A stereo preset to your favorite radio stations is irrelevant; that’s mere personalization that can be keyed to your mobile phone or any other sort of identification. The jumper cables, full tank, and Bluetooth system are irrelevant: they are either standard equipment or unnecessary. Remember, you do not really need a Bluetooth system if you’re not driving.
As for densely populated areas where owning a car is a real pain – you might remember I was talking about cities buying cars for such sharing. Last I checked, cities were densely populated areas where owning a car is a real pain. But what do I know, I only live in one.
Actually, the series is about as old as I am: its beginning dates into the early eighties. (Though the Book of Ivan has yet to be published.)
What amazed me is the path you have to take to get to it – if you really have no sense of humor, you won’t much enjoy the books.
Actually, buses might become much more prevalent for commuting. Buses are a part of the answer; yes, there’d need to be more of them (but not more drivers, mind you!), and given some more incentive, more people might start using them. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I’ve gathered, riding the bus seems to carry a slight social stigma in the US. Is it really true?)
It’s all fairly simple math, as long as you don’t focus just on one aspect. Which is what you did do, and wrongly so.
People now justify car purchase with, among other things, the need to commute. With this kind of system, they might need to commute only to some bus stop or other, because cars could then go off to pick up other passengers. This would reduce congestion, so you might get same or slightly shorter commute time even with passenger transfers.
All in all, it’s doable. It’s economically feasible. However, the automobile industry might show some resistance as it would reduce their sales.
I predict marketing ploys akin to those that made diamonds so valuable; stuff like “you’re not a real man if you let a machine drive you” (see Sly Stallone in “Demolition Man”). Still, there are very few buggy whip manufacturers around nowadays, aren’t there?
One car per commuter is both impractical and unnecessary. And I am quite certain ordering a ride via your mobile phone would allow for some damned efficient scheduling, as well as collecting passengers en route.
Commuting should be fairly easy as it’s constant.
Both these problems are circumventable.
Vandals etc. can be taken care of with some monitoring – even if the state of the vehicle were only photographed after a seat has been emptied, since each passenger would pay for the ride either by credit card or by mobile phone, it would be trivial to find the offender and fine him.
Leaving small objects in the car will die out as people can keep them in their bags as well, and any non-driving related objects will seamlessly find their place there. Larger packages while shopping – simple. You just reserve the vehicle, paying some amount per hour, and free it after shopping. What’s more, you could actually fill the vehicle with packages and send it home without you (providing there’s someone there to unload it), while you go on with whatever else you were doing, or take another car in another direction.
What’s especially funny is that by the time these toll systems gain wide adoption, they will become irrelevant.
I believe that in the next two decades we’re going to see really autonomous automobiles, i.e., self-driving cars. They will mark the beginning of the end of the era of a personally-owned vehicle, as well as parking space issues. These cars will have all it takes to become public transportation (also, automatic carpooling via mobile phone), with cars being owned by municipalities instead of individuals. Which will also mean the downfall of taxi drivers – however, used car salesmen will get screwed too.
Taxation by distance traveled will therefore become obsolete; you will be paying by distance traveled anyway. Though I guess not only municipalities will purchase those cars; taxi companies might purchase them as well (same income, albeit with no need to pay any drivers!), but I don’t really care how exactly they are taxed.
As sibling poster pointed out, it’s “its”, not “it’s”.
But never mind that. I would have passed on that were it not for your mention of Wirth. I’d have expected this kind of comment from a Lisp programmer, sure; but Wirth and Pascal... *shudder*
Yegge's point about a default font size is dear to my heart. While I had perfect vision a decade ago, I've been growing progressively farther-sighted over the last five years. Being unable to change the default font size in a browser is a deal-breaker to me. It angers me because someone had to decide to take the feature OUT. I mean, setting a default font size is one of the first things you configure into a browser, and exposing the value to make it user-changeable is trivially easy. But no, some eagle-eyed boy scout decided that it wasn't necessary.
Actually, if you want to make it as zero-conf as possible, you don’t want the user to set a specific font size. You want what WordPerfect used to do, and which everyone ever since has ignored: relative sizes. Create, say, five degrees of relative text sizes and let the user choose one as the default. Resize everything accordingly, just like selecting a preset zoom level. “Make text bigger/smaller” is what the option should read. Done.
