An interesting possible use of the technology, if it were implemented for the phones themselves. It conjures memories of the coolness of Dick Tracy.
Of course there is still a big question in the industry whether people really want that. Those of us who are geeks no doubt think it is "cool", but even of us, how many of us would really want to use a video phone all the time? There are guaranteed to be times that you're going to want to remain unseen. And the question is, do those outweigh the times you want to be seen? If the answer is yes, video will have to remain a just a feature of the phone, rather than the main selling point, which means it will need to not have a big price impact. The corps are worried about that, because it means the technology will have to be cheap before they can sell it to the general populace.
Hence the 10-year timeline, which still should put things in perspective for the original poster.
I think you might be missing the point of the article. I read it as being an interesting little ironic factoid, not something everyone needs to worry about. And as far as the term "pollution", I think they mean it to be something that is diffused (or dumped) into the environment that damages the ecosystem in the area. There's no inherent problem with that. The earth's ecosystem has evolved to recover from these events. The problem is that human pollution doesn't stop. It just keeps pumping away, day after day, year after year. And it's been doing so at a higher rate than the rest of nature (for C02 at least) since the mid-18th century.
As another poster pointed out, the fringe eco-groups seem to view man as some type of plague or virus whose only purpose is destruction (always makes me think of Agent Smith). But it's clear we arose out of natural processes, and are a part of nature. But I think we definitely need the watchdog groups, and we need people who don't let us forget that we do have an effect. I don't think that corporations, left to themselves, would spend their money to try and preserve the earth unless we were in dire danger due to our own actions. I'm convinced that the watchdogs will help us, over time, decrease our polluting output and eventually reach a state where us and our technology co-exist safely with the environment. But I also don't think we could get there without going through such environmentally destructive eras as the industrial and post-industrial.
"On a global scale, the difference is even more dramatic, said Gerlach, who often gets calls from power-plant operators and oil-company executives who believe nature is just as responsible for global warming as man. His answer always disappoints them.
'I tell them the amounts don't even come close and I usually never hear from them again.' "
It is pretty clear that this is prototype technology. Especially given their 10-year timeline. They've got a lot of time to figure things out. But they didn't say it was for the phones either.
There is pretty much no reason to provide that type of bitrate on a phone. The human voice only needs a 3KHz bandwith to sound pretty darn good. Assuming the sound waves are being transmitted digitally, even with no compression, that translates to only 6Kbps (gotta sample at least twice per cycle of the highest frequency component). Let's say that overhead in multiple levels of protocol wrappings is 200% of the data size (seems large to me, but I could be wrong). That ups the necessary transfer rate to 18Kbps.
Granted, that may not be ideal for the increasing variety of data services offered on the phones. But 1Gbps? That's a bit extreme. Our PCs do just fine at 100Mbps (or less if they're wireless). I just can't believe they'd be talking about the actual phones. It has to be the backend.
I was going to say, "at least you didn't get the Mothers Against Violent Acts website", but when I search google to get a link, I couldn't even find it. Do they not have one, or is Google missing it?
He's behind Sourcefire, not Sourceforge. Though his open source software is stored in the Sourceforge repository.
Though it is probably superfluous to point it out here at/. there's a big difference. Sourcefire is a company that sells proprietary interfaces to open source security software. Sourceforge is a repository for open source software and a focal point of the open source community.
Maybe I was misinformed, and overestimated the benevolence of those who created copyright. But I remain convinced of the vision of what copyright should be. You seem to at least partially agree with me on that.
I'm getting away from the legal issue here, and focusing on the ideal of what many people wish copyright was. And that's a way to do what you love, create something meaningful, and not live in poverty. Not a way to get rich and famous.
I'm using it as a metaphor to demonstrate that you won't get far without going through a publisher.
I'm also not convinced, especially with the near ubiquity of internet access among Americans, that the publishing industry is necessary anymore for an artist to be "successful". Rich, maybe. But not everyone defines success by how much money they rake in. Ideally, an artist sees past this, and their creations are about something more than satisfying demand. How many of the chart-toppers today will we still be listening to long after they're dead, like we still look at the paintings of the Renaissance masters? I guarantee it'll be a tiny percentage. A much smaller percentage than the percentage that are getting rich off what they produce. Again, that makes the difference between an economic product and a piece of art. With the current publishing system, there is no distinction between the two.
