True, but humans then use outside context to figure out the missing/misunderstood words. If the computer could use the 70-80%, combined with a larger context than the current phrase to infer an additional 15% like humans do (pulling numbers out of my hindquarters), that'd be the key.
I look at the subject "Muffin for Jew to Ski here?" and use both my knowledge of Slashdot and of similar-sounding words to infer what the writer is getting at. The knowledge of Slashdot is an important factor in my accuracy in deciphering the subject. Without it, I can only make assumptions about which words are incorrect (almost all of them, in this case). The key is the combination of context from outside of the text with the context of the text itself.
My understanding is that the grammar and language rules help define the textual context, but do nothing to deal with bringing in the larger context of Slashdot memes or other seemingly unrelated topics.
To use another example, I am learning Spanish. My wife and her mother are both native Spanish speakers. There are times where I understand one word between them in ten, if I'm lucky. However, I can usually use that one word -- a name, a place, etc -- to figure out the topic of conversation. Using my knowledge of the topic, I can assume the direction of the conversation, and use that to help fit in more words that I wouldn't otherwise have been able to figure out. Granted, there's a higher error rate than had I been missing a single word in English, but I'm also working from a much smaller known data set. Stuff like tone of voice (is she angry? excited? happy?) and body language also figure into the context.
To be sure, true language recognition in computers is difficult because they have smaller datasets to work from. They don't see body language, generally ignore tone of voice, and have little to no knowledge of outside events from which to draw context. Without those things, high accuracy rates are possible, but they'll never match humans.
The importance of egg cooking is subjective to the tastes of said programmer. Consider, if you would, that the programmer in question may have an aversion to eating in public places, a lack of time and/or funds, or simply prefer cooking his/her own food. In this case, the importance of egg cooking skills would be significantly higher for this individual.
For that portion of geek population who would simply yell upstairs for mom to cook an egg, this particular skill would have an appreciably lower value.
As for the correctness of the statement, I think it may be sufficient to say that the statement is not provably false, and may be assumed to be true for some positive whole-number percentage of the sample. In the interest of geek culinary science, a Slashdot poll may be in order.
Just a tongue-in-cheek reference to (Guido Van Rossum?)'s response to a question in the article. Since it's slashdotted, I can't go back and check.
Basically, one of the questions was about what's an important skill for programmers to know. The response was language parsing typical of a programmer, stating that the ability to cook an egg for breakfast is a really important skill, generally speaking. (ESR has a section of the jargon file that might help explain the joke a bit.)
The upshot is that the question was vague, so the question was technically correct, if totally irrelevant.
That was easily one of the best interviews I've read. The questions weren't overbearing, and the guys responding were generally conscientious in their responses. Some points that really struck me as I read some of the answers:
Communication is extremely valuable. Programming in large projects is a social activity. Good ideas must be adequately expressed, or they'll likely whither on the vine.
A good understanding of math concepts is valuable in that they teach the programmer to think about algorithms logically and coherently, not so much for their direct usage in programming. Dave Thomas even associated a musical background with good programmers.
Open your mind. Be a student of everything, not just technology. Read fiction, study music, be social, be curious about the world in general, and learn as much about it as possible. The best programmers tend to love learning and knowledge for their own sakes.
Good tools allow you to make them better.
Programmer + vague question = eggs for breakfast.
University education *is* valuable, but one shouldn't believe they've learned everything there. Programming is an artform that is refined over time with patience and experience.
Cultivate a sense of "value". Don't waste 90% of your time on the 5% of the work that doesn't really matter.
Develop good "taste" in how you attack problems. This is a bit esoteric, but I think part of what Linus was referring to is what I tend to call "elegance". Don't use a lot of code where a little will do. Don't overcomplicate. Use the right tool for the job. I think the other part was actually being able to recognize this quality in the work of others. Apologies to Linus if I misunderstood.
Don't worry about the Next Big Thing. Keep building fundamentals. When the Big Things come along, they're usually the product of lots of fundamentals put together in a creative way. More often, the future is shaped in small increments that people barely notice.
