Why should corps be silent on issues that affect them? The problem with corps is undue influence, not them speaking in the first place.
I could just as well ask, why should churches? We all know the stories of LBGT's (or whatever the acronym is now) trying to force this or that church (or other social/community organization like Boy Scouts) to have to allow them to do this or that function. In the name of equality/non-discrimination.
If being tax-exempt means that the government can tell you to do anything they want, then there's a problem, especially since corporations that DO pay taxes get told what to do, too... a catch 22 pretty soon.:)
Two comments. First - the New Testament part of the Bible also condemns homosexuality.
Second. Some argue about the degradation/deterioration of the family in a nation being correlated to its demise (e.g., Rome's "family values" got pretty bad, especially as it applied to mistresses/prostitutes/marriage/kids). Saying it doesn't affect (or, as you more strongly put it, "harm") anyone but the two people involved is, IMO, an understatement. You may as well say that prostitution or gambling doesn't affect anyone but those directly involved. Family, friends, acquaintances (kids, in the gay marriage case?) are all affected.
Whether or not the effect is bad is partially what should be considered, too.
It's also interesting (I guess this makes #3) to point out that not allowing gay marriage doesn't mean gays can't live together; it means the government doesn't recognize it as a marriage. Which is, by this time, almost a name-only thing. I am guessing it has similar arguments (the non-legalizing it) as not allowing polygamy and bestiality to be legal marriage unions. Except homosexuals can be domestic partners, polygamists cannot be domestic partners with 2+ others, and you can't be a domestic partner of a cat.
Short version: there's a lot more to it than "it's between the two men or women, it doesn't affect anyone or anything else, so why is it illegal?"
[Prop 8 would have a harmful effect on this, that,... ] and on California's ability to attract and retain a diverse mix of employees from around the world.
I guess Google is arguing that California won't attract gays (ha, haven't they heard of that small, country town, San Francisco?) therefore the huge gay talent pool will be lost?
IMO, Google is acting strangely. I personally voted for Prop 8 but I understand a business's ability to say who or what they will hire and what they will allow of their employees... but Google isn't just doing corporate policy here.
Kinda depends on who is filing, don't you think? It's one thing for a patent troll to file, it's another for IBM to file. IBM, last I checked, hasn't been involved in the whole get-patent-sue-other-company-for-money thing.
Internet download speeds or does Ubuntu handles networking that much faster than Windows XP?
Just going out on a limb initially to say Ubuntu is much newer than Windows XP. The Ubuntu people's release ideology is completely different from Microsoft's.
The article yields a little more information. Ubuntu 8.04
There's another question to be asked, too... I do'nt know how Bandwidth.com works. Could it also be different caching mechanisms? If bandwidth.com sends a bunch of the same information, maybe Ubuntu is caching it somehow or something. I don't know.
The cable connection the guy had also is the speed that XP is getting, and not the speed that Ubuntu is getting:
Time Warner's latest promises are for download speeds, but I think it's 10 mega bits per second to 12 mbps. Upload speeds are throttled down to 1mbps.
My Ubuntu machine returned a rating from the Bandwidth.com test of 22-25mbps over several tests. That's darn fast today, faster than normal. Then I did the same test from a Windows XP PC and got results from Still fast, but not nearly as fast as the Ubuntu machine.
Anyone know how bandwidth.com in particular analyzes results?
Here is a link to the first unknown site to me ("unknown" means not wikipedia and not openoffice.org) from google.de search for "openoffice." here is the search. Still having a hard time finding a scam.
shameless reply: "why is this awful" is in response to charging for free software. Scamming or tricking people into buying otherwise free software IS awful, albeit NOT illegal and not necessarily a scam. RedHat and Novell and many other software companies try to get people to buy it, though in more honest ways.
Summary: tricking someone into buying openoffice.org is awful. I still haven't seen the page though...
People sell CDs of Linux, people sell CDs of SHAREWARE (trial versions!). People can, according to someone who quoted the GPL, sell GPL software.
