No. They took advantage of what was clearly a broken contract. The insurance company made a foolish mistake. They DID abide by their end of the contract (no doubt spreading the cost to people in other plans not at that university) and the next year, that option was not offered again. One plan for all that made financial sense.
You have the right to use 1/10th this vacation property when you need it.
Okay- most folks have 2 weeks a year vacation.
Oh wait... now ten people have moved in, set up tents or even built a house, and are living there 52 weeks a year.
The other 90 people are thinking "WTF?"
Broken model. It will change.
Reminds me of my university. They put in ala carte health care.
$150 a month - GREAT health care- covered everything, $10 deductable. $50 a month - OKAY health care- covered everything after a $2k yearly deductable and $25 deductable per office visit.
Everyone old chose $150 and used it to death. Everyone young chose $50 and barely used it.
The old drove the system broke while the young paid nothing into it.
People will always do what you incent them to- whether you realize it or not.
LoL... "Looks like crap on a 55" screen." Spoken like a true videophile. DVD's look great on HD monitors at 720p. HD is *very* marginally better. To most people I know, the quality difference worth about $50 bucks.
2) $500 is very expensive. A person making a great living pulls in about $4k after taxes. So there went 1/8 of your monthly income for a player (vs 3 hours). If you are making a managerial or doctor's salary then cool. I also don't drive around a dodge viper (only about 3x a normal car price in its day) or wear armani suits (about 7x a decent suit). And HD/blu ray are no where near better a DVD than a dodge viper/armani suit are than their counterparts.
3)I paid about $1,200 for a phillips 57" HD monitor with tuner. It is a great monitor. When I can get a bluray or hd player for $99, then I'm there. I agree, average joe can get a crappy monitor for less. I agree videophile can get an EXCELLENT monitor for about $2800 (plus 600 service plan plus 340 taxes plus 120 delivery and setup or about $4000 total with misc cables and crap). I looked long and hard at the $2800 level which IS better (and DVD's look great on that format). I love the look and form-factor of 57" LCD screens. But I don't want to eat dog-food when I retire to have one. And I think they will drop by over $1000 in the next 12 months to a more reasonable $1,800 for the same quality.
4) As the other person already pointed out- businesses make promises all the time that they do not keep- the capability IS there. They will use it before 2010 if they can get away with it.
I agree with all your other points about why no one wants it.
---
There is NO point in being a first adopter these days. Used to be, that gave you a BIG edge over everyone else. You might be 12 to 24 months ahead of them and be "cool" for a long time. These days- if something is going to be successful it is probably ubiquous within 6 months. Why keep paying a 10x premium? I purchased 80% of my dvd library for about $5 to $7.50. As a result, I have 99% of what my friend's have AND then I have a bunch of stuff they can't afford because they are all paying $20.00. (Why pay $80 per xfiles season when THIS week you can now pay $20 per season! ($180 total)).
There is such a huge glut of entertainment now- I can't possibly watch or keep up with it. So I fell behind and noticed how much money it was saving me to be just 3-4 months off the leading edge. So then I pushed it to 6 months and the savings were even bigger. Now i push it to 6 months + next major holiday nad the savings are almost always 60% or more vs what my bleeding edge buds pay.
It would be *different* if HD/BLU was NIGHT and DAY, hands down, fabulous, life changing, emotion wringing, bud attracting (hey let's all go over to Maxo's house- he has HD/BLU!) better. But it is not.
It's a teensy bit better for normal people and MUCH more expensive AND heavily laden-- no CRIPPLED-- with DRM format which was stupid and gives us 50/50 odds of picking the format which will have the movies we want.
There isn't just ONE reason to crush the sellers on this- we need to crush them so bad, their entire departments will be fired and they will have to leave their respective countries in shame.
Okay.. here we go. I'll use a riding lawnmower analogy.
The ISP's leases use of a riding lawnmower for a year $1,000. The leasing company agrees that up to 5 days a year, they can use two lawnmowers without extra charge and three lawnmowers for $10 per day.
They sell 50 people the right to use a lawnmower for $25 each (pocketing a nice $250 profit).
They reasonably expect that people are going to mow about 2 hours a day once every 2 weeks- some will mow for 2 hours a day every week and some will mow for 2 hours a day once a month. Given 365 days a year, there should rarely be a line for the lawnmower. And when there is they have a bit of extra capacity.
