I see no confusion between your two posts. I agree that the Bible doesn't give all the steps, but we at some point must accept "And God said...". In Genesis 11:1-9, we read a story of people who wanted to build a tower to heaven. God came and confused their language and scattered them abroad. God gave them the ability to build, but they misused that ability. We can't confuse the knowledge, with a need to know. Knowledge and faith are not mutually exclusive, but knowledge is not required for faith.
I do not believe that God gave us every detail. I also do not believe that I must be able to duplicate everything to be able to believe it. I can't see electrons flowing through my cable modem, but I believe that all of these postings came from people located somewhere in the world. I can't see any of you and might never see you, but I believe that you exist. I have never seen England, but I believe that it exists. I don't know the exact steps that God used to create the world, but I do know that according to Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. That tells me that everything was here by his plan and it was his breath that gave me life. That breath can't be explained in human terms any better than that, and therefore even if we learn everything else we can't duplicate the creation of life. Therefore we can never determine if our knowledge is accurate, because we can't duplicate the experiment.
My contention is that our time would be better spent investigating things that we can duplicate and use, rather than investigating things that can't possibly be duplicated. Space exploration and investigation of our own planet are important as God has made us the custodians of the universe. How can we protect our world or the universe if we don't understand them?
I agree that God is complex. Why would an omnipotent being like God, who knows all, want to create man, a being that would cause him so much trouble? How could he have possibly sent his only son to earth to live as one of us and to be ridiculed and killed in such a cruel way? That is just a part of the complexity of God.
What you are saying is exactly what I said about people that "can't believe in God". It seems to me that you are saying, "If I can't get it into simple terms that can be described in an earthly manner and I can duplicate, then it can't possibly be true". You seem to be stuck on "Where did God come from?" and I say that he didn't come from anywhere because he always was. God is a spirit according to John 4:24
God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
If you say that theories can be tested, how do you test that this "sugar-like substance" is where life came from? I have yet to see people just suddenly appear in this world, I haven't seen anything just suddenly appear in this world. I disagree with you on the sorry state part also. I am a computer programmer, and my family has participated in the space program in various ways for 3 generation (engineering, programming, model making, research, etc.). We in no way see that it conflicts with our religious beliefs. God saw fit to give me the understanding to program computers and I use that ability. If you decide not to use your abilities in "astrophysics and go have a lie down", remember 2 Thessalonians 3:10
For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.
If you read every one of my posts concerning God, you will find that I back them up with scriptures. The Bible is the inspired word of God, written by men to whom God gave directions. It is recorded for our learning and training. God wants us to know of him, and he doesn't hide anything from us.
Now I would like to answer your question they might have originated elsewhere? with another question. Is it impossible that they came from God? Maybe he has given you a clue that you are too blind to see. Just a thought.
I like the link you provided for the Taoist sage. It is quite like some Biblical scriptures in Joshua 4:5-7
And Joshua said unto them, Pass over before the ark of the LORD your God into the midst of Jordan, and take you up every man of you a stone upon his shoulder, according unto the number of the tribes of the children of Israel:
That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones?
Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD; when it passed over Jordan, the waters of Jordan were cut off: and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever.
I can also see that you lack a basic requirement to be able to believe in God. That basic requirement is FAITH or as is stated in Hebrews 11:1
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Without FAITH one can't possibly break free of material constraints. Without FAITH you can't possibly believe anything that you can't see or touch or feel.
While it is easy for me to agree with a lot of the things that you say as I believe that there are many good and scholarly men that do or did not believe in God as I do, you can only believe that I have loose screws for believing in something that can't be totally comprehended in earthly terms. I can agree that a lot of the things taught by Zen masters or Taoist sages are useful, but you can't believe that life is eternal, because you can't understand eternity.
I can say that God created man, because I have FAITH in God. He created man because he wanted to do so, and I can't possibly understand it.
You are correct that having FAITH in God doesn't tell you how to live this life at all. However, in John 14:15 you can learn about living this life
If ye love me, keep my commandments.
And how do you learn his commandments? 2 Timothy 2:15 states
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
This is no different than studying the quotes of Zen masters or Taoist sages. You can't possibly understand (believe) if you don't know (or hear).
To sum it all up please read John 1:1-4
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
Without a creator deity (let's call him God), you can't explain eternal life. Oops, I forgot, you probably don't believe in that either.
I personally believe in eternal life after God judges the world on the last day. If my soul can live with God forever after this world is over, then God could have lived forever before the beginning of the world. To put material limits on God is unrealistic, however it is quite human as that is all that we fully understand.
To take this one step further, if you don't believe in God and his omnipotence, why are you wasting time at Slashdot? You could make much more of the short time you have to live by robbing banks, old people, children, etc. And if there is no God and no eternal life, why worry about morals? There would be no right and no wrong? The biggest dog eats the most, might make right, etc.
Don't feed me any lines about humanity either. Humanity comes from Genesis 1:26-27
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
This is continued in Genesis 2:7 "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."
The difference between my believing God and your accepting that life came from somewhere in space, is that you give life a materialistic beginning and I give it an omnipotent creator whose powers are far beyond anything that we can imagine or dream. You accept that there are limits to everything and I believe in infinity in both directions, Revelations 22:13 "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last."
