It was done by the Jehovah's Witnesses in order to provide "scriptural" support for some of their doctrinal positions--e.g. claiming that Jesus was not divine and that the cross was a stake, not a cross. The problem is that the people who did the translating are anonymous, and so you can't tell whether they had any relevant training (or skill!) in the languages. Nor, since this translation was published by a rather tendentious sect, can it be thought that the translators were free to disagree with the doctrines of that sect in their translation. For example, in John 1:1 they translate "the word was 'A' god", which is just plain wrong. It is also just plain wrong to translate yrios as "Jehovah." And, let it be said, I often find myself in sympathy with some Watchtower positions--but not this translation!
It happened all the times with railroads... there were multiple lines built between the same cities. What killed telephone competition was that Bell refused to interoperate with competitors in any market where they were established, and bought competitors in markets where they werent' and wanted to be. So... it's a "natural monopoly", but more for reasons of anti-competitive behavior than because of anything intrinsic to the business.
The New English Translation (The "NET" Bible) has tried to do this to some degree. And I think succeeded to a remarkable degree, especially given the backgrounds of the translators. While it doesn't have click-through translations on a word-by-word basis (which wouldn't be all that useful unless you're trained in Biblical languages) it does have exhaustive translator's notes explaining many of the interpretive decisions made. It's actually one of my favorite translations.
Sounds great to me. Of course, I go to the doctor for one reason and one reason only: he has a prescription pad. I find that I'm usually better informed than he is about what's actually ailing me--something to do with him getting most of his continuing education courtesy of drug reps. Case in point... I'm a diabetic. My treatment? Low-carb diet and Metformin. His treatment? Low-fat diet and Metformin, then Metformin and Byetta, then I quit listening to him and went on a low-carb diet. Guess which one worked?
Another case in point... chronic asthma. His treatment? Steroids, inhalers, etc. etc. My treatment? Prilosec, as I thought it was being caused by Gastric Reflux (at the time a prescription med.) Guess which one worked?
In this day of Google, it's amazing how much a smart, critical thinker can find out about their own health. I just wish the law would recognize that with drugs that don't have high abuse potential, maybe I have the right to buy whatever I think would help me. Or maybe even with drugs that do have abuse potential.
That "27K ratings" sort of changes things, don't you think? Certainly, a "rating" sounds more rigorous than traditional, Darwinian, "useful mutations live longer/reproduce more".
You're absolutely right. IF companies could identify, employ, and retain alpha-level coders for their entire development force. They can't. The reality is that unless you're one of the alpha geeks (say in the 90th percentile or better) dynamic languages are better than C, C++, etc. This may change though as we see massive deployments of applications at company expense and data center power costs become a huge issue. For example, Google finds it worthwhile to retain really brilliant developers and seems to be using more C/C++ as times goes on (although they still use plenty of Python.) Personally, I think *some* functional language is going to be the next big thing--and those who can make useful web apps in such a language will be in huge demand.
The right wingers will surely use this as "proof" that global warming is wrong. Yet... if we started using renewable energy, it would still solve the problem.
The Eastern Orthodox chuch has always been based around more-or-less equal "patriarchs", none of whom are called "pope." The Patriarch of Constantinople is regarded as first-among-equals, but that's it. He's not a pope.
Speaking as a trained New Testament scholar... wow. Just... wow. That is quite possibly the scariest charter for a Biblical translation I've ever encountered, and I include many oddities in the mix, like the New World Translation and Reformation minefields the Geneva Bible (it's a hobby of mine.) There's no awareness whatsoever that the Bible might not support every element of their agenda, and they're going to cut lose people with no knowledge of the original languages to use a Strong's concordance and the King James in order to create their "translation." Wow.
This is almost a formula for how not to translate the Bible.
Disclaimer: I have a Ph.D. in New Testament, so I know of what I speak. While the Greek Text itself is not (technically) copyrighted in certain forms, the specific arrangement of the Greek Text known as the "UBS4" that is the basis of all modern translations IS copyrighted. And the copyright is enforced. That is why I said "critical edition" or something along those lines in my original post.
