The question you never answered is whether these witnesses wrote down the truth. Did they all actually hear a voice from heaven? I believe they did and you believe they didn't.
You presuppose far more than I actually believe. Supposing they existed, and the record of them was accurate, and that record has been unaltered for thousands of years, then we still have to talk about whether they were sane -- we still have to investigate natural explanations.
I humor you by doing so, but we're not even at that point yet.
God looks at sinners who refuse mercy in a similar way as surgeon looks at gangrene.
Yet the God you claim is not a surgeon, but an omnipotent being. A surgeon has to cut off the leg because there's no way he can remove all of the disease in time. A deity has no such restriction.
Why not simply kill those directly responsible for that "sin", and allow the children a chance? Remember, God commanded genocide, including the killing of babies -- though in at least one instance, the order was, "Kill all the men, children, pregnant women, and women who have known a man, but take the virgin girls as wives."
Maybe you can come up with one or two instances.
I can point you at whole lists of contradictions. Here's a few.
You have attempted to establish that they are true
No, I assume, I believe they are true,
That much is certain. But you are clearly trying to establish it, otherwise, what is the point of this discussion? You have your faith, and I don't.
just as I would believe a witness sworn to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, in a court of law.
Yet you have not produced such a witness. Show me where the gospels swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Note that this is necessary, but far from sufficient for your argument.
I don't want to appear as though I am moving the goalposts -- again, you've got a long way to go.
Just because you have never experienced someone rising from the dead, does not mean it could not have happened...
However, what do we say when we encounter real life witnesses offering such extraordinary claims? What do you say when people tell you about their alien abductions? Or how about something closer to home -- that an angel personally told them that the Garden of Eden was in America, and that godliness is correlated with skin tone? What do you say to such people?
By your logic, you have to take them at their word unless you can refute them. You must believe every claim anyone puts forth unless you can find a reason to doubt it.
It's amazing that you still cannot see the folly of this. Look, I've got an invisible dragon in my garage...
Study life of Jesus and the life of Muhammad. For one thing, Muhammad is dead, so is Buddha and the rest.
And so is Jesus, according to everything we know about how the natural world works.
Jesus is alive.
So is Muhammed, then -- he's in Heaven with Allah. And the Buddha -- he's likely reincarnated as a higher being, though it's also possible he's escaped the cycle entirely.
But you've missed the point again, and I wonder why I waste my time with you.
Nowhere did I claim that I place any more faith in Muhammed or Buddha. My only claim here is to show you that you don't really believe that numbers have anything to do with it. Can I count on you to stop making ad-populum fallacies yet, or are we still back in a 10th grade popularity contest?
You can ask almost any trial lawyer about this. Witnesses are sworn in court to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Witnesses are assumed to be truthful for this reason.
And what, exactly, will it be generated? That's what I mean by "much harder for humans to interpret" -- at some level, ultimately, it has to be trying to make a sales pitch. If there's nothing recognizable, where's the pitch?
Had there been no spam filters, we'd all receive about the same amount of e-mail spam as we receive in the postal mail world.
Nope, postal spam is limited by the cost of paper and ink, and is traceable, physically -- or it's even more expensive if you want to send someone directly to my house so as to avoid the postal system's tracking.
Email spam is limited by the cost of sending an electronic message, which was always absurdly low relative to postal spam, and gets lower all the time -- especially with botnets, where the cost approaches zero, seeing as it's not actually the spammer paying the cost, it's naive Internet users.
But unfortunately, the same marketing logic applies -- if I get two spams from company A and one from company B, I am (in theory) more likely to buy from company A. If these properties applied to bulk mail, you'd see the same thing.
Instead, the spam industry spends it's time trying to break through spam filters -- and they do so with volume.
Nope, that's just as ludicrous as your first suggestion. Here's a hint: If I wrote an (admittedly dumb) filter which blocks any email with the "word" v14gr4 in the subject line, and you send a million spams instead of ten? Every single spam is still going to go right to my spam folder, the only difference is how much of my CPU, bandwidth, etc that you're wasting.
No, they attempt to break filters by, as this article suggests, varying their messages in various ways to get around filters -- like the v14gr4 example above, which is especially ironic, because it actually makes filters more likely to catch it -- a friend might casually mention Viagra to me, but they're not going to mention v14gr4 or c14l1s. But I think you see my point -- they try to break the filters by outsmarting them, by being clever.
The reason for the volume is, I would suspect, partly because they're relatively decentralized, but mostly because there's so many people doing it, and also because if a few do get through, again, ten of company A beats one of company B.
As for your grandmother, it sadly isn't her job -- but I get very little spam at Gmail, and I get massive amounts on my personal address (probably partly because I leave it unobfuscated on Slashdot), but it also gets filtered, and very well, by an appropriately-trained statistical filter. Nothing special, just Bogofilter. I get hundreds (maybe thousands) of spams per day, but maybe ten that are "unsure", and no false positives outside of the "unsure" group, last I checked.
That either requires tons of cheap labor or programmatically-generated templates, which implies either a template-of-temlpates (discoverable in the same way as any other template), or something much closer to random noise, which is also going to be much harder for humans to interpret -- thus much less effective at getting actual purchases, and without actual purchases, the profitability is gone.
Perhaps we should force caught spammers to keep their eyes open, not letting them sleep until they have read out loud every spam email they ever sent...the number of times they sent them.
Interesting, but I'm still partial to the way we dealt with Alan Ralsky... if I recall, he gave an interview in which he seemed entirely impartial to how much of a pain he was being to the rest of the world... the interview was featured on Slashdot, with just enough info that someone figured out his real mailing address, and shared it...
He was then signed up for every bulk mailing list in existence. He had to have literally tons of physical spam taken away from his house with trucks.
Freenet and sealand and tor and so forth type efforts..they could shut them down if they felt like it, at the major nodes.
All except Freenet. I don't need a major Freenet node to connect, I just need any Freenet node. The only way they could shut Freenet down is by blocking all but approved traffic, thus simultaneously shutting out innovation on the Internet, and still not blocking Freenet, which would then move to steganography.
Open wireless, make it a serious crime if someone does naughty things on your open wireless, people will start restricting them more and require verified logins.
Public pushback would be fairly high on this. I mean, I've suggested this before for other reasons, but unfortunately, trying to hold people responsible for what their machines do is not reasonable to attempt in a democracy, because you'd have the vast majority of the population vote you out of office immediately.
And I do wish that were otherwise, because it'd eliminate most of the spam, etc.
For example, my local library has wireless, but you must have a library card to access it, and you must show ID to get such a card.
Do they actually install software on your machine? If so, you could probably petition for that to be changed, as they are likely requiring specific OSes. If not, it can likely be trivially circumvented with MAC spoofing -- perhaps you'll need a card at first (and perhaps not), but you'll be able to easily impersonate another patron.
most of them have security cams now, even if they don't require any ID to access, could be if later on they wanted to narrow it down, they could just correlate interesting traffic with the cam feed/storage...
Leave an iPod Touch or something similar hidden in the vicinity. It can act as a repeater to you somewhere out of range, or it can be a relay point to somewhere else.
Just about as much effort as it would take to notice who is doing what else they might want to look at or restrict. Deep packet and so on.
About as effective as it currently is at blocking BitTorrent. It takes much less effort to deal with zombies, which are by definition doing something obvious to someone else -- making SMTP connections, or DOS-ing a particular address, or connecting to a given command-and-control center -- than it does to deal with peers who only need to connect to each other, with both ends of the connection deliberately trying to hide themselves.
You could easily see canonical and a lot of other linux distros not linking at all to things like DeCSS, or half the stuff that goes with mplayer,
I don't know if Ubuntu does now. I do know there's a third-party project called Medibuntu which provides them from outside the US.
