I don't claim to know these things as fact, or anything like that. I do think it interesting, though, and I don't personally see it contradicting anything in the Bible.
We could start with the assencion... As the theory is stated in DaVinci Code, the Magdalene hypothesis requires that Jesus live substantially beyond the resurrection and father a family with Magdalene.
More to the point... It would be theologically interesting to suppose that Jesus was really a woman, or that he was really had purple hair and a fro (cf. Godspell) or that he really never existed. But we have no evidence for any of those conclusions, any more than we have significant evidence that he ran off and had kids with Magdalene.
I know what the catholic church has done, and its certainly no worse (and perhaps a bit better) than what many secular organizations have done. Lest we forget, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao were all avowedly atheists and secularists. Certainly, the idea that the catholic church (and no, I'm not catholic) has been engaged in some vast conspiracy for the past two thousand years to conceal the descendants of Jesus through Mary Magdalene is so far from reality as to be completely absurd. Yet, as a minister, I've encountered many people who have taken Davinci code and the like (cf. "Stigmata") as historically accurate.
To create a work of fiction that deliberately and blatantly mispresents the facts - as all the packaging of the Davinci Code and Stigmata are designed to do - is at best irresponsible, and at worst pure evil. Both include supplimentary material (in DC, a forward, in Stigmata an afterword) designed to make the reader think that their story lines are quite close to the truth, all the while hiding behind the shield of being "fiction". It's like a movie that is "based on a true story" that resembles the true story only in the names of the main characters.
In fact, it's quite hard to defend the Davinci Code. The whole book is little more than pure fantasy, yet the first page of the book goes out of its way to point out that Opus Dei and the Priory of Zion are real organizations - without pointing out that there is no reason to think his interpretation of the Holy Grail is in any way connected to them. (Inciudentally, in the latter case existence itself is quite a questionable assertion.) That is, it deliberately muddies the line between truth and fiction in order to create the impression that the situations of the book are real even when though the story itself is fictional. For those who lack the background or the skills to do the research to do discover what a crock it is, this functions as a lie.
In my opinion, as a non-Catholic but a Christian who is working towards a Ph.D. in Historical Theology, the book is errant nonsense. There is no serious argument offered in support of its core premise, just a bunch of fictional "academics" stating as "fact" a bunch of speculative crap that no serious person in the field takes seriously.
The Davinci code formula:
1) Use fictional characters to present speculative nonsense about real people and organizations as "proven historical fact".
2) Sell millions of copies to suckers who know nothing about church history or serious Biblical scholarship and don't know how absurd the whole premise really is.
3) Profit!
With much thanks to the educational system for more or less eliminating history from the curriculum.
When I was a boy, back during the days of Linux Kernel 1.0, we emulated SCO to run commercial applications. Now, SCO emulates *us* to run commercial apps.
Total world domination, anyone?
This remind me of one of the aphorisms in Heinlein's Time Enough for Love:
"If an elderly respected expert in a given field tells you that something can be done he is almost certainly right. If an elderly respected expert in a given field tells you that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong."
Just think it, believe it, dream about it and it's real man.
Before anyone says "macinista", I've been using computers all day every day for 25 years now (since i was eight or so), and was a commodore man if you must know. I only got my first mac about two years ago.
However, I will no longer have anything but a mac in my house because MacOS X based macs do everything I need - including a high quality X server - and never, ever, break.
I'm a Solaris admin all day for a very large company. I don't want to hassle with munged computers at home. I prefer to farm.
I have a colocated server. When my ISP (Cox) did this, I couldn't connect to port 25, but I didn't want to set my laptop to go to Cox's server (which won't work when I'm not at Cox.) What I finally did was setup my mail server to run on port 1025 as well as port 25, and pointed my mail program to that. It would be fairly trivial to do a similar setup in sendmail.
Whenever I use an ATM, I hear a little printer squirt out a line or two before it gives me the money. This is there as an audit trail: if there is some kind of electronic glitch, the bank can get the tape off the machine and know where the money went.
Most cash registers do the same thing. Yet, apparently and inexplicably, the current electronic voting systems don't have such a thing even as a backup. Why is this so complicated? The problem has been solved for at least 50 years: everytime someone votes, you print out "12:47PM|Pres:Gore|VP:Lieberman|Ballot4755:No" or whatever on a piece of paper tape. You could even setup the paper tape with a bar code if you wanted to be able to read it automatically, while still preserving an audit trail that was human readable.
Geesh, some people will never learn that low-tech is sometimes the way to go, and that most problems with high-tech can be overcome with the judicious application of paper and ink.
My thought is that we should all vote on those bubble sheets that are used for every standardized test given throughout our public school system. Everyone who came through the public schools will be familiar with them, and those that didn't are most likely products of private schools/home schooling and thus smart enough to figure it out!
