I do roll some of my own server reports (and a whole lot of other stuff.) Regardless, it's NOT spam, and should not be thrown into the spam folder. It's just that simple.
I also think that the idea that a server report would be spam is pretty silly, really. How many cases do you think there are where people who don't need them or can't turn them off, are getting them? Servers don't just email random people with tripwire data or logwatch reports; nor would custom web server log mining be a common finding in just anyone's inbox.
But again, we come down to the bare fact that I TOLD Google's lame-ass software that the emails in question were not spam, repeatedly, and it still insists they are.
This is because Google's spam identification sucks. No other reason in the world -- they have no excuse. It's like handing someone a program you claim will color things blue, and it reliably colors things red. Good job. Not.
No, it *is* a bug. Mainly because these emails are unique, they come from my own server and report its status to me. And NO spam comes from that server. But also because I *say* they aren't spam. Or, let me put it this way -- if it's not a bug, it's just really, really shitty spam software, and the "not spam" button is also crap. There's already a "transfer to inbox" button; that's all the "not spam" button does.
You can make excuses all day, but a spam system that can't determine spam from non-spam -- repeatedly, and WITH help -- that's just crap.
The problem is that Google often throws legitimate messages in the spam folder, so if you don't look at it (or let the amount of spam content accumulate to unmanageable volumes), you'll miss them.
I mean, it'd be great if Google did this faultlessly, but it really doesn't. I retrieve messages *every day* that aren't spam. And yes, I click "not spam" every time... doesn't help.
I don't know about you, but to me, an email system that loses your legitimate email isn't a very good one.
Public awareness is the key weak link in the chain in my opinion. And as a new net savvy generation arises, that will come naturally.
Not until we actually edit our genome so that the left half of the IQ Gaussian isn't dimmer than a first generation LED lightbulb, it won't.
You cannot seriously believe that this nation, of whom the vast majority believe in the reality of Zeus, or is it Odin, I forget, anyway, someone like that, will be able to discriminate between the lies of marketing and the lies of scammers.
Google is constantly marking proper email to me as spam, when it isn't spam, and I have repeatedly told Google so with the "not spam" button (and written complaints.) I presume I'm not the only one this is happening to.
So every day, I'm forced to winnow through the spam folder, find the messages I need, mark em, click "not spam" so they'll move to the in-box, and then clear out the rest (otherwise it'll be twice as hard to find the good emails tomorrow.)
I've repeatedly written Google about this, but as usual, they may be doing no evil, but they're not doing any responding to problems, either. Very reminiscent of my experience with Google Base, full of bugs that haven't been fixed in years, despite a great din of complaints on the appropriate boards.
I suspect that a lot of Google's "rise" in spam is just good email they've marked wrong. I know at least a little of it is!
Hey... you can't have a sense of humor about this, just because I made a joke. You're supposed to respond like the moderators, go on about trolling and stuff. What's wrong with you, anyway?
The problem is that these fights over science are polarizing us.
These are not "fights over science." They are fights between high confidence viewpoints backed by strong, yet malleable theoretical underpinnings, and the viewpoints of ignorant, and/or gullible, and/or critical-thinking deficient and consequently superstitious low-functioning who subsist on a diet of dogma and wishful thinking; compounded enormously by our huge social error of putting religious delusion off-limits for serious public criticism at most levels, particularly in schools.
Our problem is a social problem brought on by the underlying theocratic disease we continue to allow our people to suffer from.
It isn't going to go away until/unless all currently popular religion is treated the way it should be - the same way we treat Odin and Zeus. As the imaginary creations of primitive societies. This should be done in school. As part of normal education. So kids have some chance of escaping the cycle of ignorance that religion uses to propagate itself. Kids should be exposed to the (many) falsehoods used as arguments for religion, from the loaded dice of Pascal's wager to the complete and utter intellectual bankruptcy of creationism.
Even then, I bet it takes a couple of generations to die down to the level of, say, astrology. We'll never eradicate it completely, or at least, not until we edit gullibility, stupidity, and the inability to think critically out of our own genome, and expose the underlying dogmatic thinking as part of a normal education.
Countdown before some poor utterly deluded person comes in here to "defend" some religion or other: 3, 2, 1...
Lisp'ers just need you to cons() them into a good palette edit. So take 'em out of their nest in your cars() to an indentist, and C to it. Make sure you get parenthetical permission first, though.