Something that I rarely hear pointed out is that, with copyright as we know it today, Christianity would have died "in the womb." Imagine if the various churches who were the recipients of Paul's letters were unable to make copies and forward them to other churches. Imagine if the Bible were originally copyrighted (the way that the modern critical texts are! I still don't really get that one--how a 2000 year-old text can be coyrighted.) Copyright is an enemy of the Christian faith, and I'm disappointed in the Vatican--of course, here I am a Baptist whose theological 40% evangelical, 30% Anbaptist, and 30% Eastern Orthodox, so maybe that's not surprising.
Just a few questions for the tired responses below.
By what arbitrary criteria do you decide that a trip down the birth canal turns a "fetus" into a "baby"? Or the lack of same makes a "baby" (and human life) into "fetus" and lump of tissue.
By some unexplained circumstances, a baby turns up, strapped in a car seat in the back of my car. I'm a 9-month drive from the nearest adoption agency, and have or could get adequate formula to care for it. What is my moral obligation to this unasked-for child in my SUV?
Same circumstances, but I engaged in a behavior that I knew would likely result in baby landing in back of my car. Then what's my obligation?
Same results, but a criminal kidnapped a baby and put him in the back of my car. What is my obligation?
If you say anything to the last three but, "take care of the baby until you can turn it over to someone else who can," then you know what, I'm calling it like it is: you're wrong, and it's sinful, and you need to repent. (And spare me the contrived cases... the woman who truly doesn't have the food to carry the baby to term, rape, incest, etc., because they (a) don't represent the majority of abortions and (b) the point is that any decent person will care for a child or die trying.) As for the "judgmental" thing--Jesus wasn't afraid to call it like it was, and he wasn't afraid to call for people to stop sinning. See for example Jn 8:9--after one of the most beloved stories of Jesus' "non-judgmental" nature, Jesus goes on to say "go and sin no more."
As for the first question, I truly question whether "human" means anything if we start to draw such an arbitrary line as to when one is human and when one is not.
What changed my opinion forever when it came to abortion was fatherhood, and realizing that my children had recognizable personalities, preferences, and everything else from birth and even in the womb.
Unfortunately, it took the 13th amendment to get rid of slavery. And, although IANAL, my understanding is that it may very well take a constitutional amendment to limit intellectual property as well. The problem is that copyright is an "enumerated power", granted to Congress--and so the courts tend to give Congress a lot of leeway. Furthermore, as I understand it it's a principle of common law that once government has given you something they can't arbitrarily take it back.
The alternative is a "copyright tax", which would be constitutional, and would penalize copyright excesses, and I actually think that's a great idea. But before anything can happen there's got to be a change in "hearts and minds." Right now, the vast majority of lawmakers see traditional, expansive copyright as a good thing--and so it was, for the most part, until the Internet came along and radically lowered costs of distribution. (In fact, I'll probably get pilloried for this, but I'm not sure slavery was as bad a thing until it got combined with global trade--at the very least, I think it's fair to say that it was a contained evil. You didn't see the sort of mass, race-based, slavery that you saw in the American South until it was fueled by King Cotton.) The point I'm trying to get at, without enough time to develop it properly, is that we're in a lag where law hasn't caught up with economics or technology.
This idea really deserves a better development than I'm giving it here.. because it's important. But hopefully someone can point to someone who has done a better job or read between the lines and understand what I'm getting at.
And the problem with all "pro-choice" organizations and individuals is that they only care about the adults. They never consider that the baby, could it speak, might rather live even if it's car seat wouldn't be loaded in an SUV and mom wouldn't get to have the perfect, 2.4 kid household with the perfect husband and the perfect career. Instead, they declare on rather spurious grounds that the baby isn't a baby and say, "just excise it!" And many of them have the audacity to call themselves Christian, or even Catholic.
I certainly agree that many pro-lifers are self-righteous blowhards. But not all of them are. You might want to do a bit more looking if that's what you think.
