Just tried the new version. (Would have earlier, but my vastly overpriced 128k cable modem was down most of the evening since I posted last.)
IT WORKS without me needing to be root! Woo Hoo!
Thanks folks!
One other amusing tidbit -- it costs about 16 cents a minute to call Ecuadorian cell phones with this thing. Costs about 28 cents via an Ecuadorian land line.
> Skype brings Yet Another Voice Chat program to Linux
The difference is that Skype is the first one that lets me call regular telephones in the States from Ecuador for 2.3 cents a minute. The competitors in that area only support 'Doze (and maybe Mac, dunno).
I don't particularly hate Real, but they can be annoying at times.
I just discovered Skype about a week ago. I was thrilled upon seeing that there was a Linux version, even if beta. I live in Ecuador and badly wanted a way to call the States cheap, but was unwilling to put Windows on my computer for that purpose.
Experiences: Downloaded their version from skype.com. Ran it. It instantly hung on the registration screen. Ran it as root, and that worked.
Then realized that it was in Gentoo's portage. Emerged it. It started OK, but crashed immediately upon trying to make a call.
Went back to the first version I had downloaded, running as root, and everything worked fine!
Normally, there's little I hate more than running closed-source software as root, but I'll forgive them this time since 1) it's a beta, 2) they're bringing a valuable service to Linux, and 3) from what I can tell, they are a reputable company with a reputation to tarnish if it did something bad to my box. (Also, my personal box isn't *that* important anyway, and could be re-installed worst case scenario.)
I will try this new version tonight. If the issues are fixed and I can run as non-root, I'll be very happy! If not, I'll be mildly annoyed but still thankful.
Lots of opinions here. Some say "there's no best choice" or recommend one of any number of johny-come-lately distros. Some recommend clones of Red Hat enterprise.
I would say that for serious enterprise use, the reality is that the "best" is a toss-up between Red Hat and Novell's enterprise offerings. They have the support that enterprises need. Most of the others don't. Debian could be good if it were supported by the likes of Oracle AND had more frequent updates, but quite frankly, the delays in the Sarge release has cost them most of their credibility in my book.
I wanted to recommend Debian stable to my organization, but the current version is so ancient I could not dream of it before the Sarge release. Wouldn't have mattered, because most people here know Red Hat/RPM and they wanted to stick with something that uses RPMs. That doesn't have to be an issue for everyone, but it was for the management here.
Why I say Red Hat or Novell: What they charge is reasonable. I work for a non-profit organization without tons of money, but we will soon be buying at least two contracts for RHEL support in this one location alone. We have offices around the world, and others may also buy RHEL, though some may stick with CentOS. We are willing to buy the RHEL contracts because they provide a solid system at a reasonable price. We will know they can support us if we need it.
I'm not sure if there's any enormous reason to choose either RH or Novell above the other one, but I am confident that those two are the best "serious" work distributions right now.
Now, for less important projects and hacks and such, any of Gentoo, Debian, Mandrake, Ubuntu, etc. would be fine. I'm talking mission critical servers.
> Fatwas aren't issued to anyone who questions Islam, but the Ayatollah of Iran said Salman Rushdie should be killed for purposely insulting the religion. That was his view, and other countries didn't second him.
I'm sure it depends on the location you're talking about. I have heard of quite a number of cases where fatwas were indeed issued for anyone who questions Islam or blasphemes Mohammad. Depends on how radical the government is. Where there is Islamic Sharia law, it is likely to happen. Even where fatwas are not issued, Muslim mobs regularly, in many countries, give Christians and other non-Muslims extreme grief... things like burning churches and homes and often slaughtering people.
Here's how I understand the difference between Christianity and Islam in regards to violence.
The Bible does have some specific instances in the past where God commanded His people to slaughter their "enemies," the tribes that inhabited the promised land of Canaan. One verse specifically says that it's not because of the goodness of the Israelites that He allowed that, but due to the extreme wickedness of the people in that land. The Bible is clear from front to back that rebellion against God will be punished, in this life and/or in eternity. The attacks God commanded in the Bible were for His specific purpose at that time.
Although Christians perhaps can't rule out the possibility of God asking something like that in the future (and indeed it may happen in the end times), Jesus makes it clear that that is not how we are to live our lives. We are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, not attack and kill them.
