Nope. This isn't talking about a bill before Congress -- it's about a bill before the Washington State Legislature (the WA State Senate to be exact). If you look on the WA State Legislature's website, you'll find that Kirkland has Senators, this bill number works, and all of the other errors you mention aren't errors.
The bill in question has been referred to the Senate Technology & Communications Committee. The sponsors of the bill happen to be all of the members of the committee, which sounds to me as if the Chairman (Sen. Esser, whose district includes Redmond), has smiled on it rather heavily. It has not had a hearing yet, nor is it scheduled for a hearing the next time the committee meets (27 February). There are just a few weeks left for bills to have hearings in the committees, so it's possible that the purpose of the bill has been served just by submitting it, and there is no further interest in actually passing the bill.
OTOH, it just may not have come up for the hearing yet for other reasons, and it's not safe to assume that it's dead at this point in time when the entire committee sponsored it. So, for those who might be interested in knowing what to do, here are some ideas:
Contact your State Senator (especially if he or she is on the T&C Committee).
Contact Senators on the T&C Committee (especially if you have some connection with them -- I've met Val Stevens, although she probably won't remember me, frinstance).
Contact the Committee Staff and ask them if the bill is going to be scheduled for a hearing.
Watch the Bill Information for this bill to see when/if it is scheduled for a hearing.
If you can get to Olympia on the date of any such hearing, show up for the hearing and sign up to speak. Show up early, because those who sign up first get to speak first, and there is only so much time. There are also only so many seats available.
When contacting Senators, please have something short and intelligent to say. If you are going to testify at the hearing, that goes double. MS lobbyists are going to be slick, and if the opponents of the bill look like a bunch of hicks or idiots, the contrast is going to be noticeable. There are more good ideas on how to testify on the legislature's website.
Little trick on filtering out the MSFT spams they send to your hotmail account -- you can't get them designated as spam, but you can use email filters to filter them directly to trash.
The bias problem tends to be mostly self-correcting. You can say whatever you want with as much bias as you wish, but the very next reader might get ticked off and change it with a reversed bias (or just delete what you said). Things presented with more balance are more likely to be left alone (or replaced when removed) than things that are more biased.
Overtly discussing the different points of view is also more likely to happen here than in other similar products IMO.
I don't think you can speak that generally of Wikipedia -- the quality of articles ranges dramatically, but tends to improve with time (even then rather dramatically).
I've written a few articles, contributed to others, and even replace one. One I'm very impressed with is the Vietnam War article. It has had contributions from many people with many different perspectives and experiences with that war -- veterans and peace activists and others. Emotions have run high in the/talk page more than once, but the product has been more balanced and inclusive than anything I've seen on the subject.
But there are lots of annoying little problems -- duplicate articles that need to be merged, different models of organizing and presenting the same information that are going to be a bear to reconcile.
Vandalism is a problem, but not as much as you might thing. I contributed to the "polyhedron" article by resurrecting it (somebody had replaced the text with "concave lenses are cool"). While I had it in front of me, I created a html table for presenting some of the data there.
This is not a project for those with overly huge egos -- at least, not if they're going to try to do much outside the project -- because, over time, others will come by and change your articles, whether a little or a lot.
For those looking for peer-review, keep in mind that there are connections between Wikipedia (which is rather wide open) and Nupedia (which is peer reviewed) in both directions.
I would recommend that everybody look it over and contribute whatever they want to to make it better. But don't expect it to make any other encyclopedia obsolete -- at least, not quite yet.
If the original were to go public domain, it wouldn't harm the copyright of her derivative, but it would leave an alternative form available in the marketplace that would compete with her "value added" version that she couldn't control or eliminate. This would dilute the market for her product, as some people would rather pay a bargain price (or nothing) and will be satisfied with the lesser quality (might, in fact, prefer the "original").
So she does gain by extending copyright, by holding a corner on the legitimate market of this product.
There is no requirement that software written using GPLed products must also be GPLed.
Also, using GPLed code only requires you to release GLPed code that you make available to the public. If you use the product you've included GPLed code in for a private use, you never have to release it.
And you use the idea that someone "has no choice but to use the GPL" in those circumstances as if there was something shocking or novel about that. If I use a closed source product, I have *no choice* but to use the license they use, and there aren't many that give me nearly as many options as the GPL. The fool-proof way to avoid either of these license problems is to write your own product -- otherwise, you're going to have to live with the terms the author of the code wishes to impose on it.
Preferential treatment to your friends is the same thing as preferential treatment to a fellow national, just on a different scale. You do it because they are of your "tribe," something all humans inherently identify with, even though our individual definitions of "tribe" vary.
