Let me start off by pointing out that Lucas' series is chock full of plotholes, and I solve them only because it's a fun mental exercise.
Now then.
Vader no longer has biological legs or arms in episodes IV-VI. Instead, he has robotic prosthetic limbs, and not very good ones compared to Luke's hand (and what's left of the organic parts is in pretty bad shape). He's also ~40 years old. His abilities with the Force are nowhere near as powerful as before his death, according to Lucas.
So, his lightsaber fighting isn't going to be very good anymore.
Obi-wan, now, he's explainable too. I don't remember the real numbers, but I'd assume he's around 60ish. While he's been training for a long time in the desert, he can't have had a remotely challenging lightsaber fight in the past twenty years, with not even potential sparring partners... Put those two factors together, and you can see where he might have lost the touch.
Luke is the easiest. Sure, he's strong with the Force, but he has no idea how the Jedi used to fight with lightsabers, and since Obi-wan dies so soon after they meet, he has no one to teach him the advanced technique. When he goes to train with Yoda, he doesn't learn it, presumably because Yoda had such a handful just getting this overaged pupil to use the Force at all, and to concentrate properly.
Certainly when it comes to mathematical proofs, when a professor warns you that you won't be able to do the proof, it's usually because you haven't had training in the types of proof methods that are likely to be required.
Yeah, it's possible that you'll find the brilliant, elegant, simple proof. But it's not that likely, if no one else has found it yet...
I'm not saying don't try; I'm saying there's a reason why they warn you about them.
That said, nothing has ever annoyed me more than my discrete math professor saying, "Don't worry about this proof; a student could not understand it."
The majority of the kerfuffle about stem cell research revolves around DNA having a soul but there is also the undercurrent of "man in God's image" that is going to be a major issue in this or next century. And it will equally revolve around "moral values" as empirically groundless. Undoubtedly everyone except the Jehovah's Witnesses will be overjoyed to have genetic treatment for cancer -- but just try to enhance any capability above the "God-given" norm and we will have social unrest.
This is a misconception that I get really tired of seeing.
The phrase "in his image" that appears in Genesis does not mean that man was made to literally "look like God". The Christian God is not, emphatically not something that humans can even envision. The Hebrew there could legitimately be translated as something more like "shadow" or "imitation".
Generally, the passage is interpreted to mean that mankind's cognitive abilities and sapience were modeled after God's, insofar as man has these things and the animals obviously don't.
So, while some conservatives might argue against gene therapy (and only a very few would, I can assure you, being one myself), you misunderstand why they would. Mostly, the ones that do are just concerned that we might screw some people up pretty badly doing the early research.
Nowhere in this entire chapter are we given to understand that Abraham believe that God would raise Issac from the dead after the sacrifice...in fact, that renders the entire idea of a sacrifice pointless. No, Abraham had no reason at all to believe that Issace would be returned to him. Hebrews 11:17-20 is internally inconsistent with Genesis 22.
No, it is not.
For the passages to be internally inconsistent, it would have to say explicitly that Abraham did not expect Isaac to be raised from the dead.
This is not said.
And you know, if you believe that a sacrifice that ends in resurrection is pointless, you do not understand the Christian faith. All that we hold to hinges entirely on a sacrifice that ends in resurrection - Jesus' death on the cross.
But, that's entirely OT.
Here's some information on radiocarbon dating for you.
So, what I got from that was, "Radiocarbon dating exists. It hinges upon some assumptions that can't accurately be made unless you've been around the object for the entirety of its existence. When you get radiocarbon data on an object, people often disagree on how to interpret it."
It's about the Christians who want the Creationists dogma taught as fact side by side with evolution.
I don't know any who want that. I'm sure some exist, but I don't know them. The people I know who would like ID taught in public schools simply want it mentioned as a possibility - not necessarily in conflict with evolution, not necessarily better, not "We know that evolution is false and WE ARE ALWAYS RIGHT!" They just want an acknowledgment that ID is a legitimate perspective to hold, and maybe a quick rundown of how the data we currently have can be interpreted in favor of ID, and possibly even a relatively young earth of 8 - 14000 years (ie, wide range of species comes from the creativity of the designer, not evolutionary means; large numbers of fossils in various locations could be the result of a worldwide flood; under catastrophic conditions, major geological revamps can happen fast, ref. Mount St. Helens, etc.).
I think this is all from me today - finals this week...
Scientists have clear evidence of the evolutionary process throughout history via these fossils...where exactly did they come from if the planet is in fact only 6000-odd years old?
Honestly, I'm a Christian, and I've never met another Christian who spouted crap like "God put them there to test our faith". That's just flaming stupid.
