The point is anyone who wants some free propaganda and have idiots trust that information can just get it into wikipedia.
That's obviously what author's reputations are there to protect. Integrity.
Wikipedia is full of crap, propaganda and even blatant lies (I'm sure you've noticed creationist crap poppping up again and again in biology sections already. Mostly some turkish ip)
Hitler's rise to power came with the socialists obsession with "eugenics". You might want to look that one up, and read a bit about it. Eugenics is a simple theory : let's let the state control genetic evolution. The methods that such policy requires are the problem.
Besides the socialists are once again on about how there are "too many people". It is generally agreed that population of the world needs to be brought down in the democratic party, and al gore's been repeating just that for a while now.
I do wonder what will happen once they (once again) realize that any acceptable method will have too little effect and/or go too slowly.
1) they portray the quran as coming from a single source, even though the compilation of it selected 2000 verses out of a collection of over 250000 verses.
That means there were at the very least 125 different versions of the quran, assuming that none had the slightest overlap. Assuming 70% average overlap between different versions you'd need over 375 different versions of the quran to start with.
2) the quran is not in arabic. It's in Syrian Arameic written down in kufic script (kufic has 16 letters, does not have vowels, and there is no uniform translation to arabic possible)
3) where exactly in the new testament do you find Jesus' own words ? When I read the text I find accounts written by the apostles, who very much spoke greek, which was the widely used language in Israel around 20-30AD. There are a few pieces of text that claim to be closer to the literal text that are known, and they are indeed available (some partially) in arameic, should you wish to read them in their original form. However Christians don't claim that these are guaranteed 100% accurate. However, that's perhaps 50 lines of text total.
The point of the new testament is describing, even from different perspectives, the example that was Jesus Christ. His acts, and your own assessment of the principles that guided them are more important than the exact words. Or at least that's what I was taught at a catholic college, and I do believe that's the "official position" of the vatican. They do not claim the bible to be the "literal" word of God, the way muslims claim that, but the bible is claimed to be the example and the guidance that was given by God to humankind. If you actually read the book you will immediately see that it is not possible to see that book as the literal word of God, but the story of mankind, and an account of the participation by God in that story. God is claimed to be the inspiration for the bible, not the author.
The quran, by contrast, is a sequence of literal orders and "facts" (such as the order for muslims to say that semen is being produced in the kidneys, that god sits in a comfy chair somewhere in the ocean, or the order to state that the earth is a cloth spread out, pegged to something with mountains, that the sun sets in a muddy lake near a Jewish village). And yes, they don't actually know what most of the sentences mean, and there are a few small regions that are exceptions. If you don't accept that the quran is the literal word of allah, the entirety of the book becomes meaningless. It cannot seriously be interpreted on any meaningful level anymore than direct orders from a general can be interpreted.
But the entire argument was over the age of the bible. Yes no matter the age of the bible, that doesn't make it any more true.
However that the bible is the oldest book and that it has been kept unchanged for at least 1850 years, and some parts unchanged for over 2500 years, is as historically accurate as the fact that we had a little war in 1914.
Evaluating truth in the bible is a complex matter, since the bible itself claims to have been written by inspired individuals, and is not, with a few exceptions, the literal word of God. A few biblical authors actually claim authorship in the text, and for most texts at least approximate authorship information is known. Therefore unlike the quran, which is claimed to be the word of God (despite being written "to average" a few thousand differing oral accounts), and contains stupid mathematical mistakes, is not disproven by a statement that, taken literally proves incorrectness.
The problem is simple. Both the quran and the bible speak of a flat earth. The bible, however claims that one author saw "a large flat piece of earth", which is exactly what anyone on the surface of the ball shaped earth will see. In the quran however God claims that the earth is flat. Due to the necessity of literalism in that absolutist text (specified in quran 3:7) that disproves its contents. In the bible every book immediately makes clear that it's a historical perspective. How one human saw God's intervention in a specific event. The clearest example is the new testament : it is not the word of God, but 4 human perspectives on the behavior of God, while he was setting an example for humans to follow. The text does not, at all, lend itself to absolutist interpretations, which is probably the reason western civilization isn't absolutist, unlike just about every "alternative" (communism, islam, shinto, buddhism, Iran's whacko state structure... all are absolutist, a Christian Kingdom isn't).
