We can map the ancient Greek mythos to the Norse mythos...
Not really. Indo-European religions are related, this is nothing new (and while there are mappings between individual myths, they aren't nearly as good as some authors would have you believe. IMO they have little better than horoscope-level accuracy.)
It turns out, though, that we can also start lining the whole map up to Christianity and Judaism. Remember the name of Lucifer is the name of one of the higher angels working as a servant of Jehovah...
The wink-wink-nudge-nudge school of religious criticism isn't particularly worthwhile listening to. The name "Jehovah" is medieval speculation. The name "Lucifer" in the Bible is used in reference to a Babylonian king, not an angel, this is also a product of later theology. You shouldn't just swallow everything Freke & Gandy & co. tell you.
All of which has very little to do with attitudes to homosexuality.
The proper approach to this question is to examine other societies, past and present, with respect to both Christianity and homosexuality. You will find that anti-gay sentiments are all over the world, and pretty independent from religion.
I can confidently say that most movies, books and songs don't make money at all (though it's hard to back up with stats). But the lure of the gravy train is strong.
The sad thing is that it isn't just some evil lawyers behind this. Would-be artists want to think of themselves as "professional", and will support mandatory licensing, copyright violation detectors in every device, suppression of speech and knowledge, whatever it takes. Even though they themselves are hurt far more by it than they ever stand to gain for it - kind of like poor people who support tax breaks for the insanely rich because they want to win the lottery.
Hardly. Plato believed in a world of perfect ideas, but he also advocated inventing false religions (the myth of metals) to bring the real world closer to the ideal. Critias, another of Socrates' students, was a genuine atheist - and also an amoral, bloody tyrant.
See the wikipedia page on Critias, then. Wikipedia does not yet have pages on all of the thirty (and is in general very generous to Socrates), but from various books I read I think several of the tyrants beside Critias were Socrates' pupils.
It wasn't quite that reasonable, since there had been granted an amnesty for the crimes Socrates were really accused of. Therefore the charge was the more nebulous "corrupting the youth" rather than "getting cozy with Critias" - which he probably was guilty of.
In his defense, he boasted that he had ignored orders to round up the tyrant's political enemies - which may be noble in itself, possibly, unless it was just to avoid getting his hands dirty - but the fact that Critias and the tyrants were comfortable making such a demand of him, and let him alone when he refused, says something about his relationship to them.
Except all those perverse incentives, making money from wars and all that. Not to mention how incomprehensibly corrupt your employers are.
Even if you believe in just wars, you got to admit that both sides can't be just in the same war. So even if all wars were just, half of all weapons that were made would be used by the wrong side (assuming they are equally well armed over the course of history - if you think the good guys inherently will always have more weapons than the bad guys, I'd love to hear your reasoning.) As an arms manufacturer selling far and wide, the idea that you would always be on the "right" side is even more ridiculous than it would be for a soldier.
> A lot of people from good Christian Europe came down to the holy lands with the express intent of driving Islam out of various holy cities. Then there was that Spanish mob, I forget what they were called but no-one expected them.
And how did Islam come to Spain in the first place?
In the first few centuries of Islam's existence, the Christian kingdoms in the middle east, some of the oldest in existence (including Egypt and Turkey) were conquered. They came all the way to Spain. Muhammad's successors claimed that this invasion was commanded by the prophet. Whether it was or not, who knows. But those invasions were part of the explanation and justification for the crusades.
It's possible to fly above the clouds with a blimp - at least low clouds - but generally airships travel at low altitudes. I think the record is at 20000 feet or something, a lot lower than commercial airliners.
It's not exactly that either. You enter Java - or at least, a language that has the Java syntax, not sure they can call it Java since it isn't J2ME or J2SE. What you get out to actually run on your phone isn't Java bytecode, but Dalvik bytecode.
Dalvik bytecode is portable, too, so it shouldn't be a problem for most apps. But there is also the Native Development Kit, which almost no one talks about... I guess stuff written in that won't be portable.
