The cost of the fuel itself is a vanishingly small proportion of the actual cost of launching a rocket. Most of the cost of a launch is tied up in two things: the very expensive hardware that you're throwing away because it's not at all reusable, and the incredibly ponderous administrative and logistical hassles that go into getting a rocket assembled and ready for launch. SpaceX plans to make the Falcon-9 fully reusable eventually, and they already have significantly less administrative overhead than "traditional" launch operations. Whether $300/lb. to orbit is obtainable is, of course, questionable. But I don't think you can say that it's flat impossible, and you certainly can't say it's flat impossible because of fuel costs. That just demonstrates ignorance.
I was referring specifically to the COTS contract when I made reference to milestones. As for the rest... look, it's impressive for a privately funded vehicle to launch at all. Yes, getting to space is hard, but SpaceX is actually doing it, and if you compare their record to the record of the "traditional" space contractors they're doing it very well. So chill out with the relentless negativity.
Just a point of clarification--on reviewing my wording, it appeared that I might have made it sound like I was affiliate with SpaceX. I'm not affiliated with them in any way (I'm a part-time pastor and full-time technology consultant in Virginia.)
Just to clarify, if you RTFA you will find that SpaceX has completed all the milestones so far on time, and they are looking at a 2-4 month schedule slip on future milestones. Now, obviously we'd much rather not have the schedule slip, but in the world of NASA contracting that is like... totally nothing. I have to say that, as a confirmed space nut, SpaceX really impresses me. If they manage to deliver on a third of what they're talking about, they'll completely change the game--and they've done enough truly innovative stuff already that I think they might actually deliver on most of it in the long run.
Imagine a fully reusable launch vehicle, and a mostly reusable orbiter, making access to LEO or GTO cost in the hundreds of dollars per lb., instead of thousands... that's what Elon Musk is talking about in the long run, and I think he just might actually pull it off.
Not at all. What will make them PC liberal douche bags is not knowing the truth, not knowing what really happened, not understanding history. "Political Correctness" is a way of not talking about the reality of how bad things once were by focusing on image instead of reality. It focuses on trivial slights, and ignores how much better things really are now, compared to how they once were.
What you're missing is that this is a deliberate strategy on Microsoft's part that served them well for many, many years. For a long time, Microsoft sought to have the second best product in any given category. Then they would just sit there and wait for the best product to get lazy or stagnant and come in and sweep up the remnants. They did this again and again and again in the late 80's and 90's, and it worked every single time, because eventually the competition would trip up leaving the market open for Microsoft.
Examples?
Microsoft Word => WordPerfect (WordPerfect's failure to release a Window's version.)
Microsoft Excel => Lotus 123! (Again, Windows version)
Internet Explorer => Netscape (Netscape 4. Need I say more?)
Windows => Desqview/GEM/etc.
Windows => Macintosh (the "bad days" of the early 90's, when Macs cost fully 2-3 times as much as a PC and didn't really do THAT MUCH more than a PC.)
Windows NT => Netware (they failed to release a real, full-fledged OS, instead sitting on their file-sharing laurels.)
Windows NT => UNIX (the UNIX market fragmented instead of consolidating, and relied on sales of expensive hardware to make money instead of releasing a good, commodity UNIX that could have stomped NT early on.)
The problem with this strategy is it only works when your competition slacks off. And nowadays Microsoft's competition--i.e. Google and Apple--aren't slacking off. At least Not Yet.
I recently got my kids some Loony Tunes, which had the episode where Elmer Fudd (as a Mounty) catches Bugs and has him in front of a firing squad. For his "wast wequest", Bugs breaks out into "I wish I were in Dixie", with the whole firing squad transforming into "black-face" minstrel singers, a la the old black minstrel shows.
Well, whoever compiled this DVD chose to blur the faces out, presumably for reasons of political correctness.
Now, I have a big problem with this, because it robbed me of a great 'teachable moment' for my kids... a chance to talk about the fact that just fifty years ago that sort of thing was perfectly acceptable and accepted, and why it was wrong. This happens all over the place... all the remnants of a horrible era in American history (slavery and Jim Crow) being gradually swept under the rug. How can we help forgetting when the purveyors of common culture are working so very, very hard to make sure that we forget!?! I mean... my father went to Little Rock Central High School, and graduated a year before they sent the National Guard in, but nowadays we act as if all that stuff is something from the distant past. It's not--and it could come back if we don't watch it like a hawk.