Whatever "Facebook gets it" I don't want G+ to get it, and I don't even use G+.
This is a very stupid stance to adopt. A very stupid, fanboyish stance.
You may not like Facebook. I certainly don’t, and I have a nice list of reasons. I still use it, but I don’t have to like it much. Pretty much like Windows.
However, there is a reason Facebook is so successful. There is a reason Windows is successful (how ungrammatical this sounds). I may not like them, but I’d be a fscking idiot if I failed to note what makes them successful and learn from it. Google even more so.
Or, in short, G+ isn’t a platform. Not just in the software sense, but in any sense whatsoever. Because a platform enables communities to form, which is what Facebook does right.
Maybe he will be happier being the absolute best in his field, thanks to an education that was focused on his interests and aptitudes?
Maybe.
The problem is, he would have to be autistic for it to actually happen. Not to mention that when he needs inspiration some time in the future, he might have nothing to draw upon. Many a natural scientist drew upon something taught in the humanities he might have scorned as a student; you do not get to know what knowledge is useful until you gain it.
A general education isn't for everyone. Specialists should be able to specialize.
General education is for everyone. Specialist education goes above and beyond general education.
Many good universities adopt the T-shaped student policy: broad general surface, great depth in the chosen field. Because you do not only live to work – unless, I repeat, if you’ve got Vingean Focus. Or if you’re autistic. Other people also need to socialize; to communicate with others; to live outside their work.
The only aspect of his education that should not be sacrificed is social interaction. Our ability to relate to others is more determinative of our success both professionally and personally than any specialized talent. So, make sure he gets play time. He can study history, art, and music if he decides he wants to, but he should not be forced to. A special focused program makes sense.
Quite so. And where do children socialize? Schools. Where they learn stuff he’d mostly find boring and/or too easy. Which kind of sucks, but that’s life.
Lion’s dock IMO took a small step backwards (click-and-hold no longer shows all the app windows), but along with Spotlight and Quicksilver, it’s more than adequate.
On Linux, I just love Enlightenment’s take on Launchy/Quicksilver. Blazingly fast, intuitive... but my father still prefers the desktop menu to typing.
the heart is NOT the emotional center according to the old world up until the middle ages. That would be the kidneys. So you misunderstood that concept already, therefore you have to reevaluate the whole text. The heart is your center actually, including your mind and thoughts. The romantic view of heart is way later, its a modern thing.
I was actually responding to your statement, not the one in the Bible; therefore I’d assumed you were using the contemporary meaning. But never mind that; because taking the ancient meaning into account, your statement is even more nonsensical, and my response all the more to the point: if someone changes the way you think, is it you that’s doing the thinking? Isn’t it said: if ten people are thinking the same, nine aren’t thinking?
And btw. yes we do control emotions. We control them every day (to a certain extent of course!). Even if we mostly "let them explode into other peoples faces", if they are bad, but keep them down if they are good. We can even create emotional reactions through external factors (mirroring). We even use this fact for all kinds of therapy, by learning and understanding separating own emotions and the emotions which we mirror.
No. What you describe is controlling our responses. Can you really control your emotions if someone scares you, creeps you out, or if you fall in love with someone? Can you voluntarily stop loving someone? Can you make yourself afraid of something you actually like?
We have very little control over our emotions. Our rational mind is the new kid on the block to our ancient, primal mind which operates with emotions. You can dislike someone you meet for the first time and who appears by all rational counts as a very nice and pleasant person, for no discernible reason. You can instantly like someone who’s the exact opposite. I’ve experienced both, and it may have something to do with pheromones, for one. Hell, such things may have helped end my previous relationship. Nothing rational there, nothing controllable; our rational minds keep telling us stories that placate us, but which have little to do with reality.
I know couple languages. Now I would disagree. I think this time it was my german, and comes from "wörtlich", which I just looked up, and it means literal.
Clear?
I know a couple of languages as well, though German only on a very basic level. I’m not very impressed by your disagreement as, well, you’ve not provided any argument. Literal translation is word-for-word translation, so nothing changes in our communication.
But what he did was rather obvious: he sent plagues!? God told, he will harden his heart, because he knew, the pharaoh would not give up even after the plagues.
So he was just being an asshole. QED.
