and apple tried to make a photoshop killer app with aperture
No they didn't. Lightroom is Adobe's Aperture competitor and was released later. They have a much more specialised range of functions than Photoshop (and lower price) and a different working environment. If you thin Aperture is designed to compete with Photoshop, then you're not a photographer and you've never used the applications in question.
I found HL2 to be incredibly frustrating in quite a few places, with regard to advancing the plot. Standing about in a room for 10 minutes waiting for NPCs to do things is not fun. Plugging cables into sockets isn't any fun either. Too often the few things you can do the plot-advancement sections are simplistic and boring and elicit no great urge to repeat them, making the thought of playing through the section again rather less than appealing.
GoW annoyed me as well, occasionally putting cut-scenes between checkpoints and big battles. You could skip them, but you had to wait for them to start, then mash buttons for a few seconds before it responded.
mainly changing tabs in a program like firefox (i'll give command ~ a try tonight, that's the first time i've heard of it).
control-tab and sift-control-tab will do it. Personally I prefer Safari's shift-command-] and shift-command-[ since they fit well with command-[ and command-] for going backwards and forwards.
Maybe something like if you close the last window open, it quits the program.
If they did that, they'd have every experienced Mac user up in arms over the problems quitting when they don't want them to.
Given that the writers of the Bible wouldn't have been using modern biological classifications, trying to impose such classifications on them is anachronistic. A classic example would be birds and mammals where a bird would be defined as something with wings and therefore include bats.
They don't have 4 legs. Nothing insect-like does. Certainly not locust, katydids, crickets or grasshoppers which are explicitly mentioned in the passage.
Now, which is a better explation of things here: that the writer didn't know how many limbs locusts etc. have, or that the didn't class all their limbs as legs? I'm thinking the second option.
This is what the NIV Bible commentary has to say about: "Flying insects that walk on all fours" include such pests as cockroaches, flies, or even mosquitoes. Verses 21-22 allow the locust/grasshopper family as food. The distinction is that they have strong hind legs for springing. Evidently in the category of insects, the hind pair of legs was not counted; so these insects are described as creeping on all fours.
and thus was very unlikely omniscient
None of the writers of the Bible were omniscient. God, who inspired them was. Conservative Christian doctrine would hold that they wrote every word he wanted them to, but did so out of their own will and knowledge and with their own style. They weren't possessed by God and forced into a passive role as he used their bodies.
Have you considered reading any of the books written in response to Dawkins? I highly recommend 'The Dawkin's Delusion' by his follow Oxford professor Dr Alistair McGrath (who holds doctorates in molecular biophysics and theology). You may find it answers a lot of questions you might have.
The bibles writers believed that insects had four legs. Are you telling me you trust the Divine Inspiration through a process that can't even transmit a single digit number without error?
You know that our current classification of insect didn't exist until well after that was written, right? It's like berating the Romans for talking about Gaul when we all know there's no such place, just a country called France.
And no, pi does not, in effect, equal 3. That you would even suggest so indicates a lack of critical thought on your part that borders on the unforgivable in a forum specifically aimed for nerds and geeks.
Do you know the difference between a mathematics text book and a descriptive portion of narrative or history? If you were asked the value of pi, what would you give? 3.14? 3.1415927? 22/7? Would you start writing and just keep on going? At some point, it makes sense to stop and give a value with a certain, but not perfect degree of precision, especially if you're main point is not to define the value of pi.
Live a full and good life
What is a 'good life' and what makes your definition more valid than anyone else's?
Religion is based on faith not evidence. Once evidence is present, faith ceases to be relevant as there is no longer need to "believe" because your belief has turned to knowledge.
Just because something is true, doesn't mean people will trust in it. There's a world of difference between intellectual assent and trusting with your heart and soul.
Have you ever read the opening verses of gospel of Luke? If you take a look at them, you'll see that he has gone to great lengths to research the story of Jesus and wants people to believe based on the evidence he has gathered. He's very meticulous in the way he records details. The last couple of verses of John 20 indicate that he is presenting reasons for people to believe. The Bible is filled with reasons that are given for believing.
I think science and religion can exist quite nicely together.
any more than religion is the real issue in Northern Ireland -- if the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England re-merged, the Paddies would still be fighting over something.