Most ID folks would say that the fossils got to be there exactly how you'd think they would - the animals died, and their bodies got trapped in the right circumstances to form fossils. It doesn't take that long for stuff to get petrified if conditions are right.
I believe the traditional reply at this point is: "Fine, fossils can form relatively quickly, but the rocks you find them in can't."
Not being a geologist, I wouldn't know. Some of the geologists present care to elaborate?
Of course, this is the same god who told Abraham to sacrifice his only son to Him, and waited until the knife was actually descending to say "Psych!".
If you're gonna quote the Bible, admit that you're not arguing against ID, you're attacking Christianity. The two are different (I know several ID people who are strongly anti-Christian, and a lot of Christians who don't like ID). And if you're gonna attack Christianity, understand what you're attacking before doing it (If you want to know what that whole sacrifice thing was about, read Hebrews 11:17-20).
Can't the ID folks consider the possibility that evolution is the tool God used to create us?
A lot do. Heck, I know Christians who think that evolution is the tool God used to create us. However, most IDers look at it with something like Occam's Razor in mind - why would God introduce that much extra complexity to his creation process? If you presuppose an infinitely powerful being, evolution seems like so much wasted effort.
This is the real world where an application might have 100's of lines of codes, maybe 1000's. It might be a bunch of classes in java working together.
Okay, granted, I'm just on the verge of graduation, but having been through my software engineering class, I'm curious:
Where on earth have you seen a significant real-world application that was only a few hundred lines of code?
Most of my trivially-small programming class assignments hit 3 - 400 lines (partly due to my obsessive documentation style), and the minesweeper clone I worked on in my software engineering class was around 3000 lines. Minesweeper (even with a self-solving mode) is not exactly a major application.
I would have thought most major apps are more on the order of tens of thousands of lines of code... Are you counting complex scripts as apps, maybe?
This sounds almost exactly like the subvocalization technology that Ender uses to communicate with Jane in the later books.
As those who've read it will remember, silent communication while around others can lead to a whole new set of problems all it's own... Especially when it's apparent that you're communicating, but not what you're saying.
Look, if evolution is really about the survival of the fittest, any being which doesn't die is miles and miles ahead of everything else.
And it's not as though death is hardcoded into biological systems, is it? What's actually happening when living things die, as far as I understand it, is that the pieces that keep their system ticking start breaking.
It's not an "evolutionary advance", it's a failure of evolution to actually solve the biggest problem.
Assuming you assume evolution is the only explanation for existence, anyway.
Come on folks, where're the other OS X users out there?
Personally, I have my trusty G4 tower about nine feet from my bed. It's hooked to a fairly decent set of Altec Lansing speakers.
iTunes + 10-line AppleScript + iCal event associated with said AppleScript = best wakeup system ever, complete with volume fadein. A nice big shuffled playlist called "Wakeup" with suitable music, and you're good to go.
All you Linux folks out there, it might not be quite as straightforward (I don't know what calendar/alarm programs are available on Linux), but it should be pretty easy to do something similar.
Heck, I've never actually gone this far, but if you knew your daily computer use schedule, you could even have iCal events opening the documents you want when it's time to work on them, that sort of thing.
Anyway, the G4 alarm works nicely, because it wakes me up pleasantly, slowly, and it's far enough away from my bed that I actually have to get up to turn it off.
Well, I've never heard of anything like this, but a few comments:
The current version of Mail is 1.3.9. I don't know offhand if it runs with 10.2.8, since I'm running 10.3.8.
I wouldn't be completely surprised if there was a vulnerability in the older versions of Mail that allowed this to happen. I'm not aware of any such vulnerability, I'm just saying that it could possibly exist.
Camino's fairly beta software - I guess it's theoretically possible that there's a hole in it somewhere that allowed the attacker (who one has to presume got remote access) to find his eBay account name and password.
But, honestly, I'm much more inclined to guess user incompetence and/or deceit. Did anyone actually witness these events besides him, or is it all just on his word? I've known people to do stupider things than bid on expensive items while they're drunk, and this seems as likely an excuse as any to get back out of it.
Most likely scenario might be something like:
He acidentally did click on a link inside the email, and didn't realize it. Once activated, the link did it's job, and his account info was snagged in some nefarious way involving autofill, if Camino even supports that (I don't know, I use Safari, and cannot for the life of me fathom why a Mac user runs anything else, unless they're doing Web development).
When I first ran into the idea of thin client computing, I thought it was pretty cool, but like many other folks, I thought, "Do I really like the idea of all my data being stored elsewhere?"
