Re:Santa Cruz Out-of-business
on
Endgame For SCO
·
· Score: 1
Actually, the portions of SCO code that were licensed from M$ were things that they quit using early on, but were forced by contractual obligations to keep in the distro. Eventually SCO did get out of that contract, which was a legacy from Xenix days. It did not materially affect the "real" Unix product.
I thought about that word, but I pointedly left it out. Just because a fix is possible, doesn't mean it's going to be done. In this case, changing the interface would mean a massive junkpile of obsolete monitors/cards which they ain't nobody goin' there.
As far as X complaining about the resolution of your monitor, I couldn't say. It doesn't get its information by talking to the monitor, that's for sure. But the monitor is not all there is to it. It may well be the video card. You need to scan through your X server output; you may find you aren't getting all the screen modes you asked for, and maybe also a reason why.
I just upgraded XFree86 and spent a wonderful evening pinching and tweaking before I got my system looking "right". It was well worth the trouble, though. Now I just need to get up the courage to throw out those old servers;-P
Back before there were switching power supplies, CRT devices took their HV, which they need to accelerate the electron beam enough to make the screen glow, from a special winding on the power transformer. This had the advantage of being a reliable, independent source of HV, but it took a L-O-T of very fine wire which was hard to work with. And so began the days of sweep-derived power supplies. Since the most common CRT displays were those on TV receivers, and the sweep frequencies on those were fixed at common values, circuit designers took advantage of the situation and combined the horizontal sweep and the HV generator in one subsystem. The higher frequency of the horizontal sweep allowed them to jack up the voltage with fewer turns of wire and a lot less iron, which was a Good Thing. But the higher degree of interconnectedness between functions meant that a defective yoke (not yolk!) winding not only killed the horizontal sweep, but the HV and the boost also.
When computers began using CRT displays, the TV design philosophy spread to them metastatically, with the effect that a monitor would depend critically on a certain horizontal sweep frequency to generate the power to feed several subsystems. Couple that with the fact that the horizontal output device driving this sweep-derived power supply was now a transistor instead of the more-tolerant vacuum tube of earlier days, and you have a potential source of many cubic yards of magic smoke if somebody changes a frequency to something the designer wasn't counting on.
Nowadays monitors are built to accept wider ranges of input frequencies. They have regulators to smooth out discrepancies in the HV output and broad band sweep circuitry. It takes a little more effort to design and build this way, but when the demand surfaced, so did the designs.
To get more detail on the screen, you have to scan more lines per $unit_of_length, and if you don't want to cut down the number of screens you show in a second, you must jack up the horizontal sweep rate. But there is not, and never has been, any way for a VGA/SVGA monitor to report to the video card what brand it is or what sweep values it can accept without melting into a puddle of slag; ergo, X asks YOU. If you don't tell it otherwise, then, sure, you'll be looking at 640x480, the lowest common denominator of screen resolution settings.
I imagine that I heard somewhere the "common carrier" definition only applies if you don't store communications for an extended period. Since Slashdot archives discussions, that wouldn't apply here.
He specified female when he said "blonde". That is one of the few English adjectives which has gender. (Probably because it's not really English.) "Blond" is the masculine form.
His problem is that he has already done most of the coding before getting the assignment from this company. The new work is not quite ready to distribute, but the additional effort needed to get it finished now could end up being "owned" by his current employer. Not a pretty sight.
Btw, if the company hires him or anyone to modify GPL'ed code, they can keep the new version locked up in Superman's Fortress of Solitude (tm) if they want. The GPL doesn't bite until they try to convey the new product to another party, as posters too numerous to mention have pointed out already.
So the situation could arise in which the few bits of code still needed to finish the new rev could be legitimately claimed and locked up by the current employer, GPL notwithstanding. We can only hope that the manglement will understand what made the program attractive in the first place -- its freedom -- should be preserved in the new rev.