Well, the CoE doesn't have any presence here (it's the Church of Ireland) and most Protestants are actually Presbyterians, so I doubt it would make much difference:^) But you're correct in spirit.
Faith, by definition (Hebrews 11) is based on the unobservable.
Not quite. If you take the verse in context, you'll see that faith is about trusting God and the author goes on to talk about many instance in which God has shown himself to be trustworthy, concluding with a reminder about the promises of God.
The "there is no God" notion isn't really a conclusion of science. It isn't even a hypothesis. It is a "metaphysical presupposition."
This presupposition must be made in order for scientific investigation to be possible. If one assumes that some phenomena (whatever it may be) is simply "the work of God," then there is no incentive to do controlled tests of it. If, however, one assumes that the phenomena has a physical (non-miraculous, non-conscious) mechanism behind it, then it makes sense to to tests aimed at uncovering and modeling the mechanism
As pointed out by another poster, you have a false dichotomy here. Michael Farrady and James Clerk Maxwell are excellent proof of that, given their evangelical beliefs and considerable scientific legacy.
There wasn't all that much that in my eyes was new. You had 2 new vehicles and the weapons were modified a little.
There are modified weapons, new weapons, new grenades, the addition of equipment, quite a few alternations to existing vehicles, the addition of new vehicles, the addition of the Theatre mode and Forge, new maps, new enemies, new game modes, co-op for up to 4 people, online co-op and quite a few minor things.
Halo 3 you could drive by 90% of the fights. At least in Halo you were forced to do a lot of walking, and that in turned forced you to do a lot of fighting. Halo 2 forced you to do fighting which is what the game is about.
Then don't drive past the fights... participate in them!
Halo 2 took me 3 nights to finish about 15-18hrs, Halo was about 3-4 nights. Halo 3 is obviously too short for the $50 spent.
Did you consider that in the process of playing games, you might have got better at them? And have you completed it on Legendary? Have you collected all the skulls and played the campaign scoring metagame using them?
I've put in more hours playing "Settlers of Catan" in the Xbox live arcade for $12.50.
Solo, or with others? You know that Halo has pretty extensive multiplayer support, right?
As for FPS's, in general, it's laughable; doesn't every PC FPS have a complete, free level editor?
It's a powerful, easy to use level editor that you can play games in while editting and allows you to share your levels with other console editors. That's pretty revolutionary.
They didn't even come up with an original name.
It's named in honour of the Marathon editor, not the Quake editor. Its an homage to their own software, not someone else's.
There's only so much you can achieve with skinning. It's like putting makeup on a goat. I'm still not going to want to kiss it. The vast majority of skins I've seem are ugly and amateurish, especially the ones that try to imitate Windows or OS X. The trouble is that the interface functions in a different way under gtk and little things like the sizes of interface elements are all wrong. The skins that work are the ones that realise they're not Windows or OS X and go for a clean, simple approach that recognises how the interface the skin is going over functions. even then, I've yet to find one as pleasing as Aqua, but the people making skins are doing it fro free, so I'd expect Aqua to look a lot nicer.
SLightly different methodologies - iTunes leaves the original genre intact, whereas gtkpod doesn't. Can't say I've ever needed to rename a genre before. I make sure my music is tagged correctly and change the tags for incorrectly tagged tracks rather than globally changing tag definitions. If such a rarely used and unneeded feature is your evidence that gtkpod is way more powerful than iTunes, then you're sorely mistaken.
You have to play with it, everything in the various lists is editable. Which means I can rename my "Techno/Trance" category to "Trance" in one single rename, extremely quickly. I can rename all the "Lincoln Park" to Linkin Park.
iTunes doesnt even come close to that ease of use and power.
If I had any Techno/Trance music, I could click on the relevant genre in the browse panel, select all the music and change their genre in one go. Similarly with Lincoln Park. Not terribly difficult.
itunes honestly isnt that great looking either but atleast gtkpod has features that take advantage of its layout (the multi tab panes and lists)
gtkpod is hideous. And from the looks of the screenshots, it's layout doesn't provide any more information than the iTunes layout and even seems to take up more space.
