The additional books are typical for this period of church history. In the fourth century the church was hashing out the canon of Scripture as evidenced by Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and the various letters that circulated from church leaders discussing the issue. What is more interesting is that Sinaiticus doesn't exclude any of the now recognized books, it only adds to the list. And never mind that certain Christians still hold that these other books are at least useful if not wholly inspired works. If you take the historical context into account your "discrepancies" and objections are not nearly as substantial, especially if you entertain the idea that God works through the processes of history.
The text of Sinaiticus has been reviewed by scholars already and is part of the critical apparatus used to construct the UBS and NA modern Greek texts of the New Testament. Never mind that we also have manuscripts of individual books that predate even Sinaiticus by 200 years. This is an interesting development in terms of making the text more broadly available, but the impact of Sinaiticus on the actual translations we use today has already happened.
From the standpoint of textual criticism and biblical translation this is a non-story. From the standpoint of broad accessibility this is a great development. Remember that serious scholars have been able to get facsimiles for this text for years...
Yes, ignore one of the constraints. In my opinion, trying to satisfy everyone all the time is just stupid. I prefer the approach of "just do it right" and when you do screw up and do it wrong "just fix it." This runs contrary to so many attitudes in the world of browsers and even the wider world of FOSS which want to maintain "legacy support" even if it costs us progress. Transition periods will occur naturally as people upgrade and migrate on their own time tables. Web designers/developers will participate in the transition period via their designs and solutions to the transitional issues. Browser makers should focus more on making their browsers better not figuring out how to smooth the transition which when you're talking about multiple rendering modes and other solutions of that sort really just cause the software to get bloated and harder to maintain, and that isn't going to help us progress either.
My solution would be to screw "backwards compatibility." The notion that we always have to maintain support for old software is just dumb. At some point we have to decide to abandon the old busted crap and move forward. Certainly this approach to maintaining backwards compatibility is better than non-standard crap like has been used in the past but, really, at some point backwards compatibility should be sacrificed in favor of progress. Most others do this in some fashion. We even have a word for it: deprecation.
Yes. The dietary laws are explicitly abolished in the vision given to Peter in Acts 10:9-16. Some have interpreted this in other ways as well but it is the basis for the lifting of the dietary laws along with much of Paul's writings concerning the freedom found in Christ as opposed to the bondage and curse found in the Law.
And, interestingly, many of them are ignorant and apathetic because the government wants them that way and has devised an ingenious method to achieve this end. Public education does not exist to educate but to indoctrinate and subordinate. That's why it's such a ripe target for creationist/ID folk. And the problem isn't necessarily state governments but explicitly the involvement of the federal government. We teach too much and teach nothing well, we need to get a better understanding of the function of primary education than we have today.
We need a more educated population but not merely a more knowledgeable. We need to cultivate actual intelligence.
Certainly election reform could deal with what term limits are thought to fix but I think that a lack of term limits encourages a career mentality regarding politics which isn't what our founders conceived of. Politics wasn't conceived of to be the way a person made their living and term limits helps get away from the notion of career politician. And, in general, I would think that term limits should be somewhat liberal (4 - 5 terms perhaps, maybe more) and should not be construed to prevent non-consecutive service.
His desire to make the Senate more representative is just stupid. If the Senate is seen as a representative body then why have it? That's what the House is for. What we need to do with the Senate is go back to the original constitutional understanding that Senators represent the state legislatures, not the people of the state directly. We need to repeal the 17th amendment, it undermines the idea of our federal government as a blending of democratic and republican ideals.
His idea of having Presidents continue in any formal capacity is really dumb, that's an institutionalized American nobility, exactly what the Founders sought to avoid and even spoke explicitly against in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Last Paragraph).
His idea to synchronize elections is also silly, the point of the offset terms was continuity.
His idea of mandatory national service sounds nice but the principle of an all volunteer armed forces has served us well so I fail to see the point of this kind of forced military service.
On the whole though his ideas aren't bad. Increasing the size of the House and even the Supreme Court could be good, although I don't know that a larger Supreme Court is really as helpful as it seems. Term limits are great and his election reform ideas are solid. Automatic voter registration is just a fantastic idea, we already do something similar with Selective Service registration. And I certainly think his last point about how we should go about the changes is spot on, I would just worry that without some initial reforms in regards to lobbying and the sort that even that would be effective.
I'm using Time Machine and the ease of setup is great for the non-tech savvy (System Preferences > Time Machine > On/Off and then pick a disk). The interface is what makes it more than just another backup tool, the way you can browse backup sets is unique as far as I'm aware. I'm accustomed to automated backup utilities and on that front Time Machine isn't anything special. The way you can work with the backup sets is really what makes it useful to me.