Like you, I decided that something similar to the USB pendrives would be more likely to succeed, but carried out to a farther extreme: Your entire system, data, OS, apps, and whatever, is stored on your portable drive. Plug it into a compatible computer, and have at it. An early prototype of this model actually exists; check out Damn Small Linux on a USB pendrive. Admittedly, there's not a lot of storage space, but there're certainly bigger pendrives that could be used this way, and storage devices are only getting smaller...
It seems a little extreme at first, and in many ways (particularly in terms of data integrity) it's not as nice as the Net-based solution.
But, most technologists overlook the importance of the average person's reaction to adoption of technology, and I think that the average guy on the street is gonna prefer the idea of carrying his "computer" everywhere with him, and plugging it into a "terminal" so he can use it.
Obviously, there are pretty big obstacles to this idea (running on all the different architectures that currently exist comes to mind, although you could probably do fairly well on that with Linux), but there are also pretty big obstacles to the thin-client computing idea, and I think people are going to be fundamentally leery about someone else handling all their data. I imagine that there will be the option of uploading data to a remote location for backup, but only the data you want backed up (ie, nothing you want to keep really secure; for that, you make duplicate drives stored in a safe place).
Thus, I suspect that in the long run, ultra-portable storage that houses your full system, OS, apps, docs and all, that you can just plug into any machine, is what's gonna win.
I'm still a big fan of building a space elevator and throwing nuclear waste towards the edge of the solar system. It'd get the junk into distant space, where it won't cause anyone a problem, but it wouldn't be nearly as expensive as trying to do rocket launches to dump it up there (in the long run).
If anyone ever did catch up with it, I expect it'd be far enough in the future that the stuff wouldn't be terribly radioactive anymore.
I'd love to give you a lengthy post on this subject, because as you say, many modern churches have forgotten this part of traditional Christianity.
But, now that I'm back in classes, I just don't have the time to go into the kind of depth it deserves.
Biblical examples, related to some of the questions you ask: Israel bucking the local trend, and not offering child sacrifices (see Leviticus 20). The prophet Elijah, to the people of Israel, saying that they would have a test. If Baal fulfilled the conditions of the test, they should worship him as God; if the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did so, they should worship Him (see 1st Kings 18). Jesus' fulfillment of the prophecies of the Messiah (far too complex to explain in the time I have before class; to understand this, you'd have to actually read Isaiah, Psalms, and Matthew).
Historical examples: Augustine of Hippo, in his book The Confessions of Saint Augustine (not self-titled, of course; it was actually his private prayer journal, and was published later on), outlines in depth why he became a Christian, after holding Christianity to be wrong and ridiculous for many years. C.S. Lewis, a staunch atheist, who became a Christian not because of weakness or fear, but because he was convinced that atheism did not make sense. Martin Luther, the man who began the overthrow of the Roman Catholic Church's political power, by turning several incorrect points of Catholic theology on their head (his work is the foundation of all the non-Catholic Christian denominations today).
No matter what you believe about life, the universe, and everything, no one's ever been able to explain the whole thing adequately. Every viewpoint fails to explain something. I am a Christian because Christianity provides a cohesive view of the world, and admits up front that there are things it can't explain perfectly. But overall, of all the ways of viewing the world, Christianity is the one I've found that seems most correct, and it's what I believe.
Like I said, I don't have time right now to give a real, in-depth explanation of what I believe, and I don't expect to convince anybody here that my view is right. That's okay. But, if you want a good explanation of what I mentioned, the idea that Christianity insists on logical reasoning and a reason for believing, I'd recommend that you read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and Creed or Chaos by Dorothy Sayers. Also, The Confessions of Saint Augustine are excellent in this regard, but they're quite heavy reading (not that the first two books mentioned are lightweights). Any decent library will have these books, and I really encourage you to read them. They provide a pretty solid outline of why Christians believe what they do. I've spent a lot of my life understanding the evolutionary viewpoint; I'd appreciate it if you all would at least take the time to understand where we come from.
If by "Western religions", you mean Christianity, then, no.
Contrary to popular belief, the Christian view has always been, "Look at the evidence."
The reason most early Christians believed Christ had resurrected?
No friggin' body to be found.
It wasn't a random leap of faith; the body wasn't where they put it, and no one could show them where it was.
Heck, the Pharisees didn't even try to pawn off a fake on them, which is really surprising, if you think about it...
Okay, time for a very lengthy comment that no one will read, AND that will be modded down because I'm not an evolutionist (after all, if you don't believe that all of existence happened at random, you're a nutty Bible-thumper who can't think, right?).
First of all, the question that ought to be raised by this story isn't a scientific one. It's actually a question of constitutionality. If you read the article, you would see that the judge declared the stickers unconstitutional because "By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories."
