no technology exists that will make exact duplicates of them
Well, I mean, there is no technology that exists to make an exact duplicate of ANYTHING. That doesn't mean that digitizing this information is useless, however.
You mention that these are three dimensional mediums. Fine, three-dimensional data capture is nothing new. You're right, plopping this thing on a scanner is not going to work. But I'm sure that in some way we can get an image at a set of depth intervals and save those. Now there is an additional search criteria, the depth.
Like anything else analog, there is a certain granularity that cannot be surpassed... there is only so much 'meaningful' data that can be extracted. To say that at some point humans will be more knowledgeable and be able to extract even more info from these is a little bit of a stretch. Sure, we get smarter, but when we get smarter, wouldn't it also be possible we'd find a much more efficient way of seeing how the universe used to look? Maybe by looking at reflections of the light that bounced off of the stars that was 100 years ago? (or something equally fantastic)
Not only that, but how often are these plates even looked at? Having them available digitally, with quick referencing, probably makes the information in these plates a 100 times more valuable.
It seems like Slashdot has a greater and greater proportion of articles that relate to gadgets (stuff to buy), and fewer and fewer that are about tech developments, science, etc
Technology is merely applied science. Technology articles are more interesting than science because its easier to digest; technology is science for a specific purpose. Gadgets are even more specific; they're a technology refined into an affordable, mass produced item that people can actually use. Gadgets are most emphasized because it is science made available to everyone, that can benefit everyone. Having an iPhone that can shave minutes off my day by being able to read email wirelessly, etc may save 1 million people 5 minutes. It doesn't sound all that impressive, but it impacts people's lives much more significantly than the abstract cosmology that NASA or others puts out; or the latest refinement of TFT displays or something. I'm not saying we can't appreciate things at the higher level, I'm just saying that sometimes you want to just experience the effects in a gadget. I think that's why they're so popular.
Perhaps they all came from the same retailer which has a stockboy that liked to drop-kick the Xboxes
This happens a lot; but more likely at UPS or some other freight carrier.
I had friends who worked their way through college by working part-time at a UPS sorting facility. There were a few employees who definitely took out their aggression on merchandise.
Despite the increase in productivity (1000%?) since the 1930's- for some reason it always requires that we work at least 40 hours a week to make enough to live. We have less free time than they did in the 30's.
Studies have pegged our leisure time available during the day as having gone from 1.8 hours in 1850 to 5.8 hours in 1995. Not only that, but the modern world has given us an enormous amount of variety in the things we can do during our leisure time. Books, televison, the internet, incredible hobby specialization, etc. And this doesn't even speak to the quality of work we do: percentages of hard labor (heavy muscle use) jobs have gone down, and less than 1% of the US population are farmers. We may have to work the same 8 hours as before, but what we end up doing is much more cerebral than physical. Ask anyone who busts their back for 8 hours doing manual labor. Office work is much more desirable.
And think about this, speaking of colonial work ethic:
In Virginia, authorities also transplanted the Statue of Artificers, which obliged all Englishmen (except the gentry) to engage in productive activity from sunrise to sunset. Likewise, a 1670 Massachusetts law demanded a minimum ten-hour workday
We've got it good, and it turns out, there's actually no giant corporate conspiracy to keep us in bondage! Fancy that.
By your logic a slave is not a slave, since he is free to starve or otherwise kill himself.
Reductio ad absurdum. My argument is that in a capitalist society, a man can choose for whom he works, at what he works, when he works, or even not to work (even if the choice to not work results in his own death). Under a slave system, that same man, if he is a slave, has none of those choices. The parent of my reply then argued that because one HAS to work in order to live (regardless of any society, one must work. Humans do not photosynthesize and man cannot survive automatically), it is the same as being FORCED to work (that the nature of man needing to eat is the same force as a man consciously deciding to threaten or beat another man for not working). Therefore, the extension to his argument is that corporations are the same as slave masters. Except, of course, that corporations cannot keep you from running to a better corporation. I argued against his assertion that because we MUST work, everyone is forced to work. I was saying that needing to work, in order to live, does not equate with making someone work, and threatening their lives / killing them if they do not.