Re:It has a lot of issues that could be improved
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
At night and under normal lighting in the house, the Kindles lose. Outdoors is the only case where they don't.
Re:It has a lot of issues that could be improved
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
I can only speak for the two e-ink display devices we own, which are both Kindles, not DX's. They are barely usable in general, and compared to a iPad, iPhone or iPod, they outright suck. The free Kindle app on the iPod has been what I use instead, though now with the iPad Kindle app and the Mac Kindle application both available, the Kindles will go in a drawer. Deb (my sweetheart, who is the other serious reader in the household) feels the same way. We do a lot of reading at night, which is the very worst way to try to use the Kindles -- they need lots of light. Outdoors they'd probably win, but... we don't read outdoors. We hunt rocks, hike, boat, swim, and take photos, mainly.
Here are some photos I took of auroras generated by the leading edge of this GMF disturbance in northeastern Montana.
It has a lot of issues that could be improved
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've written up a considerably more detailed summary of the iPad's present shortcomings right here.
But eyestrain definitely isn't one of them; the Kindle is where you get eyestrain. That screen is darned near unreadable, with its low contrast, and the achingly slow change from one page to the next; the way it completely fails in readability as the light dims; the inability to show color... the Kindle is an awful reader, with the single exception of battery life.
I can read for many hours on the Kindle *app* on the iPod touch, because the screen is so much better than the actual Kindle. The iPad is worlds better yet, and I know I'll be reading constantly on it.
Which is not to say the iPad doesn't need work. I honestly think it is the least well thought out product Apple has put out. Oh, very well marketed, of course, but it needs a lot to even begin to stay in people's hands after the "new" wears off. Right now, unless you're a reader... it's just too feature poor.
I definitely expect competition to arise from the likes of Android plus a tablet design with a decent feature set that trumps the iPad -- and that won't be difficult to do, considering that the iPad is missing quite a bit. At that point, we'll probably see a significant iPad upgrade. It's just too bad it didn't come out of the chute with a decent feature set already in place. The saving grace is, as always with this whole line of hardware, the apps. Presuming there will be as wide a selection of them as those for the iPod (which work, but look kind of poor), the software functionality of the iPad combined with the responsiveness is its one and only strength. For an iPod/iPhone owner, though... we've already got a lot of that, and it fits in our pockets. Which is why the iPad will see a lot of table-sitting time.
"My research [from 2009] makes the news! President Ford authorized warrantless wiretaps in December 1976 and laid the foundation (PDF) for US telecommunications security policy."
That should read:
...laid the foundation for criminal violation of the United States federal government's authorizing document, the Constitution."
Your proposal that all religions are hoaxes is astounding.
I made no such proposal. I simply start from the premise that some are known to be (Scientology... Heaven's Gate... etc.), and since all theist religions are nonsense, and that religion is a first-order gateway to power in most societies, that intentional deceit is one of the very likely candidates for their origin. There is both motive and opportunity.
But your suggestion that this is how ALL the major religions of the world started is simply absurd.
Again, I made no such suggestion. You really need to work on those reading skills. I said that I was suggesting that Christianity may have started that way, and that it would not be either the first time, or the last, and that people had given their lives for a hoax, and laid out a few examples.
Again, please stop spreading false conspiracy theories and state something that's actually believable.
What's not believable about one possibility for Christianity's origin being a constructed religion? I mean, look at it: We have total nonsense stories about magic, and quite a few of them, told in the present tense -- not just creation stories, but stories about a magical man who walked among the people of the time (of whom there is no actual record.) We have direct conflicts in the associated myths, right in the cult's own book (for instance, Luke says Mary was being purified in Jerusalem at the same time that Matthew says Mary was hiding in Egypt, waiting for Herod to die -- one or the other... or both... of those statements is an untruth.) And Christianity has been, since it's very founding, a power base. It was used to oppose the Romans, to stand apart from the Jews, to found communities and secret societies and so forth. It has grown today into some of the wealthier entities on the planet - the Catholic church is a good example of one of those entities - and yet, the whole thing is based upon nonsense stories; furthermore, many components of those stories resemble previous religions almost to a 't.' Smells an awful lot like "borrowing."