I am cynical about calling most musical artists who sell their albums through the big labels true artists. They are just meeting a demand. I question how many of the bands that have been on tour for 20 years or more would still be making music if they had never hit it big with the labels. Or how many of them would have got into the business in the first place if they knew they'd never be "stars". Any that wouldn't, I would question whether they are truly dedicated to their art, or whether it's just business.
Yes, I'm being idealistic here. Do I really expect copyright reform to meet this ideal? Not a chance. America is too concerned with the American dream. Not the old dream of etching out a satisfying living even if you started with nothing. The new dream of entitlement, excess, and wealth.
But everyone can hope. And while I hope, I'll do my best to sift through the commodity crap "art" on the shelves and find the truly unique works I know are out there.
Well, I'm not a digital imaging expert, so my word probably isn't worth as much.
But to qualify my statements, they were based on the demo printouts that the printers in the store were set to print. Canon had little report/presentation type demos. Lots of text, small pictures. HP always had full-page images of flowers, or butterflies, or fruit. And every time there was a new demo, I was always amazed at the vibrancy of the color in HP's. They also had a DPI that absolutely blew Canon out of the water. HP had the first printer I saw in the store that could print out an image that looked like it was a page out of a magazine. And at that point, Canon's demo images were still small and grainy.
But again, I'm not an imaging expert. So maybe what I saw wasn't as amazing as I thought.
I completely agree. That's what I was trying to point out by mentioning the length of copyright. It's ridiculous! It completely subverts the copyright and turns it into a commercial tool rather than a shelter for art.
Whenever the decision was made to extend copyright beyond the end of the artist's life, that's when it started to lose track of the spirit of copyright. It stopped supporting the advancement of art, and started supporting commercialism.
The problem is that the artists that sell their rights don't see them as benefits. They're not trying to get their music heard. They're trying to sell their music. They're trying to make a profit. If they "touch" or "move" people in the meantime, then that's a bonus.
A copyright of just the artist's lifetime (maybe even less), would be fine if the artist was just trying to get his music heard, or to be able to make music and not have to hold another job on top of it. But that's not the case. Music (and movies, and art, and literature) has been commercialized and commoditized, just like everything else in the capitalistic world. It's just a product now. Just like your refrigerator, or your car, or your kitchen table.
I, personally, find it to be a despicable situation. There is true art out there, but you won't get it from the RIAA, or the MPAA, or the big publishing companies. Few people know how to find it, or even that it exists.
I haven't been keeping up on printer news since I worked at Best Buy a couple years back. But when I was working there, I was intimately familiar with the consumer models of the big brands.
I have to say that, at that point at least, Canon was most popular, because their quality was good considering their low prices. Though it also might have had something to do with the in-store sales rep they had. But HP was miles ahead of the competition in quality, if you could afford their ink. Epson couldn't seem to find a good balance between quality, speed, and ease of use. Lexmark was fast, but the quality was less than stellar, plus their ink was ridiculously expensive.
If I were to go out and buy a printer today, I'd be focused on quality, so I'd still check out HP first.
Was there somewhere else all these people were arguing about this before Google made these changes? Or was this just some sort of "last straw"? It seems to me that if Google just shut down the service today to make sure they stayed on the safe side of the law, that there would be a greater outrage among the users than there is currently.
Granted that doesn't make it right, but neither does being illegal equate to being wrong. It seems to me that this service has been a great benefit to the IT society, and I very much doubt it has hurt any "competing" business, such as consulting. I don't think it's wrong.
Obviously, there's not 1.5 billion web sites for kids under 13.
No, but (600M + 600M + 300M) * 10% = 150M, not 1.5B.
But that's still more than half the population of the United States, and about 2.5% of the population of the world. And I find it hard to believe that the % of children with websites is so high in the US, Europe, and the modern regions of Asia that it can make up for Africa, South America, and the non-modern regions of Asia.
So yes it's still hard to swallow, even without the quote from Grunwald Associates, which is being unabashedly misused.
Simplicity and self-consistency are nice, but not sufficient for truth. There are many religions with simple, self-consistent tenets that make good intuitive moral sense. But that still gives one no way to choose between them, as their logic always seems circular.
This, among other things, is why you can't convince people one way or another on this stuff. They have to actually want to believe it. Their thoughts, what they want their god to be, has to line up with who God really is. Otherwise you'd have all these people that believe in God, but don't really serve him. Which, IMO, is even worse than not believing because it's outright defiant.
Serious question about this. Why did God provide a bible which was so much more clear to thousands of Hebrews at the time than to millions of Christians today?