I think for real world examples, in the face of opposition, perhaps look at how china keeps evolving their net access and content access restrictions, working hand in glove with the top networking manufacturers.
Even there, they haven't been entirely successful. You're right in that I wouldn't want to live in China, the way it is now, but I don't think it can be entirely successful, and I do agree with the collateral damage. What I'm hoping is that the harder they push, the more obvious that damage becomes.
Sure it can be circumvented, but it gets harder all the time for the people there to do so,
Not particularly. From what I understand, it hasn't actually changed very much qualitatively. All that changes is that China blacklists more and more pages, meaning it continues to be difficult to find a proxy.
So, we can agree to disagree, you think it won't be much different from today, I think it will shoot up and get a lot harder to be "casual" with IP issues, with a lot more busts, and a lot more media coverage and people gettin
Faith in the unprovable assertion that true DRM is impossible is simply naive.
Then I'll prove it.
DRM relies on giving the user, physically (built-in to the player) or digitally, both a key and an encrypted copy of some media. Viewing the media (playing the movie) at all requires the possibility that this key can be used to decrypt this media. The "security" of DRM relies on a savvy user not being able to figure out how to put the key and the media together.
It is security through obscurity at its finest.
It is inherently flawed because all the ingredients are there. Your only solution would be to make the player somehow tamper-proof, physically -- any good ideas for how to make something cheap, mass-produced, and somehow tamper-proof? About all I can think of is packing the components in thermite, but that'd be kind of hazardous to try to sell that to consumers, and you'd have to replace a lot of units whether or not people actually try to break them.
It's also inherently flawed because it relies on the security of individual keys. Remember 09 F9? All it takes is for one of those keys -- which you are, again, physically distributing to people who actively want to get at them -- to be leaked, and suddenly half your movies are broken.
at least to the point that ripping will be prohibitively expensive
Define "prohibitively expensive." The other flaw in DRM is assuming that if you make it "hard enough", the "average user" won't be able to crack it. The problem is, your opponent here isn't John Q. Public, it's a few very talented and very motivated pirate groups, of the sort who can afford to have their own dedicated FTP servers with gigabit (and more) bandwidth.
And they only have to crack it once.
After that, it goes from there to the newsgroups, and then to BitTorrent, and in less than 24 hours -- hell, probably less than 3 hours -- it's all over the net, and John Q. Public will fire up uTorrent and grab it from his favorite tracker.
Worst case? It's not going to cost anywhere near as much per-viewer to support a group to crack your disc as it cost you to make the movie. Short of that, I think my principle holds -- it only takes one person (or a small group) with the motivation, skills, and resources, and your movie is all over the place.
So is DRM impossible? No, but effective DRM is, unless you change your definition of "effective". Most in the game industry admit that DRM is considered "successful" if it's not cracked within the first few weeks to a month or so -- but implicit in this is the acknowledgement that any DRM they use will eventually be cracked, and that goes for console games as well.
I am not entirely opposed to people protecting their copyright, but DRM is entirely the wrong way to go about it.
The only reason we can backup DVDs is that the technology wasn't there yet.
No, the reason we can backup DVDs is that DRM is inherently flawed, and cannot survive, especially as long as there's a remotely free Internet.
In a few years, they will have hardware DRM integrated into our displays,
And exactly how is this different than having hardware DRM integrated into our optical drives, which DVD already has? For that matter, how's it different than HDCP, which Blu-Ray is already using -- that's right, Blu-Ray can already encrypt the signal straight through to your TV -- but Blu-Ray has also been thoroughly cracked?
DeCss and so on, is exactly what I have been saying, they *haven't* been serious about enforcement,
And I'm saying the reasons for that have more to do with the target they're after. Consider -- if they actually manage to make me remove DeCSS from my computer, that's all the more reason for me to use BitTorrent. And torrents are something they've tried to crack down on -- key word, tried.
This previous **AA "enforcement", for example, is just them getting warmed up and developing their tech to pull this off better.
And how do you know this? Never ascribe to malice...
They will keep changing it around until they get something that works on a mass scale.
Which they won't, because it isn't possible.
After that will come blacklists, and no more net connections for people anyplace.
Given the popularity of open wireless, this seems incredibly unlikely.
A lot of these repositories and so on with "infringing" warez to make your box functional with various media will find it hard to find anyplace that will host them outside of the control of the RBN.
Not terribly. Freenet exists, and so does Sealand, among others.
The wild wild west days of the net are rapidly closing,
People keep saying this, and I keep not seeing it.
the suits are going to want their money and way more control of the net, or else.
Then, whether or not the actor actually explains what's going on, they probably do something like mutter "shit" under their breath...
I mean, think about it. Even with the bright red ACCESS DENIED, you're still usually going to need some sort of exposition to explain why their access is denied, or what they're trying to access anyway.
It doesn't make the movie any more entertaining just like turning the sound off in space scenes doesn't automatically make it better.
Sound in space is similar -- it allows for much easier suspension of disbelief. I think Firefly showed it can also work very well. Granted, it's not automatic -- it can be difficult to write something realistic -- but that's not really an excuse, especially when you consider how much budget there is for effects on a Hollywood blockbuster, they couldn't hire one decent writer?
All it buys you is one less nitpick.
When anyone who is half-awake can nitpick you ("Wait, why is their sound in space? And why are 'lasers' more like little glowing darts -- and how can you have a laser sword that's only a few feet long, yet cuts through steel?"), you kind of fucked up. When the nitpick is something more along the lines of, "But I've done the math, and the Ringworld is unstable!" and all you need to do is throw in a few as-yet undiscovered elements, or handwave it as super-advanced construction, you're doing pretty well.
That's the difference between hard science fiction and fantasy. Frankly, it's much easier for me to get into something like Stardust, which doesn't even pretend to have anything to do with the real world, where you'd actually need a Rules Lawyer to even begin poking holes in it.
I could put it another way -- if computers are playing a major role, geeks are a big potential audience for you. Things like Swordfish, or The Matrix, or even as far back as Hackers -- you've got to realize that the people who would love a movie like that are people who know their way around technology. And then you piss off your fanbase by making Unix some sort of flying-through-a-city-with-lightning-bolts interface, and a virus is some sort of 3D acid-trippy visual, and some random dude can crack 128-bit encryption in under a minute by slamming on a keyboard...
I mean, come on. It's like making a movie about the life of Jesus and filling it with random sex and nudity. It's like if Slumdog Millionaire filmed the slums in a Chicago suburb. It's like if Disney bought Devo and replaced them with some 12-year-olds... oh wait, that happened.
Even in an action movie, it's annoying. Unfortunately, since I'll still watch a good movie with bad computers, it's likely to continue...
Problem #1: I don't know about everyone else, but I am in favor of Mozilla promoting an open, free, and sane video standard. I just wish they would do that while also giving their users choice by supporting proprietary codecs through mechanisms which have been set up specifically for this purpose.
That is: I have no problem with Mozilla supporting Theora. I have no problem with them promoting it, or even providing a little notice on pages that use other codecs. I have a very big problem with them refusing to support anything else, even through plugins.
Fortunately, that particular bit of insanity seems to have passed -- it looks as though Firefox will support GStreamer on Linux, so we'll get h.264 support if we want.
Problem #2: I might Mozilla doing this if Theora was a stupidly-obvious choice. An example of a stupidly-obvious choice is PNG -- there is no rational reason to choose GIF instead of PNG for any still image. Another example is FLAC -- if you've got the space, and you're looking for a lossless format, FLAC is the obvious choice, and it's not going to be terribly painful for anyone to convert from, say, Apple Lossless to FLAC.
