Assume that phone numbers have at most 11 digits (ie 1-910-xxx-xxxx). Each digit has 10 different values. So there are 10^11, or 100,000,000,000 possible 10 digit phone numbers. Does that number look familiar? If the story is correct, they have tried to copyright every single possible 11 digit phone number
For example, if a collection of friends decide to create an Aqua-like theme and distribute it, what's that to prevent Microsoft from doing the same?
Nothing. Microsoft has already done this, in a way. The user interface for windows XP (called Luna) seems to take a lot of inspiration from Mac OS X without directly copying it.
Looks like TiVo that retails for $2000 and writes to DVDs. Won't the media companies try to block this in any way they can? With TiVo you had to hack your unit to be able to read from the hard drive and get the video on your computer so you could post it on the net, but with this you just write to a DVD and then read it to your computer.
Of course, if this becomes popular then maybe CmdrTaco won't have to complain about having missed the Enterprise pilot episode.
This is simply flamebait. Or would be if the rest of the message weren't fairly well written and reasonable.
You don't exactly say why someone can't be Christian, adult, and realist at the same time, but I'm guessing your quotations form some of your evidence for that. The thing about the Bible is that it is a huge book (compilation of books, actually) written over a very large span of time in cultures significantly different from our own. They seem jarringly "unchristian."
But I want to show that a Christian person can be realistic and logical. Such a person (me, for example) would do some research and come up with the following conclusions:
Exodus 21:20 And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall surely be punished. It actually gets worse if you read the next verse. That verse says that if the servant lives, then he won't be punished at all, because, after all, he's already lost the services of that slave, who was his property.
The thing is that the slavery/servanthood system back then was not as bad as the slavery that existed in the US before the civil war. Now that doesn't mean that it was good on any scale, but if you happen to be a Deity who is trying to lead a group of people "rough and stiffnecked" people through the desert, who complain that instead of all the really great food they had in Egypt while they were SLAVES there, they have to eat this mana stuff which you cause to appear on the ground every morning while they wander through the desert for 40 years because even though they saw You (said Deity) rain down the 10 plagues on Egypt, open the Red Sea, etc., they took one look at the giants in the promised land and didn't think You could handle that little problem, then as said Deity You have to realize that you have the racial equivalent of a "problem child" on your hands and they probably won't accept it if you try to change their whole social, political, and economic structures over night. (*) As such, you will prioritize the Bad Things which you have to get rid of, and perhaps even make some gradual changes on them.
That's where the second verse comes in:
Deuteonomy 15:12 [And] if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. God changes the slavery system here. It is no longer a permanent thing, but more like selling your services to someone for seven years in return for room and board. As opposed to various forms of robbery or begging, I think that's a marked improvement. Slavery here wasn't a system in which a group of people captured a bunch of foreigners and then forced them to work for life, along with their children and all their decendents. Slaves were people who had been hit with sudden and severe lack of economic means with which to sustain their basic needs (mainly just food, in those days). Thus, the slaves came from the same set of people as their owners, and so the owners placed a greater value on them (as a human being). Also because of this, they weren't all that common, and were looked upon with far more value (economically) than slaves in the US were. Thus, beatings would be pretty rare. If they did happen, the law states that if the slave lived, the loss of his services would be enough to convince any smart slaveowner that beatings weren't a very good economic choice. In summary, slavery in this culture was not what we think of when we think slavery, and while not wholly desirable, was something far more akin do (indentured) servanthood.
Also, there were three types of laws given to the Isrealites. This law was part of the laws for the nation of Isreal. We're not necessarily bound by them today, although they are worth studying for the principles behind them. Another part of the law was the ceremonial law, which had to do with the priests, worship service, and sacrifices in the sanctuary. This whole system of laws was a symbol of the plan of Salvation - specifically, Jesus taking our sins on Himself and dying on the cross for us. These laws are very much worth studying, but these symbols of what was to come became meaningless when what was to come came. The other set of laws was the 10 commandments, or Moral Law. These laws are still very much in effect, no matter who tells you that they were "nailed to the cross." Christians would do well to heed them, and here I'll take the oppurtunity to suggest that they all take a closer look at the 4th one. (well, 3rd if you think that it was valid for the roman catholic church to remove commandment number 2 and split commandment 10 into 2 commandments so that there would still be 10.)