So how is it that Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted cop-killer, is permitted to lecture at universities (by tape from his death-row cell) but Mitnick, a completely non-violent criminal, is not? He must be playing this wrong. As things stand, since Mitnick just looked around and didn't damage anything, this is seen as serving his own personal interest. He needs a *cause*, like Angela Davis or (insert long list of media-lionized malefactors here), then he could literally get away with murder. It's been done before.
Apropos of this, I was recently spammed by an entity proposing to create, for a fee, 600 "websites" all pointing to mine. It looked suspiciously like an attempt to fool Google-like search engines into ranking a client site higher.
Elrond does not say it directly, but at the Council, he says something like, "If I understand rightly all that I have heard, I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo, and that if you do not find a way, no one will." The question is, who does Elrond think is doing the appointing? Not himself--he pointed out at the outset of the Council that he had not even convened the meeting--they all were "called" (his word) but not by him. By whom, he again does not say.
Gandalf once brushed this subject when Frodo asked him why the Ring should have left Gollum just when Bilbo would happen by to find it. After all, "wouldn't an orc have suited it better?" And Gandalf said (danger! quoting without checking source! #include <stddisclaimer.h>) "I can put it no more plainly that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its Maker." The question sometimes comes up as to whether this mysterious Power that summons councils, appoints burdens, and directs the loss and finding of a powerful weapon is actually Iluvatar or maybe just one of the Valar, Manwë most likely.
I don't think that Manwë is the Unnamed Power in this case, because his input into the situation was the sending of the Five Wizards--Gandalf was one of those. But although Gandalf did a lot for the cause, there were a number of things that happened above and beyond his control or knowledge. The "fortuitous" meeting of the Council, the selection of Frodo, of Bilbo even, all these came to Gandalf and the others from "outside".
I read a webpage once that opined that Gandalf's downfall in Moria constituted the actual failure and ruin of the plans of the Valar for Sauron's overthrow. Gandalf's aid was essential for the resistance--everybody knew they had next to zero chance of withstanding Sauron without him, for although he was not as powerful as Sauron, they were beings of the same order, and Gandalf had wisdom that nobody else had. But upon meeting the Balrog, which, like Gandalf, was also a Maia, Gandalf engaged the thing in combat, knowing that he could be no more help to the Company or anyone else, and in so doing he died.
His coming back to life was not the doing of Manwë at all. He had no such power. It was Iluvatar himself that sent Gandalf back. Tolkien meant this as a "seal of approval" on the sacrifice that Gandalf, and all the Valar, had made. Their plan had failed, and could not but have failed against such an enemy, but they had done the right thing in trying it. So Iluvatar stepped in and made it possible to succeed anyway.
None of this is explicitly stated in the books, which avoid directly mentioning Eru/Iluvatar in Middle-Earth contexts.
Not so...Gollum didn't "slip into" Mordor, he was captured at the frontier and dragged in, then interrogated and eventually released. When Frodo was given the mission to sneak into Mordor, nobody had any proper idea how he was supposed to do it. All the Council were certain of is that force was not an option, and if the Ring were to be destroyed at all, a hobbit might as well do it as anybody. And Master Elrond sensed that Iluvatar was actively guiding the process, and that He had appointed Frodo particularly to take the burden. That decision was not taken lightly, no more than it would have been in RL.
I wouldn't call that a "honeypot"; I would call it a "Wild Weasel" box. But it would be a Wild Weasel using remote-controlled, unmanned flight hardware. A much more career-friendly implementation than its Vietnam-era namesake. Not a bad idea at all....
Well, when I run make -n on software, I'm actually not looking for boldfaced 'rm -rf/' commands anyway...I'm looking at things like what libraries the thing is building, directories that it proposes to install in, and stuff like that. If I were searching for a deeply nested 'rm -rf/' in a suspicious makefile, I would not resort to 'make -n' to find it. I would put a wrapper around 'rm' and trap the call.
