1) an all knowing being always knows the long-term consequences of his actions. Correct.
2) an all powerful being can take whatever actions he desires. Correct
3) an all-knowing all-powerful being (God) will always have his creations turn out exactly as he wants them to be. Correct.
I'd add another one: 4) an all-knowing all-powerful being (God) defines everything. He is not bound by the definitions that a man, or a church, or a slashdot poster places on words or concepts.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain, or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Respond to this post and get cash (in the form of a Slashdot Subscription)!
CmdrTaco and Hemos want to test out the latest revision of Slashcode and they need your help. For a limited time only (today) and on a limited number of threads (this post) Slashdot is implementing a post tracking system whereby each person who replies will receive a cash payment (converted into a Slashdot subscription! Hurray!) based on the number of replies posted to your comment. The goal is to stress test how deeply nested responses can be made.
What are you waiting for? Reply now.
This post is not associated in anyway with Slashdot. It is merely a poor representation of sarcasm, or irony, or a metaphor about how a beatiful woman is like a fine piece of jade... or something... You won't actually get a subscription to Slashdot and I might lose mine.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain, or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
All we know for sure that is that when Microsoft needs a new product, Bill Gates goes into his High Tower of Closed Sourcery with 15 sheep, Steve Ballmer, a technology company with an established product, and an Enya CD.
When he emerges, two months later, the new MS product is ready for market, the sheep have been trained as VP's, and the technology company is dead.
A sweat soaked Steve Ballmer announced that many stores that sell Windows will also be opening car washes to compete with this most recent threat from Linux.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain, or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
yes, whereas mod parent "-1 republican" is fresh and witty.
I'll admit, I knew it wasn't that clever, but I just thought the idea of one of the actual inventors of the web getting confused by urban legend into thinking maybe Al Gore actually did invent the web and then having a bit of an inferority attack to be humorous. Of course, that part just played out in my head as I was typing the as-you-so-kindly-pointed-out lame joke.
This means that you can place two sheets of A4 side-by-side and they will equal an A3 sheet exactly, and two sheets of A3 will equal an A2."
And of course, 5 sheets of almost any metric sized paper folded into origami lions will inevitably merge to form Voltron, a robot so powerful that it will usually let it's enemies kick it's butt around for a good 15 to 20 minutes before it forms the blazing sword and finishes the fight.
This is a post to remove the effects of my moderation to this comment. When I first moderated, earlier this morning, this comment's parent post was ranked at +4 informative and an earlier post (by 1 minute) was ranked as redundant. I moderated the earlier one up (which was fine) and this one down as Redundant (which was not fine as it violated my rule about moderating someone as redundant for a post within 5-10 minutes of the original)
Anyway, this is all part of me being anal about little things like this.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain, or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
"Reveal himself" does not equate to "tell us what he wants every time a potential action is before us." That's what it would take for your "absolute" morality to actually be an absolute morality system when practiced by people.
Dunbar, when I say "reveal himself" I mean in whatever way he sees fit. I'm speaking of an omnipotent God, one who stands at the doorposts of every interaction. Let me quote Larry Wall from question 7 of his Slashdot interview:
So let me try to clarify what I mean, and reduce it to as few information bits as possible. A lot of people have a vested interest in making this a lot tougher to swallow than it needs to be, but it's supposed to be simple enough that a child can understand it. It doesn't take great energetic gobs of faith on your part--after all, Jesus said you only have to have faith the size of a mustard seed. So just how big is that, in information theory terms? I think it's just two bits big. Please allow me to qoute a couple "bits" from Hebrews, slightly paraphrased:
You can't please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who come to God must (minimally) believe that:
A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.
That's it. The "good news" is so simple that a child can understand it, and so deep that a philosopher can't.