The Koran does seem to give a general command to Muslims to attack infidels. However, my understanding is that the definition of "infidel" historically has not included other believers in the monotheistic God (Jews and Christians), but mainly atheists (i.e. most of the Slashdot crowd:-) ). So, why have Muslims departed from this and are going after Christians and Jews?
So I have to agree with the grandparent troll that from everything I've seen, Islam is NOT a religion of peace. Of course, they have to make it look like it is in the United States and other areas where they are not dominant. But I have no doubt that if they converted most of the US to Islam, they would start pulling stunts that are common in, say, Pakistan today.
I've thought about this a good deal but haven't started anything yet.
Most of my taxes are simple except for a Schedule D for stock/option trades, which can be a pain in the arse by pen and paper. I keep my trades in Gnumeric, and think there should be a program to import Gnumeric (or, better, an OASIS format spreadsheet) and spit out a Schedule D and any D-1s.
I've been wanting to write a program to do exactly that, but the biggest holdup is the lack of a Free library that can write arbitrary strings to arbitrary locations on PDF pages (the downloadable IRS forms) and generate a PDF containing the D and any needed D1s. Anyone have an easy solution to this? It's not something I want to spend a great deal of time on right now, but if it's there, I'll do it. Perhaps convert the PDFs to PostScript and modify the PostScript, but I don't know PS...
Anyway, once something like this was accomplished, it should be relatively easy to expand it to other tax forms for other purposes, and eventually fill in the complete 1040. We don't need to do it all in one year... just get a usable base that helps some people, and add to it every year so that it's more and more complete.
> (e.g. does that mean that literally everyone except Noah (and remarkably his sons +sons wives) was evil and deserved to die, including women and babies?)
well, this conversation is old enough and this is deep enough that the moderators probably won't get to modding this down, so...:-)
I think that is what the Bible says, yes. Genesis 6:5: "Yahweh saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." Murder was almost certainly rampant in those days, which is why God specifically commanded capital punishment for murder as a post-flood ordinance. This gave God a chance to "reset" the world and start over. Yes, things have been bad since then, but not THAT bad.
I believe the Flood account in the Bible, and that it accomplished what God willed it to accomplish. The point is that since men only lived in the Messopotamia plain at that time, it did not need to be truly worldwide in order to accomplish that.:-)
Only problem with Kylix is that it's dead as a doorknob and doesn't work well (if at all) on recent distributions.
Borland could have had a hit with this one, but they screwed the pooch royally. Yet Another Reason(tm) why you should never depend on non-Free software for anything important.
I'm not going to get into a long debate here, not worth it. Will just try to briefly answer your question.
> What about that makes you believe that the god described in the Bible is responsible, though?
For starters, I think it's reasonable (but cannot prove) that for such longshot odds of the Big Bang producing a universe that can support intelligent life, Something intelligent must have been behind it. I apologize to atheists who will find this concept difficult to grasp, but undirected explosions (which the BB would be if they were right) do not tend to result in systems that are fine-tuned by hundreds of orders of magnitude more accurately than the best possible human engineering.
Given that such a Being was behind the Big Bang, we can start to speculate about His character. Obviously, He has wisdom beyond measure. He has infinite power beyond anything we could comprehend -- He can create time/space dimensions at will! Finally, we can see that He also designed humans. The heart, for example, is one of the most efficient possible pumps, and the brain is amazing.
Now, would Someone like this want to simply allow for humans' existence, then un-involve Himself, as deists suggest? I don't think so; why would He have bothered? I think (but cannot prove) that it's reasonable that this Person would want humans to know something about Himself.
So we can begin to look at ways God may have revealed Himself. Are they consistent? Are they reasonable? Do they truly satisfy?
1) Yes, I've seen long lists of "Bible contradictions." As someone who has reasonable knowledge of the Bible myself, though, I am amazed at how consistent its entire message is, given the fact that it was written by dozens of humans over thousands of years -- humans from all walks of life and in three continents. Most of these "contradictions" were conjured up by folks who, frankly, don't understand the message of the Bible and/or are deliberately trying to make it look bad. Yes, there are a few things that appear to be real contradictions; these may well be a result of ancient memorization practices and/or the fact that some of the Bible is based on eyewitness accounts (which God may have inspired them to write but could be off in minor details).