Before there was "teenager repellent" there was "rodent repellent" (hint: it's the same thing). My church had one, and I could hear it perfectly well. By design, most people couldn't hear it -- even other teens. I knew I wasn't crazy, because there was one other guy, the pastor's son, who could hear it as well. (Neither of us knew the church had one of these installed. It was installed by the caretaker.)
The biggest problem with these high-pitched noises is that they're non-directional. It's *very* difficult to figure out where the noises are coming from, and we took about two hours before we tracked down the source. I have the same problem with certain types of light bulbs as well -- especially at restaurants. My wife can't hear it, so she just assumes it's my ears ringing.
...now that immorality is hurting them. Is this the same Hollywood that has been overtly hostile to people who insist that there is such a thing as right and wrong? Piracy is just one of the many effects that Hollywood's fuzzy morality is having on society, and it happens to be the one that's directly biting them in the ass. I don't feel a bit sorry for them. In the various ways they've attacked traditional values over the years, I can't help but wonder how they didn't have the foresight to expect their current predicament.
As if I said we weren't! (sorry - just couldn't resist!:-P )
I'm no MS apologist. Indeed, I've been a Linux advocate and user for nigh on ten years. I would *love* it if the US government seriously funded Linux development.
Before you call me a hypocrite, please understand that my point was not that the US is not dependent on MS software. Really, I thought it went without saying. However, I was responding to a complaint made by the EU government, and so I address my admonition to them. As an international government who is whining about a problem that could be easily remedied, my suggestion is that the EU use a small fraction of their budget to actually alleviate the situation.
In addition, consider that it actually becomes a matter of (er... "international"?) security for a foreign country to have too much influence in critical infrastructure and economics. The problem is much more urgent there. The EU has a very large interest in developing alternatives to Windows -- much more-so than the US.
I doubt that the shareholders would complain much if the EU proves to be a money pit. If the cost (fines, lawers, etc) is high enough, it wouldn't make sense to be in that market, as the cost is artificially high, and would have real potential to be even higher. That's called "risk", and investors don't like it. There's plenty of money to be made in other markets.
"Delaying the introduction in Europe [...] would put European companies at a competitive disadvantage with every other company around the world who does have access to these new technologies.'"
Awww. Cry, Baby, Cryyyy! Look, whether it was justified or not, the fact remains that they did everything possible to make life difficult for MS. I know some will say that it was a slap on the wrist, others will say that what the EU commission did was unjustified. The fact remains that MS was singled out and (very) publicly sanctioned. I think this is MS's way of poking back, and reminding the EU that they aren't, in fact, required to sell their software in Europe. Maybe now the EU understands that MS can bite back, too.
Second, maybe the EU will recognize the importance of shifting away from MS software, and possibly even offer incentives of some sort. If a single foreign company can put every EU company at a competitive disadvantage, willfully or otherwise, maybe it's time to seriously re-evaluate your dependencies. Linux may be behind in some specific areas, but if the EU were to fund serious development to bring it up to speed, that gap would close in a hurry, and soon those using MS products would be the ones at a "competitive disadvantage" for every checkbox on the scorecard.
So, I repeat: Cry, Baby, Cryyyy! When you're done, get off your asses and fund development of a viable alternative. Solve your own problems, and stop your frikkin whining. It's not like you're strapped for cash on the scale of a moderate corporate IT development project.
Heh - me too. Now that I've had more than an hour to play with it, it really is a little too development for my needs. It's mostly solid, but there are odd (and important) things broken. For instance, Open Office crashes when I try to save a document. Of all things, I figured they'd have the basics working, at least. Ah well, the price to pay for being adventuresome!:) I'll probably spend some time downgrading in the near future, though I'm hopeful that they'll fix the bugs that affect me before I get around to it.
You can upgrade just by changing all occurences of 'dapper' to 'edgy' in/etc/apt/sources.list. 'aptitude update' and 'aptitude dist-upgrade' will get you *most* of the way there.
