Given that the ratio of scientists being paid to produce results compatible with Naturalism to those being paid to produce results compatible with Theism must be hundreds to one, I think the creationist theories that have been put forward so far have fared exceptionally well.
Even so, Naturalism is a house divided against itself. One bunch tout "dark matter" and "dark energy" because without them their theories fall flat. A more honest bunch speak up about the patent ridiculousness of these just-so stories and try to produce Naturalistic theories that fit (so far, to no avail but yet their efforts are a good deal purer in heart than their opponents). Occam's answer would be to discard a lot of Naturalistic preconceptions about the age and uniformity of the Universe, and just work with what we have actually observed, not adding any interpretation to it until the last moment.
If you find your own gradual creation myths comforting, well, enjoy it. But I suggest that getting a right answer is far more important than getting a reassuring answer.
It's a compile time option, and list mails in 2000 indicate that 256k rows worked fine, so presumably megarow spreadsheets will too.
OOo's row limitation has already been raised to 64k (in non-production versions), and a plan is afoot to raise it again to "hundreds of millions" of rows, the bottlenecks being display code and a couple of memory-hungry accounting processes which will need redesign. The 64k rows is probably not a hard limit any more, you could probably compile a 128k or 256k row version of ooCalc 1.1.2 and suffer only performance/memory use penalties for going that high.
But as has been said so often above, you should probably be using a database at that scale, not a spreadsheet. Or perhaps awk or PERL will do the trick. (-:
What Helix does bring to the party is WMA, which allows you to listen Freely to all of the radio stations and such that have been suckered into the DRM boondoggle and consequently work only with Microsoft's moderately crappy WMP codec.
Jesus prayed that the faith of the Apostles would be preserved by Peter. (Luke 22:31-32)
...who promptly goes on to betray Christ...
Why didn't He pray for all the Apostles instead of just Peter?
He did. "I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine." John 17:6-9. A verse out of context is a pretext.
The bit about the rock is misleading too. Jesus said "You are a loose stone ["petros"], but upon this rock ["petra", think in terms of bedrock] I will build My church". You could possibly interpret that as "upon these stones", but that's still too inclusive to support a Pope. Jesus repeats the offer of the keys to all of the Disciples in chapter 18, and note that in context there the Disciples are not represented as being in any way the leaders of the church as it existed then.
Next, consider Matthew 8:14 - Peter is married, and Popes are not (well... not in theory anyway). In Acts 15, James presided over the council and Peter was merely one of those who testified to it. In Galatians 2, Paul condemns Peter's hypocrisy. Finally, in 1Peter 5:1, Peter explicitly refers to himself as one among equals, and in 1Peter 2:8 he calls Jesus "the rock". None of this supports what you're saying, all of it speaks against the traditional Catholic position. You can see how the Bible wound up on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum until Vatican II.
If you want to conform to Christ, then you should accept personal responsibility for your own actions, so you can then admit fault completely to God and in turn receive complete forgiveness and be pointed towards a completely guileless and helpful life.
Here's one set of lists from among many. Yes, many real scientists are creationists.
The scientist on the right is a creationist, and wrote the TERRA software being discussed on that page. In its time, it was regarded as the single best Earth-modelling package available and is still very well regarded (Linux and ForTran afficiondos will be pleased by that too, since it's written in ForTran-90 and runs on Beowulves).
Dr D Russell Humphreys predicted the whacko magentic fields of Naptune and Uranus from creationist principles; the predictions of materialists were well wide of the mark.
I could go on to labour the point, but there is real science and real scientists on the side of creationism.
Go from village to village, town to town armed with the Maleum Maleficarum, and hunt for them.
You'll also need a large set of scales, and a duck.
On a more serious note, "witches" was a term which in practice meant anyone who believed differently to you, or that you didn't like. Protestants (even before the Protest of the Princes, they had Waldenses and Albigenses and such to torture) were as much fair game as helpful, peaceful herbalists and genuinely nasty might-makes-right invokers of dark powers.