If I know that you’re not going to do something I tell you to even if I destroy your prized collection of Star Wars memorabilia, and then I destroy your prized collection of Star Wars memorabilia anyway to force you do what I want, am I being a dick, stupid, or a stupid dick?
It was still the pharaoh letting this happen - you just read the text in retrospect, without any cultural or lingual knowledge, you completely miss the point about what is said about god throughout the 66 books there, and you think that god influences the world like a magician and influences people like a puppeteer, even if your life, and even the bible would tell another story.
You are very quick to judge my knowledge, and with very little data. Not good.
Anyway, I do not miss the point. Not unintentionally, anyway; I know what the intended message is. I’ve been taught that.
However, getting some education in literature also means learning to read differently. And my favorite reading of the Bible is, well, as JHWH’s pamphlet against the Prom
expected a better answer, but putting aside a very funny comparison between an external force hitting you and an internal process which actually people have control of, but as you say.
How do you figure people have control of their emotions? We don’t. Not really.
This is why psychological tricks can and do work.
I don’t care whether JHWH waved his hand and did a Jedi mind-trick on the pharaoh or simply exploited his human weaknesses (which he, omniscient as he is purported to be, must have known). In either case, he was a puppeteer, and demonstrably evil.
and of course, i meant translation in context of sentences, and the cultural and religious meaning of what it means, that god changes hearts and stuff. That might be a babylonian problem there in communication, since I am not english native.
Neither am I. But it’s not a Babylonian problem; “word” is a pretty clear concept in most languages (we’d be getting into rather tricky ground if your native tongue was incorporative, but I’m hazarding a guess you’re not, say, a member of an Eskimo, Indian, or Oceanian tribe).
just because i would know you want to eat waffels tomorrow morning does not mean, its not you who decides that.
But if you know that, and knowing that, you sell me some syrup to go with them, you are influencing my purchasing decision with your knowledge.
If you know my economy depends on slave labor and I will therefore not release any slaves just because some guy raised by my family tells me to, and you’re telling that guy what to tell me knowing I’d react in that way just so you could decimate my people... then yeah, you’re an asshole.
If god exists, as I believe him to be, you exist.
Actually, if JHWH exists, then I might not exist. I might be just a trick of ha-Satan’s.
if god does not exist, either you exist as a soul or are at least the prism of your initial variables resulting in the mechanics you work upon - which basicly means that existence can be even an illusion - to whom?.
Existence is not an illusion. Identity is, though; and consciousness is not all that far.
Maybe life can be explained.
What do you mean by that? It’s been pretty well-explained for a while AFAICT.
for me however the real interesting question is, if god exists, why on earth would i bother if he is not love?
The question that I find really interesting is: whether or not gods exist, why would I bother, period?
No gods seem to take any active part in the functioning of the world. Apart from the FSM, of course, who presses us to the ground with His Noodly Appendage and tweaks the results of scientific research to provide consistency (I wonder what He’s been doing with neutrinos lately).
But love only works in relationships.
It is a fact of life we can only witness, accept and give. But not analyze nor understand.
As Forrest Gump would say, Bein’ a idiot is no box of chocolates.
Claiming that there is something we can witness but not analyze or understand is an act of willful stupidity. Life may be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but that doesn’t mean each and every one of us is Benjy.
Or: I am wrong, and relationships do not work and are just random, or are an illusion, too.
Or you are just wrong. Take your false dichotomies elsewhere.
Do you have any idea how hard it can be for one translator to remain consistent throughout the translation?
Do you have the slightest clue how difficult it would be to actually organize a group translation of such a book?
It is a rather large book, it is highly technical and therefore sensitive to the slightest nuance, and since professional translators are very seldom also highly technically competent, the translation will require frequent consultation with the authors.
All in all, donating money towards the translation is actually more efficient than donating an equivalent amount of your time. Because you are likely not a professional translator. Because you likely do not have the required mastery in both French and English. Because even if the work were divided up and group-translated, it would still have to be reviewed and corrected for grammar, style, and consistency. And trust me, it is often easier to simply trash the whole thing and redo it right, from scratch.
Now, community translation projects can and do function. But they are ongoing projects, often with mistranslated and untranslated parts that keep for ages because nobody had touched or noticed them, and they are often fairly bad.
