Eh? You what? Is that 'Bad English' in the grammatical sense (in which case perhaps you should buy a dictionary) or in the narrowly defined BNP concept of what being English is?
Yes. Being in favour of the BNP you probably wouldn't say that.
Be sure however Tony Blair probably loves the BBC as much as you you love blacks.
-5 Idiot Racist.
I for one would not object if the BBC had a licensing scheme for users outside of the UK to take advantage of the content (although technically it is the UK government, not the BBC, that controls TV licensing). Clearly the BBC is a well respected media organasation and there's no reason I cannot see that opening up subscription based content to users across the world couldn't generate extra revenue and shutup some of the nay-sayers who have it in for the BBC and public broadcasting.
Assuming such a man existed and was the son of a god. I'll let the Christians fight about triune gods and whether or not an omniscient being needs to obtain such knowledge. I'll just maintain there's no particular reason to think the Gospel's are historical and their claims of divinity should have any credance.
And an omniscient being who is also deeply loving and empathetic can't be anything but warm.
Except since most Christians apart from believing in an omnibenevolent god also think the same god is going to punish everyone who doesn't follow his rules correctly or believe in him with firey pain. That's not the kind of warmth I'm looking for.
There are numerous advantages of using CSS with HTML rather than using HTML alone - not least of which is that the old way is just fugly to maintain. As far as the user is concerned it has advantages too. For example it makes life a lot easier if you're using Lynx on a webpage that uses CSS and HTML standards properly. That goes for other accessability conerns as well.
IMHO the old Netscape way of doing styles with et al is broken, dead, and should be expunged from the Internet.
I don't know if you've ever tried developing with it but I stopped doing things the old way right after I found out about it.
YUV, or luminance and two chrominance (red and blue) channels, is the colour space used for the discrete cosine transform stage of JPEG. The reason for this is that human perception is more sensitive to luminance (brightness) than chrominance (colour) and therefore more information can be removed from the colour channels before noticeable image degredation occurs. This is one of the ways in which JPEG achieves its high compression factors. Also the more you quantize the DCT result the more zeros you have per each block (remembering that JPEG works on 8x8 blocks of an image) and hence the more you can compress with a RLE compression algorithm.
This particular image really shouldn't be in JPEG - it's certainly not suited to it. JPEG works best with 'realistic' photographs. Really what this means is that the more sharp the changes in brightness/luminance are the more AC components will have non-trivial values that will be discarded by the quantizer leading to more noticeable artifacts when decoded. And if you DON'T quantize then you could end up with a very inefficiently compressed image - bigger than it would be stored uncompressed (as one can note from the filesize).
But why would you want to re-install a system that is just going to enevitably degrade? Surely it would be better in this analogy to seek out a new system rather than just resetting the one that failed in the first place?
However, what's up with the format not even supporting embedding of images and charts? These are things pretty commonly included in documents and people don't want to waste time sending several files, they want them embedded in one file.
I don't get what MS is on about. OOo has it's own spreadsheet and drawing programs and certainly copes with images and other embedded obejcts. I've done it before so unless I was dreaming it I really don't see how they can justify such FUD.
Erm no. The coding of the DNA has A precise order - be it randomly generated or not there is only one configuration for any particular DNA strand. You've just taken the word and skewed its meaning to fit something else. But I will rephrase for your education (as wasted as that is since you seem content to merely pick any phrase out of my text you think you can attack and ignore the rest).
After replication the resultant DNA strand may have differences to its parent, known as errors, which may be influenced by any number of factors or may be entirely random copying errors.
Try some random alphabet soup as a computer program some time and see what happens when you try to execute your code.
Oh you want to go computer analogies with me now? Judging by the rest of your scientific knowledge this is gonna pan out just as well for you.
Natural selection as well as everything else operates by certain rules or information, if you will. 1000 monkeys typing for the 100th power of ten number of years STILL would not produce the writings of say Shakespeare of the US constitution. Nobody has yet satisfactorily explained the origin of information from anything other than MIND.
That's because YOU don't grasp the difference between what is and what isn't random in the process. 1000 monkeys typing for the 100th power of ten number of years WOULD produce Shakespear if there was some other influence apart from the mere random tapping of keys that would encourage the works of Shakespear to come out. The analogies are flawed because they take ONE component of natural selection - an inherent randomness in the process - and ignore the other bit... SELECTION. Without selection your analogies fail every time.
Software as information is not physical, has no mass
E=MC^2 last time I checked...
and can be preserved on any number of carriers simultaneously and transmitted at the speed of light. The real you is software, right now carried in a physical body part called brain. That software can be transmitted and stored in many places. How that may be done we still don't know.
Your point? That we don't need the supernatural to explain a single thing about human existence? Doesn't help your case at all.
Examining the circuits and chips in a computer tells you NOTHING about its operation.
Not if you're looking with your naked eyes. If you have the right tools to investigate the chip it becomes somewhat easier.
I run Virtual PC in a Mac. If you were to examine that Mac you could not discover that ability unless the Mac were "alive", that is powered up and have its software loaded and have a functioning I/O system.
I can't know every possible program? No shit, that's mathmatically proven.
In the same way, the real you is SOFTWARE, information, immaterial and as such can just like computer software be loaded into new hardware after your present hardware ceases operation. That is exactly what God tells us will happen after death, at the resurrection. He has a backup of all that you are, your personality and the sum total of all your thoughts.
Your god says nothing of the sort. But your analogy was fun and at least I could agree with it right up until you included the supernatural. You're still asking me to take the fanciful leap that there's some mystical, magical force that's gonna eject my harddrive upon my death and whisk it away to be placed in a super-whizzy new computer that never breaks down. So right up until that point you're dealing with reality. And then suddenly the computer gets up and starts dancing.
Jesus said: "And I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." (Matt 12:36)
There is much evidence that any kind of scenario for expaining what exits, especially life, cannot come from anything random.
It took less than one sentence to get an evolutionary fallacy. Sigh...
Every day in life we observe a part of the second law of thermodynamics called entropy, which ONLY ALWAYS increases. The ONLY exception to this is when ENERGY and THOUGHT are acting together against it.
