I think that the line of where mythology ends in the Bible is probably a point of discussion as it's not entirely clear to me, and could probably use insight from someone better educated on this topic. I would hazard to say that this is not divided into fact and fiction, as it seems that the authors of the biblical texts did not/could not have such a world view. Literature, its role within a society, their conceptions of truth and meaning, all functioned very differently.
I would personally assume that the Adam and Eve story is also mythology for reasons similar to what you mention: nothing about the story is actually asking me to take it literally, and it doesn't seem to match our best historical records. So yeah, a literalist hermeneutic has all sorts of problems, and not just in Genesis. This is why most branches of Christianity, save the pronounced post-pietist and conservative Anabaptist movements, do not maintain this hermeneutical approach.
As C. S. Lewis famously stated, and I paraphrase, "Christianity is a myth that is true." To equate myth with fiction due to a binary view on the role of language as conveying either truths or errors seems to be a lazy application of reason. This is where fundamentalists thrive; that is indeed their worldview. It should be rejected by all persons because it is not very unintelligent. By that I mean not well equipped for understanding the world around us.
Oh sorry, I forgot to respond to your actual question: "How would you reconcile that with your own belief that evolution is part of God's creation, as it seems to be?" It's a really good question. However, if you don't believe that Adam and Eve were real persons (I really think it to be highly unlikely given the information we have about human evolution, and given that the story is not uncommon in ancient literature in various forms), then you don't have a causal conflict. You may have interesting theological questions about the nature of sin and death: does death need sin to precede it, to cause it in a sequential manner? or is it that death and sin are aspects of the same thing?
People who say that evolution cannot be true due to perceived conflicts with religious texts are really just protecting their hermeneutic, I think. Their hermeneutic is tied to their view of how God relates to people in general, so this is a really hard thing for people to change since it is equivalent to changing your entire epistemology on the whole.
I am not a theologian, though. I'm just a programmer who likes to think about these things and reads as much as possible. I chose to become a Christian later in life, and identify myself as such, but I don't presently attend church. Believe it or not, once you get past the Fox News version of religious life, there is an incredible intellectual history that awaits even the casual person; that is ultimately what drew me to Christianity.
Most of us who are religious have known that Evolution and belief in God are not exclusive. It's just that mainstream culture does not find us interesting, and so we do not get put on TV, nor do we get much time in [mostly evangelical] churches. This is really unfortunate, to make an understatement.
For the Christian Scientist, all theories of the "natural" world as identified by the set of sciences that interest us are a subset of a larger, engaging reality. For the Christian layperson, having a theory on the working of one mechanism or another, buttressed by direct observation, if not by yourself then at least by others who have established themselves as trustworthy, should be convincing enough for most material at hand. To put this on topic: "evolution" contains robust models and should be seen as both able to provide useful explanations for our own natural history as well as provide insight into our future. And we can safely stop short of the drama right there.
Part of what has gone wrong in the highlighted subculture is that people who are not qualified will sometimes speak authoritatively on topics and end up with moronic conclusions. Sometimes this is how I feel when I read slashdot comments from naturalists that really feel that there is a conflict of interests between religion and science; and it is exactly what grates on me when I hear religious people espouse the same. Both persons will go away from what they fear and toward what they trust, and this is a bad process in general when it comes to advancing knowledge, no matter who does it.
And let me point out the great irony of culturally conservative Christianity: an in-depth attention to the Bible, particularly the Genesis creation myth will reveal that it is *nothing* about actual physical "creation". One thing that conservative theologians like to claim is understanding the historical and cultural significance of the Bible (this is a good thing). In my opinion, it is jettisoned frequently on this single topic for the purpose of funding a culture war.
Briefly, let me summarize that it is common practice among ancient near eastern cultures to take the dominant mythology, particularly the creation myth, and to retell it from the perspective of the current Monarch who uses this retelling to establish their role in the world, specifically their fitness for rule as it is often retold to highlight the character traits this Monarch possesses. In the Genesis creation account, what we see happening is a retelling of the dominant Sumerian/Akkadian creation myths (check out the Enuma Elis cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enuma_Elish for an example) from the perspective of the God of Israel: the major changes are a shift away from chaos and randomness toward order and predictability. The Israelites, safely said, were concerned by things such as established, powerful people groups in the same region, and basic things like sustaining a crop or herd of livestock; living through a winter and avoiding things like being enslaved again were definitely on the mind.