Frinstance, I can look at you and see you as part of my tribe, because about half my ancestors came from Sweden. And, to some degree I do, just because I saw you identify yourself as a Swede. If you were from the Pacific Nortwest of the US, I would identify with you slightly from that, and we'd have a conversation about what part you were from and where I'm from, and different places and people we might know in common. The tribe are people who are "us," as opposed to "them."
When we take that process to a national level, and create policy, that comes out as a preference for "us," and we will not treat "them" as well as we do "us."
The trick, I think, is going to be helping people see that expanding their personal (and national) definition of tribe works to their benefit and not their detriment. Put that in a bottle and sell it, and we might be on our way to world peace.
As a once and future student, as well as a long-term math tutor, I've had direct and indirect interaction with a fair amount of teachers/professors/lecturers. As a bit of a geek, the last time I started school, I took my laptop with me. I type much faster (and more legibly) than I can write, and I can do more with my notes in a data format than I can on paper, so this was all good. But the darn thing was heavy to haul around all day, the battery is shot, so I had to have access to an outlet, and, as laptops seem to be, it was generally a pain in the butt.
I looked into getting another laptop that would have better stuff, but the pricing was hard to justify. So, for kicks, I looked into PDAs, and found I could get a decent Palm with a portable keyboard for a few hundred bucks. Buying a nice word processor and database program helped a lot too. I can pack the whole thing into my fanny/tummy back (my I-don't-call-it-a-purse) and set up and shut down can be done in less than half a minute each. No wifi, no net browsing, but handy.
I agree that the notion of demanding attention is silly. Good instructors will attract attention by presenting their information in an interesting manner -- usually because they have legitimate interest in their subject matter and their students, and have a real desire to share their excitement with the subject with their students. Good students learn how to tell what they need to pay attention to, what they can space out on. Bad instructors can make interesting subject matter boring, and bad students can be bored by anything.
As long as a student isn't distracting others through their inattention, or taking up space that someone more attentive could otherwise use, I don't see the problem here.
Yes, very much the system is the users and the structures they function in as well as the computers and the structures they function in.
I remember when I started getting involved in the Net back in the days before AOL was there, and I would describe it to people, and some would talk about being more interested in people than computers, so they didn't want to do the Net. I would tell them that the value of the Net was entirely in the way it enables people to connect themselves with other people to communicate and interact.
The hardware and software are channels, but the content of those channels come from people who contribute it (much/most of it without regard to their ability to comprehend the way the hardware and software enable them to do so).
Okay. That makes more sense. Early early Christians were Jews, and the early ones who weren't celebrated Jewish traditions (which was handy, since there weren't any non-Jewish Christian ones around yet).
I'm trying to recall off the top of my head, but wasn't Constantine's "cross" the chi-rho? That wasn't exactly post-persecution, but did mark a watershed in the persecution patterns for Christians.
I would be interested in a source that shows Xmas being an older term than Christmas, but clearly the X was used in old (old old) Christian texts as an abbreviation for Xpi6tos (aka Christos, meaning "annointed", which, in Hebrew is ~Messiach). There were lots of abbreviations and weird tricky conventions in use in those days, because all copying was done by hand and those abbreviations of common words/terms/phrases save a lot of time and writers cramp. Learning how to read in those days was more than learning letters and how to make words out of them -- you had to learn how to tell when one word stopped, because spaces between words, punctuation, case differences, white space and indenting weren't used like they are now, if at all. And then there was the Greek tendency to string together huge sentences with lots of subordinate clauses with the only finite verb the last one in the sentence.
The Good Old Days <tm>.
Christmas isn't all that old a celebration, really. My guess is that there wasn't all that much theological composition going on in Greek in that time-frame
(and how many people will still remember TJ Hooker in 10 more years if they even remember now)?
TJ Hooker will always be remembered by those of us who appreciated this amazingly interesting vehicle for putting young Heather Locklear on two (2) weekly TV Series (on the same network) at the same time. Add a nice "Battle of the Network Stars" (where Heather beat Mr. T in the "Simon Says" competition -- anybody other than me remember how?) and you could get lots of Heather/Stacy/Sammi Jo, and lots was good.
Seriously. You can run both. I've been running d.net and f@h for a couple weeks now with nothing bad happening.
Personally, I'm none too excited about RC5-72, because, in the end, we don't really know anymore than we do now. But OGR-25 actually has some value, so I'm sticking with it and, for the moment, doing a few RC5's just for the heck of it.
You won't climb the stats mountain as quickly doing both, but I'm not a stats hound exactly either.