I'm fighting back though... my oldest (11) just finished reading (at my insistence) Uncle Tom's Cabin, and I plan to have him read the Autobiography of Frederick Douglas and watch Schindler's List as well this summer. (He's quite precocious. Most 11 year olds probably wouldn't be ready for this.) Later, we'll read together the works of Martin Luther King and similar writings. I've laid out an education program for my kids in my mind, to make sure that they at least know what a horrible thing racism (and it's cousins, racist nationalism, fascism, and National Socialism) is.
If only the schools would do the same, instead of white-washing everything and reducing the desperate fight of oppressed peoples against brutal oppression to a few names and dates, boring and bloodless.
If, in a billion years, we can't change the gravitational constant of the universe by extending the warp field around the rogue planet and tow it back to its proper orbit, then we're sunk anyway. Either that or just call "Q"!
I'm sure it cost apple a considerable amount to develop and have a manufacturing line for the second version of the iPhone, and I'm willing to bet that the vast bulk of iPhones sold will be the 16gb model. Therefore, they have to amortize the development costs over a smaller market for the larger memory size. It's not really about the cost of the memory, it's about the additional R&D and the cost of having a second assembly line.
A Quarter Century of Unix, the Book
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 4, Informative
For those who haven't read it, this book is a GREAT read:
A quarter Century of Unix by Peter H Salus
Highly recommended, and once you've read it you'll suddenly understand why a lot of stuff is the way it is. Hat's off to the Best. Operating System. Ever.
One of the things that drove the revolution in understanding of Koine Greek (as used in the New Testament) over the last 200 years or so was the discovery of a massive cache of routine commercial transactions in Egypt, written on Papyrus. So, your $15.19 @ Lulu.com might be more relevant than you realize.
Hmm... I'm not sure what sort of churches you might be dealing with, but as others have posted the sort of system I described is pretty ubiquitous. You might want to dig a little harder.
So... you're complaining that you can't get to the "secret archives" of the Horrible, Evil Vatican--by which you mean details of the Vaticans business operations since 1922--when you have by your own admission only skimmed the surface of the wealth of information publicly available? Think about this for a second... the secret archives are restricted to scholars of the Catholic Church--they aren't even available to most priests!--so how much influence could they really have on Christian theology? The answer, simply put, is Not Much. Your whole point in this thread, your whole contention, which has been that the Vatican Secret Archives constitute a secret source of Christian theology, is silly.
Now, if you want to reject Christianity on the basis of its public theology, which is what you do in this latest post, that's fine. In fact, that's your privilege--I would argue (and have argued) that the one natural right of man, given by God, is the privilege of rejecting God. But don't accuse us of having a secret theology, because we don't. Neither Roman Catholicism, nor orthodox Christianity more broadly have unpublished theology that differs markedly from their public theology. Quite the opposite: we hand out our beliefs for free to all who will listen, every Sunday morning at 11AM.
Disagree if you want, but don't slander us. And may I suggest you seek therapy for your very evident issues with your parents?
The Vatican secret archives wouldn't really be source documents for theology. More like a presidential library. But hey, who knows, maybe how many Ducats Pope Innocent XIV spent on hookers really IS relevant for YOUR theology. It's sure not very important to mine. And in any case, everything prior to 1922 is open to non-clerical scholars anyway--and archives from 1939 and before from the department of state are available as well.
Now, when I refer to "source documents of Christian theology", I'm referring to:
Scripture--Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Apocrypha
The Apostolic Fathers
Patristics--i.e. Christian theologians from the 2nd-5th century.
Subsequent theological works of interest--e.g. Boethius, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Occam, Gregory Palamas, Balaam, etc.
The writings of the reformers and the counter-reformers, and the Anabaptists
Theology since the time of the Reformation--Pietists, Liberal Theology, Existentialism, Fundamentalism, etc. etc.
Since you're looking for "hidden sources", I assume you've read all that?
As a seminary graduate with a Doctorate in New Testament from the University of Virginia... and I never had to blow a single goat. Amazing!
All the source documents for Christian theology are publicly available, and well out of copyright. What are copyrighted is modern translations of documents... which I sort of hate, but then again theology professors have to eat too. If you're willing to take the time and effort to learn Greek and Latin, you can read them more-or-less for free. And if even if you're not, the modern translations are pretty much available from any well-stocked library (sadly, public libraries ignore religion, so public libraries don't help.)
Shoot... Union Theological Seminary of Virginia in Richmond--which has one of the best theological libraries in the country--will give you a card just for the asking. And they're not alone... many seminary libraries are open to the public.
