> While it's true that life *as it currently exists* might not be able to survive under a different set of physical laws, who is to say that it couldn't in any given (non-trivial) universe?
Because if the universe had expanded any faster by one part in about 10^50, no stars with heavy elements necessary for life would have formed. Any slower by one part in 10^50, and it would have collapsed on itself.
Try to imagine any kind of life existing in either of those two cases.:)
I think the days could have had some overlap. They are finite periods of time, but with no super-well-defined beginning or end.
The Genesis account also is not comprehensive, describing ALL life.
Also, although most translations say of the various days "evening and morning, thenth day," a more accurate translation is "evening and morning, anth day." That is the meaning of the text, and also can give some license to make them overlap.
The general flow of the Genesis account is quite good, though. It tell us the universe had a beginning, whereas the people of the day probably would have thought it existed forever. It tells us the early earth was void, certainly true in the Hadean era. It then tells us the Spirit was moving upon the waters, which I believe is when He first created life.
It also implies the early earth was dark, which can be verified with science. The collision that produced the Moon created a thick atmosphere around the earth for some time. When God says "let there be light," it is referring to that thick atmosphere starting to dissapate. See also Job 38:9, which talks about the earth being covered with thick clouds.
Then you have the formation of a stable water cycle and plate tectonics forming the continents (days 2 and 3 of Creation).
Then God creates more advanced life, both on the continents and the oceans.
The 4th day still causes confusion. It says God made the sun, moon, and stars. Obviously, the most obvious interpretation would contradict science. However, the word "made" is originally in an imperfect tense, implying that these bodies were a done deal possibly before Day 4. In fact, Genesis 1:1 tells us they were made "in the beginning." On Day 4, the atmosphere was completely cleared out so an observer on the earth could have a good view. They became useful for marking seasons.
> If the chances of a life supporting universe are slim, what are the chances of a magical consciousness with omnipotent powers of control and influence supporting universe?
I don't know, because it seems as though NOTHING should exist.
Certainly, God exists outside of our normal space-time dimensions, which is an area that humans do not and cannot understand. I am just going by evidence, which I believe *strongly* supports the existence of God.
> raw leap of faith in absolutely no evidence supporting creationist stories
Don't know where to begin with that one. I agree that there's no evidence if you're talking about a Creation in 6 literal days 6000 years ago. But I have no problem fitting the Bible with modern cosmology and geology.
I would even say that the Bible taught the Big Bang 2500 years before science discovered it.:)
"...by His understanding He stretched out the heavens." (Jeremiah 51:15) One of many verses that talk about the heavens expanding, and this one emphasizes *understanding*. Given what we've learned recently about the fine tunedness of the universe, it implies a heck of a lot of understanding to me!
Actually, a testable hypothesis of life's origins as predicted by the Bible (in an old earth creationist context) vs. the assumptions of naturalistic evolution is precisely the subject of the excellent book Origins of Life, just published last year and containing fairly up-to-date info. This is NOT your daddy's creationist drivel.
> A bigger "leap of faith" than a supernatural all powerful entitiy that controls and pushes everything through a divine plan?
Actually, yes. The universe is fine tuned to many, many orders of magnitude greater than the best possible human engineering. If any physical constants were different by one part in ten to the umpteenth power, no life of any form could have existed at any time or place in the universe.
If you want to read books, I highly recommend these two:
Origins of Life takes a good look at how life appeared on early earth -- and compares predictions based on the naturalistic model vs. what we should expect if the God of the Bible created life. It points out that life appeared rather quickly after the end of the late great bombardment, and appeared suddenly. It looks at the lack of evidence for the prebiotic soup that the naturalistic model needs. And lots of other issues!
I'm not saying God could not have used evolution; maybe He did in some cases (though I tend to prefer special creation of various species over the eons). But to put your faith in the naturalistic model is a MUCH bigger stretch than believing in the God of the Bible. Especially since we as Christians see His hand not only in the formation of the universe, but at work in peoples' lives and around the world today.:)
Far better than that "gap theory" is the "day age" theory. The Hebrew word translated to "day" in Genesis 1 is the ONLY ancient Hebrew word that COULD have been used to describe a long but finite period of time.