If the site said it was free and then charged for it, that's one thing. If it did not say it was free, it probably said something about buying it or something like that.
What I find interesting is that the summary says she "googled" it. What in the WORLD did she google? have yo uever tried putting "openoffice" or "open office" or any other variant of it in google? What's the first site that comes up, and obviously the official one? openoffice.org. After that comes a number of openoffice.org subdomains, a wikipedia page for it, etc.
IMO, the summary almost sounds more like a scam than selling a subscription to openoffice.org downloads.
It's far worse to punish an innocent man than to let a guilty one go. Someone who habitually drives drunk will be caught eventually, even with a high standard of proof.
It's a harder decision than that. Someone who habitually drives drunk is putting a LOT of innocent people in great risk. Your dichotomy of punish innocent or release guilty implies that the only person in danger, here, is the punished innocent (if he is innocent).
Justice is not going to ever be perfect, and there will always be that line to be drawn between over-punishing and under-punishing.
In this case, I'm fine with checking the code... but only if the critique of it is reasonable. You may as well complain about the hardware and OS potentially flipping a bit and causing a false positive!
I'm pretty sure any software engineer or programmer will agree with me here - the best way to test whether or not the software works routinely is not just to look at the source code. That's why there are such things as software testers (I happen to be one). Why not put the same breath thingies used through a bunch of tests? Give a few beers to 500 people (do you know how many people would be willing to get free beers juts for coming in and having their breath examined? I bet quite a few) and do the exact same test on them with the exact same breath analyzers and measure the results. Of course, you'll want 500 people that haven't had anything to drink, too. Those might be harder to find (I'm one, though!)
You're absolutely right. However, pretty is often used to obfuscate poor information and organization.
Yay, we're both right;) I'd agree to that, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be pretty. I was a music major in college as well as a CS major, and we had to do a fairly extensive research paper on a Romantic period composer. The passing-grade minimum page number was 12. It actually did seem that the "prettier" (turned in with a neat little folder, etc) papers were the shorter and less-researched paperes (at least, based on the class participation/performance of the students, whom I all knew... small school:) ).
Anyways, apparently misunderstood the point of your post, apologies... I think I reacted to the tendency of some of the CS people that I knew to not care how anything looked, as long as it worked. Including grammar, spelling, typing, papers, programming, comments in programming, etc.:)
In fact, if I were Professor at a big U, I wouldn't accept.doc files. Print it, or submit in an open standard. Hell, I'd probably require them to be.txt just so people would have to focus on content, and not on making it "pretty".
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of the world LIKES "pretty." If Linux users can't make something pretty, they're going to fail. Ever tried giving a presentation to your higher-ups (no, I don't mean the people above the basement;) ) with a.txt document? They don't CARE if it's an open standard format or not, unless you work for a pretty geeky set of managers. And they don't care that you used openoffice. They don't even care you're running Linux. They want a good presentation, they want it to work, and they don't want you to waste their time.
Making something look "pretty" is... pretty important. Next time you read a book, read a paper, or go look at a website, notice the ones you tend to like are the ones with some design in them. Not stupid, mindless flashiness, but design.
That said, you can of course have prettiness with no content, just like you can have content with no grammar =P which seems to be a common trend. But using an open standard as opposed to a.doc file that works and easily looks pretty and 99% of the world can use doesn't accomplish a whole lot, except your own motives of getting rid of MS or MS Office or whatever it is you would want to get rid of it for.:)
I kinda doubt Verizon randomly offered that until this made some sort of news. This news story appears to cover a significant span of time, as one does not drop out of spring AND fall semesters a month before the FALL semester... at least, usually.
Yes, she didn't understand its possible to configure internet access without the cdrom. Frankly, Verizon makes that hard to understand unless you actually understand waht you're actually doing. She's young and she SHOULD get it, but hey, not everyone does. Does Verizon support Linux, by the way? Last time I called Verizon, they wouldn't even let me use a non-internet-explorer browser to help debug an issue. All I wanted was to check to see if there was an outage.