Because the Hebrews were originally supposed to bring the word of God to the rest of the world. But they didn't hold up their end of the deal. Which is why, after Jesus came, Paul travelled around and preached salvation to the Gentiles.
The Old Testament was not written to the Gentiles. It refers to us, but it wasn't for us. We can read it, and learn from it. But the message there is not necessary for salvation, like the message in the New Testament is.
This is why it is completely irrelevant for people to say things such as "well if you believe the Bible, why don't you stone sinners?" The answer is because we weren't commanded to, and when Jesus came he told the Jews not to do it either. It was originally a preventative measure to keep their culture from being corrupted. But they were intent on corrupting it and it happened anyway.
It just seems to me the the Word of God would be unambiguous and self-evidently true, like a mathematical proof.
The more I learn about scripture, the more self-consistent and simple it is. Yes, if you take bits and pieces out of context, it doesn't make sense, or seems to be self-contradictory. But taken altogether, it explains itself. People make it complicated because they are always looking for loopholes, or ways to disprove it, or are trying to fit in with it their own ideas of how it should be. This is borne out by my previous example of the Satan thing. It isn't consistent, even within scripture to think of it as some powerful being above man but below God. But if you take the whole Bible altogether, a more accurate, and simple picture emerges. The scripter even says that the source of evil is the heart of man.
Hmm... This may cancel out my credibility with some of the Christian readers, but I don't believe Satan is an entity. The Hebrew word for Satan (pronounced almost exactly the same) means only "adversary". I've come to believe that the only consistent way to interpret "Satan", or "the devil", in scripture is merely as a noun referring to anything that is contrary to God. This doesn't apply to "devils" as used in the N.T., which were diseases or illnesses. The average Jew called them devils and demons because of the superstition and the continual acceptance of pagan ideas into Jewish culture, which is referenced by the prophets, the rare bastions who kept the word of God pure, throughout the O.T.
This can resolve any number of seeming self-contradictions, such as Jesus saying "get thee behind me Satan" to Peter when he protests Jesus' crucifixion, which was to be the salvation of man. Also, the "sons of God" and "sons of the devil" in Job "presenting themselves before God": I believe this refers merely to believers and unbelievers, maybe at some sort of church service. The testing of Job requested by the devil is no different than someone accusing a person of having faith only because they haven't had to suffer in life. "Oh sure, he's a good guy, because he's never had anything bad happen to him. If xxxx happened to him, he'd give up on his faith." Whereupon xxxx did happen, and the protester was proved wrong.
There are also several places in the Bible where animals are referred to as the Devil. If I remember correctly, in one place it is a donkey, and in another it is a bunch of rats.
Also, there is a place where king David is referred to as Satan. In one verse it says something to the effect of "and Satan stood up to provoke God by numbering the people", and then a few verses later it's talking about David ordering a census, and his assistant (Joab?) protesting that it was unfaithful to number them for his own confidence when God would be with them no matter how few there were.
Anyway, I doubt that all will convince anyone, it's just a bit of an example of why you can't make blanket statements to discredit all Christians. We don't all subscribe to the same seemingly self-contradictory beliefs.
Oh, and by the way, here's something else to think about. In Luke Jesus says that we (humans) are the gods of the earth. "Have ye not read that ye are gods?" It refers to the fact that God gave this earth over to our dominion. "Go forth and subdue all things."
If I remember correctly it's stated by one of the prophets later in the old testament. The Jews, at least, believe that the Torah (first 5 books of the O.T.) was recorded by Moses. Except for the last chapter of Deuteronomy, which occurred after his death. My understanding is that was recorded by Joshua.
Why is this post modded as flamebait and troll when it holds no malice whatsoever? Yet posts (from both Christians and non-Christians) that are openly malicious, and filled with arguments ad hominem, are not modded as such?
Doesn't seem fair to me. In fact, it seems downright biased on the part of whoever modded it.
From what I've read, the word roughly meant "a period of time in which code performs an act". It's questionable how reliable that is, of course.
In general, what I tend to do when I see something in scripture that seems to not jive with science is to see if there's an alternate interpretation that is both consistent with scripture and science.
In fact, this also applies to "inconsistencies" among scripture. If you believe in God, then which is more likely: the apparent contradiction is really a contradiction, or you are misunderstanding/misinterpreting something? If you don't believe in God, then obviously you have no reason to even ask yourself this question.