There's so much BS going around about democracy and the "tyranny of the majority".
Constitutions don't need to be written down. A constitution, in the classical sense, is merely the fundamental rules and institutions of a society. Arguably, written constitutions aren't even real constitutions, but attempts to describe them and capture them. All organized societies are "constitutional".
Representative democracy really does nothing to solve the problem of the "tyranny of the majority", if it is a problem at all. Some written constitutions purport to protect certain minorities, but there simply is no procedure to decide when a minority should be allowed to overrule a majority, and when it shouldn't. Enshrined minorities with power is just as often a problem as opressed minorites - and more often than majorities of any sort, I argue.
Minorities are protected when, and only when majorities choose to restrain themselves. The magic bits of paper called constitutions only work as long as people believe they work - a bit like placebo medicine.
It could maybe become useful to some degree. If you can make people think of it as a game, a challenge, maybe it will develop to the point that it will be useful. People love the artificially constrained communication of Twitter, so why not?
Yet, I would advise the initiators to read the sad story of Blissymbolics. I wanted to link to wikipedia, but they don't tell it (in fact they tell an extremely sanitized story!) It's recounted in other places, such as Arika Orkent's book "In the land of invented languages".
In brief, Bliss wanted to create an internationally intuitive symbol language, suitable for full communication. That didn't work, but by chance, a centre working with CP children came across it. These are children who have normal intelligence, but extremely few ways of expressing themselves. They were also too young to have learned to read, so they couldn't slowly spell out what they want a la Hawkins. Instead they used Bliss' symbols as a sort of rebus: One kid who wanted to go as a vampire on halloween pointed to the signs for "dark", "man", "blood", "mouth" etc.
Bliss was at first overjoyed. Then he was furious, because he found out the teachers (and the kids) used it "wrong", not according to the rules he'd set up. He threatened to sue. Eventually they were forced to settle, for a large sum. So in essence he stole money from handicapped children, but had to give up his dream of an international symbol language.
Yes, maybe this doesn't matter at all. You go ahead and prove that. Meanwhile, the evidence suggests that looks do matter, just like we already know race and gender matters.
Sorry, typo. It should read actual product development. If you look at kickstarter, you'll notice none of the products on the front page are already made.
Conceptually, there's nothing wrong with making it first, and releasing it later; known by the not very flattering term "ransomware". There was a guy who kept doing that on fundable.org for indie RPG modules - one of the very few serious efforts there. But kickstarter appears to be far less interested in such projects, if they have them at all.
My guess it's because they want to make it as easy as possible for contributors to accept the unusual business model. Customers need to understand that they are actually buying something, not just contributing to a cause (however noble that may be). Thus the focus on rewards, also.
I've met a couple people who swear they have had a Duke Nukem Forever prototype that was running on their machine for months.
So? They exist, you know. They just never reached the stage where the company could release them without embarrassment, because technology kept outrunning them.
It's their reputation. There was another site, conceptually very similar to kickstarter, that predated it by many years: fundable.org. They made the "group action" mechanism their core focus, and permitted just about anything.
People didn't get it. 95% of the "projects" at fundable were begging, plain and simple. Fundable doesn't exist anymore.
Kickstarter has decided to focus on rewards - it's really something rather peripheral to the concept, but it's something people understand. And they only accept projects of actual product developed - rather than fundraising for any good cause that already exists. Their pickiness is understandable, although for all I know they could have been unreasonable in this lawn-moving site rejection.
In this case, the pledges were made through kickstarter. As I understand it, they reserve an amount on your card in the same way hotels do; it's not withdrawn, but it's locked until the drive succeeds - or until it fails, in which case the reservations are deleted.
Slashdot Mirror
All other religions, obviously.
Not really. Indo-European religions are related, this is nothing new (and while there are mappings between individual myths, they aren't nearly as good as some authors would have you believe. IMO they have little better than horoscope-level accuracy.)