To give you some idea of how this mentality works, consider that when Inquisitions were set up, wealthy people were one of the high-risk categories. Methinks the confiscation of property and the spotter's-fee bounty associated therewith might have had something to do with this. A lot more than anything to do with religion, in point of fact.
wouldn't unashamed public nakedness (and acceptance thereof) be a return to the "better, good ol' days" of pre-sin innocence?
BION, this is actually quite a historically common occurence. Forex, not long after the turn of this century a bunch of people calling themselves the "Holy Flesh" movement decided that since they were forgiven all sin (they had a kind of Catholic view of it: it was technically possible in their eyes to kind of pre-forgive a crime), they were immune to its effects and that as an act of faith they should at least worship starkers. With predictable results.
the filipino's I have met cannot mentally seem to comprehend that another religion beyond their own might even exist in the world.
Sounds familiar. Many Humanists are like this. They may well hear about other religions, but they're in some way unreal, not something that serious people do.
So what, exactly, makes the Christian standpoint the right one?
Uncannily accurate history and prophecy. Miracles. But both of those can be forged to some degree; God's the only deity to claim authorship of the universe de novo, ex nihilo and offer evidence (e.g. astronomical details not available to the ancients) to back the claim up.
"The Christian standpoint" could be made to cover a lot of ground. I specifically exclude interpretations incompatible with Scripture, since they will be considerably less true-to-plan.
You can't define what's right and wrong for everyone based on your personal beliefs, since so many different belief structures exist in this world.
Welcome to relativism, where there is no point in doing anything because there's no goals, no endpoints, no purpose, no hope.
All beliefs may be equally sincere, but not all beliefs can be equally valid, especially so since most of them contradict one another. The scientific approach to deciding which is most valid is to compare each belief system with observation and history.
Unfortunately for materialism, many features of this universe and specifically the planet we're standing on are completely incompatible with a long history, and even if a long history is granted in the face of the evidence most of the processes which we observe around us work directly against the development of the myriad forms of life which we also observe. And of course, commensurate with this, what we actually see in nature is species disappearing, not new ones forming.
Supporters of materialism are caught on the horns of a cruel dilemma (or possibly crottling fork:-) in that they cannot admit [2nd-last par] any hint of teleology to the question, yet without it the odds against anything recognisable as life happening are far beyond jaw-droppingly huge. "Scientific materialism" is an oxymoron.
Once you delete materialism, it completely changes the philosophical playfield. You're basically down to creationism, standing the world on turtles (hello, Terry Pratchett), or building it from the body parts and blood of assorted godlets. Tough call.
It was Jesus who said the bread was His Body and the wine was His Blood
Finish the quote, from Luke 22:19 -
this do in remembrance of me
Not to recreate Him, not to call Him down, but to remember Him.
It also happened to be a Roman method of execution
Nothing accidental about it. The political masters of the sun cult (Mithras to most Romans) seem to have deliberately chosen the crucifix shape and proportions to make their point.
It had nothing to do with getting away from "pagan implications".
If the ring of thorns were other than universally portrayed hung about the intersection of the crucifix, that might be believable. As things stand, the crucifix and notably the ringed crucifix as messianic symbols predate Christianity by at least several hundred years - including preChristian examples found in South America.
The leaders lined people up, had them walk through the water of large baptistries, and - abracadabra - they were "Christians."
It's a time-honoured practice, if time can be said to honour anything. Constantine did this with his troops around 300AD, which was a very long time before the Crusades, also a very long time before the Crusaders' enemy faction even existed.
Abracadabra, Aramaic for "I create as I speak" is heavily paralleled in the Bible. The term you're probably looking for is "hocus pocus", a corruption of "Hoc est corpus meum", the Latin uttered at the climax of a Mass when the priest purports to compress God (presumably a copy) into a wafer.
In another interesting pierce of irony, the cross is actually a symbol of Tammuz, the sun god. The cross-with-halo is an exact replica of the rising sun with atmospheric "lens effects". Christ was crucified on the symbol of His arch enemy. Mutating the solar disk into a crown of thorns in order to get away from the pagan implications is spectacularly ironic.
...the story of Naaman's cure or Zaccheus' conversion can be turned into an interesting game. Mind you, some people can make toilet paper or styro-burgers seem exciting, so I won't say outright that it can't be done.