As I said, (and please pay attention this time), I don't know how Christianity got started. There's no record of that except in the bible, and as the bible proves itself an unreliable record many times over, I won't accept the bible's account of anything as evidence by itself. I just consider it likely that it was an intentional construct. But hey, it might have been just bad bread... you can see amazing visions with a little fungus byproduct in your system. Or the whole thing might have been the result of a head injury. Or dreams. CS Lewis asks, "Liar, lunatic or lord?" I think he's being more than a little disingenuous there, as there certainly are other possibilities (such as entirely fictional, alien, or peacemaker) but as one can ask those questions about Jesus, one can also pose them about the religion itself. Lies are certainly not uncommon in human experience.
However, New Testament Scholarship has been growing by leaps and bounds since the 20th century because more and more evidence (scrolls, historical documents) is being discovered. Along with that, certainty of their authenticity is growing.
More copies have been found. We already knew there were lots of copies. We already knew they were fairly similar. Finding more doesn't do anything but up the copy count. There are still no originals.
There is little doubt that the vast majority of these are authentic copies of something. However, if we found an original from the same time (which would mean it was a work of fiction circa the 100's or so), we would not know, because errors and changes would obscure whether it was original or copy itself. They're all handwritten, and none of them say "copy 23" on them.
As far as the authenticity of the stories, there is no such certainty. Because these stories tell tales of magic and nonsense. So the certainty is that they are made up, at least to that extent. And given that the magical portions are nonsense, the rest of the story isn't very interesting anyway. Take out every reference to heaven, god, etc... and you have a badly written, self-contradictory book about a wandering jew, complete with goat-age rationales about life, the universe, and equality.
Scholarly consensus is growing toward dating all four of the canonical Gospels in the 1st Century.
The stories are dated then. Just as a story written now about the 1800's would be dated as about the 1800's. When one writes a work of fiction, one attempts to create a consistent image of the time one is telling the story about. Surely you've encountered this in every book you've ever read. There's even a word for failing: anachronism. I also agree that the stories are about the 0-30's, from the perspective of narrators in the 30's-60s'. But so what? This doesn't mean that it was written in the 30's-60's, it means that the narration has the tone of those times, which is entirely something else. Add to that the knowledge, the certainty, that the works are fictitious (we know this because of the magic and the contradictions), and it isn't any great leap to consider the possibility that the tone and timing of the writing is also fiction.
I would suggest reading... [clipped]
Please. You have no idea the depth of my religious library, or the time I've spent with the materials therein. Here's a reference for you, written by me, some years ago.
Other thoughts about the historicity of Jesus: First-hand witnesses could be considered reliable.
There aren't any. The only "witnesses" are characters in the bible, which is like saying that U.S. Navy Vice Admiral James Greer is a "witness" to the existence of Jack Ryan in a Tom Clancy book. If you want to show that Jack Ryan is real, you need contemporaneous evidence from outside the book. There is no such thing for the biblical claims of Jesus. The only reports of his existence are in the bible itself. Trying to prove the bible, using claims made in the bible, is like watching a snake eating its tail. Its going to kill itself in the process. And again, since the NT both contradicts itself and tries to present magical nonsense as reality... you should really want an outside opinion. And don't even get me started on the OT. You really don't want to go there.
Oral tradition. Teachers, scholars, and students of the day were far better at memorization than we are. It was a firm part of their educational inheritance and their story-telling culture.
My grandmother told me stories about little black sambo, and she got them pretty much right, too, as I found when I read them, later. That doesn't mean that the s
Assuming Jesus didn't exist, how did Christianity start?
I wasn't there. Nor are there any reports from people who lived at the same time... just this one book, which is full of nonsense. So I don't know. However, I don't have a problem with that. Looking at modern examples of similar events, though, there are a number of reasonable candidates that don't involve magic, only human nature. The smart money bets on the mundane, not the magic. Because we've never - ever - been able to demonstrate any magic. Anywhere. Period. So either the cult is based upon a complete work of fiction - an idea that is backed by the fact that there is no evidence for Jesus's existence outside the cult itself; or else Jesus was just Some Dude, because again, everyone to date has been just Some Dude. No magical people. Ever. Anywhere. Period.
Are you seriously proposing that a bunch of people got together, invented a story about a man who could do magic and believed it so much that they were willing to be burned on crosses and get eaten by lions before admitting that it was a hoax?