A word of caution, though. This didn't go 100% smoothly for me. First of all, I had to run the dist-upgrade several times, and go through synaptic's 'mark all upgrades' a couple times as well. I finally got it to install what needed installing, upgrade what needed upgrading, and remove what needed removing. It just took several iterations. The only other issue I've had so far is that my nVidia drivers broke with the new X.org. I just downloaded the newest driver package from nVidia, and it was off to the races.
Now that I've had a little time to poke around, I generally like it. It seems there's an IMAP bug in Evolution, so I'm using Thunderbird for now. I'm sure they'll have that worked out quickly enough. Lots of things seem cleaned up in the admin tools, a bug fix seems to have gone in for my Intel wireless card, things like that.
Overall, I'd say your chances of surviving an upgrade via aptitude are very good if you are the technical type (I assume you are). So far, I like what I see.
I've generally been really happy with nVidia, but now the GLX extension reliably crashes X.org. I have to either disable it or use 'blank screensaver', because my screensaver kills my session every time I leave my computer for a few minutes. It's a newish card (I forget the model right now, but it's got 256MB, if that helps) in a laptop, so maybe that's the cause. I dunno.
Otherwise, it works great. Twinview, digital vibrance, CRT detection so it does the right thing in docked/undocked situations, etc. Just the GLX issue.
You know, you bring up a good point with this flash stick. Check out the numbers:
Memory Size 64GB Write Speed 1 MB/s
If these things are gonna be larger and larger, they're really gonna have to work on the speed. The stick you point out would need to be partitioned and used in an LVM-like fashion (add partitions as you need space), simply because formatting it would take almost 18 hours.
Granted -- after initial formatting, you wouldn't need to write 64GB all at once to the stick, but even for "smaller" items (DVD-quality movies, large quantities of music, etc), you're still talking a little over an hour.
Capacity is wonderful -- if it's actually practical to use.
True. This is one basic safeguard against a specific class of fraud. The idea of human-and-machine-readable paper ballots makes the hand-recount possible as well - solving/minimizing the musical-votes class of fraud.
I think the idea is simple, intuitive fail-safes to double-check the high-tech primary method. Effectively, voters vote twice: once the new, fast way, once the old slow way (via paper receipts), and they need to match or have a *very* good explanation at the end of the night. The voter should, of course, be tasked with making sure that the receipt matches their vote *before* leaving the voting area.
Meh -- it's not abnormal for a few people in an organization to have special software that IT needs to support. E.g. developers have lots of software that salespersons don't have, and vice-versa.
Presumably, there aren't scores of (nearly-)blind people working for the MA government, so the proportion of those with MS-Office + plugin should be really low. The trick is that you should have a doctor-verified vision disability to warrant the most expensive product - not just a don't-wanna-learn disability.
"Insightful", indeed. There's very little insight to be had in your post, I'm afraid. Be careful focusing on six words and making a generalization. To ancient folks, and to some degree modern ones, which god you identify with determines which set of rules you follow.
In many cases, "religious law" seems to have been "engineered" in a way. In other words, the reason for the law was not really religious in nature, it was pragmatic.
Examples in health:
Don't eat food XYZ. Why? Because God said so. In reality, they likely noticed that people who ate XYZ wound up getting sick or dieing of food poisoning more often. In reality, it was probably due to bacteria proliferating in certain types of food more than others. For them, it was wrath of their god. The result? Dietary laws.
Circumcision has long been protested as "pointless mutilation", which it may well be. However, there's strong evidence that circumcision may save your life if you have sex with an HIV-positive person. I think the figure I heard was that you'd have 60% better chances if circumcised, due to a lower white blood cell count at the tip of your penis (white blood cells which are directly infected by HIV). Someone will correct me, I'm sure. Did ancient people have *anecdotal* evidence that suggested circumcision would prevent certain diseases? I don't know, but for such a large percentage, it seems plausible. They didn't have microscopes, but they weren't blind or stupid. They were simply misidentifying the causes of some very real observations.