Obviously, some of the things some posters have listed as inconsistencies (record of Solomon's cattle, record of the age of kings as they took the throne) may really be inaccurate recordings or translations. But, being a Christian, I tend to have faith that God has ensured the important parts were preserved, such as those regarding salvation. But again, if you don't believe in God, there is no reason to do so.
It's funny how so much of this comes down to a question of whether you believe in God or not, not what science says as opposed to religion. If you truly believe in God, then most of the arguments of a skeptic don't matter, because God has the ability to work around them. If you don't believe in God, there is no argument that is going to change your mind. In fact, Corinthians 2 actually says that a man cannot understand spiritual matters with the natural mind. Faith is required. If you're a skeptic, and don't like that stipulation, well, then you're free to decide you don't believe.
IMO, we shouldn't waste our time to trying to "convert" people who have no desire to believe. It just annoys everyone and ruins our credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course there is still a big question in the industry whether people really want that. Those of us who are geeks no doubt think it is "cool", but even of us, how many of us would really want to use a video phone all the time? There are guaranteed to be times that you're going to want to remain unseen. And the question is, do those outweigh the times you want to be seen? If the answer is yes, video will have to remain a just a feature of the phone, rather than the main selling point, which means it will need to not have a big price impact. The corps are worried about that, because it means the technology will have to be cheap before they can sell it to the general populace.
Hence the 10-year timeline, which still should put things in perspective for the original poster.
It's supposed to be funny. Maybe I should be saying "good work genius", to you.
As another poster pointed out, the fringe eco-groups seem to view man as some type of plague or virus whose only purpose is destruction (always makes me think of Agent Smith). But it's clear we arose out of natural processes, and are a part of nature. But I think we definitely need the watchdog groups, and we need people who don't let us forget that we do have an effect. I don't think that corporations, left to themselves, would spend their money to try and preserve the earth unless we were in dire danger due to our own actions. I'm convinced that the watchdogs will help us, over time, decrease our polluting output and eventually reach a state where us and our technology co-exist safely with the environment. But I also don't think we could get there without going through such environmentally destructive eras as the industrial and post-industrial.
Let's chill for a second and think about this.
It is pretty clear that this is prototype technology. Especially given their 10-year timeline. They've got a lot of time to figure things out. But they didn't say it was for the phones either.
There is pretty much no reason to provide that type of bitrate on a phone. The human voice only needs a 3KHz bandwith to sound pretty darn good. Assuming the sound waves are being transmitted digitally, even with no compression, that translates to only 6Kbps (gotta sample at least twice per cycle of the highest frequency component). Let's say that overhead in multiple levels of protocol wrappings is 200% of the data size (seems large to me, but I could be wrong). That ups the necessary transfer rate to 18Kbps.
Granted, that may not be ideal for the increasing variety of data services offered on the phones. But 1Gbps? That's a bit extreme. Our PCs do just fine at 100Mbps (or less if they're wireless). I just can't believe they'd be talking about the actual phones. It has to be the backend.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22mother s+against+violent+acts%22&btnG=Search
http://www.vasoftware.com/sourceforge/difs.php
And VA Software is "the guy" behind it.
This is the guy behind Snort and Sourceforge
/. there's a big difference. Sourcefire is a company that sells proprietary interfaces to open source security software. Sourceforge is a repository for open source software and a focal point of the open source community.
He's behind Sourcefire, not Sourceforge. Though his open source software is stored in the Sourceforge repository.
Though it is probably superfluous to point it out here at
Maybe I was misinformed, and overestimated the benevolence of those who created copyright. But I remain convinced of the vision of what copyright should be. You seem to at least partially agree with me on that.
I'm getting away from the legal issue here, and focusing on the ideal of what many people wish copyright was. And that's a way to do what you love, create something meaningful, and not live in poverty. Not a way to get rich and famous.
I'm using it as a metaphor to demonstrate that you won't get far without going through a publisher.
I'm also not convinced, especially with the near ubiquity of internet access among Americans, that the publishing industry is necessary anymore for an artist to be "successful". Rich, maybe. But not everyone defines success by how much money they rake in. Ideally, an artist sees past this, and their creations are about something more than satisfying demand. How many of the chart-toppers today will we still be listening to long after they're dead, like we still look at the paintings of the Renaissance masters? I guarantee it'll be a tiny percentage. A much smaller percentage than the percentage that are getting rich off what they produce. Again, that makes the difference between an economic product and a piece of art. With the current publishing system, there is no distinction between the two.