A simple slavery test, I propose: Is a man allowed to take what action he thinks necessary to ensure his own survival? If he believes the methods that he is doing are not the best way, and would like to try differently, is he allowed to do so? Or will he feel the whip of oppression on his back, and will his chains grip tighter?
Slavery defines a relationship between men. Capitalism is a decidedly different relationship. Whether a man has to eat because he is a man, and that's what his body requires, does not factor into the above two. Sorry if I was unclear previously.
You've made the mistake of thinking the only way to be a slave is to be physically coerced.
I haven't made the mistake because it is true.
The definition I am using is: a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another; a bond servant. This is from dictionary.com . The closest definition I can find to the way you are using the word is: a person entirely under the domination of some influence or person . Even if we use the more generous second meaning; it simply does not apply, because one can simply be undominated by work by simply not showing up or doing it.
When the alternative is starving in the gutter, that's close enough to coercion for most people.
Let me ask you this: Imagine we are 8000 years in the past. An prehistoric farmer is carving out a meek farming existence. He carefully tills the soil with hand tools and scratches out a basic existence on what little he can cull from the soil. Is he then a slave to his farm? Is he a slave to the fact that he is an animal, and must, from time to time, feed his belly? What is coercing him to farm?
The answer is, he is not coerced. There is no force. He is free to starve. Just because men must provide for their own survival does not enslave them. If that were the case, using that definition, under no circumstances could a man *not* be a slave. And in which case, all men are slaves and then there's no such thing as slavery.
Capitalism is not slavery. Slavery is labor procured by force or the threat of force. In a capitalist society you are free to not have a job. There is no threat of force from a government, or a corporation. You're simply misusing the word slavery. If what you mean is INCENTIVE, then you might be closer. Capitalism provides incentive to work by the promise of compensation; that compensation can in turn be used to obtain the efforts of other's labors. Having an incentive to work (aka benefits that one would want to achieve) is most certainly not the same as being forced to work.
To compare this process to slavery is disingenuous. Ask a REAL slave from Mauritania or the Sudan whether having the choice to go to work at Google is slavery.
The way it works is some HD channels are encrypted, and some are not. unencrypted channels can be picked up by your HD cable box via comcast, or you can just plug your cable feed into the antennae spot on an OTA tuner.
Soon you will be able to buy your own set-top, and cable-card will become more prevalent. But its soon as in, the next 10 years, not soon as in Q4. Most of the reason is the fragmented nature of cable companies. Even though most companies have merged into Comcast, Time-Warner, etc the last 10 years, there's still a ways to go. And the big companies often act disjointedly, acting one way in the northeast and another way in the south. Its hard to get everyone on an initiative as large as cable-cards.
Some argue that if you cut off aid you risk throwing nations into even more tumultuous states than before. However, I agree aid alone is also not the solution.
The idea is that you cannot add ONLY money to a situation and expect the economy of a country to produce. The government has to have a minimum respect for property rights and be stable. Then, when the nation proves to be a place where people can actually do business, the economy will start to gain steam.
If you worked at a company that had the opportunity to set up a store and sell items in nation 'X', and nation 'X' had a military junta running its government and frequently 'appropriated' local business assets to further its gain, would you ship $1 million worth of widgets there, knowing they could be stolen by the government? As a bank, would you loan money to a farmer to buy a tractor to automate his farming, knowing that farmer has no collateral to provide, the farmer has no experience farming or using heavy machinery, and that farmer could have his land seized at any time anyways?
Aid is given to lessen the negative effect of market forces in a downward market. However, those downward forces are necessary to change the decision making of the economy: if there are no bad repercussions from an action, why not continue to loot the people of their property? I mean, the money will still come.