Apart from health, sociology was a big target (in fact, the stated target) of religious law. How do people treat each other? What rules define the interactions of people in a society? How do we attempt to avoid a "welfare class", "bankruptcy", a certain few owning most of the property, etc? (For just one example, think "Year of Jubilee" and imagine its economic impact).
All I'm saying is that many of the religious laws were anything but. They were laws that were a response to issues of the day. Just like today, there were lots of pointless and stupid ones -- some probably downright harmful. How do you get people to obey the laws? Threaten death, jail, etc? Sure, and they did. What's a more pleasant way to do it? Tell them their god said so. That way you don't look like the bad guy for creating rules, and, what's more, people don't think they can get away with unseen crime when an omniscient god is the judge, jury, and executioner.
So this is where people argue that "that was then, and this is now". Wrong. Human nature doesn't really change much over time. People are still basically greedy, hateful, lustful, kind, loving, and generous. They always have been, and always will be. The essence of religious law is the most time-tested way of dealing with the way we've been since we've been human. Do situations change? Would Moses have envisioned the internet and motor vehicles? No, of couse not. But he would have known what people would act like on the internet, and how they would drive. See? The *things* don't change the *people*. They just change the *object* of the desire, or the *cause* of the murdurous rage.
Insisting on monotheism was, in a way, insisting that people follow a uniform code of conduct. They didn't want their carefully constructed legal system to be polluted by outside influences, which would generally prove destructive to Jewish society.
On a more theological note, you quote the "you shall have no other gods". The actual passage is "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me." (Ten Commandments)
Jewish tradition never said that there were no other "godlike" entities in the spiritual world. They just said that you shouldn't worship them in a higher precedence than the I AM. In fact, the Bible is chock full of stories about angels, demons, spirits, and precognition,
I thought the same thing. I didn't know he'd had a tumor, but when the summary described him as "very thin, almost gaunt", illness is the first thing I thought of. So the guy may be sick, and we're worried about "lackluster" performance at a keynote address.
No kidding. I went to school at University Park. Trying to find anything techie over $7/hour was a real challenge. I'd imagine that's due to the fact that employers have their pick of the PHD students at rock bottom prices while they're just trying to survive grad school. It's also a small business type of place. There are some major companies around, but not many.
Beautiful, safe town, though. If I didn't have to earn a living, I'd consider moving there again. I liked it a lot when I was in school, and $7/hour was pretty fine for pocket money.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but humans then use outside context to figure out the missing/misunderstood words. If the computer could use the 70-80%, combined with a larger context than the current phrase to infer an additional 15% like humans do (pulling numbers out of my hindquarters), that'd be the key.
I look at the subject "Muffin for Jew to Ski here?" and use both my knowledge of Slashdot and of similar-sounding words to infer what the writer is getting at. The knowledge of Slashdot is an important factor in my accuracy in deciphering the subject. Without it, I can only make assumptions about which words are incorrect (almost all of them, in this case). The key is the combination of context from outside of the text with the context of the text itself.
My understanding is that the grammar and language rules help define the textual context, but do nothing to deal with bringing in the larger context of Slashdot memes or other seemingly unrelated topics.
To use another example, I am learning Spanish. My wife and her mother are both native Spanish speakers. There are times where I understand one word between them in ten, if I'm lucky. However, I can usually use that one word -- a name, a place, etc -- to figure out the topic of conversation. Using my knowledge of the topic, I can assume the direction of the conversation, and use that to help fit in more words that I wouldn't otherwise have been able to figure out. Granted, there's a higher error rate than had I been missing a single word in English, but I'm also working from a much smaller known data set. Stuff like tone of voice (is she angry? excited? happy?) and body language also figure into the context.
To be sure, true language recognition in computers is difficult because they have smaller datasets to work from. They don't see body language, generally ignore tone of voice, and have little to no knowledge of outside events from which to draw context. Without those things, high accuracy rates are possible, but they'll never match humans.