Disclaimer: I am an ordained Baptist minister, and have pastored churches on a part-time basis. So, on the one hand, I speak from experience. On the other hand, if you follow the usual Slashdot assumptions about ministers, I'm a liar and a cheat. (I'm neither.)
I can't speak to how other denominations manage it, but in most traditional Baptist churches around here (Virginia) a LOT of effort is taken to prevent this. At the low end, only 2 people count the offering each week, and these people are NOT the pastor. At the high end, many churches outsource the counting of the offering entirely (banks will do this for you, for a fee.) The one constant, in my experience, is that the pastor never has access to the offering figures and that information is always closely held. I've served 4 separate churches, and have never had any idea who gave how much. Nor did I want to know.
Some years ago, there was a "snippet" published in the Atlantic comparing the per capita GDP of European countries to the per capita GDP of US states. IIRC, France scored 49th. Now, I would certainly admit that the US doesn't do a very good job of distributing wealth... but there are better ways to encourage equitable distribution of wealth than punitive taxation and socialism.
eBook readers will take off the same time that mp3 players and smart phones did... when apple releases the 'iRead' (or whatever they call it.) I'm convinced that apples the only company out there with enough sense (and cojones) to make an eBook reader that will actually be a useful substitute for the printed word. If Apple doesn't do it, then that's just an indication that the technology isn't Quite There Yet.
Sorry, I hate to sound like a hopeless fan-boi, but after getting burned on mp3 players (that just weren't Good Enough), then on Blackberrys (that Just Weren't Quite Good Enough), and loving life with my iPod and iPhone, I'm sold.
My first time running Linux was before the whole concept of "distributions" had even really caught hold. Back then, you downloaded a "boot disk" (a floppy disk that contained the kernel) and a "root disk" (a second floppy containing a few basic UNIX utilities.) If you wanted a hard drive installation, you used this to format your hard drive, then copied the contents of the root disk over to the hard drive over. This was before LILO, so booting off the hard drive was not supported.
Now, this was not the Linux we have today. No X-windows. No networking. No kernel modules. Driver support was ridiculously limited. But it was the first free Linux I'd ever found, and I was psyched to have it.
Then along came a couple of distros and this all began to change very fast. First distro I ever used was "SLS". (There was another one, IIRC, called "MLM" or something like that. But I never used it.) SLS was a lot like Slackware or, more accurately, Slackware is a lot like SLS--originally, Slackware was just an extention of some of SLS's basic concepts.
One thing all these early distros had in common was they came on floppies. Yes, Virginia, 1.44MB floppies. In fact, if I remember right, I think SLS would even work on 1.2MB 5.25" floppies. This was before CDR's were readily available, and I remember... not fondly... sitting in the Sun lab at college with literally 30-40 floppies downloading the latest Slackware, one disk at a time. And if one floppy had one fault on it, you had to go back to school the next day and redownload the image. Pain in the ass doesn't even begin to cover it.
Eventually I abandoned Slackware for Redhat, which I stuck with until Redhat abandoned being free for the whole Fedora nightmare. I found Fedora to be junk, so I decided to try Debian, as I had been meaning to do for years. Tried Debian, loved it. Then eventually switched to Ubuntu as a more "polished" version of Debian.
Man I feel old. I guess I've been using Linux for over 15 years now. Wow.
Copyright on Ancient texts is nothing new
on
Ancient Books Go Online
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Really, copyrighting of ancient texts is nothing new. The thing is that you don't generally find an ancient text all nicely wrapped up, clear and legible in one place. Generally, you find bits and pieces of it scattered all over the place, and have to piece it together from many contradictory sources. Hence, scholars develop what are called "critical editions"--editions of ancient texts where scholars or teams of scholars have put tremendous amounts of effort into making a best effort at reconstructing the original text. Seriously, in some cases even deciphering the hand-writing can be difficult.
The best example is the New Testament, where there are literally tens of thousands of manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts dating from the first few centuries. For the most part, they agree, however there are some significant differences. (For a really egregious example, take a look at Mark 16.9ff. in a modern translation, and read the footnotes. Good place to look would be the NET, available online at bible.org). It takes a non-trivial amount of effort to sort through these thousands of manuscripts and variations and decide which one is the "original".
Another good example would be my copy of the works of Origen, a second-third century Christian scholar. Origen fell out of favor in the late third and fourth centuries and a lot of his works were lost. So, his works have not survived in one piece. My edition of Origen has three columns--Latin fragments, where he was quoted by Latin fathers, Greek fragments, where he was quoted by Greek fathers, and an English translation that tries to put it all together. Note that Origen wrote in Greek, so that the Latin fragments are translations of his words, not his original words.