Now, it appears that you're willing to admit the possibility of bit A being a 1, so you're almost halfway there. Or maybe you're a quarter way there on average, if it's a qubit that's still flopping around like Shoedinger's Cat. You're the observer there, not me--unless of course you're dead.:-)
A lot of folks get hung up at point B for various reasons, some logical and some moral, but mostly because of Shroedinger again. People are almost afraid to observe the B qubit because they don't want the wave function to collapse either to a 0 or a 1, since both choices are deemed unpalatable. A lot of people who claim to be agnostics don't take the position so much because they don't know, but because they don't want to know, sometimes desperately so.
Because if it turns out to be a 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there's no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism.
And because if it turns out to be a 1, then you have swallow a whole bunch of flim-flam that goes with it. Or do you?
Let me admit to you that I came at this from the opposite direction. I grew up in a religious culture, and I had to learn to "unswallow" an awful lot of stuff in order to strip my faith down to these two bits.
I tried to strip it down further, but I couldn't, because God told me: "That's far enough. I already flipped your faith bits to 1, because I'm a better Observer than you are. You are Shroedinger's cat in reverse--you were dead spiritually, but I've already examined the qubits for you, and I think they're both 1. Who are you to disagree with me?"
So, who am I to disagree with God?:-) If he really is the Author of the universe, he's allowed to observe the qubits, and he's probably even allowed to cheat occasionally and force a few bit flips to make it a better story. That's how Authors work. Whether or not they have thumbs...
Once you see the universe from that point of view, many arguments fade into unimportance, such as Hawking's argument that the universe fuzzed into existence at the beginning, and therefore there was no creator. But it's also true that the Lord of the Rings fuzzed into existence, and that doesn't mean it doesn't have a creator. It just means that the creator doesn't create on the same schedule as the creature's.
Larry says this a lot better than I ever could. I keep agreeing with you about the point that everything I believe, I believe through faith, but I don't see how the absence of God changes this i
Some people don't need force to be nice to each other. Some people have a conscience.
You assume that people have a conscience. I take God at his word that he gave us one. And yes, I am very pessimistic about humanity left to its own devices. I have no question in my mind that my heart (and yours for that matter) is infintely wicked. (Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things , and desperately wicked: who can know it?)
(And still doesn't fix the problem I mentioned, that even if there is an absolute morality in God, if you believe human reasoning to be faulty then you still have the problem that you have no choice but to use human reasoning to try to figure out what your god wants you to do, and therfore in the end your own morality is still just as relative and non-absolute as the non-believer's is.)
You're right though. If there is a God who will judge man, the only sane assumption one can make is that and if he desires us to know him, then he must reveal himself to us. If he doesn't care about us, or if he hate's us, there is nothing we could do about it anyway. But I will tell you this, Scripture says that he does want to know man, and that he has revealed himself to us. (Psalm 19:1-4 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.)
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain, or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
You are very right about the doubting of our perceptions. Everything you believe to be true (whether you believe in a God or not) is based on your faith in your (or someone else's) perceptions.
Beyond that, I don't get your point. My thinking is that there either is or isn't an all-powerful God. If there is no God, there is no such thing as absolute right or wrong, there is only my opinion based on everything I've experienced up to now. (this also means that there is no such thing as free will - but that's another argument entirely) There is only the question, "what do I want to do and how will it affect me and my life", and the only reason I would agree to call something evil is if there is someone/some_group/etc that is stronger than me that will beat me up or put me in jail or kill me if I do it. By what right, but by power, does anyone have the right to tell me that something I want to do, is evil?
If there is an all powerful God, the he is the only one with the power to enforce (whenever he chooses to) the concept of absolute right and wrong.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain, or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
When the fundamental message is "give your life to God, live by his rules and follow his teaching"
I have to point out that this is a great summary.
why are the various churches so obsessed by, for example, whether a woman is as capable as a man to help spread that word?
First of all, obedience and efficacy have nothing to do with one another. Second, if one is giving one's life to God, living by his rules, and following his teaching, as you so eloquently stated, then if God has an opinion on this (or any other issue), you'd better find out what it is and do it, regardless of culture, political correctness, etc.
