Hmm 2-3 pages out of 1500 dedicated to how it happened, and the rest dealing with why. I think the emphasis is clear, which is why the description of it is so vague and clearly not intended to be a literal text. The Jews never understood it to be literal in that way, and it has only really started to be though of like that in the last few hundred years. It's window dressing but to understand the point of it you have to compare it to the other contemporary creation myths. It explicitly denies that the sun and moon are gods, and that the earth was created out of a battle between gods, or that the scary monsters of the deep are anything other than normal parts of the creation of a single God. That's the important stuff, because it's what the Israelites were faced with, and what they needed to know at the time.
Because Jesus rose from the dead. All the historical evidence points to it if you come to the question with an open mind. His disciples almost all died violently proclaiming that fact, and they would have had to know it was a lie if it were not true. People sometimes die for what they believe to be true, but never suffer and die for something they know to be a lie. Besides, if it were not true then wouldn't the Jewish authorities merely produce the body?
This is then supported by the countless miracles performed and lives changed over the last 2000 years, including more known personally to me than I care tell you about. I do find it odd that there is such a paucity of hard evidence when it is so common (and it really is). It seems that those who see a lot of miracles don't even bother to record them as they're so commonplace, and those to whom it has happened don't need to question it and get a mere doctors opinion. I wonder whether God is actually preventing hard undeniable evidence from being gathered because of the effect that would have on us.
If Jesus rose from the dead, then He is who He said he was, The Son of God, and then the rest of the Bible is also true because He testified to it in his teaching. If the Bible is true, then it contains the answers to the big questions of life.
But that would miss the point of the story in Genesis 1-3, which is not to explain how we got here, but to declare that we are creations of a loving God, who created us to love Him, and to be loved by Him, but that we turn our backs on Him because of our jealousy of Him and our pride. The rest of the story, about how it happened is largely window dressing, and not what we really need to know about.
All that sciency stuff is answering "how is it that this ball is flying through the air?", and it does not ultimately lead to a conclusion, because the questions of "why are the laws of physics what they are?" are fundamentally unanswerable. You may have an answer you can believe in, but it doesn't actually answer the question.
You're also quite wrong about a God who can use quantum uncertainty to control the universe. The ability to predict and control macro and cosmological scale events from the quantum level is awesome in the extreme. A god who relies merely on overt displays of power is crude and weak by comparison. As the "god" entity in the futurama episode "godfellas" says "when you have done everything right, it looks like you have done nothing at all"
I don't see why an anomaly is necessarily evidence in favour of this deity of yours, or even of the supernatural (nebulous as that concept is).
An anomaly is not evidence in favour per se, but all direct interventions (bar some unambiguous second coming type event) would appear to be anomalous, pretty much by definition. In other words, all miracles are anomalies at some level from the quantum to the macro, but not all apparent anomalies are necessarily miracles. Having said that, I'd love to know what kind of anomaly can make someone's cataract go from opaque to transparent in moments, as a good friend of mine saw happen in the summer as he prayed for a woman.
science can never answer why as a simple consequence of what science is
Science can answer "why" a ball falls to the ground when I throw it (and the how), though I suspect you were trying to make another point:-)
Which "why" questions, which are sensible, are you concerned with?
This just shows how you've misunderstood what a why question is. "Why?" the ball fell to the ground is not "Gravity", but "Because you threw it", which leads to "Why did you throw it?", which science cannot really answer. Gravity is the answer to "How?", but "Why" questions are ones of intent and purpose. The "Why?" of the universe is "Why are we here? What purpose do our lives have?" This is seeking after the mind of the creator of the universe, and beyond the ability of science to answer. The only possible answer can come from the creator revealing it to us, which is what religions claim to be.
The problem with science and God is that science cannot test something it cannot measure or repeat. Since any intervention God may make will, by definition appear as an uncaused event, scientists will cite experimental error, attempt to repeat the circumstances and fail, then declare the intervention never occurred. The scientific method mitigates against recognising interventions. God is not a lab rat that can be run through a maze to get a treat, so a scientific investigation must end in a misattribution of an effect to a cause, or else an argument from incredulity which discards the event as an error or a lie. Or else, God, if He exist, is also master of Chaos theory. If a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, how small an intervention must God make to answer a prayer? There is no necessary contradiction here.