In that context, with days being eons, Genesis 1 fits quite nicely into modern cosmology and geology. I could explain further, but no time right now.
The idea of a global flood came from a hyperliteral interpretation of some words in the original that were mistranslated into English. Studying everything the Bible actually says about the Flood clearly refutes its globality.
> I've heard speculation that the first microbes might have come to Earth from Mars
There are numerous problems with that theory. Mars was only debatably suitable for life production for a short time around 3.8 billion years ago. Before that, it was affected by the late heavy bombardment, as was earth, that would have made any form of life impossible. Not long after that, the atmosphere on Mars became such that it would have not been able to produce life -- any liquid water would have boiled due to the low atmospheric pressure. Harmful rays from the sun also would have been a far greater problem than on earth. Life would have only had a few tens of millions of years maximum to form and get on an earth-bound rock. Plus, Mars contains even less evidence of proper chemical conditions for origins of life than does early earth.
> I think if you boot the install passing it reiserfs, you can use reiserfs.
That was the case with RHEL 3 and still is with Fedora, but RHEL 4 has completely removed Reiser. You will not even see reiserfs-utils in the package list.
Other than that I suppose you're right, especially if ext3 can now handle directories with thousands of small files as well as Reiser.
You would think that a serious enterprise Linux distro would support filesystems beyond ext3.
Ext3 is good and stable and all, and is fine for pretty much any general purpose use. But Reiserfs and XFS both have advantages in certain areas. Reiserfs for tons of small files (like mail spools) and XFS for monster files. Either of those could have uses in the enterprise.
So I'm a little disappointed that RHEL4 only supports ext3, and even removed Reiser from the distribution entirely. We were going to use Reiser for our new RHEL based mail server, but now it will have to be ext3.
Seeing the table layout of the page can be accomplished with.... I *think* it's the Web Developer Bar extension, or something like that. I have it installed at work but not here, or I could say the exact name. But it is very possible, and that extension rocks!
It gives you a bar where you can display borders between block elements, HTML "id" tags, HTTP request headers, lots of stuff!
Nearly everyone adds retarded rules that ruin the game, such as the Free Parking jackpot. The FP is supposed to be a "free landing space" according to the rules. The FP Jackpot adds far too much money to the game's economy, adds too much luck to the game, and makes the game take longer. (Playing it right, I've had full games as short as an hour.)
Also, be sure to use the auction rule, which many people ignore. If anyone lands on a property and refuses to buy it, it gets auctioned to the highest bidder.
Also know about hosing shortages. There can be 32 houses and 12 hotels in the game but no more. (Many people naively use other objects for houses and hotels when they run out.)
Get the book The Monopoly Companion, endorsed by Parker Brothers. It has a very good, thorough explanation of the rules.
Hate to admit it, but this guy is right. Sorry! really is a great game. It's quick, you can play it with anyone, and if you get into it your emotions can really roll with your fortune, which can change quickly!
Aggravation is a (possibly older, not sure) similar game which is also good, but not quite as many twists as Sorry!.
I wonder what's wrong with Ecuador, that it's so much more. We have a lot more people than CR, and there are plenty of tech-saavy people, many with money.
Crimony, I only have 128k down/64k up here in Ecuador. You can get faster but you pay BIG time. Even for this I pay $85/month. What does your 512/128 cost in CR? Just curious.
Software needs to be installed/upgraded/removed in exactly one place, with a simple RPM command. No viruses (nobody but IT has root). Everyone has a piece of junk desktop computer with no movable parts (hard drive) that can break. Backup is much simpler than backing up workstation HDs.
Then spend all day reading Slashdot and STILL save the company money.:)
> However, overall, the system doesn't seem like it would transfer to print well. I suppose the only way to find out is to try it.
Great Scott, another reason to be amazed at this. I didn't think it would print well either.
Just tried the print preview in Mozilla. Not only did the map show up well, but the navigation controls and most of the rest of the cruft on the page were GONE!!!
They must have used the CSS media type to hide some elements when printing. Which is what everyone should do instead of having stupid "click here for a printer friendly version" links.
Now, it looks like the main weakness of the thing is that you apparently can't email links to map directions or locations. Can't copy URLs. Also, you apparently can't save PNG images, but you could get around that with a screen capture program.