Yes, absolutely. It certainly would not be either the first time, or the last. See behaviors predicated upon the Hindu, Chinese, and many other mythologies to observe exactly the same thing. And more recently, Heaven's Gate, Muslim bombers, the behavior of the Protestants and Catholics in northern Ireland, and it is also interesting to consider the socially orthogonal behavior of those in Sun Myung Moon's recent cult. Also, pay attention to the history: That willingness, as it were, came along considerably after the time the biblical stories refer to. It is typical cult behavior. We still see it today in various sects of Christianity. Crucifixion, crawling miles on gravel, on bloodied knees, to get to church, and so forth. There's no shortage of demonstrative people with strong convictions, without the benefit of a real Jesus anywhere to be found.
Your faith in people's common sense is nice to see, but the objective facts don't support it at all. People, especially in groups with wacked out leadership, act dependably as excitable idiots. Go to a tent revival if you'd like a concrete modern example of this. Or a homeopathy seminar, for that matter.
Download the archive, then use the contact form on blackbeltsystems.com to write to me, and I'll get you going. You'll probably enjoy it - it's very fast and there is a metric f-ton of software on the (virtual) disks that come with it. Assembler, editors, commands, etc.
It works on XP or earlier for sure; I gave up on Windows after XP, so it's possible it'd have to run in a compatibility mode or something under Vista or 7. Or not. I didn't break any rules that I know of when I wrote it. Of course, that doesn't mean Microsoft didn't...
The only source that says he existed is a single book, compiled from papers that come from almost a century later, that further contains all manner of information that can't be trusted - magic, superstition, etc. That doesn't make his existence likely.
Since we only have the bible and for variations of the life of Jesus as evidence we can at least say that since there are four variations of a story
No. We only have copies of the scrolls, codexes, etc. These all date from a hundred, or more, years after the time the story is placed in. There's no evidence whatsoever that there are four true stories. The book is full of fiction - magic, etc. - it is obviously a fabrication. Just because there are four chapters that purport to tell the story from four perspectives doesn't mean that any one of those perspectives is any more valid than the magical story of making wine out of water, etc.
The bottom line is that there is no contemporaneous evidence for the existence of Jesus. No tax records, nothing about the legal issues, nothing about the costs of the supposed execution, not one darned thing. All there is, is the NT, and it in turn isn't from the same time as the story. Every historical mention that talks about Christians (and what a pain in the neck they were, usually... some things just don't change)...all of these mentions are about the Christian groups/cults of the day... not about Jesus himself.
People talking or writing about something -- even in a very emphatic and passionate manner -- is not evidence of the thing. Look at the Heaven's Gate cult. Those buffoons went so far as to off themselves... for an entirely imaginary premise. So the historical evidence that bands of Christians were running around causing havoc in the mid 50's is in no way a slam-dunk that there was a Jesus at all.
The only certainties about Christianity are that the leather and papyrus scraps that form the source for the NT are from 150 AD or later; that they are either each and every one a copy, and therefore we have no originals (this is the position of most reputable scholars, btw) or else they were created 150 AD or later; that there is no contemporaneous information about Jesus at all; and that the NT contains stories that are scientifically nonsensical.
Now, if that leads you to think that Jesus's existence is "likely"... well, you're one gullible person, that's all I can say. There's better book-evidence for the existence of Jack Ryan, CIA agent. At least the books that he is in don't have any magical malarkey in them. They do tell the story from multiple perspectives; they do refer to people, cities and geographies we can recognize; they do refer to events that actually happened... all of these places where bible apologists try to stand... but Jack Ryan stories are still 100% fiction. Odds hugely favor that Jesus is also fiction.
All those wonderful indexing modes... the dual stack pointers... relative everything for PI code... what a great instruction set.
The downfall was it was random logic inside, and they hit a speed wall they couldn't get past.
I missed that thing so bad I wrote a complete emulation, from mpu to OS (flex09) to drives to terminal and graphics card. Now I'll always have it. Nothing like a little 6809 assembler to relax by.
sample and fix, total fix time, about 3 seconds, two operations. Which is not to say that the Photoshop tool isn't cool; it is. But these aren't difficult tasks unless you simply have little skill at image editing. The video talks about those tiny, super-easy edits of the scene with the tree and bench as taking "all day"... that's a spit coffee, LOL moment, right there. Total fixup time for that image, same issues addressed... maybe five minutes or so. The best part of the demo was the outward fix of the missing sky on the panorama; that would take at least five minutes by itself with the tools I have (to do it as nicely.)