But it's not. Theora is catching up, but is still measurably and visibly behind h.264 in every comparison I've seen, including comparisons done by Theora proponents and Theora developers. So far, it appears it would cost Google more than 5 million in extra storage space and bandwidth to store Theora files instead of h.264 files -- and that's ignoring the additional cost of transcoding all these videos again, adding a generational loss to the ones people managed to upload in a format YouTube didn't feel the need to transcode at all.
And the only thing standing in the way of h.264 being an open standard is legal issues. That means this is all going to be moot in, what, 10 years? 15 at the most. Technologically, we understand it, we have many free software implementations of it, and it's already an open standard anywhere software patents aren't enforced.
These problems aren't addressed by your simple explanation -- perhaps I should call it a simplistic explanation. If you can make Theora (or Dirac) better than h.264 in every way, then I will support it, I'll participate in letter-writing campaigns to YouTube, and so on. But as it stands, you're letting the lawyers force you into adopting worse technology, and you're taking one of the icons of user freedom, Firefox, and severely limiting users' freedom in that way. That's where we have a problem.
As soon as ACTA [wikipedia.org] is made law all over, this "just download the naughty bits" that go to make your fav browser/OS/player "just work" for your listening and viewing pleasure will be tracked and people will start getting notices that this might result in getting their connection turned off, or worse, if they are distributing or facilitating the "naughty bits", perhaps charged with "enabling" or some other lawspeak.
It's been over a decade since DeCSS was released. If they haven't already, I very much doubt anyone will track down individual Linux users who downloaded x264.
Short of that, Windows and OS X both have h.264 built-in, and there are legal ways of getting the codecs for Linux -- nothing "naughty" about it. The only problem is that for ideological reasons, Mozilla refuses to support these, even though the most users already have licensed codecs for just this purpose.
"man, this sucks, a fifty grand fine! I ain't touching that stuff. I'll have to use the officially approved browser/OS/Player"
I would think that would also rapidly transition to many websites supporting Theora instead, if it came to it. But again, this hasn't happened, and you're applying an absurd amount of slippery-slope fallacy here.
Ya, some will say they can stay pure and just use "hooks" for this or that in the software to allow these naughty bits to work..those moneysuits see billions that they ain't got and billions that they do want, the politicians see their cut coming, and this duality will soon be dictating to the cops and prosecutors...
...at which point, it won't matter who won this battle right here. They'll just declare Theora to be evil and un-american, or they'll come up with some bullshit submarine patent (Apple's excuse for not supporting it) and the judges will allow it.
You have to have some faith in the system, otherwise you may as well give up now and just ignore the law. And if you're going to do that, I don't see why you give a rat's ass about free codecs -- x264 works pretty well.
everything that matters exists and acts because it serves the plot.
Everything that matters, right.
So what would be the problem with showing an actual ssh "access denied" or "someone is doing something nasty" message? Or with using real security-related tools like netcat and iptables? I mean, sure, most of the screen is going to be irrelevant, but I'm sure the actors are going to be able to tell you what's going on, and it's still throwing in a bunch of "red herrings" or "generic extras" in the UI, still everything that matters serves the plot.
There were at least two occasions, where God personally testified from heaven to three or more witnesses, that Jesus is the son of God.
So we've also got a disembodied voice, which puts them back, roughly, on the same level as Paul.
The Gospel of Luke for example was written to a guy named Theophilus.
Where's your citation for this?
No, of course not, because God never contradicts himself. He said in his Word, the 10 Commandments, "thou shalt not commit murder".
Yet he commanded the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites. He also commanded Abraham to kill his son. Even within the pages of the Bible, he frequently contradicts himself.
Yes you are, you're trying to establish that the Gospels are false
No, I'm not. You have attempted to establish that they are true, and I have expressed skepticism.
Do you not understand the difference between a lack of belief and a positive belief to the contrary? Must I explain this to you in every conversation we have?
Are you really that damned slow?
I and millions of Christians assert that these stories are true history.
Millions of Muslims assert that they are false.
Historians and courts of law assume truth.
You've clearly gotten the rules of law mixed up. I suggest you ask a few other sources, rather than only a clearly biased one like Lee Strobel.
Historians, as a rule, are capable of distinguishing what is meant as a story of fact versus a myth. This is why other "histories" are not often assumed to be true either, such as the Hopi story of humans climbing out of the Earth, or the Hindu story of Lord Rama defeating Ravana...
Is your goal really to convince me that you are right about the legal system, or is it to convince me that you're right about the existence of God?
Neither. My goal is to persuade you to diligently pursue the truth of this matter...
...then why continue to hammer on this point of a court of law, and your argument ad-populum, when you know I see both as fallacious? Why not search for an argument which is actually sound?
You could try something like this in your quest for truth: "Dear God I am not even sure at this point whether you exist....
Aside from the absurdity of asking an imaginary being whether or not he exists -- can you say you've done the same for Zeus or Mithra? -- you assume that I haven't tried something like this.
I have occasionally asked God for some sort of a sign. I've never been given one, so I've stopped asking.
Neither I or any other human being can convince you of the truth of God in the Bible.
Why do you think that is so? Human beings can convince me of many unbelievable things, and I suspect it was first a human who convinced you of your faith.
There may be elements of truth,
Stop dancing around my questions. Every story has "elements of truth" -- the question wasn't whether it's truthy, but whether it's true. Do you believe it to be true or not?
but the question I would ask is this: is homer or whoever wrote this poem an eyewitness to all this? Was he actually there? Did he even talk to eyewitnesses?
Given the Gospel authors do not name themselves, it seems Homer could be as much an eyewitness -- it's not explicit either, but doesn't it seem just as plausible that Homer could've spoken with Odysseus? And Odysseus was a king, certainly well-respected, one whose word would be trusted.
However, you try to claim two things -- that documents are implicitly assumed to be true, and that eyewitnesses are implicitly trusted. However, we aren't dealing with eyewitnesses (unless you can introduce me to John or Peter while I'm alive), we
The web needs to be open. Trademarks do not. That's why your Cola analogy sucks.
It's not only a trademark, but the formula itself. The web keeps us informed; food keeps us fed, and literally is us. Why doesn't food need to be open?
Quality hardly matters at all. Just look at how VHS won over BetaMax, how Super CD never took off,
Yes, you keep repeating this. And yet, while adoption has been slow, we do have Blu-Ray, HDTV in general, and 1080p on YouTube -- and we also have Google themselves saying Theora isn't usable for exactly the same bitrate issues.
You are handwaving away a real problem by saying it "doesn't matter", and then wondering why people continue to choose proprietary codecs -- and will continue to do so, until open codecs improve. Maybe Dirac?
There's a difference between the web and a soft drink.
Yes, that's why it's called an analogy. Or why is it that you don't think this is a good analogy?
ask Microsoft to resurrect their old Microsoft Network.
MSN is alive and well, last I checked, though probably not in the form you're thinking of.
I said "a lot of the time".
And I'm asking you to clarify which times.
It only needs to be good enough.
Unless there's something better -- and again, you need real numbers to back up your claim that the licensing costs are worse than additional storage and bandwidth.
Because courts of law is where evidence, including written depositions are methodically considered.
They are far from the only place.
In legal terms, the Gospels are written depositions and not hearsay. They are recorded testimonies of eyewitnesses who heard and saw what they wrote about. Hearsay by definition is nothing more than unsubstantiated rumor.
Well, you've used some fancy legal terminology there -- "written deposition" -- but you've also shown a clear lack of understanding of what hearsay is:
Hearsay is information gathered by one person from another concerning some event, condition, or thing of which the first person had no direct experience.