2) The Bible has some pretty outrageous claims by the modern world's standards. But are they reasonable? Just because it claims that Jesus did miracles and claimed to be the only way to God the Father does not in itself mean that it isn't true. "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel does a reasonable job of showing that the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus Christ are reasonable, even if not proven.
3) What is the fruit of a given belief? Does it satisfy your inmost being? I think it was Blaise Pascal who said there's a "God-shaped hole in everyone's heart." What fills it? Does going to church or doing good works fill it? No. I and many Christians could easily testify that only a personal relationship with Jesus Christ fits the bill. Beyond simply "filling the hole," we can testify that Jesus Christ lives in us and has been faithful through the ages. Can I prove this scientifically? No. But His presense in us is just as good. In fact, it has a way of making gigabytes of intellectual arguments against His existence look rather shallow.:)
I'm not Strobel, but what the heck, I'll bite. (I have read the book though... thought it was pretty good but certainly not exhaustive.)
> 1. How can we know Jesus' miracles were genuine, when Paul himself later in the epistles admits that some charlatans can perform miracles? Whar *is* a miracle if both humans and demons can fake it?
We look at the fruits of those doing the miracles. Jesus said we could recognize prophets by their fruits; see Matthew 7:16. Anyone who performs miracles according to God's power will produce the fruit of the Spirit -- love, joy, peace, patience, etc (Galatians 5:22-23) Someone who does miracles that do not lead to these fruits are doing so by the power of Satan.
> 2. How come miracles aren't happening today? I know several arguments for why God wouldn't perform a miracle on demand
Click on my siggy, go down to the point "Jesus Christ: the anser for physical sickness"
> 3. If the evidence was so compelling, how come most Jews of the time didn't convert? The Jews have the same God, same history, same creation and Messiah story, they should have been the most likely people to switch, but the Gentiles switched faster.
They also rejected and tortured and killed their own prophets. The Jews did not exactly have a stellar record of believing what their God told them.
> Christian's believe that in addition to there being a God, there is also Satan.
Right.
> While God is more powerful then Satan, Satan is capable of causing great harm.
Absolutely.
> Any negative events that occur are attributed to Satan, not God.
That might be stretching it. Certainly many/most, but I'm not sure I'd say any/all.
As for the tsunami, I would say it's likely simply a result of how God created the earth (earthquake activity was and is fairly necessary for things to be "just right" on Earth's surface for our form of life) and the fact that the current fallen world will see trouble, as opposed to the future perfect one He has promised.
As others have noted, some good has come from it. In Sri Lanka (and probably other places), enemies are now working together for common good. God loves that sort of thing! I'm sure a lot of survivors in the region are now more aware of the frailty of life and are more open to God's message. Sure, a lot of bad happened, but I believe in a God who is capable of bringing good from bad.
Well said. As a Christian it's my job to be a witness for Christ, to anyone who cares. Conversion is the job of the Holy Spirit, not me. If someone doesn't want to talk about it, I'll leave them alone. I may pray for them, but I won't force anything, because that's not God's way. Jesus never forced anything on anyone when He walked the earth, so why should we?
> The odds of that happening by chance are estimated at 1 to 10^50.
And that isn't all. If one of any number of physical constants were different by one part in ten to the umpteenth power (where "umpteenth" can range from about 10 to about 100), life could not have existed in any form at any time nor place in the universe.
Stuff to think about. As for me, I think it's strong evidence that God was behind the Big Bang.
I don't remember too many details, except that the successor to the ENIAC (forget name now) helped CBS (I think) predict the winner in 1952. Anyone remember more?
Wow, thanks for sharing that. I have always loved watching O'Reilly, and I can honestly say he's about the only thing I miss watching now that I don't have a TV. But if what you said is true, my respect for FOX News just went down the toilet.
I support Bush for practical reasons, but there is a lot to like about Badnarik and America needs to hear about him. If FOX, claiming to be "fair and balanced" intentionally pulls that kind of stunt, they should be horribly ashamed of themselves.