SLOT - what a surprise. More scientific misunderstanding from the ID crowd.
(You might like to know that endothermic reactions manage to decrease entropy with energy but no thought... imagine that! Not only that you'd have to show somehow that thought is some intangeable non-energy based thing - good luck.)
A mess in you house doesn't clean itself up and a wrecked car doesn't repair itself.
Flawed analogy; there is no mechanism for such things to occur by itself.
All random evolution is a theory in the minds of those who do not wish to acknowledge the fact that one day they will have to give an account of their lives to the God who is.
Sigh. Evolution doesn't say things came together randomly - yet more ID nonsense. What it actually talks about is natural SELECTION. Random things include the precise coding after DNA replicates - otherwise known as mutation. Evolution is essentially a mechanism whereby information about an environment is transfered statistically to DNA by reproduction. The outward effect of this is DNA carriers that will eventually become more effective at reproducing in their given environment. The events are random: the selection is not. You may want to learn about statistics to see how this works.
I also love your threat. Very Christian of you. I know you can't comprehend this but your god isn't really real so I'm not really worried about being judged by its arbitary rules. Plus at the time of Darwin people thought science could lead them to your god - it's only when nature started disagreeing that Christians suddenly decided they'd live in ignorance of scientific advancement. Darwin ended up agnostic due to his Theory on Natural Selection. Later Christians have reconsiled his ideas with their faith. No-one who doesn't believe in your god thinks evolution is correct because they don't want to think about damnation.
I'm not about to argue with the universe on its nature.
Nowhere has random evolution ever been OBSERVED to happen, nor has anyone EVER done an experimental demonstration of such evolution.
Sorry wrong. I could show you why but it's beginning to become clear you get your science from AIG so I would first have to re-educate you on some basic concepts. I don't think you'd be willing to do that.
Nobody has ever made a fossil to demonstrate how that is done.
Only someone without the first clue what a fossil is would say such a silly thing.
You are getting older, your body is wearing out and one day it will no longer be inhabitable by you and you will have to leave and stand before God.
Sigh. Your god is a man-made fiction. I'm getting old, sure, but the scientific evidence doesn't show entropy to be the reason.
The Bible says
You think I care why? Do you care what the Koran says?
Just as the first part of this verse is indisputable, so is the second part about judgment.
I can see why you like Dr Greenleaf so much - you like your indisputable axioms don't you? Shame I don't buy them really.
Death will happen to you and you know it, and I am telling you that the second part will also.
Well I'm telling you the second part won't. What will happen when you die is that your body will be consumed by various organisms and your biomass recycled so that your nutrients can re-enter the food chain. With the lack of any persistence device such as a 'soul' haveing any evidence for existence there is no reason to think that your individuality will
Why are emotions and logical understanding mutually incompatible?
Emotions can't help you derrive factual things - i.e. they are no good for objective reasoning. They may be useful in the abstract world of social interaction but they're a pretty useless guide for deciding, oh, say, which OS is better. So if women are more likely to make a decision based on emotion and a man more on logic then clearly a woman may choose Windows and a man Linux as their preferred OS.:)
However I tend to find that it's more about how educated one is about reasoning rather than what sex one is. Although I can certainly attest to the theory that women simply study harder in order to please whilst men as more lazy.
You are obviously biased against anything Christian.
Not quite - I'm clearly going to QUESTION anything a Christian has to say regarding the veracity of his own beliefs given he has a vested interest in making them true. There's pleanty of examples of Christians doing this (and other faiths before you think I'm singling your particular one out).
When someone starts out a book on the veracity of the Gospels and declares that his god and his god's son definitively did those things in the book he's supposedly trying to show as valid - well, that sets off my skeptical alarm bells you know?
Dr. Greenleaf is saying is that the eyewitnesses of the gospels are credible and truthful by the tests that are applied in human tribunals
And I'm saying, "what eyewitnesses?"
Modern archeological techniques and finds have also been in harmony with the historical accounts of the Bible.
Yeah, some have. Best to ignore all those that DON'T gel with the Bible eh? (It's a common filter for believers). Although this sounds very much like a Spiderman defence to me (i.e. Spiderman lives in New York, New York exists, therefore Spiderman does). I'm not about to say the Bible is through and through false - but just because some of it happens to reference REAL places and REAL people doesn't mean the entire work is TRUE. Just as because Spiderman lives in New York doesn't mean the webslinger is fighting crime. Also if Spiderman's New York conflicted with evidence we had about New York then I'm afraid the paperback becomes questionable before the physical evidence. Such as it is for your Bible.
Nevertheless it has a single authorship which becomes very evident to those who carefully study these writings.
It's very evident to me that the Gospel writers certainly were not under a single authorship. This is wishful thinking - the Gospels make more sense once you assume these people were simply writing down an oral messaih myth and throwing in stuff they liked and quoting from the OT (albeit sometimes not understanding it, as with the case of the two donkeys in Matthew IIRC). It also helps explain why a supposedly extraordinary fellow has bugger all written about him elsewhere (apart from the aforementioned forgeries you've gone silent on).
It tells us about an eternally, self existent Creator God, dwelling outside our time-space domain, whose existence can neither "proven" nor disproven.
No it doesn't. It talks about a tribal war god who was called upon to smite the enemies of the Israelites - a god who had problems finding Adam in his garden and defeating iron chariots. The Bible says nowt about space-time.
.Just as a juror can believe or disbelieve the evidence presented in court, so you too can believe or not the evidence that God gives of Himself in this book and in the creation.
Ah ha! Creation as evidence - wondered when that would come up. And pray tell, precisely how does one derrive that YOUR god must have constructed the universe from observation? I have a thousand others waiting to claim that title... The Bible? That's the best you've got? It ain't evidence of anything supernatural I'm afraid. What it testifies to is the thoughts and observations of a primitive people living in the Middle East with ambitions of empire they never could achieve. It requires an extreme amount of generosity to make it even coherent, let alone consistent. It's description of the nature which its author supposedly built is lacking. It appears to me to simply be another collection of writings by man that happens to talk about the supernatural. I see no reason whatsoever to single it out as the one 'True' one.