In which one political entity (the Roman Catholic Church) taught another (Islam) how to be brutal on a large scale, yes? And what does that have to do with religion?
How about the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which subjects of the same political entity suddenly rose up and murdered over 70,000 of their competitors in one day, not to mention slicing the breasts off others with shears, and other such pleasantries?
Or the invasion of Beziers, in which about 30,000 people - roughly half of them being at least nominal adherents to the aforementioned political entity - were wiped out in one go by mercenaries at the direction of said political entity, and the famous quotation "Tuez-les tous; Dieu reconnaitra les siens" (or, in English, "Kill them all; for the Lord knoweth them that are His") was born?
Yes, politics is murder. And often the reverse is true as well.
Lest you fall to believing that all lethal political entities have paternalistic religious connections, consider that (Atheist) Mao managed to kill more than 80 million of his own people, (Atheist) Stalin got another 20 million or so, and the Manchu got another few tens of millions suppressing the Ti Ping. To say nothing of strictly commercial murder and mass inhumanity like King Leopold's Congo (chalk up another ten million for that one, give or take).
We know of a Christianity that demands absolute conformity.
To...? If it's not Christ, then the person you're facing is not Christian, whatever they claim to the contrary. That's built right into the etiology of the word. The largest "Christian" denomination in the world demands first loyalty to the head of a small European state. Another large one demands loyalty to an office just off the same coast (not quite correct: they're split into two major faction groups, and one of those seems to have their basic priorities right).
We know of a Christianity that beleives in conversions and in the process is ruining states of North-east India.
It takes two to tango. Until you know about the individual Christians and what exactly it is that they're ruining, generalisations like that are at best pointless and in practice usually dangerous. Forex, if they're "ruining" a society which frowns on charity for fear of damaging the recipient's karma, then I'm all for "ruining" that. But I'd need more data than you've supplied in order to make a call there.
More-or-less genuine Christianity is also "ruining" (depending on your PoV) hundreds of Orthodox rabbis every year and hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of Mohammedans. In return, many Mohammedans have demonstrated that they would rather murder their own than see them convert, including their own children (that's a pretty clear demonstration of the inferiority of their argument). How do you feel about that? Your answers might teach you a lot about your own anxiety.
Note to moderators: please don't mod stuff down because you disagree with it. Moderate it up or down based on the quality or otherwise of the points made. The parent AC deserves the occasional positive mod for polite, constructive sarcasm.
any kind of violent and sexual behaviour is a bad thing
Strawman detected.
In an average TV crime show, the hero of the plot kills one person per episode. An average New York police officer draws their gun about twice in their working lifetime. An average FPS player kills several opponents per minute.
What they're looking for is a game which is closer to Real Life, both less traumatising/anaesthetising for the player (however small the doses of trauma are) and better training for Real Life.
Children's games don't fulfil that aim because they are too simple.
I notice that you don't directly address your first point. Meanwhile...
FPSs are violent by nature
Not. To be precise (AFAIK) all that you can make a valid claim for is "existing FPS implementations are all violent", and this represents a poverty of imagination, not a natural feature of the genre.
Does a paintball FPS exist - where the objective is to tag opponents rather than killing them, or perhaps paint them with enough of your team's colour to initiate them into your side? If not, maybe it should. How about an FPS where the objective is to stick radio tags to wildlife? How about an "orbital debris hunter" FPS? How about a waldo FPS, where you're working on mechanical stuff in high orbit (or maybe you're in a ship orbiting a planet that needs terraforming), and there's a couple of seconds of lag in the feedback loop, maybe even a slowly-varying few seconds? Much harder to master than Quake, and much easier to set up for a meaningful ranking system.
Any of these can be intricate and exhilarating, and there's absolutely no need for them to be nasty or gory. How about a baseball FP[BatterPitcherFieldsman]? How about a first-person run in a fibreglass suit to emplace sensors in and/or collect samples from an actively erupting volcano?
The problem is your viewpoint. It's not an honest one, it's only an excuse to run people down from faux philosophical high ground. If your aim is to convert Christians to your own (short-sighted) way of thinking, you should be pushing this for all it's worth, as a foot-in-the-door way of weaning Christians onto more violent games. But no, you're too busy looking for immediate peer-group approval instead, so you're not. News flash! There is more to life!
