The problem is that the rest of the world uses the wall clock, and one has to go to work, school, etc on that schedule. So the adjustment from the rest-of-the-world clock to the sunrise-sunset clock is exceedingly jarring by DST.
As to weather [sic] rabbis are frequently described as charismatic, or whether there are some who exert a controlling influence over the thoughts of their congregation I can not say. I'm pretty sure there are more than a few extremist Jewish sects (extremist in the opinions of the majority of Jews I suppose) led by their own extreme rabbis and these could probably fit the bill as far as a cult is concerned.
So you admit to speculating with no actual knowledge of the situation? You're "pretty sure"? "probably"? That's a pretty low proof standard for libeling the belief system of a large number of people, no?
What is a judeo-christian-islamic god if not this? Yes it does say 'personal quality', but I think that has more to do with syntax than semantics. Whether or not the god is actively appearing to people doesn't matter if it's purported words are being read every day by millions and used as the basis for their lives.
You are mistaken: the "personal quality" is not just syntax. There is a reason that "charismatic" is not used to describe the Abrahamic God. "Charisma" is a human attribute, and while many use antropomorhpisms when discussing God, those are at most considered metaphorical, and thus don't fit the bill for the requirement of "cult."
Come on - if you actually want to discuss your lack of belief, that's fine. We can disagree all we want, but there's no reason not to be civil.
Onto brainwaishing - the crux of the matter for me is whether active questioning of the subject matter is encouraged. That is, whether the subject is being taught dogmatically or not. I've never attended a religious class or church where anything is questioned. Indeed questioning is actively discouraged from my experience. You can't call that education and you certainly can call it brainwashing, especially if the subject matter relates to ethics and ideology. When those subjects are being taught (i.e. education) everything is questioned, every idea examined. In a religious setting the very opposite is the norm: ideas and beliefs are presented as facts, to question them - blasphemy. That, to me, is brainwashing.
So exactly which seminary did you attend? I can tell you conclusively that no Jewish seminary or instructional method forbids questions. In fact, at the Seder which started this conversation, there is even a section called "the Four Questions" which was included to forstall the unlikely possibility that there not be any questions asked over the course of the night.
The entire Talmud, which is the crux of Jewish Law, is recordings of the great Rabbis of a 400 year period arguing with each other, and questioning all of the prior legal and Biblical texts.
Your statement shows a tremendous ignorance of what you speak. In the words of Hillel the Elder, "Go and learn."
My response to that is that I neither try to offend nor shirk from it. I say precisely what I think and use the words which reflect it.
I assume by this that you are young. As you age, you'll learn the value of tact, which is the art of choosing words carefully. As an example of tact, try this on for size:
Here's your original comment:
What a shame you'll find it harder to brainwash your youngsters. If you choose to base your life on a bunch of ancient superstitious rituals then you can hardly complain about the modern world not working around them as it progresses.
Here's a tactfully redacted version:
I don't have much sympathy for religious views with regard to public policy. If you choose to be religious, you can hardly complain about the modern world not accomodating you as it progresses
Now, both of those express pretty much the same actual content. One is
Why not just go in to work earlier if you want daylight after work?
I called it worthless because much garbage science is used to justify it. The biggest reason not to use DST is the increase in auto accidents in the morning.
Even if we went to DST year-round (if it's good for these months, it should be good for those, right?), that would be better than the back-and-forth we have now. At least that way, people's internal clocks would match what the one on the wall said...
That's actually an interesting problem: in short, the solution ends up as "use the calculations from the nearest place which has nightfall." If one is in orbit or something like that, the answer ends up being "use Jerusalem time"
The only time of year when the problem is acutely felt is Passover, due to the particular structure of the Seder. For the rest of the year, people's internal clocks are reasonably well-set and used to it.
Most religions educate their followers that their own religion is the only true religion and that all the others are false. They have different ways to express how these believers in other gods should be treated, but generally those are not very positive.