I never claimed that the people in gitmo were there legitimately, or should have been there. I said "it's got its problems"--in fact, I think it's a shock and a horror. But that's not the point I was making. Stop with the red herrings already.
This nonsense gets modded "Insightful"? The only people transported from US territory to Gitmo have been a couple of bonafide Al Quaeda operatives who were actually involved in the 9-11 conspirace, so far as I know. Everyone else are people who were picked up on foreign territory making war against U.S. forces--i.e. prisoners of war. Gitmo has got its problems, but unless I'm completely misinformed, transporting people from U.S. soil or even U.S. entry points there is not one of them. If this had been the U.S., and she had been arrested, she would have had full due process in the U.S. legal system and U.S. prisons.
And perhaps the most important revelation to come from my (for I am the whatever-great-grandparent-poster) looking up Tidal Locking on my iPhone? The realization that having an app like Wikipanion in your pocket Changes Things. And given that I work as a Network & Systems Architect for a communications company, and am on two advisory boards, and the fact that I was able to find an article on Tidal Locking has actually changed some recommendations I have made. This has in turn affected our (more than 1 million) customers pretty substantially. The information I looked up was entirely unrelated to my job. The fact that I was able to look it up and slake my curiosity was not unrelated.
I wonder if one could express these sorts of relationships mathematically... hmm... if you could, that'd probably be worth a Fields Medal. And now I've gone from Tidal Locking to cell phones to epistemology to information theory to math to an idea that will surely win me a Fields Medal. Thank you Slashdot!
For years I told people, "the information revolution has not yet begun." About six months ago, while eating breakfast at a little, podunk diner in a town of around 500 people, I got curious about what causes Tidal Locking. So, without thinking about it, I whipped out my iPhone and looked it up using Wikipanion.
Then, I realized what I was doing. I, as someone who knows basically nothing about orbital mechanics, was sitting in a little diner on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and had access to more information than I could possibly use on an obscure, orbital-mechanical phenomenon. All on a whim. That's when I decided that "the information revolution has begun." It's not well-begun, it's not finished, it's not even fully taken shape yet. But it's begun.
Part of the problem here is that the language of "right" doesn't really capture what we ought to be capturing here. Webster's defines a right as "something to which one has a just claim." And that is the right way to look at things like employment discrimination, etc.
But when we start talking about universal access to services like broadband, healthcare, electric, I think it's much better to speak of it in terms of what's best for society. Simply put, our society as a whole is better off with a healthy work-force. Businesses will have more predictable costs, and the playing field between large and small companies, as well as government, will be leveled substantially, promoting innovation. Likewise, it promotes economic development for everyone to have electricity, not to mention public health--it's no accident that regular bathing became much more popular once everyone had a water heater. And, in a democracy, isn't the publics access to information equally vital? Isn't the ability for all members of society to communicate on a somewhat equal footing a useful social function? In other words, let's not talk about this as a moral question, but as a pragmatic one.
High speed Internet is infrastructure. Maybe it's not a "right". But if you don't have it available to all of our population and all of your competitors do, then watch out!
In Friday, Heinlein made the point that the problem is not an energy shortage, but a shortage of really good, efficient, cheap ways to store and transport energy. He invented a technology called "Shipstones" to overcome this--which were essentially a sort of supercharged storage battery. This in turn enabled a world where fossil fuel use was all but unknown. (This was one of the few Heinlein books to address anything resembling environmental issues--and while I think some elements of his "solution" are far-fetched, such as a return to horses and animal power except for "Authorized Power Vehicles"--it's interesting to see how he dealt with it.)
There is a point to be made here. A really good battery technology is potentially a world changer. With such technology, we could get back to using oil for plastics and medicinal uses, just like the Romans did.:)
Well, for what it's worth I'm currently a 37-year-old single dad and looking... and I more or less look for "warmish" or even "coolish", but smart. I'll admit that I'm just not attracted to really unattractive women (200 lbs. overweight,, 20 years older than me, that sort of thing), but I can fall in love with most any woman if she can hang in an intellectual conversation for more than 30 seconds before going, "huh?" I can even deal with what would be major flaws if the girls is smart--right now my leading prospect is at least 75 lbs. overweight, but that's fine.