Now, I personally have some serious reservations whether this sort of work is sufficiently original to merit a copyright. But, thus far, it has been concluded that it is. I suppose the real answer would be, "sometimes it is, and sometimes it ain't. But the only way to test it would be to slap the work up on your website and wait to get sued.
Nightmare of nightmares... a very pushy project manager decided I was his star coder (I was) and that he needed "full access" to me. This mean that I needed to share an office with him. This gave him "full access" to change specs at a moments notice, look over my shoulder, disrupt my very slow morning routine, etc. etc.
I rather resent you claiming that I'm confused about what is and what is not science... I've actually got a good bit more grounding in philosophy of science than most scientists (most of whom have NO ground in philosophy whatsoever), and I can offer you three or four definitions for what is "science".
You seem to be missing the larger point I'm trying to make. What I'm saying here is that I don't think that science has the right to insist that it is a privileged epistemology, no matter which definition of "science" you use. That is, whether you go with the inductive, deductive, or "falsifiability" approaches, just because something is "scientific" doesn't (it seems to me) give it the right to demand that the government support it against all comers. As free citizens in a free democracy, we have the right to choose our own epistemological standards, free of government interference. To me, the proper role of the public school system would be to expose students to different ways of "knowing" and allow the students to choose what they want to believe, based on their/own/ preconceptions.
This is not what the "we must teach evolution" crowd are looking for. In fact, what they want to do is teach a watered-down, doctrinaire form of evolution, full of bad evidence, sloppy argument, and shoddy epistemology. Students who dare to question it--no matter how intelligently--are branded "troublemakers". And, frankly, a little research on the net (on your part) will produce a number of examples where students HAVE questioned evolution intelligently, gotten the school system to admit that they had done so and garnered some small amount of public attention, and then brought down the whole apparatus of public "science" upon their heads. I mean... what sort of "science" is it that needs to send the head of the National Academy of Sciences out to deal with a school-kid in Colorado (IIRC) who questions a scientific theory? This is, in effect, a fallacious appeal to authority, because the goal is to bypass legitimate argument and crush it with "because 'great man' said so."
And, even though I think evolution is probably accurate, I resent the hell out of it.
Yeah, and nobody has passed a law making scientists go to church until they're 18 at government expense, either.
Science has demanded that it be given a privileged position as the only legitimate epistemological system, and I for one don't know that that is valid. Granted that science is proven to be useful in certain areas, it is not at all clear to me that the scientific method as applied to "historical" questions (e.g. cosmology or evolution) is the same thing as the scientific method when applied to say physical phenomenon. If nothing else, surely you can at least acknowledge that evolution is not reproducible in the same that an "experiment" is.
More importantly, I've been debating this questions literally for decades, and nobody has yet given me any reason why it is really so very important that high school students be indoctrinated in evolution. I simply can't see why it matters--unless of course you look at it as a matter of social engineering. So, it seems to me that the scientific establishment wants to indoctrinate children in their philosophical beliefs (for faith in the scientific method as a philosophical system is a BELIEF), at taxpayer expense. And what makes this utter hokum is the failure of the "scientists" to realize that at the end of the day, the "self-evident" foundations of science are not self-evident, and that they are in fact based on philosophical innovations that only occurred in the 16-17th centuries.
Now, I happen to think that evolution is probably a reasonably accurate account for the origins of of life on our planet, and I tend to go along with the Big Bang theory as well. But I don't see the need to indoctrinate others in those conclusions--expose them to the *facts* (not the conclusions!) and let them form their own opinions!
Then why are so many conservatives for the death penalty and the wars? Pro-life, my ass.
I agree with your comment, actually, and it sort of illustrates the point I'm making. Conservatives tend to be for "God, Guns, and Guts"--anti-abortion, in favor of militarism, in favor of "self-defense" (i.e. vigilante justice), in favor of drastic measures to preserve life in a medical context. There's not a consistent theme here, other than that these are all the positions that our culture held 50 years ago. Certainly, the only a couple of these positions could even arguably have a Christian foundation--so if we attribute these positions to Christianity, we are probably committing the "fallacy of a common cause", in this case ignoring the fact that social conservatism favors all these positions AND Christian faith.
I think that a truly Christian position would be consistently pro-life. That is, anti-abortion, anti-death-penalty, anti-war, anti-euthanasia (although we could dicker a bit on when to pull the plug), anti-gun or at least not wanting to own one for "self protection.