You can see that such a claim "the literal word of god" makes a book trivial to disprove, since it presents a lot of easy targets. The bible, however does not present easy targets for getting disproven. For example, in a correct interpretation there is, as long as you accept the special status and special responsability of the human race due to certain gifts from God, no fight between Genesis and Darwin. However it is equally trivial to see that Darwin's "the origin of species" does not apply to current human civilization, certainly not in the way it does to animals. All animal and plant species are the way they are due to eternal resource wars fought to extermination between races. Hitler tried that with the human race, and I think we can conclude that, however correct Darwin might have been for animals, we do not want to fight until only a single race is left (in darwin, with the exception of male/female differences, every differing gene is (obviously) a cause for lethal competition), clearly despite a few muslim racist and religious extermination wars in Darfur and Indonesia, we haven't seen anyone try to implement Darwin "let the strongest survive" mentality since the middle of the 20th century on humans. And thank God that we indeed haven't. I do hope that Darwin will prove a lot more wrong on the human front in the 21st century, and that no idiots will start acting like Darwin suggests they do (even though it seems many are trying, again, sadly, they use a religion associated with a race, instead of race directly. Then again, Hitler never used an actual ethnicity, just one in his head, then again, Darwin says this does not matter)
Isn't that what I'm saying ? It is not possible to attest for the full text dating back.
However, 400 years after it was written down, it was found to match a random piece that was retrieved from a 150AD bible letter-for-letter.
Which obviously does not "prove" any other letter is necessarily correct. However, given that erasmus did not know that this paper would be found, nor which section it is, provides a great amount of confidence that it does indeed fully match.
It's like having a "copy" of a BMW in the year 5000 and then, say, during some excavation they find a transmission casing of a BMW. It is found to match the copy's transmission casing to within tolerances of 1 micrometer.
Obviously this does not prove that the "copy" actually looks like a BMW. However it does "give a great amount of confidence" that it does indeed match the looks of the BMW to within similar tolerances.
Welcome to history. I doubt you're going to like what exactly is considered "proof" in historical contexts.
But yes, you're obviously correct. Just because 100 letters match perfectly, does not mean the other ones do. By contrast I would like to make the point that, by comparison, for the quran, it is a certainty that there isn't even 1 single letter that matches (because the claimed "original" is a translation made after the original language had been dead for over 500 years), and it's "unchangedness" is accepted on wikipedia without question.
As usual the page is not 100% correct, but this is wikipedia. Anything anyone takes offence with gets molested beyond recognition (in religious matters, mostly by muslims, e.g. try to find a "textual history" in the article about the quran, because that's seen as criticism of their stupid religion).
The new testament was spread in both Greek and Latin first, later only Latin. It was originally in Greek, with small sections of Hebrew and Arameic ("Syrian").
Actually again, "the book of the dead" is the title of an archeological account by Karl Richard Lepsius, created in 1842. So the "book of the dead" is a platry 165 years old.
The papyrus that was found is not a book, but at best a pamphflet, a religious text containing the procedure that the God of Heaven would follow in the afterlife, to decide between heaven and hell. It is not an account of the Egyptian religion, and there are hundreds of different versions of said papyrus.
The religion that they are about was killed by the muslim invasion of Egypt (then Byzantium) immmediately following the death of their paedophile prophet, and it's only surviving full books destroyed by those muslims when they burned the library of alexandria, believing it to be competition for the quran. After the massive extermination campaign the muslims waged in Egypt, amongst other things selling every black egyptian as a slave (before the muslims, you started seeing 100% black people near the nile before you crossed the egyptian border, right now you have to go another 800 kilometers (and you'd be in darfur/south sudan, so they're still racistly eradicating blacks)), nothing was left intact.
Even though there are various historical versions of the Bible, the version used as a basis for basically all modern versions is the "textus receptus" from erasmus, created in 1516.
That text (in greek) matches letter-for-letter with a (admittedly small) 150 AD source, that was almost destroyed by muslims in Cairo, and was originally looted when they burned constantinople.
So we're 100% sure that the current bible is translated from a greek source of the complete bible that was put down in 1516 AD, which matches letter-for-letter (even the spacing between the characters matched, but hey who's nitpicking ?) with a small-part-of-the-bible source that dates back to 150AD.
So at the very least (without any faith in the church) you can rest assured that the translation of the gospel of John that you buy in any bookstore dates back to 150AD without ANY insertions or deletions since that time.
The problem is frustratingly simple, muslims believe it's a sacred duty to commit those killings (not honor killings, but given Asma Bint Marwan's treatment at the hands of the prophet, certainly committing stuff like 9/11 is mandatory for any muslim).
Since this is a correct interpretation of that specific religion, the problem is with the religion itself.
This belief can obviously not come first in the behavior of a person, unless you want a new world war (which seems to be exactly what they want, despite the near-certainty that they'll lose big).
Really? I mean, those MILLIONS of people involved have made records. (I can read my grandfathers diary, for instance) There are newspapers from the time. There are literally millions of DIFFERENT sources all describing the event in different ways. There are photos. How can you possibly make this statement?
I think you will agree that there are first and foremost at best a few tnes of thousand sources for WWI, not millions by far.
Furthermore there are dozens of sources mentioning Jesus Christ (it's first-hand accounts that are in really short supply), and given that there were much, much less capable writers 2000 years ago than 80 years ago, one would at least consider them equal.