But, there you go. 'Suspicious makefile?' Since when? As another poster pointed out, if somebody tried to slip a mickey like that through the distribution system, it would get pulled from freshmeat immediately. It only has to crash a couple of victims, and the word is out.
Paranoia is useful, and in my business, it's a job qualification. But, as you mentioned, we can't manually verify everything. So if paranoia is not to become paralysis, what do we do?
"We can check if we really want to" is actually a mighty shield, one which is really only available to open source users. There may be an ambiguity lurking in your statement of this principle. "We" do check everything...I don't personally do it, but it is done all the same, by the community.
Do you remember the tcpwrapper flap? Somebody posted a patch to the code at a primary source site (U. of Eindhoven, was it?) which snagged security info and mailed it to a Hotmail account. That was discovered in short order, and the news was everywhere. The crocked tcpwrapper was pulled, the Hotmail account was canned, and everybody was agog for maybe 2 weeks. "How could something like that happen in Open Source!" But, you know, that whole affair provided a demonstration of the hostile environment that open source software provides to malicious code, whether it be a virus, a bomb, or a trojan.
No, you don't want to blithely trust everything, but you don't have to rely only on your own powers for safety. By myself I could no more close every possible loophole in my system than I could write a kernel to compete with linux. But, just as I benefit from the work of a community which provides the OS that I'm running, I can use the eyes of the community to watch out for those pesky 'rm -rf ' things too.
That's not a virus, it's actually a bomb. The thing that defines a virus is that it replicates itself manyfold before destroying its 'host' (if it ever does so). The point of the article is that the linux installed base is too hostile to virus reproduction for them to become a major threat.
Btw, if you're worried about a makefile of suspicious provenance, just say "make -n " and check out all the commands it wants to run before you execute them.
Well, to steal a quote from a hostile source, "If $bignum people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing." STR.
This doubt of the existence and historicity of Jesus is mostly a post-Enlightenment(sic) thing. It arises not from any inadequacy of evidence, but from an ideological rejection of the message of Jesus. In ancient times, this rejection took other forms, because to dispute the existence of Jesus in the third century would be like claiming to disbelieve in George Washington today. But the mere passage of 1500 years would not make a disbelief in the existence of George Washington suddenly reasonable.
This modern scholarship to which you appeal was once likened by one of its followers to a rugby game with 5 balls and 10 teams on the field, everybody tackling everybody, and everybody claiming to be winning. Doctorates are awarded on the basis of outlandish theories which are shot to ribbons 6 months after the dissertations containing them are filed.
I would recommend in my turn that you read Eta Linnemann's _Is There a Synoptic Problem?_. I didn't find this randomly; this is aimed fire.
We have no reason to believe that a resurrection of any kind has ever taken place, or even in the historicity of this Christ,
And I submit that you have herewith exemplified a form of religious faith, in that you believe either that sufficient evidence has been provided to make this sort of statement, or (more likely) you simply believe that no evidence is needed.
The historicity of Jesus of Nazareth is in no more dispute than that of Julius Caesar. Though these days it seems to be a badge of distinction to disbelieve in something dear to the unwashed masses. Maybe that's why we get fellows that profess to disbelieve in William Shakespeare or the Holocaust. Whatever. Thought is free. Who says it has to make sense as well?
I was going to put this in but since somebody already did, let me add my two bits.
I often manage polls, and we have very specific rules to make sure that we get an uncoerced vote. That polling booth with the curtain by itself is not enough to guarantee that the voter is not being pressured to vote a certain way. It's the polling booth, with the curtain, surrounded by a supervised open space in a polling place open to the public where all can see, the voter is in there alone, and there is absolutely no way to tell what was marked on that particular ballot. Ballots are serialized, and voters sign in after verification of identity, but there is absolutely no way to connect a particular ballot with a particular voter.
Voters who require assistance may choose an assistant to go with them, but a poll manager goes also to ensure that the voter is not being coerced. And if you are a candidate or organization interested in the way the election is being run, you can come or send a representative to observe the polling places, to make sure everything is fair.