Well, if you don't like the service, run your own miles of fiber cable, and equipment. Lease space on Telephone poles. buy your own converter. It shoudl only be a few thousand dollars, maybe a hundred thousand, tops.
Wow, I feel bad for the developers who spent time incorporating Traditional Chinese into flickr. now no one who speaks it will see the site. Terrible timing!
All environmental laws and movements are a marketing scheme. They recognize a certain percentage of the population feels guilty about being wealthy and consuming; so they market to them to allow them to assuage their guilt by 'going green'. People will gladly fork over extra money to feel better about their purchases, regardless of whether they are actually making a difference.
And in turn, because 'green' is popular, the government gets involved to garner votes from the popularity. And in turn, other companies with fly-by-night ideas want a piece of the money the government is spending in green ideas.
And everything is dandy, unless you're a politician and the wind farm is going to be near your property, then your true colors will show.
That is true, but there is also no objective, repeatable evidence that such a being does not exist.
I've argued this point before about falsifiability. Simply put, it is up to a claimant to offer evidence of an idea, not the other way around. Am i supposed to analyze every atom in the universe for god? at what point would you say I have disproven it? or do you deny my faculty to even make such a judgement, due to my limited human mind? If our minds are so weak as to not be able to discover god scientifically, how are our minds so broad as to understand that there is a god?
Putting that aside; what does that say about believers if the best evidence they have is that no one can prove it wrong? At least the pious of the past claimed to speak with god, to witness his miracles. Today's mystics either mold their religions tenets and events to fit their own desires (such as Christians who don't attend church, don't forgo premarital sex, accept homosexuality, etc), or they flee to a more consistent view, such as 'New Age' type mysticism, where people unabashedly believe in magic like crystal energy, shakras and faith healers.
I used to believe in god when I was younger. I went to catholic school, was an altar server. I know what its like to believe. And do I wish it were true! immortality, unconditional love! But alas, as I have learned, wanting something to be true does not make it so.
when people in this thread are saying 'literal interpretation of the bible', they mean
in accordance with, involving, or being the primary or strict meaning of the word or words; not figurative or metaphorical
(first definition of the word).
People are demonstrating at this creationist museum that if you could build a time machine, the furthest you could go back is 6000 years. If you went back 5999 years, 350~ days, they are saying, with a straight face, that there were two humans living in a perfect garden. This is indisputable, see the photos. They created a full size display saying it is the case.
I myself take Scripture as literally true, but I may not think it means the same thing as others
Then you are quite simply misusing the word 'literal'. What you think about a meaning of a word doesn't change what the word actually means. You can obfuscate all you want with the writings of Thomas Aquinas. I bet the guy wrote some insightful stuff about the literature of the bible. But the question is simple: Do you believe that the bible retells, in specific detail, the actual events of 6000 years ago? And for the museum creationists, the answer is an emphatic yes.
It outside the scope of science to determine the "Who?" and "Why?" of the origin of Earth and the origin of life.
This is completely a legitimate function of science, to identify causality of phenomenon. Why is it outside the scope of science? If we can use science to unlock the function and meaning of our own bodies and their components, why can't we apply the same sort of discovery to our entire planet? Why is examining bacteria bound by one rule, but examining our very existence and nature bound by others?
For every animal we study, for every storm we track, for every electromagnetic field we describe, we are determining a very small piece of the entire fabric of what makes up the universe. and part of that universe is us, and our planet. And I see no reason to analyze plants and animals one way, and the cosmos in another.
So the importance of those five verses isn't about a foolish interpretation of what one "day" means -- it is that there is a much more powerful, intelligent being that could place a planet with the correct attributes in the exact right place in a solar system so that "life" as we know it could begin and then flourish -- and that everything else comes after.