Amazing what $50 million can buy. The gotcha is that, by default under copyright law, one has no distribution rights whatsoever. So, if SCO holds the GPL to be invalid, then they have no rights and can't redistribute the code. It's one or the other, it can't be both.
The only reason I can see for SCO's actions is that they have a vested interest in destroying Linux, and the only person with such an interest iwth $50mil is Microsoft. Let's stop protending that the enemy is anyone buy Bill Gates. Darl is nothing but a puppet.
This case becomes more and more ridiculous. I wonder - could someone with appropriate standing subpoena information regarding SCO's $50 million to see if it really did come from Microsoft? If Microsoft were funding this, would that not be a pretty clear anti-trust matter?
The slashdot editors must be so conflicted. On the one hand, Walmart is being sued, which is a good thing. On the other hand, they are being sued for distributing video games, which is a bad thing. What's a guy to do?
State vehicles are often serviced by state mechanics. This is especially true of Police vehicles, which have, in times past, even been substantially modified by state mechanics for greater performance. Maintenance contracts for state vehicles are also often placed out for bid.
As another example, consider that military vehicles *always* have maintenance done by military mechanics, and usually most minor repairs as well.
First, try nagios, which is open source from www.nagios.org. It takes a small commitment to setup, but works *very* well.
Second, you might try Sun netconnect since you are running all Solaris. I haven't used it myself, but some people at my nameless company have and think well of it.
Newer versions of OpenSSH don't support -c none. (The usual security zealot nonsense from the OpenBSD people from what I can tell. There *is* a place for -c none.)
Kerberos will do this, although you will have to put a bit of effort into setting up a domain. Essentially, it allows you to do fully authenticated rsh, rcp, ftp, etc. while never transmitting your password. Instead, you get a cryptographic key.
Another option would be to chose a faster encryption algorithm for ssh than the default. In particular, I've seen the arcfour cipher recommended for speed (although I've not used it.) Check out the man page. Older versions of ssh - which you could presumably still find somewhere - support "none" as an encryption option. Using this, you could setup an RSA key and avoid entering a password altogether. One of these options would be easier than setting up kerberos, but not nearly as cool or useful otherwise.
Finally, you could setup an anonymous ftp server, accessible only from your remote IP address with a world writable "drop box" in it (which would be, however, readable only by you.) This might be the easiest thus far, but I misdoubt that your sysadmin will care for it if he's security paranoid. It is, however, very secure since it is only vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack which could be avoided using a quota, and even without the quota vulnerable only from you IP address. You could do something similar with an http form and/or a webdav server.
Or, instead of uploading the files, could you download them? That is, could you put up a webserver on the box where the files are captured, then use wget or something to pull them down without a password at all? That might be the easiest of all.
And, lest we forget, where there's a perl, there's a way.:) You could hack something up using XML::RPC or something in about ten minutes, no doubt. Authenticate by transmitting crypted passwords or something.
How exactly do you rip off a series that persists in ripping off anime and sci-fi? The only thing the Matrix did was put things in front of a large audience, many of whom would find them new.
Heh. Good point. I was mainly thinking of the fighting style though. Did you pick up on all the shots of bimbo-lady with her trench-coat tails flapping in the breeze as she pirouetted her way to kick-ass holiness? It was exactly like Neo in reloaded.
I took it as a silly "trick" to try to build suspense. That is, you don't figure out what the core conflict is about until half way through the movie. (Of course the first, entirely gratuitous, fight takes the first quarter of the movie anyway.) So, their intent was to keep you in the dark for a while using the "Lycan device". It was frankly a pretty lame device either way.
And what is with this lame-o shot of what's-her-face walking forward firing both pistols like some kind of imperial walker? Sorry, once it was lame, twice it was four times as lame, three times... you get the picture. It was definitely an exponential progression of lameness.
Slashdot Mirror
To create a work of fiction that deliberately and blatantly mispresents the facts - as all the packaging of the Davinci Code and Stigmata are designed to do - is at best irresponsible, and at worst pure evil. Both include supplimentary material (in DC, a forward, in Stigmata an afterword) designed to make the reader think that their story lines are quite close to the truth, all the while hiding behind the shield of being "fiction". It's like a movie that is "based on a true story" that resembles the true story only in the names of the main characters.
In fact, it's quite hard to defend the Davinci Code. The whole book is little more than pure fantasy, yet the first page of the book goes out of its way to point out that Opus Dei and the Priory of Zion are real organizations - without pointing out that there is no reason to think his interpretation of the Holy Grail is in any way connected to them. (Inciudentally, in the latter case existence itself is quite a questionable assertion.) That is, it deliberately muddies the line between truth and fiction in order to create the impression that the situations of the book are real even when though the story itself is fictional. For those who lack the background or the skills to do the research to do discover what a crock it is, this functions as a lie.
In my opinion, as a non-Catholic but a Christian who is working towards a Ph.D. in Historical Theology, the book is errant nonsense. There is no serious argument offered in support of its core premise, just a bunch of fictional "academics" stating as "fact" a bunch of speculative crap that no serious person in the field takes seriously.