And there are also a few thousand historical sources, both Christian and otherwise (Tacitus, Suetonus, Pliny the younger, Lucian, Philo, Josephus,...) mentioning Jesus Christ, and referencing the gospels, most of those can of course easily be dismissed as fabrications (I only named reliable sources), but then again so can a lot of WWI sources. The bible is one of those sources that can be shown to have been written by people that have been proven to have been in Israel at more-or-less the right time (and consists of a lot of books), and is by far the most reliably preserved of those sources.
Actually it is both in Latin and in Greek, and arameic, and hebrew, and... The versions that were accepted as bible were initally spread with greek and latin versions of the same text on facing pages, or only the latin text.
You are correct that greek is the original language of the bible (well actually a syrian arameic dialect for most of the bible, but most of the new testament was indeed originally written down in greek), but the versions that were actually used were latin, not greek.
Latin is certainly the language of the bible, despite the book being originally written in greek. And the bible and the church were the main motivation, and the main people for the renaissense to push latin as a language.
For comparison, muslims use an arabic quran. However the quran was written in kufic script of a southern arameic dialect, which has long been a dead language that noone has understood for more than a millenium, and even an arabic linguist would not be able to read the few orignal verses that remain, nor can you learn either arameic or kufic anywhere in the islamic world (google "christopher luxenberg" for the description of someone who actually tries to understand it). Arameic and arabic are of the same family, but then again so are English and Parsi (example farsi site)
Get in the way of a good Christian-bashing. After all Bush is Christian (not that anyone ever checked:-p), that proves they're all evil, right ?
By contrast pointing out that the founder of islam was a thieving (took things from people violently) paedophile (f*cked children below 9 years old) rapist (f*cked said child without her permission, using force, also others) is a fact (according to muslim sources), yet apparently here facts are not important, and have to be denied.
Of course said thieving paedophile rapist also killed women for criticizing him, and left their children to die (google "asma bint marwan").
Perhaps Jesus should have murdered some more women and children, and stolen more. Surely it seems that would have raised his standing on slashdot (and elsewhere) enormously.
And then you realize that -oops- the bible is also the most accurately kept book of all times. Whether you have faith in God or not, you'd have to admit that there are lines found on parchment dating back a millenium before christ (the dead sea scrolls), that appear verbatim in the currently accepted bible. This doesn't prove nothing ever changed (since it's about 12 lines of the text), but the mere fact that they agree and that we can actually still read them is extremely special.
The bible has a secure claim of being the oldest preserved book (or, if you don't have faith, that part of it contains a copy of the oldest preserved book). Not the oldest book, but the oldest that you can reasonably hope to read.
The mere fact that we still have this codex, and the care invested in keeping it safe for future generations, should illustrate just how much faith you can put in the text of the bible being unchanged. It is also a very incomplete codex.
Do you believe WWI happened ? Well we are MORE certain about the bible being unchanged than we are about that little event actually having had place. We don't have a single reliable wittness, and only inconsistent, conflicting accounts that mostly agree on a small subset of what they describe. That small "mostly agreed upon" subset is accepted as historical truth.
All of history is uncertain. That the text of the bible hasn't been changed in nearing 2 millenia is one of the most trusted assumptions in any serious historical course. It is also VERY uncommon for any source to be that reliable.
By contrast, neither the vedas nor the quran can claim even 100 years of constant text (the current quran was "edited" together in 1923 in Cairo, and originally contained the warning that it was pieced together from unreliable sources, of even the accepted sources (they rejected about 20x more text than they accepted for being "probably made up on the spot") which about 30% STILL isn't deciphered, the vedas don't have real unity, we know they date back much farther than the bible, but only from external sources, there aren't any actual vedas backdating more than 600 years, this bible by contrast is nearing it's 2000th birthday). Of course in the case of the quran they hide the older texts for fear of getting blown up (like the one in constantinopel).
Don't you think weaponry should be held to a higher standard of scrutiny than file sharing?
No I think the law should dispense justice blind and without prejudice. BOTH on the p2p thief and on the murderer, and blindly, from both the punishment specified by congress should be exacted. At best it could be specified that the police should try first to catch murderers and afterwards go after illegal p2p, but they should most defineately go after it.
Why, pray tell, does a thief get to violate the law and a murderer not ? Why not a physical thief ? p2p certainly destroys value, as any sane person will agree, so it *does* do damage.
You forget the basis of human nature. I am 100% completely and utterly opposed to guns... in another guy's hand, not in my own.
However since more people have guns and they might point them at me (for example if I try to take their property without their consent, you know, p2p), I am opposed to guns (I couldn't be bothered to keep one clean and functional anyway). Since I don't have much, and nobody ever steals from me, I think stealing should be legalized. I want that 3g iphone dammit.
And I am 100% completely in favor of having a permanent, armed, goon squad at my whim, allowed to beat up anyone.
Obama's living this slashdot dream. Just think what he might do if he became president.