Hey, I like this idea! If we can't explain it we'll just move it elsewhere, then we don't have to explain it for now. So if my checking account comes up empty, aliens must have taken the money.
To believe this, you still have to come up with an answer to where did it come from originally. I believe that it is much easier to believe in God than to believe that all this stuff just happened to occur in the right order.
Also, since this "sugar-like substance" was found on "meteorites that are chips off old asteroid that fell to Earth", are we sure that the "sugar-like substance" didn't get on them here on earth?
Why is it so much easier to believe this than to believe Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."? Is it impossible to believe that truth as we know it just simply started one day, because an omnipotent being declared it should begin?
Yes, the word 'hacker' is usually used when 'cracker' would be better. With a properly configured Linux/Unix machine, you can really restrict users. In the past, I have seen some that were locked down almost as tight as an IBM mainframe using RACF.
While the standard permissions set on Linux/Unix isn't as rich as the ACLs on some other OSes, the capabilities are much more versatile. For instance, most Unix systems have rsh (restricted shell) that will completely lock down the programs to which the user has access. With rsh as their shell, they can't even execute a command if they know the full path to it.
On most Unix systems, services can be locked down with limited access. On all Unix systems, services can easily be turned off. With no services running, you don't have to worry about being attacked nearly as much as you have no doors or windows (no pun intended).
I disagree with your take. I use both Windows (unfortunately) and Linux (fortunately). I have less trouble deciding what to use on Linux than on Windows. With Windows I can't afford to make a mistake due to the cost of everything. When you are talking about spending several hundred dollars for Office versus one hundred dollars for Anyware 2.0 Desktop for Linux (from Vistasource) the decision is much easier. I can buy several different packages for Linux to find the parts that work for me.
I can even go find Star Office (from Sun), or KOffice (from KDE), or Gnome Office (from Gnome) for free.
And being a System Administrator for many years, I know how to secure a system, either a Linux/Unix system or a Windows system. Unfortunately neither Microsoft nor most of the Linux distributions (until recently) came very secure. Both have gotten a little better with recent releases. Unfortunately, it takes several years to get the older machine out of the loop. Given the fact that you can go to CompUSA or Best Buy or many other stores and get a new Linux distribution for under fifty dollars while a Microsoft OS will cost several hundred dollars, more folks are likely to upgrade their linux distributions. This doesn't totally fix security problems, but it does help get rid of some of the issues.
While there may be personal agenda behind some open source software, there is a much worse agenda (IMO) behind Microsoft. Have you tried to find a competitive office suite recently? What has happened to web browsers? Where are the email programs that used to be out there? What about development tools? It is beginning to be like a song I remember from way back when "I owe my soul to the company store".
Someone from Mircosoft once called Linux a virus, it seems to me that Microsoft is more of a virus as it is killing off everything else. At least with Linux you have choices. They may not all be good and they may not have all the features, but there is usually a choice.
I can't totally disagree with you on the point of shady congressmen. But the only way to deal with that is get out and vote. If you are a citizen of the U.S. and didn't vote, you have NO RIGHT to complain. If you are not a citizen of the U.S., you need to spend your time worrying about your own government and not ours.
I stand by my statement that the WTC is a symbol of FREEDOM. If the U.S. is truely in slavery, then why are there so many people trying to get into this slavery (both legally and illegally)? Call it what you like, but it is desirable.
I will agree that many have felt the byte of BUFF. I have no trouble, however, denying freedom to folks like the Republican Guard of Iraq, who use their freedom to attack other countries. Yes there is a difference between freedom and FREEDOM, freedom is I can do something because I have the power and no one can stop me. FREEDOM is I, personally, have the ability to choose whether I want to do something or not. The U.S. has both freedom and FREEDOM, but the government can't use freedom without the people using FREEDOM.
Unfortunately, many people don't use their FREEDOM regularly enough. If everyone in this country used their FREEDOM in every election, some things might be different.M
Yes, please ask them! They know that the owner of the B-52 has FREEDOM. It rains death on the enemies of FREEDOM. Ask the Iraqies also, especially if you can find someone that was in the Republician Guard. They know about being an enemy of FREEDOM.
It must be deployed with care. It is a dangerous weapon, but it is definitely a symbol of FREEDOM. It isn't (or wasn't) the only symbol of FREEDOM. The World Trade Center was a symbol of FREEDOM. And there are many more, not all of which are located in the U.S.
Isn't it appropriate that one symbol of FREEDOM is being used to exact retribution for the distruction of another symbol?
I agree with you on this. If we weren't as strong as we are, then it might be harder to _persuade_ others to help in the war on terrorism. Do you really think that Pakistan would have been as quick to join us in the fight against the Taliban, if they hadn't seen what happened to Iraq a few years back?
Also the military is working to keep the cost of such equipment down somewhat. Let's see how the JSF works out. It is known that when the military went to the M-16 as a universal personal weapon that costs were cut as the different branches of the military achieved a savings by purchasing both weapons and ammunition in bulk. The Navy and Air Force used few small arms (Marines purchased their own weapons, not the Navy), and they (until the M-16) weren't interchangable with any other branch of the military (ammo might work in some models, but no guarantee).