Re:While you're at it, move to OpenNIC
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I went and checked out OpenNIC a week or two ago, and it looked pretty cool. I set it up on my machine, and I can now reach cool tlds that I used to couldn't (although it can take a couple reloads to do it).
Slight downside -- there doesn't seem to be anything there right now.
But it works just as well as using ICANN's system for my purposes, so I'll keep it this way, and hope that somebody somewhere puts something in all these new tlds that's worth looking at.
It's been about 13 years ago, but I remember an article in Popular Science that was talking about mixed-hydrocarbon fuel cells that would run on gasoline, methanol, ethanol, propane and probably some others. Since then, I've seen very little discussion of fuel cells that wasn't hydrogen based.
If we can have methanol fuel cells to run laptops, is there any particular reason we can't get them sized up to do things like run cars? Methanol's a lot easier to come by than hydrogen, a lot easier to store, yadda yadda. The only downer is that it breathes out CO2 and water, instead of just water. But so do you. Um, and me too.
The whole idea as I understood it was that these things produce electricity lots more efficiently than piston or turbine based generation.
Um, I think he's comparing the use of carbon that's recently been in the atmosphere (plant based) versus adding carbon that's been underground for a long time (oil based).
Also, this CO2 would seem to be pretty easily isolated and clean, for use in stuff like carbonating water, adding to greenhouses maybe, or just storing in calcium carbonate somewhere to keep it out of the atmosphere.
Thinking about that middle idea, I kinda like the idea of pumping the CO2 back into greenhouses used to grow the glucose in, so we're recycling the carbon and outputting the H2. Anybody know if we can conveniently extract glucose from algae? From kelp, maybe?
Maybe I'm missing something, but this sounds distinctly like a Good Thing to me if it can be done economically.
What I wish advertisers would understand is that there's smart advertising and stupid advertising, and attention isn't all that you want to get from someone.
Animated banners, though "eye-catching" are also headache inducing. I would never buy anything from anybody because of one, and would almost as certainly avoid their product because of them. Same thing as spam, and all of the other places I'm finding advertising getting wedged into. If it's annoying, that's going to reflect on the product negatively, and make me less apt to buy it than I was just not knowing about it (if I didn't). Personally, I think there'd be a lot more room for advertising of the "I never knew there was such a thing" type (which is more likely to be effective with me) if the bezillionth different version of "my product is better than that one because I'm cooler" type (which is wasted on me) would across the board cut their budgets in half. I mean, it's not like anyone in the planet hasn't heard of Coca-cola, so how much name id do they need?
Feel free to pass this along to your advertisers who want to use those sorts of things if you wish.
Other than that (and a few other small issues) I'm relatively pleased with your browser. I like it a lot, and I'm planning to get the pay version probably next quarter.
My travel history isn't extensive. However, I was recently given some basic AIDS/HIV training from someone who has travelled through the world, including Africa, and has given AIDS/HIV training to medical people in Africa. That's where I got the information I used.
I understand the notion that "people are people", and I think it's got a lot going for it. However, to claim that there's no difference between my life in the USA and the life of someone in Africa is ludicrous (and I don't think you've done so, here). I don't have national leaders telling me that the reason so many of my countrymen have AIDS is because they are poor, and that their behavior has nothing to do with their infection rate. I don't have armed conflict going on in my country. I have never had to leave my home and move to another country to try to get away from fighting. I do have access to roads that stretch continuously across my country that I can drive with little fear. I have access to electricity 24 hours a day (which may be available in parts of Africa, but is not available to everybody).
All of those issues have contributed to the spread of HIV and complicate trying to provide treatment -- they even make it difficult in using prevention technologies such as latex condoms.
There isn't time to worry about blame in dealing with this disease. Once we have a cure, we will have that luxury. Until then, we need to address and challenge the cultural issues that stand in the way of limiting the spread of the disease. It isn't cultural bigotry to discuss them -- every culture has them.
It's amazing to me how much time people are willing to spend hyping this or that supposed AIDS problem, and how little time people are willing to spend on providing quality information about AIDS. It's also amazing to me the willful blindness most people have about this disease.
The assertion that drug companies are putting their profits ahead of lives in Africa is ludicrous. Pumping out enough AIDS/HIV medications to treat all of the HIV+ people in Africa and shipping it there at cost (without regard to marketing or promotion) would not stop the spread of the disease, nor would it save a significant number of lives. In the US, with a massive medical infrastructure, it is difficult to support the claim that these medications save any lives either. The idea that things would work even this well on a continent with problems of basic distribution and very little infrastructure (not to mention armed revolution) is silly.