Fine, what you're describing is some sort of hyper-able and hyper-advanced species or race or being who can make planets. However, you better have a good explanation as to where this being came from... and also, what is the being made of, who can manipulate things in the universe. Even if the universe itself spawned a superbeing such as one who could make and seed entire planets, it would still be a product of the universe and be bound by its laws; it would be a byproduct of it, which fails to explain where the universe itself came from. Unless 'God' created the universe, he isn't really a god, but a logical conclusion based on the rules of a universe whose genesis is independent of this god.
You may not be fitting your views to the Bible as I stated in my previous post. But you are definitely starting as your yardstick the 'creator' must exist, therefore let me posit a universe that could be created by a creator. The reason why scientists do not pursue a creator model is because it doesn't fit what we observe about the universe. Also, because there is no objective, repeatable evidence of such a being.
drop that there 'must' be a creator for a minute. Science believes in a 'big bang' based on background radiation levels and other measurements. Therefore the universe had to exist in some sort of incredibly small, matter poor state. before the big bang, where did the creator 'live'. did he occupy space? there are no good answers. that's why scientists are not modeling and forwarding ideas about a creator.
At the core of a creationist argument is that all of the Bible's stories are literally true.
The whole point of creationism and other philosophies like them is that they are a response to, and not a discovery of, new knowledge. The bible says that the flood happened. Therefore, when investigating the 'origins of life', that HAS TO BE accounted for. No option of how history happened can exclude that information. The entire museum takes all of the information in the bible and then attempts to map that information to a model which would allow the bible to be true. The bible is the yardstick to which all other information is measured.
Science, on the other hand, is progressing by asking questions, proposing models and ideas, and advancing those models and ideas through objective testing. If the model or idea is invalidated by the testing results, they are modified. The yardstick in this case is objective reality. If an idea is good enough, we can test its validity in the world.
I personally side with science/reality. I mean, I don't have much choice. Reality will continue to be what it is regardless of what I want to believe.:)
I doubt that iPhones are going to sync with Corp. email so easily. The reason Blackberry has such a great sync with corporate email is because businesses have their own blackberry management servers (I don't know if the servers live at RIM or at the the local company's site, though) that tie into the corporate email servers. iPhone is not being launched as a business product, or as with a business 'edition'.
iPhone will probably have POP3 access to mailboxes like most current smartphones do.
I think small business/independent businessmen could use iPhone no problem; but they have to manage their own contacts and keep their own address book. Corporate Joe working at a firm with more than 100 users will probably just continue to use the solution handed down to him via his company; and the only decent enterprise system right now is RIMs.
Most large employers include it as part of their background check. Once an offer, contingent on verification, is presented, the employer runs a background check via a third party. The third party reports all sorts of info. Sometimes the third party cannot obtain the proper education verification. Happened to me. On my first day of work I had to bring in my Diploma.
What worries me more, is that my mother, who is not my guardian anymore (by a longshot) can still call educational institutions that I attend and get information about my enrollment with nothing more than my name and social security number. She's hardly what anyone would call an expert in social engineering.
Even worse, places of prospective employment can call universities and get information about my enrollment as well (oftentimes without my social security number)! How many times have I lost a potential job from an employer who called a University to find out I never graduated. What a load! they should obviously by law only be allowed to take what I say about it.
In all the examples you mentioned, only one has outsold its competition. There have always been more PCs than macs, or Windows installs rather than OSX installs. Where Apple has been wildly successful is the MP3 market. Their strengths in this arena, which I believe allowed them to be so successful, is their design sense, usability sense, and marketing sense. If they can apply the same to the iPhone, AND it becomes affordable second/third gen, then it will be successful.
These days Apple stores are selling Macs almost as iPod accessories.
Slashdot Mirror
no technology exists that will make exact duplicates of them
Well, I mean, there is no technology that exists to make an exact duplicate of ANYTHING. That doesn't mean that digitizing this information is useless, however.
You mention that these are three dimensional mediums. Fine, three-dimensional data capture is nothing new. You're right, plopping this thing on a scanner is not going to work. But I'm sure that in some way we can get an image at a set of depth intervals and save those. Now there is an additional search criteria, the depth.