What the Genesis creation myth does say is basically this, if I can grossly oversimplify in a paraphrase: "The God who has lead you out of Egypt is greater than the gods and the people whom you face next; where the world is random and unpredictable, this God establishes order and sustains the land; have no fear."
And *that* is what a conservative pastor should be telling their congregations about creation and the meaning of the stories in Genesis.
Making this conflict with "science" is obviously left as an exercise from an aggressive or intentionally ignorant mind. Or maybe both:(
I agree. There is a healthy Darwinian struggle here toward which financial savings factor.
I work for a private graduate school of about one thousand students. We are not exceedingly wealthy. That is to say that finances are a big deal around here. Over time, we found ourselves continually in the position of "We have the skill and talent to do this, but we cannot afford it."
Over time, through the influence of myself and others, along with judicious hiring practices, we now have 50% of the machines in our server room running Debian. It is used for database servers running PostgreSQL (to which we also successfully moved some legacy Informix data stores), to our web servers running Apache/PHP5, to various networking devices (VLANs get complex with supporting some student housing, internet cafes, open wireless, library access, student lab, classrooms and administration), to proxy servers, and to miscellany.
So many of these projects were implementations that we sketched, scoped, vendor-checked, and found that we are saving tens of thousands a year (which is a lot to us). Open Source solutions closed the gap between "can do" and "can't do" in many situations.
Additionally, there is a lot of positive energy among our technologists regarding Open Source software. Not everyone wants to be a vendor extension. This team is engaged and optimistic about many complex challenges. This has been a boon for our productivity since our project lists keep growing.
I used to work in a larger company (a global HR firm of 12,000 employees at the time) doing revenue and HR forecasting software development, as well as managing projects and nearly 20 developers. I keep in touch with them and I see my old coworkers propping up silent Linux clusters that just work and work and work. I mention this, because I can empirically verify that the gains of Open Source scale well in both directions organizationally.
From Augustine to Aquinas to Descartes to C.S.Lewis, this has been a valid Christian question. In Lewis' terms, the question of Christ was phrased in aliteration as the question "Was Jesus a Liar, Lord, or Lunatic?"
It's a great question not because of the open-endedness of it, but because it gets to the nature of God, revelation, and the human condition. These are all central concerns for Christians and should be embraced by them.
We just use the concept of God whenever we reach personal limits.
Some people do, some people do not. The generalization doesn't hold.
God is generally portrayed as a "coping mechanism" by atheists, within my personal experience (others may differ). Putting aside religious people trying to sell something, most of the rest of us deal with the reality that Life with God is more complex and often more difficult than Life without God. There is no "coping" for me.
There's a strain of Christian thought that through history has emphasized a distinction between Christianity and Religion, per se. Of course, we don't hear this emphasized by the religious Christian groups today as it has generally been championed by those who have resisted the status quo (Of more recent note, cf. Karl Barth and other Neo-orthodox who rallied against old Christian Liberalism that clung to the state and endorsed pretty much anything that came from it, including horrid old doctrines like Eugenics; or cf. the whole Liberation Theology movement in present day Latin America and elsewhere).
It's so ironic that theological conservatives are today the ones who are quickly willing to side with big government and do things like try to legislate rules on marriage to push their own moral world view on others. The earliest Christians, renowned for their anti-establishment conservativism (no Ceasar worship?! Gasp!!) were pacifists in the truest sense.....pre-Constantine, as you noted.
When the early Christians had a problem with abortion (contemporary forms of the practice), they didn't kill people for it, they waited at the dumps and adopted what children they could....Now that is pro-Life!
And now, I sit in Sunday School, and listen to people who honestly believe that if Jesus were here today, he would be writing his senators and politicking on trendy moral issues. It burns me the hell up to have Jesus rendered so trite and tied entirely to local drama. Have they ever even read the damn book they talk about so much?
So, instead of just complaining and throwing in the towel, I now teach Sunday School, and I teach about Jesus and use his words which sound oddly out of place in my Baptist church. It gets me in trouble, and some days I really really want to quit, but also on rare occassions, it turns on lights and people begin to see that there is a difference between Christianity (following Christ) and Religion (the polical, moral, and pop psychology package) and maybe the world is a little better place.
What else would a Geek with a degree in theology do? There's an itch; it needs to be scratched.