I would tend to think that there's just a correlation between conventional thinking and a sort of religious conviction. This is the same reason that (on a whole) religious people tend to be more socially conservative across the board then the non-religious--because "religion" is a conservative social value. Since "preserve life at all costs" is also a conservative social value, it's not really surprising that the two are correlated.
Personally, I don't think that that sort of Christianity is Christianity at all. True Christianity is a radical thing, iconoclastic in the extreme, and if anything it tends to be socially progressive rather than socially conservative (although perhaps not socially progressive in the manner prescribed by humanist systems.) What the socially conservative value is not Christianity, but "civic religion" in any form. If they had been Romans, they'd be sacrificing to the genius of the emperor just as readily, since that was the received wisdom of THAT era.
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of the fuel itself is a vanishingly small proportion of the actual cost of launching a rocket. Most of the cost of a launch is tied up in two things: the very expensive hardware that you're throwing away because it's not at all reusable, and the incredibly ponderous administrative and logistical hassles that go into getting a rocket assembled and ready for launch. SpaceX plans to make the Falcon-9 fully reusable eventually, and they already have significantly less administrative overhead than "traditional" launch operations. Whether $300/lb. to orbit is obtainable is, of course, questionable. But I don't think you can say that it's flat impossible, and you certainly can't say it's flat impossible because of fuel costs. That just demonstrates ignorance.
I was referring specifically to the COTS contract when I made reference to milestones. As for the rest... look, it's impressive for a privately funded vehicle to launch at all. Yes, getting to space is hard, but SpaceX is actually doing it, and if you compare their record to the record of the "traditional" space contractors they're doing it very well. So chill out with the relentless negativity.
Just a point of clarification--on reviewing my wording, it appeared that I might have made it sound like I was affiliate with SpaceX. I'm not affiliated with them in any way (I'm a part-time pastor and full-time technology consultant in Virginia.)
Just to clarify, if you RTFA you will find that SpaceX has completed all the milestones so far on time, and they are looking at a 2-4 month schedule slip on future milestones. Now, obviously we'd much rather not have the schedule slip, but in the world of NASA contracting that is like... totally nothing. I have to say that, as a confirmed space nut, SpaceX really impresses me. If they manage to deliver on a third of what they're talking about, they'll completely change the game--and they've done enough truly innovative stuff already that I think they might actually deliver on most of it in the long run.
Imagine a fully reusable launch vehicle, and a mostly reusable orbiter, making access to LEO or GTO cost in the hundreds of dollars per lb., instead of thousands... that's what Elon Musk is talking about in the long run, and I think he just might actually pull it off.
Not at all. What will make them PC liberal douche bags is not knowing the truth, not knowing what really happened, not understanding history. "Political Correctness" is a way of not talking about the reality of how bad things once were by focusing on image instead of reality. It focuses on trivial slights, and ignores how much better things really are now, compared to how they once were.
What you're missing is that this is a deliberate strategy on Microsoft's part that served them well for many, many years. For a long time, Microsoft sought to have the second best product in any given category. Then they would just sit there and wait for the best product to get lazy or stagnant and come in and sweep up the remnants. They did this again and again and again in the late 80's and 90's, and it worked every single time, because eventually the competition would trip up leaving the market open for Microsoft.
Examples?
The problem with this strategy is it only works when your competition slacks off. And nowadays Microsoft's competition--i.e. Google and Apple--aren't slacking off. At least Not Yet.
I recently got my kids some Loony Tunes, which had the episode where Elmer Fudd (as a Mounty) catches Bugs and has him in front of a firing squad. For his "wast wequest", Bugs breaks out into "I wish I were in Dixie", with the whole firing squad transforming into "black-face" minstrel singers, a la the old black minstrel shows.
Well, whoever compiled this DVD chose to blur the faces out, presumably for reasons of political correctness.
Now, I have a big problem with this, because it robbed me of a great 'teachable moment' for my kids... a chance to talk about the fact that just fifty years ago that sort of thing was perfectly acceptable and accepted, and why it was wrong. This happens all over the place... all the remnants of a horrible era in American history (slavery and Jim Crow) being gradually swept under the rug. How can we help forgetting when the purveyors of common culture are working so very, very hard to make sure that we forget!?! I mean... my father went to Little Rock Central High School, and graduated a year before they sent the National Guard in, but nowadays we act as if all that stuff is something from the distant past. It's not--and it could come back if we don't watch it like a hawk.