If you’ve got a big language, such as English or German or Spanish or Chinese (i.e., a language with a large number of well-educated speakers), it’s not all that bad. But in the case of small languages, such as my native Croatian, what you get is crap. And I mean a metric fuckton of crap.
I don’t intend to berate anyone’s work, really. But the problem is that we are a small population (a bit over 4 million), with a lousy percentage of highly educated people, of which few can afford to work for free because our economy is dead, buried, and digging deeper. I’m actually doing some corpus analyses for my thesis (that I’ve been writing, on and off, for over two years) that will help such projects immensely, but I have to get round to it. And when I finally do, I still have to beg my translator friends for a bit of their time, which is at a premium.
ah yes, and the pharaoh lost his first born in the end, so yeah, he did not even move as long as it did not hit him. very human.
Shame an omniscient and omnipotent being such as him never saw that coming. Don’t you think?
translation of words is not always the translation of meaning.
Texts are not translated word-for-word. Unless the translator is incompetent.
But let’s ignore that part. Let’s ponder upon the fact that the supposedly perfect, unalterable “Word of God” has to be imperfectly translated into a metric fuckload of languages just because a bunch of Babylonians had decided to build a tower most probably much shorter than some we’ve built since.
A convincing case, don’t you think?
if somebody makes your heart harden, its still your friggin heart.
And if someone smashes your head open, it’s still your fucking head.
Oh. When you put it that way... that’s all right, then.
He tortured and killed a bunch of innocents so that another bunch of people would never forget how he’d supposedly rescued their ancestors from alleged slavery in a civilization which had disappeared in the meantime. Cool story, bro.
Torturing and killing thousands of innocents as a publicity stunt. Why does the name Breivik come to mind?
Slashdot Mirror
A stereo preset to your favorite radio stations is irrelevant; that’s mere personalization that can be keyed to your mobile phone or any other sort of identification. The jumper cables, full tank, and Bluetooth system are irrelevant: they are either standard equipment or unnecessary. Remember, you do not really need a Bluetooth system if you’re not driving.
As for densely populated areas where owning a car is a real pain – you might remember I was talking about cities buying cars for such sharing. Last I checked, cities were densely populated areas where owning a car is a real pain. But what do I know, I only live in one.
Actually, the series is about as old as I am: its beginning dates into the early eighties. (Though the Book of Ivan has yet to be published.)
What amazed me is the path you have to take to get to it – if you really have no sense of humor, you won’t much enjoy the books.
Why is that so? You are mostly paying for your own car to sit there, empty. Whether you need it or not.
I don’t really see people carrying anything they might need in their cars, either. They’re mostly empty space. And so are the cars.
Actually, buses might become much more prevalent for commuting. Buses are a part of the answer; yes, there’d need to be more of them (but not more drivers, mind you!), and given some more incentive, more people might start using them. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I’ve gathered, riding the bus seems to carry a slight social stigma in the US. Is it really true?)
It’s all fairly simple math, as long as you don’t focus just on one aspect. Which is what you did do, and wrongly so.
People now justify car purchase with, among other things, the need to commute. With this kind of system, they might need to commute only to some bus stop or other, because cars could then go off to pick up other passengers. This would reduce congestion, so you might get same or slightly shorter commute time even with passenger transfers.
All in all, it’s doable. It’s economically feasible. However, the automobile industry might show some resistance as it would reduce their sales.
I predict marketing ploys akin to those that made diamonds so valuable; stuff like “you’re not a real man if you let a machine drive you” (see Sly Stallone in “Demolition Man”). Still, there are very few buggy whip manufacturers around nowadays, aren’t there?
One car per commuter is both impractical and unnecessary. And I am quite certain ordering a ride via your mobile phone would allow for some damned efficient scheduling, as well as collecting passengers en route.
Commuting should be fairly easy as it’s constant.
Both these problems are circumventable.
Vandals etc. can be taken care of with some monitoring – even if the state of the vehicle were only photographed after a seat has been emptied, since each passenger would pay for the ride either by credit card or by mobile phone, it would be trivial to find the offender and fine him.