No, this is good news for the Christian on the Genesis front. The Bible says "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground", and if you consider this passage as allegory or simplification for the benefit of a Bronze age people (as most major denominations do), then what more perfect way of describing DNA forming in the dust of space.
It's not like this wasn't obvious off the bat with iTunes and iPod. That's why I never bought one.
I rent my music from napster for a monthly fee, and I can use it with any device capable of playing DRMd WMAs. I've had Creative, iRiver, and now Sony dedicated devices, not to mention a bunch of mobile phones which can use them too.
Not true. WinSXS makes heavy use of hard links, so a great many of the entries point to the same file, and many of those files actually exist in windows\system32. When explorer tries to add up the size of the folder it follows all these links and counts the files several times.
Well, your customers may be looking for that "make it look and act like XP" button, but some of ours have already installed our software on the Win 7 RC, and are asking when they can get official support for it. We don't even officially support Vista yet, we've never a shipped a system with Vista on, and no-one ever seriously asked us to provide a system with Vista on.
Many people believe that anything that does not satisfy Occam's Razor can be excluded absolutely. I apologise if you are not one of them. By the way, I like your sig insomuch as it reminds me about something someone says about regular expressions.
Well, I don't understand Americans. They claim "the worlds greatest democracy", but at the same time do not trust their elected officials and government. They then, with a straight face and raised fist, attempt to impose this corrupt government model onto other nations. Either you've got corrupt government, in which case your democracy isn't working, or else you got good government, so trust them to work for you and get you decent healthcare for everyone, at a reasonable price. An NHS model would save you ~50% of your current healthcare costs, give universal coverage, stress free treatment, better outcomes, more preventative treatment, more efficient distribution of limited resources and reduced unnecessary treatment. But Oh No! It's SOCIALIST!! They've bought into the "red terror" FUD so deeply that they won't do something that is blatantly in their best interests, with no logical argument against it. We Brits may have a few slight issues with some of our institutions, but at least we're not gullible or driven more by ideology than pragmatism.
This is the "qualified immunity" defence. You can report an accusation made in court (which is a protected case. It is not possible to accuse someone of defamation for something they say in a court of law. They may however be guilty of perjury), as long as the report is accurate and fair, but you have to careful when commenting on such an accusation. For example you must not imply that the accusation is either true or false, or draw any conclusion from the accusation.
I think the fact that something is true may not enough if you could not be justified in making it public knowledge. For example, breach of trust or privacy. If I discovered that you and your S.O. were into hardcore BDSM, and I printed it in salacious detail in a gossip rag (with pictures) I suspect I would have defamed you even if it is true because I had no business making it public for profit.
As I understand it these PC are technically sold with a Vista licence, which is then downgraded to XP. I don't know whether that's enough to cover them, but I'm sure the MS lawyers are betting on it.
Have actually created a limited user account (as opposed to an administrator one) on XP?
I'm sorry, I simply do not believe you can kill the graphics driver in XP as a limited user. Maybe kill the user mode control panel bit, but not the driver or you'd have a blank screen.
Windows 7 is now basically, in contrast to lies, lies and even more lies, except for the kernel; Windows 3.x+95+98+2000+XP+Vista = Windows 7. It's rediculous and unbelievable, yet still very true... Which is the reason why some very, very old Windows apps (like win98) can still run on Windows 7. They keep expanding and expanding on what they have and almost nothing gets rewritten, which is why each version of Windows is getting slower and slower.