There are methods for dealing with irregularities in public challenge hearings. There are rules about campaigning in and around the polling places. Candidates may greet folks waiting in the line, but they can't pass out campaign literature there. Law officers are allowed in only to vote, otherwise they cannot enter unless a poll manager calls them in.
On the whole, I suspect that much of the enthusiasm about internet voting would evaporate if those who favor it could experience the joys of machine politics, which these rules, workable only in "meatspace", are designed to prevent.
I instantly thought of "Bringin' Home the Oil" from an old TV commercial. I doubt that the tune was written just for that, and I don't remember it well enough to be sure if it fits these words.
So, tell us what tune to use next time. And, btw, are you going to archive these brain droppings somewhere?
Actually, when I saw the notice that entries were going to be received by email with no visible means of verifying their origin, that was clue enough that it was bogus. Even so, I would like to suggest a third prize category: a life-size likeness of JonKatz modeled in hot grits, or a DeCSS T-shirt worn once by Natalie Portman.
Many posters have pointed to the influence of the Edison boosters in downplaying Tesla's contributions. But don't forget that at one time, Tesla had both George Westinghouse and J.P.Morgan in his corner. Westinghouse died, and Morgan became disenchanted with Tesla's increasingly impractical and costly experiments; experiments which he refused to explain or submit to peer review. Nobody could deny that Tesla was a genius of the first rank. But he cut himself off from other researchers, and, in consequence, his later work is a sordidly mixed bag of "results" that are not much use to anybody.
You want a real hero, then check out Charles Proteus Steinmetz. There's the man who made AC distribution possible. Don't know what the Smithsonian has to say about him, tho (he *did* work for Edison).
Gotcha. There also seems to be some wiggle in the understanding of "even if"--I didn't bold it because it sounded to me as if it meant "even though".
Don't know if you'll even see this, since it's so far out of date now. Only reason I saw it is because I checked my karma (amazingly, still positive). So I'll keep it short.
You don't have to search the entire universe if you have something that is falsifiable to check. Look at the resurrection of Christ. All His teaching and that of the apostles either stands or falls by that one historical fact. Either it happened or it didn't. If it didn't, then Jesus of Nazareth was "just another guy", and there is no need to check that line of inquiry further. But if it did happen--
I sure wouldn't call him an extreme left-winger. But what he is is bad enough. I no longer remember the last article of his in which I saw him toss off a gratuitous, ill-informed swipe at the Christian faith, nor what the particular swipe was. What I do remember is that that was the moment I had had enough. Off to "User Preferences" I went, and changed my previously default/. settings to block him. Though the feature allows you to block any or all/. authors, I understand that it was added to slash principally because of him.
Now we have other authors posting JonKatz stories. Ugh. Do I gotta block all of them too?
I don't feel like getting into a long harangue about this, but I gotta point out something.
1 - There are certain types of statements that are not possible to disprove even if they are in fact false. The assertion that there is a god is such a statement.
Now, it would appear that it takes some kind of faith to make that statement so positively. The subtlety of the distinction between this and an active belief that there is no God escapes me, as it did the poster to whom you are replying.
All religion does is offer a false hope to people. The world would be a better place if people would realise this is it, this is the only chance you get, there is no hope but that future which we make for ourselves. So don't fuck it up.
This is as blatant a statement of faith as any that you might be tempted to rail against. Try to understand: you believe that this life is all we get, and that anybody who says otherwise is wrong. But how do you know that to be true? I submit that you don't know it from any experience or hard proof. Maybe you heard it from somebody you respect; maybe you just feel more comfortable with this statement than with its opposite.
I won't say anything about the first possibility; that one is too easy. Besides, I guess that the second one is the more likely to be true. I should therefore like to point out that the comfort I once had in atheism/materialism was only sustainable with a corresponding blindness to uncomfortable facts. "The universe... is a rather unsettlingly big place", you know.