If determining the truth for youself is not worth taking your own time, rather than the boss' then perhaps truth doesn't really matter to you.
Actually I asked if I was going to get anything from this book that wasn't going to be rife with such assumptions. I could see from those fir
Not really a brief outline, nonetheless I will give it a brief look.
Dr. Greenleaf lived from 1783 to 1853
WTF!!!! Haha. Sorry. I thought this might have been slightly more contemporary. Probably explains why I'm having such a hard time reading this thing (it certainly doesn't help that it's been OCRd). Certainly confirms my suspicion of total bias - he's a Christian and makes no bones about it. I particularly like this gem:
The proof that God has revealed himself to man by;special and express communications, and that Christianity
constitutes that revelation, is no part of these inquiries.'This has already been shown, in the most satisfactory;manner, by others, who have written expressly upon this:subject.'
Hell, why bother with this crap about making the Gospels into a (incredibly outdated) legal testimony? Just show me the above proof!
It didn't take very long to find a completely questionable assertion thrown in as an axiom to the entire underpinning of his argument.
Can you give me a good reason for continuing to read after the above? I expect to find nothing of value in the following pages and can't really spend all day reading it when I'm supposed to be working.
No system devised by man is perfect. If you ARE accused of a crime, you, as an accused have the option to have a Judge decide the outcome. If you feel that he/she is less emotional
It's not about someone being emotional, it's about making judgements about matters of fact based on emotion.
It's the kind of mentality that leads to people being mistaken for pedophiles and killed by vigilantes - as happened recently in London. The emotions surrounding the case cloud any rational judgements. All people are susceptible to this and most people don't even realise (even after such incidents) why one's emotions are not reliable indicators for FACT.
Do read Dr. Greenleaf's treatise, or at least skim through it to review the rules of evidence used in courts. These are the rules that are used to sufficiently learn the truth upon which you may be acquitted or convicted.
I have some understanding of the various levels for the rules of evidence. I fail to see why it should change my opinion on the evidence for the Gospels. Unless Dr. Greenleaf has provided good reason not to view the Gospels as hearsay at best - since none of the supposed authors (of whom we know basically nothing) were witnesses. Or perhaps he'd like to explain the lost Gospel of Thomas? Or any of the other Gospels that didn't make the final cut. Any good reason not to assume that the four that made it did so based on what the Council of Nicea wanted for their religion rather than the factual basis of the Gospels? If you start from the unproven assumption there must have been a god driving them then maybe - but I see no reason to capitualate on that point and I see the early Church for the very human organisation it was. They wanted power, not truth.
If these rules concerning witnesses may be used to possibly determine the life or death of an accused, it seems they ought to be good enough to determine if the witness of the 4 Gospels could be admitted and stand up in your life, with you acting as an impartial juror.
It would seem like that - but if 12 people weighed the evidence and told me the Earth is flat that doesn't change the fact that it is a globe. I would be most interested to see just how skewed Dr Greenleaf has made it - after all it's quite a common tactic to obfuscate the issue, confuse with technicalities and force the uneducated reader to agree with the conclusions they already wanted to hear (a common ID method of attacking evolution with analogies that fail to represent the thing they are attacking). Using law, a VERY complicated and built up system, has to be a great way to obfuscate the major points of contention I have with the story.
So you too, if you do not have an aready closed mind, may approach the witness of the gospel by these rules and then base your decison concerning the truth or falsity thereof ONLY on what YOU actually read, not on what you may have heard from any other source at any time before in your life.
Well disregarding everything else I know about the relgion the Gospels STILL do not stand up on their own. They lack coherency between them. They lack any factual evidence for their claims. The case is poor.
Have you actually EVER read the 4 gospels?
I certainly have.
Whether you have or have not, you ought to read them with the rules of evidence in mind to see whether they are true for you. Read them with the rules of cold logic used in courts, rather that relying your emotions or feelings.
I know logic - very formally as a Computer Scientist. My basic understand of the rules of evidence would say that four stories without a consistent narrative, corroborating evidence, at best hearsay for the events would not stand up particularly well in court.
Did Dr Greenleaf conclude this as well? Perhaps you could just give a brief outline of what he has to say regarding my above objections? I suspect I have a pretty good idea, I would just like to confirm they're illogical and show why before committing time to this any more.
If you are ever accused of a crime, you better hope that the legal system tries to determine the truth of that accusation.
I didn't say it didn't try, I'm just pointing out the rather lamentable fact that it's not a system that produces highly reliable results. Often (as is the case with religion incidentally) jury trials rely on appealing to emotion rather than fact due to the simple reason that the average Joe is unable to grasp more subtle concepts such as logic.
So...
a body of 12 people, and let them decide whether to BELIEVE one side or the other of a case according to what they perceive to be the truth based on what was presented to them in court.
Is only as good as the beliefs of 12 people - and as I'm sure you'd suspect I don't place a hell of a lot of stock in the beliefs of the average man since the average man believes in so much superstitious nonsense (your man god included) with barely any question.
What Dr. Greenleaf has done is to apply the methods of sifting and examining evidence that is used in every American court to the record and witness of the Gospels as they have come down to us.
I'd sure be interested to see how he's handled the Centurion.
You then, the reader acts as the jury and must decide whether the evidence presented (not your own opinion) convinces you of the truth of the Gospels or not. Read his book and the gospels as an impartial juror, with no preconceived ideas about the merits of the case.
I fail to see why I should: I have the source material available. I need not have it mangled by some lawyer. You (Christians) are the ones who oft claim that merely reading the Good News should be enough to inspire a mighty transformation. Why the need to continually refilter this stuff in endless translations, examinations and an overwhelming desire to add additional evidence no matter how flimsy or falsified it is to balster a belief I suspect most realise is inherently irrational? That can be the only people get so excited by supposed miracles - it shouldn't make a difference to them if their god was already as real as another person. Face it: the source material is dodgy, the additional evidence provided is dodgy, the story itself is weak (if THAT's the best a divine being can do to produce a consistent story with internal logic well...). You might as well try to convince me the Earth is flat (try Isaiah) because your Jesus is as ludicrous to me as that notion is.