Parallels is in the better position on this one since they are now part of SWSoft. The Virtuozzo/OpenVZ team could likely look to implement OS Virtualization for OS X that would bypass the hardware emulation concerns. Sure it ain't as flexible as full-stack virtualization but it would work for many just the same and would provide better performance than hardware emulation to boot.
In my opinion this is the flaw of these world-wide governing bodies such as the WTO, the WHO and the UN: they deny a particular state's right to determine for themselves what is good or appropriate. These organizations constitute an assault on the sovereignty of individual countries to determine for themselves how they will function and interact with the rest of the world. The problem goes back to the fact that we're involved with such organizations to begin with, if we had any sense we would have steered clear of them in the first place. But now we're in and looking rather foolish trying to pretend we're sovereign when we gave that up by getting into bed with the organizations in the first place.
How do we solve the problem? Well I say pull out, leave all these multi-national bodies and reassert US sovereignty in regards to trade, governance and the like. Be friendly with other countries but don't make long-term commitments to them and certainly don't subject yourself to them in any form or fashion. Should we pay the fine? Hell no, but if we don't we should just leave the organization all together, not pick and choose what of its actions we want to pay attention to.
Twitter had a problem with growing real big, really quick. Scaling at the pace with which Twitter needed to would suck across the board no matter what was backing it. Sure RoR might not have made things any easier but I doubt it was incredibly worse than say CakePHP would have been under the circumstances.
I think of sites like Basecamp and other 37signals apps that run quite well. Scaling tends to be a matter of money and foresight and trying to work with what you've got. Scaling public apps is never simple in my experience, especially when you're dealing with a multi-tiered setup; there are always trade-offs and compromises that can or must be made.
I know this sort of I hate "them" and "they" hate us sort of banter is normal for Slashdot but this sort of oversimplification is just stupid.
PHP is a good language which I've developed with extensively and which is always on the table for projects I work on. RoR is a great framework built on a great language that I also use extensively. RoR, in my opinion and experience, is better for developing many types of web application in comparison to PHP on its own. PHP frameworks such as Zend, Cake, Symphony and others make the decision between Ruby and PHP (with any of those frameworks) more a matter of preference although I still feel RoR is a superior framework.
However, I don't develop web sites with PHP or RoR because that is just dumb, I build web applications with them. I personally do most of my web sites with Radiant which is built on RoR because I like it as a CMS. But I could just as easily use one of the many PHP alternatives. RoR apps are harder to deploy than PHP apps and for that reason RoR isn't for the newbie or person just starting out but if you are fine with having to actually work a little to get your app deployed on most common hosting systems then I think RoR is definitely worth learning and using when it meets your needs or makes programming more enjoyable.
The big thumbs is my fault and could be helped by changes in the software design.
IE works fine but I like the features of Minimo, especially tabbed browsing.
Orientation problem is worse when more applications are active in memory but that is a problem related to the OS' task scheduling and such I suspect. Also, Midlet applications don't support the slide-out keyboard at all as far as I can tell and this issue is more a problem on an app by app basis than universally.
Again, at $400 new I would have like more memory than was installed. I work alright with the SD card but 1G of built-in memory and that would have been one less accessory to buy.
Data speeds are fine for me, I mostly check emails. I use web sporadically so slow is ok for me on that front.
I'm the IT guy for the little marketing company I work at and one of the owner's had a 700w, replaced a 650, that had all kinds of problems, replaced three times before I convinced her to insist on getting a new in box 700wx from Verizon. The 700wx has fixed the problem of not ringing on an incoming call and most of the other really annoying problems relating to email.
If you are with Verizon and having issues with the 700w I'd suggest badgering tech support to give you and your coworkers new, not refurbed, 700wx units.
Preview would be perfect, especially if it has the sort of zooming capabilities that the iPhone's version of Safari appears to have. Readers for iWork files would be excellent, although since my employer has to deal with Office docs that becomes somewhat of a necessity even though we use iWork internally. Regarding Keynote I would be interested in seeing how the iPhone could act as a presentation remote via Bluetooth, "Cover Flow" for my slides seems cool conceptually to me.
That's what we do at my shop. We've got 14 Apple systems and a couple Xserves. We use lots of open source stuff. We use NeoOffice to deal with what iWork can't. MacPorts gives me almost everything I need for servers and basic tools not in the default system and the rest I can compile from source. Now, granted, a Mac at home is a bit different since most folks don't want to muck about with MacPorts or anything like it. But there are a lot of open source products getting packaged for OS X, the problem is finding them. Once OpenOffice is "officially" packaged that will be a nice thing. What's needed is more open source evangelism in general for the Mac and more development effort to effectively package the open source stuff that is out there for the Mac.