I just had a look at gtkpod and my goodness it's ugly. Aside from that, it doesn't seem to do anything iTunes doesn't. If anything, it seems less powerful. What exactly is the advantage you see in gtkpod?
The trouble is that it takes a lot longer. Planning ahead doesn't change the journey times and when you have limited time available, flying is far and away the better option. I'd also like to see you get around London on a bike with a suitcase and camera bag/laptop.
As it stands, increasing the price of short haul flights disproportionately affects people living over here (or wanting to travel here from Great Britain for that matter) and we're one of the poorest regions of the country already! Now, if someone built a tunnel under the Irish and found a way to make it both cheap and economically viable (not much chance, I know) and you could get a train from Belfast across, then I wouldn't have any case for objecting to flights going up in price. In fact, I think I'd enjoy a train journey from Belfast to London more than a flight, given the absence of waiting in queues, more comfortable seating and not having to spend have the journey with electronic equipment switched off.
Private jet flyers and short haul flights should just be stopped completely, there is absolutely no reason for them, and it will kill people, plain and simple.
That's just being silly. There are reasons. You may not think they're good enough, but it doesn't stop them being reasons. For example, flights from Belfast to London could be considered short haul as they're round about an hour, but there is nothing else that can get you there in a comparable period of time because of the Irish Sea. Short haul flights are very useful for students, businessmen and people who have friends on the other side of the Irish Sea.
It may not be now in the majority of modern churches, but that isn't to say that it wasn't the practice previously or in some areas of the church.
My point is that when it was practised, it was effectively done outside of the church because it was a departure from historic and orthodox belief and practice.
No, it doesn't always happen, but because that's the way that it should happen then that's the way that people will expect it will happen, and so they will have faith in the fact that the person who is a Deacon or whatever is a suitably devout person. In a more 'enlightened' western church then maybe that's correct, but what about in a developing church in the rest of the world?
Sadly the case is that the church in the developing world has a lot of breadth, but not a lot of depth, so it is vulnerable to manipulations and cultish practices such as the 'prosperity gospel.' As I've previously said, when such things happen, they are a departure from what the church is supposed to be doing.
Also, slightly off-topic, but I always find it strangely amusing how those who believe so strongly in a religion believe that there's very little way to be truly moral without having that religion.
I believe that everyone has a conscience and is capable of a basic level of morality. The book of Romans is pretty clear on that. The historic and orthodox Christian position would be that no-one is capable of a sufficient level of morality to please God and that it is only possible by the imputation of Christ's righteousness i.e. being counted as if we had his level of morality. Christians aren't necessarily more moral than non-Christians; they're people who realise they're not moral enough for God and ask to share in Christ's righteousness.
Of course, there are certain good things are non-believer cannot do. Jesus did point out that the greatest commandments were loving God and loving your neighbour. If you don't even believe in God, then you automatically fail on the most important test of morality.
Yes, it probably once had a basis in Christian morals but it all makes sense in its own right without the religious aspect.
How do you determine the logic of a system of morality? Ethics and logic are rather different things. How could you go about proving that your moral code is superior to another? What makes it objectively superior to, for instance, Hitler's?
Assuming you (and millions/billions of other Christians) are correct and that God exists, and that myself and the millions/billions of other religions and atheists are incorrect.
We were talking about Christian belief and practice, for which these are essential assumptions, yes.
Personally, I doubt that all Christians have such a high standing based purely on the fact that they purport to follow a religion. You would either need to follow it strictly at which point you get a high moral standing through working to that high standard, or else you get the corruption and issues that you see in the church now because not all Christians have such high morals.
You just completely missed the point. Re-read what I wrote (or even better, go read the first few chapters of the book of Romans). It's very clear that moral standing for Christians is not dependent on their own actions (which can never be sufficient moral), but rather on Christ's righteousness which is given to Christians and is the evidence which is rpesented when God determines whether someone is righteousness enough for heaven. The actions of Christians on earth will not match the effective standing they enjoy with God because that standing is based on Christ who lived perfectly, but our actions on earth are influenced by our as yet imperfect lives and susceptibility to temptation.