I'm fighting back though... my oldest (11) just finished reading (at my insistence) Uncle Tom's Cabin, and I plan to have him read the Autobiography of Frederick Douglas and watch Schindler's List as well this summer. (He's quite precocious. Most 11 year olds probably wouldn't be ready for this.) Later, we'll read together the works of Martin Luther King and similar writings. I've laid out an education program for my kids in my mind, to make sure that they at least know what a horrible thing racism (and it's cousins, racist nationalism, fascism, and National Socialism) is.
If only the schools would do the same, instead of white-washing everything and reducing the desperate fight of oppressed peoples against brutal oppression to a few names and dates, boring and bloodless.
If, in a billion years, we can't change the gravitational constant of the universe by extending the warp field around the rogue planet and tow it back to its proper orbit, then we're sunk anyway. Either that or just call "Q"!
I'm sure it cost apple a considerable amount to develop and have a manufacturing line for the second version of the iPhone, and I'm willing to bet that the vast bulk of iPhones sold will be the 16gb model. Therefore, they have to amortize the development costs over a smaller market for the larger memory size. It's not really about the cost of the memory, it's about the additional R&D and the cost of having a second assembly line.
For those who haven't read it, this book is a GREAT read: A quarter Century of Unix by Peter H Salus Highly recommended, and once you've read it you'll suddenly understand why a lot of stuff is the way it is. Hat's off to the Best. Operating System. Ever.
One of the things that drove the revolution in understanding of Koine Greek (as used in the New Testament) over the last 200 years or so was the discovery of a massive cache of routine commercial transactions in Egypt, written on Papyrus. So, your $15.19 @ Lulu.com might be more relevant than you realize.
Hmm... I'm not sure what sort of churches you might be dealing with, but as others have posted the sort of system I described is pretty ubiquitous. You might want to dig a little harder.
So... you're complaining that you can't get to the "secret archives" of the Horrible, Evil Vatican--by which you mean details of the Vaticans business operations since 1922--when you have by your own admission only skimmed the surface of the wealth of information publicly available? Think about this for a second... the secret archives are restricted to scholars of the Catholic Church--they aren't even available to most priests!--so how much influence could they really have on Christian theology? The answer, simply put, is Not Much. Your whole point in this thread, your whole contention, which has been that the Vatican Secret Archives constitute a secret source of Christian theology, is silly.
Now, if you want to reject Christianity on the basis of its public theology, which is what you do in this latest post, that's fine. In fact, that's your privilege--I would argue (and have argued) that the one natural right of man, given by God, is the privilege of rejecting God. But don't accuse us of having a secret theology, because we don't. Neither Roman Catholicism, nor orthodox Christianity more broadly have unpublished theology that differs markedly from their public theology. Quite the opposite: we hand out our beliefs for free to all who will listen, every Sunday morning at 11AM.
Disagree if you want, but don't slander us. And may I suggest you seek therapy for your very evident issues with your parents?
The Vatican secret archives wouldn't really be source documents for theology. More like a presidential library. But hey, who knows, maybe how many Ducats Pope Innocent XIV spent on hookers really IS relevant for YOUR theology. It's sure not very important to mine. And in any case, everything prior to 1922 is open to non-clerical scholars anyway--and archives from 1939 and before from the department of state are available as well.
Now, when I refer to "source documents of Christian theology", I'm referring to:
Since you're looking for "hidden sources", I assume you've read all that?
Oh... you haven't? Why not?
As a seminary graduate with a Doctorate in New Testament from the University of Virginia... and I never had to blow a single goat. Amazing!
All the source documents for Christian theology are publicly available, and well out of copyright. What are copyrighted is modern translations of documents... which I sort of hate, but then again theology professors have to eat too. If you're willing to take the time and effort to learn Greek and Latin, you can read them more-or-less for free. And if even if you're not, the modern translations are pretty much available from any well-stocked library (sadly, public libraries ignore religion, so public libraries don't help.)
Shoot... Union Theological Seminary of Virginia in Richmond--which has one of the best theological libraries in the country--will give you a card just for the asking. And they're not alone... many seminary libraries are open to the public.
Disclaimer: I am an ordained Baptist minister, and have pastored churches on a part-time basis. So, on the one hand, I speak from experience. On the other hand, if you follow the usual Slashdot assumptions about ministers, I'm a liar and a cheat. (I'm neither.)
I can't speak to how other denominations manage it, but in most traditional Baptist churches around here (Virginia) a LOT of effort is taken to prevent this. At the low end, only 2 people count the offering each week, and these people are NOT the pastor. At the high end, many churches outsource the counting of the offering entirely (banks will do this for you, for a fee.) The one constant, in my experience, is that the pastor never has access to the offering figures and that information is always closely held. I've served 4 separate churches, and have never had any idea who gave how much. Nor did I want to know.