I think there are already reasonable alternatives to Exchange on Linux, though they are not necessarily free.
My organization will in a month or two migrate from our #^$#@% Exchange 5.5 server to Bynari Insight Server. It uses open source components (Postfix, OpenLDAP, etc) and some proprietary components to put together a pretty good set of features. Our IT director did a TCO study, and Bynari (along with all the other Linux options) costs a small fraction of what Exchange would cost. And we think it will do what we need.
Also, this is supported software. Their tech support rocks. They've gone way out of their way to accommodate our demented testing and questions, before we spent a cent! Try that with anything Microsoft.
At first, we'll likely use their web client for calendar/groupware functions, but eventually they say it will support iCal support, which would enable using it with Sunbird. I'm certainly looking forward to that.
There is reason to believe that there will be a truly Free/OSS groupware server on the level of Apache in the next couple years. Until then, Bynari is a very good choice IMHO.
I *did* specify Exchange 5.5, which certainly does suck. I did not specifically say that current Exchange servers suck. However, I don't like the way they work. I would much rather have a mail server that keeps its data store in a way that can be freely accessible with open source software. Like Postfix...
XP may be technically good, but doesn't freedom and openness mean anything? In order to liberate the computer industry from a control-freak monopoly, as many of us as possible need to put up with any inconveniences of Linux relative to Windows (which are getting fewer every month) until Linux has enough market share to be taken seriously. And we're almost there, don't quit now!!!!
As for Exchange, I recently had to suffer (and that is an understatement) some Exchange 5.5 administration. What an utterly horrid pile of tripe! Fortunately, we will be moving to Bynari Insight Server on Linux within a month or two.
Slashdot Mirror
> While it's true that life *as it currently exists* might not be able to survive under a different set of physical laws, who is to say that it couldn't in any given (non-trivial) universe?
:)
Because if the universe had expanded any faster by one part in about 10^50, no stars with heavy elements necessary for life would have formed. Any slower by one part in 10^50, and it would have collapsed on itself.
Try to imagine any kind of life existing in either of those two cases.
I think the days could have had some overlap. They are finite periods of time, but with no super-well-defined beginning or end.
The Genesis account also is not comprehensive, describing ALL life.
Also, although most translations say of the various days "evening and morning, the nth day," a more accurate translation is "evening and morning, a nth day." That is the meaning of the text, and also can give some license to make them overlap.
The general flow of the Genesis account is quite good, though. It tell us the universe had a beginning, whereas the people of the day probably would have thought it existed forever. It tells us the early earth was void, certainly true in the Hadean era. It then tells us the Spirit was moving upon the waters, which I believe is when He first created life.
It also implies the early earth was dark, which can be verified with science. The collision that produced the Moon created a thick atmosphere around the earth for some time. When God says "let there be light," it is referring to that thick atmosphere starting to dissapate. See also Job 38:9, which talks about the earth being covered with thick clouds.
Then you have the formation of a stable water cycle and plate tectonics forming the continents (days 2 and 3 of Creation).
Then God creates more advanced life, both on the continents and the oceans.
The 4th day still causes confusion. It says God made the sun, moon, and stars. Obviously, the most obvious interpretation would contradict science. However, the word "made" is originally in an imperfect tense, implying that these bodies were a done deal possibly before Day 4. In fact, Genesis 1:1 tells us they were made "in the beginning." On Day 4, the atmosphere was completely cleared out so an observer on the earth could have a good view. They became useful for marking seasons.
> If the chances of a life supporting universe are slim, what are the chances of a magical consciousness with omnipotent powers of control and influence supporting universe?
:)
I don't know, because it seems as though NOTHING should exist.
Certainly, God exists outside of our normal space-time dimensions, which is an area that humans do not and cannot understand. I am just going by evidence, which I believe *strongly* supports the existence of God.
> raw leap of faith in absolutely no evidence supporting creationist stories
Don't know where to begin with that one. I agree that there's no evidence if you're talking about a Creation in 6 literal days 6000 years ago. But I have no problem fitting the Bible with modern cosmology and geology.
I would even say that the Bible taught the Big Bang 2500 years before science discovered it.