I am cynical about calling most musical artists who sell their albums through the big labels true artists. They are just meeting a demand. I question how many of the bands that have been on tour for 20 years or more would still be making music if they had never hit it big with the labels. Or how many of them would have got into the business in the first place if they knew they'd never be "stars". Any that wouldn't, I would question whether they are truly dedicated to their art, or whether it's just business.
Yes, I'm being idealistic here. Do I really expect copyright reform to meet this ideal? Not a chance. America is too concerned with the American dream. Not the old dream of etching out a satisfying living even if you started with nothing. The new dream of entitlement, excess, and wealth.
But everyone can hope. And while I hope, I'll do my best to sift through the commodity crap "art" on the shelves and find the truly unique works I know are out there.
But to qualify my statements, they were based on the demo printouts that the printers in the store were set to print. Canon had little report/presentation type demos. Lots of text, small pictures. HP always had full-page images of flowers, or butterflies, or fruit. And every time there was a new demo, I was always amazed at the vibrancy of the color in HP's. They also had a DPI that absolutely blew Canon out of the water. HP had the first printer I saw in the store that could print out an image that looked like it was a page out of a magazine. And at that point, Canon's demo images were still small and grainy.
But again, I'm not an imaging expert. So maybe what I saw wasn't as amazing as I thought.
I've never heard this before. What license are you talking about? Can you cite some of the evidence?
Whenever the decision was made to extend copyright beyond the end of the artist's life, that's when it started to lose track of the spirit of copyright. It stopped supporting the advancement of art, and started supporting commercialism.
The advent of USB should have resolved that issue for the most part.
The problem is that the artists that sell their rights don't see them as benefits. They're not trying to get their music heard. They're trying to sell their music. They're trying to make a profit. If they "touch" or "move" people in the meantime, then that's a bonus.
A copyright of just the artist's lifetime (maybe even less), would be fine if the artist was just trying to get his music heard, or to be able to make music and not have to hold another job on top of it. But that's not the case. Music (and movies, and art, and literature) has been commercialized and commoditized, just like everything else in the capitalistic world. It's just a product now. Just like your refrigerator, or your car, or your kitchen table.
I, personally, find it to be a despicable situation. There is true art out there, but you won't get it from the RIAA, or the MPAA, or the big publishing companies. Few people know how to find it, or even that it exists.
I have to say that, at that point at least, Canon was most popular, because their quality was good considering their low prices. Though it also might have had something to do with the in-store sales rep they had. But HP was miles ahead of the competition in quality, if you could afford their ink. Epson couldn't seem to find a good balance between quality, speed, and ease of use. Lexmark was fast, but the quality was less than stellar, plus their ink was ridiculously expensive.
If I were to go out and buy a printer today, I'd be focused on quality, so I'd still check out HP first.
Was there somewhere else all these people were arguing about this before Google made these changes? Or was this just some sort of "last straw"? It seems to me that if Google just shut down the service today to make sure they stayed on the safe side of the law, that there would be a greater outrage among the users than there is currently.
Granted that doesn't make it right, but neither does being illegal equate to being wrong. It seems to me that this service has been a great benefit to the IT society, and I very much doubt it has hurt any "competing" business, such as consulting. I don't think it's wrong.
Obviously, there's not 1.5 billion web sites for kids under 13.
No, but (600M + 600M + 300M) * 10% = 150M, not 1.5B.
But that's still more than half the population of the United States, and about 2.5% of the population of the world. And I find it hard to believe that the % of children with websites is so high in the US, Europe, and the modern regions of Asia that it can make up for Africa, South America, and the non-modern regions of Asia.
So yes it's still hard to swallow, even without the quote from Grunwald Associates, which is being unabashedly misused.
I always found it funny that Connery, playing Indy's dad, is actually only 12 years older than Ford.
Although, given the Jones' infamous libido, maybe that's not too far-fetched.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=131606&cid=109 91575/
This, among other things, is why you can't convince people one way or another on this stuff. They have to actually want to believe it. Their thoughts, what they want their god to be, has to line up with who God really is. Otherwise you'd have all these people that believe in God, but don't really serve him. Which, IMO, is even worse than not believing because it's outright defiant.
Because the Hebrews were originally supposed to bring the word of God to the rest of the world. But they didn't hold up their end of the deal. Which is why, after Jesus came, Paul travelled around and preached salvation to the Gentiles.