IMO, this is osmething bad that can happen when Linux is touted as being just like Windows, just as easy as Windows, blah blah blah. People read tha tand see "Oh, I can do anything I can do in Windows on Linux." And they aren't thinking "Oh, I can use OpenOffice for documents instead of Microsoft Word," they are thinking "I can install Microsoft Word!" Ok, so not everyone, but a lot of people are - I get the questions. ("Why can't I just install ********?")
it's nice that science and math can be used when it's convenient.
Not just when it is convenient. When someone complains "The Bible doesn't make sense with science" and is referring to something like flat-earth or four-footed insects, that can be discussed... what does it actually mean, did it really mean they only have four feet or does it mean something else. But when arguments of "Why didn't God..." or "Why can't God..." come up, usually the person asking really doesn't know what God has already revealed about what He did; and secondly, the questions along the lines of "Can God create a rock He can't lift, if He can do anything?"... those questions don't even really make sense in themselves, but somehow God has to be able to do them because He can do anything (meaning, He can do anything I can imagine, even if I'm TRYING to be ludicrous... may as well ask, if God can do anything and lives forever, can He kill Himself?... )
thank you for pointing that out. now how about something that speaks to our culture here and now?
There is plenty. My point was that the original language used is that of Hebrews. I hope nobody expects the physical words to change depending on who reads it, a la Harry Potter. Something that speaks to our culture here and now? How about not murdering, not adulterating, not stealing, not coveting, being a peacemaker, being humble, being meek, loving your neighbor, loving your enemy, doing good to all? Most people don't have a problem with those. Of course, there's also the more important aspects of loving God, weeping/repenting over sin, serving God, not having idols, etc. Those are ones people don't like so much, and thus are "irrelevant," because we tend to define "relevant" as "what I want right now."
I think there's more to it than that, though, too. For example, you'd have to completely bypass all checking, device discovery, etc., on boot (it takes time to discover drives, PCI/PCI-E/ISA;)/USB device. Yeah, you could just have that set up in BIOS or something and just use that configuration, but that could be a pain, too.
Now, if we're talking about post-POST boot-up, I think something could be done there. Even if it was having the option of, oh, 8GB of onboard memory dedicated to having a fast-boot operating system.
As far as the extremely fast-boot idea goes, though, isn't that sorta what Good OS's partnership of Cloud and GIGABYTE is supposed to be? The GIGABYTE Touch Netbook M912 to be precise. Link here. It was mentioned on slashdot a while ago as well.
At my work, I'm actually not allowed to have a vested interest in a competitor. But I guess government advisory boards can favor different companies if they want, based on vested interests of their advisory board members...
If so, that would be yet another reason governments tend to run worse than private enterprises.:)
Invincible to any kind of critique? Meaning it cannot be critiqued or cannot be critiqued correctly or... ? I'm a bit confused about your dichotomy here. If you want to know what I think, I believe it was divinely inspired by God through humans. Which means it has human characteristics (personality, it's firmly stuck into history, no pains are taken to hide claims of what happened where, etc), but yes, it is eternal truth where that is concerned. This also means it was written in a human language, to a human population, using human idioms and phrases and everything (e.g., "four corners of the earth" is still used today, I guess that means we're all flat-earthers... or calling the earth a "circle" or whatever). On the other hand, I could show you some quite interesting comments in some OT books that show some undiscovered scientific stuff. My guess is you would think I'm stretching it way out of proportion to get it out of the text; and so I would say to you, also, that you are stretching the text to fit what you want it to say (such as the "circle of the earth" implying that it is flat, or the four corners thing, etc... also, I can comment that "circle" is a translation, and what the Hebrew word actually meant should be looked into as well - I actually haven't, so I am not sure waht the word is:) )
even one gray area (and I'm being very lenient here) would suffice for it to be unable to be considered as divinely inspired.
The ironic part is that I agree with you.
Take into account how modern history rejects the bible as a credible source of historical fact.
That's been happening for a while. Like the Hittites, etc. But I think we're going to simply divide at this point because of the people we are choosing to believe when discussing the Biblical account... of anything, apparently.