Study some more religion. The plurality of the world's religious people are either Hindu or Buddhist, and neither of those belief systems make any claim toward exclusivity.
Judaism, which was of course the subject of this thread, likewise makes no claim on being the only true religion. It does make the claim of being the only true and correct religion for Jews, but that's a horse of a different colour, and thus does not fit into your argument.
Continuing onward, after Vatican II, the Catholic Church, representing the plurality (if not outright majority) of the world's Christians) declared that (paraphrased) non-Christians who are decent people have a place in heaven - thus their beliefs are not entirely false.
Assuming that those statements are all true, there are only two ways out:
- all religions are false - all religions but one are false.
As we don't want to discriminate against large groups of inhabitants of the world, the safest bet is that all religions are false. Q.E.D.
Well, the premeses weren't so solid, so I can forgive the mistaken conclusions. However, even if your premeses had been correct, your conclusion would not have been: you haven't differentiated between the concept of having a religion and the particular theology of the religion.
Yehudah Ha-Levi used something similar to your argument in his seminal work Kuzari, where a king listed to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars, and concluded by what amounted to set theory that only Judaism could be true.
The argument you made could be restated thus:
Most people believe the value of pi to be between 3 and 4, and believe that there is only one value of pi, and that all other values are wrong. Because they cannot agree on the value of pi, there must not be a value.
"QED" is a bit overstated for a non-proof: what exactly was demonstrandum here?
Passover in 2002 started at 7:14 (ST) on April 3rd. Passover in 2003 started at 8:28 (DST) on April 17th.
It's about 2 hours from the start of the holiday to the eating part, so it's the difference between eating dinner in the 9 o'clock hour, and eating dinner in the 10 o'clock hour.
It's funny - it would be nice to have the extra hour in the dead of winter (when nightfall is around 4:30), but once we're into spring, it's not as valuable, and it gets less valuable the further we go into the year.
Oh well - I suspect we can't fight city hall on this one.:(
you wrote "I consider all religions to be completely and obviously false, therefore all religions are cults."
The flaw in your reasoning is readily apparent: just because you can't or won't understand something doesn't mean that it's false.
Point two is the charismatic religious leader: while many Christian and Islamic denominations have charismatic leaders, very few Rabbis are described as charismatic. Further, Rabbi = "teacher" i.e. someone who has studied a lot about Jewish law, ritual, and philosophy. Not an intercessor before God, not someone who is especially holy, or anything of the sort.
Let's return to the dictionary, shall we?
charisma 1. A rare personal quality attributed to leaders who arouse fervent popular devotion and enthusiasm.
2. Personal magnetism or charm: a television news program famed for the charisma of its anchors.
3. (Christianity). An extraordinary power, such as the ability to perform miracles, granted by the Holy Spirit.
Clearly, the word "charismatic" is not meant to apply to God.
Now, "brainwashing"... sheesh... what exactly would you consider the difference between "brainwashing" and "educating"? Whether the subject of the education is one of which you approve, I presume. Feel free to correct me if you have a more precise definition, although it sounds like you're using malapropisms merely to attempt to offend.
Please, if you're going to play the part of the angry Athiest (doesn't that get old after a while?), there are arguments against various and sundry religious beliefs which don't require torturing the English language. Feel free to try them. I'll assume you've read Russell's Why I am not a Christian? His arguments, while easily refuted, are civil and the model of appropriate use of language and rhetoric.
Otherwise it's just trolling...
I find it interesting that your signature is from PKD's Valis - are you at all familiar with his theology?
Well, that's the solution people are stuck with.:/
If DST was actually worth something scientifically, that would be one thing - but it's been shown that the energy offset you save in the afternoon is paid for by increased numbers of auto accidents in the morning darkness. sigh.
You might find that being polite is a more effective communication approach than being rude.