The implication is that there is some pill that you take that keeps AIDS at bay indefinitely, and this just isn't the case. A treatment regimen for HIV involves a mixture of pills that have to be taken multiple times a day in a very specific fashion (with food, without food, different times of day, etc.), some of which require special treatment (like refrigeration). Religiously following this regimen may leave an individual with little to no measurable virus, and may slow the destruction of that person's immune system, but it will definitely bring major lifestyle impacts including the very real risk of major side effects which can be more difficult to live with than active HIV (not to mention more deadly). Following the regimen less religiously brings the very real danger of medication resistant virus taking over.
Throwing HIV medications into Africa, under current conditions, would do little to nothing for the masses of HIV+ people there -- those who have a stable enough situation that they can preserve the medications properly are few.
When people start talking about the realities of HIV tests and that they don't reliably show infection for six to twelve months after exposure, which means that having unprotected sex with someone after a few months puts you at risk regardless of how much you trust that person, then we'll have something available which can save lives.
I wasn't aware that he used to edit Sunstone. I did think it was odd, though, when I read _Songmaster_ and found that the title character was gay, and that
Card didn't particularly moralize that point. Is that one of the ones he apologized for?
Small correction -- Anset's only sexual experience was homosexual, but he really didn't have a sexual aspect to his life, so it's hard to reasonably label him as a homosexual. And many Mormons have been uncomfortable with his inclusion of homosexual characters and actions in his stories -- enough so that he wrote an essay on the matter years back to clarify his position on the matter. It might be available somewhere on hatrack.com.
I didn't see a quote in which he was apologizing for any of his work, so I can't comment on whether this was one or not. I found it a very beautiful story, personally.
In general, I think the severe cognitive dissonance experienced by "liberal" Mormons tends to cause them to either become more conservative or drop out of the church. At least, that's been my experience. So it's not surprising that Card would shrink back into the official bounds of behavior for a good LDS man.
I don't think he's ever really been outside the official bounds of behavior for a good LDS man. Not that I'm aware of. He has been well outside the unofficial and cultural bounds of what a good Mormon should be doing on many occasions, and I don't see those stopping. And I think that's a good thing. Shaking people up is a good thing in that regard.
Actually, every character in that book (and all the rest of his) had character flaws -- some of them pretty major. The Mormon characters had just as many as anybody else -- Sister LeSuere, for example.
Lost Boys was as Mormon as it was because it was semi-autobiographical (the short-story version was told in the first person using the names of his actual family). People I know who live in his area actually know the people some of those characters (particularly the Mormon ones) are based on. There was nothing pushy about Mormonism in it, and it is far from a missionary tract. It happens to show the most realistic version of Mormon life of any piece of fiction I'd seen at the point it was written (and I'm not sure I've seen better since).
Scott makes no secret of his religious belief. He doesn't hide it. But that's not the same as attempting to push it down anybody's throat. Even his Mormon-oriented writing is not based in trying to persuade people that Mormonism is true. He expresses his beliefs, and invites people to explore and come to their own conclusions. I've seen people cram their beliefs down others throats -- I've seen it tried around here -- and that's not what he does.
2 questions:
1. If Sunstone changed rather than Card, why does he refer to his "Sunstone phase"?
Obviously both have changed -- everybody has changed over that time. My point was rather that Sunstone has changed since he editted it, as the implication was that he was the one doing all the changing.
2. What exactly has Sunstone become? Since the excommunication of the September 6, it's been more conservative and mainstream than it was in the Card years.
Sunstone's never particularly been my thing, and I've only read a handful of things from it, so I can respond primarily based on comments I recall Scott making about it (and some of those comments were referring to things at Signature Press, so they might not all apply to Sunstone per se). During his time, his interest was in making a place for an honest exploration of the gospel without a lot of the white-washing through traditional forums, rather than a place for attacking the Church which he saw it becoming. YMMV, of course, and my recollection my be faulty, but I think you can find his thoughts about this in A Storyteller in Zion, which has been re-released, apparently
As to whether it's more conservative or mainstream, I can't speak, but certainly those judgments can be as subjective as your opinion about my taste.
That's an interesting idea that makes sense if you haven't followed Scott's writing over the years. In the days when he editted Sunstone, it was very different from what Sunstone became (which is why he left it). He still speaks with essentially the same voice he did then -- willing to explore the truths of his religion with honest eyes, and without losing his faith. The world would be better if many more people were willing to do that than currently do.