I wouldn't worry about all that stuff either, but mainly because most of Luke 21 was fulfilled in the same generation as Jesus.:)
Luke 21:32 -- I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.
Indeed, all those things you mentioned, and more, were fulfilled up to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, just like Jesus predicted less than 40 years before. Yep, part of God's plan. But nothing to be concerned with here, move along.:)
Sure, there's truth to that, but at some point there needs to be some real competition for the Republicrats.
Certainly, however, a Presidential candidate is NOT the place to start. Third parties, maybe even moderate ones, need a few House seats, then they can go for more interesting targets.
That's a big part of the Constitution Party platform, yes. Probably too big. I certainly agree with them on that, but America isn't ready to elect someone as rabidly anti-abortion as they are, so they're pretty much screwing themselves over.
They're also big on eliminating the rampant Constitution violations that the big parties continue to commit without thinking.
They also want to get America out of most foreign "problems" such as Iraq. They believe that America should be a "friend of liberty everywhere, defender only of her own." Makes sense to me.
Personally, I'd love to vote for Peroutka (their candidate this year) -- he matches my values much more closely than Bush does. But realities of the two party system will force me to vote Bush.:(
I'm in Quito, Ecuador and pay a bit over $80/month for 128k down/64k up. Fortunately there's competition, with ADSL (though it's currently more expensive) and some type of wireless deal. The speed has already gone up twice in the last year or so -- when my roommate first signed up it was 64k/32k for the same price.
Apparently there is fiber from the States to somewhere in Colombia. It is transferred by microwave from there to northern Ecuador, and by more fiber to Quito. Anyone have any predictions as to how rapidly such a system can/will be expanded? I'm looking forward to the day of affordable >1Mb broadband to the home.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Please tell me how a bunch of FOSS hackers are going to set up a network so that I can call nearly any phone in the world at dirt cheap prices?
PC to PC should be doable with OSS though, and there may exist something already.
Just tried the new version. (Would have earlier, but my vastly overpriced 128k cable modem was down most of the evening since I posted last.)
IT WORKS without me needing to be root! Woo Hoo!
Thanks folks!
One other amusing tidbit -- it costs about 16 cents a minute to call Ecuadorian cell phones with this thing. Costs about 28 cents via an Ecuadorian land line.
> Skype brings Yet Another Voice Chat program to Linux
The difference is that Skype is the first one that lets me call regular telephones in the States from Ecuador for 2.3 cents a minute. The competitors in that area only support 'Doze (and maybe Mac, dunno).
I don't particularly hate Real, but they can be annoying at times.
I just discovered Skype about a week ago. I was thrilled upon seeing that there was a Linux version, even if beta. I live in Ecuador and badly wanted a way to call the States cheap, but was unwilling to put Windows on my computer for that purpose.
Experiences: Downloaded their version from skype.com. Ran it. It instantly hung on the registration screen. Ran it as root, and that worked.
Then realized that it was in Gentoo's portage. Emerged it. It started OK, but crashed immediately upon trying to make a call.
Went back to the first version I had downloaded, running as root, and everything worked fine!
Normally, there's little I hate more than running closed-source software as root, but I'll forgive them this time since 1) it's a beta, 2) they're bringing a valuable service to Linux, and 3) from what I can tell, they are a reputable company with a reputation to tarnish if it did something bad to my box. (Also, my personal box isn't *that* important anyway, and could be re-installed worst case scenario.)
I will try this new version tonight. If the issues are fixed and I can run as non-root, I'll be very happy! If not, I'll be mildly annoyed but still thankful.
Thanks Skype.
Lots of opinions here. Some say "there's no best choice" or recommend one of any number of johny-come-lately distros. Some recommend clones of Red Hat enterprise.
I would say that for serious enterprise use, the reality is that the "best" is a toss-up between Red Hat and Novell's enterprise offerings. They have the support that enterprises need. Most of the others don't. Debian could be good if it were supported by the likes of Oracle AND had more frequent updates, but quite frankly, the delays in the Sarge release has cost them most of their credibility in my book.
I wanted to recommend Debian stable to my organization, but the current version is so ancient I could not dream of it before the Sarge release. Wouldn't have mattered, because most people here know Red Hat/RPM and they wanted to stick with something that uses RPMs. That doesn't have to be an issue for everyone, but it was for the management here.