... what did your wonderful god do? Denied us all immortality (there were two trees, remember?). Denied us equality with him.
Since you know about the two trees, you should have noticed that Adam was not forbidden to eat from the Tree of Life--until after he had eaten from the forbidden one. But what are you looking for anyway? Immortality? Meaning what? Eternal continuance? More of the same ol' same old every day? God has given far better than that: In Christ He has given Himself. More like an eternal marriage.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the portions of SCO code that were licensed from M$ were things that they quit using early on, but were forced by contractual obligations to keep in the distro. Eventually SCO did get out of that contract, which was a legacy from Xenix days. It did not materially affect the "real" Unix product.
"There's an infinite number of monkeys out here that want to talk about this manuscript of Hamlet they've created".
Obviously, they did it by XORing all the pads then available. How many do you suppose it would take?
I thought about that word, but I pointedly left it out. Just because a fix is possible, doesn't mean it's going to be done. In this case, changing the interface would mean a massive junkpile of obsolete monitors/cards which they ain't nobody goin' there.
;-P
As far as X complaining about the resolution of your monitor, I couldn't say. It doesn't get its information by talking to the monitor, that's for sure. But the monitor is not all there is to it. It may well be the video card. You need to scan through your X server output; you may find you aren't getting all the screen modes you asked for, and maybe also a reason why.
I just upgraded XFree86 and spent a wonderful evening pinching and tweaking before I got my system looking "right". It was well worth the trouble, though. Now I just need to get up the courage to throw out those old servers
Back before there were switching power supplies, CRT devices took their HV, which they need to accelerate the electron beam enough to make the screen glow, from a special winding on the power transformer. This had the advantage of being a reliable, independent source of HV, but it took a L-O-T of very fine wire which was hard to work with. And so began the days of sweep-derived power supplies. Since the most common CRT displays were those on TV receivers, and the sweep frequencies on those were fixed at common values, circuit designers took advantage of the situation and combined the horizontal sweep and the HV generator in one subsystem. The higher frequency of the horizontal sweep allowed them to jack up the voltage with fewer turns of wire and a lot less iron, which was a Good Thing. But the higher degree of interconnectedness between functions meant that a defective yoke (not yolk!) winding not only killed the horizontal sweep, but the HV and the boost also.
When computers began using CRT displays, the TV design philosophy spread to them metastatically, with the effect that a monitor would depend critically on a certain horizontal sweep frequency to generate the power to feed several subsystems. Couple that with the fact that the horizontal output device driving this sweep-derived power supply was now a transistor instead of the more-tolerant vacuum tube of earlier days, and you have a potential source of many cubic yards of magic smoke if somebody changes a frequency to something the designer wasn't counting on.
Nowadays monitors are built to accept wider ranges of input frequencies. They have regulators to smooth out discrepancies in the HV output and broad band sweep circuitry. It takes a little more effort to design and build this way, but when the demand surfaced, so did the designs.
To get more detail on the screen, you have to scan more lines per $unit_of_length, and if you don't want to cut down the number of screens you show in a second, you must jack up the horizontal sweep rate. But there is not, and never has been, any way for a VGA/SVGA monitor to report to the video card what brand it is or what sweep values it can accept without melting into a puddle of slag; ergo, X asks YOU. If you don't tell it otherwise, then, sure, you'll be looking at 640x480, the lowest common denominator of screen resolution settings.
I imagine that I heard somewhere the "common carrier" definition only applies if you don't store communications for an extended period. Since Slashdot archives discussions, that wouldn't apply here.
He specified female when he said "blonde". That is one of the few English adjectives which has gender. (Probably because it's not really English.) "Blond" is the masculine form.
HTH. HAND.
His problem is that he has already done most of the coding before getting the assignment from this company. The new work is not quite ready to distribute, but the additional effort needed to get it finished now could end up being "owned" by his current employer. Not a pretty sight.