Leaving small objects in the car will die out as people can keep them in their bags as well, and any non-driving related objects will seamlessly find their place there. Larger packages while shopping – simple. You just reserve the vehicle, paying some amount per hour, and free it after shopping. What’s more, you could actually fill the vehicle with packages and send it home without you (providing there’s someone there to unload it), while you go on with whatever else you were doing, or take another car in another direction.
Change is inevitable.
What’s especially funny is that by the time these toll systems gain wide adoption, they will become irrelevant.
I believe that in the next two decades we’re going to see really autonomous automobiles, i.e., self-driving cars. They will mark the beginning of the end of the era of a personally-owned vehicle, as well as parking space issues. These cars will have all it takes to become public transportation (also, automatic carpooling via mobile phone), with cars being owned by municipalities instead of individuals. Which will also mean the downfall of taxi drivers – however, used car salesmen will get screwed too.
Taxation by distance traveled will therefore become obsolete; you will be paying by distance traveled anyway. Though I guess not only municipalities will purchase those cars; taxi companies might purchase them as well (same income, albeit with no need to pay any drivers!), but I don’t really care how exactly they are taxed.
Looking into it? I’d thought they’d made it.
What distribution are we supposed to use now?
Bodhi Linux.
Ubuntu-based distro with Enlightenment. It’s wonderful.
As sibling poster pointed out, it’s “its”, not “it’s”.
But never mind that. I would have passed on that were it not for your mention of Wirth. I’d have expected this kind of comment from a Lisp programmer, sure; but Wirth and Pascal... *shudder*
Yegge's point about a default font size is dear to my heart. While I had perfect vision a decade ago, I've been growing progressively farther-sighted over the last five years. Being unable to change the default font size in a browser is a deal-breaker to me. It angers me because someone had to decide to take the feature OUT. I mean, setting a default font size is one of the first things you configure into a browser, and exposing the value to make it user-changeable is trivially easy. But no, some eagle-eyed boy scout decided that it wasn't necessary.
Actually, if you want to make it as zero-conf as possible, you don’t want the user to set a specific font size. You want what WordPerfect used to do, and which everyone ever since has ignored: relative sizes. Create, say, five degrees of relative text sizes and let the user choose one as the default. Resize everything accordingly, just like selecting a preset zoom level. “Make text bigger/smaller” is what the option should read. Done.
Whatever "Facebook gets it" I don't want G+ to get it, and I don't even use G+.
This is a very stupid stance to adopt. A very stupid, fanboyish stance.
You may not like Facebook. I certainly don’t, and I have a nice list of reasons. I still use it, but I don’t have to like it much. Pretty much like Windows.
However, there is a reason Facebook is so successful. There is a reason Windows is successful (how ungrammatical this sounds). I may not like them, but I’d be a fscking idiot if I failed to note what makes them successful and learn from it. Google even more so.
Or, in short, G+ isn’t a platform. Not just in the software sense, but in any sense whatsoever. Because a platform enables communities to form, which is what Facebook does right.
I seem to recall an episode with a similar plot, actually.
(I have a feeling this will be moderated (-1, Obvious).)
Ah, well. It is common in politics to elect the biggest asshole.
And neither is the Goatse man.
Maybe he will be happier being the absolute best in his field, thanks to an education that was focused on his interests and aptitudes?
Maybe.
The problem is, he would have to be autistic for it to actually happen. Not to mention that when he needs inspiration some time in the future, he might have nothing to draw upon. Many a natural scientist drew upon something taught in the humanities he might have scorned as a student; you do not get to know what knowledge is useful until you gain it.
A general education isn't for everyone. Specialists should be able to specialize.
General education is for everyone. Specialist education goes above and beyond general education.
Many good universities adopt the T-shaped student policy: broad general surface, great depth in the chosen field. Because you do not only live to work – unless, I repeat, if you’ve got Vingean Focus. Or if you’re autistic. Other people also need to socialize; to communicate with others; to live outside their work.
The only aspect of his education that should not be sacrificed is social interaction. Our ability to relate to others is more determinative of our success both professionally and personally than any specialized talent. So, make sure he gets play time. He can study history, art, and music if he decides he wants to, but he should not be forced to. A special focused program makes sense.
Quite so. And where do children socialize? Schools. Where they learn stuff he’d mostly find boring and/or too easy. Which kind of sucks, but that’s life.
Damn. I forgot about that when I filled the survey.
