I don't see how you could read any books about Perl and not have any idea where the language came from. This is why PHP is so much more popular than Perl among people who don't already have a familiarity with UNIX and C: a C programmer learning Perl can say "oh hey, perl has a localtime() function, I already know how to use that" while a newbie will say "wtf, why do months start with 0 and the year is 106, and how am I supposed to remember what order all these numbers are in?" A UNIX hacker can say "oh hey, $0 and $$ are exactly the same as they are in shell scripts, and the regex syntax looks just like sed" while a Windows user will say "wtf, what are all these meaningless variables, and what the hell is a regex?"
My advice for OOP in Perl: 1) learn how OOP is supposed to work in some other language 2) pretend that it works that way in Perl, and try not to think about how "bless" actually works.
My understanding is that Perl doesn't have real objects, it just lets you pretend that it has objects, and everything basically works.
So my question is, what would I want to do with objects that a language like Ruby would let me do (because Ruby has real objects), but I can't do (as easily) in Perl (because Perl doesn't have real objects)? Other than preventing myself from directly accessing an object's internal workings, which breaks the concept of OOP but isn't a problem if I simply choose not to do it.
I meant they shouldn't cause much of a problem with the cell network. We weren't talking about interference with equipment on the airplane. That's a completely separate issue.
Long ago when I had a Diamond Rio (I was quite the early adopter), I learned quickly just how important the sampling rate is. To squeeze a 60-minute album on the rio's slim 32 MB of storage, I had to rip mp3's at 80kbps or sometimes 64 if it was a longer album. They sounded terrible, especially piano music and other acoustic sounds were very distorted and tinny. So I'd pick 8 tracks from the album, rip them at 128, and get by with a partial album and decent sound quality. Aah, momories.
There's a reason why Apple sells 60GB iPods, and has never sold one with less than 512MB.
I didn't mean to claim that I can tell the difference between 128kbps AAC and lossless. But on any decent stereo system, anyone can tell the difference between 128kbps Mp3 and a real CD, for sure. (Not so much on an ipod tho.) I just assumed that 128-AAC was as poor as 128-mp3, so I've been buying CDs and ripping them at a higher rate into iTunes and WMP.
Like I said, try before you buy. I'm not saying you won't be able to tell the difference between 128kbps AAC and a CD; the only one who can answer that question is you. It's good enough that it doesn't bother me.
Do you know what a comparable rate is for AAC? For instance, 96kbps in format WMA is similar in quality to 192kbps mp3. Is AAC a 2-for-1 compression too, compared to mp3?
No idea. You may want to try ripping a CD in iTunes, using AAC at different bit rates (from Preferences, go to Advanced, Importing, select Import Using AAC Encoder, and in the Setting menu go to Custom).
Turns out the rest of the album was pretty good, and it remains planted on my playlist (after the requisite ripping to 320K.mp3, of course).
I hope you understand that if you bought a 128kbps AAC file, then re-encoded it as 320kbps MP3, the resulting MP3 file will be WORSE quality than the original AAC file (in adition to being 2.5 times the file size). Interoperability is the only valid reason for doing this; if that's why you're doing it, carry on.
While we're on (or off) the topic, can you shine some light onto why all the major online music stores sell music sampled at 128kbps?
Keep in mind that 128kbps AAC is higher quality than 128kbps MP3, so if you're avoiding the iTunes Music Store because you don't like the sound of 128kbps MP3s, I suggest you try downloading some of the free tracks they offer (look in the bottom left corner of the home page, new free songs released every Tuesday). You can do this without giving them any credit card information, although you do have to register with a valid e-mail address.
Of course if you've heard 128kbps AAC and aren't satisfied, then I fully agree that you shouldn't send them your money.
To answer your question, the reasons Apple and their competitors offer compressed music are:
1) smaller files use less bandwidth for the user to download, therefore costing Apple less money 2) smaller files take less time to download, so the user gets closer to instant gratification 3) smaller files take up less space on disk, which isn't really significant on most desktop computers but is quite significant on portable media players such as iPods 4) the average person doesn't notice an audible difference between 128kbps AAC and lossless
Given #4, the demand for higher quality really isn't as strong as you expect, especially in light of #2 and #3. Throw in #1, and it's a no-brainer.
Take a look at all the links on this page. Notice how many have a.py extension. Why do you suppose that might be?