Some years ago, there was a "snippet" published in the Atlantic comparing the per capita GDP of European countries to the per capita GDP of US states. IIRC, France scored 49th. Now, I would certainly admit that the US doesn't do a very good job of distributing wealth... but there are better ways to encourage equitable distribution of wealth than punitive taxation and socialism.
eBook readers will take off the same time that mp3 players and smart phones did... when apple releases the 'iRead' (or whatever they call it.) I'm convinced that apples the only company out there with enough sense (and cojones) to make an eBook reader that will actually be a useful substitute for the printed word. If Apple doesn't do it, then that's just an indication that the technology isn't Quite There Yet.
Sorry, I hate to sound like a hopeless fan-boi, but after getting burned on mp3 players (that just weren't Good Enough), then on Blackberrys (that Just Weren't Quite Good Enough), and loving life with my iPod and iPhone, I'm sold.
My first time running Linux was before the whole concept of "distributions" had even really caught hold. Back then, you downloaded a "boot disk" (a floppy disk that contained the kernel) and a "root disk" (a second floppy containing a few basic UNIX utilities.) If you wanted a hard drive installation, you used this to format your hard drive, then copied the contents of the root disk over to the hard drive over. This was before LILO, so booting off the hard drive was not supported.
Now, this was not the Linux we have today. No X-windows. No networking. No kernel modules. Driver support was ridiculously limited. But it was the first free Linux I'd ever found, and I was psyched to have it.
Then along came a couple of distros and this all began to change very fast. First distro I ever used was "SLS". (There was another one, IIRC, called "MLM" or something like that. But I never used it.) SLS was a lot like Slackware or, more accurately, Slackware is a lot like SLS--originally, Slackware was just an extention of some of SLS's basic concepts.
One thing all these early distros had in common was they came on floppies. Yes, Virginia, 1.44MB floppies. In fact, if I remember right, I think SLS would even work on 1.2MB 5.25" floppies. This was before CDR's were readily available, and I remember ... not fondly ... sitting in the Sun lab at college with literally 30-40 floppies downloading the latest Slackware, one disk at a time. And if one floppy had one fault on it, you had to go back to school the next day and redownload the image. Pain in the ass doesn't even begin to cover it.
Eventually I abandoned Slackware for Redhat, which I stuck with until Redhat abandoned being free for the whole Fedora nightmare. I found Fedora to be junk, so I decided to try Debian, as I had been meaning to do for years. Tried Debian, loved it. Then eventually switched to Ubuntu as a more "polished" version of Debian.
Man I feel old. I guess I've been using Linux for over 15 years now. Wow.
Really, copyrighting of ancient texts is nothing new. The thing is that you don't generally find an ancient text all nicely wrapped up, clear and legible in one place. Generally, you find bits and pieces of it scattered all over the place, and have to piece it together from many contradictory sources. Hence, scholars develop what are called "critical editions"--editions of ancient texts where scholars or teams of scholars have put tremendous amounts of effort into making a best effort at reconstructing the original text. Seriously, in some cases even deciphering the hand-writing can be difficult.
The best example is the New Testament, where there are literally tens of thousands of manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts dating from the first few centuries. For the most part, they agree, however there are some significant differences. (For a really egregious example, take a look at Mark 16.9ff. in a modern translation, and read the footnotes. Good place to look would be the NET, available online at bible.org). It takes a non-trivial amount of effort to sort through these thousands of manuscripts and variations and decide which one is the "original".
Another good example would be my copy of the works of Origen, a second-third century Christian scholar. Origen fell out of favor in the late third and fourth centuries and a lot of his works were lost. So, his works have not survived in one piece. My edition of Origen has three columns--Latin fragments, where he was quoted by Latin fathers, Greek fragments, where he was quoted by Greek fathers, and an English translation that tries to put it all together. Note that Origen wrote in Greek, so that the Latin fragments are translations of his words, not his original words.
Now, I personally have some serious reservations whether this sort of work is sufficiently original to merit a copyright. But, thus far, it has been concluded that it is. I suppose the real answer would be, "sometimes it is, and sometimes it ain't. But the only way to test it would be to slap the work up on your website and wait to get sued.
Nightmare of nightmares... a very pushy project manager decided I was his star coder (I was) and that he needed "full access" to me. This mean that I needed to share an office with him. This gave him "full access" to change specs at a moments notice, look over my shoulder, disrupt my very slow morning routine, etc. etc.
Quit that job in a hurry.