I used to meta-moderate religiously. Then they changed the system and I slowly stopped bothering.
Why would you want to eject him?
Lion’s dock IMO took a small step backwards (click-and-hold no longer shows all the app windows), but along with Spotlight and Quicksilver, it’s more than adequate.
On Linux, I just love Enlightenment’s take on Launchy/Quicksilver. Blazingly fast, intuitive... but my father still prefers the desktop menu to typing.
the heart is NOT the emotional center according to the old world up until the middle ages. That would be the kidneys. So you misunderstood that concept already, therefore you have to reevaluate the whole text. The heart is your center actually, including your mind and thoughts. The romantic view of heart is way later, its a modern thing.
I was actually responding to your statement, not the one in the Bible; therefore I’d assumed you were using the contemporary meaning. But never mind that; because taking the ancient meaning into account, your statement is even more nonsensical, and my response all the more to the point: if someone changes the way you think, is it you that’s doing the thinking? Isn’t it said: if ten people are thinking the same, nine aren’t thinking?
And btw. yes we do control emotions. We control them every day (to a certain extent of course!). Even if we mostly "let them explode into other peoples faces", if they are bad, but keep them down if they are good. We can even create emotional reactions through external factors (mirroring). We even use this fact for all kinds of therapy, by learning and understanding separating own emotions and the emotions which we mirror.
No. What you describe is controlling our responses. Can you really control your emotions if someone scares you, creeps you out, or if you fall in love with someone? Can you voluntarily stop loving someone? Can you make yourself afraid of something you actually like?
We have very little control over our emotions. Our rational mind is the new kid on the block to our ancient, primal mind which operates with emotions. You can dislike someone you meet for the first time and who appears by all rational counts as a very nice and pleasant person, for no discernible reason. You can instantly like someone who’s the exact opposite. I’ve experienced both, and it may have something to do with pheromones, for one. Hell, such things may have helped end my previous relationship. Nothing rational there, nothing controllable; our rational minds keep telling us stories that placate us, but which have little to do with reality.
I know couple languages. Now I would disagree. I think this time it was my german, and comes from "wörtlich", which I just looked up, and it means literal. Clear?
I know a couple of languages as well, though German only on a very basic level. I’m not very impressed by your disagreement as, well, you’ve not provided any argument. Literal translation is word-for-word translation, so nothing changes in our communication.
But what he did was rather obvious: he sent plagues!? God told, he will harden his heart, because he knew, the pharaoh would not give up even after the plagues.
So he was just being an asshole. QED.
If I know that you’re not going to do something I tell you to even if I destroy your prized collection of Star Wars memorabilia, and then I destroy your prized collection of Star Wars memorabilia anyway to force you do what I want, am I being a dick, stupid, or a stupid dick?
It was still the pharaoh letting this happen - you just read the text in retrospect, without any cultural or lingual knowledge, you completely miss the point about what is said about god throughout the 66 books there, and you think that god influences the world like a magician and influences people like a puppeteer, even if your life, and even the bible would tell another story.
You are very quick to judge my knowledge, and with very little data. Not good.
Anyway, I do not miss the point. Not unintentionally, anyway; I know what the intended message is. I’ve been taught that. However, getting some education in literature also means learning to read differently. And my favorite reading of the Bible is, well, as JHWH’s pamphlet against the Prom
expected a better answer, but putting aside a very funny comparison between an external force hitting you and an internal process which actually people have control of, but as you say.
How do you figure people have control of their emotions? We don’t. Not really.
This is why psychological tricks can and do work.
I don’t care whether JHWH waved his hand and did a Jedi mind-trick on the pharaoh or simply exploited his human weaknesses (which he, omniscient as he is purported to be, must have known). In either case, he was a puppeteer, and demonstrably evil.
and of course, i meant translation in context of sentences, and the cultural and religious meaning of what it means, that god changes hearts and stuff. That might be a babylonian problem there in communication, since I am not english native.
Neither am I. But it’s not a Babylonian problem; “word” is a pretty clear concept in most languages (we’d be getting into rather tricky ground if your native tongue was incorporative, but I’m hazarding a guess you’re not, say, a member of an Eskimo, Indian, or Oceanian tribe).
just because i would know you want to eat waffels tomorrow morning does not mean, its not you who decides that.