Also remember that other countries must be able to defeat or match our small, fast fighters before they can worry about our bomber fleet. We must keep our fighters completely up-to-date to maintain Total Air Superiority. If we don't have Total Air Superiority, we can't put any of the B-52s in the air. Therefore spending money in the right place saves money in the long run.
If I were a B-52 crew member, I would be happy that the military were spending $$$(hundreds of millions) on those fighters that went in front of me, and left me the old bomber. Yes, it is nice to have neat, new equipment, but in this case it means that the B-52 will have less probability of seeing direct enemy action (unless the action is the enemy ground troops running for cover).
But that reproduction can be controlled. It requires a human to interven to reproduce the software. Now using my logic and your software analogy, you might not be able to patent a software virus or a software worm. They do replicate on their own once in the free.
But then that would be another thing that might be good to get a patent on right now. You could then sue everyone who had the virus/worm on their system.
However, that CD didn't copy itself, nor did it combine with RedHat Linux 7.2 to produce WinUx, LinDows, or any thing else on its own.
Re:Just a thought
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Patented Seeds
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Or as I remember from childhood, in our gardens sometimes plants would come up from seed left over from the previous year. If I buy their seed this year and someone elses patented seed next year, and then the two patented plants cross-pollenate, who owns the "new" variety? Obviously I don't want to own it as that would infringe upon both of the other patents and I don't want to have to fight their lawyers.
I realize that a lot of genetically altered seed or hybrid seed are sterile, but they do have to be able to reproduce one time in order for them to be of any value to the farmers (in most cases) as it is the seed that is usually the desired crop in some form.
I don't have a problem with companies producing seed that produce sterile off-spring, but if they plan to patent and enforce the patent seed, this is a different proposal. By producing hybrid seed, they ensure that they can line their pockets (which is their right in a free market economy such as ours), but they do not endanger the freedom of others to make a living. A patent will allow them to make money off of accidental cross-pollenation that can't be controlled. And this is most likely to happen to small farmers that can't afford to defend themselves.
If this flys for a little while, I am going to patent some version of the dandilion. Those things reproduce like crazy and there is no way in this world to control them from spreading everywhere. I will be able to sue everyone for growing my patented flower and live like no king ever dreamed for the rest of my life.
Your concept has some good logic included in it. If we allow the patent system to become so over burdened, it will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Surely it can be done better the next time around:-)
Now as to your logic on living or dead, there is a difference. Living things tend to replicate or reproduce in some manner. The replication or reproduction is hard to control outside of the laboratory (see my earlier post in this discussion about farmers that are neighbors). If the process can not be controlled, should the patent owner be allowed to control the "accidental" side-effects?
If you can patent your children (I assume that you are referring to their genetic make-up), then you would have to license that patent to their spouse before they could reproduce? Wow now that is a cool way to control who is your son-in-law or daughter-in-law.
Great, now we can't eat either
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Patented Seeds
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This is really bad! What if I am a farmer planting my corn seed that has been handed down through my family, and some pesky little honey bee brings the pollen from my neighbors field to my field (assuming my neighbor is stupid enough to grow their patented trash). I am screwed, because I can't sell or use my corn anymore, it has been polluted by their patented garbage, but they have the right to call up their school of bottom feeding, scum sucking lawyers and sue me.
My pure corn was polluted and they will win the case bacause they own a patent and lawyers. Sounds like another case of let's make sure that the lawyers stay employed to me. But what can we expect when we have lawyers making the laws, lawyers judging the laws, and laywers enforcing the laws.
Last I heard (about 2 years ago now), there was some code running that I worked on once upon a time. I was at least the 8th maintainer of the code and the original code was written in the '66 to '68 range. It was originally written as I understand it in ForTran 4 and had been upgraded to ForTran 77 and enhanced over time, but the original code was still there.
As a matter of fact, one of the mainframe systems on which it ran over time was low on storage, so someone wrote a program that would strip the comments from all source files. So when I was working on it, there were almost no comments there.
The software was used to do usage accounting and resource accounting in a testing environment and basically worked flawlessly (except when features needed added or changed).
No I didn't misunderstand, you misunderstood me. I DON'T believe that determinism is true. I believe that God can know the outcome without causing the outcome, just as I knew the outcome of the ice cream vs. lettuce test without choosing for my children. My knowledge is limited, even about my own children. Obviously ice cream and lettuce are two extremes. If I, like God, could know everything, I could get the two choices closer together and still be accurate.
At any rate, I think that the point is still made that prior knowledge of the outcome, doesn't mean that the outcome is determined in a way that can't be changed.
I will give you an example in the real world that can show free will and knowledge of the outcome. I have two children, and I can offer the each a bowl of ice cream or a bowl of lettuce. I know that my children will chose the bowl of ice cream, but I have in no way determined this for them. They have freely chosen the bowl of ice cream.
This example beats your option b. If you aren't a parent, you might not understand but it is true. And after all God is our father, and he knows us.