The Old Testament was not written to the Gentiles. It refers to us, but it wasn't for us. We can read it, and learn from it. But the message there is not necessary for salvation, like the message in the New Testament is.
This is why it is completely irrelevant for people to say things such as "well if you believe the Bible, why don't you stone sinners?" The answer is because we weren't commanded to, and when Jesus came he told the Jews not to do it either. It was originally a preventative measure to keep their culture from being corrupted. But they were intent on corrupting it and it happened anyway.
It just seems to me the the Word of God would be unambiguous and self-evidently true, like a mathematical proof.
The more I learn about scripture, the more self-consistent and simple it is. Yes, if you take bits and pieces out of context, it doesn't make sense, or seems to be self-contradictory. But taken altogether, it explains itself. People make it complicated because they are always looking for loopholes, or ways to disprove it, or are trying to fit in with it their own ideas of how it should be. This is borne out by my previous example of the Satan thing. It isn't consistent, even within scripture to think of it as some powerful being above man but below God. But if you take the whole Bible altogether, a more accurate, and simple picture emerges. The scripter even says that the source of evil is the heart of man.
This can resolve any number of seeming self-contradictions, such as Jesus saying "get thee behind me Satan" to Peter when he protests Jesus' crucifixion, which was to be the salvation of man. Also, the "sons of God" and "sons of the devil" in Job "presenting themselves before God": I believe this refers merely to believers and unbelievers, maybe at some sort of church service. The testing of Job requested by the devil is no different than someone accusing a person of having faith only because they haven't had to suffer in life. "Oh sure, he's a good guy, because he's never had anything bad happen to him. If xxxx happened to him, he'd give up on his faith." Whereupon xxxx did happen, and the protester was proved wrong.
There are also several places in the Bible where animals are referred to as the Devil. If I remember correctly, in one place it is a donkey, and in another it is a bunch of rats.
Also, there is a place where king David is referred to as Satan. In one verse it says something to the effect of "and Satan stood up to provoke God by numbering the people", and then a few verses later it's talking about David ordering a census, and his assistant (Joab?) protesting that it was unfaithful to number them for his own confidence when God would be with them no matter how few there were.
Anyway, I doubt that all will convince anyone, it's just a bit of an example of why you can't make blanket statements to discredit all Christians. We don't all subscribe to the same seemingly self-contradictory beliefs.
Oh, and by the way, here's something else to think about. In Luke Jesus says that we (humans) are the gods of the earth. "Have ye not read that ye are gods?" It refers to the fact that God gave this earth over to our dominion. "Go forth and subdue all things."
If I remember correctly it's stated by one of the prophets later in the old testament. The Jews, at least, believe that the Torah (first 5 books of the O.T.) was recorded by Moses. Except for the last chapter of Deuteronomy, which occurred after his death. My understanding is that was recorded by Joshua.
I have a question:
Why is this post modded as flamebait and troll when it holds no malice whatsoever? Yet posts (from both Christians and non-Christians) that are openly malicious, and filled with arguments ad hominem, are not modded as such?
Doesn't seem fair to me. In fact, it seems downright biased on the part of whoever modded it.
From what I've read, the word roughly meant "a period of time in which code performs an act". It's questionable how reliable that is, of course. In general, what I tend to do when I see something in scripture that seems to not jive with science is to see if there's an alternate interpretation that is both consistent with scripture and science. In fact, this also applies to "inconsistencies" among scripture. If you believe in God, then which is more likely: the apparent contradiction is really a contradiction, or you are misunderstanding/misinterpreting something? If you don't believe in God, then obviously you have no reason to even ask yourself this question. Obviously, some of the things some posters have listed as inconsistencies (record of Solomon's cattle, record of the age of kings as they took the throne) may really be inaccurate recordings or translations. But, being a Christian, I tend to have faith that God has ensured the important parts were preserved, such as those regarding salvation. But again, if you don't believe in God, there is no reason to do so. It's funny how so much of this comes down to a question of whether you believe in God or not, not what science says as opposed to religion. If you truly believe in God, then most of the arguments of a skeptic don't matter, because God has the ability to work around them. If you don't believe in God, there is no argument that is going to change your mind. In fact, Corinthians 2 actually says that a man cannot understand spiritual matters with the natural mind. Faith is required. If you're a skeptic, and don't like that stipulation, well, then you're free to decide you don't believe. IMO, we shouldn't waste our time to trying to "convert" people who have no desire to believe. It just annoys everyone and ruins our credibility.