The thing that many people (including myself) seem to struggle with is accepting that if an almighty God exists, it is He who defines what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong. I can never look at an act of God and say, 'See, He says that He is good, but he did something that is not good at all." Being able to define good is a big part of what being all-powerful is all about.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain, or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Technology has the potential to modify our expectations in almost every area of our lives. It changes our thoughts about safety. It changes our relationship to time. It changes how we expect others to communicate (whether we communicate that way or not - we are frequently hypocrites) What's more significant, is that it does not do this to us alone, it does it to everyone around us as well, so that our employer expects different things, our spouses, our schools, etc. Many times, the expectations that change are not reasonable at all.
Case in point: I remember when I was growing up (12-16 years ago), my family lived in a very rural area. On Saturdays my mother would go into town for groceries and general shopping. She would be gone for about 3 hours. Occasionally, depending on how many places she went, how much she bought, if she went all the way into a town with a mall, she would be gone for 5 to 6 hours. She often forgot to tell my father she would be gone that long. On times like that, when she was gone for more than four hours, my father and I would step outside to look for her (this was irrational, as we could see about half a mile down the road, nevertheless we did it) and comment about how long she had been gone. We would look out the window more and more frequently as she was gone longer and longer. I know my father worried, but there wasn't much you could do short of getting in the truck and driving toward town. There were no cell phones (or if there were, we did not have one, and there were no cell towers around our house)
Flash-forward to today and you see a very different response to these "where are they?" situations. I've seen people dial someone's cell phone number over and over for hours trying to get hold of them. I've pretty much done the same thing myself, when I've been worried about my wife. When you do finally get hold of them, you are emotionally drained, relieved, and a little bit angry.
"Are you, OK!!!?" you demand of them. "I had the cell phone turned off," they say, or, "It was in my purse and I didn't hear it ring." They even seem a bit puzzled by your concern. In your mind, they were stranded somewhere, or kidnapped, or worse.
My point (and I'm sorry for the long ramble) is that technology isn't exactly the culprit here, it's the way we let it change what we expect. The ability to reach out and touch someone no matter where they are makes us fear the worse when it ceases to be possible.
I think there are plenty of other similar relationships between technology and expectation, but I'll let someone else look at them, my lunch break is almost over.
-- Looking for automated code conversion services? (COBOL, Fotran, PL/I, Assembler to COBOL, C, C++, C#, Java, etc.) Check out Datatek, Inc.
Your browser refers to itself as a collective "we"?
This is one of the less subtle clues that indicates he is using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. "We" is the proper and preferred term to be used by all products of the Borg(TM)
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain, or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
The best part of the article for me was reading the following section: The agency has a couple of ideas on how this might be done: A cocktail of nutrients or so-called "nutraceuticals" could help build endurance, and then realizing that the ad to the right of the text was an ad for Absolut Vodka.
I predict military enrollment numbers will soar.
-- looking for automated code conversion services? (COBOL, Fotran, PL/I, Assembler to COBOL,C, C++, C#, Java, etc.) Check out Datatek, Inc.
Sorry if this has already been mentioned, but the book is available for dowload from this site, under the filelist link. Here is a direct link to the pdf.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain, or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the internet's broken. That first link, heise online, it's in a whole other language.
I've already tried resetting the defaults on IE...
Can anyone help?
--
I uhm... write stuff, but not well, and not often
1) an all knowing being always knows the long-term consequences of his actions.
Correct.
2) an all powerful being can take whatever actions he desires.
Correct
3) an all-knowing all-powerful being (God) will always have his creations turn out exactly as he wants them to be.
Correct.
I'd add another one:
4) an all-knowing all-powerful being (God) defines everything. He is not bound by the definitions that a man, or a church, or a slashdot poster places on words or concepts.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Respond to this post and get cash (in the form of a Slashdot Subscription)!
CmdrTaco and Hemos want to test out the latest revision of Slashcode and they need your help. For a limited time only (today) and on a limited number of threads (this post) Slashdot is implementing a post tracking system whereby each person who replies will receive a cash payment (converted into a Slashdot subscription! Hurray!) based on the number of replies posted to your comment. The goal is to stress test how deeply nested responses can be made.