The Davinci code formula: 1) Use fictional characters to present speculative nonsense about real people and organizations as "proven historical fact". 2) Sell millions of copies to suckers who know nothing about church history or serious Biblical scholarship and don't know how absurd the whole premise really is. 3) Profit! With much thanks to the educational system for more or less eliminating history from the curriculum.
$9.4 million?
When I was a boy, back during the days of Linux Kernel 1.0, we emulated SCO to run commercial applications. Now, SCO emulates *us* to run commercial apps. Total world domination, anyone?
Before anyone says "macinista", I've been using computers all day every day for 25 years now (since i was eight or so), and was a commodore man if you must know. I only got my first mac about two years ago. However, I will no longer have anything but a mac in my house because MacOS X based macs do everything I need - including a high quality X server - and never, ever, break. I'm a Solaris admin all day for a very large company. I don't want to hassle with munged computers at home. I prefer to farm.
I have a colocated server. When my ISP (Cox) did this, I couldn't connect to port 25, but I didn't want to set my laptop to go to Cox's server (which won't work when I'm not at Cox.) What I finally did was setup my mail server to run on port 1025 as well as port 25, and pointed my mail program to that. It would be fairly trivial to do a similar setup in sendmail.
Most cash registers do the same thing. Yet, apparently and inexplicably, the current electronic voting systems don't have such a thing even as a backup. Why is this so complicated? The problem has been solved for at least 50 years: everytime someone votes, you print out "12:47PM|Pres:Gore|VP:Lieberman|Ballot4755:No" or whatever on a piece of paper tape. You could even setup the paper tape with a bar code if you wanted to be able to read it automatically, while still preserving an audit trail that was human readable.
Geesh, some people will never learn that low-tech is sometimes the way to go, and that most problems with high-tech can be overcome with the judicious application of paper and ink.
Amazing what $50 million can buy. The gotcha is that, by default under copyright law, one has no distribution rights whatsoever. So, if SCO holds the GPL to be invalid, then they have no rights and can't redistribute the code. It's one or the other, it can't be both.
The only reason I can see for SCO's actions is that they have a vested interest in destroying Linux, and the only person with such an interest iwth $50mil is Microsoft. Let's stop protending that the enemy is anyone buy Bill Gates. Darl is nothing but a puppet.
Yeah, but no Mac version since May and no source. Sucks.
If this product isn't vapor, where's the source? There's no reason they couldn't put up source or a developer preview.
How dare you imply that emacs is JUST a text editor? After all, that's the only thing a self-respecting Geek uses...
This case becomes more and more ridiculous. I wonder - could someone with appropriate standing subpoena information regarding SCO's $50 million to see if it really did come from Microsoft? If Microsoft were funding this, would that not be a pretty clear anti-trust matter?
The slashdot editors must be so conflicted. On the one hand, Walmart is being sued, which is a good thing. On the other hand, they are being sued for distributing video games, which is a bad thing. What's a guy to do?
As another example, consider that military vehicles *always* have maintenance done by military mechanics, and usually most minor repairs as well.
I was about to finance my house through them. Oh well, sorry folks. I don't finance lies, damned lies, sco lies.
Second, you might try Sun netconnect since you are running all Solaris. I haven't used it myself, but some people at my nameless company have and think well of it.
Newer versions of OpenSSH don't support -c none. (The usual security zealot nonsense from the OpenBSD people from what I can tell. There *is* a place for -c none.)
Another option would be to chose a faster encryption algorithm for ssh than the default. In particular, I've seen the arcfour cipher recommended for speed (although I've not used it.) Check out the man page. Older versions of ssh - which you could presumably still find somewhere - support "none" as an encryption option. Using this, you could setup an RSA key and avoid entering a password altogether. One of these options would be easier than setting up kerberos, but not nearly as cool or useful otherwise.
Finally, you could setup an anonymous ftp server, accessible only from your remote IP address with a world writable "drop box" in it (which would be, however, readable only by you.) This might be the easiest thus far, but I misdoubt that your sysadmin will care for it if he's security paranoid. It is, however, very secure since it is only vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack which could be avoided using a quota, and even without the quota vulnerable only from you IP address. You could do something similar with an http form and/or a webdav server.
Or, instead of uploading the files, could you download them? That is, could you put up a webserver on the box where the files are captured, then use wget or something to pull them down without a password at all? That might be the easiest of all.
And, lest we forget, where there's a perl, there's a way. :) You could hack something up using XML::RPC or something in about ten minutes, no doubt. Authenticate by transmitting crypted passwords or something.
Hope this helps.
And what is with this lame-o shot of what's-her-face walking forward firing both pistols like some kind of imperial walker? Sorry, once it was lame, twice it was four times as lame, three times ... you get the picture. It was definitely an exponential progression of lameness.