The API is extended, and is constantly getting larger, and this is a good thing (although it does make for a complex and inconsistent API), because backwards compatibility is vital, and key to the reason why Windows will keep beating linux and Mac on the desktop. You should read Raymond Chen for some of the crazy stuff Microsoft have added over the years to maintain compatibility for apps which break the rules. Did you know there is a special memory allocation mode just for Sim City because it expects freed memory to still be accessible for some time, as it was in some early version of windows? Word 2.0 still runs, unmodified, on Vista! Businesses and users appreciate this. BUT this is not why it has got slower. Adding API's does not really slow anything down. Adding feature does. It has got slower because people expect an OS to do more, and to be more secure. The more that the OS does, the more it has to mode switch between kernel and user mode, which is very slow. These days the hard disk is a huge bottleneck because as the OS has tried to do more, the available data from the hard disk has not been able to keep up.
Of course they can't make raw CPU calculations faster! This is a OS, not a hardware upgrade! The improved responsiveness of the OS is about the only performance measure that actually tests what the OS does. Third party applications simply don't make use of OS code enough to provide useful information about OS performance. The only useful measure involving third party applications and the OS is launch time. Anecdotally, I am running XP pro on my work machine (quad core) and my windows 7 laptop is much more responsive machine, even with just 2, slower cores. Word, excel, visual studio all start faster on the windows 7 laptop than on the win XP desktop
Clearly I know nothing about computers. I've only been writing software professionally on windows for 10 years, and VAX/VMS, Alpha/VMS and PDP11 before that, and fortran on DEC UNIX at university before that.
You cannot terminate the XP graphics driver as a limited user (You may be able to crash it, and that may be a genuine security bug, but that's a different matter). Get a copy of VMware and try it, like I have. You cannot uninstall it or update it or anything as a limited user. XP home lacks some of the more advanced access control features, so I wonder if this is what you're thinking of, but XP Pro is much more secure.
On ALL operating systems device I know of device drivers MUST run (at least in part) in the Kernel in order to access hardware. Even in Vista only part of the graphics drivers run in user mode. There is still a core driver which runs in kernel mode, just as there is for your web cam and everything else. In Linux these drivers usually have to be compiled as kernel modules.
Do I know how Windows truly works within? Well, I've not read the source code, but I have read Mark Russinovich's excellent Windows Internals book, and Pravat's Advanced Widows Debugging (awesome when you have device driver bugs to fix).
The question is, do YOU know anything about windows? You keep talking about ROOT, but Windows doesn't have an exact analogue to the ROOT user. You say MS can't speed windows up, but that's precisely what they've done with Windows 7. In many cases it's faster even than XP on the same hardware, and it scales much better to high end enterprise machines thanks to finer grained locking in the task scheduler and memory subsystems. There are major improvements to the GDI subsystem which should mean that an app stuck (or just going slow) in some paint code will no longer hang up all the other apps trying to paint to the screen.
What are you on about? Task Manager runs as the logged on user, not as admin.
Try this. From a limited XP user account check that you cannot access the private data of another user (C:\Documents and Settings\\...)
Do what you suggest (ctrl-alt-del) and get task manager, and then launch explorer. Note that you still not access the other users documents. This shows you are still running as a limited user.
Hmm. What if someone actually cares about security and didn't give you an admin account on XP? So far you've demonstrated a successful hack against your own PC.
Agreed. Unless there is a possibility of a decapitating strike that renders NC3 inoperable the rational thing to do in the case of a missile launch report is wait until the nuclear strike has actually occurred and been confirmed, and the culprits identified.Massive retaliatory strikes in an instant won't stop the inbound and may be mis-targeted. With that procedure in place in order to justify an all out response a terrorist would have to simulate hundreds of missile launches to provoke a premature response.
The most used programming language in the world is VBA in excel. Most of the worlds companies have millions of lines of business critical stuff in spreadsheets that would need porting to something else. That's simply not going to happen, even if it was a completely brain dead decision when it was first made.
IIRC there was a merger of two large insurance companies here in the UK a few years ago, and as soon as they tried to rationalise their systems they got stuck because the process relied on circa 30,000 excel spreadsheets with extensive macros.