No, I compared one practice that I was taught about to one of the practices of many a campus cult
And I criticised that one comparison, saying that Christianity wasn't remotely similar to that practice.
I did not say or imply that Christianity was entirely the same as those cults, only that the one practice was similar.
And I never accused you of saying the two were entirely the same; I simply criticised the comparison you did make as being inaccurate.
No, but you wouldn't get into the position of being a Deacon or whatever without having some degree of piousness and devoutness above that of a normal person.
Plenty of people do get to be deacons or ministers who shouldn't, which is one of the reasons the church in a lot of places is in a bit of a mess.
And as you said, theory and practice often differ, which is what I was simply pointing out. Members of the church should exercise better moral behaviour that those outside and leaders should be chosen who are known to be committed to this, but in practice this doesn't always happen and there is no cast iron guarantee that they will be more moral and indeed any teaching within historic, orthodox Christianity that you should hand over your possessions to more moral members for safekeeping. Such teachings would raise eyebrows and be regarded as cultish within the church, rather than as Christian.
I attended a C of E Primary School, so we went to church once a week for half an hour or so. There was the "everyone is equal before God" but when you're in a school of several hundred children, most of whom are only vaguely Christian (generally by default of feeling they should be, and because that's where they went for marriages etc) then there's a definite separation between clergy and congregation in terms of devoutness.
Given that our standing before God is down to the righteousness of Jesus Christ, rather than any individual level of morality (which would be far below God's acceptability), superior moral conduct (actual or implied) can never make any Christian 'better' in the sight of God than any other. Every Christian possesses the highest standing they can because they all gain their standing from the same source - Jesus Christ. This is the historic and orthodox teaching of Christianity and anyone who teaches otherwise would be regarded as foolishly mistaken at the least and heretical or cultish at the worst, rather than Christian.
But he's speaking for the catholic church, which most definitely was involved.
And of course an organisation doesn't change at all over the course of a thousand years.
I'm not a fan of the Roman Catholic church, but I'm pretty sure that they've apologised for the crusades, have changed their stance on a few things and aren't likely to go leading a war against Muslims today.
Slashdot Mirror
No they didn't. Lightroom is Adobe's Aperture competitor and was released later. They have a much more specialised range of functions than Photoshop (and lower price) and a different working environment. If you thin Aperture is designed to compete with Photoshop, then you're not a photographer and you've never used the applications in question.
I found HL2 to be incredibly frustrating in quite a few places, with regard to advancing the plot. Standing about in a room for 10 minutes waiting for NPCs to do things is not fun. Plugging cables into sockets isn't any fun either. Too often the few things you can do the plot-advancement sections are simplistic and boring and elicit no great urge to repeat them, making the thought of playing through the section again rather less than appealing.
GoW annoyed me as well, occasionally putting cut-scenes between checkpoints and big battles. You could skip them, but you had to wait for them to start, then mash buttons for a few seconds before it responded.
control-tab and sift-control-tab will do it. Personally I prefer Safari's shift-command-] and shift-command-[ since they fit well with command-[ and command-] for going backwards and forwards.
If they did that, they'd have every experienced Mac user up in arms over the problems quitting when they don't want them to.
Given that the writers of the Bible wouldn't have been using modern biological classifications, trying to impose such classifications on them is anachronistic. A classic example would be birds and mammals where a bird would be defined as something with wings and therefore include bats.
Now, which is a better explation of things here: that the writer didn't know how many limbs locusts etc. have, or that the didn't class all their limbs as legs? I'm thinking the second option.
This is what the NIV Bible commentary has to say about:
"Flying insects that walk on all fours" include such pests as cockroaches, flies, or even mosquitoes. Verses 21-22 allow the locust/grasshopper family as food. The distinction is that they have strong hind legs for springing. Evidently in the category of insects, the hind pair of legs was not counted; so these insects are described as creeping on all fours.
None of the writers of the Bible were omniscient. God, who inspired them was. Conservative Christian doctrine would hold that they wrote every word he wanted them to, but did so out of their own will and knowledge and with their own style. They weren't possessed by God and forced into a passive role as he used their bodies.