A lot of Google's software, like Google Earth and Picasa, was bought from other companies, not originally developed by Google. They've ported both to Linux, and Google Earth to Mac OS X.
Python is a great language but I doubt if all that much of their code is written Python. A lot of their work is C/C++/Java/Javascript/Ajax/etc...
JavaScript (including AJAX, which as someone else pointed out is not a language) doesn't count, since that's code that runs in your browser and there is no alternative language. I challenge you to produce any evidence that Google uses Java for anything. I won't argue sbout C/C++; it wouldn't surprise me if they use them quite a bit (although I have no specific knowledge either way).
It seems as if you singled out passages that I only included for context, and took them as if they were the main points. You overlooked the most important passages:
Fine, I'll try to be more thorough (I'm a little more awake today).
"Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.
What would have been the merciful thing for the coffee shop to do? Keep in mind that by taking up a parking space and using bandwidth, this guy is detrimentally affecting other customers - trespassing against them, you could say - and they can't be expected (by the coffee shop) to subscribe to the same philosophy of being merciful, so the coffee shop did have a responsibility to take some kind of action.
Judge not, and ye shall not be judged:
As the article says, the police are deciding whether or not the man has committed a crime; that's not up to the coffee shop.
condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned:
If he has committed a crime, the coffee shop can choose whether or not to press charges against him, and I am not suggesting that they should.
forgive, and ye shall be forgiven:"
"Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven."
That doesn't mean literally tally it up, it means ALWAYS forgive.
Back to the point I made in my original post, forgiveness isn't the same as allowing the trespass to continue to occur. If the man were willing to stop his behavior, THEN forgiveness for his trespass would be in order, but until he stops, the coffee shop has a real problem it needs to address.
1 Peter 3:8-19 specifies that we are not to return evil with evil. Rather return evil with kindness, prayer and blessings: "Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing;"
I disagree that turning the problem over to the police to deal with is evil. If it is, then we have a serious problem with the police. In fact, bringing the matter to the police could be considered analogous to bringing the matter to the church as directed in Matthew 18:17, since we're not specifically dealing with believers: the police represent an authority presumably respected by all parties, just as the church would be to the believers Jesus was addressing.
As for turning the other cheek (Matthew 5), that works fine when you're the only one being trespassed against. In this case, as I said, the man is also trespassing against other customers of the coffee shop (by taking up a parking space and using bandwidth), and the coffee shop has a responsibility to look out for its customers. I don't want to disagree with you, but I don't believe inaction would have been the best course here, and I can't think of a really good alternative if the man wasn't willing to stop when asked.
What do you suggest the coffee shop should have done?
If there's any doubt, about translations, IMO, KJV is the standard Bible.
I disagree that overall the KJV is any more accurate than modern translations such as the NIV, NASB, etc. However, in this particular case, it does appear that the NIV's translation differs from the original Greek (which Slashdot won't let me post here) in a way that could result in a different interpretation of the passage. The NASB says "let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector," and most other translations (excluding the NIV) agree with this.
Out of curiosity I looked up the passage in several Spanish translations, and got similar results: RVR and CST say "have him as" and LBLA says "he will be for you like", while BLS says "you must treat him like" and not surprisingly the NVI says "treat him like". I'm not fluent in Spanish and my retranslations into English probably aren't perfect, but the basic idea is close.
But yeah, back to the point:
The difference seems clear to me. In the latter case it says "let him be" as a pagan or tax collector. The way I read it, it means "if he insists, just let him be his evil way.
Is "just let him be his evil way" not the way you should treat a pagan or tax collector? I understand that the wording is a little different, but I'm not seeing much of a difference in the real meaning between "let him be that way" and "treat him that way."
Interestingly, The Message says "you'll have to start over from scratch, confront him with the need for repentance, and offer again God's forgiving love."
Creation Science is the idea that God created the universe and everything in it around 6,000 years ago, as described in the Bible; the Bible omits most of the details, and Creation Science attempts to fill them in. Although it is built upon an obviously nonscientific foundation, the science on top of that foundation is real science, disprovable (some ideas have been disproved, and the model changed as a result) and making predictions (although some of these predictions happen to be consistent with the theory of evolution as well). There are many unanswered questions; Creation Science is very far from being complete, but that does not make it unscientific.