I have a HTC 8125 (Cingular branded) that I hate. The problems I have aren't so much with the device, although the hardware obviously plays a part, but the God awful software. Windows Mobile just sucks. Maybe Windows Mobile 6 will be better than version 5 on my handset but I am skeptical. I am planning to buy the iPhone sometime after it hits the market if it meets my needs, which my current HTC/Windows Mobile does not. Namely the things that suck worst are the following:
Dialing with the on-screen keypad is horrible, the stupid sidebar of function buttons force the keypad into an area so small I can't use my thumb with it (big thumbs are my fault...)
Certain applications crash the phone inexplicably: Minimo and Midlets most notably which isn't necessarily Microsoft's or HTC's fault.
When sliding the screen over to access the keyboard the change in on-screen orientation is slow and not always reliable. Sometimes I have to slide and close and then slide again to get the phone to figure out what I'm doing. Also, some applications still call up an on-screen keyboard when I have the keypad exposed, that's just dumb.
The built in storage capacity is a joke. Having to add a card for even a reasonable amount of storage is dumb. Would giving me 1-2GB have been so hard?
I am hoping that the iPhone will do correctly what Microsoft and Palm seem to not be able to figure out. Namely I want my iPhone to meet my functional expectations and barring any functional shortfalls the only thing I am waiting to see are the following from AT&T:
What will the actual data plans cost? If they're in-line with MediaNET service then I'm on-board; if its PDA Connect plans then screw that (unless they drop the price).
What about insuring my shiny and expensive phone? Even if AT&T won't cover it I will want somebody to offer me insurance in the case of theft at the very least.
More software! Namely I would like a PDF reader at the very least. An Office document reader would be nice, I don't want or need the ability to create or edit though. I also wouldn't mind a DashCode sort of application so I can develop my own widgets.
Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 0
Why is this so hard for some GPL advocates to understand?
Because zealotry and propagandizing is just so much darn fun!
God is free to love whomever He wishes. We do not deserve God's love, that is the lie of universalism. God loves all persons in some form or they would not be alive, but God has chosen to love some in a particular way, redeeming them from sin and giving to them redemption through Christ.
Tension exists wherever the natural and the supernatural meet, Jesus was fully God and fully man. We don't know how it works. God is sovereign, yet man is responsible. It is a divine mystery that is not reasonable or logical, but that does not make it untrue. It's a matter of faith.
I am fine with what I believe. If I weren't I wouldn't believe it. I am often confounded by it or fail to understand it. But that's ok, I seek to know all I can and recognize my own failings when I fail to grasp certain things.
I give you permission to temporarily cast God in your own image - would the God you would create be THIS God?
This question is somewhat faulty in my estimation. If I were to create God as I saw fit, or were free to imagine that God was as I wished Him to be He would be markedly different, because I would be casting myself into who I wanted God to be. He wouldn't be God, merely a reflection of myself.
But I don't have that liberty. I am constrained by what God has wrought in me, making me to believe and to look to the Bible for the revelation of Him. I do not believe the Bible to be merely a human work. I am an inerrantist. I believe the Bible to be divinely inspired and inerrant in the autographs and without the stain of human failings. It expresses all that man needs to know about God and is God's final and sole revelation to man of Himself.
You're defining God's love as omnibenevolence, assuming that God must love all persons in the same way. This isn't born out by Scripture. Did God love Pharoah and the Egyptians in the same way He loved Moses and the Israelites, killing thousands in the process of redeeming a nation? God hardened Pharoah's heart and poured out wrath on the nation of Egypt while expressing love for the Israelites. Certainly God was not being equally loving in this circumstance, was He?
God is not omnibenevolent. He shows a universal love for creation in that He sustains it and restrains sin in any fashion. Yet He expresses particular love for His chosen people, the Israel of the Old Testament and the Church after the work of Christ. Christ did not die to redeem all mankind, that is universalism and it is not in line with scripture. Christ died to redeem a particular people, chosen before creation to be the object of God's special and gracious love. The offer of salvation is universal but only those whom God effectually calls are able to respond positively.
The way the Doctrines of Grace, as they are typically referred to in Reformed circles, fit together are intricate and leave certain aspects of God's working in this world a mystery.
God sovereignly governs all aspects of creation, permitting and restraining sin and working goodness in many. Yet we have a will that we are accountable for, when we act we must accept the consequences and be responsible. The exact way this fits with God's sovereign governance in light of the vast evil in the world is a mystery to us for now.
We our condemned for our sins and it is a positive working of God that raises many to spiritual life from our naturally dead state, this is the grace of the gospel that while we were dead in our trespasses and sins we were made alive together with Christ. Somehow all that is wrong in the world will glorify God, how that will occur is a mystery. But God is supreme and sovereign Lord over creation and we are responsible for our actions. How these two fit together is a mystery, it is a result of our natural minds being unable to grasp the supernatural mind of God.