The wink-wink-nudge-nudge school of religious criticism isn't particularly worthwhile listening to. The name "Jehovah" is medieval speculation. The name "Lucifer" in the Bible is used in reference to a Babylonian king, not an angel, this is also a product of later theology. You shouldn't just swallow everything Freke & Gandy & co. tell you.
All of which has very little to do with attitudes to homosexuality.
The proper approach to this question is to examine other societies, past and present, with respect to both Christianity and homosexuality. You will find that anti-gay sentiments are all over the world, and pretty independent from religion.
I can confidently say that most movies, books and songs don't make money at all (though it's hard to back up with stats). But the lure of the gravy train is strong.
The sad thing is that it isn't just some evil lawyers behind this. Would-be artists want to think of themselves as "professional", and will support mandatory licensing, copyright violation detectors in every device, suppression of speech and knowledge, whatever it takes. Even though they themselves are hurt far more by it than they ever stand to gain for it - kind of like poor people who support tax breaks for the insanely rich because they want to win the lottery.
Hardly. Plato believed in a world of perfect ideas, but he also advocated inventing false religions (the myth of metals) to bring the real world closer to the ideal. Critias, another of Socrates' students, was a genuine atheist - and also an amoral, bloody tyrant.
See the wikipedia page on Critias, then. Wikipedia does not yet have pages on all of the thirty (and is in general very generous to Socrates), but from various books I read I think several of the tyrants beside Critias were Socrates' pupils.
Ballons, yes, blimps, apparently not.
It wasn't quite that reasonable, since there had been granted an amnesty for the crimes Socrates were really accused of. Therefore the charge was the more nebulous "corrupting the youth" rather than "getting cozy with Critias" - which he probably was guilty of.
In his defense, he boasted that he had ignored orders to round up the tyrant's political enemies - which may be noble in itself, possibly, unless it was just to avoid getting his hands dirty - but the fact that Critias and the tyrants were comfortable making such a demand of him, and let him alone when he refused, says something about his relationship to them.
Except all those perverse incentives, making money from wars and all that. Not to mention how incomprehensibly corrupt your employers are.
Even if you believe in just wars, you got to admit that both sides can't be just in the same war. So even if all wars were just, half of all weapons that were made would be used by the wrong side (assuming they are equally well armed over the course of history - if you think the good guys inherently will always have more weapons than the bad guys, I'd love to hear your reasoning.) As an arms manufacturer selling far and wide, the idea that you would always be on the "right" side is even more ridiculous than it would be for a soldier.
> A lot of people from good Christian Europe came down to the holy lands with the express intent of driving Islam out of various holy cities. Then there was that Spanish mob, I forget what they were called but no-one expected them.
And how did Islam come to Spain in the first place?
In the first few centuries of Islam's existence, the Christian kingdoms in the middle east, some of the oldest in existence (including Egypt and Turkey) were conquered. They came all the way to Spain. Muhammad's successors claimed that this invasion was commanded by the prophet. Whether it was or not, who knows. But those invasions were part of the explanation and justification for the crusades.
It's possible to fly above the clouds with a blimp - at least low clouds - but generally airships travel at low altitudes. I think the record is at 20000 feet or something, a lot lower than commercial airliners.
The Acorn Archimedes? The fricking Acorn Archimedes? No, I did not know that. That is awesome, now I have a reason for rooting for them!
Browsing traffic is a much better indicator. We've had "smart phones" with Windows CE and its descendants for ages.
It's not exactly that either. You enter Java - or at least, a language that has the Java syntax, not sure they can call it Java since it isn't J2ME or J2SE. What you get out to actually run on your phone isn't Java bytecode, but Dalvik bytecode.
Dalvik bytecode is portable, too, so it shouldn't be a problem for most apps. But there is also the Native Development Kit, which almost no one talks about... I guess stuff written in that won't be portable.
When you quote like that, you make the parent look pretty confused about the benefits of python.
There's so much BS going around about democracy and the "tyranny of the majority".