Further, may I recommend rechecking your definitions? Neither "brainwash" nor "cult" were the words you were looking for. "Superstition" is loaded and insulting, but not not complete malapropisms like the other two. You'll find that you'll be taken more seriously if you use words correctly.
Finally, DST is a worthless idea, propped up with erroneous pseudoscience. I wouldn't necessarily care about its inherent worthlessness, however, were it not to impinge upon my ability to pursue happiness.
DST is already bad enough from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, because we our holidays and sabbaths start at nightfall, and this makes "night" exceedingly late for much of the year.
The specific case which shows the problem is the Passover Seder, which has to begin after nightfall, and there's about 2 hours of stuff before eating. Right now, about half the time, Passover falls during ST, and starts at a reasonable hour. With this change, it'll be much harder to keep children up to participate.:(
1) The OSI model has nothing whatsoever to say about how Windows printer adds work. Trust me on this one. Why do you think that the OSI model implies that an IP printer should be considered "local" as opposed to "network"?
2) changing the IP address is a proxy for doing everything else: Windows BY DEFAULT prefers to use NetBIOS to IP. The ad-hoc filesharing which was mentioned earlier in the thread (right click, share this folder): what is that based on?
3) No, I'm not trying to suggest that manually editing text files is easier than a "few mouse clicks." However, consider the paradigm: in Unix, EVERYTHING is manually editing obscure text files. In Windows, some things are really easy, and other things require much more arcane knowledge.
Another thing to consider - the process for adding an IP printer hasn't changed much since windows 95, right? (I don't remember my 3.1 anymore...) Would you say that windows 95 was "built with IP in mind," or was IP "grafted on"? Ditto for NT.
Given that the current windows implementations are basically NT with a 98 frontend, it's not surprising that the IP services are still so cumbersome. Again, I repeat my claim that IP on windows is in the Mac OS 8 realm: it works, but it's clunky, and it was treated as an afterthought when the OS was written.
What it does prevent is people poking around in their OS and starting unnessecary services because they sound cool, despite them not having any idea what they are doing. Or for that matter, having the software sitting around wasting disk space on every computer just waiting for some trojan or virus to turn it on. Can you imagine the mess we would be in if every Windows computer came with IIS and some SSH equilivant ready to go with the default install? Even most Linux distros don't install a web server and ftp server by default (though most do install SSH and some start the service by default).
huh?
first, most linux distros DO include Apache, and given that the openssh package which comes on these distros includes sftp and scp, they do include this.
Second, the "mess" we'd be in has nothing to do with those tools, rather the inherent insecurity of Windows: consider that every mac ships with these tools "out of the box" today, and you don't hear about widespread virus/trojan problems on macs, do you?
Apache, SSHD, SFTPD and the other services are not exactly big:/home/david# ls -la/usr/sbin/sshd -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 288408 Jul 29 2004/usr/sbin/sshd
so the complaint about wasting disk space is a red herring.
Finally, as to your point about not having people poking around in their OS, well, having services easy to enable and disable will make it easier for people enable only what they need right then, because it's not a tremendous amount of effort to disable/reenable the services.
Not going to be a big hassle to install Apache32 indeed! why not just include it out of the box like all of the other OS vendors do?
Which part of IP do you think is "grafted on" and why ?
Ask yourself what the process is for changing the IP address of a windows machine.
Then look at the process for changing the IP address for a Linux/Unix/Mac machine.
Look at the process for adding an IP printer vs. that of a NetBIOS printer.
There are lots of examples, Windows just wasn't built with IP in mind - that's not the end of the world, but it shows through in the complexity of the interface.
And what happened to "ad-hoc" networking? If I have a laptop in a room, I want to be able to do quick-n-dirty filesharing/collaboration whether or not I've got my windows CD available.
Also, I've got a bunch of machines at home - how exactly do I set up an encrypted login process to my windows box?
My macs have ssh installed by default, and access just requires a checkbox.
My basic point is not that all of these things are impossible on Windows, rather that they require effort to set them up.