I'll assume you're referring to the Hatrack River books as "horrible pieces of uplifting trash", and I can't agree with that. They're humorous, but they also dig into the realities of Mormon life in ways that "uplifting trash" won't. Kathy Kidd's Paradise Vue books are well written and inciteful
I'm sorry you don't like where Scott's going with his writing. Perhaps you aren't his audience anymore. I don't know. I am. I find his writing to still be engaging and interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. This isn't talking about a bill before Congress -- it's about a bill before the Washington State Legislature (the WA State Senate to be exact). If you look on the WA State Legislature's website, you'll find that Kirkland has Senators, this bill number works, and all of the other errors you mention aren't errors.
The bill in question has been referred to the Senate Technology & Communications Committee. The sponsors of the bill happen to be all of the members of the committee, which sounds to me as if the Chairman (Sen. Esser, whose district includes Redmond), has smiled on it rather heavily. It has not had a hearing yet, nor is it scheduled for a hearing the next time the committee meets (27 February). There are just a few weeks left for bills to have hearings in the committees, so it's possible that the purpose of the bill has been served just by submitting it, and there is no further interest in actually passing the bill.
OTOH, it just may not have come up for the hearing yet for other reasons, and it's not safe to assume that it's dead at this point in time when the entire committee sponsored it. So, for those who might be interested in knowing what to do, here are some ideas:
When contacting Senators, please have something short and intelligent to say. If you are going to testify at the hearing, that goes double. MS lobbyists are going to be slick, and if the opponents of the bill look like a bunch of hicks or idiots, the contrast is going to be noticeable. There are more good ideas on how to testify on the legislature's website.
Little trick on filtering out the MSFT spams they send to your hotmail account -- you can't get them designated as spam, but you can use email filters to filter them directly to trash.
It's been working for me for several months now.
The bias problem tends to be mostly self-correcting. You can say whatever you want with as much bias as you wish, but the very next reader might get ticked off and change it with a reversed bias (or just delete what you said). Things presented with more balance are more likely to be left alone (or replaced when removed) than things that are more biased.
Overtly discussing the different points of view is also more likely to happen here than in other similar products IMO.
I don't think you can speak that generally of Wikipedia -- the quality of articles ranges dramatically, but tends to improve with time (even then rather dramatically).
/talk page more than once, but the product has been more balanced and inclusive than anything I've seen on the subject.
I've written a few articles, contributed to others, and even replace one. One I'm very impressed with is the Vietnam War article. It has had contributions from many people with many different perspectives and experiences with that war -- veterans and peace activists and others. Emotions have run high in the
But there are lots of annoying little problems -- duplicate articles that need to be merged, different models of organizing and presenting the same information that are going to be a bear to reconcile.
Vandalism is a problem, but not as much as you might thing. I contributed to the "polyhedron" article by resurrecting it (somebody had replaced the text with "concave lenses are cool"). While I had it in front of me, I created a html table for presenting some of the data there.
This is not a project for those with overly huge egos -- at least, not if they're going to try to do much outside the project -- because, over time, others will come by and change your articles, whether a little or a lot.
For those looking for peer-review, keep in mind that there are connections between Wikipedia (which is rather wide open) and Nupedia (which is peer reviewed) in both directions.
I would recommend that everybody look it over and contribute whatever they want to to make it better. But don't expect it to make any other encyclopedia obsolete -- at least, not quite yet.
If the original were to go public domain, it wouldn't harm the copyright of her derivative, but it would leave an alternative form available in the marketplace that would compete with her "value added" version that she couldn't control or eliminate. This would dilute the market for her product, as some people would rather pay a bargain price (or nothing) and will be satisfied with the lesser quality (might, in fact, prefer the "original").
So she does gain by extending copyright, by holding a corner on the legitimate market of this product.
There is no requirement that software written using GPLed products must also be GPLed.
Also, using GPLed code only requires you to release GLPed code that you make available to the public. If you use the product you've included GPLed code in for a private use, you never have to release it.
And you use the idea that someone "has no choice but to use the GPL" in those circumstances as if there was something shocking or novel about that. If I use a closed source product, I have *no choice* but to use the license they use, and there aren't many that give me nearly as many options as the GPL. The fool-proof way to avoid either of these license problems is to write your own product -- otherwise, you're going to have to live with the terms the author of the code wishes to impose on it.
I must be missing something here.
Preferential treatment to your friends is the same thing as preferential treatment to a fellow national, just on a different scale. You do it because they are of your "tribe," something all humans inherently identify with, even though our individual definitions of "tribe" vary.
Frinstance, I can look at you and see you as part of my tribe, because about half my ancestors came from Sweden. And, to some degree I do, just because I saw you identify yourself as a Swede. If you were from the Pacific Nortwest of the US, I would identify with you slightly from that, and we'd have a conversation about what part you were from and where I'm from, and different places and people we might know in common. The tribe are people who are "us," as opposed to "them."