There is no real way for us as humans to beat option a, as we (including yourself and myself) can't possibly understand omniscient in the same way that God does. And it is impossible to beat your option C as it is so vague (or vauge as you put it). You could pronounce anything that I write to be vague.
But the real answer comes down to "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" and what is mankind without love? Just another animal?
I think that weatherbug would kill me. It hits a page for weather data every few seconds. If we assume that it hits the site every 3 seconds (which is what it seems to be to my proxy log files), that is 20 times each minute. I would hit my cap in one hour and 40 minutes and still have most of the month left to go.
The other negative on this, is would I be compensated for hits on my homepage on my ISP's site or would they get the money for that? That would be a great way for broadband ISP's to make money, give you broadband access and require you to put your content on their server, and block access to standard ports and cut off users with servers running on non-standard ports (port scanning, etc.) and grab the money for the hits on their users content.
Actually find a new field so that there will again be a shortage to programmers and our salaries can go even higher.
I have been in your shoes, and that is how I ended up in programming and systems administration. I started out to be a teacher and after trying it, discovered it wasn't all that I thought. I worked at jobs that I didn't enjoy for 7 years to earn enough $$$s to get a degree in computers (I was introduced to computers and programming while teaching). I should have done it right the first time. While you are young and still in school you can change much easier than going back at nearly 30 and doing it again.
What will your son feel when he grows up and his memories are of a toy that never challenged him for more than a few minutes?
A toy can be challenging in many ways. As a parent (yes I am a parent of two lego maniacs, a 9 year old son and a 3 year old daughter), giving my children a set of lego blocks is a part of the challenge. They can build by the instructions (at their respective levels), but that is only the start. There are other things that can be done to present a challenge to them.
1) lose the instructions after they have been built once or twice. You might file them away somewhere so that they can be retrieved at a later time if necessary. But save the box, haven't you noticed that on the back of the box are other models which can be built with those blocks? No instructions, just a picture. I know that this still isn't using the imagination, but other skills are being learned. Just as following instructions is also a good skill to learn.
2) come up with your own games. Yes it takes a little work on your (and your childs part) but it can be a lot of fun. We play lego yard wars (our own version of Junk Yard Wars (on The Learning Channel). My son and I will decide on something to build and how to test it, and then we will go build it from lego blocks. We have built bridges that had to support a certain amount of weight and vehicles that had to travel a predetermined path, machines which could walk, and many others. But we did it together and with only our imaginations.
3) start early. Even my 3 year old builds with blocks, she uses duplo blocks which are more her size. She build walls and towers and even sometimes builds with her brother using duplo and lego blocks together, learning to cooperate and share.
4) give your child an assignment. Make it very broad and tell them that using instructions is not allowed. Start simple with stuff like a wall. Get more specific and complex as they start to use their imagination. Remember an imagination like any other skill must be developed, it doesn't just happen.
5) join in! Do your part as a parent, just providing isn't enough. Yes, I have trouble with time myself sometimes, but when I sit on the floor and dump all those bricks out and start building, nothing else matters.
I also have one of their Linux based products. MicroTest made a similar system named the LinuxZerver or WebZerver that came with a modified version of RedHat 6.0 (according to their website just before the sell-off it was using RedHat 6.1). It looks virtually identical to the DiskZerver Cyclone. The main modification that I have found from stock RedHat 6.0 is the kernel, they added a lzfs filesystem compiled into the kernel. This box did not use flash and worked like a headless, keyboardless linux machine (use a terminal emulator to load it, etc.) I asked for the source for the lzfs from MicroTest before they sold off the last of the NAS product line and was told that source did not exist. The discussion went on for about a week, or a little more via emails once a day and ended when I recieved no reply (just about the time I saw that XStore bought the Zerver line). It did come with a CD that even had the source for some sample programs using the "enhancements", but not the source for the lzfs driver. The worst part is that they include kernel source when you install, but the lzfs source is not there anywhere. They attempt to make it look like they are compliant, until you attempt to build a kernel yourself. I had looked all over the system and the CD before asking MicroTest for the source code, assuming that they were compliant and provided the source with the product.
The lzfs is used to control LEDs on the front panel, check CPU temp, and a few other things. It is a virtual filesystem like/proc and uses ioctls to gather information.
I post this as I can say that I didn't violate a license agreement to discover this, you must login to this machine as root to configure it properly and they gave me the default root password in the manual. All I wanted to be able to do was build newer kernels without losing functionality. Everything else works fine, I have upgraded Apache on it, and added java, and other things with no problem, but I can't change the kernel without losing some of the functionality. Due to that I haven't attempted to upgrade the kernel using standard kernel code, however, I believe that it should work as long as I build for headless usage properly.
How long did it take the world to wake up to Hitler? Or for that matter any number of "leaders" in the past with grand ideas of ruling the world. And even when the world does awake, the "leader" has so much power that he can't be easily stopped.
If I'm paying for it, I expect to be able to use it.
Use it all you want. The GPL allows you to use it. You can make money off it even, but you can't restrict my use of it either. The idea being that we all paid for it and can all share it equally. But in the case of GPL'ed code, you also pay the interest on the borrowed code, which is that you have to give away the source to your changes.