Lastly, I've been trying to ignore your insinuations that I don't know what I'm talking about,
If I was highly critical of, say, evolution, you would likely ask what I had read too, would you not? The insinuation that you had not read it was definitely there, because I assumed you had not, as that is what appeared to be the case. And you didn't answer the simple question. If you said you had read it, I wouldn't have asked several times...:)
And I'm not referring to the beliefs that mainstream religion now considers primitive. (how queer, that the eternal truth is subject to the inevitable changes of time and social context) I'm also talking about the beliefs which are at the core of the christian idea system.
These sound interesting. not that I particularly care about mainstream religion, as most people go along with whatever flow happens to be flowing (in science, in society, in ethics, in pretty much everything, the proverbial lemming syndrome takes place).
Regarding historical accuracy, it's been proven historically accurate quite a few times, and has been verified quite a bit, and contains a ton of history. For being such an inaccurate hoax, the writers were either plain stupid or... something else, because if they DIDN'T know their geography/history, they were pretty stupid to put it in anyways. And yet, many like to think that the Bible was written for 40 some odd authors over the course of 1500 years and it is completely based on myth... that's some pretty amazing mythology right there. Greek mythology, as smart as they were, doesn't even agree with itself and appears to be far closer to what humans tend to think about... gods and goddesses having sex, murder, rape, kidnapping, etc. The gods were nothing more than supernatural humans and acted in the same petty and immoral ways.
It's not the accuracies that surprise me, though, it's the scientifical, geographical, historical inaccuriacies and the internal inconsistencies that bother me.
Rightly so, let's look.
I mean, if a book cannot accurately describe common geographical knowledge how can it be attributed to divine revelation?
Agreed.
(read Mark 10:46 and have a map ready. The jesus-and-friends itinerary is quite impossible)
So, the issue is Matthew says Jericho -> Bethpage -> Bethany -> Jerusalem whereas Matthew just mentions Jericho -> Bethpage -> Jericho, correct? Firstly, there were three routes from Jericho to Jerusalem. There's a mountain in the middle. You can sorta see it on this map. So, the three routes were to the south side, right straight up the mountain, or the north side. I forget which was the most common. If Jesus took the northern route, He would hit Bethpage first. However, we know that He did not immediately go into Jerusalem but went to Bethany, where he stayed for a while. Note, by the way, that Luke gives the same account in Luke 19:29. Bethany is on the east slope of the Mount of Olives. Mark 11:12 directly states, "As they were leaving Bethany..."
I find it interesting that people are so willing to admit the mistake without bothering to look up the history and compare all the accounts with an open mind, especially seeing that we are accusing Mark of not knowing the area around Jerusalem. That seems pretty hard to believe for a Jew.
I mean, why would a book written with the help of god tell me that pi = 3, or that insects have four legs?
Pi does more or less equal 3, does it not. 3.14, 3.14..... etc. You would bring up the same argument no matter what value was mentioned because it's an infinitely long decimal, ans thus a "perfect God" would reveal it to us "in its entirety" even though it's mathematically impossible, right? A very detailed look into this issue. You may not like the source of the information but that does not immediately discredit it.
As for insects with 4 legs, don't forget the Bible spoke to a Hebrew culture, 1500 years ago. This means, among other things, that they viewed things differently. I am quite sure that the Hebrews knew what flying and creeping things were and how many "feet" they had. But they may have defined "feet" differently. In fact, the Leviticus passage that you have apparently not read but only read a sort of "atheist's guide to Biblical errors" version, mentions "legs above the feet." So apparently, the Jews back then knew what feet were and distinguished the feet used for walking from the legs used for other things.
Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon all four, which have legs above their feet,
I ask again. Have you actually read the Bible for yourself, or are you just going on other people's opinions and recycling the same 'errors' while ignoring the refutations?
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Why should corps be silent on issues that affect them? The problem with corps is undue influence, not them speaking in the first place.