So, for example, even supposing the Gospels were penned directly by people who actually saw and heard Christ, they have only his word that he's the Son of God, and not, say, a demon. Thus, that part alone is by definition hearsay.
As for the Gospels themselves, I would hope a "written deposition" would have, at the very least, a signature. We don't have that -- nowhere within any of the Gospels does the Gospel author name himself.
I would apply more rigorous standards here, however. Consider the eyewitness testimony of this woman. Granted, even if it were accurate, it would not be sufficient; our legal system does not allow murder simply because God said so.
But the more important question is, do you believe her?
If you do not have any witnesses or other admissible evidence, such as depositions, that is writings of other eyewitnesses, you have no case.
You are correct -- I have no case.
That is because I am not trying to establish something -- you are. The burden is, and always has been, on you.
Suppose I said you were right about the rules of evidence. Would that make you happy? Is your goal really to convince me that you are right about the legal system, or is it to convince me that you're right about the existence of God?
If it's the latter, you have a lot of work to do, work you've been avoiding.
A court as well as historians will assume the statements in the written documents are true.
Do you assume the Illiad is true?
I don't either, but that does not make by itself the written depositions of the eyewitnesses untrue.
Then why is it that when people claim to hear voices, we lock them up, instead of pondering whether or not they might actually be hearing something? Why is it that if someone today said "I am the son of God," or "I saw a UFO the other day," we tend to assume that there is a chemical imbalance in their brain, rather than that what they said is true?
Or are you saying that we should open the gates of the asylums and assume that everything everyone ever said is true, no matter how insane they are?
The more I study the Bible, the more I come to the conclusion of its truth and divine authorship.
What is divine about condoning slavery, rape, forced marriage, stoning, genocide, mutilation of the dead (including genital mutilation), genital mutilation of infants, religious intolerance (including stoning any relatives who worship another god), vengeance, and wholesale, wanton destruction?
A sheep that has wandered willingly and purposefully away from the shepherd is by definition evil. Anyone who will purposefully not humble himself under the rightful rulership of Almighty God is evil. This leaves you out, because presumably you are still willing to submit to truth WHEN you find it.
Then why does it not also apply to the same people mentioned in that bible verse? In fact, why am I not included? If I do find "truth", certainly, I will have to accept it,
The fact is that most people only need something that's "good enough".
We were originally talking about Google, and I've identified at least a few quality levels for which Theora makes less than no sense.
Have some chipset designs for me?
No, but as I said, it would be trivial to do it.
Then do it.
I had to learn the hard way, but you don't get to say something is "trivial" until after the fact.
And no license fees of course.
You keep hammering this point, and it's a good point, but how important is it, really? In particular, how do the license fees stack up against the cost of hiring a developer to design Vorbis or Theora hardware?
they'll be looking for stuff that's already mass-produced and has a fair amount of competition.
That will be expensive for them. It will be cheaper to go for Theora.
Please, provide some numbers. I'm very skeptical of this assertion, but you don't back it up at all.
Again: These things are already mass-produced in a market with a fair amount of competition. Both of these things drive prices way down, and that's ignoring the cost of R&D. Usually R&D vs licensing is no contest, unless there's something very wrong with what you're going to license.
Quick question: Do you drink OpenCola? If not, why not? Especially, if you drink Pepsi, why do you? Think about how much you pay for a "license" of Pepsi (or Coke, etc) versus OpenCola ingredients.
That won't be noticeable to most people,
First of all: Obviously, Google thinks it's noticeable. You don't think they've done their research when selecting the bitrate for h.264? If a drop in quality for the same amount of space/bandwidth really "wouldn't be noticeable", why wouldn't they drop quality, use h.264, and save some space/bandwidth?
Second: On which stream are we talking about? Are you going to claim that Theora is "good enough" for everything from mobile devices on up to 1080p?
Picture quality is one of the last things people are looking for.
That depends very much which "people" we're talking about -- and again, this is your opinion versus Google's, and Google is rolling out 1080p. After all...
Quality doesn't matter a lot of the time,
If quality really doesn't matter, why is Google rolling out 1080p?
If quality does matter "sometimes", why would Google use Theora on some videos, and h.264 on others? It'd have to be enough to drop them down below the license cap, which seems unlikely.
No, if this were tried in a court of law, the burden of proof would be on you.
Why are you so enamored with the rules in a court of law? This is not a course of law, and I am not interested in getting into all of the legal reasons this is wrong. As I've said, Lee Strobel has been answered. Here you go:
Here is an example of Strobel missing a basic concept in evidence law: He never addresses the issue of hearsay. Hearsay is an out of court statement offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted. Subject to many exceptions, hearsay is generally inadmissible as evidence. If the gospels are used to prove the truth of its statements, then they are technically hearsay. If they do not fall under a recognized exception, then the statements would be inadmissible. On the whole (I am not going to go line-by-line here), the gospel statements do not qualify under any of the recognized exceptions.
Chapter 2 is entitled "Testing the Eyewitness Evidence," yet he never once mentions the hearsay problem or that the eyewitness accounts are that of unavailable witnesses whose statements would be inadmissible in court because the declarants could not be cross-examined.
The same would apply to Paul and Damascus:
What evidence can you bring forth that this is so? Were those that were with him on drugs also?
Looks like you are shifting the burden of proof again -- so, what is your evidence that he wasn't, or that he wasn't surrounded by men on drugs? All of this, again, assuming the veracity of the document itself, which I don't accept either.
Why would I start out by doubting this? Because it is an extraordinary claim -- I don't know about you, but I don't often hear disembodied voices, and people who do are generally locked up. When a group of people tells me they saw something (like a UFO), I have to wonder where they all got the idea, but it doesn't mean I immediately believe in aliens.
Name someone from that time who is as well known to as many people as Jesus Christ or the apostle Paul.
Nope, I'm out of patience for this strange ad-populum. Know what even more people believe in? Violence! Surely, there must be something to it...
I think the biblical definition of evil and yours are different. What, in your estimation is the essence of evil?
I don't think I have to provide one, since you indeed agreed with me. You said:
Of course they are not evil, but lost, like sheep in the wilderness.
Either retract that statement, or admit the Bible has a flaw. You really don't have a third option there.
Yes, it does in a big way, especially for those who have no hope of eternal life.
The point is that humans invented the idea of eternal life because they don't like the thought of dying.
Of course, most people haven't thought it through -- do you really want to live forever? How long would it be before you'd watched every movie, read every book, and thought every thought you could possibly think? And then what?
And would it still be you? Think about yourself when you were five years old. Was that really you? Chances are, not a single atom of your body is the same, and your personality is very likely quite different, you don't play with the same toys, you read very different books (assuming you were reading at five)... On what basis do you call yourself the same person now that you were then? Wouldn't it be fair to say you're a changed person?
But that wasn't that long ago, relative to eternity. A thousand years from now, ten thousand, eighty billion, will you still in any way be the same person?
If you aren't, what's the point, really, of wanting eternal life, since it won't be you living it? If you are the same person, don't you think that'd get really boring a
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The question you never answered is whether these witnesses wrote down the truth. Did they all actually hear a voice from heaven? I believe they did and you believe they didn't.
You presuppose far more than I actually believe. Supposing they existed, and the record of them was accurate, and that record has been unaltered for thousands of years, then we still have to talk about whether they were sane -- we still have to investigate natural explanations.
I humor you by doing so, but we're not even at that point yet.
God looks at sinners who refuse mercy in a similar way as surgeon looks at gangrene.
Yet the God you claim is not a surgeon, but an omnipotent being. A surgeon has to cut off the leg because there's no way he can remove all of the disease in time. A deity has no such restriction.