The mystery that keeps coming up is the tension between God' sovereign authority over creation and our accountability before Him for our actions. They do not seem to match-up but they are both testified to in scripture. "Free will" is not part of the Bible, yet man's accountability is. How our moral responsibility squares with the absolute sovereignty of God is not explained fully in the Bible and even if it were I doubt we would be able to comprehend it. How can we as finite creations possibly understand the workings of the infinite God who created us. How can we as the pots, shaped by the potters hands, understand the purposes and mind of God?
It is a mystery of faith. And this side of eternity it is incomprehensible.
A "sovereign God who governs all of creation" (by which I take you mean that nothing happens without God's direct intervention) and "a God who holds humans responsible for their actions" are mutually exclusive - otherwise you have a God who makes humans do certain things and then punishes them for carrying out His will.
By those statements I mean that God is able to control all aspects of creation via whatever means he desires: supernaturalism. Nothing takes place that God does not either expressly decree or willfully permit. God's restraining grace (an expression of common grace) is that thing which keeps the human race from annihilating itself or otherwise expressing its totally depraved state. We actually will to do evil. Our fallen natures incline us inescapably towards sin to the extent that we are all born spiritually dead and without hope in and of ourselves, this is the taint of original sin that gives rise to the reformed doctrine of Total Depravity/Inability. This state is what Paul talks about in Romans when he describes all having sinned and having fallen in Adam.
That's a pretty sadistic God, don't you think? To hold out the possibility of salvation (via the Gospels) but then deny it to all except those he chooses to make follow his commandments?
Your overall concern is again addressed by Paul in Romans when he describes vessels "prepared for wrath" in contrast to those "prepared for mercy." Paul addresses whether God can be called just in doing this and Paul's reply is that the pot has no business questioning the potter.
You seem well educated, but this moral philosophy/theology is frankly horrifying. It means that any particular person is either saved or dammed at birth, and nothing they do has any bearing whatsoever on their ultimate fate. Furthermore, it makes God directly responsible for all the evil in the world, because those doing evil are only carrying out God's instructions to them.
Regarding my education I have an undergraduate degree in Christian Ministry and a minor in Biblical Studies from a Southern Baptist seminary and am planning to enroll in a Masters of Divinity program focusing in church history this fall. Hopefully one day I'll earn my PhD, so while I am not overly academically credentialed I have aspirations of such and try to keep myself sharp as I go.
All persons have either been elected unto salvation or passed over and condemned by their own sin before the foundation of the world. Before Adam was ever created the eternal condition of every soul that has ever, or will ever exist was already decided and fixed. Because of Adam we are unable to make any truly right decisions apart from the grace of God. God is the one responsible for salvation, which is why it is gracious. Were it up to us our sin would keep us from it, but nothing can separate a person from the love of God. Man is responsible for sin, Adam's original defiance has tainted all of us and placed us in a state where we naturally desire to sin. God permits and restrains sin according to his own purposes, but we actually will to sin, sin comes naturally and we are responsible. The fact that God permits sin does not make Him chiefly responsible since He does not commit the sinful act and because He holds us responsible. The exact way this works is lost on us because of the incomprehensibility of how God supernaturally interacts with His creation. It's a matter of faith, not logically explainable.
What sect are you? Seriously?
I am a Reformed Baptist. I am a member of a Southern Baptist Church and am Calvinistic. Conservative Presbyterians would have similar doctrinal views. The views I hold are not unusual in the context of Christian history and have been around for centuries in formal teaching. Not to mention the biblical basis for the doctrines of predestination and election are inescapable in Paul and other new testament writings. In Ameri
We're gonna start running laps soon so I think we're effectively at an impasse. But I'll leave my final thought:
Our ability to observe at certain subatomic levels is not very good. We don't have the ability to see a pattern or the underlying governing effects and so we produce models that take into account our inabilities but that represent what we are able to know. This does not mean that our present uncertainty will remain forever or that certain things should be taken as unknowable. Just because it looks random to us now doesn't mean ten, fifty or a hundred years from now that we won't have worked out the governing dynamics. The randomness we currently account for may one day be proven to not be random at all but rather just a very complex and difficult to observe interaction.
This isn't the place for a theological debate but your conception of Christianity ignores the thinking of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Bezos, Spurgeon, Edwards, Gill, Broadus, Boyce and countless others. You are adopting an implicitly Pelagian/Arminian position that was rejected by the Roman Catholic church for centuries (although later adopted) and rejected vehemently by the Reformers. Luther's "Bondage of the Will" is a classic text along with Augustine's writings "Against the Palagians." The Bible presents a sovereign God who governs all of creation and simultaneously holds humans responsible for their actions. Predestination and Election are central doctrines of the Christian gospel and they don't allow for "Free Will" as it is typically conceived.
Redemption is God's sovereign choosing of some persons unto everlasting life out of His mere mercy, not on the basis of foreseen merit or anything good within us. It is He that quickens the spiritually dead heart and illuminates it with the light of the truth. We then respond naturally in favor of this illumination if and when it comes. Salvation is a work of God, wholly of grace.