OK, next verse:
1 Corinthians 14:34 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but [they are commanded] to be under obedience, as also saith the law. Paul can be a pain to reconcile with the modern day idea of the equality of the sexes. My take on it is that males and females are of equal value, but are generally assigned different roles. One of these, as un-PC as it may seem, is that in a marriage relationship the women are supposed to be obedient to the man. Or rather, the two people are metophorically supposed to become one, so that they make decisions and decide on things together, but if they can't come to an agreement (which shouldn't happen very often in a working marriage), the man gets the final say. But why should the women shut up in church? Well, evidently the church services in Corinth were a bit too chaotic, to the point where hardly anyone could understand anything. The Corinthian populous was fairly heterogenous, linguistically speaking, and at any given time in the service there might be several different people prophesying/preaching in different languages, more people translating for them, and on top of this all the wives talking to their husbands and asking for their husbands to explain this chaos to them. So in the last part of 1 Corinthians 14, Paul is trying to lay down some ground rules which suggest that if in general only one person speaks at a time then in general everyone will get a lot more benefit out of the service.
Exodus 31:15 Six days may work be done; but in the seventh [is] the sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD; whosoever doeth [any] work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death. Exodus through Deuteronomy cover roughly overlapping time sequences. In Deuteronomy 15:32-36 there is a story of a man who was gathering sticks on the Sabbath. He wasn't supposed to be doing that, but the leader's didn't know what to do with him so they asked Moses, who asked God. Got told Moses the man had to be stoned. The first point about this story is that neither the leaders nor Moses knew what to do, so the law from Exodus hadn't been given yet. This story gives us some of the background on that law. Not much, so let me use my imagination and my view of God to fill in one plausible account of these events - Gathering sticks on the Sabbath is not such a big infraction, and in my opinion (I keep the Sabbath) is in most cases quite ok to do. But this man did it, and God had him stoned. Why? I'd say it's because this guy was pretty angry at these restrictions placed on him and on God in general. He probably didn't even need the sticks, he was just rebelling against the Rules and in effect saying "I'm breaking the law, what are you going to do about it?" Now God, in his infinite love, realizes that your eternal destiny is the only thing that really matters, and that this life doesn't. So if this person is already in such a mindset that he will forever be rebelling against God and never allowing himself to be saved, it is insignificant whether he gets killed now or lives a few more years. Maybe stoning him now is actually the only way in which he might be saved if he realizes his error as he is getting stoned or about to be getting stoned and has true repentence. So as far as the man is concerned, punishing him with death is not eternally significant except for the chance that he'll reconsider and be saved because of it, which is a good thing. Nothing to lose, everything to gain for him.
However, this was the first time that this law had been broken, and it was clear that the decision on this issue would affect how the Israelites viewed sin, and the Sabbath. Stoning would drive home the eternal consequences of sin home to the Israelites (humans have this way of ignoring the eternal) and hopefully deter them from making the same mistakes.
My point is that Christianity can form the basis for a consistent, logical view of life, the universe, and everything. I'm just guessing, but I'd say that your view of this stuff probably also constitutes a fairly consistent system.
So why do I believe in Christianity and not agree with you? I have basically two choices: The universe was created by some sort of God, or the universe, and all life in it, came about because of some random chain of events. Now I think, for many reasons, that evolution is incredibly improbable on astronomical proportions. I'm talking about the kind of thing where it's theoretically possible, according to quantum theory, that I could suddenly find myself transported one foot in any given direction, because electrons and such don't actually exist at a certain place but rather there are certain finite but extremely small probabilities that they are in any given place in the universe. My knowledge of quantum theory being limited I may have screwed something up, but I think the chances of evolution happening are something of one to the number of atoms in the universe or something.
You see, evolution says that we evolved from more primitive organisms and on down the line via random mutations in our DNA in which the bad ones got filtered out (natural selection) and the good ones remained. But for this to work, there has to be some mechanism for the DNA to propogate itself, and to mutate. The simplest thing capable of doing this would be a very simple cell. Simple, as far as cells go, but incredibly complex nontheless. So where did the first cell come from? Lots of structures in the cell are very interdependent on eachother, so you'd basically have to have the cell wall, it's DNA, incredibly complex enzymes that walk along this DNA and copy it in some manner, and a method to provide energy for these reactions, to name a few. None of these components can really exist without all the other ones. So, you'd have to have them spring into existence (the atoms would have to magically form into the right molecules, and so on) virtually instantly, for it to work at all.
That's one of the big reasons I don't believe in evolution. Some evolutionists also see this problem and think the first cells were seeded by some alien race or came from mars or something. I just think Creation by a God is a better explanation.
Daniel Plaisted
daniel@danielplaisted.com
* - I apologize for the runon (andonandonandon) sentence. I tend to think it's funny...
I am an undergrad student in the Computer Science Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm not all that familiar with the various graduate research programs, but telecollaboration is one area that we are researching. This page has a list of some of these research projects. Although I didn't immediately find anything like what you're describing, you're surely welcome to try.