The importance of egg cooking is subjective to the tastes of said programmer. Consider, if you would, that the programmer in question may have an aversion to eating in public places, a lack of time and/or funds, or simply prefer cooking his/her own food. In this case, the importance of egg cooking skills would be significantly higher for this individual.
For that portion of geek population who would simply yell upstairs for mom to cook an egg, this particular skill would have an appreciably lower value.
As for the correctness of the statement, I think it may be sufficient to say that the statement is not provably false, and may be assumed to be true for some positive whole-number percentage of the sample. In the interest of geek culinary science, a Slashdot poll may be in order.
Just a tongue-in-cheek reference to (Guido Van Rossum?)'s response to a question in the article. Since it's slashdotted, I can't go back and check.
Basically, one of the questions was about what's an important skill for programmers to know. The response was language parsing typical of a programmer, stating that the ability to cook an egg for breakfast is a really important skill, generally speaking. (ESR has a section of the jargon file that might help explain the joke a bit.)
The upshot is that the question was vague, so the question was technically correct, if totally irrelevant.
Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.
Before there was "teenager repellent" there was "rodent repellent" (hint: it's the same thing). My church had one, and I could hear it perfectly well. By design, most people couldn't hear it -- even other teens. I knew I wasn't crazy, because there was one other guy, the pastor's son, who could hear it as well. (Neither of us knew the church had one of these installed. It was installed by the caretaker.)
:-)
The biggest problem with these high-pitched noises is that they're non-directional. It's *very* difficult to figure out where the noises are coming from, and we took about two hours before we tracked down the source. I have the same problem with certain types of light bulbs as well -- especially at restaurants. My wife can't hear it, so she just assumes it's my ears ringing.
Good hearing: blessing or curse?
...now that immorality is hurting them. Is this the same Hollywood that has been overtly hostile to people who insist that there is such a thing as right and wrong? Piracy is just one of the many effects that Hollywood's fuzzy morality is having on society, and it happens to be the one that's directly biting them in the ass. I don't feel a bit sorry for them. In the various ways they've attacked traditional values over the years, I can't help but wonder how they didn't have the foresight to expect their current predicament.
-Walrus
Didn't he die shortly after the filming?
Is NBC sociopathic as well?
Yes.
As if I said we weren't! (sorry - just couldn't resist! :-P )
I'm no MS apologist. Indeed, I've been a Linux advocate and user for nigh on ten years. I would *love* it if the US government seriously funded Linux development.
Before you call me a hypocrite, please understand that my point was not that the US is not dependent on MS software. Really, I thought it went without saying. However, I was responding to a complaint made by the EU government, and so I address my admonition to them. As an international government who is whining about a problem that could be easily remedied, my suggestion is that the EU use a small fraction of their budget to actually alleviate the situation.
In addition, consider that it actually becomes a matter of (er... "international"?) security for a foreign country to have too much influence in critical infrastructure and economics. The problem is much more urgent there. The EU has a very large interest in developing alternatives to Windows -- much more-so than the US.
I doubt that the shareholders would complain much if the EU proves to be a money pit. If the cost (fines, lawers, etc) is high enough, it wouldn't make sense to be in that market, as the cost is artificially high, and would have real potential to be even higher. That's called "risk", and investors don't like it. There's plenty of money to be made in other markets.
First:
/American
"Delaying the introduction in Europe [...] would put European companies at a competitive disadvantage with every other company around the world who does have access to these new technologies.'"
Awww. Cry, Baby, Cryyyy! Look, whether it was justified or not, the fact remains that they did everything possible to make life difficult for MS. I know some will say that it was a slap on the wrist, others will say that what the EU commission did was unjustified. The fact remains that MS was singled out and (very) publicly sanctioned. I think this is MS's way of poking back, and reminding the EU that they aren't, in fact, required to sell their software in Europe. Maybe now the EU understands that MS can bite back, too.