I originally assumed Intelligent Design was basically the same idea, but simply omitting the nature of the Creator. Well, it appears that Intelligent Design is not that at all, but rather a philosophy that the universe is so complex that there must have been a Creator and the universe couldn't have evolved by chance. Because it doesn't start with the Biblical account of Creation, it doesn't really have any sort of framework upon which to build a model that can be tested.
It sounds like somebody took Creation Science and tried to take out the religious part and call it ID, but they accidentally took out the science part too. Whoops.
ID is not science, it's philosophy, and has no place in serious scientific discussion. And I say this as someone who believes the universe is ~6,000 years old.
"God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?" - Numbers 23:19 (NIV)
"Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath." - Hebrews 6:17 (NIV)
I can't find any better quotes at the moment, but yeah, God is constant and unchanging, and the laws of the universe (both physical and spiritual) reflect that.
FWIW I have a Motorola v551 with Cingular, and I've set it to check my e-mail on my own mail server over IMAPS. Unfortunately it doesn't like my SSL certificate (and the only way to add more certs is to hack the phone with some Windows app and a USB cable) so I get a warning every time, and it takes forever to connect, but it works. Send mail out via SMTP on cwmx.com (I wanted to use authenticated SMTP with TLS on my server, but that doesn't seem to work). You can download Opera. I can't get an SSH client to work; apparently that requires more hacking (replace part of the JVM with files from a different model of phone?) but aside from that I'm fairly happy with it.
DO NOT buy a Cingular belt clip (included with their accessory tri-pack with a car charger and earphone thing).
It works OK for a few phones. One or two phones in a single airplane shouldn't cause much of a problem if the network isn't already swamped. The more active phones you have flying, the more switching the network has to do.
I think what I said is perfectly consistent with the model set out in Matthew 18:15-17 (which you mis-cited, btw): If your brother trespasses against you, tell him personally to knock it off; if he doesn't listen, get a group together and tell him; if he still doesn't listen, take it up with the church, and if he STILL doesn't listen, "treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector" (NIV). This situation is a little different, of course. In this case, TFA doesn't have any details, but I gather that the manager did confront him individually. Since this is a business, I don't think approaching him as a group really applies, the way it would for an individual; the manager of the business is basically acting on behalf of everyone who works there. Likewise, bringing the matter to the church isn't really applicable to this situation, since Jesus was addressing a group of believers who might be trespassed upon by their "brother" (i.e. someone else within the church). Calling the police and having the man arrested would be equivalent to treating him as a tax collector (assuming tax collectors are corrupt, which apparently they generally were at the time).
As for the parable of the servant in Matthew 18:21-35, notice that the servant who owed the debt begged for patience and promised to repay the debt. In this case, it doesn't sound like the guy in the parking lot ever acknowledged that there was a problem.
Luke 17:1-4, if someone trespasses against you by sitting in your parking lot using your free wifi without buying coffee, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. I'm not seeing repentance here.
1 John 2, I have no idea what you're getting at here.
1 Peter 3:8-19, no idea what you're getting at here either, but that's probably my fault, it's late and my brain is tired. Sorry.
I'm a Bible-thumping church-going Christian, and I totally side with the coffee shop here. As I understand it, he parked his van in their parking lot and used their free wifi without buying anything, and they turned the other cheek for three months. Finally they asked him to leave and not come back, because he was using up a parking space and network bandwidth that was no longer available to the coffee shop's customers. He could have gone to some other coffee shop. There's plenty of free wifi around Portland. The Multnomah County Library has plenty of computers with Internet access open to anyone with a library card. No, he came back to the same coffee shop after being asked not to return.
Should they forgive his tresspasses? Sure, if he'll stop tresspassing. In the mean time, calling the police was entirely justified, although they should not have used 911 since this obviously wasn't an emergency.
You're off-topic, since this is an article about China and you're complaining about somebody in Texas. Also, since this IP is already listed in multiple spam blacklists (including cbl.abuseat.org, dnsbl.sorbs.net, sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org, and bl.spamcop.net), anybody who wanted to block spam from this IP is probably already doing so, and they don't need you to inform them. I've never received spam from this IP, probably because I use various blacklists, both to completely deny connections and to add to SpamAssassin's weighted scores.
So chill out. Spam happens, and this is just one example out of hundreds of thousands. If you're not willing to just ignore it, then call AT&T and see what they have to say about it.