Now- someone figures out that the lawnmower can be used to drive to work with while their car is in the shop. Someone else figures out that they can run a small busines mowing people's lawns with it. Another person borrows it and then loans it out to his 5 best friends to mow their lawns with too.
The business model that was going to work doesn't work any more. Because every day people are using 7 lawnmowers all day. The ISP is now paying $60 per day over what they thought they would pay. The rules have changed.
---
Don't get me wrong- I torrent things too. I know at some point they are going to charge per megabyte (or gigabyte) downloaded. This is a very temporary window where they did not know how people would use their services. Server accounts have always taken bandwidth into account.
I expect in the next few years that we will see things like "4 gigs a month and then $1.00 per 10 gigs a month" and then the ISP's will compete on price. These will get higher as bandwidth grows (USA is pathetic at 9mbps when Japan/korea/etc. have something like 100mpbs).
I can't imagine why folks are not rushing to this.
DVD's look great on screens up to 55". DVD's can be backed up and are very cheap. DVD players are dirt cheap.
HD/Blu ray are 1) expensive 2) heavily drm'd 3) havn't chosen the best movies to start with. 4) Not that much better on the screens joe average can buy. 5) DO NOT EVEN WORK CORRECTLY on HD MONITORS if they are more than about 7 months old (downsample if the player doesn't detect a secure connection to the monitor)
I can't imagine why consumers are not flocking to these--
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Muds defined the general area. Everquest defined the visual mud.
Wow was the first to hit the right balance of difficulty- Everquest drove away millions of customers through their hardcore attitudes. They would have BEEN Wow if not for Brad and "the vision". And then after it was all over, they sold out to being an easy game after all (still *way* harder than WoW but no longer pure in the same way EQ was back in 2002).
Wow was hard AND easy enough to be fun. And WoW didn't require being in a 72 person raiding guild, giving up your day job, and STILL "losing" to people who could play 14 hours a day with 3 computers and 2 bots.
But it is still a too easy watered down version of EQ for the hard core veterans. You can "beat" the game in 4 months. You have no hope at all of beating EQ in under 2 years short of relentlessly screwing over multiple guilds while playing 14 hours a day and maybe even starting by buying a high level character. Perhaps 2-4% of all EQ subscribers at any given time have "beat" the game and are waiting for the next expansion. Wow gets a bit more raid centric/harder with each expansion tho.
You have to recognize that it is a cultural thing as well.
The Iraqi's have plenty of weapons now.
What they probably need most is a sweep of the country that removes every weapon that can be found and then harsh anti weapon laws.
A riled up population with guns is not safe. A *reasonable* secular society with a good moral (usually religious) foundation does well with guns.
The swiss are *extremely* reasonable.
In some american cities, legalizing guns drops crime. This is because 1% of the population is preying on the other 99% and arming the 99% stops the 1%. In some other locations that's not the case- because things are too far gone, there are too many criminals, and too few non-corrupt law enforcement officers.
Legal guns ONLY make sense if 99% of your population is rational and doesn't want to die.
Windmills are not so bad on birds any more tho. Solar is close to going down an order of magnitude in price (and weight which means much easier to install) (and amount of materials required to get the same amount of power) .
The most recent version of word has a toolbar option to compress images once you decide you really do want them to be a 1" square at 200dpi.
No clue on powerpoint.
You can't edit easily (as in paint or coreldraw) but you can clip, crop, create arbitrary wrap points, etc.
I'm looking forward to OO becoming mature. It is now about 97% complete. That last 3% may be a killer to get done tho.
I have no interest in the newer feature Word is pushing these days (real time network collaboration- BLEH) so I assume most basic features have been defined- it's just a matter of coding them.
OO is close but still isn't there for me. I've made 3 serious attempts to swap over from Word so far. I have three 150 page documents that I don't want to reenter into OO that OO loads okay and then it corrupts them or crashes.
I send in crash reports periodically.
And, you can't do rectangular cut and pastes. A feature I use a lot at times in word.