The mere fact that you believe creationists are stupid does not mean you should cheer every time creationism is knocked as a theory of origin. If the courts decide now that creationism should be censored all the time, imagine how you'll feel if Bush gets the appointees he'd like for the Supreme Court, and they make the opposite decision twenty-three years down the road...
That aside, let's look at the constitutionality issue.
Essentially, the judge said this: By not presenting evolution as fact, the school district was supporting creationism as a theory of origin. Further, the judge reasons, a school district supporting creationism as a theory of origin is breaking the separation of church and state.
The question, then, is, "Is the judge's analysis correct?"
Putting a disclaimer on one theory does not necessarily imply that you agree with an opposing theory. The image of the disclaimer shown in the article reads: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
Yep, that definitely states that evolution is a theory, not a fact. However, it doesn't indicate that there are any facts about the origin of living things, nor does it even indicate that the suppliers of the textbook (that is, the school district) thinks there's a better theory. All it states is that evolution is a theory, not a fact.
denigrate
tr.v. denigrated, denigrating, denigrates
1. To attack the character or reputation of; speak ill of; defame.
2. To disparage; belittle: The critics have denigrated our efforts.
As far as I can tell, that does not 'denigrate' evolution as a theory of origins. Nowhere does this sticker say, "Evolution is probably wrong," or "Evolution is a bad theory." It just says that evolution is not proven to be the way life originated in our universe/on our planet. That may or may not be a true statement; I haven't addressed that question yet. But, that is what the disclaimer says.
It also says to consider the material with an open mind, and to analyze it critically. We'd all agree that this is the way to view a mathematical proof, or a proof of correctness for an algorithm. I think the average Slashdotter would definitely say that one should do this when examining religious material, such as the Bible, the Qu'ran, or perhaps the Bhagavad Gita.
So why would it be wrong to give this advice to students who are studying theories of origin? Shouldn't every decision we make be based on careful thought and analysis?
If evolution is so solidly proven to be true, and so obviously the only valid view, then advising students to come to the material on evolution analytically and with an open mind will help evolution out, if anything. A few of those "fundamentalist right-wing idiots" may just take the advice, see how the massive preponderance of the evidence supports evolution, and change their beliefs.
If, after having thought about evolution analytically, students decide they don't believe in it, one can only say, "Well, they're individuals, and they have the right to believe what they like."
We
Re:You guys need to get a clue.
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Halo 2 Reviews
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This is pointless, but I'll say it anyway -
I was born and bred on UT. Little bit of Quake. Some GoldenEye and PerfectDark on my friends' N64s.
Those were the first FPS's I played.
I'd been a bit of a Bungie fan until MS bought them out (mostly just Myth and Myth II), at which point I said to myself, "Well, that's over with."
I wound up trying Halo long after it hit the scene, and fell in love with it. The game is mind-numbingly easy on Normal, though, and granted, it takes maybe an hour to get decent with the Xbox controller if you're used to mousing.
The main thing is, play on Legendary. The rather stupid enemies become the most intelligent AI opponents I've ever played against on Legendary.
It's true that Halo brought little new to the table (good vehicles and good music), and I doubt Halo 2 brings much more (dual wielding and vehicle jacking, essentially, with of course more good music). What Halo did so well was present all the ideas that other FPS makers had had, streamlined and polished wonderfully. It wasn't about a brand new style of gameplay, it was about the little details, like the Grunts' pathetic screams of "Not again!!!" when you tagged them with a plasma grenade, or the Marines running up to enemy corpses and filling them with lead (accompanied by insults), or the joy of managing to sneak up behind a Gold Sword Elite and melee him off the edge of a cliff to his doom.
You'll see that most of these guys can be found elsewhere on the Web. A fair number of them seem to have a reasonably solid reputation, and also seem to have backgrounds that fit their current roles.
Obviously, this doesn't settle the question of whether QuickTransit is vaporware in the least, but you have to wonder:
Most of these guys have at least decent reputations in their old circles, it seems. Why would they go and trash those by making ridiculous claims about complete vaporware?
I don't know that it's all it's cracked up to be, but I'd guess that at least Transitive's Board of Directors has a lot of faith in it. Which, of course, means absolutely nothing...
I'd also point out that when you poke around the Web, you'll see evidence that some of these folks have been working on exactly this problem for a while... Like, since the mid-90s, if I understand everything I saw correctly.
Just something to chew on.
Slashdot Mirror
This one's not too hard, actually.
Let me start off by pointing out that Lucas' series is chock full of plotholes, and I solve them only because it's a fun mental exercise.
Now then.