Why I say Red Hat or Novell: What they charge is reasonable. I work for a non-profit organization without tons of money, but we will soon be buying at least two contracts for RHEL support in this one location alone. We have offices around the world, and others may also buy RHEL, though some may stick with CentOS. We are willing to buy the RHEL contracts because they provide a solid system at a reasonable price. We will know they can support us if we need it.
I'm not sure if there's any enormous reason to choose either RH or Novell above the other one, but I am confident that those two are the best "serious" work distributions right now.
Now, for less important projects and hacks and such, any of Gentoo, Debian, Mandrake, Ubuntu, etc. would be fine. I'm talking mission critical servers.
> Fatwas aren't issued to anyone who questions Islam, but the Ayatollah of Iran said Salman Rushdie should be killed for purposely insulting the religion. That was his view, and other countries didn't second him.
... things like burning churches and homes and often slaughtering people.
:-) ). So, why have Muslims departed from this and are going after Christians and Jews?
I'm sure it depends on the location you're talking about. I have heard of quite a number of cases where fatwas were indeed issued for anyone who questions Islam or blasphemes Mohammad. Depends on how radical the government is. Where there is Islamic Sharia law, it is likely to happen. Even where fatwas are not issued, Muslim mobs regularly, in many countries, give Christians and other non-Muslims extreme grief
Here's how I understand the difference between Christianity and Islam in regards to violence.
The Bible does have some specific instances in the past where God commanded His people to slaughter their "enemies," the tribes that inhabited the promised land of Canaan. One verse specifically says that it's not because of the goodness of the Israelites that He allowed that, but due to the extreme wickedness of the people in that land. The Bible is clear from front to back that rebellion against God will be punished, in this life and/or in eternity. The attacks God commanded in the Bible were for His specific purpose at that time.
Although Christians perhaps can't rule out the possibility of God asking something like that in the future (and indeed it may happen in the end times), Jesus makes it clear that that is not how we are to live our lives. We are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, not attack and kill them.
The Koran does seem to give a general command to Muslims to attack infidels. However, my understanding is that the definition of "infidel" historically has not included other believers in the monotheistic God (Jews and Christians), but mainly atheists (i.e. most of the Slashdot crowd
So I have to agree with the grandparent troll that from everything I've seen, Islam is NOT a religion of peace. Of course, they have to make it look like it is in the United States and other areas where they are not dominant. But I have no doubt that if they converted most of the US to Islam, they would start pulling stunts that are common in, say, Pakistan today.
I've thought about this a good deal but haven't started anything yet.
... just get a usable base that helps some people, and add to it every year so that it's more and more complete.
Most of my taxes are simple except for a Schedule D for stock/option trades, which can be a pain in the arse by pen and paper. I keep my trades in Gnumeric, and think there should be a program to import Gnumeric (or, better, an OASIS format spreadsheet) and spit out a Schedule D and any D-1s.
I've been wanting to write a program to do exactly that, but the biggest holdup is the lack of a Free library that can write arbitrary strings to arbitrary locations on PDF pages (the downloadable IRS forms) and generate a PDF containing the D and any needed D1s. Anyone have an easy solution to this? It's not something I want to spend a great deal of time on right now, but if it's there, I'll do it. Perhaps convert the PDFs to PostScript and modify the PostScript, but I don't know PS...
Anyway, once something like this was accomplished, it should be relatively easy to expand it to other tax forms for other purposes, and eventually fill in the complete 1040. We don't need to do it all in one year
> (e.g. does that mean that literally everyone except Noah (and remarkably his sons +sons wives) was evil and deserved to die, including women and babies?)
:-)
:-)
well, this conversation is old enough and this is deep enough that the moderators probably won't get to modding this down, so...
I think that is what the Bible says, yes. Genesis 6:5: "Yahweh saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." Murder was almost certainly rampant in those days, which is why God specifically commanded capital punishment for murder as a post-flood ordinance. This gave God a chance to "reset" the world and start over. Yes, things have been bad since then, but not THAT bad.
I believe the Flood account in the Bible, and that it accomplished what God willed it to accomplish. The point is that since men only lived in the Messopotamia plain at that time, it did not need to be truly worldwide in order to accomplish that.