Unless you can sign an SSL certificate from a CA my browser is configured to trust, I'll get security warnings if you try to hijack my HTTPS or IMAPS connections.
And if you have the private key of a trusted CA, well then I salute you sir!
The Chinese government requires that any search engine operating in China filter their results. Google is not in a position to affect this policy in any way whatsoever. The policy is evil, but that's not Google doing evil, that's the Chinese government doing evil.
Now, with this situation, I see two options for Google: they can provide a filtered search engine in China, or they can refuse to provide a filtered search engine in China. Either way, the Chinese government doesn't care. But here's the problem: Google's competitors don't necessarily indicate to the user that their search results are being filtered. Google displays a message saying that the Chinese government is requiring them to censor something. Displaying this message helps to raise awareness among the Chinese people about the policies of their government... and THAT is the ONLY thing Google actually CAN do to help fight government censorship: raise public awareness.
So, Google has an opportunity to do something good (letting Chinese users see when search results have been blocked by the government), as well as providing the Chinese public with access to (what is in my opinion) the best search engine available. Or, they could refuse to do either of those positive things for the Chinese people. Which of these two options is evil?
The world is not as black-and-white as you would like it to be.
MySpace says on a "Tips for Parents" page that users must be 14 or older. The Web site does nothing to verify the age of the user, such as requiring a driver's license or credit card number, Loewy said.
Explain to me how verifying a 14-year-old's driver's license or credit card number is going to work.
Age verification is fine for sites that require you to be 18 or over, but if you want 14-year-olds to use your site, I can't think of a good way to verify their age that doesn't have really disturbing implications.
Solis contacted the girl through her MySpace Web site in April, telling her that he was a high school senior who played on the football team, according to the lawsuit.
In May, after a series of e-mails and phone calls, he picked her up at school, took her out to eat and to a movie, then drove her to an apartment complex parking lot in South Austin, where he sexually assaulted her, police said. He was arrested May 19.
If they talked to each other on the phone several times before meeting in person, why is AT&T not liable for failing to protect her?
Let me see if I understand this correctly: a 19-year-old claimed to be only 18 on his myspace profile, and this is worth $30 million?
I'm not excusing the guy's actions. He knew she was 14, and that's not OK, even if she said yes, which I'm guessing she probably did. And lying about your age is generally not cool. But I really don't think MySpace could have reasonably done anything that would have stopped this from happening. Do you think she wouldn't have agreed to meet him, if she had known he was really 19?
They started by sending e-mail, then exchanging phone numbers and talking on the phone; at what point do you draw the line and say what these people do is not MySpace's responsibility? If I find a (18+) girl on MySpace, send her e-mail, she e-mails me back, I send her my phone number, she calls me, we talk, we go out for coffee, things go well, we start dating, have dinner a few times, then one day we get into an argument and she punches me in the face - can I sue MySpace for failing to protect me from her?
I do the same with my 12" iBook, and it's great - at home I set it on the desk and plug everything in, then I unplug everything and stuff it in a backpack. Most of the time when I'm away from home, I don't need to do anything that would be difficult on a 12" screen, and the small size is much more convenient to haul around.
There are small PC laptops available, of course, but apparently most people haven't seen them, because I very frequently get comments on how small my laptop is (plus it's white and has a glowing Apple logo on the back, so that tends to stand out too).
The only downside is, my iBook isn't quick.:-( I'm hoping Apple figures out how to make a 13" MacBook Pro; the new MacBooks look awesome but I want decent video (mostly because of Quartz 2D Extreme which should be working in Mac OS X 10.5).
The botched installation you mentioned is VERY typical for any phone company; I used to work in DSL tech support so I've seen it a million times, but I've run into it quite a bit outside of work as well (not my own line, though). But aside from that, as you say, it's not their fault.
See if you can find the point of demarcation - the box where the phone line comes in, than the lines in your apartment are connected to. For a house, it's usually a grey box on the side of the house; I have no idea what it would look like in an apartment complex. One side of this box is the phone company's responsibility to maintain; the other side is the apartment complex's responsibility. Since the chance of getting the apartment managers to fix your lines is approximately zip, see if you can run your own cat5 line into this box (connect the blue wire to red/ring, the blue-and-white striped wire to green/tip, and cut the rest off; keep the blue pair twisted as far as you can, don't straighten out the two individual wires). Try not to make it obvious, and keep your mouth shut.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how you could read any books about Perl and not have any idea where the language came from. This is why PHP is so much more popular than Perl among people who don't already have a familiarity with UNIX and C: a C programmer learning Perl can say "oh hey, perl has a localtime() function, I already know how to use that" while a newbie will say "wtf, why do months start with 0 and the year is 106, and how am I supposed to remember what order all these numbers are in?" A UNIX hacker can say "oh hey, $0 and $$ are exactly the same as they are in shell scripts, and the regex syntax looks just like sed" while a Windows user will say "wtf, what are all these meaningless variables, and what the hell is a regex?"