When we take that process to a national level, and create policy, that comes out as a preference for "us," and we will not treat "them" as well as we do "us."
The trick, I think, is going to be helping people see that expanding their personal (and national) definition of tribe works to their benefit and not their detriment. Put that in a bottle and sell it, and we might be on our way to world peace.
You mean, what if comfort at the center is to be found by exploiting those on the periphery?
I've been bouncing that idea around for a while now. Haven't found a comfortable answer yet.
As a once and future student, as well as a long-term math tutor, I've had direct and indirect interaction with a fair amount of teachers/professors/lecturers. As a bit of a geek, the last time I started school, I took my laptop with me. I type much faster (and more legibly) than I can write, and I can do more with my notes in a data format than I can on paper, so this was all good. But the darn thing was heavy to haul around all day, the battery is shot, so I had to have access to an outlet, and, as laptops seem to be, it was generally a pain in the butt.
I looked into getting another laptop that would have better stuff, but the pricing was hard to justify. So, for kicks, I looked into PDAs, and found I could get a decent Palm with a portable keyboard for a few hundred bucks. Buying a nice word processor and database program helped a lot too. I can pack the whole thing into my fanny/tummy back (my I-don't-call-it-a-purse) and set up and shut down can be done in less than half a minute each. No wifi, no net browsing, but handy.
I agree that the notion of demanding attention is silly. Good instructors will attract attention by presenting their information in an interesting manner -- usually because they have legitimate interest in their subject matter and their students, and have a real desire to share their excitement with the subject with their students. Good students learn how to tell what they need to pay attention to, what they can space out on. Bad instructors can make interesting subject matter boring, and bad students can be bored by anything.
As long as a student isn't distracting others through their inattention, or taking up space that someone more attentive could otherwise use, I don't see the problem here.
Yes, very much the system is the users and the structures they function in as well as the computers and the structures they function in.
I remember when I started getting involved in the Net back in the days before AOL was there, and I would describe it to people, and some would talk about being more interested in people than computers, so they didn't want to do the Net. I would tell them that the value of the Net was entirely in the way it enables people to connect themselves with other people to communicate and interact.
The hardware and software are channels, but the content of those channels come from people who contribute it (much/most of it without regard to their ability to comprehend the way the hardware and software enable them to do so).
Okay. That makes more sense. Early early Christians were Jews, and the early ones who weren't celebrated Jewish traditions (which was handy, since there weren't any non-Jewish Christian ones around yet).
I'm trying to recall off the top of my head, but wasn't Constantine's "cross" the chi-rho? That wasn't exactly post-persecution, but did mark a watershed in the persecution patterns for Christians.
Classicist geeks. Who knew?
I would be interested in a source that shows Xmas being an older term than Christmas, but clearly the X was used in old (old old) Christian texts as an abbreviation for Xpi6tos (aka Christos, meaning "annointed", which, in Hebrew is ~Messiach). There were lots of abbreviations and weird tricky conventions in use in those days, because all copying was done by hand and those abbreviations of common words/terms/phrases save a lot of time and writers cramp. Learning how to read in those days was more than learning letters and how to make words out of them -- you had to learn how to tell when one word stopped, because spaces between words, punctuation, case differences, white space and indenting weren't used like they are now, if at all. And then there was the Greek tendency to string together huge sentences with lots of subordinate clauses with the only finite verb the last one in the sentence.
The Good Old Days <tm>.
Christmas isn't all that old a celebration, really. My guess is that there wasn't all that much theological composition going on in Greek in that time-frame
Why do I feel my first -1 offtopic coming on?
(and how many people will still remember TJ Hooker in 10 more years if they even remember now)?
TJ Hooker will always be remembered by those of us who appreciated this amazingly interesting vehicle for putting young Heather Locklear on two (2) weekly TV Series (on the same network) at the same time. Add a nice "Battle of the Network Stars" (where Heather beat Mr. T in the "Simon Says" competition -- anybody other than me remember how?) and you could get lots of Heather/Stacy/Sammi Jo, and lots was good.
sigh
Choose both.
Seriously. You can run both. I've been running d.net and f@h for a couple weeks now with nothing bad happening.
Personally, I'm none too excited about RC5-72, because, in the end, we don't really know anymore than we do now. But OGR-25 actually has some value, so I'm sticking with it and, for the moment, doing a few RC5's just for the heck of it.
You won't climb the stats mountain as quickly doing both, but I'm not a stats hound exactly either.
I went and checked out OpenNIC a week or two ago, and it looked pretty cool. I set it up on my machine, and I can now reach cool tlds that I used to couldn't (although it can take a couple reloads to do it).