I'm sure the new CS will be great. All of Adobe's releases are great. The only thing better than CS is the marketing behind it.:)
Inasmuch as these aren't actual 3d displays such as this or this, but simply stereo displays, very limited single-perspective (same as 2d) "flat-image-per-eye" technology from about 1900 or so, it seems somewhat beside the point to complain about entities marketing installation with the word "sync."
The market has already looked at the jug, poured the koolaid in its mouth, and swallowed it entirely on its own. There's little point in claiming they didn't want any koolaid.
It's 3D if the display offers more than one viewing angle, composite or not. Or to put it in a way that even the most uninformed consumer can grasp, if a one-eyed person (or a person with one eye closed) can view the object in the perspectives we expect from the real world, it's actually there to perceive. That's something worth characterizing as 3D display.
Preemptive multitasking (not the hopeless cooperative multitasking of Windows < W95) has been a feature of Linux since before Linus unleashed it on the public in 1991.
...and on the Amiga since CBM shipped it in October 1985...
...and on OS9/6809 since Microware shipped it in 1980.
Slashdot Mirror
I do roll some of my own server reports (and a whole lot of other stuff.) Regardless, it's NOT spam, and should not be thrown into the spam folder. It's just that simple.
I also think that the idea that a server report would be spam is pretty silly, really. How many cases do you think there are where people who don't need them or can't turn them off, are getting them? Servers don't just email random people with tripwire data or logwatch reports; nor would custom web server log mining be a common finding in just anyone's inbox.
But again, we come down to the bare fact that I TOLD Google's lame-ass software that the emails in question were not spam, repeatedly, and it still insists they are.
This is because Google's spam identification sucks. No other reason in the world -- they have no excuse. It's like handing someone a program you claim will color things blue, and it reliably colors things red. Good job. Not.
No, it *is* a bug. Mainly because these emails are unique, they come from my own server and report its status to me. And NO spam comes from that server. But also because I *say* they aren't spam. Or, let me put it this way -- if it's not a bug, it's just really, really shitty spam software, and the "not spam" button is also crap. There's already a "transfer to inbox" button; that's all the "not spam" button does.
You can make excuses all day, but a spam system that can't determine spam from non-spam -- repeatedly, and WITH help -- that's just crap.
The problem is that Google often throws legitimate messages in the spam folder, so if you don't look at it (or let the amount of spam content accumulate to unmanageable volumes), you'll miss them.
I mean, it'd be great if Google did this faultlessly, but it really doesn't. I retrieve messages *every day* that aren't spam. And yes, I click "not spam" every time... doesn't help.
I don't know about you, but to me, an email system that loses your legitimate email isn't a very good one.
Not until we actually edit our genome so that the left half of the IQ Gaussian isn't dimmer than a first generation LED lightbulb, it won't.
You cannot seriously believe that this nation, of whom the vast majority believe in the reality of Zeus, or is it Odin, I forget, anyway, someone like that, will be able to discriminate between the lies of marketing and the lies of scammers.
Google is constantly marking proper email to me as spam, when it isn't spam, and I have repeatedly told Google so with the "not spam" button (and written complaints.) I presume I'm not the only one this is happening to.
So every day, I'm forced to winnow through the spam folder, find the messages I need, mark em, click "not spam" so they'll move to the in-box, and then clear out the rest (otherwise it'll be twice as hard to find the good emails tomorrow.)
I've repeatedly written Google about this, but as usual, they may be doing no evil, but they're not doing any responding to problems, either. Very reminiscent of my experience with Google Base, full of bugs that haven't been fixed in years, despite a great din of complaints on the appropriate boards.
I suspect that a lot of Google's "rise" in spam is just good email they've marked wrong. I know at least a little of it is!
Hey... you can't have a sense of humor about this, just because I made a joke. You're supposed to respond like the moderators, go on about trolling and stuff. What's wrong with you, anyway?
These are not "fights over science." They are fights between high confidence viewpoints backed by strong, yet malleable theoretical underpinnings, and the viewpoints of ignorant, and/or gullible, and/or critical-thinking deficient and consequently superstitious low-functioning who subsist on a diet of dogma and wishful thinking; compounded enormously by our huge social error of putting religious delusion off-limits for serious public criticism at most levels, particularly in schools.