The workings out of God's sovereignty are mysterious and ultimately unknowable since He has not revealed the "how" of it. But as a Christian I accept it and believe it, many would not and unfortunately they miss a big part of who God is and how awesome salvation truly is in light of our natural condition.
And that is my last word on this theological line.
Randomness and uncertainty are different. Things may appear random but the failing might be in our observations. Science is full of uncertainty, much because we're still pushing and learning, but that uncertainty may not be entirely random or unknowable. We may just not be certain of it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
The additional books are typical for this period of church history. In the fourth century the church was hashing out the canon of Scripture as evidenced by Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and the various letters that circulated from church leaders discussing the issue. What is more interesting is that Sinaiticus doesn't exclude any of the now recognized books, it only adds to the list. And never mind that certain Christians still hold that these other books are at least useful if not wholly inspired works. If you take the historical context into account your "discrepancies" and objections are not nearly as substantial, especially if you entertain the idea that God works through the processes of history.
The text of Sinaiticus has been reviewed by scholars already and is part of the critical apparatus used to construct the UBS and NA modern Greek texts of the New Testament. Never mind that we also have manuscripts of individual books that predate even Sinaiticus by 200 years. This is an interesting development in terms of making the text more broadly available, but the impact of Sinaiticus on the actual translations we use today has already happened.
From the standpoint of textual criticism and biblical translation this is a non-story. From the standpoint of broad accessibility this is a great development. Remember that serious scholars have been able to get facsimiles for this text for years...
Yes, ignore one of the constraints. In my opinion, trying to satisfy everyone all the time is just stupid. I prefer the approach of "just do it right" and when you do screw up and do it wrong "just fix it." This runs contrary to so many attitudes in the world of browsers and even the wider world of FOSS which want to maintain "legacy support" even if it costs us progress. Transition periods will occur naturally as people upgrade and migrate on their own time tables. Web designers/developers will participate in the transition period via their designs and solutions to the transitional issues. Browser makers should focus more on making their browsers better not figuring out how to smooth the transition which when you're talking about multiple rendering modes and other solutions of that sort really just cause the software to get bloated and harder to maintain, and that isn't going to help us progress either.
My solution would be to screw "backwards compatibility." The notion that we always have to maintain support for old software is just dumb. At some point we have to decide to abandon the old busted crap and move forward. Certainly this approach to maintaining backwards compatibility is better than non-standard crap like has been used in the past but, really, at some point backwards compatibility should be sacrificed in favor of progress. Most others do this in some fashion. We even have a word for it: deprecation.
Yes. The dietary laws are explicitly abolished in the vision given to Peter in Acts 10:9-16. Some have interpreted this in other ways as well but it is the basis for the lifting of the dietary laws along with much of Paul's writings concerning the freedom found in Christ as opposed to the bondage and curse found in the Law.
And, interestingly, many of them are ignorant and apathetic because the government wants them that way and has devised an ingenious method to achieve this end. Public education does not exist to educate but to indoctrinate and subordinate. That's why it's such a ripe target for creationist/ID folk. And the problem isn't necessarily state governments but explicitly the involvement of the federal government. We teach too much and teach nothing well, we need to get a better understanding of the function of primary education than we have today.
We need a more educated population but not merely a more knowledgeable. We need to cultivate actual intelligence.
Certainly election reform could deal with what term limits are thought to fix but I think that a lack of term limits encourages a career mentality regarding politics which isn't what our founders conceived of. Politics wasn't conceived of to be the way a person made their living and term limits helps get away from the notion of career politician. And, in general, I would think that term limits should be somewhat liberal (4 - 5 terms perhaps, maybe more) and should not be construed to prevent non-consecutive service.
Some of his ideas are just bad.
His desire to make the Senate more representative is just stupid. If the Senate is seen as a representative body then why have it? That's what the House is for. What we need to do with the Senate is go back to the original constitutional understanding that Senators represent the state legislatures, not the people of the state directly. We need to repeal the 17th amendment, it undermines the idea of our federal government as a blending of democratic and republican ideals.
His idea of having Presidents continue in any formal capacity is really dumb, that's an institutionalized American nobility, exactly what the Founders sought to avoid and even spoke explicitly against in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Last Paragraph).
His idea to synchronize elections is also silly, the point of the offset terms was continuity.
His idea of mandatory national service sounds nice but the principle of an all volunteer armed forces has served us well so I fail to see the point of this kind of forced military service.
On the whole though his ideas aren't bad. Increasing the size of the House and even the Supreme Court could be good, although I don't know that a larger Supreme Court is really as helpful as it seems. Term limits are great and his election reform ideas are solid. Automatic voter registration is just a fantastic idea, we already do something similar with Selective Service registration. And I certainly think his last point about how we should go about the changes is spot on, I would just worry that without some initial reforms in regards to lobbying and the sort that even that would be effective.