Seriously, you'd make a good one. Plus I hear they're recruiting right now. Particularly they like people who lack hermeneutical skills, are simplistic and are willing to exaggerate or play with "truth" in a way that suits their agenda.
Another way of looking at it is perhaps to see the CTO as involved with corporate profit centers and the CIO as involved with corporate cost centers. I'm in a small company where I chose to become CTO instead of CIO simply because we're aiming to advance new technology and sell it as products and services, however I'll be general head of technology and could easily have chosen either title. So, in that sense, it really is somewhat arbitrary.
Good question, though! I'm glad to see this kind of a question asked on Slashdot.
I went down for a bit about two months ago. I had just gotten a DSL connection and had installed Red Hat 6.2. While I was working on my firewall, I ran an errand for my wife (note to self: bring down interface when no firewall is present). I came back from the errand, finished the firewall, updated my software (oh my! I think I need this WuFTP update!), built my md5 database and was good to go.
I started getting a DoS on myself as I noticed that I could hardly get *anywhere*. So much so that I kept dropping off my ISP's network (of course I was suspicious of my new ISP). When I checked the logs, it was clear that I was in the process of "attacking" other people. Only, here's the irony, my firewall was working well enough that I (being anal, as I am) was not actually succeeding in doing so (all the packets were being denied, and my logs were flooding). A look at my process table showed "t0rn" taking the bulk of my CPU power and basically just spitting and sputtering, not being able to do much more than be a pain in my butt. Still, I had to rebuild my machine since I determined that/bin/ls had been ovewritten and I had no idea what else they had done.
I would like to note that OpenBSD was installed later that evening. Funny how your experiences influence your platform decisions, eh?:-)
How can you take a nation seriously that provides college scholarships for people whose only talent is throwing a ball whilst wearing enough padding to keep them safe in the event of a car crash?
You can if you realize that the nation is large enough to support it and those same colleges turn out individuals capable of producing enormous amounts of capital. It's not really that hard to take the US Universities seriously. Although one-dimensional criticisms like yours can still make a point, I guess. And I would tend to agree: I think it's ridiculous that some people have a better chance at higher "education" than others simply because they're good at moving small balls around a pre-defined area in pre-defined methods.
Honestly, athletics is hardly the greatest irony in US universities. If anything, it's proliferation is a sign of the success of an economy strong enough to sustain such an industry within it's own educational circles....an economy built by the products of those same universities.
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As we can see, we are all being overwhelmed by religious zealots here. Truly, truly overwhelmed.
The best part of your post is that you voiced a logic that is owned by religious zealots everywhere. If only they'd realize that they are at risk of distributing their logic to the acceptance of Nazism.
People who would rather support a UNIX-like environment in their company as opposed to a Windows environment, that's who.
You're ability to work your own way wouldn't be hampered by this at all. Certainly not any more than it is now. You would still be able to have an Uber-cool Enlightenment desktop at home, you'd just have another standard desktop at work with good GUI *and* a stable, cost-efficient platform.
Be certain: We won't get Linux/UNIX/etc. in the door at a corporate desktop level en masse if there's no standard interface.
Seriously, how can we not win? I can imagine sinister behavior from anyone, but I hardly think a standard interface could really do *any* damage to our current situation.
But your point is good: the diversity of work should be a formative part of how we think about and implement user interfaces. Unfortunately, what do you do with the 95% of people who know *squat* about anything, whose work is relatively non-creative and task-oriented, and who need something that behaves predictably across applications?....give them a "standard" interface that is relatively intuitive and consistent. Windows actually does well here for such people, and the aim of the Gnome Foundation is appropriate and well-suited for that user penetration.
Hey, we're a community, right? And aren't community members supposed to help each other out in times of need?
Indeed.
This will be a good time to show others how a community operates. Let's all please take this situation seriously and set new precedents of community support and development. The trick will be to somehow not inflate the awkward egos of the little weaners who brought down the site while at the same time demonstrating that perhaps being a script kiddie isn't the safest, anonymous thing it appears to be and that the broader community is stronger than this.
My experience is that artists tend to prefer Macs because the technology does not get in the way of the creative process. Whereas with developers, getting involved with the technology is the objective.
Point well taken.
Though network administrators are never seen as arrogant, right?:)
And not to mention the very real psychological hurdle of Technologists who simply do not take Macs seriously.
After years of marketing itself as an OS just fine for idiots, didn't we all internally say "ok, fine, you retards" and mentally write them off? After years of retreating into niche markets populated by arrogant graphic artists, et al. who had almost no real technical know-how, didn't we say "whatever!" internally and let them piss and moan on their own time?