Vader no longer has biological legs or arms in episodes IV-VI. Instead, he has robotic prosthetic limbs, and not very good ones compared to Luke's hand (and what's left of the organic parts is in pretty bad shape). He's also ~40 years old. His abilities with the Force are nowhere near as powerful as before his death, according to Lucas.
So, his lightsaber fighting isn't going to be very good anymore.
Obi-wan, now, he's explainable too. I don't remember the real numbers, but I'd assume he's around 60ish. While he's been training for a long time in the desert, he can't have had a remotely challenging lightsaber fight in the past twenty years, with not even potential sparring partners... Put those two factors together, and you can see where he might have lost the touch.
Luke is the easiest. Sure, he's strong with the Force, but he has no idea how the Jedi used to fight with lightsabers, and since Obi-wan dies so soon after they meet, he has no one to teach him the advanced technique. When he goes to train with Yoda, he doesn't learn it, presumably because Yoda had such a handful just getting this overaged pupil to use the Force at all, and to concentrate properly.
Sometimes the teachers really do know better.
Certainly when it comes to mathematical proofs, when a professor warns you that you won't be able to do the proof, it's usually because you haven't had training in the types of proof methods that are likely to be required.
Yeah, it's possible that you'll find the brilliant, elegant, simple proof. But it's not that likely, if no one else has found it yet...
I'm not saying don't try; I'm saying there's a reason why they warn you about them.
That said, nothing has ever annoyed me more than my discrete math professor saying, "Don't worry about this proof; a student could not understand it."
The majority of the kerfuffle about stem cell research revolves around DNA having a soul but there is also the undercurrent of "man in God's image" that is going to be a major issue in this or next century. And it will equally revolve around "moral values" as empirically groundless. Undoubtedly everyone except the Jehovah's Witnesses will be overjoyed to have genetic treatment for cancer -- but just try to enhance any capability above the "God-given" norm and we will have social unrest.
This is a misconception that I get really tired of seeing.
The phrase "in his image" that appears in Genesis does not mean that man was made to literally "look like God". The Christian God is not, emphatically not something that humans can even envision. The Hebrew there could legitimately be translated as something more like "shadow" or "imitation".
Generally, the passage is interpreted to mean that mankind's cognitive abilities and sapience were modeled after God's, insofar as man has these things and the animals obviously don't.
So, while some conservatives might argue against gene therapy (and only a very few would, I can assure you, being one myself), you misunderstand why they would. Mostly, the ones that do are just concerned that we might screw some people up pretty badly doing the early research.
Nowhere in this entire chapter are we given to understand that Abraham believe that God would raise Issac from the dead after the sacrifice...in fact, that renders the entire idea of a sacrifice pointless. No, Abraham had no reason at all to believe that Issace would be returned to him. Hebrews 11:17-20 is internally inconsistent with Genesis 22.
No, it is not.
For the passages to be internally inconsistent, it would have to say explicitly that Abraham did not expect Isaac to be raised from the dead.
This is not said.
And you know, if you believe that a sacrifice that ends in resurrection is pointless, you do not understand the Christian faith. All that we hold to hinges entirely on a sacrifice that ends in resurrection - Jesus' death on the cross.
But, that's entirely OT.
Here's some information on radiocarbon dating for you.
So, what I got from that was, "Radiocarbon dating exists. It hinges upon some assumptions that can't accurately be made unless you've been around the object for the entirety of its existence. When you get radiocarbon data on an object, people often disagree on how to interpret it."
It's about the Christians who want the Creationists dogma taught as fact side by side with evolution.
I don't know any who want that. I'm sure some exist, but I don't know them. The people I know who would like ID taught in public schools simply want it mentioned as a possibility - not necessarily in conflict with evolution, not necessarily better, not "We know that evolution is false and WE ARE ALWAYS RIGHT!" They just want an acknowledgment that ID is a legitimate perspective to hold, and maybe a quick rundown of how the data we currently have can be interpreted in favor of ID, and possibly even a relatively young earth of 8 - 14000 years (ie, wide range of species comes from the creativity of the designer, not evolutionary means; large numbers of fossils in various locations could be the result of a worldwide flood; under catastrophic conditions, major geological revamps can happen fast, ref. Mount St. Helens, etc.).
I think this is all from me today - finals this week...
Scientists have clear evidence of the evolutionary process throughout history via these fossils...where exactly did they come from if the planet is in fact only 6000-odd years old?
Honestly, I'm a Christian, and I've never met another Christian who spouted crap like "God put them there to test our faith". That's just flaming stupid.
Most ID folks would say that the fossils got to be there exactly how you'd think they would - the animals died, and their bodies got trapped in the right circumstances to form fossils. It doesn't take that long for stuff to get petrified if conditions are right.