Yes it means that you can't let a group of government paid programmers develop a really neat application, you make some minor changes to it and sell it as your own application, nor can you take a little piece of it and paste it into your big application to sell as closed source, but you can still use it, if you are willing to pay the interest by giving your software freedom also.
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I see no confusion between your two posts. I agree that the Bible doesn't give all the steps, but we at some point must accept "And God said...". In Genesis 11:1-9, we read a story of people who wanted to build a tower to heaven. God came and confused their language and scattered them abroad. God gave them the ability to build, but they misused that ability. We can't confuse the knowledge, with a need to know. Knowledge and faith are not mutually exclusive, but knowledge is not required for faith.
I do not believe that God gave us every detail. I also do not believe that I must be able to duplicate everything to be able to believe it. I can't see electrons flowing through my cable modem, but I believe that all of these postings came from people located somewhere in the world. I can't see any of you and might never see you, but I believe that you exist. I have never seen England, but I believe that it exists. I don't know the exact steps that God used to create the world, but I do know that according to Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. That tells me that everything was here by his plan and it was his breath that gave me life. That breath can't be explained in human terms any better than that, and therefore even if we learn everything else we can't duplicate the creation of life. Therefore we can never determine if our knowledge is accurate, because we can't duplicate the experiment.
My contention is that our time would be better spent investigating things that we can duplicate and use, rather than investigating things that can't possibly be duplicated. Space exploration and investigation of our own planet are important as God has made us the custodians of the universe. How can we protect our world or the universe if we don't understand them?
What you are saying is exactly what I said about people that "can't believe in God". It seems to me that you are saying, "If I can't get it into simple terms that can be described in an earthly manner and I can duplicate, then it can't possibly be true". You seem to be stuck on "Where did God come from?" and I say that he didn't come from anywhere because he always was. God is a spirit according to John 4:24 If you say that theories can be tested, how do you test that this "sugar-like substance" is where life came from? I have yet to see people just suddenly appear in this world, I haven't seen anything just suddenly appear in this world. I disagree with you on the sorry state part also. I am a computer programmer, and my family has participated in the space program in various ways for 3 generation (engineering, programming, model making, research, etc.). We in no way see that it conflicts with our religious beliefs. God saw fit to give me the understanding to program computers and I use that ability. If you decide not to use your abilities in "astrophysics and go have a lie down", remember 2 Thessalonians 3:10 If you read every one of my posts concerning God, you will find that I back them up with scriptures. The Bible is the inspired word of God, written by men to whom God gave directions. It is recorded for our learning and training. God wants us to know of him, and he doesn't hide anything from us.
Now I would like to answer your question they might have originated elsewhere? with another question. Is it impossible that they came from God? Maybe he has given you a clue that you are too blind to see. Just a thought.
I can also see that you lack a basic requirement to be able to believe in God. That basic requirement is FAITH or as is stated in Hebrews 11:1 Without FAITH one can't possibly break free of material constraints. Without FAITH you can't possibly believe anything that you can't see or touch or feel.
While it is easy for me to agree with a lot of the things that you say as I believe that there are many good and scholarly men that do or did not believe in God as I do, you can only believe that I have loose screws for believing in something that can't be totally comprehended in earthly terms. I can agree that a lot of the things taught by Zen masters or Taoist sages are useful, but you can't believe that life is eternal, because you can't understand eternity.
I can say that God created man, because I have FAITH in God. He created man because he wanted to do so, and I can't possibly understand it.
You are correct that having FAITH in God doesn't tell you how to live this life at all. However, in John 14:15 you can learn about living this life
And how do you learn his commandments? 2 Timothy 2:15 states
This is no different than studying the quotes of Zen masters or Taoist sages. You can't possibly understand (believe) if you don't know (or hear).
To sum it all up please read John 1:1-4
Without a creator deity (let's call him God), you can't explain eternal life. Oops, I forgot, you probably don't believe in that either.
I personally believe in eternal life after God judges the world on the last day. If my soul can live with God forever after this world is over, then God could have lived forever before the beginning of the world. To put material limits on God is unrealistic, however it is quite human as that is all that we fully understand.
To take this one step further, if you don't believe in God and his omnipotence, why are you wasting time at Slashdot? You could make much more of the short time you have to live by robbing banks, old people, children, etc. And if there is no God and no eternal life, why worry about morals? There would be no right and no wrong? The biggest dog eats the most, might make right, etc.
Don't feed me any lines about humanity either. Humanity comes from Genesis 1:26-27
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
This is continued in Genesis 2:7 "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."
The difference between my believing God and your accepting that life came from somewhere in space, is that you give life a materialistic beginning and I give it an omnipotent creator whose powers are far beyond anything that we can imagine or dream. You accept that there are limits to everything and I believe in infinity in both directions, Revelations 22:13 "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last."
Hey, I like this idea! If we can't explain it we'll just move it elsewhere, then we don't have to explain it for now. So if my checking account comes up empty, aliens must have taken the money.
To believe this, you still have to come up with an answer to where did it come from originally. I believe that it is much easier to believe in God than to believe that all this stuff just happened to occur in the right order.