I'm using Time Machine and the ease of setup is great for the non-tech savvy (System Preferences > Time Machine > On/Off and then pick a disk). The interface is what makes it more than just another backup tool, the way you can browse backup sets is unique as far as I'm aware. I'm accustomed to automated backup utilities and on that front Time Machine isn't anything special. The way you can work with the backup sets is really what makes it useful to me.
Parallels is in the better position on this one since they are now part of SWSoft. The Virtuozzo/OpenVZ team could likely look to implement OS Virtualization for OS X that would bypass the hardware emulation concerns. Sure it ain't as flexible as full-stack virtualization but it would work for many just the same and would provide better performance than hardware emulation to boot.
In my opinion this is the flaw of these world-wide governing bodies such as the WTO, the WHO and the UN: they deny a particular state's right to determine for themselves what is good or appropriate. These organizations constitute an assault on the sovereignty of individual countries to determine for themselves how they will function and interact with the rest of the world. The problem goes back to the fact that we're involved with such organizations to begin with, if we had any sense we would have steered clear of them in the first place. But now we're in and looking rather foolish trying to pretend we're sovereign when we gave that up by getting into bed with the organizations in the first place.
How do we solve the problem? Well I say pull out, leave all these multi-national bodies and reassert US sovereignty in regards to trade, governance and the like. Be friendly with other countries but don't make long-term commitments to them and certainly don't subject yourself to them in any form or fashion. Should we pay the fine? Hell no, but if we don't we should just leave the organization all together, not pick and choose what of its actions we want to pay attention to.
Twitter had a problem with growing real big, really quick. Scaling at the pace with which Twitter needed to would suck across the board no matter what was backing it. Sure RoR might not have made things any easier but I doubt it was incredibly worse than say CakePHP would have been under the circumstances.
I think of sites like Basecamp and other 37signals apps that run quite well. Scaling tends to be a matter of money and foresight and trying to work with what you've got. Scaling public apps is never simple in my experience, especially when you're dealing with a multi-tiered setup; there are always trade-offs and compromises that can or must be made.
I know this sort of I hate "them" and "they" hate us sort of banter is normal for Slashdot but this sort of oversimplification is just stupid.
PHP is a good language which I've developed with extensively and which is always on the table for projects I work on. RoR is a great framework built on a great language that I also use extensively. RoR, in my opinion and experience, is better for developing many types of web application in comparison to PHP on its own. PHP frameworks such as Zend, Cake, Symphony and others make the decision between Ruby and PHP (with any of those frameworks) more a matter of preference although I still feel RoR is a superior framework.
However, I don't develop web sites with PHP or RoR because that is just dumb, I build web applications with them. I personally do most of my web sites with Radiant which is built on RoR because I like it as a CMS. But I could just as easily use one of the many PHP alternatives. RoR apps are harder to deploy than PHP apps and for that reason RoR isn't for the newbie or person just starting out but if you are fine with having to actually work a little to get your app deployed on most common hosting systems then I think RoR is definitely worth learning and using when it meets your needs or makes programming more enjoyable.
Thanks for being friendly.
The big thumbs is my fault and could be helped by changes in the software design.
IE works fine but I like the features of Minimo, especially tabbed browsing.
Orientation problem is worse when more applications are active in memory but that is a problem related to the OS' task scheduling and such I suspect. Also, Midlet applications don't support the slide-out keyboard at all as far as I can tell and this issue is more a problem on an app by app basis than universally.
Again, at $400 new I would have like more memory than was installed. I work alright with the SD card but 1G of built-in memory and that would have been one less accessory to buy.
Data speeds are fine for me, I mostly check emails. I use web sporadically so slow is ok for me on that front.
I'm the IT guy for the little marketing company I work at and one of the owner's had a 700w, replaced a 650, that had all kinds of problems, replaced three times before I convinced her to insist on getting a new in box 700wx from Verizon. The 700wx has fixed the problem of not ringing on an incoming call and most of the other really annoying problems relating to email.
If you are with Verizon and having issues with the 700w I'd suggest badgering tech support to give you and your coworkers new, not refurbed, 700wx units.
Preview would be perfect, especially if it has the sort of zooming capabilities that the iPhone's version of Safari appears to have. Readers for iWork files would be excellent, although since my employer has to deal with Office docs that becomes somewhat of a necessity even though we use iWork internally. Regarding Keynote I would be interested in seeing how the iPhone could act as a presentation remote via Bluetooth, "Cover Flow" for my slides seems cool conceptually to me.