...EMACS as "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping". Now your keyboard or mouse might have more RAM, and your 'phone certainly does. The march of progress?
Seeing is believing. That's MPlayer running through AAlib.
On a more serious note, here's Lynx and Links looking at SlashDot. Still quite useful. Not so special for seeing the latest from Cassini or Rutan, but more than enough for 95% of your browsing needs. Links can be compiled to (if run under X) display images.
Printer install walkthrough, screen by screen
on
Slow Printing on Linux?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Menu: K -> System -> Configuration -> Configure Your Computer.
Type root password.
Hardware -> Printers. (Printer thingy starts; if CUPS had not been installed, I would have been prompted to insert the first install CD and CUPS plus all dependencies installed from it)
Add Printer.
Next.
(Autodetects Epson Stylus C41) Next.
Next.
Yes (I want to set this printer as the default printer), Next.
(Leave "Standard test page" selected, other options are "Photo test page" and "Do not print any test page") Next.
Finish. At this point, the printer is hammering out a test page.
Close printer thingy.
Close Mandrake Control Center.
Works just as well for networked printers and printers attached to MS-Windows boxes (might need a username/password for an MS-Window box set up to require that), other CUPS printers are 100% automatic unless you tell CUPS not to.
It is good, the vast majority of printers install without a hassle and you can do all manner of tricks which are hard work and extra software under MS-Windows, BUT when CUPS breaks, the error logging is often opaque, very obscure or nonexistent (as in the case of the default action for "binary" files containing Epson (impact dotmatrix) printer control codes from an app being to silently throw away the file on the assumption that the user had doen something dense like print an executable).
Slashdot Mirror
Given that the ratio of scientists being paid to produce results compatible with Naturalism to those being paid to produce results compatible with Theism must be hundreds to one, I think the creationist theories that have been put forward so far have fared exceptionally well.
Even so, Naturalism is a house divided against itself. One bunch tout "dark matter" and "dark energy" because without them their theories fall flat. A more honest bunch speak up about the patent ridiculousness of these just-so stories and try to produce Naturalistic theories that fit (so far, to no avail but yet their efforts are a good deal purer in heart than their opponents). Occam's answer would be to discard a lot of Naturalistic preconceptions about the age and uniformity of the Universe, and just work with what we have actually observed, not adding any interpretation to it until the last moment.
If you find your own gradual creation myths comforting, well, enjoy it. But I suggest that getting a right answer is far more important than getting a reassuring answer.
It's a compile time option, and list mails in 2000 indicate that 256k rows worked fine, so presumably megarow spreadsheets will too.
OOo's row limitation has already been raised to 64k (in non-production versions), and a plan is afoot to raise it again to "hundreds of millions" of rows, the bottlenecks being display code and a couple of memory-hungry accounting processes which will need redesign. The 64k rows is probably not a hard limit any more, you could probably compile a 128k or 256k row version of ooCalc 1.1.2 and suffer only performance/memory use penalties for going that high.
But as has been said so often above, you should probably be using a database at that scale, not a spreadsheet. Or perhaps awk or PERL will do the trick. (-:
...oops.
What Helix does bring to the party is WMA, which allows you to listen Freely to all of the radio stations and such that have been suckered into the DRM boondoggle and consequently work only with Microsoft's moderately crappy WMP codec.
The bit about the rock is misleading too. Jesus said "You are a loose stone ["petros"], but upon this rock ["petra", think in terms of bedrock] I will build My church". You could possibly interpret that as "upon these stones", but that's still too inclusive to support a Pope. Jesus repeats the offer of the keys to all of the Disciples in chapter 18, and note that in context there the Disciples are not represented as being in any way the leaders of the church as it existed then.
Next, consider Matthew 8:14 - Peter is married, and Popes are not (well... not in theory anyway). In Acts 15, James presided over the council and Peter was merely one of those who testified to it. In Galatians 2, Paul condemns Peter's hypocrisy. Finally, in 1Peter 5:1, Peter explicitly refers to himself as one among equals, and in 1Peter 2:8 he calls Jesus "the rock". None of this supports what you're saying, all of it speaks against the traditional Catholic position. You can see how the Bible wound up on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum until Vatican II.