I believe the traditional reply at this point is: "Fine, fossils can form relatively quickly, but the rocks you find them in can't."
Not being a geologist, I wouldn't know. Some of the geologists present care to elaborate?
Of course, this is the same god who told Abraham to sacrifice his only son to Him, and waited until the knife was actually descending to say "Psych!".
If you're gonna quote the Bible, admit that you're not arguing against ID, you're attacking Christianity. The two are different (I know several ID people who are strongly anti-Christian, and a lot of Christians who don't like ID). And if you're gonna attack Christianity, understand what you're attacking before doing it (If you want to know what that whole sacrifice thing was about, read Hebrews 11:17-20).
Can't the ID folks consider the possibility that evolution is the tool God used to create us?
A lot do. Heck, I know Christians who think that evolution is the tool God used to create us. However, most IDers look at it with something like Occam's Razor in mind - why would God introduce that much extra complexity to his creation process? If you presuppose an infinitely powerful being, evolution seems like so much wasted effort.
This is the real world where an application might have 100's of lines of codes, maybe 1000's. It might be a bunch of classes in java working together.
Okay, granted, I'm just on the verge of graduation, but having been through my software engineering class, I'm curious:
Where on earth have you seen a significant real-world application that was only a few hundred lines of code?
Most of my trivially-small programming class assignments hit 3 - 400 lines (partly due to my obsessive documentation style), and the minesweeper clone I worked on in my software engineering class was around 3000 lines. Minesweeper (even with a self-solving mode) is not exactly a major application.
I would have thought most major apps are more on the order of tens of thousands of lines of code... Are you counting complex scripts as apps, maybe?
No.
In leaving your door open, perhaps you're being irresponsible, but you certainly weren't expecting someone to steal something from your room.
By putting something in your shared folder, you're implicitly saying, "Hey folks! Look at this! Make a copy if you like!"
At least, in the comp. sci. program at my campus, that's the understood implication, and I think that's the case for most (competent) computer users.
This sounds almost exactly like the subvocalization technology that Ender uses to communicate with Jane in the later books.
As those who've read it will remember, silent communication while around others can lead to a whole new set of problems all it's own... Especially when it's apparent that you're communicating, but not what you're saying.
That's ridiculous.
Look, if evolution is really about the survival of the fittest, any being which doesn't die is miles and miles ahead of everything else.
And it's not as though death is hardcoded into biological systems, is it? What's actually happening when living things die, as far as I understand it, is that the pieces that keep their system ticking start breaking.
It's not an "evolutionary advance", it's a failure of evolution to actually solve the biggest problem.
Assuming you assume evolution is the only explanation for existence, anyway.
Come on folks, where're the other OS X users out there?
Personally, I have my trusty G4 tower about nine feet from my bed. It's hooked to a fairly decent set of Altec Lansing speakers.
iTunes + 10-line AppleScript + iCal event associated with said AppleScript = best wakeup system ever, complete with volume fadein. A nice big shuffled playlist called "Wakeup" with suitable music, and you're good to go.
All you Linux folks out there, it might not be quite as straightforward (I don't know what calendar/alarm programs are available on Linux), but it should be pretty easy to do something similar.
Heck, I've never actually gone this far, but if you knew your daily computer use schedule, you could even have iCal events opening the documents you want when it's time to work on them, that sort of thing.
Anyway, the G4 alarm works nicely, because it wakes me up pleasantly, slowly, and it's far enough away from my bed that I actually have to get up to turn it off.
Well, I've never heard of anything like this, but a few comments:
;)
The current version of Mail is 1.3.9. I don't know offhand if it runs with 10.2.8, since I'm running 10.3.8.
I wouldn't be completely surprised if there was a vulnerability in the older versions of Mail that allowed this to happen. I'm not aware of any such vulnerability, I'm just saying that it could possibly exist.
Camino's fairly beta software - I guess it's theoretically possible that there's a hole in it somewhere that allowed the attacker (who one has to presume got remote access) to find his eBay account name and password.
But, honestly, I'm much more inclined to guess user incompetence and/or deceit. Did anyone actually witness these events besides him, or is it all just on his word? I've known people to do stupider things than bid on expensive items while they're drunk, and this seems as likely an excuse as any to get back out of it.
Most likely scenario might be something like:
He acidentally did click on a link inside the email, and didn't realize it. Once activated, the link did it's job, and his account info was snagged in some nefarious way involving autofill, if Camino even supports that (I don't know, I use Safari, and cannot for the life of me fathom why a Mac user runs anything else, unless they're doing Web development).
I still bet he was drunk...
No, you did present it that way; I just misread it.