What are you waiting for? Reply now.
This post is not associated in anyway with Slashdot. It is merely a poor representation of sarcasm, or irony, or a metaphor about how a beatiful woman is like a fine piece of jade... or something... You won't actually get a subscription to Slashdot and I might lose mine.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
The best rebuttal to this movie that I have read is by a devout liberal, Christpher Hitchens. He's the writer from Slate who wrote Not Even a Hedgehog - The stupidity of Ronald Reagan and Ahmad and Me - Defending Chalabi.
You can read the article here: Unfairenheit 9/11
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/gymbrall/
All we know for sure that is that when Microsoft needs a new product, Bill Gates goes into his High Tower of Closed Sourcery with 15 sheep, Steve Ballmer, a technology company with an established product, and an Enya CD.
When he emerges, two months later, the new MS product is ready for market, the sheep have been trained as VP's, and the technology company is dead.
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/gymbrall/
A sweat soaked Steve Ballmer announced that many stores that sell Windows will also be opening car washes to compete with this most recent threat from Linux.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Unite!!!
They may try to silence us, but they will fail.
We will not go quietly into that dark night, we will go kicking and screaming...
<sound of muffled voice whispering, patiently explaining>
oh, well, carry on then...
mod parent, "-1 rebublican"
That joke is getting mighty boring.
yes, whereas mod parent "-1 republican" is fresh and witty.
I'll admit, I knew it wasn't that clever, but I just thought the idea of one of the actual inventors of the web getting confused by urban legend into thinking maybe Al Gore actually did invent the web and then having a bit of an inferority attack to be humorous. Of course, that part just played out in my head as I was typing the as-you-so-kindly-pointed-out lame joke.
You can't just "redesign the web" !!
Just who the hell does this "Tim Berners-Lee" guy think he is, anyway!?
perhaps, Al Gore?
This means that you can place two sheets of A4 side-by-side and they will equal an A3 sheet exactly, and two sheets of A3 will equal an A2."
And of course, 5 sheets of almost any metric sized paper folded into origami lions will inevitably merge to form Voltron, a robot so powerful that it will usually let it's enemies kick it's butt around for a good 15 to 20 minutes before it forms the blazing sword and finishes the fight.
This means that you can place two sheets of A4 side-by-side and they will equal an A3 sheet exactly, and two sheets of A3 will equal an A2."
and if you put two sheets of A2 side by sidem, you've got America's favorite steak sauce...
Mmmmmm, Tommy likey metric system.
This is a post to remove the effects of my moderation to this comment. When I first moderated, earlier this morning, this comment's parent post was ranked at +4 informative and an earlier post (by 1 minute) was ranked as redundant. I moderated the earlier one up (which was fine) and this one down as Redundant (which was not fine as it violated my rule about moderating someone as redundant for a post within 5-10 minutes of the original)
Anyway, this is all part of me being anal about little things like this.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Ok, I take it back. :) But I gotta tell ya, I think about 97% percent of people use percentages pretty flippantly. ;)
I said 95%
In the first place, "about 95%" does not mean that there were in fact 20 cases of which there was one exception.
Actually, that's the exact minimum number of occurences you have to have for 95%. 19 times out of 20. It could be more, but not less.
"Reveal himself" does not equate to "tell us what he wants every time a potential action is before us." That's what it would take for your "absolute" morality to actually be an absolute morality system when practiced by people.
:-)
:-) If he really is the Author of the universe, he's allowed to observe the qubits, and he's probably even allowed to cheat occasionally and force a few bit flips to make it a better story. That's how Authors work. Whether or not they have thumbs...