From merriam-webster: Theft 1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
Copyright infringement is neither theft nor stealing. In addition, there are some clear moral issues with the current laws. 1) We know they often *do not* compensate the artists but only the record corporations. 2) It is unreasonable to continue payment for something *after* the person has been dead a couple years. 3) A lot of modern music (esp jazz) wouldn't even exist if the current laws were in place. Who knows what new forms of music we are killing. For example- a lot of jazz shares the same musical chord sequences-- illegal today in rock where even under few dozen notes in the same sequence can get you sued. 4) Copyright was intended to promote music-- does it seem music needs much promotion to be created today? 5) When the businesses are so wealthy- is this a sign that they have monopoly pricing and that the laws have been corrupted?
Artists deserve compensation for their work just like anyone else.
However, they do not deserve compensation for their work for 50 years past their bloody death.
I get paid for the work I do every day. Just because they use my work to do business, they are not going to pay me again every day until I die for each for the 100,000 people that use my software every day.
Pick any high but ordinary salary ($120k-- even $150k) and I'll support it.
The current model *invites* abuse. The current model is based on changing the rules *after the fact* the extend copyright on songs that were long ago paid for.
But taking new songs (anything made in the last 28 years) without giving compensation to the artists (and yea- eveb the evil Riaa) is not right either.
Amazing thing to me is that I saw problems with him from the start and no one else seemed too. And I'm not a democrat. He just had a creepy pro-nobility attitude. About a third of the republicans do now. And the democrats are getting it lately too.
Well. As long as you don't oppose scientific progress on religious grounds, I have no big problem with your personal beliefs. So be happy.
And as for the rest, I've already beat my head against you guys enough in the past to do more than post for the rest. No point in continuing from here. The facts are out there for folks that are not in denial.
Since you were wrong to the point of purposely ignoring facts in almost every line of your original post and since I've dealt with "you" so many times I feel no need to go through the exercise again, no.
Sadly, not even this statement, "If there is a program, there HAS to be a programmer in whose mind the program was first conceived." is true.
They've been using genetic algorithms to create code for years. In some cases, using genetic algorithms has discovered previously unknown solutions to problems.
Evolution is a rock rolling downhill. No one had to start the rock rolling. The basic rules of the universe were all that was necessary.
Let me ask you this spud... we are very close to being able to *build* life. Probably within the next 30 years. Are you going to be a religious cliche and oppose that because "it's reserved for god to make life"?
My god man--- if you really believe the noah story, there is no help for you.
Very clear genetic evidence shows no genetic pinch-point in *many* species any time in the last 10k years. Noah clearly lived after that period. There was no massive die off of land animals during this period.
There is no geological evidence for a massive worldwide flood anytime during that period (tho we did have an ice age- so one would logically expect a "and god covered the land with ice" to be more likely).
There is no evidence that land masses were repopulated with new land animals in the last 10k years.
No evidence of floods, no evidence of mass land animal die off, no evidence of repopulation.:. The noah story is false.
You must wonder if man is so important, why god created the universe and let it run without us for 15 billion years.
Our genetics would have been the perfect chance for god to reveal us as different- but instead he faked up our genetics to be 99% the same as apes- and even cleverly adjusted mitochodria and other internal clocks to be consistent with our evolving from a common ancestor with apes.
Given a measurable, repeatable fact, I'll choose it any time over a book written by savages.
God may or may not exist and may or may not have created the universe. God may or may not give a damn about us. Science doesn't cover those issues.
But the earth isn't flat, it's not the center of the universe, pi isn't 3.00 and the bible is *not* a science text. As such, it should be read for the moral and ethical content and anything that doesn't jibe with the evidence should be taken as allegory. You should never deny hard evidence because of the contents of the bible.
Slashdot Mirror
No. They took advantage of what was clearly a broken contract.
The insurance company made a foolish mistake.
They DID abide by their end of the contract (no doubt spreading the cost to people in other plans not at that university) and the next year, that option was not offered again. One plan for all that made financial sense.
Well how about this with land:
You have the right to use 1/10th this vacation property when you need it.
Okay- most folks have 2 weeks a year vacation.
Oh wait... now ten people have moved in, set up tents or even built a house, and are living there 52 weeks a year.
The other 90 people are thinking "WTF?"
Broken model. It will change.
Reminds me of my university. They put in ala carte health care.
$150 a month - GREAT health care- covered everything, $10 deductable.