The subjects are clearly related: windows networking configurations are profoundly non-obvious. In a lot of ways, it's similar to pre OSX Mac networking, which is to say that it's non-IP based, with IP grafted on. That there is one task which requires fewer clicks in Windows is not surprising, but let me give you the corresponding Mac example: try turning sharing OFF if someone has enabled some random folders...
Hopefully the next windows version will treat IP networking like it's not some bastard child...
well, maybe my ignorance of the subject comes from only using corporate windows builds, rather than owning the darn thing myself; however, don't you think that's a bit more rigamarole to have to go through than just checking a box on an obvious settings tab?
7. Intelligent file sharing with permissions; in windows you have to go through hell to get this working.
Eh? I've found exactly the opposite IFF we're talking about networking the same machines. Different machines, all platforms have quirks, even Samba under Linux.
8. System Preferences application... Try getting windows to run an FTP server, or an HTTP server, or an SSH server, or...:-) All with two clicks!
Click on Services. Click on the Service you want to start. Done.
I now see one of the differences - you're comparing a Windows SERVER to a Mac DESKTOP: The "Services" of which you speak aren't available on my win2k laptop (work provided), but I've seen them on win2k SERVER (or Server Advanced) builds.
getting file sharing to work on a windows desktop is a non-trivial PITA: look at the process you have to go through to add an IP printer, and you'll see what I mean (for Heaven's sake, why is an IP Printer a "local" device?)
Some of the other points you make are legit, and some aren't, but one of the primary differences between M$ and AAPL is that the desktop variety OSX includes a lot more "server" features out of the box.
I generally found that the geeky girls weren't too interested in me - I eventually met and married a very smart woman who's not in the least geeky (unless liking "Six Feet Under" counts...) but she's my best friend, and she puts up with my bad case of nerdiness
I've got an album on CDBaby - it's (plug) The Sound and the Furry, and I can attest that artists set the prices of their albums there. In general terms, CDBaby takes about $4 per full-length album, and generally they're about $1-2 each to produce in not-huge quantities, so I wouldn't expect prices to ever be below $8, and $10 seems reasonable to me.
Even if you could photocopy onto parchament (2'x3' sections of animal skin), doing so would make the Sefer (scroll) unfit for use in a public synagogue service.
The $50K value is for a new one. People pay less for older or damaged ones, and for the same reason that people will try to pay $300 for a "brand new iMac G5" you'll get people who will pay $20K for a Sefer of unknown provenance...:(
" Every so often, they find a letter that's chipped off a bit (the ink is the worst culprit), and it has to be taken and repaired.
Can you enlighten me as to the type of ink this is that chips? Does it act more like a paint than a dye? What kind of material can a Torah be made of?
I can't tell you the composition of the ink ('cause I don't know it, it's not a secret or anything), but it does act more like a paint.
The scolls themselves are made of sections of parchament, i.e skin from a kosher animal (cow, sheep, etc) which has been specially treated and scraped on one side. The Sofer (Scribe) has to draw lines to serve as letter guides, and then fill in the letters, in order, in a particular font called Ashirit (lit. "Assyrian," although the history of how that Hebrew font came to be called that is long and complicated).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, right. :)
The problem is that the rest of the world uses the wall clock, and one has to go to work, school, etc on that schedule. So the adjustment from the rest-of-the-world clock to the sunrise-sunset clock is exceedingly jarring by DST.
-David
So you admit to speculating with no actual knowledge of the situation? You're "pretty sure"? "probably"? That's a pretty low proof standard for libeling the belief system of a large number of people, no?
You are mistaken: the "personal quality" is not just syntax. There is a reason that "charismatic" is not used to describe the Abrahamic God. "Charisma" is a human attribute, and while many use antropomorhpisms when discussing God, those are at most considered metaphorical, and thus don't fit the bill for the requirement of "cult."