If you want to conform to Christ, then you should accept personal responsibility for your own actions, so you can then admit fault completely to God and in turn receive complete forgiveness and be pointed towards a completely guileless and helpful life.
The scientist on the right is a creationist, and wrote the TERRA software being discussed on that page. In its time, it was regarded as the single best Earth-modelling package available and is still very well regarded (Linux and ForTran afficiondos will be pleased by that too, since it's written in ForTran-90 and runs on Beowulves).
Dr D Russell Humphreys predicted the whacko magentic fields of Naptune and Uranus from creationist principles; the predictions of materialists were well wide of the mark.
I could go on to labour the point, but there is real science and real scientists on the side of creationism.
Consider yourself called. (-:
On a more serious note, "witches" was a term which in practice meant anyone who believed differently to you, or that you didn't like. Protestants (even before the Protest of the Princes, they had Waldenses and Albigenses and such to torture) were as much fair game as helpful, peaceful herbalists and genuinely nasty might-makes-right invokers of dark powers.
To give you some idea of how this mentality works, consider that when Inquisitions were set up, wealthy people were one of the high-risk categories. Methinks the confiscation of property and the spotter's-fee bounty associated therewith might have had something to do with this. A lot more than anything to do with religion, in point of fact.
"The Christian standpoint" could be made to cover a lot of ground. I specifically exclude interpretations incompatible with Scripture, since they will be considerably less true-to-plan.Welcome to relativism, where there is no point in doing anything because there's no goals, no endpoints, no purpose, no hope.
All beliefs may be equally sincere, but not all beliefs can be equally valid, especially so since most of them contradict one another. The scientific approach to deciding which is most valid is to compare each belief system with observation and history.
Unfortunately for materialism, many features of this universe and specifically the planet we're standing on are completely incompatible with a long history, and even if a long history is granted in the face of the evidence most of the processes which we observe around us work directly against the development of the myriad forms of life which we also observe. And of course, commensurate with this, what we actually see in nature is species disappearing, not new ones forming.
Supporters of materialism are caught on the horns of a cruel dilemma (or possibly crottling fork
Once you delete materialism, it completely changes the philosophical playfield. You're basically down to creationism, standing the world on turtles (hello, Terry Pratchett), or building it from the body parts and blood of assorted godlets. Tough call.
The server runs under WINE, I'll snaffle a secondhand client and see how well it goes.
Abracadabra, Aramaic for "I create as I speak" is heavily paralleled in the Bible. The term you're probably looking for is "hocus pocus", a corruption of "Hoc est corpus meum", the Latin uttered at the climax of a Mass when the priest purports to compress God (presumably a copy) into a wafer.
In another interesting pierce of irony, the cross is actually a symbol of Tammuz, the sun god. The cross-with-halo is an exact replica of the rising sun with atmospheric "lens effects". Christ was crucified on the symbol of His arch enemy. Mutating the solar disk into a crown of thorns in order to get away from the pagan implications is spectacularly ironic.
...but they were a lot more inclined to negotiate than the Crusaders were, and did a lot less damage to the locals in their ever so righteous paths.
...the story of Naaman's cure or Zaccheus' conversion can be turned into an interesting game. Mind you, some people can make toilet paper or styro-burgers seem exciting, so I won't say outright that it can't be done.
In which one political entity (the Roman Catholic Church) taught another (Islam) how to be brutal on a large scale, yes? And what does that have to do with religion?
How about the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which subjects of the same political entity suddenly rose up and murdered over 70,000 of their competitors in one day, not to mention slicing the breasts off others with shears, and other such pleasantries?
Or the invasion of Beziers, in which about 30,000 people - roughly half of them being at least nominal adherents to the aforementioned political entity - were wiped out in one go by mercenaries at the direction of said political entity, and the famous quotation "Tuez-les tous; Dieu reconnaitra les siens" (or, in English, "Kill them all; for the Lord knoweth them that are His") was born?