$50 a month - OKAY health care- covered everything after a $2k yearly deductable and $25 deductable per office visit.
Everyone old chose $150 and used it to death.
Everyone young chose $50 and barely used it.
The old drove the system broke while the young paid nothing into it.
People will always do what you incent them to- whether you realize it or not.
I mostly agree but would it be fair to say they leased you:
"the right to use a lawnmower when you needed it."
They reasonably assumed you only needed it 2 to 4 hours a month.
LoL... "Looks like crap on a 55" screen." Spoken like a true videophile. DVD's look great on HD monitors at 720p. HD is *very* marginally better. To most people I know, the quality difference worth about $50 bucks.
2) $500 is very expensive. A person making a great living pulls in about $4k after taxes. So there went 1/8 of your monthly income for a player (vs 3 hours). If you are making a managerial or doctor's salary then cool. I also don't drive around a dodge viper (only about 3x a normal car price in its day) or wear armani suits (about 7x a decent suit). And HD/blu ray are no where near better a DVD than a dodge viper/armani suit are than their counterparts.
3)I paid about $1,200 for a phillips 57" HD monitor with tuner. It is a great monitor. When I can get a bluray or hd player for $99, then I'm there. I agree, average joe can get a crappy monitor for less. I agree videophile can get an EXCELLENT monitor for about $2800 (plus 600 service plan plus 340 taxes plus 120 delivery and setup or about $4000 total with misc cables and crap). I looked long and hard at the $2800 level which IS better (and DVD's look great on that format). I love the look and form-factor of 57" LCD screens. But I don't want to eat dog-food when I retire to have one. And I think they will drop by over $1000 in the next 12 months to a more reasonable $1,800 for the same quality.
4) As the other person already pointed out- businesses make promises all the time that they do not keep- the capability IS there. They will use it before 2010 if they can get away with it.
I agree with all your other points about why no one wants it.
---
There is NO point in being a first adopter these days. Used to be, that gave you a BIG edge over everyone else. You might be 12 to 24 months ahead of them and be "cool" for a long time. These days- if something is going to be successful it is probably ubiquous within 6 months. Why keep paying a 10x premium? I purchased 80% of my dvd library for about $5 to $7.50. As a result, I have 99% of what my friend's have AND then I have a bunch of stuff they can't afford because they are all paying $20.00. (Why pay $80 per xfiles season when THIS week you can now pay $20 per season! ($180 total)).
There is such a huge glut of entertainment now- I can't possibly watch or keep up with it. So I fell behind and noticed how much money it was saving me to be just 3-4 months off the leading edge. So then I pushed it to 6 months and the savings were even bigger. Now i push it to 6 months + next major holiday nad the savings are almost always 60% or more vs what my bleeding edge buds pay.
It would be *different* if HD/BLU was NIGHT and DAY, hands down, fabulous, life changing, emotion wringing, bud attracting (hey let's all go over to Maxo's house- he has HD/BLU!) better. But it is not.
It's a teensy bit better for normal people and MUCH more expensive AND heavily laden-- no CRIPPLED-- with DRM format which was stupid and gives us 50/50 odds of picking the format which will have the movies we want.
There isn't just ONE reason to crush the sellers on this- we need to crush them so bad, their entire departments will be fired and they will have to leave their respective countries in shame.
That's a pretty atrocious analogy.
Hmm. Can I find one.
It's about sharing something.
Okay.. here we go. I'll use a riding lawnmower analogy.
The ISP's leases use of a riding lawnmower for a year $1,000. The leasing company agrees that up to 5 days a year, they can use two lawnmowers without extra charge and three lawnmowers for $10 per day.
They sell 50 people the right to use a lawnmower for $25 each (pocketing a nice $250 profit).
They reasonably expect that people are going to mow about 2 hours a day once every 2 weeks- some will mow for 2 hours a day every week and some will mow for 2 hours a day once a month. Given 365 days a year, there should rarely be a line for the lawnmower. And when there is they have a bit of extra capacity.
Now- someone figures out that the lawnmower can be used to drive to work with while their car is in the shop.
Someone else figures out that they can run a small busines mowing people's lawns with it.
Another person borrows it and then loans it out to his 5 best friends to mow their lawns with too.