Switching to an open system that doesn't completely implement excel vba, with full bug compatibility simply isn't an option, because it's good money after bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm 2-3 pages out of 1500 dedicated to how it happened, and the rest dealing with why. I think the emphasis is clear, which is why the description of it is so vague and clearly not intended to be a literal text. The Jews never understood it to be literal in that way, and it has only really started to be though of like that in the last few hundred years. It's window dressing but to understand the point of it you have to compare it to the other contemporary creation myths. It explicitly denies that the sun and moon are gods, and that the earth was created out of a battle between gods, or that the scary monsters of the deep are anything other than normal parts of the creation of a single God. That's the important stuff, because it's what the Israelites were faced with, and what they needed to know at the time.
Because Jesus rose from the dead. All the historical evidence points to it if you come to the question with an open mind. His disciples almost all died violently proclaiming that fact, and they would have had to know it was a lie if it were not true. People sometimes die for what they believe to be true, but never suffer and die for something they know to be a lie. Besides, if it were not true then wouldn't the Jewish authorities merely produce the body?
This is then supported by the countless miracles performed and lives changed over the last 2000 years, including more known personally to me than I care tell you about. I do find it odd that there is such a paucity of hard evidence when it is so common (and it really is). It seems that those who see a lot of miracles don't even bother to record them as they're so commonplace, and those to whom it has happened don't need to question it and get a mere doctors opinion. I wonder whether God is actually preventing hard undeniable evidence from being gathered because of the effect that would have on us.
If Jesus rose from the dead, then He is who He said he was, The Son of God, and then the rest of the Bible is also true because He testified to it in his teaching. If the Bible is true, then it contains the answers to the big questions of life.
But that would miss the point of the story in Genesis 1-3, which is not to explain how we got here, but to declare that we are creations of a loving God, who created us to love Him, and to be loved by Him, but that we turn our backs on Him because of our jealousy of Him and our pride. The rest of the story, about how it happened is largely window dressing, and not what we really need to know about.
No, you've still got it wrong.
All that sciency stuff is answering "how is it that this ball is flying through the air?", and it does not ultimately lead to a conclusion, because the questions of "why are the laws of physics what they are?" are fundamentally unanswerable. You may have an answer you can believe in, but it doesn't actually answer the question.
You're also quite wrong about a God who can use quantum uncertainty to control the universe. The ability to predict and control macro and cosmological scale events from the quantum level is awesome in the extreme. A god who relies merely on overt displays of power is crude and weak by comparison. As the "god" entity in the futurama episode "godfellas" says "when you have done everything right, it looks like you have done nothing at all"
I don't see why an anomaly is necessarily evidence in favour of this deity of yours, or even of the supernatural (nebulous as that concept is).
An anomaly is not evidence in favour per se, but all direct interventions (bar some unambiguous second coming type event) would appear to be anomalous, pretty much by definition. In other words, all miracles are anomalies at some level from the quantum to the macro, but not all apparent anomalies are necessarily miracles. Having said that, I'd love to know what kind of anomaly can make someone's cataract go from opaque to transparent in moments, as a good friend of mine saw happen in the summer as he prayed for a woman.
religion answers why
How does religion answer the "why"?
science can never answer why as a simple consequence of what science is
Science can answer "why" a ball falls to the ground when I throw it (and the how), though I suspect you were trying to make another point :-)
Which "why" questions, which are sensible, are you concerned with?
This just shows how you've misunderstood what a why question is. "Why?" the ball fell to the ground is not "Gravity", but "Because you threw it", which leads to "Why did you throw it?", which science cannot really answer. Gravity is the answer to "How?", but "Why" questions are ones of intent and purpose. The "Why?" of the universe is "Why are we here? What purpose do our lives have?" This is seeking after the mind of the creator of the universe, and beyond the ability of science to answer. The only possible answer can come from the creator revealing it to us, which is what religions claim to be.
The problem with science and God is that science cannot test something it cannot measure or repeat. Since any intervention God may make will, by definition appear as an uncaused event, scientists will cite experimental error, attempt to repeat the circumstances and fail, then declare the intervention never occurred. The scientific method mitigates against recognising interventions. God is not a lab rat that can be run through a maze to get a treat, so a scientific investigation must end in a misattribution of an effect to a cause, or else an argument from incredulity which discards the event as an error or a lie. Or else, God, if He exist, is also master of Chaos theory. If a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, how small an intervention must God make to answer a prayer? There is no necessary contradiction here.