And now, after their lame attempts to associate themselves Open Source software and an Ad campaign to "think different" in really only *ONE WAY*..... how on earth could any of us take the weak sci-fi future painted in the article above even moderately seriously.
Apple-- you had plenty of chances to get it right. Historically, we would have been much worse off if we were living in an Apple-dominated world than a Microsoft-dominated one. And oh, I could go on....
That (or should I say "thet"?) has to be the most mis-spelled word on this web site. I have seen the word "than" spelled as "then" repeatedly here. It really does make the site hard to take seriously. I introduce it to outsiders to demonstrate a functioning sub-subculture, and they think it's a juvenile, even though you can find cool links occassionally.
No, no, no- you're quite wrong. Just step through the logic:
1) College areas have reduced sales 2) Non-college areas have increased sales 3) Napster detracts from sales 4) Therefore, Napster detracts from sales.
One of the most important marks of a free society is Right to Revolution, both on a small and large scale. In parallel, one of the most significant signs of a healthy society is the existence of public dissent and certain amounts of thoughtful anarchy on part of the citizenry.
With all the things we've chosen to learn in the course of time, how can making information, knowledge, opinion and debate less freely available be considered the proper evolution of an "advanced" society?
Why are we the only ones who care? (as if I didn't know the answer: $$)
I think the dominant mistake being made by those who want to push filtering software on the populous is believing that lack of encounters with "bad" stuff will helps people in the long run. The thing I most worry that people are missing is something my mom mentioned to me once: "you don't raise children, you raise adults". That means that naive children who don't end up learning to navigate the Internet without wasting their time in front of any worthless stuff out there will have lost something that's important in every other area of life: avoiding worthless stuff and finding good stuff (since you'll encounter a lot of both in life).
Making cigarettes illegal did very little for consumption: there's always a way to get something you want, even though store clerks are supposed to not sell them. Whether or not you think that filters on web access will be good for children (or whoever), you're still just addressing an easy problem while not having much to say about the root problem: let's raise kids who make good decisions, not create a world in which we hope they don't have room to make bad decisions, and somehow call that a victory.
Whatever.
Let's try not to go on a Jihad over this, though. It already suffers from being over-politicized, and that warps people's ability to interact with it. In that case, you end up with winners and losers of a fight and not actually with anyone enlightened as a result.
I echo the sentiments of those who are trying to point out the fact that Free Will and Determinism are mutually exclusive. They are not. "Bi-causal Determinism" is a phrase that I've heard to describe the fact that the two are simultaneous and really the same thing. Free will is as easy to identify as the casuality of making arbitrary decisions. Determinism is as easy to identify as the knowing the Universe to be a highly complex machine governed by laws of its own: science banks on these being knowable and at least somewhat predictable.
Describing the mechanical processing of the human brain, or calling on the holy name of a yet-to-be-formulated Grand Unified Theory does not entail a complete explanation. I'm glad some one here pointed out that Existentialism has been dealing with this, and that's been since the mid-19th century with this century's emphasis crossing more heavily with the issues of science, so this is hardly new stuff.
For those interested in the issues around Science, God, Metaphysics (in the sense of philosophy), I heartily recommend Wolfhart Pannenberg's works. His Metaphysics and the Idea of God deals heavily with the symbiotic relationship between theology and metaphysics without equating them. His Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith is a culmination of decades of work with theologians and scientists working together. His Theology and the Philosophy of Science is not currently in print, but is one of the best books I have ever read on this topic. Being a few years old, it's missing the deep crises presently occurring the in the philosophy of science....if you don't believe that, you're not reading enough.
Pannenberg is particularly enjoyable to those with a background in philosophy or theology. He is not easy reading by any stretch of the imagination. Europeans will be more familiar with him, while he may be somewhat undiscovered to many American readers. He's known for repackaging German Idealism toward a synthetic worldview: Science and God cannot conflict, neither can they continue to exist completely independent of each other. His sense of religion is rational and not a mystical cop-out when dealing with explanations.
It's far too easy for someone who's interested/knowledgeable in science and had some sort of religious experience/exposure to feel that they can push these ideas together well. Let's be dutiful to read works like the one mentioned in this article or like the one's that I mentioned,...or... let's keep our mouths shut and make room for those who are actually putting well-tempered effort into this discussion.