That's a problem that is caused by the ideology of the Egyptian state (a certain religion, 3 guesses which one, same reason they refuse to let atheists get a job), not by the guns used the egyptian state uses to enforce it's religion on it's victims.
In saudi arabia the "morality police" who have been accused of anally raping people with sticks for not going to the mosque one of the 5 required times per day will probably get access to these guns.
The problem is the ideology, not the guns. As was aptly demonstrated yesterday, a bulldozer can be an effective weapon too, you can't forbid weapons. And yes, at least with these guns those people, even those oppressed, will live to see another day as opposed to dieing.
Well entire religions (well, one specific religion) and it's adherents deny their critics right to life.
Google "asma bint marwan", read what happened, and then we'll see if you're consistently prepared to defend freedom of speech or not. In other words, do you forbid people from having islam as a religion, knowing that it forbids freedom of speech, or do you allow people to use violence (and thus all imams to incite this violence), and even murder, against freedom of speech because of "it's their religion" or not ?
They don't let facts interfere with their policies. Just look at Obama :
2006 : "We must withdraw because it has no chance of success" 2007 : "I was always in favor of the surge"
Obama. Will screw up everything a lot worse than McCain could ever hope to do, but, on the plus side : he'll deny it afterwards.
And if you're wondering how deep the rabbit hole of leftist ideology versus facts goes, you might want to check who they supported until July 1941 and why. Not that the guy they supported after July 1941 was much better (a russian, take a wild guess who), but, on the plus side, he lied about it too.
And let's not forget that these minorities get "free passes" from the left over their own "little" transgressions : muslims applying a genocidally racist law (well the actual translation of sharia is "the path of a good muslim", it isn't a law, it's just a series of crimes, including paedophilia, that a good muslim should commit*) in Iran and Saudi arabia, Blacks in Zimbabwe (and a large part of South Africa),... these are not nice guys and what they do is not excuseable in any way.
* in the words of arguably the most important islamic figure of the 20th century :
"A man can marry a girl younger than nine years of age, even if the girl is still a baby being breastfed. A man, however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine, other sexual acts such as foreplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed. A man having intercourse with a girl younger than nine years of age has not committed a crime, but only an infraction, if the girl is not permanently damaged. If the girl, however, is permanently damaged, the man must provide for her all her life. But this girl will not count as one of the man's four permanent wives. He also is not permitted to marry the girl's sister." - Ayatollah Khomeini, personal friend of Jimmy Carter, personally responsible for the killings of at least 50.000 people merely for disagreeing with him, and another 500.000
(if you wish to ascertain the source of the quote and it's authenticiy, just google the words)
Actually the algorithm is not performing a search through truly random blocks, but rather generating new 'random"* blocks by combining old blocks with the copyrighted file.
So the blocks AND they key are derivative works, meaning even users of this app who are just researching it become liable for copyright infringement if any of the users puts even a single copyrighted file on it.
DESPITE not being able to read said file.
The law does not specify what comes out, only what goes in. Copyrighted files go in -> duplication of what comes out is prohobited without copyright owner's permission.
It's like leaving your car without the handbreak on the top of a hill. Nothing has to go wrong, but one little blow of wind, one single individual who brushes the car and *bang*.
* this is a totally unprecedented definition of the term random, by this definition anything not recognizeable is random. So a rot-13 encrypted stream of zeros will be random under this definition... it's not. At all. These blocks contain in reality a huge amount of entropy.
But you know exactly what is stored : that's the whole point of having this filesystem.
You know the way to combine these supposedly random bytes (they are actually derivatives of copyrighted works, since they are generated starting with said copyrighted work) into the original work.
The first is merely infringement. The second is conspiracy to commit infringement, and you will have lost any chance of defending with "I didn't know it was copyrighted".
Curiously enough things like this are exactly why "conspiracy to commit" crimes exist.
Furthermore, unless I'm making a stupid mistake, it doesn't actually distribute the data, the key to find the data in the P2P net is the same length as the original data, in the random case, which buys you exactly... nothing. You have to download the file twice.
This thing does not evade copyright law, and it's inconvenient to boot. I don't think I'll be placing a second look.
Never let logic get in the way of a good "progressive" argument.
The muslims are VICTIMS I tell you...
www.thereligionofpeace.com (this week : over 38 people killed by muslims in the name of allah... it's monday... last week over 350)
Glad there are people around here that are actually a bit smarter than average, who don't believe the muslim "victims" crap. Victims don't fire rockets on "opressors". It's the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
But at least you ALSO get a coherent version uninfected by creationist idiots (apparently there's a harun yahya cultish type thing big in Turkey atm)
In wikipedia you just get, well, infected articles. I can't seem to find a better term.
Most people are utterly incapable and unqualified to write wikipedia articles. And they have this huge ego at the top who'll "fix it all". Riiight.
The point is anyone who wants some free propaganda and have idiots trust that information can just get it into wikipedia.