Did you click on the link in my message?
Only problem with Kylix is that it's dead as a doorknob and doesn't work well (if at all) on recent distributions.
Borland could have had a hit with this one, but they screwed the pooch royally. Yet Another Reason(tm) why you should never depend on non-Free software for anything important.
I'm not going to get into a long debate here, not worth it. Will just try to briefly answer your question.
:)
> What about that makes you believe that the god described in the Bible is responsible, though?
For starters, I think it's reasonable (but cannot prove) that for such longshot odds of the Big Bang producing a universe that can support intelligent life, Something intelligent must have been behind it. I apologize to atheists who will find this concept difficult to grasp, but undirected explosions (which the BB would be if they were right) do not tend to result in systems that are fine-tuned by hundreds of orders of magnitude more accurately than the best possible human engineering.
Given that such a Being was behind the Big Bang, we can start to speculate about His character. Obviously, He has wisdom beyond measure. He has infinite power beyond anything we could comprehend -- He can create time/space dimensions at will! Finally, we can see that He also designed humans. The heart, for example, is one of the most efficient possible pumps, and the brain is amazing.
Now, would Someone like this want to simply allow for humans' existence, then un-involve Himself, as deists suggest? I don't think so; why would He have bothered? I think (but cannot prove) that it's reasonable that this Person would want humans to know something about Himself.
So we can begin to look at ways God may have revealed Himself. Are they consistent? Are they reasonable? Do they truly satisfy?
1) Yes, I've seen long lists of "Bible contradictions." As someone who has reasonable knowledge of the Bible myself, though, I am amazed at how consistent its entire message is, given the fact that it was written by dozens of humans over thousands of years -- humans from all walks of life and in three continents. Most of these "contradictions" were conjured up by folks who, frankly, don't understand the message of the Bible and/or are deliberately trying to make it look bad. Yes, there are a few things that appear to be real contradictions; these may well be a result of ancient memorization practices and/or the fact that some of the Bible is based on eyewitness accounts (which God may have inspired them to write but could be off in minor details).
2) The Bible has some pretty outrageous claims by the modern world's standards. But are they reasonable? Just because it claims that Jesus did miracles and claimed to be the only way to God the Father does not in itself mean that it isn't true. "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel does a reasonable job of showing that the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus Christ are reasonable, even if not proven.
3) What is the fruit of a given belief? Does it satisfy your inmost being? I think it was Blaise Pascal who said there's a "God-shaped hole in everyone's heart." What fills it? Does going to church or doing good works fill it? No. I and many Christians could easily testify that only a personal relationship with Jesus Christ fits the bill. Beyond simply "filling the hole," we can testify that Jesus Christ lives in us and has been faithful through the ages. Can I prove this scientifically? No. But His presense in us is just as good. In fact, it has a way of making gigabytes of intellectual arguments against His existence look rather shallow.
I'm not Strobel, but what the heck, I'll bite. (I have read the book though ... thought it was pretty good but certainly not exhaustive.)
> 1. How can we know Jesus' miracles were genuine, when Paul himself later in the epistles admits that some charlatans can perform miracles? Whar *is* a miracle if both humans and demons can fake it?
We look at the fruits of those doing the miracles. Jesus said we could recognize prophets by their fruits; see Matthew 7:16. Anyone who performs miracles according to God's power will produce the fruit of the Spirit -- love, joy, peace, patience, etc (Galatians 5:22-23) Someone who does miracles that do not lead to these fruits are doing so by the power of Satan.
> 2. How come miracles aren't happening today? I know several arguments for why God wouldn't perform a miracle on demand
Click on my siggy, go down to the point "Jesus Christ: the anser for physical sickness"
> 3. If the evidence was so compelling, how come most Jews of the time didn't convert? The Jews have the same God, same history, same creation and Messiah story, they should have been the most likely people to switch, but the Gentiles switched faster.
They also rejected and tortured and killed their own prophets. The Jews did not exactly have a stellar record of believing what their God told them.
> Christian's believe that in addition to there being a God, there is also Satan.
Right.
> While God is more powerful then Satan, Satan is capable of causing great harm.
Absolutely.