Why not simply kill those directly responsible for that "sin", and allow the children a chance? Remember, God commanded genocide, including the killing of babies -- though in at least one instance, the order was, "Kill all the men, children, pregnant women, and women who have known a man, but take the virgin girls as wives."
Maybe you can come up with one or two instances.
I can point you at whole lists of contradictions. Here's a few.
You have attempted to establish that they are true
No, I assume, I believe they are true,
That much is certain. But you are clearly trying to establish it, otherwise, what is the point of this discussion? You have your faith, and I don't.
just as I would believe a witness sworn to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, in a court of law.
Yet you have not produced such a witness. Show me where the gospels swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Note that this is necessary, but far from sufficient for your argument.
I don't want to appear as though I am moving the goalposts -- again, you've got a long way to go.
Just because you have never experienced someone rising from the dead, does not mean it could not have happened...
However, what do we say when we encounter real life witnesses offering such extraordinary claims? What do you say when people tell you about their alien abductions? Or how about something closer to home -- that an angel personally told them that the Garden of Eden was in America, and that godliness is correlated with skin tone? What do you say to such people?
By your logic, you have to take them at their word unless you can refute them. You must believe every claim anyone puts forth unless you can find a reason to doubt it.
It's amazing that you still cannot see the folly of this. Look, I've got an invisible dragon in my garage...
Study life of Jesus and the life of Muhammad. For one thing, Muhammad is dead, so is Buddha and the rest.
And so is Jesus, according to everything we know about how the natural world works.
Jesus is alive.
So is Muhammed, then -- he's in Heaven with Allah. And the Buddha -- he's likely reincarnated as a higher being, though it's also possible he's escaped the cycle entirely.
But you've missed the point again, and I wonder why I waste my time with you.
Nowhere did I claim that I place any more faith in Muhammed or Buddha. My only claim here is to show you that you don't really believe that numbers have anything to do with it. Can I count on you to stop making ad-populum fallacies yet, or are we still back in a 10th grade popularity contest?
You can ask almost any trial lawyer about this. Witnesses are sworn in court to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Witnesses are assumed to be truthful for this reason.
Thanks
And what, exactly, will it be generated? That's what I mean by "much harder for humans to interpret" -- at some level, ultimately, it has to be trying to make a sales pitch. If there's nothing recognizable, where's the pitch?
Had there been no spam filters, we'd all receive about the same amount of e-mail spam as we receive in the postal mail world.
Nope, postal spam is limited by the cost of paper and ink, and is traceable, physically -- or it's even more expensive if you want to send someone directly to my house so as to avoid the postal system's tracking.
Email spam is limited by the cost of sending an electronic message, which was always absurdly low relative to postal spam, and gets lower all the time -- especially with botnets, where the cost approaches zero, seeing as it's not actually the spammer paying the cost, it's naive Internet users.
But unfortunately, the same marketing logic applies -- if I get two spams from company A and one from company B, I am (in theory) more likely to buy from company A. If these properties applied to bulk mail, you'd see the same thing.
Instead, the spam industry spends it's time trying to break through spam filters -- and they do so with volume.
Nope, that's just as ludicrous as your first suggestion. Here's a hint: If I wrote an (admittedly dumb) filter which blocks any email with the "word" v14gr4 in the subject line, and you send a million spams instead of ten? Every single spam is still going to go right to my spam folder, the only difference is how much of my CPU, bandwidth, etc that you're wasting.
No, they attempt to break filters by, as this article suggests, varying their messages in various ways to get around filters -- like the v14gr4 example above, which is especially ironic, because it actually makes filters more likely to catch it -- a friend might casually mention Viagra to me, but they're not going to mention v14gr4 or c14l1s. But I think you see my point -- they try to break the filters by outsmarting them, by being clever.
The reason for the volume is, I would suspect, partly because they're relatively decentralized, but mostly because there's so many people doing it, and also because if a few do get through, again, ten of company A beats one of company B.
As for your grandmother, it sadly isn't her job -- but I get very little spam at Gmail, and I get massive amounts on my personal address (probably partly because I leave it unobfuscated on Slashdot), but it also gets filtered, and very well, by an appropriately-trained statistical filter. Nothing special, just Bogofilter. I get hundreds (maybe thousands) of spams per day, but maybe ten that are "unsure", and no false positives outside of the "unsure" group, last I checked.
That either requires tons of cheap labor or programmatically-generated templates, which implies either a template-of-temlpates (discoverable in the same way as any other template), or something much closer to random noise, which is also going to be much harder for humans to interpret -- thus much less effective at getting actual purchases, and without actual purchases, the profitability is gone.
I should clarify: I mean "physical spam" as in "junk mail", not as in the actual mystery-meat made of pork and ham.
Perhaps we should force caught spammers to keep their eyes open, not letting them sleep until they have read out loud every spam email they ever sent...the number of times they sent them.
Interesting, but I'm still partial to the way we dealt with Alan Ralsky... if I recall, he gave an interview in which he seemed entirely impartial to how much of a pain he was being to the rest of the world... the interview was featured on Slashdot, with just enough info that someone figured out his real mailing address, and shared it...
He was then signed up for every bulk mailing list in existence. He had to have literally tons of physical spam taken away from his house with trucks.
The sad part is, he didn't see the irony.
Freenet and sealand and tor and so forth type efforts..they could shut them down if they felt like it, at the major nodes.
All except Freenet. I don't need a major Freenet node to connect, I just need any Freenet node. The only way they could shut Freenet down is by blocking all but approved traffic, thus simultaneously shutting out innovation on the Internet, and still not blocking Freenet, which would then move to steganography.
Open wireless, make it a serious crime if someone does naughty things on your open wireless, people will start restricting them more and require verified logins.
Public pushback would be fairly high on this. I mean, I've suggested this before for other reasons, but unfortunately, trying to hold people responsible for what their machines do is not reasonable to attempt in a democracy, because you'd have the vast majority of the population vote you out of office immediately.
And I do wish that were otherwise, because it'd eliminate most of the spam, etc.
For example, my local library has wireless, but you must have a library card to access it, and you must show ID to get such a card.
Do they actually install software on your machine? If so, you could probably petition for that to be changed, as they are likely requiring specific OSes. If not, it can likely be trivially circumvented with MAC spoofing -- perhaps you'll need a card at first (and perhaps not), but you'll be able to easily impersonate another patron.
most of them have security cams now, even if they don't require any ID to access, could be if later on they wanted to narrow it down, they could just correlate interesting traffic with the cam feed/storage...
Leave an iPod Touch or something similar hidden in the vicinity. It can act as a repeater to you somewhere out of range, or it can be a relay point to somewhere else.
Just about as much effort as it would take to notice who is doing what else they might want to look at or restrict. Deep packet and so on.
About as effective as it currently is at blocking BitTorrent. It takes much less effort to deal with zombies, which are by definition doing something obvious to someone else -- making SMTP connections, or DOS-ing a particular address, or connecting to a given command-and-control center -- than it does to deal with peers who only need to connect to each other, with both ends of the connection deliberately trying to hide themselves.
You could easily see canonical and a lot of other linux distros not linking at all to things like DeCSS, or half the stuff that goes with mplayer,
I don't know if Ubuntu does now. I do know there's a third-party project called Medibuntu which provides them from outside the US.
I think for real world examples, in the face of opposition, perhaps look at how china keeps evolving their net access and content access restrictions, working hand in glove with the top networking manufacturers.
Even there, they haven't been entirely successful. You're right in that I wouldn't want to live in China, the way it is now, but I don't think it can be entirely successful, and I do agree with the collateral damage. What I'm hoping is that the harder they push, the more obvious that damage becomes.