My advice for OOP in Perl:
1) learn how OOP is supposed to work in some other language
2) pretend that it works that way in Perl, and try not to think about how "bless" actually works.
My understanding is that Perl doesn't have real objects, it just lets you pretend that it has objects, and everything basically works.
So my question is, what would I want to do with objects that a language like Ruby would let me do (because Ruby has real objects), but I can't do (as easily) in Perl (because Perl doesn't have real objects)? Other than preventing myself from directly accessing an object's internal workings, which breaks the concept of OOP but isn't a problem if I simply choose not to do it.
Look dickhead,
I meant they shouldn't cause much of a problem with the cell network. We weren't talking about interference with equipment on the airplane. That's a completely separate issue.
Long ago when I had a Diamond Rio (I was quite the early adopter), I learned quickly just how important the sampling rate is. To squeeze a 60-minute album on the rio's slim 32 MB of storage, I had to rip mp3's at 80kbps or sometimes 64 if it was a longer album. They sounded terrible, especially piano music and other acoustic sounds were very distorted and tinny. So I'd pick 8 tracks from the album, rip them at 128, and get by with a partial album and decent sound quality. Aah, momories.
There's a reason why Apple sells 60GB iPods, and has never sold one with less than 512MB.
I didn't mean to claim that I can tell the difference between 128kbps AAC and lossless. But on any decent stereo system, anyone can tell the difference between 128kbps Mp3 and a real CD, for sure. (Not so much on an ipod tho.) I just assumed that 128-AAC was as poor as 128-mp3, so I've been buying CDs and ripping them at a higher rate into iTunes and WMP.
Like I said, try before you buy. I'm not saying you won't be able to tell the difference between 128kbps AAC and a CD; the only one who can answer that question is you. It's good enough that it doesn't bother me.
Do you know what a comparable rate is for AAC? For instance, 96kbps in format WMA is similar in quality to 192kbps mp3. Is AAC a 2-for-1 compression too, compared to mp3?
No idea. You may want to try ripping a CD in iTunes, using AAC at different bit rates (from Preferences, go to Advanced, Importing, select Import Using AAC Encoder, and in the Setting menu go to Custom).
My mistake, I thought you said you bought the album online. Never mind!
If the alternative is bundling the MSN search bar, I'm completely in favor of this.
Turns out the rest of the album was pretty good, and it remains planted on my playlist (after the requisite ripping to 320K .mp3, of course).
I hope you understand that if you bought a 128kbps AAC file, then re-encoded it as 320kbps MP3, the resulting MP3 file will be WORSE quality than the original AAC file (in adition to being 2.5 times the file size). Interoperability is the only valid reason for doing this; if that's why you're doing it, carry on.
While we're on (or off) the topic, can you shine some light onto why all the major online music stores sell music sampled at 128kbps?
Keep in mind that 128kbps AAC is higher quality than 128kbps MP3, so if you're avoiding the iTunes Music Store because you don't like the sound of 128kbps MP3s, I suggest you try downloading some of the free tracks they offer (look in the bottom left corner of the home page, new free songs released every Tuesday). You can do this without giving them any credit card information, although you do have to register with a valid e-mail address.
Of course if you've heard 128kbps AAC and aren't satisfied, then I fully agree that you shouldn't send them your money.
To answer your question, the reasons Apple and their competitors offer compressed music are:
1) smaller files use less bandwidth for the user to download, therefore costing Apple less money
2) smaller files take less time to download, so the user gets closer to instant gratification
3) smaller files take up less space on disk, which isn't really significant on most desktop computers but is quite significant on portable media players such as iPods
4) the average person doesn't notice an audible difference between 128kbps AAC and lossless
Given #4, the demand for higher quality really isn't as strong as you expect, especially in light of #2 and #3. Throw in #1, and it's a no-brainer.