On the other hand, millions of people do believe that the accounts in the Bible are true.
If every person on Earth believed it were true then it would still not make it so.
Truth doesn't come from opinion. These things either happened or they didn't - committees don't decide it.
This is known as an appeal to popularity - but then I doubt the billion or so Muslims and Hindus really convince you so why should you convince me?
In the case of Jesus and some of the things He said, there are three possibilities. 1) He was crazy, 2) He deceived, 3) He told the truth.
No, there's a fourth I already pointed out:
4) He was made up.
We have way more ancient written material about Jesus and the early church history than we do of the Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato.
That old fallacy.
Well firstly I don't believe there's anyone running around telling us that we should do X, Y and Z because Aristotle said so. That alone makes it rather less important from my perspective whether or not these people existed or were pseudonyms for other Greeks.
Secondly there isn't actually any more evidence for your guy - four totally biased propaganda peices that can't agree on the narrative and a later Christian forgery (that of the oft brought up Josepheus which you have unsurprisingly used) doesn't make for good evidence.
All you've done is made a good case for discounting a few more people as fictions - not include another one as real.
Even back then, the enemies of Jesus would have dearly loved to demolish the claim of Jesus' followers concerning the resurrection.
Right, but the best you've got is what honest Christian scollars would have to agree is most likely a forgery of Josepheus' work made by early Christians to lend weight to their claims.
Apart from that you can't even CLAIM any contemporary writings by historians. Not much cop for someone who is supposed to have got right up the noses of the Jewish and Roman authourities. Either they didn't consider him that important or he didn't exist as proprosed by the Gospels. (Not a difficult conclusion to make given that Jesus wasn't an uncommon name).
All they would have to do is produce the broken, mutilated body.
Which again assumes the highly questionable and contradictory narrative of your Gospels is historic - if Jesus of Nazarath didn't exist there's no body to produce and no-one to care to produce it.
Dr. Simon Greenleaf, one of the founders of Harvard Law School wrote a lawyerly treatise called; "The Testimony of the Evangelists" Every lawyer in every American law school still studies Greenleaf's voluminous "A treatise on the Law of Evidence". These rules are what every law court of our land still follows. Mr. Greenleaf used these rules to determine if the testimony of the Gospels could stand up in a court of law.
Now you're using an appeal to authourity to try to convince me. All the usuals come out.
So please tell me why I should care that some, almost certainly Christian, law doctor has to say on matters of HISTORY? If you're going to appeal to authourity at least use the right one.
If you are not afraid to have your ideas expressed in your post and other erroneous ones about the veracity of the Gospel accounts as we find them today refuted, as they would be in a court of law,
*Sigh* No, they wouldn't be in a court of law. That's for legal matters, not historical ones. You seem to be labouring under some delusion about how reality works - it is not judged by 12 people picked at random. You also seem to be labouring under some delusions about the effectiveness of your legal system at determining truth by this method.
I just can't believe I'm being told I'm the one with the erroneous ideas about the veracity of the Gospels when these classic fallacies come up.
Cast aside all philosophy and religiosity and ask Jesus in a simple, from the heart prayer if you too, as I have, can come into a personal love relationship with the everlasting God through Him. Jesus has dealt with all your failures and shortcomings so that you are able to have a relationship with a just and perfect God whom you can then address as YOUR Father.
As well intentioned as this all is, and aside from the rather ludicrously contorted story that Christianity has become, your Jesus character is highly unlikely to have existed as portrayed in your Bible - not least of which because he simply cannot have performed all the actions he is supposed to have done as portrayed in the Gospels due to their contradictory properties.
None of the other religious figures that have come and gone throughout the ages was able or even claimed to conquer the chief enemy of man -- death.
So this statement is rather moot - Jesus didn't defeat death either - he didn't exist in the first place. As such the Christian notions of being a great acheivement or worthy sacrafice or anything else become rather meaningless. You're just following some Messianic stories that blended poorly referenced OT prophecies, popular religious concepts from around the region and plagarism without regard for possible consequences when the Paul established Church decided it was going to have the final word on what is to be the final divine scripture.
As such you might as well be arguing who the better Star Trek captain is because from my perspective all these characters have exactly the same realness - none.
The Build engine source has been out for some time, the Duke source less so and the Shadow Warrior source more recently. The JonoF port uses a new render developed by Ken Silverman, the original coder, to render a Build world with polygons rather than rasters. It would seem rather pointless to spend a huge amount of time and effort trying to covert from one engine paradigm to another, especially when they are really quite different. Not to meantion that you can't really have a conversion without the maps and 3DR doesn't like people converting their maps and placing them in other games and has shut down conversions that have done things like this in the past.
You could try automatic converters but I don't think anyone has written one with any degree of competence. Besides there are things you can do in Build that I imagine would be far harder to acheive in Quake 3 - such as dynamically creating sectors out of nowhere and placing them in the map (which is pretty much how the map editor works and allows for such rapid development).
Last time I checked Quake engine games required a lengthy compile process to produce lightmaps and BSP trees and such. In Build you just modify the sector/wall/sprite data structures and that's what your game world will be.
An old engine Build may be but I don't think it's been surpassed in regard to its simplicity of the game world and the absolute power to modify everything in the game world at runtime.
they way i see it C/C++ have EVERYTHING you need to program.
The way I see it assembler really has EVERYTHING you need to program. But then people use C rather than assembler for a reason and the same for other languages. The whole point of the high level language is to give the programmer a better abstraction of the problem rather than having to concern the programmer with bits and bytes (not that they shouldn't understand this). Abstracting away the details of a machine is not always a bad thing - you may like thinking about pointers and unsafe typecasts but you'd probably like it less if you had to worry the implications of the possible architectures your code may be compiled for. The Java VM removes this problem for you. That's just one example.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh? You what? Is that 'Bad English' in the grammatical sense (in which case perhaps you should buy a dictionary) or in the narrowly defined BNP concept of what being English is?
Eh?
Yes. Being in favour of the BNP you probably wouldn't say that. Be sure however Tony Blair probably loves the BBC as much as you you love blacks. -5 Idiot Racist.