Sure it can be circumvented, but it gets harder all the time for the people there to do so,
Not particularly. From what I understand, it hasn't actually changed very much qualitatively. All that changes is that China blacklists more and more pages, meaning it continues to be difficult to find a proxy.
So, we can agree to disagree, you think it won't be much different from today, I think it will shoot up and get a lot harder to be "casual" with IP issues, with a lot more busts, and a lot more media coverage and people gettin
Faith in the unprovable assertion that true DRM is impossible is simply naive.
Then I'll prove it.
DRM relies on giving the user, physically (built-in to the player) or digitally, both a key and an encrypted copy of some media. Viewing the media (playing the movie) at all requires the possibility that this key can be used to decrypt this media. The "security" of DRM relies on a savvy user not being able to figure out how to put the key and the media together.
It is security through obscurity at its finest.
It is inherently flawed because all the ingredients are there. Your only solution would be to make the player somehow tamper-proof, physically -- any good ideas for how to make something cheap, mass-produced, and somehow tamper-proof? About all I can think of is packing the components in thermite, but that'd be kind of hazardous to try to sell that to consumers, and you'd have to replace a lot of units whether or not people actually try to break them.
It's also inherently flawed because it relies on the security of individual keys. Remember 09 F9? All it takes is for one of those keys -- which you are, again, physically distributing to people who actively want to get at them -- to be leaked, and suddenly half your movies are broken.
at least to the point that ripping will be prohibitively expensive
Define "prohibitively expensive." The other flaw in DRM is assuming that if you make it "hard enough", the "average user" won't be able to crack it. The problem is, your opponent here isn't John Q. Public, it's a few very talented and very motivated pirate groups, of the sort who can afford to have their own dedicated FTP servers with gigabit (and more) bandwidth.
And they only have to crack it once.
After that, it goes from there to the newsgroups, and then to BitTorrent, and in less than 24 hours -- hell, probably less than 3 hours -- it's all over the net, and John Q. Public will fire up uTorrent and grab it from his favorite tracker.
Worst case? It's not going to cost anywhere near as much per-viewer to support a group to crack your disc as it cost you to make the movie. Short of that, I think my principle holds -- it only takes one person (or a small group) with the motivation, skills, and resources, and your movie is all over the place.
So is DRM impossible? No, but effective DRM is, unless you change your definition of "effective". Most in the game industry admit that DRM is considered "successful" if it's not cracked within the first few weeks to a month or so -- but implicit in this is the acknowledgement that any DRM they use will eventually be cracked, and that goes for console games as well.
I am not entirely opposed to people protecting their copyright, but DRM is entirely the wrong way to go about it.
It takes too long
Takes exactly as long to show a real "access denied" message as a fake one. Less time, since it doesn't have to be animated and flashing.
and your dialogue is reduced to unintelligible techno-babble.
Well again, no moreso than before. Here, read my followup comment.
Notice how the Roman empire fell.
The only reason we can backup DVDs is that the technology wasn't there yet.
No, the reason we can backup DVDs is that DRM is inherently flawed, and cannot survive, especially as long as there's a remotely free Internet.
In a few years, they will have hardware DRM integrated into our displays,
And exactly how is this different than having hardware DRM integrated into our optical drives, which DVD already has? For that matter, how's it different than HDCP, which Blu-Ray is already using -- that's right, Blu-Ray can already encrypt the signal straight through to your TV -- but Blu-Ray has also been thoroughly cracked?
DeCss and so on, is exactly what I have been saying, they *haven't* been serious about enforcement,
And I'm saying the reasons for that have more to do with the target they're after. Consider -- if they actually manage to make me remove DeCSS from my computer, that's all the more reason for me to use BitTorrent. And torrents are something they've tried to crack down on -- key word, tried.
This previous **AA "enforcement", for example, is just them getting warmed up and developing their tech to pull this off better.
And how do you know this? Never ascribe to malice...
They will keep changing it around until they get something that works on a mass scale.
Which they won't, because it isn't possible.
After that will come blacklists, and no more net connections for people anyplace.
Given the popularity of open wireless, this seems incredibly unlikely.
A lot of these repositories and so on with "infringing" warez to make your box functional with various media will find it hard to find anyplace that will host them outside of the control of the RBN.
Not terribly. Freenet exists, and so does Sealand, among others.
The wild wild west days of the net are rapidly closing,
People keep saying this, and I keep not seeing it.
the suits are going to want their money and way more control of the net, or else.
Or else what? I mean, I want a pony, but...
The problem is you end up spending 10 seconds explaining to the audience what 2 seconds of fictional computer display does.
Except that's happening already anyway. If something is only onscreen for two seconds, with no other confirmation, you're going to lose the audience.
Think about that "access denied" message. Now imagine, instead, simply zooming in on something like:
Then, whether or not the actor actually explains what's going on, they probably do something like mutter "shit" under their breath...
I mean, think about it. Even with the bright red ACCESS DENIED, you're still usually going to need some sort of exposition to explain why their access is denied, or what they're trying to access anyway.
It doesn't make the movie any more entertaining just like turning the sound off in space scenes doesn't automatically make it better.
Sound in space is similar -- it allows for much easier suspension of disbelief. I think Firefly showed it can also work very well. Granted, it's not automatic -- it can be difficult to write something realistic -- but that's not really an excuse, especially when you consider how much budget there is for effects on a Hollywood blockbuster, they couldn't hire one decent writer?
All it buys you is one less nitpick.
When anyone who is half-awake can nitpick you ("Wait, why is their sound in space? And why are 'lasers' more like little glowing darts -- and how can you have a laser sword that's only a few feet long, yet cuts through steel?"), you kind of fucked up. When the nitpick is something more along the lines of, "But I've done the math, and the Ringworld is unstable!" and all you need to do is throw in a few as-yet undiscovered elements, or handwave it as super-advanced construction, you're doing pretty well.
That's the difference between hard science fiction and fantasy. Frankly, it's much easier for me to get into something like Stardust, which doesn't even pretend to have anything to do with the real world, where you'd actually need a Rules Lawyer to even begin poking holes in it.
I could put it another way -- if computers are playing a major role, geeks are a big potential audience for you. Things like Swordfish, or The Matrix, or even as far back as Hackers -- you've got to realize that the people who would love a movie like that are people who know their way around technology. And then you piss off your fanbase by making Unix some sort of flying-through-a-city-with-lightning-bolts interface, and a virus is some sort of 3D acid-trippy visual, and some random dude can crack 128-bit encryption in under a minute by slamming on a keyboard...
I mean, come on. It's like making a movie about the life of Jesus and filling it with random sex and nudity. It's like if Slumdog Millionaire filmed the slums in a Chicago suburb. It's like if Disney bought Devo and replaced them with some 12-year-olds... oh wait, that happened.
Even in an action movie, it's annoying. Unfortunately, since I'll still watch a good movie with bad computers, it's likely to continue...
Or like Firewall, yes. At least, I think I saw iptables being used in Firewall, but I can't find a screenshot of it...
Problem #1: I don't know about everyone else, but I am in favor of Mozilla promoting an open, free, and sane video standard. I just wish they would do that while also giving their users choice by supporting proprietary codecs through mechanisms which have been set up specifically for this purpose.
That is: I have no problem with Mozilla supporting Theora. I have no problem with them promoting it, or even providing a little notice on pages that use other codecs. I have a very big problem with them refusing to support anything else, even through plugins.
Fortunately, that particular bit of insanity seems to have passed -- it looks as though Firefox will support GStreamer on Linux, so we'll get h.264 support if we want.