"...by His understanding He stretched out the heavens." (Jeremiah 51:15) One of many verses that talk about the heavens expanding, and this one emphasizes *understanding*. Given what we've learned recently about the fine tunedness of the universe, it implies a heck of a lot of understanding to me!
Actually, a testable hypothesis of life's origins as predicted by the Bible (in an old earth creationist context) vs. the assumptions of naturalistic evolution is precisely the subject of the excellent book Origins of Life, just published last year and containing fairly up-to-date info. This is NOT your daddy's creationist drivel.
> A bigger "leap of faith" than a supernatural all powerful entitiy that controls and pushes everything through a divine plan?
:)
Actually, yes. The universe is fine tuned to many, many orders of magnitude greater than the best possible human engineering. If any physical constants were different by one part in ten to the umpteenth power, no life of any form could have existed at any time or place in the universe.
If you want to read books, I highly recommend these two:
Origins of Life takes a good look at how life appeared on early earth -- and compares predictions based on the naturalistic model vs. what we should expect if the God of the Bible created life. It points out that life appeared rather quickly after the end of the late great bombardment, and appeared suddenly. It looks at the lack of evidence for the prebiotic soup that the naturalistic model needs. And lots of other issues!
Creator and the Cosmos looks at the extreme fine-tunedness of the universe.
I'm not saying God could not have used evolution; maybe He did in some cases (though I tend to prefer special creation of various species over the eons). But to put your faith in the naturalistic model is a MUCH bigger stretch than believing in the God of the Bible. Especially since we as Christians see His hand not only in the formation of the universe, but at work in peoples' lives and around the world today.
Far better than that "gap theory" is the "day age" theory. The Hebrew word translated to "day" in Genesis 1 is the ONLY ancient Hebrew word that COULD have been used to describe a long but finite period of time.
In that context, with days being eons, Genesis 1 fits quite nicely into modern cosmology and geology. I could explain further, but no time right now.
You're right. I am a Christian with fairly conservative views of the Bible, and I would love to see all of them!
Granted, I do believe in the Big Bang and an old earth, but I have found perfectly good reasons from the Bible for that belief, not just from science.
That might fit reasonably well with the Bible, which does not in any way teach a global flood.
The idea of a global flood came from a hyperliteral interpretation of some words in the original that were mistranslated into English. Studying everything the Bible actually says about the Flood clearly refutes its globality.
> I've heard speculation that the first microbes might have come to Earth from Mars
There are numerous problems with that theory. Mars was only debatably suitable for life production for a short time around 3.8 billion years ago. Before that, it was affected by the late heavy bombardment, as was earth, that would have made any form of life impossible. Not long after that, the atmosphere on Mars became such that it would have not been able to produce life -- any liquid water would have boiled due to the low atmospheric pressure. Harmful rays from the sun also would have been a far greater problem than on earth. Life would have only had a few tens of millions of years maximum to form and get on an earth-bound rock. Plus, Mars contains even less evidence of proper chemical conditions for origins of life than does early earth.
8) Loose support by Red Hat, which is why we're paying for the freeking thing...
> I think if you boot the install passing it reiserfs, you can use reiserfs.
That was the case with RHEL 3 and still is with Fedora, but RHEL 4 has completely removed Reiser. You will not even see reiserfs-utils in the package list.
Other than that I suppose you're right, especially if ext3 can now handle directories with thousands of small files as well as Reiser.
You would think that a serious enterprise Linux distro would support filesystems beyond ext3.
Ext3 is good and stable and all, and is fine for pretty much any general purpose use. But Reiserfs and XFS both have advantages in certain areas. Reiserfs for tons of small files (like mail spools) and XFS for monster files. Either of those could have uses in the enterprise.
So I'm a little disappointed that RHEL4 only supports ext3, and even removed Reiser from the distribution entirely. We were going to use Reiser for our new RHEL based mail server, but now it will have to be ext3.
Seeing the table layout of the page can be accomplished with .... I *think* it's the Web Developer Bar extension, or something like that. I have it installed at work but not here, or I could say the exact name. But it is very possible, and that extension rocks!
It gives you a bar where you can display borders between block elements, HTML "id" tags, HTTP request headers, lots of stuff!
... but learn how to play it RIGHT!