Btw, if the company hires him or anyone to modify GPL'ed code, they can keep the new version locked up in Superman's Fortress of Solitude (tm) if they want. The GPL doesn't bite until they try to convey the new product to another party, as posters too numerous to mention have pointed out already.
So the situation could arise in which the few bits of code still needed to finish the new rev could be legitimately claimed and locked up by the current employer, GPL notwithstanding. We can only hope that the manglement will understand what made the program attractive in the first place -- its freedom -- should be preserved in the new rev.
So how is it that Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted cop-killer, is permitted to lecture at universities (by tape from his death-row cell) but Mitnick, a completely non-violent criminal, is not? He must be playing this wrong. As things stand, since Mitnick just looked around and didn't damage anything, this is seen as serving his own personal interest. He needs a *cause*, like Angela Davis or (insert long list of media-lionized malefactors here), then he could literally get away with murder. It's been done before.
Apropos of this, I was recently spammed by an entity proposing to create, for a fee, 600 "websites" all pointing to mine. It looked suspiciously like an attempt to fool Google-like search engines into ranking a client site higher.
Gandalf once brushed this subject when Frodo asked him why the Ring should have left Gollum just when Bilbo would happen by to find it. After all, "wouldn't an orc have suited it better?" And Gandalf said (danger! quoting without checking source! #include <stddisclaimer.h>) "I can put it no more plainly that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its Maker." The question sometimes comes up as to whether this mysterious Power that summons councils, appoints burdens, and directs the loss and finding of a powerful weapon is actually Iluvatar or maybe just one of the Valar, Manwë most likely.
I don't think that Manwë is the Unnamed Power in this case, because his input into the situation was the sending of the Five Wizards--Gandalf was one of those. But although Gandalf did a lot for the cause, there were a number of things that happened above and beyond his control or knowledge. The "fortuitous" meeting of the Council, the selection of Frodo, of Bilbo even, all these came to Gandalf and the others from "outside".
I read a webpage once that opined that Gandalf's downfall in Moria constituted the actual failure and ruin of the plans of the Valar for Sauron's overthrow. Gandalf's aid was essential for the resistance--everybody knew they had next to zero chance of withstanding Sauron without him, for although he was not as powerful as Sauron, they were beings of the same order, and Gandalf had wisdom that nobody else had. But upon meeting the Balrog, which, like Gandalf, was also a Maia, Gandalf engaged the thing in combat, knowing that he could be no more help to the Company or anyone else, and in so doing he died.
His coming back to life was not the doing of Manwë at all. He had no such power. It was Iluvatar himself that sent Gandalf back. Tolkien meant this as a "seal of approval" on the sacrifice that Gandalf, and all the Valar, had made. Their plan had failed, and could not but have failed against such an enemy, but they had done the right thing in trying it. So Iluvatar stepped in and made it possible to succeed anyway.
None of this is explicitly stated in the books, which avoid directly mentioning Eru/Iluvatar in Middle-Earth contexts.
Yup, that's what I meant.
Not so...Gollum didn't "slip into" Mordor, he was captured at the frontier and dragged in, then interrogated and eventually released. When Frodo was given the mission to sneak into Mordor, nobody had any proper idea how he was supposed to do it. All the Council were certain of is that force was not an option, and if the Ring were to be destroyed at all, a hobbit might as well do it as anybody. And Master Elrond sensed that Iluvatar was actively guiding the process, and that He had appointed Frodo particularly to take the burden. That decision was not taken lightly, no more than it would have been in RL.
I wouldn't call that a "honeypot"; I would call it a "Wild Weasel" box. But it would be a Wild Weasel using remote-controlled, unmanned flight hardware. A much more career-friendly implementation than its Vietnam-era namesake. Not a bad idea at all....
Well, when I run make -n on software, I'm actually not looking for boldfaced 'rm -rf /' commands anyway...I'm looking at things like what libraries the thing is building, directories that it proposes to install in, and stuff like that. If I were searching for a deeply nested 'rm -rf /' in a suspicious makefile, I would not resort to 'make -n' to find it. I would put a wrapper around 'rm' and trap the call.