Also, since this "sugar-like substance" was found on "meteorites that are chips off old asteroid that fell to Earth", are we sure that the "sugar-like substance" didn't get on them here on earth?
Why is it so much easier to believe this than to believe Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."? Is it impossible to believe that truth as we know it just simply started one day, because an omnipotent being declared it should begin?
Yes, the word 'hacker' is usually used when 'cracker' would be better. With a properly configured Linux/Unix machine, you can really restrict users. In the past, I have seen some that were locked down almost as tight as an IBM mainframe using RACF.
While the standard permissions set on Linux/Unix isn't as rich as the ACLs on some other OSes, the capabilities are much more versatile. For instance, most Unix systems have rsh (restricted shell) that will completely lock down the programs to which the user has access. With rsh as their shell, they can't even execute a command if they know the full path to it.
On most Unix systems, services can be locked down with limited access. On all Unix systems, services can easily be turned off. With no services running, you don't have to worry about being attacked nearly as much as you have no doors or windows (no pun intended).
I disagree with your take. I use both Windows (unfortunately) and Linux (fortunately). I have less trouble deciding what to use on Linux than on Windows. With Windows I can't afford to make a mistake due to the cost of everything. When you are talking about spending several hundred dollars for Office versus one hundred dollars for Anyware 2.0 Desktop for Linux (from Vistasource) the decision is much easier. I can buy several different packages for Linux to find the parts that work for me.
I can even go find Star Office (from Sun), or KOffice (from KDE), or Gnome Office (from Gnome) for free.
And being a System Administrator for many years, I know how to secure a system, either a Linux/Unix system or a Windows system. Unfortunately neither Microsoft nor most of the Linux distributions (until recently) came very secure. Both have gotten a little better with recent releases. Unfortunately, it takes several years to get the older machine out of the loop. Given the fact that you can go to CompUSA or Best Buy or many other stores and get a new Linux distribution for under fifty dollars while a Microsoft OS will cost several hundred dollars, more folks are likely to upgrade their linux distributions. This doesn't totally fix security problems, but it does help get rid of some of the issues.
While there may be personal agenda behind some open source software, there is a much worse agenda (IMO) behind Microsoft. Have you tried to find a competitive office suite recently? What has happened to web browsers? Where are the email programs that used to be out there? What about development tools? It is beginning to be like a song I remember from way back when "I owe my soul to the company store".
Someone from Mircosoft once called Linux a virus, it seems to me that Microsoft is more of a virus as it is killing off everything else. At least with Linux you have choices. They may not all be good and they may not have all the features, but there is usually a choice.
I can't totally disagree with you on the point of shady congressmen. But the only way to deal with that is get out and vote. If you are a citizen of the U.S. and didn't vote, you have NO RIGHT to complain. If you are not a citizen of the U.S., you need to spend your time worrying about your own government and not ours.
I stand by my statement that the WTC is a symbol of FREEDOM. If the U.S. is truely in slavery, then why are there so many people trying to get into this slavery (both legally and illegally)? Call it what you like, but it is desirable.
I will agree that many have felt the byte of BUFF. I have no trouble, however, denying freedom to folks like the Republican Guard of Iraq, who use their freedom to attack other countries. Yes there is a difference between freedom and FREEDOM, freedom is I can do something because I have the power and no one can stop me. FREEDOM is I, personally, have the ability to choose whether I want to do something or not. The U.S. has both freedom and FREEDOM, but the government can't use freedom without the people using FREEDOM.
Unfortunately, many people don't use their FREEDOM regularly enough. If everyone in this country used their FREEDOM in every election, some things might be different.M
Yes, please ask them! They know that the owner of the B-52 has FREEDOM. It rains death on the enemies of FREEDOM. Ask the Iraqies also, especially if you can find someone that was in the Republician Guard. They know about being an enemy of FREEDOM.
It must be deployed with care. It is a dangerous weapon, but it is definitely a symbol of FREEDOM. It isn't (or wasn't) the only symbol of FREEDOM. The World Trade Center was a symbol of FREEDOM. And there are many more, not all of which are located in the U.S.
Isn't it appropriate that one symbol of FREEDOM is being used to exact retribution for the distruction of another symbol?
I agree with you on this. If we weren't as strong as we are, then it might be harder to _persuade_ others to help in the war on terrorism. Do you really think that Pakistan would have been as quick to join us in the fight against the Taliban, if they hadn't seen what happened to Iraq a few years back?
Also the military is working to keep the cost of such equipment down somewhat. Let's see how the JSF works out. It is known that when the military went to the M-16 as a universal personal weapon that costs were cut as the different branches of the military achieved a savings by purchasing both weapons and ammunition in bulk. The Navy and Air Force used few small arms (Marines purchased their own weapons, not the Navy), and they (until the M-16) weren't interchangable with any other branch of the military (ammo might work in some models, but no guarantee).
Also remember that other countries must be able to defeat or match our small, fast fighters before they can worry about our bomber fleet. We must keep our fighters completely up-to-date to maintain Total Air Superiority. If we don't have Total Air Superiority, we can't put any of the B-52s in the air. Therefore spending money in the right place saves money in the long run.