Moderators: please ignore this posting as it has nothing to do with Legos, robots, or malevolent monopolist stooges.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the line of where mythology ends in the Bible is probably a point of discussion as it's not entirely clear to me, and could probably use insight from someone better educated on this topic. I would hazard to say that this is not divided into fact and fiction, as it seems that the authors of the biblical texts did not/could not have such a world view. Literature, its role within a society, their conceptions of truth and meaning, all functioned very differently.
I would personally assume that the Adam and Eve story is also mythology for reasons similar to what you mention: nothing about the story is actually asking me to take it literally, and it doesn't seem to match our best historical records. So yeah, a literalist hermeneutic has all sorts of problems, and not just in Genesis. This is why most branches of Christianity, save the pronounced post-pietist and conservative Anabaptist movements, do not maintain this hermeneutical approach.
As C. S. Lewis famously stated, and I paraphrase, "Christianity is a myth that is true." To equate myth with fiction due to a binary view on the role of language as conveying either truths or errors seems to be a lazy application of reason. This is where fundamentalists thrive; that is indeed their worldview. It should be rejected by all persons because it is not very unintelligent. By that I mean not well equipped for understanding the world around us.
Oh sorry, I forgot to respond to your actual question: "How would you reconcile that with your own belief that evolution is part of God's creation, as it seems to be?" It's a really good question. However, if you don't believe that Adam and Eve were real persons (I really think it to be highly unlikely given the information we have about human evolution, and given that the story is not uncommon in ancient literature in various forms), then you don't have a causal conflict. You may have interesting theological questions about the nature of sin and death: does death need sin to precede it, to cause it in a sequential manner? or is it that death and sin are aspects of the same thing?
People who say that evolution cannot be true due to perceived conflicts with religious texts are really just protecting their hermeneutic, I think. Their hermeneutic is tied to their view of how God relates to people in general, so this is a really hard thing for people to change since it is equivalent to changing your entire epistemology on the whole.
I am not a theologian, though. I'm just a programmer who likes to think about these things and reads as much as possible. I chose to become a Christian later in life, and identify myself as such, but I don't presently attend church. Believe it or not, once you get past the Fox News version of religious life, there is an incredible intellectual history that awaits even the casual person; that is ultimately what drew me to Christianity.
Most of us who are religious have known that Evolution and belief in God are not exclusive. It's just that mainstream culture does not find us interesting, and so we do not get put on TV, nor do we get much time in [mostly evangelical] churches. This is really unfortunate, to make an understatement.
:(
For the Christian Scientist, all theories of the "natural" world as identified by the set of sciences that interest us are a subset of a larger, engaging reality. For the Christian layperson, having a theory on the working of one mechanism or another, buttressed by direct observation, if not by yourself then at least by others who have established themselves as trustworthy, should be convincing enough for most material at hand. To put this on topic: "evolution" contains robust models and should be seen as both able to provide useful explanations for our own natural history as well as provide insight into our future. And we can safely stop short of the drama right there.
Part of what has gone wrong in the highlighted subculture is that people who are not qualified will sometimes speak authoritatively on topics and end up with moronic conclusions. Sometimes this is how I feel when I read slashdot comments from naturalists that really feel that there is a conflict of interests between religion and science; and it is exactly what grates on me when I hear religious people espouse the same. Both persons will go away from what they fear and toward what they trust, and this is a bad process in general when it comes to advancing knowledge, no matter who does it.
And let me point out the great irony of culturally conservative Christianity: an in-depth attention to the Bible, particularly the Genesis creation myth will reveal that it is *nothing* about actual physical "creation". One thing that conservative theologians like to claim is understanding the historical and cultural significance of the Bible (this is a good thing). In my opinion, it is jettisoned frequently on this single topic for the purpose of funding a culture war.
Briefly, let me summarize that it is common practice among ancient near eastern cultures to take the dominant mythology, particularly the creation myth, and to retell it from the perspective of the current Monarch who uses this retelling to establish their role in the world, specifically their fitness for rule as it is often retold to highlight the character traits this Monarch possesses. In the Genesis creation account, what we see happening is a retelling of the dominant Sumerian/Akkadian creation myths (check out the Enuma Elis cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enuma_Elish for an example) from the perspective of the God of Israel: the major changes are a shift away from chaos and randomness toward order and predictability. The Israelites, safely said, were concerned by things such as established, powerful people groups in the same region, and basic things like sustaining a crop or herd of livestock; living through a winter and avoiding things like being enslaved again were definitely on the mind.