Slashdot Mirror
It was done by the Jehovah's Witnesses in order to provide "scriptural" support for some of their doctrinal positions--e.g. claiming that Jesus was not divine and that the cross was a stake, not a cross. The problem is that the people who did the translating are anonymous, and so you can't tell whether they had any relevant training (or skill!) in the languages. Nor, since this translation was published by a rather tendentious sect, can it be thought that the translators were free to disagree with the doctrines of that sect in their translation. For example, in John 1:1 they translate "the word was 'A' god", which is just plain wrong. It is also just plain wrong to translate yrios as "Jehovah." And, let it be said, I often find myself in sympathy with some Watchtower positions--but not this translation!
It happened all the times with railroads... there were multiple lines built between the same cities. What killed telephone competition was that Bell refused to interoperate with competitors in any market where they were established, and bought competitors in markets where they werent' and wanted to be. So... it's a "natural monopoly", but more for reasons of anti-competitive behavior than because of anything intrinsic to the business.
The New English Translation (The "NET" Bible) has tried to do this to some degree. And I think succeeded to a remarkable degree, especially given the backgrounds of the translators. While it doesn't have click-through translations on a word-by-word basis (which wouldn't be all that useful unless you're trained in Biblical languages) it does have exhaustive translator's notes explaining many of the interpretive decisions made. It's actually one of my favorite translations.
Sounds great to me. Of course, I go to the doctor for one reason and one reason only: he has a prescription pad. I find that I'm usually better informed than he is about what's actually ailing me--something to do with him getting most of his continuing education courtesy of drug reps. Case in point... I'm a diabetic. My treatment? Low-carb diet and Metformin. His treatment? Low-fat diet and Metformin, then Metformin and Byetta, then I quit listening to him and went on a low-carb diet. Guess which one worked?
Another case in point... chronic asthma. His treatment? Steroids, inhalers, etc. etc. My treatment? Prilosec, as I thought it was being caused by Gastric Reflux (at the time a prescription med.) Guess which one worked?
In this day of Google, it's amazing how much a smart, critical thinker can find out about their own health. I just wish the law would recognize that with drugs that don't have high abuse potential, maybe I have the right to buy whatever I think would help me. Or maybe even with drugs that do have abuse potential.
That "27K ratings" sort of changes things, don't you think? Certainly, a "rating" sounds more rigorous than traditional, Darwinian, "useful mutations live longer/reproduce more".
You're absolutely right. IF companies could identify, employ, and retain alpha-level coders for their entire development force. They can't. The reality is that unless you're one of the alpha geeks (say in the 90th percentile or better) dynamic languages are better than C, C++, etc. This may change though as we see massive deployments of applications at company expense and data center power costs become a huge issue. For example, Google finds it worthwhile to retain really brilliant developers and seems to be using more C/C++ as times goes on (although they still use plenty of Python.) Personally, I think *some* functional language is going to be the next big thing--and those who can make useful web apps in such a language will be in huge demand.
Very arguably, I'd say. The purpose of the Book Curse was to keep people from stealing the book, not from copying it.
The right wingers will surely use this as "proof" that global warming is wrong. Yet... if we started using renewable energy, it would still solve the problem.
The Eastern Orthodox chuch has always been based around more-or-less equal "patriarchs", none of whom are called "pope." The Patriarch of Constantinople is regarded as first-among-equals, but that's it. He's not a pope.
Speaking as a trained New Testament scholar... wow. Just ... wow. That is quite possibly the scariest charter for a Biblical translation I've ever encountered, and I include many oddities in the mix, like the New World Translation and Reformation minefields the Geneva Bible (it's a hobby of mine.) There's no awareness whatsoever that the Bible might not support every element of their agenda, and they're going to cut lose people with no knowledge of the original languages to use a Strong's concordance and the King James in order to create their "translation." Wow.