Like anything else analog, there is a certain granularity that cannot be surpassed... there is only so much 'meaningful' data that can be extracted. To say that at some point humans will be more knowledgeable and be able to extract even more info from these is a little bit of a stretch. Sure, we get smarter, but when we get smarter, wouldn't it also be possible we'd find a much more efficient way of seeing how the universe used to look? Maybe by looking at reflections of the light that bounced off of the stars that was 100 years ago? (or something equally fantastic)
Not only that, but how often are these plates even looked at? Having them available digitally, with quick referencing, probably makes the information in these plates a 100 times more valuable.
This is going to sound incredibly trollish, but why not use the internet capabilities of your phone?
Just because A precedes B, does not necessarily mean that A caused B.
It seems like Slashdot has a greater and greater proportion of articles that relate to gadgets (stuff to buy), and fewer and fewer that are about tech developments, science, etc
Technology is merely applied science. Technology articles are more interesting than science because its easier to digest; technology is science for a specific purpose. Gadgets are even more specific; they're a technology refined into an affordable, mass produced item that people can actually use. Gadgets are most emphasized because it is science made available to everyone, that can benefit everyone. Having an iPhone that can shave minutes off my day by being able to read email wirelessly, etc may save 1 million people 5 minutes. It doesn't sound all that impressive, but it impacts people's lives much more significantly than the abstract cosmology that NASA or others puts out; or the latest refinement of TFT displays or something. I'm not saying we can't appreciate things at the higher level, I'm just saying that sometimes you want to just experience the effects in a gadget. I think that's why they're so popular.
Perhaps they all came from the same retailer which has a stockboy that liked to drop-kick the Xboxes
This happens a lot; but more likely at UPS or some other freight carrier.
I had friends who worked their way through college by working part-time at a UPS sorting facility. There were a few employees who definitely took out their aggression on merchandise.
Despite the increase in productivity (1000%?) since the 1930's- for some reason it always requires that we work at least 40 hours a week to make enough to live. We have less free time than they did in the 30's.
o urs.us
Do you have numbers to back this up?
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.h
Studies have pegged our leisure time available during the day as having gone from 1.8 hours in 1850 to 5.8 hours in 1995. Not only that, but the modern world has given us an enormous amount of variety in the things we can do during our leisure time. Books, televison, the internet, incredible hobby specialization, etc. And this doesn't even speak to the quality of work we do: percentages of hard labor (heavy muscle use) jobs have gone down, and less than 1% of the US population are farmers. We may have to work the same 8 hours as before, but what we end up doing is much more cerebral than physical. Ask anyone who busts their back for 8 hours doing manual labor. Office work is much more desirable.
And think about this, speaking of colonial work ethic:
In Virginia, authorities also transplanted the Statue of Artificers, which obliged all Englishmen (except the gentry) to engage in productive activity from sunrise to sunset. Likewise, a 1670 Massachusetts law demanded a minimum ten-hour workday
We've got it good, and it turns out, there's actually no giant corporate conspiracy to keep us in bondage! Fancy that.
Well-reasoned.
Maybe its a personal thing, but to me, if someone tries to deny me my options.. he/she is treating me like his/her slave
Do you agree then, that a company cannot possibly deny you those options? (unless the company put you in bondage, which isn't at all capitalism).
By your logic a slave is not a slave, since he is free to starve or otherwise kill himself.
Reductio ad absurdum. My argument is that in a capitalist society, a man can choose for whom he works, at what he works, when he works, or even not to work (even if the choice to not work results in his own death). Under a slave system, that same man, if he is a slave, has none of those choices. The parent of my reply then argued that because one HAS to work in order to live (regardless of any society, one must work. Humans do not photosynthesize and man cannot survive automatically), it is the same as being FORCED to work (that the nature of man needing to eat is the same force as a man consciously deciding to threaten or beat another man for not working). Therefore, the extension to his argument is that corporations are the same as slave masters. Except, of course, that corporations cannot keep you from running to a better corporation. I argued against his assertion that because we MUST work, everyone is forced to work. I was saying that needing to work, in order to live, does not equate with making someone work, and threatening their lives / killing them if they do not.