Have you considered reading any of the books written in response to Dawkins? I highly recommend 'The Dawkin's Delusion' by his follow Oxford professor Dr Alistair McGrath (who holds doctorates in molecular biophysics and theology). You may find it answers a lot of questions you might have.
You know that our current classification of insect didn't exist until well after that was written, right? It's like berating the Romans for talking about Gaul when we all know there's no such place, just a country called France.
Do you know the difference between a mathematics text book and a descriptive portion of narrative or history? If you were asked the value of pi, what would you give? 3.14? 3.1415927? 22/7? Would you start writing and just keep on going? At some point, it makes sense to stop and give a value with a certain, but not perfect degree of precision, especially if you're main point is not to define the value of pi.
What is a 'good life' and what makes your definition more valid than anyone else's?
Just because something is true, doesn't mean people will trust in it. There's a world of difference between intellectual assent and trusting with your heart and soul.
Have you ever read the opening verses of gospel of Luke? If you take a look at them, you'll see that he has gone to great lengths to research the story of Jesus and wants people to believe based on the evidence he has gathered. He's very meticulous in the way he records details. The last couple of verses of John 20 indicate that he is presenting reasons for people to believe. The Bible is filled with reasons that are given for believing.
I quite agree.
Well, the CoE doesn't have any presence here (it's the Church of Ireland) and most Protestants are actually Presbyterians, so I doubt it would make much difference :^) But you're correct in spirit.
Not quite. If you take the verse in context, you'll see that faith is about trusting God and the author goes on to talk about many instance in which God has shown himself to be trustworthy, concluding with a reminder about the promises of God.
As pointed out by another poster, you have a false dichotomy here. Michael Farrady and James Clerk Maxwell are excellent proof of that, given their evangelical beliefs and considerable scientific legacy.
There are modified weapons, new weapons, new grenades, the addition of equipment, quite a few alternations to existing vehicles, the addition of new vehicles, the addition of the Theatre mode and Forge, new maps, new enemies, new game modes, co-op for up to 4 people, online co-op and quite a few minor things.
Then don't drive past the fights... participate in them!
Did you consider that in the process of playing games, you might have got better at them? And have you completed it on Legendary? Have you collected all the skulls and played the campaign scoring metagame using them?
Solo, or with others? You know that Halo has pretty extensive multiplayer support, right?
It's a powerful, easy to use level editor that you can play games in while editting and allows you to share your levels with other console editors. That's pretty revolutionary.
It's named in honour of the Marathon editor, not the Quake editor. Its an homage to their own software, not someone else's.
Not the 256 kbps ones he's talking about; they're DRM-free
There's only so much you can achieve with skinning. It's like putting makeup on a goat. I'm still not going to want to kiss it. The vast majority of skins I've seem are ugly and amateurish, especially the ones that try to imitate Windows or OS X. The trouble is that the interface functions in a different way under gtk and little things like the sizes of interface elements are all wrong. The skins that work are the ones that realise they're not Windows or OS X and go for a clean, simple approach that recognises how the interface the skin is going over functions. even then, I've yet to find one as pleasing as Aqua, but the people making skins are doing it fro free, so I'd expect Aqua to look a lot nicer.
That is arguably the superior option. Actually, there's really no argument about it.
SLightly different methodologies - iTunes leaves the original genre intact, whereas gtkpod doesn't. Can't say I've ever needed to rename a genre before. I make sure my music is tagged correctly and change the tags for incorrectly tagged tracks rather than globally changing tag definitions. If such a rarely used and unneeded feature is your evidence that gtkpod is way more powerful than iTunes, then you're sorely mistaken.
If I had any Techno/Trance music, I could click on the relevant genre in the browse panel, select all the music and change their genre in one go. Similarly with Lincoln Park. Not terribly difficult.
gtkpod is hideous. And from the looks of the screenshots, it's layout doesn't provide any more information than the iTunes layout and even seems to take up more space.
I just had a look at gtkpod and my goodness it's ugly. Aside from that, it doesn't seem to do anything iTunes doesn't. If anything, it seems less powerful. What exactly is the advantage you see in gtkpod?
The clickwheel allows you to navigate the interface a lot faster while maintaining precision.
Wasn't he a Corsican?