Ajax? It evolved into a language?
No, it was intelligently designed that way.
(sorry, couldn't resist!)
Take a look at all the links on this page. Notice how many have a .py extension. Why do you suppose that might be?
A lot of Google's software, like Google Earth and Picasa, was bought from other companies, not originally developed by Google. They've ported both to Linux, and Google Earth to Mac OS X.
Python is a great language but I doubt if all that much of their code is written Python. A lot of their work is C/C++/Java/Javascript/Ajax/etc...
JavaScript (including AJAX, which as someone else pointed out is not a language) doesn't count, since that's code that runs in your browser and there is no alternative language. I challenge you to produce any evidence that Google uses Java for anything. I won't argue sbout C/C++; it wouldn't surprise me if they use them quite a bit (although I have no specific knowledge either way).
It seems as if you singled out passages that I only included for context, and took them as if they were the main points. You overlooked the most important passages:
Fine, I'll try to be more thorough (I'm a little more awake today).
"Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.
What would have been the merciful thing for the coffee shop to do? Keep in mind that by taking up a parking space and using bandwidth, this guy is detrimentally affecting other customers - trespassing against them, you could say - and they can't be expected (by the coffee shop) to subscribe to the same philosophy of being merciful, so the coffee shop did have a responsibility to take some kind of action.
Judge not, and ye shall not be judged:
As the article says, the police are deciding whether or not the man has committed a crime; that's not up to the coffee shop.
condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned:
If he has committed a crime, the coffee shop can choose whether or not to press charges against him, and I am not suggesting that they should.
forgive, and ye shall be forgiven:"
"Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven."
That doesn't mean literally tally it up, it means ALWAYS forgive.
Back to the point I made in my original post, forgiveness isn't the same as allowing the trespass to continue to occur. If the man were willing to stop his behavior, THEN forgiveness for his trespass would be in order, but until he stops, the coffee shop has a real problem it needs to address.
1 Peter 3:8-19 specifies that we are not to return evil with evil. Rather return evil with kindness, prayer and blessings: "Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing;"
I disagree that turning the problem over to the police to deal with is evil. If it is, then we have a serious problem with the police. In fact, bringing the matter to the police could be considered analogous to bringing the matter to the church as directed in Matthew 18:17, since we're not specifically dealing with believers: the police represent an authority presumably respected by all parties, just as the church would be to the believers Jesus was addressing.
As for turning the other cheek (Matthew 5), that works fine when you're the only one being trespassed against. In this case, as I said, the man is also trespassing against other customers of the coffee shop (by taking up a parking space and using bandwidth), and the coffee shop has a responsibility to look out for its customers. I don't want to disagree with you, but I don't believe inaction would have been the best course here, and I can't think of a really good alternative if the man wasn't willing to stop when asked.
What do you suggest the coffee shop should have done?
If there's any doubt, about translations, IMO, KJV is the standard Bible.
I disagree that overall the KJV is any more accurate than modern translations such as the NIV, NASB, etc. However, in this particular case, it does appear that the NIV's translation differs from the original Greek (which Slashdot won't let me post here) in a way that could result in a different interpretation of the passage. The NASB says "let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector," and most other translations (excluding the NIV) agree with this.
Out of curiosity I looked up the passage in several Spanish translations, and got similar results: RVR and CST say "have him as" and LBLA says "he will be for you like", while BLS says "you must treat him like" and not surprisingly the NVI says "treat him like". I'm not fluent in Spanish and my retranslations into English probably aren't perfect, but the basic idea is close.
But yeah, back to the point:
The difference seems clear to me. In the latter case it says "let him be" as a pagan or tax collector. The way I read it, it means "if he insists, just let him be his evil way.
Is "just let him be his evil way" not the way you should treat a pagan or tax collector? I understand that the wording is a little different, but I'm not seeing much of a difference in the real meaning between "let him be that way" and "treat him that way."
Interestingly, The Message says "you'll have to start over from scratch, confront him with the need for repentance, and offer again God's forgiving love."
Creation Science is the idea that God created the universe and everything in it around 6,000 years ago, as described in the Bible; the Bible omits most of the details, and Creation Science attempts to fill them in. Although it is built upon an obviously nonscientific foundation, the science on top of that foundation is real science, disprovable (some ideas have been disproved, and the model changed as a result) and making predictions (although some of these predictions happen to be consistent with the theory of evolution as well). There are many unanswered questions; Creation Science is very far from being complete, but that does not make it unscientific.