I could just as well ask, why should churches? We all know the stories of LBGT's (or whatever the acronym is now) trying to force this or that church (or other social/community organization like Boy Scouts) to have to allow them to do this or that function. In the name of equality/non-discrimination.
If being tax-exempt means that the government can tell you to do anything they want, then there's a problem, especially since corporations that DO pay taxes get told what to do, too... a catch 22 pretty soon. :)
Two comments. First - the New Testament part of the Bible also condemns homosexuality.
Second. Some argue about the degradation/deterioration of the family in a nation being correlated to its demise (e.g., Rome's "family values" got pretty bad, especially as it applied to mistresses/prostitutes/marriage/kids). Saying it doesn't affect (or, as you more strongly put it, "harm") anyone but the two people involved is, IMO, an understatement. You may as well say that prostitution or gambling doesn't affect anyone but those directly involved. Family, friends, acquaintances (kids, in the gay marriage case?) are all affected.
Whether or not the effect is bad is partially what should be considered, too.
It's also interesting (I guess this makes #3) to point out that not allowing gay marriage doesn't mean gays can't live together; it means the government doesn't recognize it as a marriage. Which is, by this time, almost a name-only thing. I am guessing it has similar arguments (the non-legalizing it) as not allowing polygamy and bestiality to be legal marriage unions. Except homosexuals can be domestic partners, polygamists cannot be domestic partners with 2+ others, and you can't be a domestic partner of a cat.
Short version: there's a lot more to it than "it's between the two men or women, it doesn't affect anyone or anything else, so why is it illegal?"
I guess this.
[Prop 8 would have a harmful effect on this, that, ... ] and on California's ability to attract and retain a diverse mix of employees from around the world.
I guess Google is arguing that California won't attract gays (ha, haven't they heard of that small, country town, San Francisco?) therefore the huge gay talent pool will be lost?
IMO, Google is acting strangely. I personally voted for Prop 8 but I understand a business's ability to say who or what they will hire and what they will allow of their employees ... but Google isn't just doing corporate policy here.
... I much rather would have liked to have a Cowboy Neil movie.
you can watch it. the video that is. ;)
Kinda depends on who is filing, don't you think? It's one thing for a patent troll to file, it's another for IBM to file. IBM, last I checked, hasn't been involved in the whole get-patent-sue-other-company-for-money thing.
True, I forgot about sponsored links.
Internet download speeds or does Ubuntu handles networking that much faster than Windows XP?
Just going out on a limb initially to say Ubuntu is much newer than Windows XP. The Ubuntu people's release ideology is completely different from Microsoft's.
The article yields a little more information. Ubuntu 8.04
There's another question to be asked, too... I do'nt know how Bandwidth.com works. Could it also be different caching mechanisms? If bandwidth.com sends a bunch of the same information, maybe Ubuntu is caching it somehow or something. I don't know.
The cable connection the guy had also is the speed that XP is getting, and not the speed that Ubuntu is getting:
Time Warner's latest promises are for download speeds, but I think it's 10 mega bits per second to 12 mbps. Upload speeds are throttled down to 1mbps. My Ubuntu machine returned a rating from the Bandwidth.com test of 22-25mbps over several tests. That's darn fast today, faster than normal. Then I did the same test from a Windows XP PC and got results from Still fast, but not nearly as fast as the Ubuntu machine.
Anyone know how bandwidth.com in particular analyzes results?
It also apparently makes no huge attempt (nor does www-openoffice.com) to hide the fact that you're paying for it.
Yet another reply...
Here is a link to the first unknown site to me ("unknown" means not wikipedia and not openoffice.org) from google.de search for "openoffice." here is the search. Still having a hard time finding a scam.
This guy apparently did find one: openoffice-suite.com and also www-openoffice.com
Summary: tricking someone into buying openoffice.org is awful. I still haven't seen the page though...
People sell CDs of Linux, people sell CDs of SHAREWARE (trial versions!). People can, according to someone who quoted the GPL, sell GPL software.
If the site said it was free and then charged for it, that's one thing. If it did not say it was free, it probably said something about buying it or something like that.