Nearly everyone adds retarded rules that ruin the game, such as the Free Parking jackpot. The FP is supposed to be a "free landing space" according to the rules. The FP Jackpot adds far too much money to the game's economy, adds too much luck to the game, and makes the game take longer. (Playing it right, I've had full games as short as an hour.)
Also, be sure to use the auction rule, which many people ignore. If anyone lands on a property and refuses to buy it, it gets auctioned to the highest bidder.
Also know about hosing shortages. There can be 32 houses and 12 hotels in the game but no more. (Many people naively use other objects for houses and hotels when they run out.)
Get the book The Monopoly Companion, endorsed by Parker Brothers. It has a very good, thorough explanation of the rules.
Hate to admit it, but this guy is right. Sorry! really is a great game. It's quick, you can play it with anyone, and if you get into it your emotions can really roll with your fortune, which can change quickly!
Aggravation is a (possibly older, not sure) similar game which is also good, but not quite as many twists as Sorry!.
*sob*
I wonder what's wrong with Ecuador, that it's so much more. We have a lot more people than CR, and there are plenty of tech-saavy people, many with money.
Crimony, I only have 128k down/64k up here in Ecuador. You can get faster but you pay BIG time. Even for this I pay $85/month. What does your 512/128 cost in CR? Just curious.
Either that or they just invalidated Microsoft's .Net trademark since MS didn't enforce it by coming after them. :)
That would be sort of funny.
> Your ID is not low.
:D
Neither is yours, you newbie!
Simple. Switch as many people as possible to linux terminals with the Linux Terminal Server Project.
:)
Software needs to be installed/upgraded/removed in exactly one place, with a simple RPM command. No viruses (nobody but IT has root). Everyone has a piece of junk desktop computer with no movable parts (hard drive) that can break. Backup is much simpler than backing up workstation HDs.
Then spend all day reading Slashdot and STILL save the company money.
> However, overall, the system doesn't seem like it would transfer to print well. I suppose the only way to find out is to try it.
Great Scott, another reason to be amazed at this. I didn't think it would print well either.
Just tried the print preview in Mozilla. Not only did the map show up well, but the navigation controls and most of the rest of the cruft on the page were GONE!!!
They must have used the CSS media type to hide some elements when printing. Which is what everyone should do instead of having stupid "click here for a printer friendly version" links.
Now, it looks like the main weakness of the thing is that you apparently can't email links to map directions or locations. Can't copy URLs. Also, you apparently can't save PNG images, but you could get around that with a screen capture program.
I think there are already reasonable alternatives to Exchange on Linux, though they are not necessarily free.
My organization will in a month or two migrate from our #^$#@% Exchange 5.5 server to Bynari Insight Server. It uses open source components (Postfix, OpenLDAP, etc) and some proprietary components to put together a pretty good set of features. Our IT director did a TCO study, and Bynari (along with all the other Linux options) costs a small fraction of what Exchange would cost. And we think it will do what we need.
Also, this is supported software. Their tech support rocks. They've gone way out of their way to accommodate our demented testing and questions, before we spent a cent! Try that with anything Microsoft.
At first, we'll likely use their web client for calendar/groupware functions, but eventually they say it will support iCal support, which would enable using it with Sunbird. I'm certainly looking forward to that.
There is reason to believe that there will be a truly Free/OSS groupware server on the level of Apache in the next couple years. Until then, Bynari is a very good choice IMHO.
I *did* specify Exchange 5.5, which certainly does suck. I did not specifically say that current Exchange servers suck. However, I don't like the way they work. I would much rather have a mail server that keeps its data store in a way that can be freely accessible with open source software. Like Postfix...
XP may be technically good, but doesn't freedom and openness mean anything? In order to liberate the computer industry from a control-freak monopoly, as many of us as possible need to put up with any inconveniences of Linux relative to Windows (which are getting fewer every month) until Linux has enough market share to be taken seriously. And we're almost there, don't quit now!!!!
As for Exchange, I recently had to suffer (and that is an understatement) some Exchange 5.5 administration. What an utterly horrid pile of tripe! Fortunately, we will be moving to Bynari Insight Server on Linux within a month or two.
Native ALSA would be nice, but I have ALSA compiled with the OSS compatibility layer, and Skype works fine.