Slight downside -- there doesn't seem to be anything there right now.
But it works just as well as using ICANN's system for my purposes, so I'll keep it this way, and hope that somebody somewhere puts something in all these new tlds that's worth looking at.
It's been about 13 years ago, but I remember an article in Popular Science that was talking about mixed-hydrocarbon fuel cells that would run on gasoline, methanol, ethanol, propane and probably some others. Since then, I've seen very little discussion of fuel cells that wasn't hydrogen based.
If we can have methanol fuel cells to run laptops, is there any particular reason we can't get them sized up to do things like run cars? Methanol's a lot easier to come by than hydrogen, a lot easier to store, yadda yadda. The only downer is that it breathes out CO2 and water, instead of just water. But so do you. Um, and me too.
The whole idea as I understood it was that these things produce electricity lots more efficiently than piston or turbine based generation.
I must be missing something.
Um, I think he's comparing the use of carbon that's recently been in the atmosphere (plant based) versus adding carbon that's been underground for a long time (oil based).
Also, this CO2 would seem to be pretty easily isolated and clean, for use in stuff like carbonating water, adding to greenhouses maybe, or just storing in calcium carbonate somewhere to keep it out of the atmosphere.
Thinking about that middle idea, I kinda like the idea of pumping the CO2 back into greenhouses used to grow the glucose in, so we're recycling the carbon and outputting the H2. Anybody know if we can conveniently extract glucose from algae? From kelp, maybe?
Maybe I'm missing something, but this sounds distinctly like a Good Thing to me if it can be done economically.
What I wish advertisers would understand is that there's smart advertising and stupid advertising, and attention isn't all that you want to get from someone.
Animated banners, though "eye-catching" are also headache inducing. I would never buy anything from anybody because of one, and would almost as certainly avoid their product because of them. Same thing as spam, and all of the other places I'm finding advertising getting wedged into. If it's annoying, that's going to reflect on the product negatively, and make me less apt to buy it than I was just not knowing about it (if I didn't). Personally, I think there'd be a lot more room for advertising of the "I never knew there was such a thing" type (which is more likely to be effective with me) if the bezillionth different version of "my product is better than that one because I'm cooler" type (which is wasted on me) would across the board cut their budgets in half. I mean, it's not like anyone in the planet hasn't heard of Coca-cola, so how much name id do they need?
Feel free to pass this along to your advertisers who want to use those sorts of things if you wish.
Other than that (and a few other small issues) I'm relatively pleased with your browser. I like it a lot, and I'm planning to get the pay version probably next quarter.
My travel history isn't extensive. However, I was recently given some basic AIDS/HIV training from someone who has travelled through the world, including Africa, and has given AIDS/HIV training to medical people in Africa. That's where I got the information I used.
I understand the notion that "people are people", and I think it's got a lot going for it. However, to claim that there's no difference between my life in the USA and the life of someone in Africa is ludicrous (and I don't think you've done so, here). I don't have national leaders telling me that the reason so many of my countrymen have AIDS is because they are poor, and that their behavior has nothing to do with their infection rate. I don't have armed conflict going on in my country. I have never had to leave my home and move to another country to try to get away from fighting. I do have access to roads that stretch continuously across my country that I can drive with little fear. I have access to electricity 24 hours a day (which may be available in parts of Africa, but is not available to everybody).
All of those issues have contributed to the spread of HIV and complicate trying to provide treatment -- they even make it difficult in using prevention technologies such as latex condoms.
There isn't time to worry about blame in dealing with this disease. Once we have a cure, we will have that luxury. Until then, we need to address and challenge the cultural issues that stand in the way of limiting the spread of the disease. It isn't cultural bigotry to discuss them -- every culture has them.
It's amazing to me how much time people are willing to spend hyping this or that supposed AIDS problem, and how little time people are willing to spend on providing quality information about AIDS. It's also amazing to me the willful blindness most people have about this disease.
The assertion that drug companies are putting their profits ahead of lives in Africa is ludicrous. Pumping out enough AIDS/HIV medications to treat all of the HIV+ people in Africa and shipping it there at cost (without regard to marketing or promotion) would not stop the spread of the disease, nor would it save a significant number of lives. In the US, with a massive medical infrastructure, it is difficult to support the claim that these medications save any lives either. The idea that things would work even this well on a continent with problems of basic distribution and very little infrastructure (not to mention armed revolution) is silly.