:)
Oops.
I tend to agree with you on this one.
When I first ran into the idea of thin client computing, I thought it was pretty cool, but like many other folks, I thought, "Do I really like the idea of all my data being stored elsewhere?"
Like you, I decided that something similar to the USB pendrives would be more likely to succeed, but carried out to a farther extreme: Your entire system, data, OS, apps, and whatever, is stored on your portable drive. Plug it into a compatible computer, and have at it. An early prototype of this model actually exists; check out Damn Small Linux on a USB pendrive. Admittedly, there's not a lot of storage space, but there're certainly bigger pendrives that could be used this way, and storage devices are only getting smaller...
It seems a little extreme at first, and in many ways (particularly in terms of data integrity) it's not as nice as the Net-based solution.
But, most technologists overlook the importance of the average person's reaction to adoption of technology, and I think that the average guy on the street is gonna prefer the idea of carrying his "computer" everywhere with him, and plugging it into a "terminal" so he can use it.
Obviously, there are pretty big obstacles to this idea (running on all the different architectures that currently exist comes to mind, although you could probably do fairly well on that with Linux), but there are also pretty big obstacles to the thin-client computing idea, and I think people are going to be fundamentally leery about someone else handling all their data. I imagine that there will be the option of uploading data to a remote location for backup, but only the data you want backed up (ie, nothing you want to keep really secure; for that, you make duplicate drives stored in a safe place).
Thus, I suspect that in the long run, ultra-portable storage that houses your full system, OS, apps, docs and all, that you can just plug into any machine, is what's gonna win.
I'm still a big fan of building a space elevator and throwing nuclear waste towards the edge of the solar system. It'd get the junk into distant space, where it won't cause anyone a problem, but it wouldn't be nearly as expensive as trying to do rocket launches to dump it up there (in the long run).
If anyone ever did catch up with it, I expect it'd be far enough in the future that the stuff wouldn't be terribly radioactive anymore.
I'd love to give you a lengthy post on this subject, because as you say, many modern churches have forgotten this part of traditional Christianity.
But, now that I'm back in classes, I just don't have the time to go into the kind of depth it deserves.
Biblical examples, related to some of the questions you ask: Israel bucking the local trend, and not offering child sacrifices (see Leviticus 20). The prophet Elijah, to the people of Israel, saying that they would have a test. If Baal fulfilled the conditions of the test, they should worship him as God; if the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did so, they should worship Him (see 1st Kings 18). Jesus' fulfillment of the prophecies of the Messiah (far too complex to explain in the time I have before class; to understand this, you'd have to actually read Isaiah, Psalms, and Matthew).
Historical examples: Augustine of Hippo, in his book The Confessions of Saint Augustine (not self-titled, of course; it was actually his private prayer journal, and was published later on), outlines in depth why he became a Christian, after holding Christianity to be wrong and ridiculous for many years. C.S. Lewis, a staunch atheist, who became a Christian not because of weakness or fear, but because he was convinced that atheism did not make sense. Martin Luther, the man who began the overthrow of the Roman Catholic Church's political power, by turning several incorrect points of Catholic theology on their head (his work is the foundation of all the non-Catholic Christian denominations today).
No matter what you believe about life, the universe, and everything, no one's ever been able to explain the whole thing adequately. Every viewpoint fails to explain something. I am a Christian because Christianity provides a cohesive view of the world, and admits up front that there are things it can't explain perfectly. But overall, of all the ways of viewing the world, Christianity is the one I've found that seems most correct, and it's what I believe.
Like I said, I don't have time right now to give a real, in-depth explanation of what I believe, and I don't expect to convince anybody here that my view is right. That's okay. But, if you want a good explanation of what I mentioned, the idea that Christianity insists on logical reasoning and a reason for believing, I'd recommend that you read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and Creed or Chaos by Dorothy Sayers. Also, The Confessions of Saint Augustine are excellent in this regard, but they're quite heavy reading (not that the first two books mentioned are lightweights). Any decent library will have these books, and I really encourage you to read them. They provide a pretty solid outline of why Christians believe what they do. I've spent a lot of my life understanding the evolutionary viewpoint; I'd appreciate it if you all would at least take the time to understand where we come from.
If by "Western religions", you mean Christianity, then, no. Contrary to popular belief, the Christian view has always been, "Look at the evidence." The reason most early Christians believed Christ had resurrected? No friggin' body to be found. It wasn't a random leap of faith; the body wasn't where they put it, and no one could show them where it was. Heck, the Pharisees didn't even try to pawn off a fake on them, which is really surprising, if you think about it...