Dunbar, when I say "reveal himself" I mean in whatever way he sees fit. I'm speaking of an omnipotent God, one who stands at the doorposts of every interaction. Let me quote Larry Wall from question 7 of his Slashdot interview:
So let me try to clarify what I mean, and reduce it to as few information bits as possible. A lot of people have a vested interest in making this a lot tougher to swallow than it needs to be, but it's supposed to be simple enough that a child can understand it. It doesn't take great energetic gobs of faith on your part--after all, Jesus said you only have to have faith the size of a mustard seed. So just how big is that, in information theory terms? I think it's just two bits big. Please allow me to qoute a couple "bits" from Hebrews, slightly paraphrased:
You can't please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who come to God must (minimally) believe that:
A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.
That's it. The "good news" is so simple that a child can understand it, and so deep that a philosopher can't.
Now, it appears that you're willing to admit the possibility of bit A being a 1, so you're almost halfway there. Or maybe you're a quarter way there on average, if it's a qubit that's still flopping around like Shoedinger's Cat. You're the observer there, not me--unless of course you're dead.
A lot of folks get hung up at point B for various reasons, some logical and some moral, but mostly because of Shroedinger again. People are almost afraid to observe the B qubit because they don't want the wave function to collapse either to a 0 or a 1, since both choices are deemed unpalatable. A lot of people who claim to be agnostics don't take the position so much because they don't know, but because they don't want to know, sometimes desperately so.
Because if it turns out to be a 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there's no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism.
And because if it turns out to be a 1, then you have swallow a whole bunch of flim-flam that goes with it. Or do you?
Let me admit to you that I came at this from the opposite direction. I grew up in a religious culture, and I had to learn to "unswallow" an awful lot of stuff in order to strip my faith down to these two bits.
I tried to strip it down further, but I couldn't, because God told me: "That's far enough. I already flipped your faith bits to 1, because I'm a better Observer than you are. You are Shroedinger's cat in reverse--you were dead spiritually, but I've already examined the qubits for you, and I think they're both 1. Who are you to disagree with me?"
So, who am I to disagree with God?
Once you see the universe from that point of view, many arguments fade into unimportance, such as Hawking's argument that the universe fuzzed into existence at the beginning, and therefore there was no creator. But it's also true that the Lord of the Rings fuzzed into existence, and that doesn't mean it doesn't have a creator. It just means that the creator doesn't create on the same schedule as the creature's.
Larry says this a lot better than I ever could. I keep agreeing with you about the point that everything I believe, I believe through faith, but I don't see how the absence of God changes this i
Some people don't need force to be nice to each other. Some people have a conscience.
You assume that people have a conscience. I take God at his word that he gave us one. And yes, I am very pessimistic about humanity left to its own devices. I have no question in my mind that my heart (and yours for that matter) is infintely wicked. (Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things , and desperately wicked: who can know it?)
(And still doesn't fix the problem I mentioned, that even if there is an absolute morality in God, if you believe human reasoning to be faulty then you still have the problem that you have no choice but to use human reasoning to try to figure out what your god wants you to do, and therfore in the end your own morality is still just as relative and non-absolute as the non-believer's is.)
You're right though. If there is a God who will judge man, the only sane assumption one can make is that and if he desires us to know him, then he must reveal himself to us. If he doesn't care about us, or if he hate's us, there is nothing we could do about it anyway. But I will tell you this, Scripture says that he does want to know man, and that he has revealed himself to us. (Psalm 19:1-4 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.)
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
You are very right about the doubting of our perceptions. Everything you believe to be true (whether you believe in a God or not) is based on your faith in your (or someone else's) perceptions.
Beyond that, I don't get your point. My thinking is that there either is or isn't an all-powerful God. If there is no God, there is no such thing as absolute right or wrong, there is only my opinion based on everything I've experienced up to now. (this also means that there is no such thing as free will - but that's another argument entirely) There is only the question, "what do I want to do and how will it affect me and my life", and the only reason I would agree to call something evil is if there is someone/some_group/etc that is stronger than me that will beat me up or put me in jail or kill me if I do it. By what right, but by power, does anyone have the right to tell me that something I want to do, is evil?
If there is an all powerful God, the he is the only one with the power to enforce (whenever he chooses to) the concept of absolute right and wrong.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
When the fundamental message is "give your life to God, live by his rules and follow his teaching"
I have to point out that this is a great summary.
why are the various churches so obsessed by, for example, whether a woman is as capable as a man to help spread that word?