But, there you go. 'Suspicious makefile?' Since when? As another poster pointed out, if somebody tried to slip a mickey like that through the distribution system, it would get pulled from freshmeat immediately. It only has to crash a couple of victims, and the word is out.
Paranoia is useful, and in my business, it's a job qualification. But, as you mentioned, we can't manually verify everything. So if paranoia is not to become paralysis, what do we do?
"We can check if we really want to" is actually a mighty shield, one which is really only available to open source users. There may be an ambiguity lurking in your statement of this principle. "We" do check everything...I don't personally do it, but it is done all the same, by the community.
Do you remember the tcpwrapper flap? Somebody posted a patch to the code at a primary source site (U. of Eindhoven, was it?) which snagged security info and mailed it to a Hotmail account. That was discovered in short order, and the news was everywhere. The crocked tcpwrapper was pulled, the Hotmail account was canned, and everybody was agog for maybe 2 weeks. "How could something like that happen in Open Source!" But, you know, that whole affair provided a demonstration of the hostile environment that open source software provides to malicious code, whether it be a virus, a bomb, or a trojan.
No, you don't want to blithely trust everything, but you don't have to rely only on your own powers for safety. By myself I could no more close every possible loophole in my system than I could write a kernel to compete with linux. But, just as I benefit from the work of a community which provides the OS that I'm running, I can use the eyes of the community to watch out for those pesky 'rm -rf ' things too.
That's not a virus, it's actually a bomb. The thing that defines a virus is that it replicates itself manyfold before destroying its 'host' (if it ever does so). The point of the article is that the linux installed base is too hostile to virus reproduction for them to become a major threat.
Btw, if you're worried about a makefile of suspicious provenance, just say "make -n " and check out all the commands it wants to run before you execute them.
Well, to steal a quote from a hostile source, "If $bignum people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing." STR.
This doubt of the existence and historicity of Jesus is mostly a post-Enlightenment(sic) thing. It arises not from any inadequacy of evidence, but from an ideological rejection of the message of Jesus. In ancient times, this rejection took other forms, because to dispute the existence of Jesus in the third century would be like claiming to disbelieve in George Washington today. But the mere passage of 1500 years would not make a disbelief in the existence of George Washington suddenly reasonable.
This modern scholarship to which you appeal was once likened by one of its followers to a rugby game with 5 balls and 10 teams on the field, everybody tackling everybody, and everybody claiming to be winning. Doctorates are awarded on the basis of outlandish theories which are shot to ribbons 6 months after the dissertations containing them are filed.
I would recommend in my turn that you read Eta Linnemann's _Is There a Synoptic Problem?_. I didn't find this randomly; this is aimed fire.
HAND.
And I submit that you have herewith exemplified a form of religious faith, in that you believe either that sufficient evidence has been provided to make this sort of statement, or (more likely) you simply believe that no evidence is needed.
The historicity of Jesus of Nazareth is in no more dispute than that of Julius Caesar. Though these days it seems to be a badge of distinction to disbelieve in something dear to the unwashed masses. Maybe that's why we get fellows that profess to disbelieve in William Shakespeare or the Holocaust. Whatever. Thought is free. Who says it has to make sense as well?
I was going to put this in but since somebody already did, let me add my two bits.
I often manage polls, and we have very specific rules to make sure that we get an uncoerced vote. That polling booth with the curtain by itself is not enough to guarantee that the voter is not being pressured to vote a certain way. It's the polling booth, with the curtain, surrounded by a supervised open space in a polling place open to the public where all can see, the voter is in there alone, and there is absolutely no way to tell what was marked on that particular ballot. Ballots are serialized, and voters sign in after verification of identity, but there is absolutely no way to connect a particular ballot with a particular voter.