That's what we do at my shop. We've got 14 Apple systems and a couple Xserves. We use lots of open source stuff. We use NeoOffice to deal with what iWork can't. MacPorts gives me almost everything I need for servers and basic tools not in the default system and the rest I can compile from source. Now, granted, a Mac at home is a bit different since most folks don't want to muck about with MacPorts or anything like it. But there are a lot of open source products getting packaged for OS X, the problem is finding them. Once OpenOffice is "officially" packaged that will be a nice thing. What's needed is more open source evangelism in general for the Mac and more development effort to effectively package the open source stuff that is out there for the Mac.
I have a HTC 8125 (Cingular branded) that I hate. The problems I have aren't so much with the device, although the hardware obviously plays a part, but the God awful software. Windows Mobile just sucks. Maybe Windows Mobile 6 will be better than version 5 on my handset but I am skeptical. I am planning to buy the iPhone sometime after it hits the market if it meets my needs, which my current HTC/Windows Mobile does not. Namely the things that suck worst are the following:
I am hoping that the iPhone will do correctly what Microsoft and Palm seem to not be able to figure out. Namely I want my iPhone to meet my functional expectations and barring any functional shortfalls the only thing I am waiting to see are the following from AT&T:
God is free to love whomever He wishes. We do not deserve God's love, that is the lie of universalism. God loves all persons in some form or they would not be alive, but God has chosen to love some in a particular way, redeeming them from sin and giving to them redemption through Christ.
Tension exists wherever the natural and the supernatural meet, Jesus was fully God and fully man. We don't know how it works. God is sovereign, yet man is responsible. It is a divine mystery that is not reasonable or logical, but that does not make it untrue. It's a matter of faith.
I am fine with what I believe. If I weren't I wouldn't believe it. I am often confounded by it or fail to understand it. But that's ok, I seek to know all I can and recognize my own failings when I fail to grasp certain things.
I give you permission to temporarily cast God in your own image - would the God you would create be THIS God?This question is somewhat faulty in my estimation. If I were to create God as I saw fit, or were free to imagine that God was as I wished Him to be He would be markedly different, because I would be casting myself into who I wanted God to be. He wouldn't be God, merely a reflection of myself.
But I don't have that liberty. I am constrained by what God has wrought in me, making me to believe and to look to the Bible for the revelation of Him. I do not believe the Bible to be merely a human work. I am an inerrantist. I believe the Bible to be divinely inspired and inerrant in the autographs and without the stain of human failings. It expresses all that man needs to know about God and is God's final and sole revelation to man of Himself.
You're defining God's love as omnibenevolence, assuming that God must love all persons in the same way. This isn't born out by Scripture. Did God love Pharoah and the Egyptians in the same way He loved Moses and the Israelites, killing thousands in the process of redeeming a nation? God hardened Pharoah's heart and poured out wrath on the nation of Egypt while expressing love for the Israelites. Certainly God was not being equally loving in this circumstance, was He?
God is not omnibenevolent. He shows a universal love for creation in that He sustains it and restrains sin in any fashion. Yet He expresses particular love for His chosen people, the Israel of the Old Testament and the Church after the work of Christ. Christ did not die to redeem all mankind, that is universalism and it is not in line with scripture. Christ died to redeem a particular people, chosen before creation to be the object of God's special and gracious love. The offer of salvation is universal but only those whom God effectually calls are able to respond positively.
The way the Doctrines of Grace, as they are typically referred to in Reformed circles, fit together are intricate and leave certain aspects of God's working in this world a mystery.
God sovereignly governs all aspects of creation, permitting and restraining sin and working goodness in many. Yet we have a will that we are accountable for, when we act we must accept the consequences and be responsible. The exact way this fits with God's sovereign governance in light of the vast evil in the world is a mystery to us for now.
We our condemned for our sins and it is a positive working of God that raises many to spiritual life from our naturally dead state, this is the grace of the gospel that while we were dead in our trespasses and sins we were made alive together with Christ. Somehow all that is wrong in the world will glorify God, how that will occur is a mystery. But God is supreme and sovereign Lord over creation and we are responsible for our actions. How these two fit together is a mystery, it is a result of our natural minds being unable to grasp the supernatural mind of God.
The mystery that keeps coming up is the tension between God' sovereign authority over creation and our accountability before Him for our actions. They do not seem to match-up but they are both testified to in scripture. "Free will" is not part of the Bible, yet man's accountability is. How our moral responsibility squares with the absolute sovereignty of God is not explained fully in the Bible and even if it were I doubt we would be able to comprehend it. How can we as finite creations possibly understand the workings of the infinite God who created us. How can we as the pots, shaped by the potters hands, understand the purposes and mind of God?
It is a mystery of faith. And this side of eternity it is incomprehensible.
Fine, I'll go a little further...
A "sovereign God who governs all of creation" (by which I take you mean that nothing happens without God's direct intervention) and "a God who holds humans responsible for their actions" are mutually exclusive - otherwise you have a God who makes humans do certain things and then punishes them for carrying out His will.