Yes, politics is murder. And often the reverse is true as well.
Lest you fall to believing that all lethal political entities have paternalistic religious connections, consider that (Atheist) Mao managed to kill more than 80 million of his own people, (Atheist) Stalin got another 20 million or so, and the Manchu got another few tens of millions suppressing the Ti Ping. To say nothing of strictly commercial murder and mass inhumanity like King Leopold's Congo (chalk up another ten million for that one, give or take).
It takes two to tango. Until you know about the individual Christians and what exactly it is that they're ruining, generalisations like that are at best pointless and in practice usually dangerous. Forex, if they're "ruining" a society which frowns on charity for fear of damaging the recipient's karma, then I'm all for "ruining" that. But I'd need more data than you've supplied in order to make a call there.
More-or-less genuine Christianity is also "ruining" (depending on your PoV) hundreds of Orthodox rabbis every year and hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of Mohammedans. In return, many Mohammedans have demonstrated that they would rather murder their own than see them convert, including their own children (that's a pretty clear demonstration of the inferiority of their argument). How do you feel about that? Your answers might teach you a lot about your own anxiety.
Obviously, you don't get the point. (-:
Note to moderators: please don't mod stuff down because you disagree with it. Moderate it up or down based on the quality or otherwise of the points made. The parent AC deserves the occasional positive mod for polite, constructive sarcasm.
Strawman detected.
In an average TV crime show, the hero of the plot kills one person per episode. An average New York police officer draws their gun about twice in their working lifetime. An average FPS player kills several opponents per minute.
What they're looking for is a game which is closer to Real Life, both less traumatising/anaesthetising for the player (however small the doses of trauma are) and better training for Real Life.
Children's games don't fulfil that aim because they are too simple.
I notice that you don't directly address your first point. Meanwhile...
Not. To be precise (AFAIK) all that you can make a valid claim for is "existing FPS implementations are all violent", and this represents a poverty of imagination, not a natural feature of the genre.Does a paintball FPS exist - where the objective is to tag opponents rather than killing them, or perhaps paint them with enough of your team's colour to initiate them into your side? If not, maybe it should. How about an FPS where the objective is to stick radio tags to wildlife? How about an "orbital debris hunter" FPS? How about a waldo FPS, where you're working on mechanical stuff in high orbit (or maybe you're in a ship orbiting a planet that needs terraforming), and there's a couple of seconds of lag in the feedback loop, maybe even a slowly-varying few seconds? Much harder to master than Quake, and much easier to set up for a meaningful ranking system.
Any of these can be intricate and exhilarating, and there's absolutely no need for them to be nasty or gory. How about a baseball FP[BatterPitcherFieldsman]? How about a first-person run in a fibreglass suit to emplace sensors in and/or collect samples from an actively erupting volcano?
The problem is your viewpoint. It's not an honest one, it's only an excuse to run people down from faux philosophical high ground. If your aim is to convert Christians to your own (short-sighted) way of thinking, you should be pushing this for all it's worth, as a foot-in-the-door way of weaning Christians onto more violent games. But no, you're too busy looking for immediate peer-group approval instead, so you're not. News flash! There is more to life!
...the instructions are here.
...EMACS as "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping". Now your keyboard or mouse might have more RAM, and your 'phone certainly does. The march of progress?
Seeing is believing. That's MPlayer running through AAlib.
On a more serious note, here's Lynx and Links looking at SlashDot. Still quite useful. Not so special for seeing the latest from Cassini or Rutan, but more than enough for 95% of your browsing needs. Links can be compiled to (if run under X) display images.
Works just as well for networked printers and printers attached to MS-Windows boxes (might need a username/password for an MS-Window box set up to require that), other CUPS printers are 100% automatic unless you tell CUPS not to.
It is good, the vast majority of printers install without a hassle and you can do all manner of tricks which are hard work and extra software under MS-Windows, BUT when CUPS breaks, the error logging is often opaque, very obscure or nonexistent (as in the case of the default action for "binary" files containing Epson (impact dotmatrix) printer control codes from an app being to silently throw away the file on the assumption that the user had doen something dense like print an executable).