A simple slavery test, I propose: Is a man allowed to take what action he thinks necessary to ensure his own survival? If he believes the methods that he is doing are not the best way, and would like to try differently, is he allowed to do so? Or will he feel the whip of oppression on his back, and will his chains grip tighter?
Slavery defines a relationship between men. Capitalism is a decidedly different relationship. Whether a man has to eat because he is a man, and that's what his body requires, does not factor into the above two. Sorry if I was unclear previously.
You've made the mistake of thinking the only way to be a slave is to be physically coerced.
I haven't made the mistake because it is true.
The definition I am using is: a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another; a bond servant. This is from dictionary.com . The closest definition I can find to the way you are using the word is: a person entirely under the domination of some influence or person . Even if we use the more generous second meaning; it simply does not apply, because one can simply be undominated by work by simply not showing up or doing it.
When the alternative is starving in the gutter, that's close enough to coercion for most people.
Let me ask you this: Imagine we are 8000 years in the past. An prehistoric farmer is carving out a meek farming existence. He carefully tills the soil with hand tools and scratches out a basic existence on what little he can cull from the soil. Is he then a slave to his farm? Is he a slave to the fact that he is an animal, and must, from time to time, feed his belly? What is coercing him to farm?
The answer is, he is not coerced. There is no force. He is free to starve. Just because men must provide for their own survival does not enslave them. If that were the case, using that definition, under no circumstances could a man *not* be a slave. And in which case, all men are slaves and then there's no such thing as slavery.
Capitalism is not slavery. Slavery is labor procured by force or the threat of force. In a capitalist society you are free to not have a job. There is no threat of force from a government, or a corporation. You're simply misusing the word slavery. If what you mean is INCENTIVE, then you might be closer. Capitalism provides incentive to work by the promise of compensation; that compensation can in turn be used to obtain the efforts of other's labors. Having an incentive to work (aka benefits that one would want to achieve) is most certainly not the same as being forced to work.
To compare this process to slavery is disingenuous. Ask a REAL slave from Mauritania or the Sudan whether having the choice to go to work at Google is slavery.
To get HD broadcast channels, you don't need comcast's box:
http://www.slate.com/id/2167389/
The way it works is some HD channels are encrypted, and some are not. unencrypted channels can be picked up by your HD cable box via comcast, or you can just plug your cable feed into the antennae spot on an OTA tuner.
Soon you will be able to buy your own set-top, and cable-card will become more prevalent. But its soon as in, the next 10 years, not soon as in Q4. Most of the reason is the fragmented nature of cable companies. Even though most companies have merged into Comcast, Time-Warner, etc the last 10 years, there's still a ways to go. And the big companies often act disjointedly, acting one way in the northeast and another way in the south. Its hard to get everyone on an initiative as large as cable-cards.
Some argue that if you cut off aid you risk throwing nations into even more tumultuous states than before. However, I agree aid alone is also not the solution.
The idea is that you cannot add ONLY money to a situation and expect the economy of a country to produce. The government has to have a minimum respect for property rights and be stable. Then, when the nation proves to be a place where people can actually do business, the economy will start to gain steam.
If you worked at a company that had the opportunity to set up a store and sell items in nation 'X', and nation 'X' had a military junta running its government and frequently 'appropriated' local business assets to further its gain, would you ship $1 million worth of widgets there, knowing they could be stolen by the government? As a bank, would you loan money to a farmer to buy a tractor to automate his farming, knowing that farmer has no collateral to provide, the farmer has no experience farming or using heavy machinery, and that farmer could have his land seized at any time anyways?
