goals to Xen, but runs Windows under Linux. Unlike VMware, sound and video run at full speed. The catch is that only supported (i.e. "ported") versions of Windows run.
"Porting" the OS means providing drivers and possibly boot code that works with the VM interface instead of with precisely emulated hardware. Win4Lin and Xen do not precisely emulate high speed devices - but provide a device like interface that is efficiently implemented by the VM, but requires custom drivers for the OS in question.
How much more efficient? My Dad had a Windows ME system, and bought an audio recording application for it to archive all our old reel to reel recordings (including one of Elvis Presley jamming with his church buddies singing "Just a Little Talk with Jesus"). Under ME, the audio driver was cruddy and added pops and dropouts. Solution: install RedHat 7.3 and Win4Lin, and run ME in the Win4Lin VM. The Linux sound driver worked flawlessly, and this carried over to the ME application - which now used the Win4Lin sound driver talking to the VM interface talking to the Linux sound driver talking to the hardware.
The ME sound application now works flawlessly in the Win4Lin VM under Linux. Want some MP3s of "Hitler's Airwaves" recorded off the radio on reel to reel?
Re:Being able to decompile code....
on
Decompiling Java
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Because the enclosed code must still meet all syntax and semantic requirements. This is a feature - it ensures (unlike
Wrong. Prior art does not prevent anyone from filing for and obtaining a patent. It does not prevent them from suing you. I might help you win your case in court provided you have enough money to pay the lawyers.
That is just one of the ways in which the current patent system is broken - especially for software.
This patent is yet another example of patenting something that retailers have done for 100 years (Sears Catalog customized by past orders) - "but do it on the internet!"
The first wave of stupid patents: do something that people have done for centuries - "but do it on a computer!" (E.g. Bingo on a computer was patented.)
The second wave: do something on a computer that people have done on computers since 1960 - "but do it on the internet!"
The third wave: do something that people have done on the internet since 1980 - "but do it on the web!"
The fourth wave: do something that people have done on the web since the first browser - "but do it with web services!"
Re:Being able to decompile code....
on
Decompiling Java
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No, lifetime analysis is not required. Only direct operations on constants. FOr instance:
int DAYSECS = 24 * 60 * 60;
is required to be a simple integer assignment and
if (false) { ... }
is required to completed remove the enclosed code.
It might take a language lawyer, however, to determine whether
if (a)
is required to be equivalent to
if (a == true)
(and I don't recall the exact wording) but my intuition strongly
wants that to be the case.
Re:Being able to decompile code....
on
Decompiling Java
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· Score: 1
Anyhow, decompiling the classfile with "javap -c" shows that a couple of instructions get eliminated by dropping the explicit comparison to "true". So the classfile gets smaller, it loads faster, and (unless the JIT compiler is smart enough to do constant propagation on that conditional) it'll run faster, too.
The Java Language spec requires that a conforming compiler (not JIT, but source to bytecode compiler) do constant propagation.
If true, and China does scap their missiles, that is good news. For all the complaints about Japan cleaning our clocks in manufacturing for a few decades, it sure beat fighting them hand to hand on pacific islands. If only all wars could be waged economically.
Unfortunantly, I don't see any signs of China toning down their military ambitions. What with North Korea and U.S., I don't blame them, but I wish they'd leave Taiwan alone.
The whole problem with stupidly (or evilly) designed e-voting machines is that there is no possibility of a recount. There is no audit trail (e.g. printed ballots in addition to electronic counts). There are no physically stable counters. For example, Viriginia used pinball counters before going to WinVote. India uses battery backed counters in sealed tamper proof enclosures controlled by a few hundred lines of public assembly code.
I've been using Mozilla on Linux for years. I have been using Web Bill Pay at suntrust.com - but just this month they anounced a new "upgrade". Now their Bill Pay refuses to run unless you are running one of four supported browsers. It does not simply look at the UserAgent header, it runs some javascript code to get a signature of your browser (so lying about which browser you are doesn't help unless you can tweak the results of their tests). When I wrote to them to complain about them cutting off my service with no warning, they wrote back saying not to worry, I'll love the new features.
So, any recommendations for a bank where web bill pay is actually web bill pay and not PC banking with a cruddy interface? BB&T already drank the Microsoft koolaid last year. I am in Fairfax, VA, USA area.
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Entire books have been written by Protestants documenting case after case of errors and wicked action of Popes throughout history. In exasperation, they conclude, "so how can you believe in Papal Infallibility?" They miss the point of course, because they are confusing infallibility with inerrancy.
> The Bible is either the correctly transcribed, perfect word of God, or it is
not.
Let me clear up some straw men. You may still snort at what's left, but the confusion will be lessened.
In Christian doctrine, the Bible is inerrant, which is a stronger form of infallible. The Pope is infallible according to Catholic doctrine, but not inerrant.