Constitutions don't need to be written down. A constitution, in the classical sense, is merely the fundamental rules and institutions of a society. Arguably, written constitutions aren't even real constitutions, but attempts to describe them and capture them. All organized societies are "constitutional".
Representative democracy really does nothing to solve the problem of the "tyranny of the majority", if it is a problem at all. Some written constitutions purport to protect certain minorities, but there simply is no procedure to decide when a minority should be allowed to overrule a majority, and when it shouldn't. Enshrined minorities with power is just as often a problem as opressed minorites - and more often than majorities of any sort, I argue.
Minorities are protected when, and only when majorities choose to restrain themselves. The magic bits of paper called constitutions only work as long as people believe they work - a bit like placebo medicine.
Yes, they do. It's kind of surprising they get away with that, since a bigger ship - and a real Zeppelin, not a mere blimp - is flying regular tours over the San Fransisco bay area.
.
Nope. The Zeppelin NT is 75 meters, 2-3 meters longer than this one. It also has twice the payload.
Cerebral palsy.
Bliss wasn't the first to attempt making an universal, ideographic writing system either.
It could maybe become useful to some degree. If you can make people think of it as a game, a challenge, maybe it will develop to the point that it will be useful. People love the artificially constrained communication of Twitter, so why not?
Yet, I would advise the initiators to read the sad story of Blissymbolics. I wanted to link to wikipedia, but they don't tell it (in fact they tell an extremely sanitized story!) It's recounted in other places, such as Arika Orkent's book "In the land of invented languages".
In brief, Bliss wanted to create an internationally intuitive symbol language, suitable for full communication. That didn't work, but by chance, a centre working with CP children came across it. These are children who have normal intelligence, but extremely few ways of expressing themselves. They were also too young to have learned to read, so they couldn't slowly spell out what they want a la Hawkins. Instead they used Bliss' symbols as a sort of rebus: One kid who wanted to go as a vampire on halloween pointed to the signs for "dark", "man", "blood", "mouth" etc.
Bliss was at first overjoyed. Then he was furious, because he found out the teachers (and the kids) used it "wrong", not according to the rules he'd set up. He threatened to sue. Eventually they were forced to settle, for a large sum. So in essence he stole money from handicapped children, but had to give up his dream of an international symbol language.
Yes, maybe this doesn't matter at all. You go ahead and prove that. Meanwhile, the evidence suggests that looks do matter, just like we already know race and gender matters.
Sorry, typo. It should read actual product development. If you look at kickstarter, you'll notice none of the products on the front page are already made.
Conceptually, there's nothing wrong with making it first, and releasing it later; known by the not very flattering term "ransomware". There was a guy who kept doing that on fundable.org for indie RPG modules - one of the very few serious efforts there. But kickstarter appears to be far less interested in such projects, if they have them at all.
My guess it's because they want to make it as easy as possible for contributors to accept the unusual business model. Customers need to understand that they are actually buying something, not just contributing to a cause (however noble that may be). Thus the focus on rewards, also.
So? They exist, you know. They just never reached the stage where the company could release them without embarrassment, because technology kept outrunning them.
It's their reputation. There was another site, conceptually very similar to kickstarter, that predated it by many years: fundable.org. They made the "group action" mechanism their core focus, and permitted just about anything.
People didn't get it. 95% of the "projects" at fundable were begging, plain and simple. Fundable doesn't exist anymore.
Kickstarter has decided to focus on rewards - it's really something rather peripheral to the concept, but it's something people understand. And they only accept projects of actual product developed - rather than fundraising for any good cause that already exists. Their pickiness is understandable, although for all I know they could have been unreasonable in this lawn-moving site rejection.
In this case, the pledges were made through kickstarter. As I understand it, they reserve an amount on your card in the same way hotels do; it's not withdrawn, but it's locked until the drive succeeds - or until it fails, in which case the reservations are deleted.
So yes, Diaspora already have that money.