Come on - if you actually want to discuss your lack of belief, that's fine. We can disagree all we want, but there's no reason not to be civil.
So exactly which seminary did you attend? I can tell you conclusively that no Jewish seminary or instructional method forbids questions. In fact, at the Seder which started this conversation, there is even a section called "the Four Questions" which was included to forstall the unlikely possibility that there not be any questions asked over the course of the night.
The entire Talmud, which is the crux of Jewish Law, is recordings of the great Rabbis of a 400 year period arguing with each other, and questioning all of the prior legal and Biblical texts.
Your statement shows a tremendous ignorance of what you speak. In the words of Hillel the Elder, "Go and learn."
I assume by this that you are young. As you age, you'll learn the value of tact, which is the art of choosing words carefully. As an example of tact, try this on for size:
Here's your original comment:
Here's a tactfully redacted version:
Now, both of those express pretty much the same actual content. One is
Why not just go in to work earlier if you want daylight after work?
I called it worthless because much garbage science is used to justify it. The biggest reason not to use DST is the increase in auto accidents in the morning.
Even if we went to DST year-round (if it's good for these months, it should be good for those, right?), that would be better than the back-and-forth we have now. At least that way, people's internal clocks would match what the one on the wall said...
That's actually an interesting problem: in short, the solution ends up as "use the calculations from the nearest place which has nightfall." If one is in orbit or something like that, the answer ends up being "use Jerusalem time"
The only time of year when the problem is acutely felt is Passover, due to the particular structure of the Seder. For the rest of the year, people's internal clocks are reasonably well-set and used to it.
Study some more religion. The plurality of the world's religious people are either Hindu or Buddhist, and neither of those belief systems make any claim toward exclusivity.
Judaism, which was of course the subject of this thread, likewise makes no claim on being the only true religion. It does make the claim of being the only true and correct religion for Jews, but that's a horse of a different colour, and thus does not fit into your argument.
Continuing onward, after Vatican II, the Catholic Church, representing the plurality (if not outright majority) of the world's Christians) declared that (paraphrased) non-Christians who are decent people have a place in heaven - thus their beliefs are not entirely false.
Well, the premeses weren't so solid, so I can forgive the mistaken conclusions. However, even if your premeses had been correct, your conclusion would not have been: you haven't differentiated between the concept of having a religion and the particular theology of the religion.
Yehudah Ha-Levi used something similar to your argument in his seminal work Kuzari, where a king listed to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars, and concluded by what amounted to set theory that only Judaism could be true.
The argument you made could be restated thus:
Most people believe the value of pi to be between 3 and 4, and believe that there is only one value of pi, and that all other values are wrong.
Because they cannot agree on the value of pi, there must not be a value.
"QED" is a bit overstated for a non-proof: what exactly was demonstrandum here?
-David
Passover in 2002 started at 7:14 (ST) on April 3rd.
Passover in 2003 started at 8:28 (DST) on April 17th.
It's about 2 hours from the start of the holiday to the eating part, so it's the difference between eating dinner in the 9 o'clock hour, and eating dinner in the 10 o'clock hour.
It's funny - it would be nice to have the extra hour in the dead of winter (when nightfall is around 4:30), but once we're into spring, it's not as valuable, and it gets less valuable the further we go into the year.
:(
Oh well - I suspect we can't fight city hall on this one.
The definition says "generally considered"
you wrote "I consider all religions to be completely and obviously false, therefore all religions are cults."
The flaw in your reasoning is readily apparent: just because you can't or won't understand something doesn't mean that it's false.
Point two is the charismatic religious leader: while many Christian and Islamic denominations have charismatic leaders, very few Rabbis are described as charismatic. Further, Rabbi = "teacher" i.e. someone who has studied a lot about Jewish law, ritual, and philosophy. Not an intercessor before God, not someone who is especially holy, or anything of the sort.
Let's return to the dictionary, shall we?
charisma 1. A rare personal quality attributed to leaders who arouse fervent popular devotion and enthusiasm.