By those statements I mean that God is able to control all aspects of creation via whatever means he desires: supernaturalism. Nothing takes place that God does not either expressly decree or willfully permit. God's restraining grace (an expression of common grace) is that thing which keeps the human race from annihilating itself or otherwise expressing its totally depraved state. We actually will to do evil. Our fallen natures incline us inescapably towards sin to the extent that we are all born spiritually dead and without hope in and of ourselves, this is the taint of original sin that gives rise to the reformed doctrine of Total Depravity/Inability. This state is what Paul talks about in Romans when he describes all having sinned and having fallen in Adam.
That's a pretty sadistic God, don't you think? To hold out the possibility of salvation (via the Gospels) but then deny it to all except those he chooses to make follow his commandments?
Your overall concern is again addressed by Paul in Romans when he describes vessels "prepared for wrath" in contrast to those "prepared for mercy." Paul addresses whether God can be called just in doing this and Paul's reply is that the pot has no business questioning the potter.
You seem well educated, but this moral philosophy/theology is frankly horrifying. It means that any particular person is either saved or dammed at birth, and nothing they do has any bearing whatsoever on their ultimate fate. Furthermore, it makes God directly responsible for all the evil in the world, because those doing evil are only carrying out God's instructions to them.
Regarding my education I have an undergraduate degree in Christian Ministry and a minor in Biblical Studies from a Southern Baptist seminary and am planning to enroll in a Masters of Divinity program focusing in church history this fall. Hopefully one day I'll earn my PhD, so while I am not overly academically credentialed I have aspirations of such and try to keep myself sharp as I go.
All persons have either been elected unto salvation or passed over and condemned by their own sin before the foundation of the world. Before Adam was ever created the eternal condition of every soul that has ever, or will ever exist was already decided and fixed. Because of Adam we are unable to make any truly right decisions apart from the grace of God. God is the one responsible for salvation, which is why it is gracious. Were it up to us our sin would keep us from it, but nothing can separate a person from the love of God. Man is responsible for sin, Adam's original defiance has tainted all of us and placed us in a state where we naturally desire to sin. God permits and restrains sin according to his own purposes, but we actually will to sin, sin comes naturally and we are responsible. The fact that God permits sin does not make Him chiefly responsible since He does not commit the sinful act and because He holds us responsible. The exact way this works is lost on us because of the incomprehensibility of how God supernaturally interacts with His creation. It's a matter of faith, not logically explainable.
What sect are you? Seriously?
I am a Reformed Baptist. I am a member of a Southern Baptist Church and am Calvinistic. Conservative Presbyterians would have similar doctrinal views. The views I hold are not unusual in the context of Christian history and have been around for centuries in formal teaching. Not to mention the biblical basis for the doctrines of predestination and election are inescapable in Paul and other new testament writings. In Ameri
We're gonna start running laps soon so I think we're effectively at an impasse. But I'll leave my final thought:
Our ability to observe at certain subatomic levels is not very good. We don't have the ability to see a pattern or the underlying governing effects and so we produce models that take into account our inabilities but that represent what we are able to know. This does not mean that our present uncertainty will remain forever or that certain things should be taken as unknowable. Just because it looks random to us now doesn't mean ten, fifty or a hundred years from now that we won't have worked out the governing dynamics. The randomness we currently account for may one day be proven to not be random at all but rather just a very complex and difficult to observe interaction.
This isn't the place for a theological debate but your conception of Christianity ignores the thinking of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Bezos, Spurgeon, Edwards, Gill, Broadus, Boyce and countless others. You are adopting an implicitly Pelagian/Arminian position that was rejected by the Roman Catholic church for centuries (although later adopted) and rejected vehemently by the Reformers. Luther's "Bondage of the Will" is a classic text along with Augustine's writings "Against the Palagians." The Bible presents a sovereign God who governs all of creation and simultaneously holds humans responsible for their actions. Predestination and Election are central doctrines of the Christian gospel and they don't allow for "Free Will" as it is typically conceived.
Redemption is God's sovereign choosing of some persons unto everlasting life out of His mere mercy, not on the basis of foreseen merit or anything good within us. It is He that quickens the spiritually dead heart and illuminates it with the light of the truth. We then respond naturally in favor of this illumination if and when it comes. Salvation is a work of God, wholly of grace.
The workings out of God's sovereignty are mysterious and ultimately unknowable since He has not revealed the "how" of it. But as a Christian I accept it and believe it, many would not and unfortunately they miss a big part of who God is and how awesome salvation truly is in light of our natural condition.
And that is my last word on this theological line.
Randomness and uncertainty are different. Things may appear random but the failing might be in our observations. Science is full of uncertainty, much because we're still pushing and learning, but that uncertainty may not be entirely random or unknowable. We may just not be certain of it yet.