Second, maybe the EU will recognize the importance of shifting away from MS software, and possibly even offer incentives of some sort. If a single foreign company can put every EU company at a competitive disadvantage, willfully or otherwise, maybe it's time to seriously re-evaluate your dependencies. Linux may be behind in some specific areas, but if the EU were to fund serious development to bring it up to speed, that gap would close in a hurry, and soon those using MS products would be the ones at a "competitive disadvantage" for every checkbox on the scorecard.
So, I repeat: Cry, Baby, Cryyyy! When you're done, get off your asses and fund development of a viable alternative. Solve your own problems, and stop your frikkin whining. It's not like you're strapped for cash on the scale of a moderate corporate IT development project.
Heh - me too. Now that I've had more than an hour to play with it, it really is a little too development for my needs. It's mostly solid, but there are odd (and important) things broken. For instance, Open Office crashes when I try to save a document. Of all things, I figured they'd have the basics working, at least. Ah well, the price to pay for being adventuresome! :) I'll probably spend some time downgrading in the near future, though I'm hopeful that they'll fix the bugs that affect me before I get around to it.
Cheers!
You can upgrade just by changing all occurences of 'dapper' to 'edgy' in /etc/apt/sources.list. 'aptitude update' and 'aptitude dist-upgrade' will get you *most* of the way there.
A word of caution, though. This didn't go 100% smoothly for me. First of all, I had to run the dist-upgrade several times, and go through synaptic's 'mark all upgrades' a couple times as well. I finally got it to install what needed installing, upgrade what needed upgrading, and remove what needed removing. It just took several iterations. The only other issue I've had so far is that my nVidia drivers broke with the new X.org. I just downloaded the newest driver package from nVidia, and it was off to the races.
Now that I've had a little time to poke around, I generally like it. It seems there's an IMAP bug in Evolution, so I'm using Thunderbird for now. I'm sure they'll have that worked out quickly enough. Lots of things seem cleaned up in the admin tools, a bug fix seems to have gone in for my Intel wireless card, things like that.
Overall, I'd say your chances of surviving an upgrade via aptitude are very good if you are the technical type (I assume you are). So far, I like what I see.
I've generally been really happy with nVidia, but now the GLX extension reliably crashes X.org. I have to either disable it or use 'blank screensaver', because my screensaver kills my session every time I leave my computer for a few minutes. It's a newish card (I forget the model right now, but it's got 256MB, if that helps) in a laptop, so maybe that's the cause. I dunno.
Otherwise, it works great. Twinview, digital vibrance, CRT detection so it does the right thing in docked/undocked situations, etc. Just the GLX issue.
we'll live for a very long time.
Sure, if we don't kill each other first.
You know, you bring up a good point with this flash stick. Check out the numbers:
Memory Size 64GB
Write Speed 1 MB/s
If these things are gonna be larger and larger, they're really gonna have to work on the speed. The stick you point out would need to be partitioned and used in an LVM-like fashion (add partitions as you need space), simply because formatting it would take almost 18 hours.
Granted -- after initial formatting, you wouldn't need to write 64GB all at once to the stick, but even for "smaller" items (DVD-quality movies, large quantities of music, etc), you're still talking a little over an hour.
Capacity is wonderful -- if it's actually practical to use.
True. This is one basic safeguard against a specific class of fraud. The idea of human-and-machine-readable paper ballots makes the hand-recount possible as well - solving/minimizing the musical-votes class of fraud.
I think the idea is simple, intuitive fail-safes to double-check the high-tech primary method. Effectively, voters vote twice: once the new, fast way, once the old slow way (via paper receipts), and they need to match or have a *very* good explanation at the end of the night. The voter should, of course, be tasked with making sure that the receipt matches their vote *before* leaving the voting area.
Meh -- it's not abnormal for a few people in an organization to have special software that IT needs to support. E.g. developers have lots of software that salespersons don't have, and vice-versa.