If I were a B-52 crew member, I would be happy that the military were spending $$$(hundreds of millions) on those fighters that went in front of me, and left me the old bomber. Yes, it is nice to have neat, new equipment, but in this case it means that the B-52 will have less probability of seeing direct enemy action (unless the action is the enemy ground troops running for cover).
Actually the EULA on reproducing mankind is in Genesis 3:16
"Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children;"
And in Genesis 2:24, we read how the process works
"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."
As quoted from the King James version of the Bible.
But that reproduction can be controlled. It requires a human to interven to reproduce the software. Now using my logic and your software analogy, you might not be able to patent a software virus or a software worm. They do replicate on their own once in the free.
But then that would be another thing that might be good to get a patent on right now. You could then sue everyone who had the virus/worm on their system.
However, that CD didn't copy itself, nor did it combine with RedHat Linux 7.2 to produce WinUx, LinDows, or any thing else on its own.
Or as I remember from childhood, in our gardens sometimes plants would come up from seed left over from the previous year. If I buy their seed this year and someone elses patented seed next year, and then the two patented plants cross-pollenate, who owns the "new" variety? Obviously I don't want to own it as that would infringe upon both of the other patents and I don't want to have to fight their lawyers.
I realize that a lot of genetically altered seed or hybrid seed are sterile, but they do have to be able to reproduce one time in order for them to be of any value to the farmers (in most cases) as it is the seed that is usually the desired crop in some form.
I don't have a problem with companies producing seed that produce sterile off-spring, but if they plan to patent and enforce the patent seed, this is a different proposal. By producing hybrid seed, they ensure that they can line their pockets (which is their right in a free market economy such as ours), but they do not endanger the freedom of others to make a living. A patent will allow them to make money off of accidental cross-pollenation that can't be controlled. And this is most likely to happen to small farmers that can't afford to defend themselves.
If this flys for a little while, I am going to patent some version of the dandilion. Those things reproduce like crazy and there is no way in this world to control them from spreading everywhere. I will be able to sue everyone for growing my patented flower and live like no king ever dreamed for the rest of my life.
Your concept has some good logic included in it. If we allow the patent system to become so over burdened, it will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Surely it can be done better the next time around :-)
Now as to your logic on living or dead, there is a difference. Living things tend to replicate or reproduce in some manner. The replication or reproduction is hard to control outside of the laboratory (see my earlier post in this discussion about farmers that are neighbors). If the process can not be controlled, should the patent owner be allowed to control the "accidental" side-effects?
If you can patent your children (I assume that you are referring to their genetic make-up), then you would have to license that patent to their spouse before they could reproduce? Wow now that is a cool way to control who is your son-in-law or daughter-in-law.
This is really bad! What if I am a farmer planting my corn seed that has been handed down through my family, and some pesky little honey bee brings the pollen from my neighbors field to my field (assuming my neighbor is stupid enough to grow their patented trash). I am screwed, because I can't sell or use my corn anymore, it has been polluted by their patented garbage, but they have the right to call up their school of bottom feeding, scum sucking lawyers and sue me. My pure corn was polluted and they will win the case bacause they own a patent and lawyers. Sounds like another case of let's make sure that the lawyers stay employed to me. But what can we expect when we have lawyers making the laws, lawyers judging the laws, and laywers enforcing the laws.
Last I heard (about 2 years ago now), there was some code running that I worked on once upon a time. I was at least the 8th maintainer of the code and the original code was written in the '66 to '68 range. It was originally written as I understand it in ForTran 4 and had been upgraded to ForTran 77 and enhanced over time, but the original code was still there.
As a matter of fact, one of the mainframe systems on which it ran over time was low on storage, so someone wrote a program that would strip the comments from all source files. So when I was working on it, there were almost no comments there.
The software was used to do usage accounting and resource accounting in a testing environment and basically worked flawlessly (except when features needed added or changed).
No I didn't misunderstand, you misunderstood me. I DON'T believe that determinism is true. I believe that God can know the outcome without causing the outcome, just as I knew the outcome of the ice cream vs. lettuce test without choosing for my children. My knowledge is limited, even about my own children. Obviously ice cream and lettuce are two extremes. If I, like God, could know everything, I could get the two choices closer together and still be accurate.
At any rate, I think that the point is still made that prior knowledge of the outcome, doesn't mean that the outcome is determined in a way that can't be changed.
I will give you an example in the real world that can show free will and knowledge of the outcome. I have two children, and I can offer the each a bowl of ice cream or a bowl of lettuce. I know that my children will chose the bowl of ice cream, but I have in no way determined this for them. They have freely chosen the bowl of ice cream.
This example beats your option b. If you aren't a parent, you might not understand but it is true. And after all God is our father, and he knows us.
There is no real way for us as humans to beat option a, as we (including yourself and myself) can't possibly understand omniscient in the same way that God does. And it is impossible to beat your option C as it is so vague (or vauge as you put it). You could pronounce anything that I write to be vague.
But the real answer comes down to "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" and what is mankind without love? Just another animal?
I think that weatherbug would kill me. It hits a page for weather data every few seconds. If we assume that it hits the site every 3 seconds (which is what it seems to be to my proxy log files), that is 20 times each minute. I would hit my cap in one hour and 40 minutes and still have most of the month left to go.