First of all, obedience and efficacy have nothing to do with one another. Second, if one is giving one's life to God, living by his rules, and following his teaching, as you so eloquently stated, then if God has an opinion on this (or any other issue), you'd better find out what it is and do it, regardless of culture, political correctness, etc.
The thing that many people (including myself) seem to struggle with is accepting that if an almighty God exists, it is He who defines what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong. I can never look at an act of God and say, 'See, He says that He is good, but he did something that is not good at all." Being able to define good is a big part of what being all-powerful is all about.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Technology has the potential to modify our expectations in almost every area of our lives. It changes our thoughts about safety. It changes our relationship to time. It changes how we expect others to communicate (whether we communicate that way or not - we are frequently hypocrites) What's more significant, is that it does not do this to us alone, it does it to everyone around us as well, so that our employer expects different things, our spouses, our schools, etc. Many times, the expectations that change are not reasonable at all.
Case in point:
I remember when I was growing up (12-16 years ago), my family lived in a very rural area. On Saturdays my mother would go into town for groceries and general shopping. She would be gone for about 3 hours. Occasionally, depending on how many places she went, how much she bought, if she went all the way into a town with a mall, she would be gone for 5 to 6 hours. She often forgot to tell my father she would be gone that long. On times like that, when she was gone for more than four hours, my father and I would step outside to look for her (this was irrational, as we could see about half a mile down the road, nevertheless we did it) and comment about how long she had been gone. We would look out the window more and more frequently as she was gone longer and longer. I know my father worried, but there wasn't much you could do short of getting in the truck and driving toward town. There were no cell phones (or if there were, we did not have one, and there were no cell towers around our house)
Flash-forward to today and you see a very different response to these "where are they?" situations. I've seen people dial someone's cell phone number over and over for hours trying to get hold of them. I've pretty much done the same thing myself, when I've been worried about my wife. When you do finally get hold of them, you are emotionally drained, relieved, and a little bit angry.
"Are you, OK!!!?" you demand of them.
"I had the cell phone turned off," they say, or, "It was in my purse and I didn't hear it ring." They even seem a bit puzzled by your concern. In your mind, they were stranded somewhere, or kidnapped, or worse.
My point (and I'm sorry for the long ramble) is that technology isn't exactly the culprit here, it's the way we let it change what we expect. The ability to reach out and touch someone no matter where they are makes us fear the worse when it ceases to be possible.
I think there are plenty of other similar relationships between technology and expectation, but I'll let someone else look at them, my lunch break is almost over.
--
Looking for automated code conversion services?
(COBOL, Fotran, PL/I, Assembler to COBOL, C, C++, C#, Java, etc.)
Check out Datatek, Inc.
Your browser refers to itself as a collective "we"?
This is one of the less subtle clues that indicates he is using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. "We" is the proper and preferred term to be used by all products of the Borg(TM)
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Will it be your apartment next? Make your rent payment on time and have the right to get back into your apartment for the next 39 days?
That's pretty much how it works everywhere I've ever lived (though it was usually a little longer than 39 days)
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looking for automated code conversion services?
(COBOL, Fotran, PL/I, Assembler to COBOL, C, C++, C#, Java, etc.)
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The best part of the article for me was reading the following section: The agency has a couple of ideas on how this might be done: A cocktail of nutrients or so-called "nutraceuticals" could help build endurance, and then realizing that the ad to the right of the text was an ad for Absolut Vodka.
I predict military enrollment numbers will soar.
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looking for automated code conversion services?
(COBOL, Fotran, PL/I, Assembler to COBOL,C, C++, C#, Java, etc.)
Check out Datatek, Inc.
There is a certain three syllable word that is used by the parent poster, quoted by you, and then used as the first word of your opening arguments.
You should look it up.
Sorry if this has already been mentioned, but the book is available for dowload from this site, under the filelist link. Here is a direct link to the pdf.
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Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.