This is almost a formula for how not to translate the Bible.
I wasn't referring to translations. I was referring to the particular, critical arrangement of the Greek Text known as the "UBS4."
Disclaimer: I have a Ph.D. in New Testament, so I know of what I speak. While the Greek Text itself is not (technically) copyrighted in certain forms, the specific arrangement of the Greek Text known as the "UBS4" that is the basis of all modern translations IS copyrighted. And the copyright is enforced. That is why I said "critical edition" or something along those lines in my original post.
Something that I rarely hear pointed out is that, with copyright as we know it today, Christianity would have died "in the womb." Imagine if the various churches who were the recipients of Paul's letters were unable to make copies and forward them to other churches. Imagine if the Bible were originally copyrighted (the way that the modern critical texts are! I still don't really get that one--how a 2000 year-old text can be coyrighted.) Copyright is an enemy of the Christian faith, and I'm disappointed in the Vatican--of course, here I am a Baptist whose theological 40% evangelical, 30% Anbaptist, and 30% Eastern Orthodox, so maybe that's not surprising.
If you say anything to the last three but, "take care of the baby until you can turn it over to someone else who can," then you know what, I'm calling it like it is: you're wrong, and it's sinful, and you need to repent. (And spare me the contrived cases ... the woman who truly doesn't have the food to carry the baby to term, rape, incest, etc., because they (a) don't represent the majority of abortions and (b) the point is that any decent person will care for a child or die trying.) As for the "judgmental" thing--Jesus wasn't afraid to call it like it was, and he wasn't afraid to call for people to stop sinning. See for example Jn 8:9--after one of the most beloved stories of Jesus' "non-judgmental" nature, Jesus goes on to say "go and sin no more."
As for the first question, I truly question whether "human" means anything if we start to draw such an arbitrary line as to when one is human and when one is not.
What changed my opinion forever when it came to abortion was fatherhood, and realizing that my children had recognizable personalities, preferences, and everything else from birth and even in the womb.
Unfortunately, it took the 13th amendment to get rid of slavery. And, although IANAL, my understanding is that it may very well take a constitutional amendment to limit intellectual property as well. The problem is that copyright is an "enumerated power", granted to Congress--and so the courts tend to give Congress a lot of leeway. Furthermore, as I understand it it's a principle of common law that once government has given you something they can't arbitrarily take it back.
The alternative is a "copyright tax", which would be constitutional, and would penalize copyright excesses, and I actually think that's a great idea. But before anything can happen there's got to be a change in "hearts and minds." Right now, the vast majority of lawmakers see traditional, expansive copyright as a good thing--and so it was, for the most part, until the Internet came along and radically lowered costs of distribution. (In fact, I'll probably get pilloried for this, but I'm not sure slavery was as bad a thing until it got combined with global trade--at the very least, I think it's fair to say that it was a contained evil. You didn't see the sort of mass, race-based, slavery that you saw in the American South until it was fueled by King Cotton.) The point I'm trying to get at, without enough time to develop it properly, is that we're in a lag where law hasn't caught up with economics or technology.
This idea really deserves a better development than I'm giving it here.. because it's important. But hopefully someone can point to someone who has done a better job or read between the lines and understand what I'm getting at.
And the problem with all "pro-choice" organizations and individuals is that they only care about the adults. They never consider that the baby, could it speak, might rather live even if it's car seat wouldn't be loaded in an SUV and mom wouldn't get to have the perfect, 2.4 kid household with the perfect husband and the perfect career. Instead, they declare on rather spurious grounds that the baby isn't a baby and say, "just excise it!" And many of them have the audacity to call themselves Christian, or even Catholic.
I certainly agree that many pro-lifers are self-righteous blowhards. But not all of them are. You might want to do a bit more looking if that's what you think.
I never claimed that the people in gitmo were there legitimately, or should have been there. I said "it's got its problems"--in fact, I think it's a shock and a horror. But that's not the point I was making. Stop with the red herrings already.