Okay, time for a very lengthy comment that no one will read, AND that will be modded down because I'm not an evolutionist (after all, if you don't believe that all of existence happened at random, you're a nutty Bible-thumper who can't think, right?).
First of all, the question that ought to be raised by this story isn't a scientific one. It's actually a question of constitutionality. If you read the article, you would see that the judge declared the stickers unconstitutional because "By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories."
The mere fact that you believe creationists are stupid does not mean you should cheer every time creationism is knocked as a theory of origin. If the courts decide now that creationism should be censored all the time, imagine how you'll feel if Bush gets the appointees he'd like for the Supreme Court, and they make the opposite decision twenty-three years down the road...
That aside, let's look at the constitutionality issue.
Essentially, the judge said this: By not presenting evolution as fact, the school district was supporting creationism as a theory of origin. Further, the judge reasons, a school district supporting creationism as a theory of origin is breaking the separation of church and state.
The question, then, is, "Is the judge's analysis correct?"
Putting a disclaimer on one theory does not necessarily imply that you agree with an opposing theory. The image of the disclaimer shown in the article reads: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
Yep, that definitely states that evolution is a theory, not a fact. However, it doesn't indicate that there are any facts about the origin of living things, nor does it even indicate that the suppliers of the textbook (that is, the school district) thinks there's a better theory. All it states is that evolution is a theory, not a fact.
denigrate
tr.v. denigrated, denigrating, denigrates
1. To attack the character or reputation of; speak ill of; defame. 2. To disparage; belittle: The critics have denigrated our efforts.
As far as I can tell, that does not 'denigrate' evolution as a theory of origins. Nowhere does this sticker say, "Evolution is probably wrong," or "Evolution is a bad theory." It just says that evolution is not proven to be the way life originated in our universe/on our planet. That may or may not be a true statement; I haven't addressed that question yet. But, that is what the disclaimer says.
It also says to consider the material with an open mind, and to analyze it critically. We'd all agree that this is the way to view a mathematical proof, or a proof of correctness for an algorithm. I think the average Slashdotter would definitely say that one should do this when examining religious material, such as the Bible, the Qu'ran, or perhaps the Bhagavad Gita.
So why would it be wrong to give this advice to students who are studying theories of origin? Shouldn't every decision we make be based on careful thought and analysis?
If evolution is so solidly proven to be true, and so obviously the only valid view, then advising students to come to the material on evolution analytically and with an open mind will help evolution out, if anything. A few of those "fundamentalist right-wing idiots" may just take the advice, see how the massive preponderance of the evidence supports evolution, and change their beliefs.
If, after having thought about evolution analytically, students decide they don't believe in it, one can only say, "Well, they're individuals, and they have the right to believe what they like."
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This is pointless, but I'll say it anyway -
I was born and bred on UT. Little bit of Quake. Some GoldenEye and PerfectDark on my friends' N64s.
Those were the first FPS's I played.
I'd been a bit of a Bungie fan until MS bought them out (mostly just Myth and Myth II), at which point I said to myself, "Well, that's over with."
I wound up trying Halo long after it hit the scene, and fell in love with it. The game is mind-numbingly easy on Normal, though, and granted, it takes maybe an hour to get decent with the Xbox controller if you're used to mousing.
The main thing is, play on Legendary. The rather stupid enemies become the most intelligent AI opponents I've ever played against on Legendary.
It's true that Halo brought little new to the table (good vehicles and good music), and I doubt Halo 2 brings much more (dual wielding and vehicle jacking, essentially, with of course more good music). What Halo did so well was present all the ideas that other FPS makers had had, streamlined and polished wonderfully. It wasn't about a brand new style of gameplay, it was about the little details, like the Grunts' pathetic screams of "Not again!!!" when you tagged them with a plasma grenade, or the Marines running up to enemy corpses and filling them with lead (accompanied by insults), or the joy of managing to sneak up behind a Gold Sword Elite and melee him off the edge of a cliff to his doom.
Just don't play on Easy.
You'll see that most of these guys can be found elsewhere on the Web. A fair number of them seem to have a reasonably solid reputation, and also seem to have backgrounds that fit their current roles. Obviously, this doesn't settle the question of whether QuickTransit is vaporware in the least, but you have to wonder: Most of these guys have at least decent reputations in their old circles, it seems. Why would they go and trash those by making ridiculous claims about complete vaporware? I don't know that it's all it's cracked up to be, but I'd guess that at least Transitive's Board of Directors has a lot of faith in it. Which, of course, means absolutely nothing... I'd also point out that when you poke around the Web, you'll see evidence that some of these folks have been working on exactly this problem for a while... Like, since the mid-90s, if I understand everything I saw correctly. Just something to chew on.