To be more precise, the Autographa of the Bible is inerrent. The Autographa is the original untranslated message before any copying or translation. (There is a "King James Only" cult that claims that certain translations are inerrant, but I will ignore them since they typically can't even tell you which edition of the Authorized Version they are talking about.)
As a consequence, investigating the transmission (copying) or translation of the text are legitimate theological pursuits. Textual criticism investigates the transmission, and is a very interesting subject. In general terms, the Hebrew texts are very accurate copies - the scribes employed checksums on every line, but we have relatively few of them. The Greek texts are rather sloppy copies, with errors introduced on nearly every copy. However, we have many thousands of these from which the original text can be deduced with high certainty by arranging them in a tree.
At this point, you may be wondering what good inerrancy is when you can't see the actual document that is supposed to be inerrant. But wait, we aren't done yet. Even if you were present when God spoke to Israel from the mountain, uncertainties will arise from imperfections in the listeners perception and understanding of the words.
If you think about it, human language does not enable perfectly error free transmission of thoughts and ideas from one person to another. Some people take this to an extreme, and pretend that nothing we say is ever really understood at all. This can be a quite humorous concept, as readers of Lemony Snicket can testify. It is equally foolish to pretend that our individual perception and understanding are perfect. The truth is, that we *do* understand each other - but sometimes there are misunderstandings. If we treat each other with humility, we can clear up the misunderstandings as we discover them.
The same thing happens with Scripture. The inerrancy of Scripture is important for the authority it confers, not because it turns every reader into a Delphic Oracle. When you are trying to improve your understanding of it, you might consider the translation, the transmission, or your own mental misinformation. However, all this is sourced in the Autographa. Simply writing your own version takes you out of the realm of orthodox Christianity (for instance, many current leaders in the Episcopal church are no longer orthodox because of their recent stance that "the Church wrote Scripture, the Church can rewrite Scripture").
The bottom line is, the Bible is inerrant, but quoting Scripture doesn't make your argument automatically true and correct.
I've had a good portion of my Windoze using friends and neighbors come up to me and ask if I have Firefox. Previously, these same people would glaze over when I attempted to explain why using IE wasn't a good idea. But now they feel "in the know", and are going around sharing their newfound knowledge with anyone who didn't see the ad. Far be it from me to rain on their parade :-)
> > Also compare with Psalms 90:4, and particularly the notation "A prayer of Moses" at the beginning of Psalms 90
> What exactly are you referring to here? I read the passage, and I don't see where it would contradict the view that a day in the Bible is 24 hours.
"A day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day." That's the same 'day' as in Genesis. And the author is explicitly given: Moses. The same author traditionally given for Genesis. (Although there is a good case to be made that Moses compiled, not authored Genesis.) Now try to justify the statement that "the Hebrew word for 'day' always refers to a 24 hour period."
Also compare the frequent phrase "the day of the LORD" - which clearly does not refer to a 24 hr day.
P.S. To get really nit picky, you'll also find a 48 hour day in Joshua (the sun stood still for 24 hours) and a 24 hr 20 min day in II Kings (the shadow on the sundial went backward 10 degrees - assuming 1 deg = 1 min).
Intelligent design gets to the heart of the real disagreement between origin of life theories. Was it purposeless and uncaused, or designed? We ask the same questions about murders, artifacts, turing tests, and radio signals from space. The same techniques can be used.
The Bible asserts that G-d created every living thing "after its kind". However, it was Aristotle, not the Bible, who declared that species (and the stars) were immutable and unchanging. The Church somehow became supporters of the scientific orthodoxy of the day (Aristotleanism) instead of sticking to the Bible and Apostolic Tradition - and has been tarred with that brush ever since.
The scientific orthodoxy began to unravel with the appearance of two visible supernovas in the 15 and 16 hundreds (spectacular evidence that no, the stars are not immutable). But many were burned at the stake for stating the obvious conclusion from what they saw. Galileo got off easy because of the support of the Pope (who saw the moons of Jupiter through Galileos telescope with his own eyes - an Aristotelean impossibility). Galileo was foolishly undiplomatic, and his house arrest was needed to appease the insulted Aristoteleans.
Detractors of Intelligent design often proceed by showing mathematically that there can be no algorithm capable of classifying signal sources as "intelligent" or "not-intelligent" (for some definition of intelligent). This begs the question. The premise of the Christian supernatural is that this universe is embedded in a larger reality. This does not mean parallel universes or higher dimensions. The traditional metaphor was book and author. Good books like "Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter" are worlds created by their author. The author resides in a larger reality. A better metaphor in the computer age is a simulation or virtual world. Just as the existence of the virtual worlds we create depends on the continued functioning of the computer systems that house them, so our universe depends for its existence on whatever it is in the "more real" world that sustains it as computers sustain our virtual worlds. In turn, that world may be embedded in an even higher reality. Like a story within a story - to use the traditional metaphor. Where does it all end (or start)? The source of all realities and all worlds is God - like in Douglas Hofstadter's "Push and Pop" dialog in "Godel, Escher, Bach".