Our problem is a social problem brought on by the underlying theocratic disease we continue to allow our people to suffer from.
It isn't going to go away until/unless all currently popular religion is treated the way it should be - the same way we treat Odin and Zeus. As the imaginary creations of primitive societies. This should be done in school. As part of normal education. So kids have some chance of escaping the cycle of ignorance that religion uses to propagate itself. Kids should be exposed to the (many) falsehoods used as arguments for religion, from the loaded dice of Pascal's wager to the complete and utter intellectual bankruptcy of creationism.
Even then, I bet it takes a couple of generations to die down to the level of, say, astrology. We'll never eradicate it completely, or at least, not until we edit gullibility, stupidity, and the inability to think critically out of our own genome, and expose the underlying dogmatic thinking as part of a normal education.
Countdown before some poor utterly deluded person comes in here to "defend" some religion or other: 3, 2, 1...
One word: condoms.
Why, are they Catholic?
Lisp'ers just need you to cons() them into a good palette edit. So take 'em out of their nest in your cars() to an indentist, and C to it. Make sure you get parenthetical permission first, though.
At night and under normal lighting in the house, the Kindles lose. Outdoors is the only case where they don't.
I can only speak for the two e-ink display devices we own, which are both Kindles, not DX's. They are barely usable in general, and compared to a iPad, iPhone or iPod, they outright suck. The free Kindle app on the iPod has been what I use instead, though now with the iPad Kindle app and the Mac Kindle application both available, the Kindles will go in a drawer. Deb (my sweetheart, who is the other serious reader in the household) feels the same way. We do a lot of reading at night, which is the very worst way to try to use the Kindles -- they need lots of light. Outdoors they'd probably win, but... we don't read outdoors. We hunt rocks, hike, boat, swim, and take photos, mainly.
Here are some photos I took of auroras generated by the leading edge of this GMF disturbance in northeastern Montana.
I've written up a considerably more detailed summary of the iPad's present shortcomings right here.
But eyestrain definitely isn't one of them; the Kindle is where you get eyestrain. That screen is darned near unreadable, with its low contrast, and the achingly slow change from one page to the next; the way it completely fails in readability as the light dims; the inability to show color... the Kindle is an awful reader, with the single exception of battery life.
I can read for many hours on the Kindle *app* on the iPod touch, because the screen is so much better than the actual Kindle. The iPad is worlds better yet, and I know I'll be reading constantly on it.
Which is not to say the iPad doesn't need work. I honestly think it is the least well thought out product Apple has put out. Oh, very well marketed, of course, but it needs a lot to even begin to stay in people's hands after the "new" wears off. Right now, unless you're a reader... it's just too feature poor.
I definitely expect competition to arise from the likes of Android plus a tablet design with a decent feature set that trumps the iPad -- and that won't be difficult to do, considering that the iPad is missing quite a bit. At that point, we'll probably see a significant iPad upgrade. It's just too bad it didn't come out of the chute with a decent feature set already in place. The saving grace is, as always with this whole line of hardware, the apps. Presuming there will be as wide a selection of them as those for the iPod (which work, but look kind of poor), the software functionality of the iPad combined with the responsiveness is its one and only strength. For an iPod/iPhone owner, though... we've already got a lot of that, and it fits in our pockets. Which is why the iPad will see a lot of table-sitting time.
That should read:
I made no such proposal. I simply start from the premise that some are known to be (Scientology... Heaven's Gate... etc.), and since all theist religions are nonsense, and that religion is a first-order gateway to power in most societies, that intentional deceit is one of the very likely candidates for their origin. There is both motive and opportunity.
Again, I made no such suggestion. You really need to work on those reading skills. I said that I was suggesting that Christianity may have started that way, and that it would not be either the first time, or the last, and that people had given their lives for a hoax, and laid out a few examples.
What's not believable about one possibility for Christianity's origin being a constructed religion? I mean, look at it: We have total nonsense stories about magic, and quite a few of them, told in the present tense -- not just creation stories, but stories about a magical man who walked among the people of the time (of whom there is no actual record.) We have direct conflicts in the associated myths, right in the cult's own book (for instance, Luke says Mary was being purified in Jerusalem at the same time that Matthew says Mary was hiding in Egypt, waiting for Herod to die -- one or the other... or both... of those statements is an untruth.) And Christianity has been, since it's very founding, a power base. It was used to oppose the Romans, to stand apart from the Jews, to found communities and secret societies and so forth. It has grown today into some of the wealthier entities on the planet - the Catholic church is a good example of one of those entities - and yet, the whole thing is based upon nonsense stories; furthermore, many components of those stories resemble previous religions almost to a 't.' Smells an awful lot like "borrowing."