I originally assumed Intelligent Design was basically the same idea, but simply omitting the nature of the Creator. Well, it appears that Intelligent Design is not that at all, but rather a philosophy that the universe is so complex that there must have been a Creator and the universe couldn't have evolved by chance. Because it doesn't start with the Biblical account of Creation, it doesn't really have any sort of framework upon which to build a model that can be tested.
It sounds like somebody took Creation Science and tried to take out the religious part and call it ID, but they accidentally took out the science part too. Whoops.
ID is not science, it's philosophy, and has no place in serious scientific discussion. And I say this as someone who believes the universe is ~6,000 years old.
"God is not a man, that he should lie,
nor a son of man, that he should change his mind.
Does he speak and then not act?
Does he promise and not fulfill?" - Numbers 23:19 (NIV)
"Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath." - Hebrews 6:17 (NIV)
I can't find any better quotes at the moment, but yeah, God is constant and unchanging, and the laws of the universe (both physical and spiritual) reflect that.
FWIW I have a Motorola v551 with Cingular, and I've set it to check my e-mail on my own mail server over IMAPS. Unfortunately it doesn't like my SSL certificate (and the only way to add more certs is to hack the phone with some Windows app and a USB cable) so I get a warning every time, and it takes forever to connect, but it works. Send mail out via SMTP on cwmx.com (I wanted to use authenticated SMTP with TLS on my server, but that doesn't seem to work). You can download Opera. I can't get an SSH client to work; apparently that requires more hacking (replace part of the JVM with files from a different model of phone?) but aside from that I'm fairly happy with it.
DO NOT buy a Cingular belt clip (included with their accessory tri-pack with a car charger and earphone thing).
It works OK for a few phones. One or two phones in a single airplane shouldn't cause much of a problem if the network isn't already swamped. The more active phones you have flying, the more switching the network has to do.
I think what I said is perfectly consistent with the model set out in Matthew 18:15-17 (which you mis-cited, btw): If your brother trespasses against you, tell him personally to knock it off; if he doesn't listen, get a group together and tell him; if he still doesn't listen, take it up with the church, and if he STILL doesn't listen, "treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector" (NIV). This situation is a little different, of course. In this case, TFA doesn't have any details, but I gather that the manager did confront him individually. Since this is a business, I don't think approaching him as a group really applies, the way it would for an individual; the manager of the business is basically acting on behalf of everyone who works there. Likewise, bringing the matter to the church isn't really applicable to this situation, since Jesus was addressing a group of believers who might be trespassed upon by their "brother" (i.e. someone else within the church). Calling the police and having the man arrested would be equivalent to treating him as a tax collector (assuming tax collectors are corrupt, which apparently they generally were at the time).
As for the parable of the servant in Matthew 18:21-35, notice that the servant who owed the debt begged for patience and promised to repay the debt. In this case, it doesn't sound like the guy in the parking lot ever acknowledged that there was a problem.
Luke 17:1-4, if someone trespasses against you by sitting in your parking lot using your free wifi without buying coffee, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. I'm not seeing repentance here.
1 John 2, I have no idea what you're getting at here.
1 Peter 3:8-19, no idea what you're getting at here either, but that's probably my fault, it's late and my brain is tired. Sorry.
I'm a Bible-thumping church-going Christian, and I totally side with the coffee shop here. As I understand it, he parked his van in their parking lot and used their free wifi without buying anything, and they turned the other cheek for three months. Finally they asked him to leave and not come back, because he was using up a parking space and network bandwidth that was no longer available to the coffee shop's customers. He could have gone to some other coffee shop. There's plenty of free wifi around Portland. The Multnomah County Library has plenty of computers with Internet access open to anyone with a library card. No, he came back to the same coffee shop after being asked not to return.
Should they forgive his tresspasses? Sure, if he'll stop tresspassing. In the mean time, calling the police was entirely justified, although they should not have used 911 since this obviously wasn't an emergency.
You're off-topic, since this is an article about China and you're complaining about somebody in Texas. Also, since this IP is already listed in multiple spam blacklists (including cbl.abuseat.org, dnsbl.sorbs.net, sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org, and bl.spamcop.net), anybody who wanted to block spam from this IP is probably already doing so, and they don't need you to inform them. I've never received spam from this IP, probably because I use various blacklists, both to completely deny connections and to add to SpamAssassin's weighted scores.