I for one would not object if the BBC had a licensing scheme for users outside of the UK to take advantage of the content (although technically it is the UK government, not the BBC, that controls TV licensing). Clearly the BBC is a well respected media organasation and there's no reason I cannot see that opening up subscription based content to users across the world couldn't generate extra revenue and shutup some of the nay-sayers who have it in for the BBC and public broadcasting.
Such as Christ obtained while on earth?
Assuming such a man existed and was the son of a god. I'll let the Christians fight about triune gods and whether or not an omniscient being needs to obtain such knowledge. I'll just maintain there's no particular reason to think the Gospel's are historical and their claims of divinity should have any credance.
And an omniscient being who is also deeply loving and empathetic can't be anything but warm.
Except since most Christians apart from believing in an omnibenevolent god also think the same god is going to punish everyone who doesn't follow his rules correctly or believe in him with firey pain. That's not the kind of warmth I'm looking for.
There are numerous advantages of using CSS with HTML rather than using HTML alone - not least of which is that the old way is just fugly to maintain. As far as the user is concerned it has advantages too. For example it makes life a lot easier if you're using Lynx on a webpage that uses CSS and HTML standards properly. That goes for other accessability conerns as well.
IMHO the old Netscape way of doing styles with et al is broken, dead, and should be expunged from the Internet.
I don't know if you've ever tried developing with it but I stopped doing things the old way right after I found out about it.
YUV, or luminance and two chrominance (red and blue) channels, is the colour space used for the discrete cosine transform stage of JPEG. The reason for this is that human perception is more sensitive to luminance (brightness) than chrominance (colour) and therefore more information can be removed from the colour channels before noticeable image degredation occurs. This is one of the ways in which JPEG achieves its high compression factors. Also the more you quantize the DCT result the more zeros you have per each block (remembering that JPEG works on 8x8 blocks of an image) and hence the more you can compress with a RLE compression algorithm. This particular image really shouldn't be in JPEG - it's certainly not suited to it. JPEG works best with 'realistic' photographs. Really what this means is that the more sharp the changes in brightness/luminance are the more AC components will have non-trivial values that will be discarded by the quantizer leading to more noticeable artifacts when decoded. And if you DON'T quantize then you could end up with a very inefficiently compressed image - bigger than it would be stored uncompressed (as one can note from the filesize).
But why would you want to re-install a system that is just going to enevitably degrade? Surely it would be better in this analogy to seek out a new system rather than just resetting the one that failed in the first place?
However, what's up with the format not even supporting embedding of images and charts? These are things pretty commonly included in documents and people don't want to waste time sending several files, they want them embedded in one file.
I don't get what MS is on about. OOo has it's own spreadsheet and drawing programs and certainly copes with images and other embedded obejcts. I've done it before so unless I was dreaming it I really don't see how they can justify such FUD.
I don't believe I said it would work - infact I used words that implied just the opposite.
The ability to unzip large groups of ZIP files in one action would be a lovely addition!!!
Simplicity itself with a CLI of your choice. Something like:
unzip *.zip
Is going to do the job. I've yet to see any GUI based interface have anything so simple for such a task.
Not unless the X server became Windows over night (not that Windows is the be-all and end-all of games anyway).
Precise coding and random are opposites
Erm no. The coding of the DNA has A precise order - be it randomly generated or not there is only one configuration for any particular DNA strand. You've just taken the word and skewed its meaning to fit something else. But I will rephrase for your education (as wasted as that is since you seem content to merely pick any phrase out of my text you think you can attack and ignore the rest).
After replication the resultant DNA strand may have differences to its parent, known as errors, which may be influenced by any number of factors or may be entirely random copying errors.
Try some random alphabet soup as a computer program some time and see what happens when you try to execute your code.
Oh you want to go computer analogies with me now? Judging by the rest of your scientific knowledge this is gonna pan out just as well for you.
Natural selection as well as everything else operates by certain rules or information, if you will. 1000 monkeys typing for the 100th power of ten number of years STILL would not produce the writings of say Shakespeare of the US constitution. Nobody has yet satisfactorily explained the origin of information from anything other than MIND.
That's because YOU don't grasp the difference between what is and what isn't random in the process. 1000 monkeys typing for the 100th power of ten number of years WOULD produce Shakespear if there was some other influence apart from the mere random tapping of keys that would encourage the works of Shakespear to come out. The analogies are flawed because they take ONE component of natural selection - an inherent randomness in the process - and ignore the other bit... SELECTION. Without selection your analogies fail every time.
Software as information is not physical, has no mass
E=MC^2 last time I checked...
and can be preserved on any number of carriers simultaneously and transmitted at the speed of light. The real you is software, right now carried in a physical body part called brain. That software can be transmitted and stored in many places. How that may be done we still don't know.
Your point? That we don't need the supernatural to explain a single thing about human existence? Doesn't help your case at all.
Examining the circuits and chips in a computer tells you NOTHING about its operation.
Not if you're looking with your naked eyes. If you have the right tools to investigate the chip it becomes somewhat easier.
I run Virtual PC in a Mac. If you were to examine that Mac you could not discover that ability unless the Mac were "alive", that is powered up and have its software loaded and have a functioning I/O system.
I can't know every possible program? No shit, that's mathmatically proven.
In the same way, the real you is SOFTWARE, information, immaterial and as such can just like computer software be loaded into new hardware after your present hardware ceases operation. That is exactly what God tells us will happen after death, at the resurrection. He has a backup of all that you are, your personality and the sum total of all your thoughts.
Your god says nothing of the sort. But your analogy was fun and at least I could agree with it right up until you included the supernatural. You're still asking me to take the fanciful leap that there's some mystical, magical force that's gonna eject my harddrive upon my death and whisk it away to be placed in a super-whizzy new computer that never breaks down. So right up until that point you're dealing with reality. And then suddenly the computer gets up and starts dancing.
Jesus said: "And I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." (Matt 12:36)
I say: Jesus be talking the shizzle,
There is much evidence that any kind of scenario for expaining what exits, especially life, cannot come from anything random.
It took less than one sentence to get an evolutionary fallacy. Sigh...