I rather resent you claiming that I'm confused about what is and what is not science... I've actually got a good bit more grounding in philosophy of science than most scientists (most of whom have NO ground in philosophy whatsoever), and I can offer you three or four definitions for what is "science".
You seem to be missing the larger point I'm trying to make. What I'm saying here is that I don't think that science has the right to insist that it is a privileged epistemology, no matter which definition of "science" you use. That is, whether you go with the inductive, deductive, or "falsifiability" approaches, just because something is "scientific" doesn't (it seems to me) give it the right to demand that the government support it against all comers. As free citizens in a free democracy, we have the right to choose our own epistemological standards, free of government interference. To me, the proper role of the public school system would be to expose students to different ways of "knowing" and allow the students to choose what they want to believe, based on their /own/ preconceptions.
This is not what the "we must teach evolution" crowd are looking for. In fact, what they want to do is teach a watered-down, doctrinaire form of evolution, full of bad evidence, sloppy argument, and shoddy epistemology. Students who dare to question it--no matter how intelligently--are branded "troublemakers". And, frankly, a little research on the net (on your part) will produce a number of examples where students HAVE questioned evolution intelligently, gotten the school system to admit that they had done so and garnered some small amount of public attention, and then brought down the whole apparatus of public "science" upon their heads. I mean... what sort of "science" is it that needs to send the head of the National Academy of Sciences out to deal with a school-kid in Colorado (IIRC) who questions a scientific theory? This is, in effect, a fallacious appeal to authority, because the goal is to bypass legitimate argument and crush it with "because 'great man' said so."
And, even though I think evolution is probably accurate, I resent the hell out of it.
Yeah, and nobody has passed a law making scientists go to church until they're 18 at government expense, either.
Science has demanded that it be given a privileged position as the only legitimate epistemological system, and I for one don't know that that is valid. Granted that science is proven to be useful in certain areas, it is not at all clear to me that the scientific method as applied to "historical" questions (e.g. cosmology or evolution) is the same thing as the scientific method when applied to say physical phenomenon. If nothing else, surely you can at least acknowledge that evolution is not reproducible in the same that an "experiment" is.
More importantly, I've been debating this questions literally for decades, and nobody has yet given me any reason why it is really so very important that high school students be indoctrinated in evolution. I simply can't see why it matters--unless of course you look at it as a matter of social engineering. So, it seems to me that the scientific establishment wants to indoctrinate children in their philosophical beliefs (for faith in the scientific method as a philosophical system is a BELIEF), at taxpayer expense. And what makes this utter hokum is the failure of the "scientists" to realize that at the end of the day, the "self-evident" foundations of science are not self-evident, and that they are in fact based on philosophical innovations that only occurred in the 16-17th centuries.
Now, I happen to think that evolution is probably a reasonably accurate account for the origins of of life on our planet, and I tend to go along with the Big Bang theory as well. But I don't see the need to indoctrinate others in those conclusions--expose them to the *facts* (not the conclusions!) and let them form their own opinions!
I agree with your comment, actually, and it sort of illustrates the point I'm making. Conservatives tend to be for "God, Guns, and Guts"--anti-abortion, in favor of militarism, in favor of "self-defense" (i.e. vigilante justice), in favor of drastic measures to preserve life in a medical context. There's not a consistent theme here, other than that these are all the positions that our culture held 50 years ago. Certainly, the only a couple of these positions could even arguably have a Christian foundation--so if we attribute these positions to Christianity, we are probably committing the "fallacy of a common cause", in this case ignoring the fact that social conservatism favors all these positions AND Christian faith.
I think that a truly Christian position would be consistently pro-life. That is, anti-abortion, anti-death-penalty, anti-war, anti-euthanasia (although we could dicker a bit on when to pull the plug), anti-gun or at least not wanting to own one for "self protection.
I would tend to think that there's just a correlation between conventional thinking and a sort of religious conviction. This is the same reason that (on a whole) religious people tend to be more socially conservative across the board then the non-religious--because "religion" is a conservative social value. Since "preserve life at all costs" is also a conservative social value, it's not really surprising that the two are correlated.
Personally, I don't think that that sort of Christianity is Christianity at all. True Christianity is a radical thing, iconoclastic in the extreme, and if anything it tends to be socially progressive rather than socially conservative (although perhaps not socially progressive in the manner prescribed by humanist systems.) What the socially conservative value is not Christianity, but "civic religion" in any form. If they had been Romans, they'd be sacrificing to the genius of the emperor just as readily, since that was the received wisdom of THAT era.
But that's really another topic.