The implication is that there is some pill that you take that keeps AIDS at bay indefinitely, and this just isn't the case. A treatment regimen for HIV involves a mixture of pills that have to be taken multiple times a day in a very specific fashion (with food, without food, different times of day, etc.), some of which require special treatment (like refrigeration). Religiously following this regimen may leave an individual with little to no measurable virus, and may slow the destruction of that person's immune system, but it will definitely bring major lifestyle impacts including the very real risk of major side effects which can be more difficult to live with than active HIV (not to mention more deadly). Following the regimen less religiously brings the very real danger of medication resistant virus taking over.
Throwing HIV medications into Africa, under current conditions, would do little to nothing for the masses of HIV+ people there -- those who have a stable enough situation that they can preserve the medications properly are few.
When people start talking about the realities of HIV tests and that they don't reliably show infection for six to twelve months after exposure, which means that having unprotected sex with someone after a few months puts you at risk regardless of how much you trust that person, then we'll have something available which can save lives.
<disclaimer> I'm an ex-Mormon... </disclaimer>
Gasp!
I wasn't aware that he used to edit Sunstone. I did think it was odd, though, when I read _Songmaster_ and found that the title character was gay, and that Card didn't particularly moralize that point. Is that one of the ones he apologized for?
Small correction -- Anset's only sexual experience was homosexual, but he really didn't have a sexual aspect to his life, so it's hard to reasonably label him as a homosexual. And many Mormons have been uncomfortable with his inclusion of homosexual characters and actions in his stories -- enough so that he wrote an essay on the matter years back to clarify his position on the matter. It might be available somewhere on hatrack.com.
I didn't see a quote in which he was apologizing for any of his work, so I can't comment on whether this was one or not. I found it a very beautiful story, personally.
In general, I think the severe cognitive dissonance experienced by "liberal" Mormons tends to cause them to either become more conservative or drop out of the church. At least, that's been my experience. So it's not surprising that Card would shrink back into the official bounds of behavior for a good LDS man.
I don't think he's ever really been outside the official bounds of behavior for a good LDS man. Not that I'm aware of. He has been well outside the unofficial and cultural bounds of what a good Mormon should be doing on many occasions, and I don't see those stopping. And I think that's a good thing. Shaking people up is a good thing in that regard.
Actually, every character in that book (and all the rest of his) had character flaws -- some of them pretty major. The Mormon characters had just as many as anybody else -- Sister LeSuere, for example.
Lost Boys was as Mormon as it was because it was semi-autobiographical (the short-story version was told in the first person using the names of his actual family). People I know who live in his area actually know the people some of those characters (particularly the Mormon ones) are based on. There was nothing pushy about Mormonism in it, and it is far from a missionary tract. It happens to show the most realistic version of Mormon life of any piece of fiction I'd seen at the point it was written (and I'm not sure I've seen better since).
Scott makes no secret of his religious belief. He doesn't hide it. But that's not the same as attempting to push it down anybody's throat. Even his Mormon-oriented writing is not based in trying to persuade people that Mormonism is true. He expresses his beliefs, and invites people to explore and come to their own conclusions. I've seen people cram their beliefs down others throats -- I've seen it tried around here -- and that's not what he does.
Obviously both have changed -- everybody has changed over that time. My point was rather that Sunstone has changed since he editted it, as the implication was that he was the one doing all the changing.
2. What exactly has Sunstone become? Since the excommunication of the September 6, it's been more conservative and mainstream than it was in the Card years.Sunstone's never particularly been my thing, and I've only read a handful of things from it, so I can respond primarily based on comments I recall Scott making about it (and some of those comments were referring to things at Signature Press, so they might not all apply to Sunstone per se). During his time, his interest was in making a place for an honest exploration of the gospel without a lot of the white-washing through traditional forums, rather than a place for attacking the Church which he saw it becoming. YMMV, of course, and my recollection my be faulty, but I think you can find his thoughts about this in A Storyteller in Zion, which has been re-released, apparently
As to whether it's more conservative or mainstream, I can't speak, but certainly those judgments can be as subjective as your opinion about my taste.
That's an interesting idea that makes sense if you haven't followed Scott's writing over the years. In the days when he editted Sunstone, it was very different from what Sunstone became (which is why he left it). He still speaks with essentially the same voice he did then -- willing to explore the truths of his religion with honest eyes, and without losing his faith. The world would be better if many more people were willing to do that than currently do.
I'll assume you're referring to the Hatrack River books as "horrible pieces of uplifting trash", and I can't agree with that. They're humorous, but they also dig into the realities of Mormon life in ways that "uplifting trash" won't. Kathy Kidd's Paradise Vue books are well written and inciteful
I'm sorry you don't like where Scott's going with his writing. Perhaps you aren't his audience anymore. I don't know. I am. I find his writing to still be engaging and interesting.