Problem #2: I might Mozilla doing this if Theora was a stupidly-obvious choice. An example of a stupidly-obvious choice is PNG -- there is no rational reason to choose GIF instead of PNG for any still image. Another example is FLAC -- if you've got the space, and you're looking for a lossless format, FLAC is the obvious choice, and it's not going to be terribly painful for anyone to convert from, say, Apple Lossless to FLAC.
But it's not. Theora is catching up, but is still measurably and visibly behind h.264 in every comparison I've seen, including comparisons done by Theora proponents and Theora developers. So far, it appears it would cost Google more than 5 million in extra storage space and bandwidth to store Theora files instead of h.264 files -- and that's ignoring the additional cost of transcoding all these videos again, adding a generational loss to the ones people managed to upload in a format YouTube didn't feel the need to transcode at all.
And the only thing standing in the way of h.264 being an open standard is legal issues. That means this is all going to be moot in, what, 10 years? 15 at the most. Technologically, we understand it, we have many free software implementations of it, and it's already an open standard anywhere software patents aren't enforced.
These problems aren't addressed by your simple explanation -- perhaps I should call it a simplistic explanation. If you can make Theora (or Dirac) better than h.264 in every way, then I will support it, I'll participate in letter-writing campaigns to YouTube, and so on. But as it stands, you're letting the lawyers force you into adopting worse technology, and you're taking one of the icons of user freedom, Firefox, and severely limiting users' freedom in that way. That's where we have a problem.
It looks as though they're finally accepting this. Is that true?
Yay for technical merit beating political bullshit, then! Next up: DirectShow on Windows and QuickTime on OS X? Please?
As soon as ACTA [wikipedia.org] is made law all over, this "just download the naughty bits" that go to make your fav browser/OS/player "just work" for your listening and viewing pleasure will be tracked and people will start getting notices that this might result in getting their connection turned off, or worse, if they are distributing or facilitating the "naughty bits", perhaps charged with "enabling" or some other lawspeak.
It's been over a decade since DeCSS was released. If they haven't already, I very much doubt anyone will track down individual Linux users who downloaded x264.
Short of that, Windows and OS X both have h.264 built-in, and there are legal ways of getting the codecs for Linux -- nothing "naughty" about it. The only problem is that for ideological reasons, Mozilla refuses to support these, even though the most users already have licensed codecs for just this purpose.
"man, this sucks, a fifty grand fine! I ain't touching that stuff. I'll have to use the officially approved browser/OS/Player"
I would think that would also rapidly transition to many websites supporting Theora instead, if it came to it. But again, this hasn't happened, and you're applying an absurd amount of slippery-slope fallacy here.
Ya, some will say they can stay pure and just use "hooks" for this or that in the software to allow these naughty bits to work..those moneysuits see billions that they ain't got and billions that they do want, the politicians see their cut coming, and this duality will soon be dictating to the cops and prosecutors...
...at which point, it won't matter who won this battle right here. They'll just declare Theora to be evil and un-american, or they'll come up with some bullshit submarine patent (Apple's excuse for not supporting it) and the judges will allow it.
You have to have some faith in the system, otherwise you may as well give up now and just ignore the law. And if you're going to do that, I don't see why you give a rat's ass about free codecs -- x264 works pretty well.
everything that matters exists and acts because it serves the plot.
Everything that matters, right.
So what would be the problem with showing an actual ssh "access denied" or "someone is doing something nasty" message? Or with using real security-related tools like netcat and iptables? I mean, sure, most of the screen is going to be irrelevant, but I'm sure the actors are going to be able to tell you what's going on, and it's still throwing in a bunch of "red herrings" or "generic extras" in the UI, still everything that matters serves the plot.
There were at least two occasions, where God personally testified from heaven to three or more witnesses, that Jesus is the son of God.
So we've also got a disembodied voice, which puts them back, roughly, on the same level as Paul.
The Gospel of Luke for example was written to a guy named Theophilus.
Where's your citation for this?
No, of course not, because God never contradicts himself. He said in his Word, the 10 Commandments, "thou shalt not commit murder".
Yet he commanded the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites. He also commanded Abraham to kill his son. Even within the pages of the Bible, he frequently contradicts himself.
Yes you are, you're trying to establish that the Gospels are false
No, I'm not. You have attempted to establish that they are true, and I have expressed skepticism.
Do you not understand the difference between a lack of belief and a positive belief to the contrary? Must I explain this to you in every conversation we have?
Are you really that damned slow?
I and millions of Christians assert that these stories are true history.
Millions of Muslims assert that they are false.
Historians and courts of law assume truth.
You've clearly gotten the rules of law mixed up. I suggest you ask a few other sources, rather than only a clearly biased one like Lee Strobel.
Historians, as a rule, are capable of distinguishing what is meant as a story of fact versus a myth. This is why other "histories" are not often assumed to be true either, such as the Hopi story of humans climbing out of the Earth, or the Hindu story of Lord Rama defeating Ravana...
Is your goal really to convince me that you are right about the legal system, or is it to convince me that you're right about the existence of God?
Neither. My goal is to persuade you to diligently pursue the truth of this matter...
...then why continue to hammer on this point of a court of law, and your argument ad-populum, when you know I see both as fallacious? Why not search for an argument which is actually sound?
You could try something like this in your quest for truth: "Dear God I am not even sure at this point whether you exist....
Aside from the absurdity of asking an imaginary being whether or not he exists -- can you say you've done the same for Zeus or Mithra? -- you assume that I haven't tried something like this.
I have occasionally asked God for some sort of a sign. I've never been given one, so I've stopped asking.
Neither I or any other human being can convince you of the truth of God in the Bible.
Why do you think that is so? Human beings can convince me of many unbelievable things, and I suspect it was first a human who convinced you of your faith.
There may be elements of truth,
Stop dancing around my questions. Every story has "elements of truth" -- the question wasn't whether it's truthy, but whether it's true. Do you believe it to be true or not?
but the question I would ask is this: is homer or whoever wrote this poem an eyewitness to all this? Was he actually there? Did he even talk to eyewitnesses?
Given the Gospel authors do not name themselves, it seems Homer could be as much an eyewitness -- it's not explicit either, but doesn't it seem just as plausible that Homer could've spoken with Odysseus? And Odysseus was a king, certainly well-respected, one whose word would be trusted.
However, you try to claim two things -- that documents are implicitly assumed to be true, and that eyewitnesses are implicitly trusted. However, we aren't dealing with eyewitnesses (unless you can introduce me to John or Peter while I'm alive), we
Why doesn't food need to be open?
Because it doesn't prevent someone else from making food.
It does, however, prevent someone else from making Pepsi.
The web needs to be open. Trademarks do not. That's why your Cola analogy sucks.
It's not only a trademark, but the formula itself. The web keeps us informed; food keeps us fed, and literally is us. Why doesn't food need to be open?
Quality hardly matters at all. Just look at how VHS won over BetaMax, how Super CD never took off,
Yes, you keep repeating this. And yet, while adoption has been slow, we do have Blu-Ray, HDTV in general, and 1080p on YouTube -- and we also have Google themselves saying Theora isn't usable for exactly the same bitrate issues.
You are handwaving away a real problem by saying it "doesn't matter", and then wondering why people continue to choose proprietary codecs -- and will continue to do so, until open codecs improve. Maybe Dirac?
There's a difference between the web and a soft drink.
Yes, that's why it's called an analogy. Or why is it that you don't think this is a good analogy?
ask Microsoft to resurrect their old Microsoft Network.
MSN is alive and well, last I checked, though probably not in the form you're thinking of.
I said "a lot of the time".
And I'm asking you to clarify which times.
It only needs to be good enough.