So chill out. Spam happens, and this is just one example out of hundreds of thousands. If you're not willing to just ignore it, then call AT&T and see what they have to say about it.
Unless you can sign an SSL certificate from a CA my browser is configured to trust, I'll get security warnings if you try to hijack my HTTPS or IMAPS connections.
And if you have the private key of a trusted CA, well then I salute you sir!
What if she turns out to have lied about her age?
Hey, that's a great question - what if she said she was 18 but she was really 17 and I get busted for statutory rape, can I sue MySpace for damages?
Here's my take on it.
The Chinese government requires that any search engine operating in China filter their results. Google is not in a position to affect this policy in any way whatsoever. The policy is evil, but that's not Google doing evil, that's the Chinese government doing evil.
Now, with this situation, I see two options for Google: they can provide a filtered search engine in China, or they can refuse to provide a filtered search engine in China. Either way, the Chinese government doesn't care. But here's the problem: Google's competitors don't necessarily indicate to the user that their search results are being filtered. Google displays a message saying that the Chinese government is requiring them to censor something. Displaying this message helps to raise awareness among the Chinese people about the policies of their government... and THAT is the ONLY thing Google actually CAN do to help fight government censorship: raise public awareness.
So, Google has an opportunity to do something good (letting Chinese users see when search results have been blocked by the government), as well as providing the Chinese public with access to (what is in my opinion) the best search engine available. Or, they could refuse to do either of those positive things for the Chinese people. Which of these two options is evil?
The world is not as black-and-white as you would like it to be.
Age verification is fine for sites that require you to be 18 or over, but if you want 14-year-olds to use your site, I can't think of a good way to verify their age that doesn't have really disturbing implications.
If they talked to each other on the phone several times before meeting in person, why is AT&T not liable for failing to protect her?
Let me see if I understand this correctly: a 19-year-old claimed to be only 18 on his myspace profile, and this is worth $30 million?
I'm not excusing the guy's actions. He knew she was 14, and that's not OK, even if she said yes, which I'm guessing she probably did. And lying about your age is generally not cool. But I really don't think MySpace could have reasonably done anything that would have stopped this from happening. Do you think she wouldn't have agreed to meet him, if she had known he was really 19?
They started by sending e-mail, then exchanging phone numbers and talking on the phone; at what point do you draw the line and say what these people do is not MySpace's responsibility? If I find a (18+) girl on MySpace, send her e-mail, she e-mails me back, I send her my phone number, she calls me, we talk, we go out for coffee, things go well, we start dating, have dinner a few times, then one day we get into an argument and she punches me in the face - can I sue MySpace for failing to protect me from her?
I do the same with my 12" iBook, and it's great - at home I set it on the desk and plug everything in, then I unplug everything and stuff it in a backpack. Most of the time when I'm away from home, I don't need to do anything that would be difficult on a 12" screen, and the small size is much more convenient to haul around.
:-( I'm hoping Apple figures out how to make a 13" MacBook Pro; the new MacBooks look awesome but I want decent video (mostly because of Quartz 2D Extreme which should be working in Mac OS X 10.5).
There are small PC laptops available, of course, but apparently most people haven't seen them, because I very frequently get comments on how small my laptop is (plus it's white and has a glowing Apple logo on the back, so that tends to stand out too).
The only downside is, my iBook isn't quick.
The botched installation you mentioned is VERY typical for any phone company; I used to work in DSL tech support so I've seen it a million times, but I've run into it quite a bit outside of work as well (not my own line, though). But aside from that, as you say, it's not their fault.
See if you can find the point of demarcation - the box where the phone line comes in, than the lines in your apartment are connected to. For a house, it's usually a grey box on the side of the house; I have no idea what it would look like in an apartment complex. One side of this box is the phone company's responsibility to maintain; the other side is the apartment complex's responsibility. Since the chance of getting the apartment managers to fix your lines is approximately zip, see if you can run your own cat5 line into this box (connect the blue wire to red/ring, the blue-and-white striped wire to green/tip, and cut the rest off; keep the blue pair twisted as far as you can, don't straighten out the two individual wires). Try not to make it obvious, and keep your mouth shut.