The business model that was going to work doesn't work any more. Because every day people are using 7 lawnmowers all day. The ISP is now paying $60 per day over what they thought they would pay. The rules have changed.
---
Don't get me wrong- I torrent things too. I know at some point they are going to charge per megabyte (or gigabyte) downloaded. This is a very temporary window where they did not know how people would use their services. Server accounts have always taken bandwidth into account.
I expect in the next few years that we will see things like "4 gigs a month and then $1.00 per 10 gigs a month" and then the ISP's will compete on price. These will get higher as bandwidth grows (USA is pathetic at 9mbps when Japan/korea/etc. have something like 100mpbs).
Smarter caching could prevent a lot of this.
I can't imagine why folks are not rushing to this.
DVD's look great on screens up to 55".
DVD's can be backed up and are very cheap.
DVD players are dirt cheap.
HD/Blu ray are
1) expensive
2) heavily drm'd
3) havn't chosen the best movies to start with.
4) Not that much better on the screens joe average can buy.
5) DO NOT EVEN WORK CORRECTLY on HD MONITORS if they are more than about 7 months old (downsample if the player doesn't detect a secure connection to the monitor)
I can't imagine why consumers are not flocking to these--
Muds defined the general area.
Everquest defined the visual mud.
Wow was the first to hit the right balance of difficulty- Everquest drove away millions of customers through their hardcore attitudes. They would have BEEN Wow if not for Brad and "the vision". And then after it was all over, they sold out to being an easy game after all (still *way* harder than WoW but no longer pure in the same way EQ was back in 2002).
Wow was hard AND easy enough to be fun. And WoW didn't require being in a 72 person raiding guild, giving up your day job, and STILL "losing" to people who could play 14 hours a day with 3 computers and 2 bots.
But it is still a too easy watered down version of EQ for the hard core veterans. You can "beat" the game in 4 months. You have no hope at all of beating EQ in under 2 years short of relentlessly screwing over multiple guilds while playing 14 hours a day and maybe even starting by buying a high level character. Perhaps 2-4% of all EQ subscribers at any given time have "beat" the game and are waiting for the next expansion. Wow gets a bit more raid centric/harder with each expansion tho.
You have to recognize that it is a cultural thing as well.
The Iraqi's have plenty of weapons now.
What they probably need most is a sweep of the country that removes every weapon that can be found and then harsh anti weapon laws.
A riled up population with guns is not safe. A *reasonable* secular society with a good moral (usually religious) foundation does well with guns.
The swiss are *extremely* reasonable.
In some american cities, legalizing guns drops crime. This is because 1% of the population is preying on the other 99% and arming the 99% stops the 1%. In some other locations that's not the case- because things are too far gone, there are too many criminals, and too few non-corrupt law enforcement officers.
Legal guns ONLY make sense if 99% of your population is rational and doesn't want to die.
Wish I had mod points. This is perfect.
Do they realize just how easy it is to put violent porn on someones computer?
.com
www. (favorite search engine)
"violent sex forced"
images
Tada! 3 years in prison.
That would take me about 2 seconds of access to any person's computer.
Then I report them for having violent porn on their computer.
Instant prison.
Really frightening.
Even if you can't play them now-- sometime- probably within 24 months, you will be able to strip them of DRM.
Good points.
Windmills are not so bad on birds any more tho.
Solar is close to going down an order of magnitude in price (and weight which means much easier to install) (and amount of materials required to get the same amount of power) .
They also don't straight up "fail". They drop off in wattage slowly over time until one day you realize you are sitting in a dim room.
I am 90% CF's.
I'm waiting for them to create a CF that can handle a dimmer switch.
I am a bit excited about LED based lighting as well.
No problem... he simply uses his 1750 point "hook covered basket" against you.
The most recent version of word has a toolbar option to compress images once you decide you really do want them to be a 1" square at 200dpi.
No clue on powerpoint.
You can't edit easily (as in paint or coreldraw) but you can clip, crop, create arbitrary wrap points, etc.
I'm looking forward to OO becoming mature. It is now about 97% complete. That last 3% may be a killer to get done tho.
I have no interest in the newer feature Word is pushing these days (real time network collaboration- BLEH) so I assume most basic features have been defined- it's just a matter of coding them.