Unless there's something better -- and again, you need real numbers to back up your claim that the licensing costs are worse than additional storage and bandwidth.
Because courts of law is where evidence, including written depositions are methodically considered.
They are far from the only place.
In legal terms, the Gospels are written depositions and not hearsay. They are recorded testimonies of eyewitnesses who heard and saw what they wrote about. Hearsay by definition is nothing more than unsubstantiated rumor.
Well, you've used some fancy legal terminology there -- "written deposition" -- but you've also shown a clear lack of understanding of what hearsay is:
Hearsay is information gathered by one person from another concerning some event, condition, or thing of which the first person had no direct experience.
So, for example, even supposing the Gospels were penned directly by people who actually saw and heard Christ, they have only his word that he's the Son of God, and not, say, a demon. Thus, that part alone is by definition hearsay.
As for the Gospels themselves, I would hope a "written deposition" would have, at the very least, a signature. We don't have that -- nowhere within any of the Gospels does the Gospel author name himself.
I would apply more rigorous standards here, however. Consider the eyewitness testimony of this woman. Granted, even if it were accurate, it would not be sufficient; our legal system does not allow murder simply because God said so.
But the more important question is, do you believe her?
If you do not have any witnesses or other admissible evidence, such as depositions, that is writings of other eyewitnesses, you have no case.
You are correct -- I have no case.
That is because I am not trying to establish something -- you are. The burden is, and always has been, on you.
Suppose I said you were right about the rules of evidence. Would that make you happy? Is your goal really to convince me that you are right about the legal system, or is it to convince me that you're right about the existence of God?
If it's the latter, you have a lot of work to do, work you've been avoiding.
A court as well as historians will assume the statements in the written documents are true.
Do you assume the Illiad is true?
I don't either, but that does not make by itself the written depositions of the eyewitnesses untrue.
Then why is it that when people claim to hear voices, we lock them up, instead of pondering whether or not they might actually be hearing something? Why is it that if someone today said "I am the son of God," or "I saw a UFO the other day," we tend to assume that there is a chemical imbalance in their brain, rather than that what they said is true?
Or are you saying that we should open the gates of the asylums and assume that everything everyone ever said is true, no matter how insane they are?
The more I study the Bible, the more I come to the conclusion of its truth and divine authorship.
What is divine about condoning slavery, rape, forced marriage, stoning, genocide, mutilation of the dead (including genital mutilation), genital mutilation of infants, religious intolerance (including stoning any relatives who worship another god), vengeance, and wholesale, wanton destruction?
A sheep that has wandered willingly and purposefully away from the shepherd is by definition evil. Anyone who will purposefully not humble himself under the rightful rulership of Almighty God is evil. This leaves you out, because presumably you are still willing to submit to truth WHEN you find it.
Then why does it not also apply to the same people mentioned in that bible verse? In fact, why am I not included? If I do find "truth", certainly, I will have to accept it,
The fact is that most people only need something that's "good enough".
We were originally talking about Google, and I've identified at least a few quality levels for which Theora makes less than no sense.
Have some chipset designs for me?
No, but as I said, it would be trivial to do it.
Then do it.
I had to learn the hard way, but you don't get to say something is "trivial" until after the fact.
And no license fees of course.
You keep hammering this point, and it's a good point, but how important is it, really? In particular, how do the license fees stack up against the cost of hiring a developer to design Vorbis or Theora hardware?
they'll be looking for stuff that's already mass-produced and has a fair amount of competition.
That will be expensive for them. It will be cheaper to go for Theora.
Please, provide some numbers. I'm very skeptical of this assertion, but you don't back it up at all.
Again: These things are already mass-produced in a market with a fair amount of competition. Both of these things drive prices way down, and that's ignoring the cost of R&D. Usually R&D vs licensing is no contest, unless there's something very wrong with what you're going to license.
Quick question: Do you drink OpenCola? If not, why not? Especially, if you drink Pepsi, why do you? Think about how much you pay for a "license" of Pepsi (or Coke, etc) versus OpenCola ingredients.
That won't be noticeable to most people,
First of all: Obviously, Google thinks it's noticeable. You don't think they've done their research when selecting the bitrate for h.264? If a drop in quality for the same amount of space/bandwidth really "wouldn't be noticeable", why wouldn't they drop quality, use h.264, and save some space/bandwidth?
Second: On which stream are we talking about? Are you going to claim that Theora is "good enough" for everything from mobile devices on up to 1080p?
Picture quality is one of the last things people are looking for.
That depends very much which "people" we're talking about -- and again, this is your opinion versus Google's, and Google is rolling out 1080p. After all...
Quality doesn't matter a lot of the time,
If quality really doesn't matter, why is Google rolling out 1080p?
If quality does matter "sometimes", why would Google use Theora on some videos, and h.264 on others? It'd have to be enough to drop them down below the license cap, which seems unlikely.
No, if this were tried in a court of law, the burden of proof would be on you.
Why are you so enamored with the rules in a court of law? This is not a course of law, and I am not interested in getting into all of the legal reasons this is wrong. As I've said, Lee Strobel has been answered. Here you go:
Here is an example of Strobel missing a basic concept in evidence law: He never addresses the issue of hearsay. Hearsay is an out of court statement offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted. Subject to many exceptions, hearsay is generally inadmissible as evidence. If the gospels are used to prove the truth of its statements, then they are technically hearsay. If they do not fall under a recognized exception, then the statements would be inadmissible. On the whole (I am not going to go line-by-line here), the gospel statements do not qualify under any of the recognized exceptions.
Chapter 2 is entitled "Testing the Eyewitness Evidence," yet he never once mentions the hearsay problem or that the eyewitness accounts are that of unavailable witnesses whose statements would be inadmissible in court because the declarants could not be cross-examined.
The same would apply to Paul and Damascus:
What evidence can you bring forth that this is so? Were those that were with him on drugs also?
Looks like you are shifting the burden of proof again -- so, what is your evidence that he wasn't, or that he wasn't surrounded by men on drugs? All of this, again, assuming the veracity of the document itself, which I don't accept either.
Why would I start out by doubting this? Because it is an extraordinary claim -- I don't know about you, but I don't often hear disembodied voices, and people who do are generally locked up. When a group of people tells me they saw something (like a UFO), I have to wonder where they all got the idea, but it doesn't mean I immediately believe in aliens.
Name someone from that time who is as well known to as many people as Jesus Christ or the apostle Paul.
Nope, I'm out of patience for this strange ad-populum. Know what even more people believe in? Violence! Surely, there must be something to it...
I think the biblical definition of evil and yours are different. What, in your estimation is the essence of evil?
I don't think I have to provide one, since you indeed agreed with me. You said:
Of course they are not evil, but lost, like sheep in the wilderness.
Either retract that statement, or admit the Bible has a flaw. You really don't have a third option there.
Yes, it does in a big way, especially for those who have no hope of eternal life.
The point is that humans invented the idea of eternal life because they don't like the thought of dying.
Of course, most people haven't thought it through -- do you really want to live forever? How long would it be before you'd watched every movie, read every book, and thought every thought you could possibly think? And then what?
And would it still be you? Think about yourself when you were five years old. Was that really you? Chances are, not a single atom of your body is the same, and your personality is very likely quite different, you don't play with the same toys, you read very different books (assuming you were reading at five)... On what basis do you call yourself the same person now that you were then? Wouldn't it be fair to say you're a changed person?
But that wasn't that long ago, relative to eternity. A thousand years from now, ten thousand, eighty billion, will you still in any way be the same person?
If you aren't, what's the point, really, of wanting eternal life, since it won't be you living it? If you are the same person, don't you think that'd get really boring a