That's obviously what author's reputations are there to protect. Integrity.
Wikipedia is full of crap, propaganda and even blatant lies (I'm sure you've noticed creationist crap poppping up again and again in biology sections already. Mostly some turkish ip)
And it's loads worse in the localized versions.
Hitler's rise to power came with the socialists obsession with "eugenics". You might want to look that one up, and read a bit about it. Eugenics is a simple theory : let's let the state control genetic evolution. The methods that such policy requires are the problem.
Besides the socialists are once again on about how there are "too many people". It is generally agreed that population of the world needs to be brought down in the democratic party, and al gore's been repeating just that for a while now.
I do wonder what will happen once they (once again) realize that any acceptable method will have too little effect and/or go too slowly.
1) they portray the quran as coming from a single source, even though the compilation of it selected 2000 verses out of a collection of over 250000 verses.
That means there were at the very least 125 different versions of the quran, assuming that none had the slightest overlap. Assuming 70% average overlap between different versions you'd need over 375 different versions of the quran to start with.
2) the quran is not in arabic. It's in Syrian Arameic written down in kufic script (kufic has 16 letters, does not have vowels, and there is no uniform translation to arabic possible)
3) where exactly in the new testament do you find Jesus' own words ? When I read the text I find accounts written by the apostles, who very much spoke greek, which was the widely used language in Israel around 20-30AD. There are a few pieces of text that claim to be closer to the literal text that are known, and they are indeed available (some partially) in arameic, should you wish to read them in their original form. However Christians don't claim that these are guaranteed 100% accurate. However, that's perhaps 50 lines of text total.
The point of the new testament is describing, even from different perspectives, the example that was Jesus Christ. His acts, and your own assessment of the principles that guided them are more important than the exact words. Or at least that's what I was taught at a catholic college, and I do believe that's the "official position" of the vatican. They do not claim the bible to be the "literal" word of God, the way muslims claim that, but the bible is claimed to be the example and the guidance that was given by God to humankind. If you actually read the book you will immediately see that it is not possible to see that book as the literal word of God, but the story of mankind, and an account of the participation by God in that story. God is claimed to be the inspiration for the bible, not the author.
The quran, by contrast, is a sequence of literal orders and "facts" (such as the order for muslims to say that semen is being produced in the kidneys, that god sits in a comfy chair somewhere in the ocean, or the order to state that the earth is a cloth spread out, pegged to something with mountains, that the sun sets in a muddy lake near a Jewish village). And yes, they don't actually know what most of the sentences mean, and there are a few small regions that are exceptions. If you don't accept that the quran is the literal word of allah, the entirety of the book becomes meaningless. It cannot seriously be interpreted on any meaningful level anymore than direct orders from a general can be interpreted.
But the entire argument was over the age of the bible. Yes no matter the age of the bible, that doesn't make it any more true.
However that the bible is the oldest book and that it has been kept unchanged for at least 1850 years, and some parts unchanged for over 2500 years, is as historically accurate as the fact that we had a little war in 1914.
Evaluating truth in the bible is a complex matter, since the bible itself claims to have been written by inspired individuals, and is not, with a few exceptions, the literal word of God. A few biblical authors actually claim authorship in the text, and for most texts at least approximate authorship information is known. Therefore unlike the quran, which is claimed to be the word of God (despite being written "to average" a few thousand differing oral accounts), and contains stupid mathematical mistakes, is not disproven by a statement that, taken literally proves incorrectness.
The problem is simple. Both the quran and the bible speak of a flat earth. The bible, however claims that one author saw "a large flat piece of earth", which is exactly what anyone on the surface of the ball shaped earth will see. In the quran however God claims that the earth is flat. Due to the necessity of literalism in that absolutist text (specified in quran 3:7) that disproves its contents. In the bible every book immediately makes clear that it's a historical perspective. How one human saw God's intervention in a specific event. The clearest example is the new testament : it is not the word of God, but 4 human perspectives on the behavior of God, while he was setting an example for humans to follow. The text does not, at all, lend itself to absolutist interpretations, which is probably the reason western civilization isn't absolutist, unlike just about every "alternative" (communism, islam, shinto, buddhism, Iran's whacko state structure ... all are absolutist, a Christian Kingdom isn't).
You can see that such a claim "the literal word of god" makes a book trivial to disprove, since it presents a lot of easy targets. The bible, however does not present easy targets for getting disproven. For example, in a correct interpretation there is, as long as you accept the special status and special responsability of the human race due to certain gifts from God, no fight between Genesis and Darwin.