Every day in life we observe a part of the second law of thermodynamics called entropy, which ONLY ALWAYS increases. The ONLY exception to this is when ENERGY and THOUGHT are acting together against it.
SLOT - what a surprise. More scientific misunderstanding from the ID crowd.
(You might like to know that endothermic reactions manage to decrease entropy with energy but no thought... imagine that! Not only that you'd have to show somehow that thought is some intangeable non-energy based thing - good luck.)
A mess in you house doesn't clean itself up and a wrecked car doesn't repair itself.
Flawed analogy; there is no mechanism for such things to occur by itself.
All random evolution is a theory in the minds of those who do not wish to acknowledge the fact that one day they will have to give an account of their lives to the God who is.
Sigh. Evolution doesn't say things came together randomly - yet more ID nonsense. What it actually talks about is natural SELECTION. Random things include the precise coding after DNA replicates - otherwise known as mutation. Evolution is essentially a mechanism whereby information about an environment is transfered statistically to DNA by reproduction. The outward effect of this is DNA carriers that will eventually become more effective at reproducing in their given environment. The events are random: the selection is not. You may want to learn about statistics to see how this works.
I also love your threat. Very Christian of you. I know you can't comprehend this but your god isn't really real so I'm not really worried about being judged by its arbitary rules. Plus at the time of Darwin people thought science could lead them to your god - it's only when nature started disagreeing that Christians suddenly decided they'd live in ignorance of scientific advancement. Darwin ended up agnostic due to his Theory on Natural Selection. Later Christians have reconsiled his ideas with their faith. No-one who doesn't believe in your god thinks evolution is correct because they don't want to think about damnation.
I'm not about to argue with the universe on its nature.
Nowhere has random evolution ever been OBSERVED to happen, nor has anyone EVER done an experimental demonstration of such evolution.
Sorry wrong. I could show you why but it's beginning to become clear you get your science from AIG so I would first have to re-educate you on some basic concepts. I don't think you'd be willing to do that.
Nobody has ever made a fossil to demonstrate how that is done.
Only someone without the first clue what a fossil is would say such a silly thing.
You are getting older, your body is wearing out and one day it will no longer be inhabitable by you and you will have to leave and stand before God.
Sigh. Your god is a man-made fiction. I'm getting old, sure, but the scientific evidence doesn't show entropy to be the reason.
The Bible says
You think I care why? Do you care what the Koran says?
Just as the first part of this verse is indisputable, so is the second part about judgment.
I can see why you like Dr Greenleaf so much - you like your indisputable axioms don't you? Shame I don't buy them really.
Death will happen to you and you know it, and I am telling you that the second part will also.
Well I'm telling you the second part won't. What will happen when you die is that your body will be consumed by various organisms and your biomass recycled so that your nutrients can re-enter the food chain. With the lack of any persistence device such as a 'soul' haveing any evidence for existence there is no reason to think that your individuality will
Why are emotions and logical understanding mutually incompatible?
:)
However I tend to find that it's more about how educated one is about reasoning rather than what sex one is. Although I can certainly attest to the theory that women simply study harder in order to please whilst men as more lazy.
Emotions can't help you derrive factual things - i.e. they are no good for objective reasoning. They may be useful in the abstract world of social interaction but they're a pretty useless guide for deciding, oh, say, which OS is better. So if women are more likely to make a decision based on emotion and a man more on logic then clearly a woman may choose Windows and a man Linux as their preferred OS.
I call shyte. Justifications for male circumcision are ad hoc for the real reason of culture. It's the done thing so it is done.
You are obviously biased against anything Christian.
Not quite - I'm clearly going to QUESTION anything a Christian has to say regarding the veracity of his own beliefs given he has a vested interest in making them true. There's pleanty of examples of Christians doing this (and other faiths before you think I'm singling your particular one out).
When someone starts out a book on the veracity of the Gospels and declares that his god and his god's son definitively did those things in the book he's supposedly trying to show as valid - well, that sets off my skeptical alarm bells you know?
Dr. Greenleaf is saying is that the eyewitnesses of the gospels are credible and truthful by the tests that are applied in human tribunals
And I'm saying, "what eyewitnesses?"
Modern archeological techniques and finds have also been in harmony with the historical accounts of the Bible.
Yeah, some have. Best to ignore all those that DON'T gel with the Bible eh? (It's a common filter for believers). Although this sounds very much like a Spiderman defence to me (i.e. Spiderman lives in New York, New York exists, therefore Spiderman does). I'm not about to say the Bible is through and through false - but just because some of it happens to reference REAL places and REAL people doesn't mean the entire work is TRUE. Just as because Spiderman lives in New York doesn't mean the webslinger is fighting crime. Also if Spiderman's New York conflicted with evidence we had about New York then I'm afraid the paperback becomes questionable before the physical evidence. Such as it is for your Bible.
Nevertheless it has a single authorship which becomes very evident to those who carefully study these writings.
It's very evident to me that the Gospel writers certainly were not under a single authorship. This is wishful thinking - the Gospels make more sense once you assume these people were simply writing down an oral messaih myth and throwing in stuff they liked and quoting from the OT (albeit sometimes not understanding it, as with the case of the two donkeys in Matthew IIRC). It also helps explain why a supposedly extraordinary fellow has bugger all written about him elsewhere (apart from the aforementioned forgeries you've gone silent on).
It tells us about an eternally, self existent Creator God, dwelling outside our time-space domain, whose existence can neither "proven" nor disproven.
No it doesn't. It talks about a tribal war god who was called upon to smite the enemies of the Israelites - a god who had problems finding Adam in his garden and defeating iron chariots. The Bible says nowt about space-time.
.Just as a juror can believe or disbelieve the evidence presented in court, so you too can believe or not the evidence that God gives of Himself in this book and in the creation.
Ah ha! Creation as evidence - wondered when that would come up. And pray tell, precisely how does one derrive that YOUR god must have constructed the universe from observation? I have a thousand others waiting to claim that title... The Bible? That's the best you've got? It ain't evidence of anything supernatural I'm afraid. What it testifies to is the thoughts and observations of a primitive people living in the Middle East with ambitions of empire they never could achieve. It requires an extreme amount of generosity to make it even coherent, let alone consistent. It's description of the nature which its author supposedly built is lacking. It appears to me to simply be another collection of writings by man that happens to talk about the supernatural. I see no reason whatsoever to single it out as the one 'True' one.