The trouble is that it takes a lot longer. Planning ahead doesn't change the journey times and when you have limited time available, flying is far and away the better option. I'd also like to see you get around London on a bike with a suitcase and camera bag/laptop.
As it stands, increasing the price of short haul flights disproportionately affects people living over here (or wanting to travel here from Great Britain for that matter) and we're one of the poorest regions of the country already! Now, if someone built a tunnel under the Irish and found a way to make it both cheap and economically viable (not much chance, I know) and you could get a train from Belfast across, then I wouldn't have any case for objecting to flights going up in price. In fact, I think I'd enjoy a train journey from Belfast to London more than a flight, given the absence of waiting in queues, more comfortable seating and not having to spend have the journey with electronic equipment switched off.
That's just being silly. There are reasons. You may not think they're good enough, but it doesn't stop them being reasons. For example, flights from Belfast to London could be considered short haul as they're round about an hour, but there is nothing else that can get you there in a comparable period of time because of the Irish Sea. Short haul flights are very useful for students, businessmen and people who have friends on the other side of the Irish Sea.
My point is that when it was practised, it was effectively done outside of the church because it was a departure from historic and orthodox belief and practice.
Sadly the case is that the church in the developing world has a lot of breadth, but not a lot of depth, so it is vulnerable to manipulations and cultish practices such as the 'prosperity gospel.' As I've previously said, when such things happen, they are a departure from what the church is supposed to be doing.
I believe that everyone has a conscience and is capable of a basic level of morality. The book of Romans is pretty clear on that. The historic and orthodox Christian position would be that no-one is capable of a sufficient level of morality to please God and that it is only possible by the imputation of Christ's righteousness i.e. being counted as if we had his level of morality. Christians aren't necessarily more moral than non-Christians; they're people who realise they're not moral enough for God and ask to share in Christ's righteousness.
Of course, there are certain good things are non-believer cannot do. Jesus did point out that the greatest commandments were loving God and loving your neighbour. If you don't even believe in God, then you automatically fail on the most important test of morality.
How do you determine the logic of a system of morality? Ethics and logic are rather different things. How could you go about proving that your moral code is superior to another? What makes it objectively superior to, for instance, Hitler's?
We were talking about Christian belief and practice, for which these are essential assumptions, yes.
You just completely missed the point. Re-read what I wrote (or even better, go read the first few chapters of the book of Romans). It's very clear that moral standing for Christians is not dependent on their own actions (which can never be sufficient moral), but rather on Christ's righteousness which is given to Christians and is the evidence which is rpesented when God determines whether someone is righteousness enough for heaven. The actions of Christians on earth will not match the effective standing they enjoy with God because that standing is based on Christ who lived perfectly, but our actions on earth are influenced by our as yet imperfect lives and susceptibility to temptation.
And I criticised that one comparison, saying that Christianity wasn't remotely similar to that practice.
And I never accused you of saying the two were entirely the same; I simply criticised the comparison you did make as being inaccurate.
Plenty of people do get to be deacons or ministers who shouldn't, which is one of the reasons the church in a lot of places is in a bit of a mess.
And as you said, theory and practice often differ, which is what I was simply pointing out. Members of the church should exercise better moral behaviour that those outside and leaders should be chosen who are known to be committed to this, but in practice this doesn't always happen and there is no cast iron guarantee that they will be more moral and indeed any teaching within historic, orthodox Christianity that you should hand over your possessions to more moral members for safekeeping. Such teachings would raise eyebrows and be regarded as cultish within the church, rather than as Christian.
Given that our standing before God is down to the righteousness of Jesus Christ, rather than any individual level of morality (which would be far below God's acceptability), superior moral conduct (actual or implied) can never make any Christian 'better' in the sight of God than any other. Every Christian possesses the highest standing they can because they all gain their standing from the same source - Jesus Christ. This is the historic and orthodox teaching of Christianity and anyone who teaches otherwise would be regarded as foolishly mistaken at the least and heretical or cultish at the worst, rather than Christian.
And of course an organisation doesn't change at all over the course of a thousand years.
I'm not a fan of the Roman Catholic church, but I'm pretty sure that they've apologised for the crusades, have changed their stance on a few things and aren't likely to go leading a war against Muslims today.