What I find interesting is that the summary says she "googled" it. What in the WORLD did she google? have yo uever tried putting "openoffice" or "open office" or any other variant of it in google? What's the first site that comes up, and obviously the official one? openoffice.org. After that comes a number of openoffice.org subdomains, a wikipedia page for it, etc.
IMO, the summary almost sounds more like a scam than selling a subscription to openoffice.org downloads.
It's far worse to punish an innocent man than to let a guilty one go. Someone who habitually drives drunk will be caught eventually, even with a high standard of proof.
It's a harder decision than that. Someone who habitually drives drunk is putting a LOT of innocent people in great risk. Your dichotomy of punish innocent or release guilty implies that the only person in danger, here, is the punished innocent (if he is innocent).
Justice is not going to ever be perfect, and there will always be that line to be drawn between over-punishing and under-punishing.
In this case, I'm fine with checking the code... but only if the critique of it is reasonable. You may as well complain about the hardware and OS potentially flipping a bit and causing a false positive!
I'm pretty sure any software engineer or programmer will agree with me here - the best way to test whether or not the software works routinely is not just to look at the source code. That's why there are such things as software testers (I happen to be one). Why not put the same breath thingies used through a bunch of tests? Give a few beers to 500 people (do you know how many people would be willing to get free beers juts for coming in and having their breath examined? I bet quite a few) and do the exact same test on them with the exact same breath analyzers and measure the results. Of course, you'll want 500 people that haven't had anything to drink, too. Those might be harder to find (I'm one, though!)
You're absolutely right. However, pretty is often used to obfuscate poor information and organization.
Yay, we're both right ;) I'd agree to that, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be pretty. I was a music major in college as well as a CS major, and we had to do a fairly extensive research paper on a Romantic period composer. The passing-grade minimum page number was 12. It actually did seem that the "prettier" (turned in with a neat little folder, etc) papers were the shorter and less-researched paperes (at least, based on the class participation/performance of the students, whom I all knew... small school :) ).
Anyways, apparently misunderstood the point of your post, apologies... I think I reacted to the tendency of some of the CS people that I knew to not care how anything looked, as long as it worked. Including grammar, spelling, typing, papers, programming, comments in programming, etc. :)
In fact, if I were Professor at a big U, I wouldn't accept .doc files. Print it, or submit in an open standard. Hell, I'd probably require them to be .txt just so people would have to focus on content, and not on making it "pretty".
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of the world LIKES "pretty." If Linux users can't make something pretty, they're going to fail. Ever tried giving a presentation to your higher-ups (no, I don't mean the people above the basement ;) ) with a .txt document? They don't CARE if it's an open standard format or not, unless you work for a pretty geeky set of managers. And they don't care that you used openoffice. They don't even care you're running Linux. They want a good presentation, they want it to work, and they don't want you to waste their time.
Making something look "pretty" is... pretty important. Next time you read a book, read a paper, or go look at a website, notice the ones you tend to like are the ones with some design in them. Not stupid, mindless flashiness, but design.
That said, you can of course have prettiness with no content, just like you can have content with no grammar =P which seems to be a common trend. But using an open standard as opposed to a .doc file that works and easily looks pretty and 99% of the world can use doesn't accomplish a whole lot, except your own motives of getting rid of MS or MS Office or whatever it is you would want to get rid of it for. :)
So let's blame her out of ignorance...
I kinda doubt Verizon randomly offered that until this made some sort of news. This news story appears to cover a significant span of time, as one does not drop out of spring AND fall semesters a month before the FALL semester... at least, usually.
Yes, she didn't understand its possible to configure internet access without the cdrom. Frankly, Verizon makes that hard to understand unless you actually understand waht you're actually doing. She's young and she SHOULD get it, but hey, not everyone does. Does Verizon support Linux, by the way? Last time I called Verizon, they wouldn't even let me use a non-internet-explorer browser to help debug an issue. All I wanted was to check to see if there was an outage.