What the Genesis creation myth does say is basically this, if I can grossly oversimplify in a paraphrase: "The God who has lead you out of Egypt is greater than the gods and the people whom you face next; where the world is random and unpredictable, this God establishes order and sustains the land; have no fear."
And *that* is what a conservative pastor should be telling their congregations about creation and the meaning of the stories in Genesis.
Making this conflict with "science" is obviously left as an exercise from an aggressive or intentionally ignorant mind. Or maybe both
I agree. There is a healthy Darwinian struggle here toward which financial savings factor.
I work for a private graduate school of about one thousand students. We are not exceedingly wealthy. That is to say that finances are a big deal around here. Over time, we found ourselves continually in the position of "We have the skill and talent to do this, but we cannot afford it."
Over time, through the influence of myself and others, along with judicious hiring practices, we now have 50% of the machines in our server room running Debian. It is used for database servers running PostgreSQL (to which we also successfully moved some legacy Informix data stores), to our web servers running Apache/PHP5, to various networking devices (VLANs get complex with supporting some student housing, internet cafes, open wireless, library access, student lab, classrooms and administration), to proxy servers, and to miscellany.
So many of these projects were implementations that we sketched, scoped, vendor-checked, and found that we are saving tens of thousands a year (which is a lot to us). Open Source solutions closed the gap between "can do" and "can't do" in many situations.
Additionally, there is a lot of positive energy among our technologists regarding Open Source software. Not everyone wants to be a vendor extension. This team is engaged and optimistic about many complex challenges. This has been a boon for our productivity since our project lists keep growing.
I used to work in a larger company (a global HR firm of 12,000 employees at the time) doing revenue and HR forecasting software development, as well as managing projects and nearly 20 developers. I keep in touch with them and I see my old coworkers propping up silent Linux clusters that just work and work and work. I mention this, because I can empirically verify that the gains of Open Source scale well in both directions organizationally.
Here is their "in" to the world of low-cost Windows/Office. At reduced cost, the product will pay for itself by forcing ads through to the user.
Just a thought.
From Augustine to Aquinas to Descartes to C.S.Lewis, this has been a valid Christian question. In Lewis' terms, the question of Christ was phrased in aliteration as the question "Was Jesus a Liar, Lord, or Lunatic?"
It's a great question not because of the open-endedness of it, but because it gets to the nature of God, revelation, and the human condition. These are all central concerns for Christians and should be embraced by them.
God is generally portrayed as a "coping mechanism" by atheists, within my personal experience (others may differ). Putting aside religious people trying to sell something, most of the rest of us deal with the reality that Life with God is more complex and often more difficult than Life without God. There is no "coping" for me.
I couldn't agree more.
....pre-Constantine, as you noted.
...Now that is pro-Life!
There's a strain of Christian thought that through history has emphasized a distinction between Christianity and Religion, per se. Of course, we don't hear this emphasized by the religious Christian groups today as it has generally been championed by those who have resisted the status quo (Of more recent note, cf. Karl Barth and other Neo-orthodox who rallied against old Christian Liberalism that clung to the state and endorsed pretty much anything that came from it, including horrid old doctrines like Eugenics; or cf. the whole Liberation Theology movement in present day Latin America and elsewhere).
It's so ironic that theological conservatives are today the ones who are quickly willing to side with big government and do things like try to legislate rules on marriage to push their own moral world view on others. The earliest Christians, renowned for their anti-establishment conservativism (no Ceasar worship?! Gasp!!) were pacifists in the truest sense.
When the early Christians had a problem with abortion (contemporary forms of the practice), they didn't kill people for it, they waited at the dumps and adopted what children they could.
And now, I sit in Sunday School, and listen to people who honestly believe that if Jesus were here today, he would be writing his senators and politicking on trendy moral issues. It burns me the hell up to have Jesus rendered so trite and tied entirely to local drama. Have they ever even read the damn book they talk about so much?
So, instead of just complaining and throwing in the towel, I now teach Sunday School, and I teach about Jesus and use his words which sound oddly out of place in my Baptist church. It gets me in trouble, and some days I really really want to quit, but also on rare occassions, it turns on lights and people begin to see that there is a difference between Christianity (following Christ) and Religion (the polical, moral, and pop psychology package) and maybe the world is a little better place.