Presumably, there aren't scores of (nearly-)blind people working for the MA government, so the proportion of those with MS-Office + plugin should be really low. The trick is that you should have a doctor-verified vision disability to warrant the most expensive product - not just a don't-wanna-learn disability.
"Insightful", indeed. There's very little insight to be had in your post, I'm afraid. Be careful focusing on six words and making a generalization. To ancient folks, and to some degree modern ones, which god you identify with determines which set of rules you follow.
In many cases, "religious law" seems to have been "engineered" in a way. In other words, the reason for the law was not really religious in nature, it was pragmatic.
Examples in health:
Don't eat food XYZ. Why? Because God said so. In reality, they likely noticed that people who ate XYZ wound up getting sick or dieing of food poisoning more often. In reality, it was probably due to bacteria proliferating in certain types of food more than others. For them, it was wrath of their god. The result? Dietary laws.
Circumcision has long been protested as "pointless mutilation", which it may well be. However, there's strong evidence that circumcision may save your life if you have sex with an HIV-positive person. I think the figure I heard was that you'd have 60% better chances if circumcised, due to a lower white blood cell count at the tip of your penis (white blood cells which are directly infected by HIV). Someone will correct me, I'm sure. Did ancient people have *anecdotal* evidence that suggested circumcision would prevent certain diseases? I don't know, but for such a large percentage, it seems plausible. They didn't have microscopes, but they weren't blind or stupid. They were simply misidentifying the causes of some very real observations.
Apart from health, sociology was a big target (in fact, the stated target) of religious law. How do people treat each other? What rules define the interactions of people in a society? How do we attempt to avoid a "welfare class", "bankruptcy", a certain few owning most of the property, etc? (For just one example, think "Year of Jubilee" and imagine its economic impact).
All I'm saying is that many of the religious laws were anything but. They were laws that were a response to issues of the day. Just like today, there were lots of pointless and stupid ones -- some probably downright harmful. How do you get people to obey the laws? Threaten death, jail, etc? Sure, and they did. What's a more pleasant way to do it? Tell them their god said so. That way you don't look like the bad guy for creating rules, and, what's more, people don't think they can get away with unseen crime when an omniscient god is the judge, jury, and executioner.
So this is where people argue that "that was then, and this is now". Wrong. Human nature doesn't really change much over time. People are still basically greedy, hateful, lustful, kind, loving, and generous. They always have been, and always will be. The essence of religious law is the most time-tested way of dealing with the way we've been since we've been human. Do situations change? Would Moses have envisioned the internet and motor vehicles? No, of couse not. But he would have known what people would act like on the internet, and how they would drive. See? The *things* don't change the *people*. They just change the *object* of the desire, or the *cause* of the murdurous rage.
Insisting on monotheism was, in a way, insisting that people follow a uniform code of conduct. They didn't want their carefully constructed legal system to be polluted by outside influences, which would generally prove destructive to Jewish society.
On a more theological note, you quote the "you shall have no other gods". The actual passage is "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me." (Ten Commandments)
Jewish tradition never said that there were no other "godlike" entities in the spiritual world. They just said that you shouldn't worship them in a higher precedence than the I AM. In fact, the Bible is chock full of stories about angels, demons, spirits, and precognition,
I thought the same thing. I didn't know he'd had a tumor, but when the summary described him as "very thin, almost gaunt", illness is the first thing I thought of. So the guy may be sick, and we're worried about "lackluster" performance at a keynote address.
Insensitive clods. Get well, Steve.
...that there's a popular restaurant there.
No kidding. I went to school at University Park. Trying to find anything techie over $7/hour was a real challenge. I'd imagine that's due to the fact that employers have their pick of the PHD students at rock bottom prices while they're just trying to survive grad school. It's also a small business type of place. There are some major companies around, but not many.
Beautiful, safe town, though. If I didn't have to earn a living, I'd consider moving there again. I liked it a lot when I was in school, and $7/hour was pretty fine for pocket money.
Looks like September may finally end. Wake up, Green Day.
Dammit! I was even trying to be extra careful with that post. Good catch. :-)