If determining the truth for youself is not worth taking your own time, rather than the boss' then perhaps truth doesn't really matter to you.
Actually I asked if I was going to get anything from this book that wasn't going to be rife with such assumptions. I could see from those fir
Not really a brief outline, nonetheless I will give it a brief look.
Dr. Greenleaf lived from 1783 to 1853
WTF!!!! Haha. Sorry. I thought this might have been slightly more contemporary. Probably explains why I'm having such a hard time reading this thing (it certainly doesn't help that it's been OCRd). Certainly confirms my suspicion of total bias - he's a Christian and makes no bones about it. I particularly like this gem:
The proof that God has revealed himself to man by;special and express communications, and that Christianity constitutes that revelation, is no part of these inquiries.'This has already been shown, in the most satisfactory;manner, by others, who have written expressly upon this:subject.'
Hell, why bother with this crap about making the Gospels into a (incredibly outdated) legal testimony? Just show me the above proof!
It didn't take very long to find a completely questionable assertion thrown in as an axiom to the entire underpinning of his argument.
Can you give me a good reason for continuing to read after the above? I expect to find nothing of value in the following pages and can't really spend all day reading it when I'm supposed to be working.
Gives a new meaning to the phrase "Holy Smoke".
No system devised by man is perfect. If you ARE accused of a crime, you, as an accused have the option to have a Judge decide the outcome. If you feel that he/she is less emotional
It's not about someone being emotional, it's about making judgements about matters of fact based on emotion.
It's the kind of mentality that leads to people being mistaken for pedophiles and killed by vigilantes - as happened recently in London. The emotions surrounding the case cloud any rational judgements. All people are susceptible to this and most people don't even realise (even after such incidents) why one's emotions are not reliable indicators for FACT.
Do read Dr. Greenleaf's treatise, or at least skim through it to review the rules of evidence used in courts. These are the rules that are used to sufficiently learn the truth upon which you may be acquitted or convicted.
I have some understanding of the various levels for the rules of evidence. I fail to see why it should change my opinion on the evidence for the Gospels. Unless Dr. Greenleaf has provided good reason not to view the Gospels as hearsay at best - since none of the supposed authors (of whom we know basically nothing) were witnesses. Or perhaps he'd like to explain the lost Gospel of Thomas? Or any of the other Gospels that didn't make the final cut. Any good reason not to assume that the four that made it did so based on what the Council of Nicea wanted for their religion rather than the factual basis of the Gospels? If you start from the unproven assumption there must have been a god driving them then maybe - but I see no reason to capitualate on that point and I see the early Church for the very human organisation it was. They wanted power, not truth.
If these rules concerning witnesses may be used to possibly determine the life or death of an accused, it seems they ought to be good enough to determine if the witness of the 4 Gospels could be admitted and stand up in your life, with you acting as an impartial juror.
It would seem like that - but if 12 people weighed the evidence and told me the Earth is flat that doesn't change the fact that it is a globe. I would be most interested to see just how skewed Dr Greenleaf has made it - after all it's quite a common tactic to obfuscate the issue, confuse with technicalities and force the uneducated reader to agree with the conclusions they already wanted to hear (a common ID method of attacking evolution with analogies that fail to represent the thing they are attacking). Using law, a VERY complicated and built up system, has to be a great way to obfuscate the major points of contention I have with the story.
So you too, if you do not have an aready closed mind, may approach the witness of the gospel by these rules and then base your decison concerning the truth or falsity thereof ONLY on what YOU actually read, not on what you may have heard from any other source at any time before in your life.
Well disregarding everything else I know about the relgion the Gospels STILL do not stand up on their own. They lack coherency between them. They lack any factual evidence for their claims. The case is poor.
Have you actually EVER read the 4 gospels?
I certainly have.
Whether you have or have not, you ought to read them with the rules of evidence in mind to see whether they are true for you. Read them with the rules of cold logic used in courts, rather that relying your emotions or feelings.
I know logic - very formally as a Computer Scientist. My basic understand of the rules of evidence would say that four stories without a consistent narrative, corroborating evidence, at best hearsay for the events would not stand up particularly well in court.
Did Dr Greenleaf conclude this as well? Perhaps you could just give a brief outline of what he has to say regarding my above objections? I suspect I have a pretty good idea, I would just like to confirm they're illogical and show why before committing time to this any more.
If you are ever accused of a crime, you better hope that the legal system tries to determine the truth of that accusation.
I didn't say it didn't try, I'm just pointing out the rather lamentable fact that it's not a system that produces highly reliable results. Often (as is the case with religion incidentally) jury trials rely on appealing to emotion rather than fact due to the simple reason that the average Joe is unable to grasp more subtle concepts such as logic.
So...
a body of 12 people, and let them decide whether to BELIEVE one side or the other of a case according to what they perceive to be the truth based on what was presented to them in court.
Is only as good as the beliefs of 12 people - and as I'm sure you'd suspect I don't place a hell of a lot of stock in the beliefs of the average man since the average man believes in so much superstitious nonsense (your man god included) with barely any question.
What Dr. Greenleaf has done is to apply the methods of sifting and examining evidence that is used in every American court to the record and witness of the Gospels as they have come down to us.
I'd sure be interested to see how he's handled the Centurion.
You then, the reader acts as the jury and must decide whether the evidence presented (not your own opinion) convinces you of the truth of the Gospels or not. Read his book and the gospels as an impartial juror, with no preconceived ideas about the merits of the case.
I fail to see why I should: I have the source material available. I need not have it mangled by some lawyer. You (Christians) are the ones who oft claim that merely reading the Good News should be enough to inspire a mighty transformation. Why the need to continually refilter this stuff in endless translations, examinations and an overwhelming desire to add additional evidence no matter how flimsy or falsified it is to balster a belief I suspect most realise is inherently irrational? That can be the only people get so excited by supposed miracles - it shouldn't make a difference to them if their god was already as real as another person.