Aid is given to lessen the negative effect of market forces in a downward market. However, those downward forces are necessary to change the decision making of the economy: if there are no bad repercussions from an action, why not continue to loot the people of their property? I mean, the money will still come.
Well, if you don't like the service, run your own miles of fiber cable, and equipment. Lease space on Telephone poles. buy your own converter. It shoudl only be a few thousand dollars, maybe a hundred thousand, tops.
Stop breathing. You're emitting CO2.
Wow, I feel bad for the developers who spent time incorporating Traditional Chinese into flickr. now no one who speaks it will see the site. Terrible timing!
n ational-launch/
http://blog.flickr.com/en/2007/06/12/flickr-inter
All environmental laws and movements are a marketing scheme. They recognize a certain percentage of the population feels guilty about being wealthy and consuming; so they market to them to allow them to assuage their guilt by 'going green'. People will gladly fork over extra money to feel better about their purchases, regardless of whether they are actually making a difference.
And in turn, because 'green' is popular, the government gets involved to garner votes from the popularity. And in turn, other companies with fly-by-night ideas want a piece of the money the government is spending in green ideas.
And everything is dandy, unless you're a politician and the wind farm is going to be near your property, then your true colors will show.
That is true, but there is also no objective, repeatable evidence that such a being does not exist.
I've argued this point before about falsifiability. Simply put, it is up to a claimant to offer evidence of an idea, not the other way around. Am i supposed to analyze every atom in the universe for god? at what point would you say I have disproven it? or do you deny my faculty to even make such a judgement, due to my limited human mind? If our minds are so weak as to not be able to discover god scientifically, how are our minds so broad as to understand that there is a god?
Putting that aside; what does that say about believers if the best evidence they have is that no one can prove it wrong? At least the pious of the past claimed to speak with god, to witness his miracles. Today's mystics either mold their religions tenets and events to fit their own desires (such as Christians who don't attend church, don't forgo premarital sex, accept homosexuality, etc), or they flee to a more consistent view, such as 'New Age' type mysticism, where people unabashedly believe in magic like crystal energy, shakras and faith healers.
I used to believe in god when I was younger. I went to catholic school, was an altar server. I know what its like to believe. And do I wish it were true! immortality, unconditional love! But alas, as I have learned, wanting something to be true does not make it so.
All that jazz you typed is all fine and dandy.
when people in this thread are saying 'literal interpretation of the bible', they mean
in accordance with, involving, or being the primary or strict meaning of the word or words; not figurative or metaphorical
(first definition of the word).
People are demonstrating at this creationist museum that if you could build a time machine, the furthest you could go back is 6000 years. If you went back 5999 years, 350~ days, they are saying, with a straight face, that there were two humans living in a perfect garden. This is indisputable, see the photos. They created a full size display saying it is the case.
I myself take Scripture as literally true, but I may not think it means the same thing as others
Then you are quite simply misusing the word 'literal'. What you think about a meaning of a word doesn't change what the word actually means. You can obfuscate all you want with the writings of Thomas Aquinas. I bet the guy wrote some insightful stuff about the literature of the bible. But the question is simple: Do you believe that the bible retells, in specific detail, the actual events of 6000 years ago? And for the museum creationists, the answer is an emphatic yes.
It outside the scope of science to determine the "Who?" and "Why?" of the origin of Earth and the origin of life.
This is completely a legitimate function of science, to identify causality of phenomenon. Why is it outside the scope of science? If we can use science to unlock the function and meaning of our own bodies and their components, why can't we apply the same sort of discovery to our entire planet? Why is examining bacteria bound by one rule, but examining our very existence and nature bound by others?
For every animal we study, for every storm we track, for every electromagnetic field we describe, we are determining a very small piece of the entire fabric of what makes up the universe. and part of that universe is us, and our planet. And I see no reason to analyze plants and animals one way, and the cosmos in another.