The "intelligence" of Intelligent Design is presumed to have its source outside of our universe - in the higher reality. A better model of the kind of experiment ID proposes can be illustrated by an online game. Suppose you are playing your favorite online game - which contains many AI players as well as human players. The game provides no explict indication of which avatars are human and which are machine driven. You have no contact with any of the human players except through the game. Would you be able to tell which avatars were controlled by human players, and which were artificial, using only the features of the virtual world and without resorting to any outside communication?
Gentoo is great for a single machine. But I want to install binary packages when they are available. You see, I have to manage 40 machines. Compiling from source on all those machines is not an option. Most don't have a compiler installed (more secure). I simply want to install a package on a prototype machine of a particular OS (AIX,Rh7.3,Rh9 currently), and when I am satisfied, build the SRPM on the other OSes and copy the RPMS to our own little yum update web site so all the other binary only machines can grab them.
Also, what dependency hell? Sure, running the low level RPM command makes you fetch dependencies manually. But when running the high level systems like RedCarpet, Yum, Apt-RPM, etc, it is automatic. What *I* would like to see is for the high level manager to handle source RPMS automatically - downloading and rebuilding them when requested or when no binary is available, and handling build dependencies similarly to install dependencies.
That's what RedHat Enterprise gives you. Unfortunately, the price point is designed for ... the enterprise. If you want a $70 pay once for x years updates, it looks like Suse is your best best. Or, go with Fedora Core for free, but be prepared to upgrade every year. There was also a company that sold RH7.x and RH9 updates for a few dollars a month - I can't remember the name. It was an example of a key business advantage of opensource. When the primary vendor abandons the product, another company can step up to the plate if there is a demand. A sibling post has a link to a volunteer update service for RH9.
I am very skeptical about these new screw in LED bulbs. I understand that the LED itself is very reliable - but what about the power supply?
However, after my post, I realized that you did not actually intend to state a universal negative. You were only trying to point out that a (hypothetical) viewpoint outside of the universe we live in is not the same kind of thing as an observer within our universe. It would not be subject to our natural laws, and therefore of limited use in understanding our laws. The source code to that giant simulation I mentioned could be enlightening - but we might not be capable of understanding it. One can certainly not assume that such an observer would be subject to our natural law as the original poster did.
You know this for a fact? You have directly observed that we are not, in fact, a giant simulation being carried out in a higher level of reality (the real, or more real world)? You can see that we are not 1 of zillions of parallel universes. (Oxymoron, I know.) That is awesome! Now I know there is a God - You! Only Deity could be so intimately aware of everything that is, was or ever will be. Only Deity could be so absolutely, perfectly, amazingly omniscient! Thank you for sharing with us your Divine knowlege, and telling us humble earth dwellers what we could never know for certain on our own.
[... but some other guy says he's God, and disagrees! Hush! Have faith...the universe is all there is. The universe is all there is. The universe is all there is...]
The goal should be to enable paying customers to backup their copies, transform their copies to new media, play it on their home network, car stereo, car network, etc, and let friends listen to a song they love - even if that friend is remote. All this while enabling copyright holders to track down big abusers.
To bring this about, the **AA needs to stop suing their customers, and concentrate for the time being on the big pirates selling $1 professionally stamped DVDs. (Harder than going after the little guys, I know.) At the same time, they need to repair relations with the technical community - so that the technical community is motivated to find technical solutions to common goals - such as those suggested above.
The first step is to have a realistic statement of what they want from the new media - and make sure everyone understands it. When your expectations are realistic, people are more likely to feel guilty when they violate them.
Realistic means that legitimate end users have all the freedoms that digital media can provide. For instance, some DVDs come with software to make a limited number of backup copies. This is helpful - but it addresses only one aspect. The end user might also want to copy the movie he bought to a compressed format for his PDA.
Ultimately, the technical problem is one of tracing authorized copies. We can trace mass produced bullets to box lots to help catch murderers without taking bullets away from legitimate users. We ought to be able to come up with ways to trace digital media copies to track down violators without infringing the freedoms of legitimate users.
Wouldn't a terrorist love to modify the flight program of the unmanned craft to turn it into a cruise missile. No payload required, hitting something at Mach 10 will be quite catastrophic enough. The coexistence of terrorism and increasingly powerful commercial technology is scary.