Face it: the source material is dodgy, the additional evidence provided is dodgy, the story itself is weak (if THAT's the best a divine being can do to produce a consistent story with internal logic well...). You might as well try to convince me the Earth is flat (try Isaiah) because your Jesus is as ludicrous to me as that notion is.
On the other hand, millions of people do believe that the accounts in the Bible are true.
If every person on Earth believed it were true then it would still not make it so.
Truth doesn't come from opinion. These things either happened or they didn't - committees don't decide it.
This is known as an appeal to popularity - but then I doubt the billion or so Muslims and Hindus really convince you so why should you convince me?
In the case of Jesus and some of the things He said, there are three possibilities. 1) He was crazy, 2) He deceived, 3) He told the truth.
No, there's a fourth I already pointed out:
4) He was made up.
We have way more ancient written material about Jesus and the early church history than we do of the Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato.
That old fallacy.
Well firstly I don't believe there's anyone running around telling us that we should do X, Y and Z because Aristotle said so. That alone makes it rather less important from my perspective whether or not these people existed or were pseudonyms for other Greeks.
Secondly there isn't actually any more evidence for your guy - four totally biased propaganda peices that can't agree on the narrative and a later Christian forgery (that of the oft brought up Josepheus which you have unsurprisingly used) doesn't make for good evidence.
All you've done is made a good case for discounting a few more people as fictions - not include another one as real.
Even back then, the enemies of Jesus would have dearly loved to demolish the claim of Jesus' followers concerning the resurrection.
Right, but the best you've got is what honest Christian scollars would have to agree is most likely a forgery of Josepheus' work made by early Christians to lend weight to their claims.
Apart from that you can't even CLAIM any contemporary writings by historians. Not much cop for someone who is supposed to have got right up the noses of the Jewish and Roman authourities. Either they didn't consider him that important or he didn't exist as proprosed by the Gospels. (Not a difficult conclusion to make given that Jesus wasn't an uncommon name).
All they would have to do is produce the broken, mutilated body.
Which again assumes the highly questionable and contradictory narrative of your Gospels is historic - if Jesus of Nazarath didn't exist there's no body to produce and no-one to care to produce it.
Dr. Simon Greenleaf, one of the founders of Harvard Law School wrote a lawyerly treatise called; "The Testimony of the Evangelists" Every lawyer in every American law school still studies Greenleaf's voluminous "A treatise on the Law of Evidence". These rules are what every law court of our land still follows. Mr. Greenleaf used these rules to determine if the testimony of the Gospels could stand up in a court of law.
Now you're using an appeal to authourity to try to convince me. All the usuals come out.
So please tell me why I should care that some, almost certainly Christian, law doctor has to say on matters of HISTORY? If you're going to appeal to authourity at least use the right one.
If you are not afraid to have your ideas expressed in your post and other erroneous ones about the veracity of the Gospel accounts as we find them today refuted, as they would be in a court of law,
*Sigh* No, they wouldn't be in a court of law. That's for legal matters, not historical ones. You seem to be labouring under some delusion about how reality works - it is not judged by 12 people picked at random. You also seem to be labouring under some delusions about the effectiveness of your legal system at determining truth by this method.
I just can't believe I'm being told I'm the one with the erroneous ideas about the veracity of the Gospels when these classic fallacies come up.
Cast aside all philosophy and religiosity and ask Jesus in a simple, from the heart prayer if you too, as I have, can come into a personal love relationship with the everlasting God through Him. Jesus has dealt with all your failures and shortcomings so that you are able to have a relationship with a just and perfect God whom you can then address as YOUR Father. As well intentioned as this all is, and aside from the rather ludicrously contorted story that Christianity has become, your Jesus character is highly unlikely to have existed as portrayed in your Bible - not least of which because he simply cannot have performed all the actions he is supposed to have done as portrayed in the Gospels due to their contradictory properties. None of the other religious figures that have come and gone throughout the ages was able or even claimed to conquer the chief enemy of man -- death. So this statement is rather moot - Jesus didn't defeat death either - he didn't exist in the first place. As such the Christian notions of being a great acheivement or worthy sacrafice or anything else become rather meaningless. You're just following some Messianic stories that blended poorly referenced OT prophecies, popular religious concepts from around the region and plagarism without regard for possible consequences when the Paul established Church decided it was going to have the final word on what is to be the final divine scripture. As such you might as well be arguing who the better Star Trek captain is because from my perspective all these characters have exactly the same realness - none.
Interesting? Ignorant perhaps.
The Build engine source has been out for some time, the Duke source less so and the Shadow Warrior source more recently. The JonoF port uses a new render developed by Ken Silverman, the original coder, to render a Build world with polygons rather than rasters. It would seem rather pointless to spend a huge amount of time and effort trying to covert from one engine paradigm to another, especially when they are really quite different. Not to meantion that you can't really have a conversion without the maps and 3DR doesn't like people converting their maps and placing them in other games and has shut down conversions that have done things like this in the past.
You could try automatic converters but I don't think anyone has written one with any degree of competence. Besides there are things you can do in Build that I imagine would be far harder to acheive in Quake 3 - such as dynamically creating sectors out of nowhere and placing them in the map (which is pretty much how the map editor works and allows for such rapid development).
Last time I checked Quake engine games required a lengthy compile process to produce lightmaps and BSP trees and such. In Build you just modify the sector/wall/sprite data structures and that's what your game world will be.
An old engine Build may be but I don't think it's been surpassed in regard to its simplicity of the game world and the absolute power to modify everything in the game world at runtime.
they way i see it C/C++ have EVERYTHING you need to program. The way I see it assembler really has EVERYTHING you need to program. But then people use C rather than assembler for a reason and the same for other languages. The whole point of the high level language is to give the programmer a better abstraction of the problem rather than having to concern the programmer with bits and bytes (not that they shouldn't understand this). Abstracting away the details of a machine is not always a bad thing - you may like thinking about pointers and unsafe typecasts but you'd probably like it less if you had to worry the implications of the possible architectures your code may be compiled for. The Java VM removes this problem for you. That's just one example.