2. Personal magnetism or charm: a television news program famed for the charisma of its anchors.
3. (Christianity). An extraordinary power, such as the ability to perform miracles, granted by the Holy Spirit.
Clearly, the word "charismatic" is not meant to apply to God.
Now, "brainwashing"... sheesh... what exactly would you consider the difference between "brainwashing" and "educating"? Whether the subject of the education is one of which you approve, I presume. Feel free to correct me if you have a more precise definition, although it sounds like you're using malapropisms merely to attempt to offend.
Please, if you're going to play the part of the angry Athiest (doesn't that get old after a while?), there are arguments against various and sundry religious beliefs which don't require torturing the English language. Feel free to try them. I'll assume you've read Russell's Why I am not a Christian? His arguments, while easily refuted, are civil and the model of appropriate use of language and rhetoric.
Otherwise it's just trolling...
I find it interesting that your signature is from PKD's Valis - are you at all familiar with his theology?
Well, that's the solution people are stuck with. :/
If DST was actually worth something scientifically, that would be one thing - but it's been shown that the energy offset you save in the afternoon is paid for by increased numbers of auto accidents in the morning darkness. sigh.
You might find that being polite is a more effective communication approach than being rude.
Further, may I recommend rechecking your definitions? Neither "brainwash" nor "cult" were the words you were looking for. "Superstition" is loaded and insulting, but not not complete malapropisms like the other two. You'll find that you'll be taken more seriously if you use words correctly.
Finally, DST is a worthless idea, propped up with erroneous pseudoscience. I wouldn't necessarily care about its inherent worthlessness, however, were it not to impinge upon my ability to pursue happiness.
DST is already bad enough from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, because we our holidays and sabbaths start at nightfall, and this makes "night" exceedingly late for much of the year.
:(
The specific case which shows the problem is the Passover Seder, which has to begin after nightfall, and there's about 2 hours of stuff before eating. Right now, about half the time, Passover falls during ST, and starts at a reasonable hour. With this change, it'll be much harder to keep children up to participate.
-David Barak
I've owned (in order):
an Apple ][ e
a mac SE
a Performa 650
a UMAX 500e
a G4 cube (still using)
a G3 iBook (went the way of a bad HD)
a G4 Powerbook (still using)
I was going to get a dual-G5 to replace the cube, but I think I'll wait for these smokin Intel chips...
1) The OSI model has nothing whatsoever to say about how Windows printer adds work. Trust me on this one. Why do you think that the OSI model implies that an IP printer should be considered "local" as opposed to "network"?
2) changing the IP address is a proxy for doing everything else: Windows BY DEFAULT prefers to use NetBIOS to IP. The ad-hoc filesharing which was mentioned earlier in the thread (right click, share this folder): what is that based on?
3) No, I'm not trying to suggest that manually editing text files is easier than a "few mouse clicks." However, consider the paradigm: in Unix, EVERYTHING is manually editing obscure text files.
In Windows, some things are really easy, and other things require much more arcane knowledge.
Another thing to consider - the process for adding an IP printer hasn't changed much since windows 95, right? (I don't remember my 3.1 anymore...)
Would you say that windows 95 was "built with IP in mind," or was IP "grafted on"?
Ditto for NT.
Given that the current windows implementations are basically NT with a 98 frontend, it's not surprising that the IP services are still so cumbersome. Again, I repeat my claim that IP on windows is in the Mac OS 8 realm: it works, but it's clunky, and it was treated as an afterthought when the OS was written.
-David
huh?
first, most linux distros DO include Apache, and given that the openssh package which comes on these distros includes sftp and scp, they do include this.
Second, the "mess" we'd be in has nothing to do with those tools, rather the inherent insecurity of Windows: consider that every mac ships with these tools "out of the box" today, and you don't hear about widespread virus/trojan problems on macs, do you?