No, this is good news for the Christian on the Genesis front. The Bible says "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground", and if you consider this passage as allegory or simplification for the benefit of a Bronze age people (as most major denominations do), then what more perfect way of describing DNA forming in the dust of space.
I wish I had some mod points right now. Excellent stuff.
It's not like this wasn't obvious off the bat with iTunes and iPod. That's why I never bought one.
I rent my music from napster for a monthly fee, and I can use it with any device capable of playing DRMd WMAs. I've had Creative, iRiver, and now Sony dedicated devices, not to mention a bunch of mobile phones which can use them too.
Not true. WinSXS makes heavy use of hard links, so a great many of the entries point to the same file, and many of those files actually exist in windows\system32. When explorer tries to add up the size of the folder it follows all these links and counts the files several times.
Well, your customers may be looking for that "make it look and act like XP" button, but some of ours have already installed our software on the Win 7 RC, and are asking when they can get official support for it. We don't even officially support Vista yet, we've never a shipped a system with Vista on, and no-one ever seriously asked us to provide a system with Vista on.
Many people believe that anything that does not satisfy Occam's Razor can be excluded absolutely. I apologise if you are not one of them. By the way, I like your sig insomuch as it reminds me about something someone says about regular expressions.
Well, I don't understand Americans. They claim "the worlds greatest democracy", but at the same time do not trust their elected officials and government. They then, with a straight face and raised fist, attempt to impose this corrupt government model onto other nations. Either you've got corrupt government, in which case your democracy isn't working, or else you got good government, so trust them to work for you and get you decent healthcare for everyone, at a reasonable price. An NHS model would save you ~50% of your current healthcare costs, give universal coverage, stress free treatment, better outcomes, more preventative treatment, more efficient distribution of limited resources and reduced unnecessary treatment. But Oh No! It's SOCIALIST!! They've bought into the "red terror" FUD so deeply that they won't do something that is blatantly in their best interests, with no logical argument against it. We Brits may have a few slight issues with some of our institutions, but at least we're not gullible or driven more by ideology than pragmatism.
repeat after me. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. See "Black Swan".
This is the "qualified immunity" defence. You can report an accusation made in court (which is a protected case. It is not possible to accuse someone of defamation for something they say in a court of law. They may however be guilty of perjury), as long as the report is accurate and fair, but you have to careful when commenting on such an accusation. For example you must not imply that the accusation is either true or false, or draw any conclusion from the accusation.
I think the fact that something is true may not enough if you could not be justified in making it public knowledge. For example, breach of trust or privacy. If I discovered that you and your S.O. were into hardcore BDSM, and I printed it in salacious detail in a gossip rag (with pictures) I suspect I would have defamed you even if it is true because I had no business making it public for profit.
It is not actually required that it satisfies Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor is a rule of thumb, not of physics.
As I understand it these PC are technically sold with a Vista licence, which is then downgraded to XP. I don't know whether that's enough to cover them, but I'm sure the MS lawyers are betting on it.
Have actually created a limited user account (as opposed to an administrator one) on XP?
I'm sorry, I simply do not believe you can kill the graphics driver in XP as a limited user. Maybe kill the user mode control panel bit, but not the driver or you'd have a blank screen.
Windows 7 is now basically, in contrast to lies, lies and even more lies, except for the kernel; Windows 3.x+95+98+2000+XP+Vista = Windows 7. It's rediculous and unbelievable, yet still very true... Which is the reason why some very, very old Windows apps (like win98) can still run on Windows 7. They keep expanding and expanding on what they have and almost nothing gets rewritten, which is why each version of Windows is getting slower and slower.