IMO, this is osmething bad that can happen when Linux is touted as being just like Windows, just as easy as Windows, blah blah blah. People read tha tand see "Oh, I can do anything I can do in Windows on Linux." And they aren't thinking "Oh, I can use OpenOffice for documents instead of Microsoft Word," they are thinking "I can install Microsoft Word!" Ok, so not everyone, but a lot of people are - I get the questions. ("Why can't I just install ********?")
it's nice that science and math can be used when it's convenient.
Not just when it is convenient. When someone complains "The Bible doesn't make sense with science" and is referring to something like flat-earth or four-footed insects, that can be discussed... what does it actually mean, did it really mean they only have four feet or does it mean something else. But when arguments of "Why didn't God ..." or "Why can't God ..." come up, usually the person asking really doesn't know what God has already revealed about what He did; and secondly, the questions along the lines of "Can God create a rock He can't lift, if He can do anything?" ... those questions don't even really make sense in themselves, but somehow God has to be able to do them because He can do anything (meaning, He can do anything I can imagine, even if I'm TRYING to be ludicrous... may as well ask, if God can do anything and lives forever, can He kill Himself? ... )
thank you for pointing that out. now how about something that speaks to our culture here and now?
There is plenty. My point was that the original language used is that of Hebrews. I hope nobody expects the physical words to change depending on who reads it, a la Harry Potter. Something that speaks to our culture here and now? How about not murdering, not adulterating, not stealing, not coveting, being a peacemaker, being humble, being meek, loving your neighbor, loving your enemy, doing good to all? Most people don't have a problem with those. Of course, there's also the more important aspects of loving God, weeping/repenting over sin, serving God, not having idols, etc. Those are ones people don't like so much, and thus are "irrelevant," because we tend to define "relevant" as "what I want right now."
Maybe Weimar has lots of schnitzel?
In a completely off-topic post...
Staring The United States as Weimar Germany.
Why is the US staring at Weimar?
I think there's more to it than that, though, too. For example, you'd have to completely bypass all checking, device discovery, etc., on boot (it takes time to discover drives, PCI/PCI-E/ISA ;) /USB device. Yeah, you could just have that set up in BIOS or something and just use that configuration, but that could be a pain, too.
Now, if we're talking about post-POST boot-up, I think something could be done there. Even if it was having the option of, oh, 8GB of onboard memory dedicated to having a fast-boot operating system.
As far as the extremely fast-boot idea goes, though, isn't that sorta what Good OS's partnership of Cloud and GIGABYTE is supposed to be? The GIGABYTE Touch Netbook M912 to be precise. Link here. It was mentioned on slashdot a while ago as well.
Which C? :)
At my work, I'm actually not allowed to have a vested interest in a competitor. But I guess government advisory boards can favor different companies if they want, based on vested interests of their advisory board members...
If so, that would be yet another reason governments tend to run worse than private enterprises. :)
New record == change, right?
Invincible to any kind of critique? Meaning it cannot be critiqued or cannot be critiqued correctly or ... ? I'm a bit confused about your dichotomy here. If you want to know what I think, I believe it was divinely inspired by God through humans. Which means it has human characteristics (personality, it's firmly stuck into history, no pains are taken to hide claims of what happened where, etc), but yes, it is eternal truth where that is concerned. This also means it was written in a human language, to a human population, using human idioms and phrases and everything (e.g., "four corners of the earth" is still used today, I guess that means we're all flat-earthers... or calling the earth a "circle" or whatever). On the other hand, I could show you some quite interesting comments in some OT books that show some undiscovered scientific stuff. My guess is you would think I'm stretching it way out of proportion to get it out of the text; and so I would say to you, also, that you are stretching the text to fit what you want it to say (such as the "circle of the earth" implying that it is flat, or the four corners thing, etc... also, I can comment that "circle" is a translation, and what the Hebrew word actually meant should be looked into as well - I actually haven't, so I am not sure waht the word is :) )
even one gray area (and I'm being very lenient here) would suffice for it to be unable to be considered as divinely inspired.
The ironic part is that I agree with you.