The other negative on this, is would I be compensated for hits on my homepage on my ISP's site or would they get the money for that? That would be a great way for broadband ISP's to make money, give you broadband access and require you to put your content on their server, and block access to standard ports and cut off users with servers running on non-standard ports (port scanning, etc.) and grab the money for the hits on their users content.
Or in 303 years and 8 months from now, it will be 4004 months old. Of course it was 4004 days old over 19 years ago, so we missed that one.
Actually find a new field so that there will again be a shortage to programmers and our salaries can go even higher.
I have been in your shoes, and that is how I ended up in programming and systems administration. I started out to be a teacher and after trying it, discovered it wasn't all that I thought. I worked at jobs that I didn't enjoy for 7 years to earn enough $$$s to get a degree in computers (I was introduced to computers and programming while teaching). I should have done it right the first time. While you are young and still in school you can change much easier than going back at nearly 30 and doing it again.
What will your son feel when he grows up and his memories are of a toy that never challenged him for more than a few minutes?
A toy can be challenging in many ways. As a parent (yes I am a parent of two lego maniacs, a 9 year old son and a 3 year old daughter), giving my children a set of lego blocks is a part of the challenge. They can build by the instructions (at their respective levels), but that is only the start. There are other things that can be done to present a challenge to them.
1) lose the instructions after they have been built once or twice. You might file them away somewhere so that they can be retrieved at a later time if necessary. But save the box, haven't you noticed that on the back of the box are other models which can be built with those blocks? No instructions, just a picture. I know that this still isn't using the imagination, but other skills are being learned. Just as following instructions is also a good skill to learn.
2) come up with your own games. Yes it takes a little work on your (and your childs part) but it can be a lot of fun. We play lego yard wars (our own version of Junk Yard Wars (on The Learning Channel). My son and I will decide on something to build and how to test it, and then we will go build it from lego blocks. We have built bridges that had to support a certain amount of weight and vehicles that had to travel a predetermined path, machines which could walk, and many others. But we did it together and with only our imaginations .
3) start early. Even my 3 year old builds with blocks, she uses duplo blocks which are more her size. She build walls and towers and even sometimes builds with her brother using duplo and lego blocks together, learning to cooperate and share.
4) give your child an assignment. Make it very broad and tell them that using instructions is not allowed. Start simple with stuff like a wall. Get more specific and complex as they start to use their imagination. Remember an imagination like any other skill must be developed, it doesn't just happen.
5) join in! Do your part as a parent, just providing isn't enough. Yes, I have trouble with time myself sometimes, but when I sit on the floor and dump all those bricks out and start building, nothing else matters.
I also have one of their Linux based products. MicroTest made a similar system named the LinuxZerver or WebZerver that came with a modified version of RedHat 6.0 (according to their website just before the sell-off it was using RedHat 6.1). It looks virtually identical to the DiskZerver Cyclone. The main modification that I have found from stock RedHat 6.0 is the kernel, they added a lzfs filesystem compiled into the kernel. This box did not use flash and worked like a headless, keyboardless linux machine (use a terminal emulator to load it, etc.) I asked for the source for the lzfs from MicroTest before they sold off the last of the NAS product line and was told that source did not exist. The discussion went on for about a week, or a little more via emails once a day and ended when I recieved no reply (just about the time I saw that XStore bought the Zerver line). It did come with a CD that even had the source for some sample programs using the "enhancements", but not the source for the lzfs driver. The worst part is that they include kernel source when you install, but the lzfs source is not there anywhere. They attempt to make it look like they are compliant, until you attempt to build a kernel yourself. I had looked all over the system and the CD before asking MicroTest for the source code, assuming that they were compliant and provided the source with the product.
/proc and uses ioctls to gather information.
The lzfs is used to control LEDs on the front panel, check CPU temp, and a few other things. It is a virtual filesystem like
I post this as I can say that I didn't violate a license agreement to discover this, you must login to this machine as root to configure it properly and they gave me the default root password in the manual. All I wanted to be able to do was build newer kernels without losing functionality. Everything else works fine, I have upgraded Apache on it, and added java, and other things with no problem, but I can't change the kernel without losing some of the functionality. Due to that I haven't attempted to upgrade the kernel using standard kernel code, however, I believe that it should work as long as I build for headless usage properly.
How long did it take the world to wake up to Hitler? Or for that matter any number of "leaders" in the past with grand ideas of ruling the world. And even when the world does awake, the "leader" has so much power that he can't be easily stopped.
If I'm paying for it, I expect to be able to use it.
Use it all you want. The GPL allows you to use it. You can make money off it even, but you can't restrict my use of it either. The idea being that we all paid for it and can all share it equally. But in the case of GPL'ed code, you also pay the interest on the borrowed code, which is that you have to give away the source to your changes. Yes it means that you can't let a group of government paid programmers develop a really neat application, you make some minor changes to it and sell it as your own application, nor can you take a little piece of it and paste it into your big application to sell as closed source, but you can still use it, if you are willing to pay the interest by giving your software freedom also.