What else would a Geek with a degree in theology do? There's an itch; it needs to be scratched.
Seriously, you'd make a good one. Plus I hear they're recruiting right now. Particularly they like people who lack hermeneutical skills, are simplistic and are willing to exaggerate or play with "truth" in a way that suits their agenda.
Sign up now!!
Another way of looking at it is perhaps to see the CTO as involved with corporate profit centers and the CIO as involved with corporate cost centers. I'm in a small company where I chose to become CTO instead of CIO simply because we're aiming to advance new technology and sell it as products and services, however I'll be general head of technology and could easily have chosen either title. So, in that sense, it really is somewhat arbitrary.
Good question, though! I'm glad to see this kind of a question asked on Slashdot.
I went down for a bit about two months ago. I had just gotten a DSL connection and had installed Red Hat 6.2. While I was working on my firewall, I ran an errand for my wife (note to self: bring down interface when no firewall is present). I came back from the errand, finished the firewall, updated my software (oh my! I think I need this WuFTP update!), built my md5 database and was good to go.
/bin/ls had been ovewritten and I had no idea what else they had done.
:-)
I started getting a DoS on myself as I noticed that I could hardly get *anywhere*. So much so that I kept dropping off my ISP's network (of course I was suspicious of my new ISP). When I checked the logs, it was clear that I was in the process of "attacking" other people. Only, here's the irony, my firewall was working well enough that I (being anal, as I am) was not actually succeeding in doing so (all the packets were being denied, and my logs were flooding). A look at my process table showed "t0rn" taking the bulk of my CPU power and basically just spitting and sputtering, not being able to do much more than be a pain in my butt. Still, I had to rebuild my machine since I determined that
I would like to note that OpenBSD was installed later that evening. Funny how your experiences influence your platform decisions, eh?
How can you take a nation seriously that provides college scholarships for people whose only talent is throwing a ball whilst wearing enough padding to keep them safe in the event of a car crash? You can if you realize that the nation is large enough to support it and those same colleges turn out individuals capable of producing enormous amounts of capital. It's not really that hard to take the US Universities seriously. Although one-dimensional criticisms like yours can still make a point, I guess. And I would tend to agree: I think it's ridiculous that some people have a better chance at higher "education" than others simply because they're good at moving small balls around a pre-defined area in pre-defined methods. Honestly, athletics is hardly the greatest irony in US universities. If anything, it's proliferation is a sign of the success of an economy strong enough to sustain such an industry within it's own educational circles. ...an economy built by the products of those same universities.
As we can see, we are all being overwhelmed by religious zealots here. Truly, truly overwhelmed.
The best part of your post is that you voiced a logic that is owned by religious zealots everywhere. If only they'd realize that they are at risk of distributing their logic to the acceptance of Nazism.
This truly is a brilliant cultural insight.
[end sarcasm]
People who would rather support a UNIX-like environment in their company as opposed to a Windows environment, that's who.
....give them a "standard" interface that is relatively intuitive and consistent. Windows actually does well here for such people, and the aim of the Gnome Foundation is appropriate and well-suited for that user penetration.
You're ability to work your own way wouldn't be hampered by this at all. Certainly not any more than it is now. You would still be able to have an Uber-cool Enlightenment desktop at home, you'd just have another standard desktop at work with good GUI *and* a stable, cost-efficient platform.
Be certain: We won't get Linux/UNIX/etc. in the door at a corporate desktop level en masse if there's no standard interface.
Seriously, how can we not win? I can imagine sinister behavior from anyone, but I hardly think a standard interface could really do *any* damage to our current situation.
But your point is good: the diversity of work should be a formative part of how we think about and implement user interfaces. Unfortunately, what do you do with the 95% of people who know *squat* about anything, whose work is relatively non-creative and task-oriented, and who need something that behaves predictably across applications?
Hey, we're a community, right? And aren't community members supposed to help each other out in times of need?
Indeed.
This will be a good time to show others how a community operates. Let's all please take this situation seriously and set new precedents of community support and development. The trick will be to somehow not inflate the awkward egos of the little weaners who brought down the site while at the same time demonstrating that perhaps being a script kiddie isn't the safest, anonymous thing it appears to be and that the broader community is stronger than this.
My experience is that artists tend to prefer Macs because the technology does not get in the way of the creative process. Whereas with developers, getting involved with the technology is the objective.
:)
:)
Point well taken.