OO is close but still isn't there for me.
I've made 3 serious attempts to swap over from Word so far.
I have three 150 page documents that I don't want to reenter into OO that OO loads okay and then it corrupts them or crashes.
I send in crash reports periodically.
And, you can't do rectangular cut and pastes. A feature I use a lot at times in word.
Uh no...
From merriam-webster:
Theft
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
Copyright infringement is neither theft nor stealing.
In addition, there are some clear moral issues with the current laws.
1) We know they often *do not* compensate the artists but only the record corporations.
2) It is unreasonable to continue payment for something *after* the person has been dead a couple years.
3) A lot of modern music (esp jazz) wouldn't even exist if the current laws were in place. Who knows what new forms of music we are killing. For example- a lot of jazz shares the same musical chord sequences-- illegal today in rock where even under few dozen notes in the same sequence can get you sued.
4) Copyright was intended to promote music-- does it seem music needs much promotion to be created today?
5) When the businesses are so wealthy- is this a sign that they have monopoly pricing and that the laws have been corrupted?
He's not completely off topic.
Artists deserve compensation for their work just like anyone else.
However, they do not deserve compensation for their work for 50 years past their bloody death.
I get paid for the work I do every day. Just because they use my work to do business, they are not going to pay me again every day until I die for each for the 100,000 people that use my software every day.
Pick any high but ordinary salary ($120k-- even $150k) and I'll support it.
The current model *invites* abuse. The current model is based on changing the rules *after the fact* the extend copyright on songs that were long ago paid for.
But taking new songs (anything made in the last 28 years) without giving compensation to the artists (and yea- eveb the evil Riaa) is not right either.
Amazing thing to me is that I saw problems with him from the start and no one else seemed too.
And I'm not a democrat. He just had a creepy pro-nobility attitude. About a third of the republicans do now. And the democrats are getting it lately too.
Well.
As long as you don't oppose scientific progress on religious grounds, I have no big problem with your personal beliefs. So be happy.
And as for the rest, I've already beat my head against you guys enough in the past to do more than post for the rest. No point in continuing from here. The facts are out there for folks that are not in denial.
Since you were wrong to the point of purposely ignoring facts in almost every line of your original post and since I've dealt with "you" so many times I feel no need to go through the exercise again, no.
Sadly, not even this statement, "If there is a program, there HAS to be a programmer in whose mind the program was first conceived." is true.
They've been using genetic algorithms to create code for years. In some cases, using genetic algorithms has discovered previously unknown solutions to problems.
Evolution is a rock rolling downhill. No one had to start the rock rolling. The basic rules of the universe were all that was necessary.
Let me ask you this spud... we are very close to being able to *build* life. Probably within the next 30 years. Are you going to be a religious cliche and oppose that because "it's reserved for god to make life"?
Actually, I agree with the first guy.
You seem like a decent fellow so you are probably not lying when you said you were not trolling.
Ergo, using logical deduction...
My god man--- if you really believe the noah story, there is no help for you.
:. The noah story is false.
Very clear genetic evidence shows no genetic pinch-point in *many* species any time in the last 10k years. Noah clearly lived after that period. There was no massive die off of land animals during this period.
There is no geological evidence for a massive worldwide flood anytime during that period (tho we did have an ice age- so one would logically expect a "and god covered the land with ice" to be more likely).
There is no evidence that land masses were repopulated with new land animals in the last 10k years.
No evidence of floods, no evidence of mass land animal die off, no evidence of repopulation.
You must wonder if man is so important, why god created the universe and let it run without us for 15 billion years.
Our genetics would have been the perfect chance for god to reveal us as different- but instead he faked up our genetics to be 99% the same as apes- and even cleverly adjusted mitochodria and other internal clocks to be consistent with our evolving from a common ancestor with apes.
Given a measurable, repeatable fact, I'll choose it any time over a book written by savages.
God may or may not exist and may or may not have created the universe. God may or may not give a damn about us.
Science doesn't cover those issues.
But the earth isn't flat, it's not the center of the universe, pi isn't 3.00 and the bible is *not* a science text. As such, it should be read for the moral and ethical content and anything that doesn't jibe with the evidence should be taken as allegory. You should never deny hard evidence because of the contents of the bible.