However it is equally trivial to see that Darwin's "the origin of species" does not apply to current human civilization, certainly not in the way it does to animals. All animal and plant species are the way they are due to eternal resource wars fought to extermination between races. Hitler tried that with the human race, and I think we can conclude that, however correct Darwin might have been for animals, we do not want to fight until only a single race is left (in darwin, with the exception of male/female differences, every differing gene is (obviously) a cause for lethal competition), clearly despite a few muslim racist and religious extermination wars in Darfur and Indonesia, we haven't seen anyone try to implement Darwin "let the strongest survive" mentality since the middle of the 20th century on humans. And thank God that we indeed haven't. I do hope that Darwin will prove a lot more wrong on the human front in the 21st century, and that no idiots will start acting like Darwin suggests they do (even though it seems many are trying, again, sadly, they use a religion associated with a race, instead of race directly. Then again, Hitler never used an actual ethnicity, just one in his head, then again, Darwin says this does not matter)
Isn't that what I'm saying ? It is not possible to attest for the full text dating back.
However, 400 years after it was written down, it was found to match a random piece that was retrieved from a 150AD bible letter-for-letter.
Which obviously does not "prove" any other letter is necessarily correct. However, given that erasmus did not know that this paper would be found, nor which section it is, provides a great amount of confidence that it does indeed fully match.
It's like having a "copy" of a BMW in the year 5000 and then, say, during some excavation they find a transmission casing of a BMW. It is found to match the copy's transmission casing to within tolerances of 1 micrometer.
Obviously this does not prove that the "copy" actually looks like a BMW. However it does "give a great amount of confidence" that it does indeed match the looks of the BMW to within similar tolerances.
Welcome to history. I doubt you're going to like what exactly is considered "proof" in historical contexts.
But yes, you're obviously correct. Just because 100 letters match perfectly, does not mean the other ones do. By contrast I would like to make the point that, by comparison, for the quran, it is a certainty that there isn't even 1 single letter that matches (because the claimed "original" is a translation made after the original language had been dead for over 500 years), and it's "unchangedness" is accepted on wikipedia without question.
You can start here for the bible :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_the_Bible
As usual the page is not 100% correct, but this is wikipedia. Anything anyone takes offence with gets molested beyond recognition (in religious matters, mostly by muslims, e.g. try to find a "textual history" in the article about the quran, because that's seen as criticism of their stupid religion).
The new testament was spread in both Greek and Latin first, later only Latin. It was originally in Greek, with small sections of Hebrew and Arameic ("Syrian").
Actually again, "the book of the dead" is the title of an archeological account by Karl Richard Lepsius, created in 1842. So the "book of the dead" is a platry 165 years old.
The papyrus that was found is not a book, but at best a pamphflet, a religious text containing the procedure that the God of Heaven would follow in the afterlife, to decide between heaven and hell. It is not an account of the Egyptian religion, and there are hundreds of different versions of said papyrus.
The religion that they are about was killed by the muslim invasion of Egypt (then Byzantium) immmediately following the death of their paedophile prophet, and it's only surviving full books destroyed by those muslims when they burned the library of alexandria, believing it to be competition for the quran. After the massive extermination campaign the muslims waged in Egypt, amongst other things selling every black egyptian as a slave (before the muslims, you started seeing 100% black people near the nile before you crossed the egyptian border, right now you have to go another 800 kilometers (and you'd be in darfur/south sudan, so they're still racistly eradicating blacks)), nothing was left intact.
Even though there are various historical versions of the Bible, the version used as a basis for basically all modern versions is the "textus receptus" from erasmus, created in 1516.
That text (in greek) matches letter-for-letter with a (admittedly small) 150 AD source, that was almost destroyed by muslims in Cairo, and was originally looted when they burned constantinople.
So we're 100% sure that the current bible is translated from a greek source of the complete bible that was put down in 1516 AD, which matches letter-for-letter (even the spacing between the characters matched, but hey who's nitpicking ?) with a small-part-of-the-bible source that dates back to 150AD.
So at the very least (without any faith in the church) you can rest assured that the translation of the gospel of John that you buy in any bookstore dates back to 150AD without ANY insertions or deletions since that time.
The problem is frustratingly simple, muslims believe it's a sacred duty to commit those killings (not honor killings, but given Asma Bint Marwan's treatment at the hands of the prophet, certainly committing stuff like 9/11 is mandatory for any muslim).
Since this is a correct interpretation of that specific religion, the problem is with the religion itself.
This belief can obviously not come first in the behavior of a person, unless you want a new world war (which seems to be exactly what they want, despite the near-certainty that they'll lose big).
Really? I mean, those MILLIONS of people involved have made records. (I can read my grandfathers diary, for instance) There are newspapers from the time. There are literally millions of DIFFERENT sources all describing the event in different ways. There are photos. How can you possibly make this statement?
I think you will agree that there are first and foremost at best a few tnes of thousand sources for WWI, not millions by far.
Furthermore there are dozens of sources mentioning Jesus Christ (it's first-hand accounts that are in really short supply), and given that there were much, much less capable writers 2000 years ago than 80 years ago, one would at least consider them equal.