As I said, (and please pay attention this time), I don't know how Christianity got started. There's no record of that except in the bible, and as the bible proves itself an unreliable record many times over, I won't accept the bible's account of anything as evidence by itself. I just consider it likely that it was an intentional construct. But hey, it might have been just bad bread... you can see amazing visions with a little fungus byproduct in your system. Or the whole thing might have been the result of a head injury. Or dreams. CS Lewis asks, "Liar, lunatic or lord?" I think he's being more than a little disingenuous there, as there certainly are other possibilities (such as entirely fictional, alien, or peacemaker) but as one can ask those questions about Jesus, one can also pose them about the religion itself. Lies are certainly not uncommon in human experience.
The stories are dated then. Just as a story written now about the 1800's would be dated as about the 1800's. When one writes a work of fiction, one attempts to create a consistent image of the time one is telling the story about. Surely you've encountered this in every book you've ever read. There's even a word for failing: anachronism. I also agree that the stories are about the 0-30's, from the perspective of narrators in the 30's-60s'. But so what? This doesn't mean that it was written in the 30's-60's, it means that the narration has the tone of those times, which is entirely something else. Add to that the knowledge, the certainty, that the works are fictitious (we know this because of the magic and the contradictions), and it isn't any great leap to consider the possibility that the tone and timing of the writing is also fiction.
Please. You have no idea the depth of my religious library, or the time I've spent with the materials therein. Here's a reference for you, written by me, some years ago.
There aren't any. The only "witnesses" are characters in the bible, which is like saying that U.S. Navy Vice Admiral James Greer is a "witness" to the existence of Jack Ryan in a Tom Clancy book. If you want to show that Jack Ryan is real, you need contemporaneous evidence from outside the book. There is no such thing for the biblical claims of Jesus. The only reports of his existence are in the bible itself. Trying to prove the bible, using claims made in the bible, is like watching a snake eating its tail. Its going to kill itself in the process. And again, since the NT both contradicts itself and tries to present magical nonsense as reality... you should really want an outside opinion. And don't even get me started on the OT. You really don't want to go there.
My grandmother told me stories about little black sambo, and she got them pretty much right, too, as I found when I read them, later. That doesn't mean that the s
I wasn't there. Nor are there any reports from people who lived at the same time... just this one book, which is full of nonsense. So I don't know. However, I don't have a problem with that. Looking at modern examples of similar events, though, there are a number of reasonable candidates that don't involve magic, only human nature. The smart money bets on the mundane, not the magic. Because we've never - ever - been able to demonstrate any magic. Anywhere. Period. So either the cult is based upon a complete work of fiction - an idea that is backed by the fact that there is no evidence for Jesus's existence outside the cult itself; or else Jesus was just Some Dude, because again, everyone to date has been just Some Dude. No magical people. Ever. Anywhere. Period.
Yes, absolutely. It certainly would not be either the first time, or the last. See behaviors predicated upon the Hindu, Chinese, and many other mythologies to observe exactly the same thing. And more recently, Heaven's Gate, Muslim bombers, the behavior of the Protestants and Catholics in northern Ireland, and it is also interesting to consider the socially orthogonal behavior of those in Sun Myung Moon's recent cult. Also, pay attention to the history: That willingness, as it were, came along considerably after the time the biblical stories refer to. It is typical cult behavior. We still see it today in various sects of Christianity. Crucifixion, crawling miles on gravel, on bloodied knees, to get to church, and so forth. There's no shortage of demonstrative people with strong convictions, without the benefit of a real Jesus anywhere to be found.
Your faith in people's common sense is nice to see, but the objective facts don't support it at all. People, especially in groups with wacked out leadership, act dependably as excitable idiots. Go to a tent revival if you'd like a concrete modern example of this. Or a homeopathy seminar, for that matter.
It's right here: ReFlex
Download the archive, then use the contact form on blackbeltsystems.com to write to me, and I'll get you going. You'll probably enjoy it - it's very fast and there is a metric f-ton of software on the (virtual) disks that come with it. Assembler, editors, commands, etc.