> Any negative events that occur are attributed to Satan, not God.
That might be stretching it. Certainly many/most, but I'm not sure I'd say any/all.
As for the tsunami, I would say it's likely simply a result of how God created the earth (earthquake activity was and is fairly necessary for things to be "just right" on Earth's surface for our form of life) and the fact that the current fallen world will see trouble, as opposed to the future perfect one He has promised.
As others have noted, some good has come from it. In Sri Lanka (and probably other places), enemies are now working together for common good. God loves that sort of thing! I'm sure a lot of survivors in the region are now more aware of the frailty of life and are more open to God's message. Sure, a lot of bad happened, but I believe in a God who is capable of bringing good from bad.
Well said. As a Christian it's my job to be a witness for Christ, to anyone who cares. Conversion is the job of the Holy Spirit, not me. If someone doesn't want to talk about it, I'll leave them alone. I may pray for them, but I won't force anything, because that's not God's way. Jesus never forced anything on anyone when He walked the earth, so why should we?
Speaking of the Flood, what the Bible actually says is rather different than what 99% of people (even Christians) think it says.
Best writup on the topic I've seen
> The odds of that happening by chance are estimated at 1 to 10^50.
And that isn't all. If one of any number of physical constants were different by one part in ten to the umpteenth power (where "umpteenth" can range from about 10 to about 100), life could not have existed in any form at any time nor place in the universe.
Stuff to think about. As for me, I think it's strong evidence that God was behind the Big Bang.
Actually, isn't that the projected release date of Duke Nukem Forever? And you thought YOU had it bad! *sob*
I don't remember too many details, except that the successor to the ENIAC (forget name now) helped CBS (I think) predict the winner in 1952. Anyone remember more?
Wow, thanks for sharing that. I have always loved watching O'Reilly, and I can honestly say he's about the only thing I miss watching now that I don't have a TV. But if what you said is true, my respect for FOX News just went down the toilet.
I support Bush for practical reasons, but there is a lot to like about Badnarik and America needs to hear about him. If FOX, claiming to be "fair and balanced" intentionally pulls that kind of stunt, they should be horribly ashamed of themselves.
I wouldn't worry about all that stuff either, but mainly because most of Luke 21 was fulfilled in the same generation as Jesus. :)
:)
Luke 21:32 -- I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.
Indeed, all those things you mentioned, and more, were fulfilled up to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, just like Jesus predicted less than 40 years before. Yep, part of God's plan. But nothing to be concerned with here, move along.
Sure, there's truth to that, but at some point there needs to be some real competition for the Republicrats.
Certainly, however, a Presidential candidate is NOT the place to start. Third parties, maybe even moderate ones, need a few House seats, then they can go for more interesting targets.
> # Abortion is Murder(tm)
:(
That's a big part of the Constitution Party platform, yes. Probably too big. I certainly agree with them on that, but America isn't ready to elect someone as rabidly anti-abortion as they are, so they're pretty much screwing themselves over.
They're also big on eliminating the rampant Constitution violations that the big parties continue to commit without thinking.
They also want to get America out of most foreign "problems" such as Iraq. They believe that America should be a "friend of liberty everywhere, defender only of her own." Makes sense to me.
Personally, I'd love to vote for Peroutka (their candidate this year) -- he matches my values much more closely than Bush does. But realities of the two party system will force me to vote Bush.
Now I find myself even debating the "in the instance of rape" option.
:-)
Can I help?
Just a simple, quick question for you to think about:
Is there any other conceivable circumstance where you would support killing a kid for the crime of his father?
'Nuff said.
My organization is just about to switch 700+ desktops from IE to Firefox. :) :) :)
Be glad for what you have.
:)
I'm in Quito, Ecuador and pay a bit over $80/month for 128k down/64k up. Fortunately there's competition, with ADSL (though it's currently more expensive) and some type of wireless deal. The speed has already gone up twice in the last year or so -- when my roommate first signed up it was 64k/32k for the same price.
Apparently there is fiber from the States to somewhere in Colombia. It is transferred by microwave from there to northern Ecuador, and by more fiber to Quito. Anyone have any predictions as to how rapidly such a system can/will be expanded? I'm looking forward to the day of affordable >1Mb broadband to the home.