Take into account how modern history rejects the bible as a credible source of historical fact.
That's been happening for a while. Like the Hittites, etc. But I think we're going to simply divide at this point because of the people we are choosing to believe when discussing the Biblical account... of anything, apparently.
Lastly, I've been trying to ignore your insinuations that I don't know what I'm talking about,
If I was highly critical of, say, evolution, you would likely ask what I had read too, would you not? The insinuation that you had not read it was definitely there, because I assumed you had not, as that is what appeared to be the case. And you didn't answer the simple question. If you said you had read it, I wouldn't have asked several times... :)
And I'm not referring to the beliefs that mainstream religion now considers primitive. (how queer, that the eternal truth is subject to the inevitable changes of time and social context) I'm also talking about the beliefs which are at the core of the christian idea system.
These sound interesting. not that I particularly care about mainstream religion, as most people go along with whatever flow happens to be flowing (in science, in society, in ethics, in pretty much everything, the proverbial lemming syndrome takes place).
Regarding historical accuracy, it's been proven historically accurate quite a few times, and has been verified quite a bit, and contains a ton of history. For being such an inaccurate hoax, the writers were either plain stupid or ... something else, because if they DIDN'T know their geography/history, they were pretty stupid to put it in anyways. And yet, many like to think that the Bible was written for 40 some odd authors over the course of 1500 years and it is completely based on myth... that's some pretty amazing mythology right there. Greek mythology, as smart as they were, doesn't even agree with itself and appears to be far closer to what humans tend to think about ... gods and goddesses having sex, murder, rape, kidnapping, etc. The gods were nothing more than supernatural humans and acted in the same petty and immoral ways.
It's not the accuracies that surprise me, though, it's the scientifical, geographical, historical inaccuriacies and the internal inconsistencies that bother me.
Rightly so, let's look.
I mean, if a book cannot accurately describe common geographical knowledge how can it be attributed to divine revelation?
Agreed.
(read Mark 10:46 and have a map ready. The jesus-and-friends itinerary is quite impossible)
So, the issue is Matthew says Jericho -> Bethpage -> Bethany -> Jerusalem whereas Matthew just mentions Jericho -> Bethpage -> Jericho, correct? Firstly, there were three routes from Jericho to Jerusalem. There's a mountain in the middle. You can sorta see it on this map. So, the three routes were to the south side, right straight up the mountain, or the north side. I forget which was the most common. If Jesus took the northern route, He would hit Bethpage first. However, we know that He did not immediately go into Jerusalem but went to Bethany, where he stayed for a while. Note, by the way, that Luke gives the same account in Luke 19:29. Bethany is on the east slope of the Mount of Olives. Mark 11:12 directly states, "As they were leaving Bethany..."
I find it interesting that people are so willing to admit the mistake without bothering to look up the history and compare all the accounts with an open mind, especially seeing that we are accusing Mark of not knowing the area around Jerusalem. That seems pretty hard to believe for a Jew.
I mean, why would a book written with the help of god tell me that pi = 3, or that insects have four legs?
Pi does more or less equal 3, does it not. 3.14, 3.14..... etc. You would bring up the same argument no matter what value was mentioned because it's an infinitely long decimal, ans thus a "perfect God" would reveal it to us "in its entirety" even though it's mathematically impossible, right? A very detailed look into this issue. You may not like the source of the information but that does not immediately discredit it.
As for insects with 4 legs, don't forget the Bible spoke to a Hebrew culture, 1500 years ago. This means, among other things, that they viewed things differently. I am quite sure that the Hebrews knew what flying and creeping things were and how many "feet" they had. But they may have defined "feet" differently. In fact, the Leviticus passage that you have apparently not read but only read a sort of "atheist's guide to Biblical errors" version, mentions "legs above the feet." So apparently, the Jews back then knew what feet were and distinguished the feet used for walking from the legs used for other things.
Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon all four, which have legs above their feet,
I ask again. Have you actually read the Bible for yourself, or are you just going on other people's opinions and recycling the same 'errors' while ignoring the refutations?