Suppose I want to be sure to get purchase orders from joe@example.com. I add his domain to my whitelist so it doesn't go through my bayesian filter (in my real life experience, POs tend to look like spam to filters). Unfortunately, I now get 6 spams claiming to be from joe@example.com for every real message from joe@example.com.
So I ask Joe which IP addresses he normally sends mail from, and whitelist his domain only when it comes from those IP addresses. This is really what AOL used to do with high volume mailers (not necessarily spam - think mailing lists). Now I reliably get Joe's POs without all the forgeries.
Now Joe gets a great deal at a new ISP, and all his email IP addresses change. Drat! I missed one of his POs! So Joe and I decide we need an automatic way for him to keep me up to date on which IP addresses are authorized to send his mail. After a handful of false starts and as many months, we come up with.... SPF. (Well, actually some other guys came up with it - I just use it.)
Since SPF is published on DNS, people getting spams claiming to be from me can now check my SPF record and REJECT them - instead of sending me death threats (yes, I really get death threats from irate recipients of spam forged in my name).
This also cuts down on bounces from spammers forging my email and trying to send to non-existent targets. The bounces I still get, I can ignore because I sign my outgoing MAIL FROM with SES (Signed Envelope Sender).
Now, most of the spam I still have to deal with is not from spammers (who are mostly blacklisted now), but from idiots who send replies (instead of a DSN) when they detect a virus that forged my email. Some ninkompoops even send replies for non-existent email targets - usually with some stupid message about how they had to change their email address because of spam.
The cable at ground level needs to be as light as possible to minimize stress at the Clarke point. At the Clarke point, stress is highest, but weight is negligible. Could the problem be solved with a cable that changes its composition? At ground level, the cable would be built from a very light weight material - just strong enough to keep it tethered. At the Clarke point, the cable would be extremely strong - but heavy. Would an optimized tapered cable of this sort do the job without nanotubes?
I hate functional websites covered with art. (Websites designed to display or market art, movies, video games, etc are another matter.) IMO, the best functional web applications use simple color schemes to look professional. They use background colors (colored text rarely looks good) to visually distinguish functional groups on screen. Pastels seem to work best. The general principles are similar to painting the walls in your office.
Our company evaluated the Micro Vax. We all loved it, but our boss felt that DEC was not serious about marketing it, and that we would be stuck with an orphan. Turns out he was right - but I felt like it was a self fulfilling prophecy at the time.
[This is intended to be "funny" or "food for thought". It is not at all clear, to say the least, that the Flood and the Extinction were the same event - even if you believe in the Flood as I do.]
Xen is a VM platform, i.e. it lets you set up multiple virtual machines that run with very little extra overhead. A lot like User Mode Linux, except easier to configure and install.
Win4Lin is a commercial product with similar goals to Xen, but runs Windows under Linux. Unlike VMware, sound and video run at full speed. The catch is that only supported (i.e. "ported") versions of Windows run.
"Porting" the OS means providing drivers and possibly boot code that works with the VM interface instead of with precisely emulated hardware. Win4Lin and Xen do not precisely emulate high speed devices - but provide a device like interface that is efficiently implemented by the VM, but requires custom drivers for the OS in question.
How much more efficient? My Dad had a Windows ME system, and bought an audio recording application for it to archive all our old reel to reel recordings (including one of Elvis Presley jamming with his church buddies singing "Just a Little Talk with Jesus"). Under ME, the audio driver was cruddy and added pops and dropouts. Solution: install RedHat 7.3 and Win4Lin, and run ME in the Win4Lin VM. The Linux sound driver worked flawlessly, and this carried over to the ME application - which now used the Win4Lin sound driver talking to the VM interface talking to the Linux sound driver talking to the hardware.
The ME sound application now works flawlessly in the Win4Lin VM under Linux. Want some MP3s of "Hitler's Airwaves" recorded off the radio on reel to reel?
That is just one of the ways in which the current patent system is broken - especially for software.
This patent is yet another example of patenting something that retailers have done for 100 years (Sears Catalog customized by past orders) - "but do it on the internet!"
The Java Language spec requires that a conforming compiler (not JIT, but source to bytecode compiler) do constant propagation.
Unfortunantly, I don't see any signs of China toning down their military ambitions. What with North Korea and U.S., I don't blame them, but I wish they'd leave Taiwan alone.
The whole problem with stupidly (or evilly) designed e-voting machines is that there is no possibility of a recount. There is no audit trail (e.g. printed ballots in addition to electronic counts). There are no physically stable counters. For example, Viriginia used pinball counters before going to WinVote. India uses battery backed counters in sealed tamper proof enclosures controlled by a few hundred lines of public assembly code.
So, any recommendations for a bank where web bill pay is actually web bill pay and not PC banking with a cruddy interface? BB&T already drank the Microsoft koolaid last year. I am in Fairfax, VA, USA area.