And there are also a few thousand historical sources, both Christian and otherwise (Tacitus, Suetonus, Pliny the younger, Lucian, Philo, Josephus, ...) mentioning Jesus Christ, and referencing the gospels, most of those can of course easily be dismissed as fabrications (I only named reliable sources), but then again so can a lot of WWI sources. The bible is one of those sources that can be shown to have been written by people that have been proven to have been in Israel at more-or-less the right time (and consists of a lot of books), and is by far the most reliably preserved of those sources.
According to that site, the oldest version still in existence was written down in 1877. Hardly compares to the bible's > 2000 years.
Actually it is both in Latin and in Greek, and arameic, and hebrew, and ... The versions that were accepted as bible were initally spread with greek and latin versions of the same text on facing pages, or only the latin text.
You are correct that greek is the original language of the bible (well actually a syrian arameic dialect for most of the bible, but most of the new testament was indeed originally written down in greek), but the versions that were actually used were latin, not greek.
Latin is certainly the language of the bible, despite the book being originally written in greek. And the bible and the church were the main motivation, and the main people for the renaissense to push latin as a language.
For comparison, muslims use an arabic quran. However the quran was written in kufic script of a southern arameic dialect, which has long been a dead language that noone has understood for more than a millenium, and even an arabic linguist would not be able to read the few orignal verses that remain, nor can you learn either arameic or kufic anywhere in the islamic world (google "christopher luxenberg" for the description of someone who actually tries to understand it). Arameic and arabic are of the same family, but then again so are English and Parsi (example farsi site)
Get in the way of a good Christian-bashing. After all Bush is Christian (not that anyone ever checked :-p), that proves they're all evil, right ?
By contrast pointing out that the founder of islam was a thieving (took things from people violently) paedophile (f*cked children below 9 years old) rapist (f*cked said child without her permission, using force, also others) is a fact (according to muslim sources), yet apparently here facts are not important, and have to be denied.
Of course said thieving paedophile rapist also killed women for criticizing him, and left their children to die (google "asma bint marwan").
Perhaps Jesus should have murdered some more women and children, and stolen more. Surely it seems that would have raised his standing on slashdot (and elsewhere) enormously.
Just a question ... mere conjecture really ... why do people still learn latin ?
Oh right there's this important book that's in latin ... hmmmm "NT" ... I wonder what that stands for ...
And then you realize that -oops- the bible is also the most accurately kept book of all times. Whether you have faith in God or not, you'd have to admit that there are lines found on parchment dating back a millenium before christ (the dead sea scrolls), that appear verbatim in the currently accepted bible. This doesn't prove nothing ever changed (since it's about 12 lines of the text), but the mere fact that they agree and that we can actually still read them is extremely special.
The bible has a secure claim of being the oldest preserved book (or, if you don't have faith, that part of it contains a copy of the oldest preserved book). Not the oldest book, but the oldest that you can reasonably hope to read.
The mere fact that we still have this codex, and the care invested in keeping it safe for future generations, should illustrate just how much faith you can put in the text of the bible being unchanged. It is also a very incomplete codex.
Do you believe WWI happened ? Well we are MORE certain about the bible being unchanged than we are about that little event actually having had place. We don't have a single reliable wittness, and only inconsistent, conflicting accounts that mostly agree on a small subset of what they describe. That small "mostly agreed upon" subset is accepted as historical truth.
All of history is uncertain. That the text of the bible hasn't been changed in nearing 2 millenia is one of the most trusted assumptions in any serious historical course. It is also VERY uncommon for any source to be that reliable.
By contrast, neither the vedas nor the quran can claim even 100 years of constant text (the current quran was "edited" together in 1923 in Cairo, and originally contained the warning that it was pieced together from unreliable sources, of even the accepted sources (they rejected about 20x more text than they accepted for being "probably made up on the spot") which about 30% STILL isn't deciphered, the vedas don't have real unity, we know they date back much farther than the bible, but only from external sources, there aren't any actual vedas backdating more than 600 years, this bible by contrast is nearing it's 2000th birthday). Of course in the case of the quran they hide the older texts for fear of getting blown up (like the one in constantinopel).
Don't you think weaponry should be held to a higher standard of scrutiny than file sharing?
No I think the law should dispense justice blind and without prejudice. BOTH on the p2p thief and on the murderer, and blindly, from both the punishment specified by congress should be exacted. At best it could be specified that the police should try first to catch murderers and afterwards go after illegal p2p, but they should most defineately go after it.
Why, pray tell, does a thief get to violate the law and a murderer not ? Why not a physical thief ? p2p certainly destroys value, as any sane person will agree, so it *does* do damage.
You forget the basis of human nature. I am 100% completely and utterly opposed to guns ... in another guy's hand, not in my own.
However since more people have guns and they might point them at me (for example if I try to take their property without their consent, you know, p2p), I am opposed to guns (I couldn't be bothered to keep one clean and functional anyway). Since I don't have much, and nobody ever steals from me, I think stealing should be legalized. I want that 3g iphone dammit.