Though network administrators are never seen as arrogant, right?
Agreed. Point well taken again!
After years of marketing itself as an OS just fine for idiots, didn't we all internally say "ok, fine, you retards" and mentally write them off? After years of retreating into niche markets populated by arrogant graphic artists, et al. who had almost no real technical know-how, didn't we say "whatever!" internally and let them piss and moan on their own time?
And now, after their lame attempts to associate themselves Open Source software and an Ad campaign to "think different" in really only *ONE WAY*..... how on earth could any of us take the weak sci-fi future painted in the article above even moderately seriously.
Apple-- you had plenty of chances to get it right. Historically, we would have been much worse off if we were living in an Apple-dominated world than a Microsoft-dominated one. And oh, I could go on....
That (or should I say "thet"?) has to be the most mis-spelled word on this web site. I have seen the word "than" spelled as "then" repeatedly here. It really does make the site hard to take seriously. I introduce it to outsiders to demonstrate a functioning sub-subculture, and they think it's a juvenile, even though you can find cool links occassionally.
No, no, no- you're quite wrong. Just step through the logic:
1) College areas have reduced sales
2) Non-college areas have increased sales
3) Napster detracts from sales
4) Therefore, Napster detracts from sales.
Oh wait, that's bad logic. Nevermind.
One of the most important marks of a free society is Right to Revolution, both on a small and large scale. In parallel, one of the most significant signs of a healthy society is the existence of public dissent and certain amounts of thoughtful anarchy on part of the citizenry.
With all the things we've chosen to learn in the course of time, how can making information, knowledge, opinion and debate less freely available be considered the proper evolution of an "advanced" society?
Why are we the only ones who care? (as if I didn't know the answer: $$)
Seems like most of the graphics here are GIFS. ..when will we see PNGs instead?
Sorry about that... it seemed to happen after I posted it... it looked fine in the textarea box
Here's a directory containing the full install as a 16 MB Windoze .exe (since I insist on installing it at work): 1 /windows/win32/sea/
1 /windows/win32/sea/Netsc apeSetup.exe
ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/netscape6/english/6_PR
Or more directly:
ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/netscape6/english/6_PR
Enjoy!
Making cigarettes illegal did very little for consumption: there's always a way to get something you want, even though store clerks are supposed to not sell them. Whether or not you think that filters on web access will be good for children (or whoever), you're still just addressing an easy problem while not having much to say about the root problem: let's raise kids who make good decisions, not create a world in which we hope they don't have room to make bad decisions, and somehow call that a victory.
Whatever.
Let's try not to go on a Jihad over this, though. It already suffers from being over-politicized, and that warps people's ability to interact with it. In that case, you end up with winners and losers of a fight and not actually with anyone enlightened as a result.
Describing the mechanical processing of the human brain, or calling on the holy name of a yet-to-be-formulated Grand Unified Theory does not entail a complete explanation. I'm glad some one here pointed out that Existentialism has been dealing with this, and that's been since the mid-19th century with this century's emphasis crossing more heavily with the issues of science, so this is hardly new stuff.
For those interested in the issues around Science, God, Metaphysics (in the sense of philosophy), I heartily recommend Wolfhart Pannenberg's works. His Metaphysics and the Idea of God deals heavily with the symbiotic relationship between theology and metaphysics without equating them. His Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith is a culmination of decades of work with theologians and scientists working together. His Theology and the Philosophy of Science is not currently in print, but is one of the best books I have ever read on this topic. Being a few years old, it's missing the deep crises presently occurring the in the philosophy of science. ...if you don't believe that, you're not reading enough.
Pannenberg is particularly enjoyable to those with a background in philosophy or theology. He is not easy reading by any stretch of the imagination. Europeans will be more familiar with him, while he may be somewhat undiscovered to many American readers. He's known for repackaging German Idealism toward a synthetic worldview: Science and God cannot conflict, neither can they continue to exist completely independent of each other. His sense of religion is rational and not a mystical cop-out when dealing with explanations.
It's far too easy for someone who's interested/knowledgeable in science and had some sort of religious experience/exposure to feel that they can push these ideas together well. Let's be dutiful to read works like the one mentioned in this article or like the one's that I mentioned, ...or... let's keep our mouths shut and make room for those who are actually putting well-tempered effort into this discussion.
Moderators: please ignore this posting as it has nothing to do with Legos, robots, or malevolent monopolist stooges.