Slashdot Mirror
Assume that phone numbers have at most 11 digits (ie 1-910-xxx-xxxx). Each digit has 10 different values. So there are 10^11, or 100,000,000,000 possible 10 digit phone numbers. Does that number look familiar? If the story is correct, they have tried to copyright every single possible 11 digit phone number
Nothing. Microsoft has already done this, in a way. The user interface for windows XP (called Luna) seems to take a lot of inspiration from Mac OS X without directly copying it.
And look at this shot. of Mac OS X:
Now look at these shots of the next version of windows CE (Pocket PC 2002).
Notice any similarities in the upper right of the screen?
As to whether this is legal (or would be if MS didn't happen to have billions of dollars), IANAL.
Looks like TiVo that retails for $2000 and writes to DVDs. Won't the media companies try to block this in any way they can? With TiVo you had to hack your unit to be able to read from the hard drive and get the video on your computer so you could post it on the net, but with this you just write to a DVD and then read it to your computer.
Of course, if this becomes popular then maybe CmdrTaco won't have to complain about having missed the Enterprise pilot episode.
I am a Christian, realist, and an adult.
That is simply contradictory.
This is simply flamebait. Or would be if the rest of the message weren't fairly well written and reasonable.
You don't exactly say why someone can't be Christian, adult, and realist at the same time, but I'm guessing your quotations form some of your evidence for that. The thing about the Bible is that it is a huge book (compilation of books, actually) written over a very large span of time in cultures significantly different from our own. They seem jarringly "unchristian."
But I want to show that a Christian person can be realistic and logical. Such a person (me, for example) would do some research and come up with the following conclusions:
Exodus 21:20 And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall surely be punished.
It actually gets worse if you read the next verse. That verse says that if the servant lives, then he won't be punished at all, because, after all, he's already lost the services of that slave, who was his property.
The thing is that the slavery/servanthood system back then was not as bad as the slavery that existed in the US before the civil war. Now that doesn't mean that it was good on any scale, but if you happen to be a Deity who is trying to lead a group of people "rough and stiffnecked" people through the desert, who complain that instead of all the really great food they had in Egypt while they were SLAVES there, they have to eat this mana stuff which you cause to appear on the ground every morning while they wander through the desert for 40 years because even though they saw You (said Deity) rain down the 10 plagues on Egypt, open the Red Sea, etc., they took one look at the giants in the promised land and didn't think You could handle that little problem, then as said Deity You have to realize that you have the racial equivalent of a "problem child" on your hands and they probably won't accept it if you try to change their whole social, political, and economic structures over night. (*) As such, you will prioritize the Bad Things which you have to get rid of, and perhaps even make some gradual changes on them.
That's where the second verse comes in:
Deuteonomy 15:12 [And] if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee.
God changes the slavery system here. It is no longer a permanent thing, but more like selling your services to someone for seven years in return for room and board. As opposed to various forms of robbery or begging, I think that's a marked improvement. Slavery here wasn't a system in which a group of people captured a bunch of foreigners and then forced them to work for life, along with their children and all their decendents. Slaves were people who had been hit with sudden and severe lack of economic means with which to sustain their basic needs (mainly just food, in those days). Thus, the slaves came from the same set of people as their owners, and so the owners placed a greater value on them (as a human being). Also because of this, they weren't all that common, and were looked upon with far more value (economically) than slaves in the US were. Thus, beatings would be pretty rare. If they did happen, the law states that if the slave lived, the loss of his services would be enough to convince any smart slaveowner that beatings weren't a very good economic choice. In summary, slavery in this culture was not what we think of when we think slavery, and while not wholly desirable, was something far more akin do (indentured) servanthood.
Also, there were three types of laws given to the Isrealites. This law was part of the laws for the nation of Isreal. We're not necessarily bound by them today, although they are worth studying for the principles behind them. Another part of the law was the ceremonial law, which had to do with the priests, worship service, and sacrifices in the sanctuary. This whole system of laws was a symbol of the plan of Salvation - specifically, Jesus taking our sins on Himself and dying on the cross for us. These laws are very much worth studying, but these symbols of what was to come became meaningless when what was to come came. The other set of laws was the 10 commandments, or Moral Law. These laws are still very much in effect, no matter who tells you that they were "nailed to the cross." Christians would do well to heed them, and here I'll take the oppurtunity to suggest that they all take a closer look at the 4th one. (well, 3rd if you think that it was valid for the roman catholic church to remove commandment number 2 and split commandment 10 into 2 commandments so that there would still be 10.)
OK, next verse:
1 Corinthians 14:34 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but [they are commanded] to be under obedience, as also saith the law.