But if you know that, and knowing that, you sell me some syrup to go with them, you are influencing my purchasing decision with your knowledge.
If you know my economy depends on slave labor and I will therefore not release any slaves just because some guy raised by my family tells me to, and you’re telling that guy what to tell me knowing I’d react in that way just so you could decimate my people... then yeah, you’re an asshole.
If god exists, as I believe him to be, you exist.
Actually, if JHWH exists, then I might not exist. I might be just a trick of ha-Satan’s.
if god does not exist, either you exist as a soul or are at least the prism of your initial variables resulting in the mechanics you work upon - which basicly means that existence can be even an illusion - to whom?.
Existence is not an illusion. Identity is, though; and consciousness is not all that far.
Maybe life can be explained.
What do you mean by that? It’s been pretty well-explained for a while AFAICT.
for me however the real interesting question is, if god exists, why on earth would i bother if he is not love?
The question that I find really interesting is: whether or not gods exist, why would I bother, period?
No gods seem to take any active part in the functioning of the world. Apart from the FSM, of course, who presses us to the ground with His Noodly Appendage and tweaks the results of scientific research to provide consistency (I wonder what He’s been doing with neutrinos lately).
But love only works in relationships. It is a fact of life we can only witness, accept and give. But not analyze nor understand.
As Forrest Gump would say, Bein’ a idiot is no box of chocolates.
Claiming that there is something we can witness but not analyze or understand is an act of willful stupidity. Life may be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but that doesn’t mean each and every one of us is Benjy.
Or: I am wrong, and relationships do not work and are just random, or are an illusion, too.
Or you are just wrong. Take your false dichotomies elsewhere.
Do you have any idea how hard it can be for one translator to remain consistent throughout the translation?
Do you have the slightest clue how difficult it would be to actually organize a group translation of such a book?
It is a rather large book, it is highly technical and therefore sensitive to the slightest nuance, and since professional translators are very seldom also highly technically competent, the translation will require frequent consultation with the authors.
All in all, donating money towards the translation is actually more efficient than donating an equivalent amount of your time. Because you are likely not a professional translator. Because you likely do not have the required mastery in both French and English. Because even if the work were divided up and group-translated, it would still have to be reviewed and corrected for grammar, style, and consistency. And trust me, it is often easier to simply trash the whole thing and redo it right, from scratch.
Now, community translation projects can and do function. But they are ongoing projects, often with mistranslated and untranslated parts that keep for ages because nobody had touched or noticed them, and they are often fairly bad.
If you’ve got a big language, such as English or German or Spanish or Chinese (i.e., a language with a large number of well-educated speakers), it’s not all that bad. But in the case of small languages, such as my native Croatian, what you get is crap. And I mean a metric fuckton of crap.
I don’t intend to berate anyone’s work, really. But the problem is that we are a small population (a bit over 4 million), with a lousy percentage of highly educated people, of which few can afford to work for free because our economy is dead, buried, and digging deeper. I’m actually doing some corpus analyses for my thesis (that I’ve been writing, on and off, for over two years) that will help such projects immensely, but I have to get round to it. And when I finally do, I still have to beg my translator friends for a bit of their time, which is at a premium.
ah yes, and the pharaoh lost his first born in the end, so yeah, he did not even move as long as it did not hit him. very human.
Shame an omniscient and omnipotent being such as him never saw that coming. Don’t you think?
translation of words is not always the translation of meaning.
Texts are not translated word-for-word. Unless the translator is incompetent.
But let’s ignore that part. Let’s ponder upon the fact that the supposedly perfect, unalterable “Word of God” has to be imperfectly translated into a metric fuckload of languages just because a bunch of Babylonians had decided to build a tower most probably much shorter than some we’ve built since.
A convincing case, don’t you think?
if somebody makes your heart harden, its still your friggin heart.
And if someone smashes your head open, it’s still your fucking head.
Oh. When you put it that way... that’s all right, then.
He tortured and killed a bunch of innocents so that another bunch of people would never forget how he’d supposedly rescued their ancestors from alleged slavery in a civilization which had disappeared in the meantime. Cool story, bro.
Torturing and killing thousands of innocents as a publicity stunt. Why does the name Breivik come to mind?