Apache, SSHD, SFTPD and the other services are not exactly big:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 288408 Jul 29 2004
so the complaint about wasting disk space is a red herring.
Finally, as to your point about not having people poking around in their OS, well, having services easy to enable and disable will make it easier for people enable only what they need right then, because it's not a tremendous amount of effort to disable/reenable the services.
Not going to be a big hassle to install Apache32 indeed! why not just include it out of the box like all of the other OS vendors do?
-David
Ask yourself what the process is for changing the IP address of a windows machine.
Then look at the process for changing the IP address for a Linux/Unix/Mac machine.
Look at the process for adding an IP printer vs. that of a NetBIOS printer.
There are lots of examples, Windows just wasn't built with IP in mind - that's not the end of the world, but it shows through in the complexity of the interface.
-David
sigh.
And what happened to "ad-hoc" networking? If I have a laptop in a room, I want to be able to do quick-n-dirty filesharing/collaboration whether or not I've got my windows CD available.
Also, I've got a bunch of machines at home - how exactly do I set up an encrypted login process to my windows box?
My macs have ssh installed by default, and access just requires a checkbox.
My basic point is not that all of these things are impossible on Windows, rather that they require effort to set them up.
-David
The subjects are clearly related: windows networking configurations are profoundly non-obvious. In a lot of ways, it's similar to pre OSX Mac networking, which is to say that it's non-IP based, with IP grafted on. That there is one task which requires fewer clicks in Windows is not surprising, but let me give you the corresponding Mac example: try turning sharing OFF if someone has enabled some random folders...
Hopefully the next windows version will treat IP networking like it's not some bastard child...
well, maybe my ignorance of the subject comes from only using corporate windows builds, rather than owning the darn thing myself; however, don't you think that's a bit more rigamarole to have to go through than just checking a box on an obvious settings tab?
-David
I now see one of the differences - you're comparing a Windows SERVER to a Mac DESKTOP: The "Services" of which you speak aren't available on my win2k laptop (work provided), but I've seen them on win2k SERVER (or Server Advanced) builds.
getting file sharing to work on a windows desktop is a non-trivial PITA: look at the process you have to go through to add an IP printer, and you'll see what I mean (for Heaven's sake, why is an IP Printer a "local" device?)
Some of the other points you make are legit, and some aren't, but one of the primary differences between M$ and AAPL is that the desktop variety OSX includes a lot more "server" features out of the box.
-David
Congratulations on the self-awareness.
I generally found that the geeky girls weren't too interested in me - I eventually met and married a very smart woman who's not in the least geeky (unless liking "Six Feet Under" counts...) but she's my best friend, and she puts up with my bad case of nerdiness
I hope you find what you're looking for...
-David
I've got an album on CDBaby - it's (plug) The Sound and the Furry, and I can attest that artists set the prices of their albums there. In general terms, CDBaby takes about $4 per full-length album, and generally they're about $1-2 each to produce in not-huge quantities, so I wouldn't expect prices to ever be below $8, and $10 seems reasonable to me.
-David Barak
Even if you could photocopy onto parchament (2'x3' sections of animal skin), doing so would make the Sefer (scroll) unfit for use in a public synagogue service.
-David Barak
The $50K value is for a new one. People pay less for older or damaged ones, and for the same reason that people will try to pay $300 for a "brand new iMac G5" you'll get people who will pay $20K for a Sefer of unknown provenance... :(
-David Barak
I can't tell you the composition of the ink ('cause I don't know it, it's not a secret or anything), but it does act more like a paint.
The scolls themselves are made of sections of parchament, i.e skin from a kosher animal (cow, sheep, etc) which has been specially treated and scraped on one side. The Sofer (Scribe) has to draw lines to serve as letter guides, and then fill in the letters, in order, in a particular font called Ashirit (lit. "Assyrian," although the history of how that Hebrew font came to be called that is long and complicated).
-David Barak