And I am 100% completely in favor of having a permanent, armed, goon squad at my whim, allowed to beat up anyone.
Obama's living this slashdot dream. Just think what he might do if he became president.
That's a problem that is caused by the ideology of the Egyptian state (a certain religion, 3 guesses which one, same reason they refuse to let atheists get a job), not by the guns used the egyptian state uses to enforce it's religion on it's victims.
In saudi arabia the "morality police" who have been accused of anally raping people with sticks for not going to the mosque one of the 5 required times per day will probably get access to these guns.
The problem is the ideology, not the guns. As was aptly demonstrated yesterday, a bulldozer can be an effective weapon too, you can't forbid weapons. And yes, at least with these guns those people, even those oppressed, will live to see another day as opposed to dieing.
Well entire religions (well, one specific religion) and it's adherents deny their critics right to life.
Google "asma bint marwan", read what happened, and then we'll see if you're consistently prepared to defend freedom of speech or not. In other words, do you forbid people from having islam as a religion, knowing that it forbids freedom of speech, or do you allow people to use violence (and thus all imams to incite this violence), and even murder, against freedom of speech because of "it's their religion" or not ?
They don't let facts interfere with their policies. Just look at Obama :
2006 : "We must withdraw because it has no chance of success"
2007 : "I was always in favor of the surge"
Obama. Will screw up everything a lot worse than McCain could ever hope to do, but, on the plus side : he'll deny it afterwards.
And if you're wondering how deep the rabbit hole of leftist ideology versus facts goes, you might want to check who they supported until July 1941 and why. Not that the guy they supported after July 1941 was much better (a russian, take a wild guess who), but, on the plus side, he lied about it too.
And let's not forget that these minorities get "free passes" from the left over their own "little" transgressions : muslims applying a genocidally racist law (well the actual translation of sharia is "the path of a good muslim", it isn't a law, it's just a series of crimes, including paedophilia, that a good muslim should commit*) in Iran and Saudi arabia, Blacks in Zimbabwe (and a large part of South Africa), ... these are not nice guys and what they do is not excuseable in any way.
* in the words of arguably the most important islamic figure of the 20th century :
"A man can marry a girl younger than nine years of age, even if the girl is still a baby being breastfed. A man, however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine, other sexual acts such as foreplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed. A man having intercourse with a girl younger than nine years of age has not committed a crime, but only an infraction, if the girl is not permanently damaged. If the girl, however, is permanently damaged, the man must provide for her all her life. But this girl will not count as one of the man's four permanent wives. He also is not permitted to marry the girl's sister." - Ayatollah Khomeini, personal friend of Jimmy Carter, personally responsible for the killings of at least 50.000 people merely for disagreeing with him, and another 500.000
(if you wish to ascertain the source of the quote and it's authenticiy, just google the words)
Actually the algorithm is not performing a search through truly random blocks, but rather generating new 'random"* blocks by combining old blocks with the copyrighted file.
So the blocks AND they key are derivative works, meaning even users of this app who are just researching it become liable for copyright infringement if any of the users puts even a single copyrighted file on it.
DESPITE not being able to read said file.
The law does not specify what comes out, only what goes in. Copyrighted files go in -> duplication of what comes out is prohobited without copyright owner's permission.
It's like leaving your car without the handbreak on the top of a hill. Nothing has to go wrong, but one little blow of wind, one single individual who brushes the car and *bang*.
* this is a totally unprecedented definition of the term random, by this definition anything not recognizeable is random. So a rot-13 encrypted stream of zeros will be random under this definition ... it's not. At all. These blocks contain in reality a huge amount of entropy.
But you know exactly what is stored : that's the whole point of having this filesystem.
You know the way to combine these supposedly random bytes (they are actually derivatives of copyrighted works, since they are generated starting with said copyrighted work) into the original work.
So you're fucked ...
"copyrighted data"
to
"encrypted copyrighted data"
The first is merely infringement. The second is conspiracy to commit infringement, and you will have lost any chance of defending with "I didn't know it was copyrighted".
Curiously enough things like this are exactly why "conspiracy to commit" crimes exist.
Furthermore, unless I'm making a stupid mistake, it doesn't actually distribute the data, the key to find the data in the P2P net is the same length as the original data, in the random case, which buys you exactly ... nothing. You have to download the file twice.
This thing does not evade copyright law, and it's inconvenient to boot. I don't think I'll be placing a second look.
Never let logic get in the way of a good "progressive" argument.
The muslims are VICTIMS I tell you ...
www.thereligionofpeace.com (this week : over 38 people killed by muslims in the name of allah ... it's monday ... last week over 350)
Glad there are people around here that are actually a bit smarter than average, who don't believe the muslim "victims" crap. Victims don't fire rockets on "opressors". It's the other way around.