The API is extended, and is constantly getting larger, and this is a good thing (although it does make for a complex and inconsistent API), because backwards compatibility is vital, and key to the reason why Windows will keep beating linux and Mac on the desktop. You should read Raymond Chen for some of the crazy stuff Microsoft have added over the years to maintain compatibility for apps which break the rules. Did you know there is a special memory allocation mode just for Sim City because it expects freed memory to still be accessible for some time, as it was in some early version of windows? Word 2.0 still runs, unmodified, on Vista! Businesses and users appreciate this. BUT this is not why it has got slower. Adding API's does not really slow anything down. Adding feature does. It has got slower because people expect an OS to do more, and to be more secure. The more that the OS does, the more it has to mode switch between kernel and user mode, which is very slow. These days the hard disk is a huge bottleneck because as the OS has tried to do more, the available data from the hard disk has not been able to keep up.
Of course they can't make raw CPU calculations faster! This is a OS, not a hardware upgrade!
The improved responsiveness of the OS is about the only performance measure that actually tests what the OS does. Third party applications simply don't make use of OS code enough to provide useful information about OS performance. The only useful measure involving third party applications and the OS is launch time.
Anecdotally, I am running XP pro on my work machine (quad core) and my windows 7 laptop is much more responsive machine, even with just 2, slower cores.
Word, excel, visual studio all start faster on the windows 7 laptop than on the win XP desktop
Clearly I know nothing about computers. I've only been writing software professionally on windows for 10 years, and VAX/VMS, Alpha/VMS and PDP11 before that, and fortran on DEC UNIX at university before that.
You cannot terminate the XP graphics driver as a limited user (You may be able to crash it, and that may be a genuine security bug, but that's a different matter). Get a copy of VMware and try it, like I have. You cannot uninstall it or update it or anything as a limited user. XP home lacks some of the more advanced access control features, so I wonder if this is what you're thinking of, but XP Pro is much more secure.
On ALL operating systems device I know of device drivers MUST run (at least in part) in the Kernel in order to access hardware. Even in Vista only part of the graphics drivers run in user mode. There is still a core driver which runs in kernel mode, just as there is for your web cam and everything else. In Linux these drivers usually have to be compiled as kernel modules.
Do I know how Windows truly works within? Well, I've not read the source code, but I have read Mark Russinovich's excellent Windows Internals book, and Pravat's Advanced Widows Debugging (awesome when you have device driver bugs to fix).
The question is, do YOU know anything about windows? You keep talking about ROOT, but Windows doesn't have an exact analogue to the ROOT user. You say MS can't speed windows up, but that's precisely what they've done with Windows 7. In many cases it's faster even than XP on the same hardware, and it scales much better to high end enterprise machines thanks to finer grained locking in the task scheduler and memory subsystems. There are major improvements to the GDI subsystem which should mean that an app stuck (or just going slow) in some paint code will no longer hang up all the other apps trying to paint to the screen.
What are you on about? Task Manager runs as the logged on user, not as admin.
Try this. From a limited XP user account check that you cannot access the private data of another user (C:\Documents and Settings\\...)
Do what you suggest (ctrl-alt-del) and get task manager, and then launch explorer. Note that you still not access the other users documents. This shows you are still running as a limited user.
Hmm. What if someone actually cares about security and didn't give you an admin account on XP? So far you've demonstrated a successful hack against your own PC.
*golf clap*
Agreed. Unless there is a possibility of a decapitating strike that renders NC3 inoperable the rational thing to do in the case of a missile launch report is wait until the nuclear strike has actually occurred and been confirmed, and the culprits identified.Massive retaliatory strikes in an instant won't stop the inbound and may be mis-targeted. With that procedure in place in order to justify an all out response a terrorist would have to simulate hundreds of missile launches to provoke a premature response.
and low altitude.
Maybe not every day, but 3851 in the past month.
The most used programming language in the world is VBA in excel. Most of the worlds companies have millions of lines of business critical stuff in spreadsheets that would need porting to something else. That's simply not going to happen, even if it was a completely brain dead decision when it was first made.
IIRC there was a merger of two large insurance companies here in the UK a few years ago, and as soon as they tried to rationalise their systems they got stuck because the process relied on circa 30,000 excel spreadsheets with extensive macros.
Switching to an open system that doesn't completely implement excel vba, with full bug compatibility simply isn't an option, because it's good money after bad.