Voters who require assistance may choose an assistant to go with them, but a poll manager goes also to ensure that the voter is not being coerced. And if you are a candidate or organization interested in the way the election is being run, you can come or send a representative to observe the polling places, to make sure everything is fair.
There are methods for dealing with irregularities in public challenge hearings. There are rules about campaigning in and around the polling places. Candidates may greet folks waiting in the line, but they can't pass out campaign literature there. Law officers are allowed in only to vote, otherwise they cannot enter unless a poll manager calls them in.
On the whole, I suspect that much of the enthusiasm about internet voting would evaporate if those who favor it could experience the joys of machine politics, which these rules, workable only in "meatspace", are designed to prevent.
I instantly thought of "Bringin' Home the Oil" from an old TV commercial. I doubt that the tune was written just for that, and I don't remember it well enough to be sure if it fits these words.
So, tell us what tune to use next time. And, btw, are you going to archive these brain droppings somewhere?
Actually, when I saw the notice that entries were going to be received by email with no visible means of verifying their origin, that was clue enough that it was bogus. Even so, I would like to suggest a third prize category: a life-size likeness of JonKatz modeled in hot grits, or a DeCSS T-shirt worn once by Natalie Portman.
Many posters have pointed to the influence of the Edison boosters in downplaying Tesla's contributions. But don't forget that at one time, Tesla had both George Westinghouse and J.P.Morgan in his corner. Westinghouse died, and Morgan became disenchanted with Tesla's increasingly impractical and costly experiments; experiments which he refused to explain or submit to peer review. Nobody could deny that Tesla was a genius of the first rank. But he cut himself off from other researchers, and, in consequence, his later work is a sordidly mixed bag of "results" that are not much use to anybody.
You want a real hero, then check out Charles Proteus Steinmetz. There's the man who made AC distribution possible. Don't know what the Smithsonian has to say about him, tho (he *did* work for Edison).
Gotcha. There also seems to be some wiggle in the understanding of "even if"--I didn't bold it because it sounded to me as if it meant "even though".
Don't know if you'll even see this, since it's so far out of date now. Only reason I saw it is because I checked my karma (amazingly, still positive). So I'll keep it short.
You don't have to search the entire universe if you have something that is falsifiable to check. Look at the resurrection of Christ. All His teaching and that of the apostles either stands or falls by that one historical fact. Either it happened or it didn't. If it didn't, then Jesus of Nazareth was "just another guy", and there is no need to check that line of inquiry further. But if it did happen--
I sure wouldn't call him an extreme left-winger. But what he is is bad enough. I no longer remember the last article of his in which I saw him toss off a gratuitous, ill-informed swipe at the Christian faith, nor what the particular swipe was. What I do remember is that that was the moment I had had enough. Off to "User Preferences" I went, and changed my previously default /. settings to block him. Though the feature allows you to block any or all /. authors, I understand that it was added to slash principally because of him.
Now we have other authors posting JonKatz stories. Ugh. Do I gotta block all of them too?
Now, it would appear that it takes some kind of faith to make that statement so positively. The subtlety of the distinction between this and an active belief that there is no God escapes me, as it did the poster to whom you are replying.
This is as blatant a statement of faith as any that you might be tempted to rail against. Try to understand: you believe that this life is all we get, and that anybody who says otherwise is wrong. But how do you know that to be true? I submit that you don't know it from any experience or hard proof. Maybe you heard it from somebody you respect; maybe you just feel more comfortable with this statement than with its opposite.
I won't say anything about the first possibility; that one is too easy. Besides, I guess that the second one is the more likely to be true. I should therefore like to point out that the comfort I once had in atheism/materialism was only sustainable with a corresponding blindness to uncomfortable facts. "The universe
Since you know about the two trees, you should have noticed that Adam was not forbidden to eat from the Tree of Life--until after he had eaten from the forbidden one. But what are you looking for anyway? Immortality? Meaning what? Eternal continuance? More of the same ol' same old every day? God has given far better than that: In Christ He has given Himself. More like an eternal marriage.