Paul can be a pain to reconcile with the modern day idea of the equality of the sexes. My take on it is that males and females are of equal value, but are generally assigned different roles. One of these, as un-PC as it may seem, is that in a marriage relationship the women are supposed to be obedient to the man. Or rather, the two people are metophorically supposed to become one, so that they make decisions and decide on things together, but if they can't come to an agreement (which shouldn't happen very often in a working marriage), the man gets the final say. But why should the women shut up in church? Well, evidently the church services in Corinth were a bit too chaotic, to the point where hardly anyone could understand anything. The Corinthian populous was fairly heterogenous, linguistically speaking, and at any given time in the service there might be several different people prophesying/preaching in different languages, more people translating for them, and on top of this all the wives talking to their husbands and asking for their husbands to explain this chaos to them. So in the last part of 1 Corinthians 14, Paul is trying to lay down some ground rules which suggest that if in general only one person speaks at a time then in general everyone will get a lot more benefit out of the service.
Exodus 31:15 Six days may work be done; but in the seventh [is] the sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD; whosoever doeth [any] work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death.
Exodus through Deuteronomy cover roughly overlapping time sequences. In Deuteronomy 15:32-36 there is a story of a man who was gathering sticks on the Sabbath. He wasn't supposed to be doing that, but the leader's didn't know what to do with him so they asked Moses, who asked God. Got told Moses the man had to be stoned. The first point about this story is that neither the leaders nor Moses knew what to do, so the law from Exodus hadn't been given yet. This story gives us some of the background on that law. Not much, so let me use my imagination and my view of God to fill in one plausible account of these events - Gathering sticks on the Sabbath is not such a big infraction, and in my opinion (I keep the Sabbath) is in most cases quite ok to do. But this man did it, and God had him stoned. Why? I'd say it's because this guy was pretty angry at these restrictions placed on him and on God in general. He probably didn't even need the sticks, he was just rebelling against the Rules and in effect saying "I'm breaking the law, what are you going to do about it?" Now God, in his infinite love, realizes that your eternal destiny is the only thing that really matters, and that this life doesn't. So if this person is already in such a mindset that he will forever be rebelling against God and never allowing himself to be saved, it is insignificant whether he gets killed now or lives a few more years. Maybe stoning him now is actually the only way in which he might be saved if he realizes his error as he is getting stoned or about to be getting stoned and has true repentence. So as far as the man is concerned, punishing him with death is not eternally significant except for the chance that he'll reconsider and be saved because of it, which is a good thing. Nothing to lose, everything to gain for him.
However, this was the first time that this law had been broken, and it was clear that the decision on this issue would affect how the Israelites viewed sin, and the Sabbath. Stoning would drive home the eternal consequences of sin home to the Israelites (humans have this way of ignoring the eternal) and hopefully deter them from making the same mistakes.
My point is that Christianity can form the basis for a consistent, logical view of life, the universe, and everything. I'm just guessing, but I'd say that your view of this stuff probably also constitutes a fairly consistent system.
So why do I believe in Christianity and not agree with you? I have basically two choices: The universe was created by some sort of God, or the universe, and all life in it, came about because of some random chain of events. Now I think, for many reasons, that evolution is incredibly improbable on astronomical proportions. I'm talking about the kind of thing where it's theoretically possible, according to quantum theory, that I could suddenly find myself transported one foot in any given direction, because electrons and such don't actually exist at a certain place but rather there are certain finite but extremely small probabilities that they are in any given place in the universe. My knowledge of quantum theory being limited I may have screwed something up, but I think the chances of evolution happening are something of one to the number of atoms in the universe or something.
You see, evolution says that we evolved from more primitive organisms and on down the line via random mutations in our DNA in which the bad ones got filtered out (natural selection) and the good ones remained. But for this to work, there has to be some mechanism for the DNA to propogate itself, and to mutate. The simplest thing capable of doing this would be a very simple cell. Simple, as far as cells go, but incredibly complex nontheless. So where did the first cell come from? Lots of structures in the cell are very interdependent on eachother, so you'd basically have to have the cell wall, it's DNA, incredibly complex enzymes that walk along this DNA and copy it in some manner, and a method to provide energy for these reactions, to name a few. None of these components can really exist without all the other ones. So, you'd have to have them spring into existence (the atoms would have to magically form into the right molecules, and so on) virtually instantly, for it to work at all.
That's one of the big reasons I don't believe in evolution. Some evolutionists also see this problem and think the first cells were seeded by some alien race or came from mars or something. I just think Creation by a God is a better explanation.
Daniel Plaisted
daniel@danielplaisted.com
* - I apologize for the runon (andonandonandon) sentence. I tend to think it's funny...
I am an undergrad student in the Computer Science Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm not all that familiar with the various graduate research programs, but telecollaboration is one area that we are researching. This page has a list of some of these research projects. Although I didn't immediately find anything like what you're describing, you're surely welcome to try.
Daniel Plaisted