So the importance of those five verses isn't about a foolish interpretation of what one "day" means -- it is that there is a much more powerful, intelligent being that could place a planet with the correct attributes in the exact right place in a solar system so that "life" as we know it could begin and then flourish -- and that everything else comes after.
Fine, what you're describing is some sort of hyper-able and hyper-advanced species or race or being who can make planets. However, you better have a good explanation as to where this being came from... and also, what is the being made of, who can manipulate things in the universe. Even if the universe itself spawned a superbeing such as one who could make and seed entire planets, it would still be a product of the universe and be bound by its laws; it would be a byproduct of it, which fails to explain where the universe itself came from. Unless 'God' created the universe, he isn't really a god, but a logical conclusion based on the rules of a universe whose genesis is independent of this god.
You may not be fitting your views to the Bible as I stated in my previous post. But you are definitely starting as your yardstick the 'creator' must exist, therefore let me posit a universe that could be created by a creator. The reason why scientists do not pursue a creator model is because it doesn't fit what we observe about the universe. Also, because there is no objective, repeatable evidence of such a being.
drop that there 'must' be a creator for a minute. Science believes in a 'big bang' based on background radiation levels and other measurements. Therefore the universe had to exist in some sort of incredibly small, matter poor state. before the big bang, where did the creator 'live'. did he occupy space? there are no good answers. that's why scientists are not modeling and forwarding ideas about a creator.
At the core of a creationist argument is that all of the Bible's stories are literally true.
:)
The whole point of creationism and other philosophies like them is that they are a response to, and not a discovery of, new knowledge. The bible says that the flood happened. Therefore, when investigating the 'origins of life', that HAS TO BE accounted for. No option of how history happened can exclude that information. The entire museum takes all of the information in the bible and then attempts to map that information to a model which would allow the bible to be true. The bible is the yardstick to which all other information is measured.
Science, on the other hand, is progressing by asking questions, proposing models and ideas, and advancing those models and ideas through objective testing. If the model or idea is invalidated by the testing results, they are modified. The yardstick in this case is objective reality. If an idea is good enough, we can test its validity in the world.
I personally side with science/reality. I mean, I don't have much choice. Reality will continue to be what it is regardless of what I want to believe.
I doubt that iPhones are going to sync with Corp. email so easily. The reason Blackberry has such a great sync with corporate email is because businesses have their own blackberry management servers (I don't know if the servers live at RIM or at the the local company's site, though) that tie into the corporate email servers. iPhone is not being launched as a business product, or as with a business 'edition'.
iPhone will probably have POP3 access to mailboxes like most current smartphones do.
I think small business/independent businessmen could use iPhone no problem; but they have to manage their own contacts and keep their own address book. Corporate Joe working at a firm with more than 100 users will probably just continue to use the solution handed down to him via his company; and the only decent enterprise system right now is RIMs.
Most large employers include it as part of their background check. Once an offer, contingent on verification, is presented, the employer runs a background check via a third party. The third party reports all sorts of info. Sometimes the third party cannot obtain the proper education verification. Happened to me. On my first day of work I had to bring in my Diploma.
What worries me more, is that my mother, who is not my guardian anymore (by a longshot) can still call educational institutions that I attend and get information about my enrollment with nothing more than my name and social security number. She's hardly what anyone would call an expert in social engineering.
Even worse, places of prospective employment can call universities and get information about my enrollment as well (oftentimes without my social security number)! How many times have I lost a potential job from an employer who called a University to find out I never graduated. What a load! they should obviously by law only be allowed to take what I say about it.
Give me a break.
In all the examples you mentioned, only one has outsold its competition. There have always been more PCs than macs, or Windows installs rather than OSX installs. Where Apple has been wildly successful is the MP3 market. Their strengths in this arena, which I believe allowed them to be so successful, is their design sense, usability sense, and marketing sense. If they can apply the same to the iPhone, AND it becomes affordable second/third gen, then it will be successful.
These days Apple stores are selling Macs almost as iPod accessories.