It works on XP or earlier for sure; I gave up on Windows after XP, so it's possible it'd have to run in a compatibility mode or something under Vista or 7. Or not. I didn't break any rules that I know of when I wrote it. Of course, that doesn't mean Microsoft didn't...
The only source that says he existed is a single book, compiled from papers that come from almost a century later, that further contains all manner of information that can't be trusted - magic, superstition, etc. That doesn't make his existence likely.
No. We only have copies of the scrolls, codexes, etc. These all date from a hundred, or more, years after the time the story is placed in. There's no evidence whatsoever that there are four true stories. The book is full of fiction - magic, etc. - it is obviously a fabrication. Just because there are four chapters that purport to tell the story from four perspectives doesn't mean that any one of those perspectives is any more valid than the magical story of making wine out of water, etc.
The bottom line is that there is no contemporaneous evidence for the existence of Jesus. No tax records, nothing about the legal issues, nothing about the costs of the supposed execution, not one darned thing. All there is, is the NT, and it in turn isn't from the same time as the story. Every historical mention that talks about Christians (and what a pain in the neck they were, usually... some things just don't change) ...all of these mentions are about the Christian groups/cults of the day... not about Jesus himself.
People talking or writing about something -- even in a very emphatic and passionate manner -- is not evidence of the thing. Look at the Heaven's Gate cult. Those buffoons went so far as to off themselves... for an entirely imaginary premise. So the historical evidence that bands of Christians were running around causing havoc in the mid 50's is in no way a slam-dunk that there was a Jesus at all.
The only certainties about Christianity are that the leather and papyrus scraps that form the source for the NT are from 150 AD or later; that they are either each and every one a copy, and therefore we have no originals (this is the position of most reputable scholars, btw) or else they were created 150 AD or later; that there is no contemporaneous information about Jesus at all; and that the NT contains stories that are scientifically nonsensical.
Now, if that leads you to think that Jesus's existence is "likely"... well, you're one gullible person, that's all I can say. There's better book-evidence for the existence of Jack Ryan, CIA agent. At least the books that he is in don't have any magical malarkey in them. They do tell the story from multiple perspectives; they do refer to people, cities and geographies we can recognize; they do refer to events that actually happened... all of these places where bible apologists try to stand... but Jack Ryan stories are still 100% fiction. Odds hugely favor that Jesus is also fiction.
All those wonderful indexing modes... the dual stack pointers... relative everything for PI code... what a great instruction set.
The downfall was it was random logic inside, and they hit a speed wall they couldn't get past.
I missed that thing so bad I wrote a complete emulation, from mpu to OS (flex09) to drives to terminal and graphics card. Now I'll always have it. Nothing like a little 6809 assembler to relax by.
11k... that's really kind of apalling when I stop and think about it.
| LIB FEQUATES
| ORG $C100
|X FCC "hello world",$D,$A,$4
|ST LDX #X
| JSR PSTRNG
| JMP WARMS
| END ST
There's no question that a certain economy of implementation has been lost.
sample and fix, total fix time, about 3 seconds, two operations. Which is not to say that the Photoshop tool isn't cool; it is. But these aren't difficult tasks unless you simply have little skill at image editing. The video talks about those tiny, super-easy edits of the scene with the tree and bench as taking "all day"... that's a spit coffee, LOL moment, right there. Total fixup time for that image, same issues addressed... maybe five minutes or so. The best part of the demo was the outward fix of the missing sky on the panorama; that would take at least five minutes by itself with the tools I have (to do it as nicely.)
I'm sure the new CS will be great. All of Adobe's releases are great. The only thing better than CS is the marketing behind it. :)
Inasmuch as these aren't actual 3d displays such as this or this, but simply stereo displays, very limited single-perspective (same as 2d) "flat-image-per-eye" technology from about 1900 or so, it seems somewhat beside the point to complain about entities marketing installation with the word "sync."
The market has already looked at the jug, poured the koolaid in its mouth, and swallowed it entirely on its own. There's little point in claiming they didn't want any koolaid.
It's 3D if the display offers more than one viewing angle, composite or not. Or to put it in a way that even the most uninformed consumer can grasp, if a one-eyed person (or a person with one eye closed) can view the object in the perspectives we expect from the real world, it's actually there to perceive. That's something worth characterizing as 3D display.
So let's not get all that cocky about linux, eh?