This nonsense gets modded "Insightful"? The only people transported from US territory to Gitmo have been a couple of bonafide Al Quaeda operatives who were actually involved in the 9-11 conspirace, so far as I know. Everyone else are people who were picked up on foreign territory making war against U.S. forces--i.e. prisoners of war. Gitmo has got its problems, but unless I'm completely misinformed, transporting people from U.S. soil or even U.S. entry points there is not one of them. If this had been the U.S., and she had been arrested, she would have had full due process in the U.S. legal system and U.S. prisons.
And perhaps the most important revelation to come from my (for I am the whatever-great-grandparent-poster) looking up Tidal Locking on my iPhone? The realization that having an app like Wikipanion in your pocket Changes Things. And given that I work as a Network & Systems Architect for a communications company, and am on two advisory boards, and the fact that I was able to find an article on Tidal Locking has actually changed some recommendations I have made. This has in turn affected our (more than 1 million) customers pretty substantially. The information I looked up was entirely unrelated to my job. The fact that I was able to look it up and slake my curiosity was not unrelated.
I wonder if one could express these sorts of relationships mathematically... hmm... if you could, that'd probably be worth a Fields Medal. And now I've gone from Tidal Locking to cell phones to epistemology to information theory to math to an idea that will surely win me a Fields Medal. Thank you Slashdot!
That should be this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking. That'll teach me to flap my gums without pressing preview.
For years I told people, "the information revolution has not yet begun." About six months ago, while eating breakfast at a little, podunk diner in a town of around 500 people, I got curious about what causes Tidal Locking. So, without thinking about it, I whipped out my iPhone and looked it up using Wikipanion.
Then, I realized what I was doing. I, as someone who knows basically nothing about orbital mechanics, was sitting in a little diner on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and had access to more information than I could possibly use on an obscure, orbital-mechanical phenomenon. All on a whim. That's when I decided that "the information revolution has begun." It's not well-begun, it's not finished, it's not even fully taken shape yet. But it's begun.
Part of the problem here is that the language of "right" doesn't really capture what we ought to be capturing here. Webster's defines a right as "something to which one has a just claim." And that is the right way to look at things like employment discrimination, etc.
But when we start talking about universal access to services like broadband, healthcare, electric, I think it's much better to speak of it in terms of what's best for society. Simply put, our society as a whole is better off with a healthy work-force. Businesses will have more predictable costs, and the playing field between large and small companies, as well as government, will be leveled substantially, promoting innovation. Likewise, it promotes economic development for everyone to have electricity, not to mention public health--it's no accident that regular bathing became much more popular once everyone had a water heater. And, in a democracy, isn't the publics access to information equally vital? Isn't the ability for all members of society to communicate on a somewhat equal footing a useful social function? In other words, let's not talk about this as a moral question, but as a pragmatic one.
High speed Internet is infrastructure. Maybe it's not a "right". But if you don't have it available to all of our population and all of your competitors do, then watch out!
In Friday, Heinlein made the point that the problem is not an energy shortage, but a shortage of really good, efficient, cheap ways to store and transport energy. He invented a technology called "Shipstones" to overcome this--which were essentially a sort of supercharged storage battery. This in turn enabled a world where fossil fuel use was all but unknown. (This was one of the few Heinlein books to address anything resembling environmental issues--and while I think some elements of his "solution" are far-fetched, such as a return to horses and animal power except for "Authorized Power Vehicles"--it's interesting to see how he dealt with it.)
There is a point to be made here. A really good battery technology is potentially a world changer. With such technology, we could get back to using oil for plastics and medicinal uses, just like the Romans did. :)
Well, for what it's worth I'm currently a 37-year-old single dad and looking... and I more or less look for "warmish" or even "coolish", but smart. I'll admit that I'm just not attracted to really unattractive women (200 lbs. overweight,, 20 years older than me, that sort of thing), but I can fall in love with most any woman if she can hang in an intellectual conversation for more than 30 seconds before going, "huh?" I can even deal with what would be major flaws if the girls is smart--right now my leading prospect is at least 75 lbs. overweight, but that's fine.