Yeah, sorry, that was a bit premature. I thought of checking the Wiki against the Alpha course week 1, but from memory most of it already seems to be there, and I'm under no illusions that I'm the first to have thought of this.
I doubt the evidence is hard to come by, and the Alpha course is far from magical; I just didn't spend more than a few minutes on Google and alphacourse.org. None of the Alpha material appears to be online as far as I can tell - not labelled as such, anyway. I'm sure lots of the original source material must be up there somewhere.
Personally, no I don't have a single document that proves the existence of Jesus or who I believe he is, except for the Bible of course. But my faith isn't based on historical records, it's based on day to day experience of an ongoing relationship with God, which is really what Christianity is all about - not that God is some far-off deity largely disinterested in humans except for a sadistic pleasure in punishment, but that he is close by and desiring a friendship with his creation. That's partially why I suggested an Alpha course - you'll meet God through his people, but you won't meet him through Google. And you won't even meet him through ancient documents, even if those documents were totally accepted as 100% true by everyone, which they never will be.
OK, I'll bite. I can't find it online although I'm sure it must be around somewhere. Find an Alpha course and attend. This stuff is covered in Week 1. Don't fear a hard sell - I've led a course and the leadership training is very clear that if people want to walk away, that's fine, and that it's primarily a course and about getting to know people, with evangelism listed under "if it happens that's great but that's not why we're here." The book will be on sale but if this really puts you off you'll be able to find someone who will lend or give you a (probably second hand) copy.
Most Alpha courses come with free nosh so at the very least you'll get a reasonable meal and a good argument out of it. If you want, it can go further, but if you don't, that's fine.
After Week 1 you'll have the references you need. Don't expect the documents themselves to be produced - there's no point, anyone totally anti would argue the documents have been tampered with anyway - but you'll have all you need to look them up and read them for yourself.
So now it's my turn to call shenanigans. Produce your reasoning why you believe those records are false.
Try explaining it to her with something she is familiar with - for example (not intending to be sexist) an oven - she probably doesn't get the knobs for the four rings mixed up, does she? Or the controls of a car - when she wants to indicate, does she get confused with that and put the windscreen wipers on instead?
Better still, have it loop through several possibilities after set amounts of time - for example, 5 seconds pops up a menu that asks if you want to click the icon, double-click it, triple click it while simultaneously patting your head and rubbin your belly, or whatever, then if you don't click on that, after 10 seconds it displays the context menu.
Then the same would apply for those menus that pop up - move the mouse over one of the options and leave it there, after 5 seconds you'd get the "do you want to click this menu option" etc menu pop up.
> BTW, I don't see any reason why fertilization for research only is a problem at all.
Depends where you view life as starting. There are arguments all over where a foetus actually becomes a life; my own opinion (stress OPINION) is that fertilisation is the point where that life begins, and if you extinguish that spark, then you eliminate up to 100-odd years of useful contribution to the human race by denying that spark the right to life.
So my problem with fertilisation for research is the same as your problem with research on foetuses/children/teenagers/adults beyond where you feel that point exists.
> If this is about abortion, why not oppose abortion, rather than research?
Yeah, right. You tried opposing abortion recently? If you're not female you get slapped down straight away because "you can't possibly know" and all that.
Then just about any reasonable objection gets slapped down for being extremist, no matter how moderately expressed. Or you get called a religious nut.
Resisting abortion appears to be futile. This leaves opposition to anything derived from abortion, such as stem cell research.
> If things get somewhat heated I am tempted to say "there is no mention in the scriptures stating the Book of Genesis is a scientific paper."
Well, it isn't. It was written way before the current scientific process was developed; plus, it was written with a global audience in mind, not a highly trained audience. If it had been a scientific paper then it would have been meaningless until recently and would have failed in its objective to give people an outline on how God created the world.
No, as ssj says below, the programmer passed away last year aged 30-something, I know no details but it sounded rather unexpected. He never released the source so my guess is his family (if they care) will probably honour that and keep it closed. Also there were some bad vibes over the software, someone pi**ed him off or something so he stopped working on it. Damn shame IMHO. Scott Lemmon, wherever you are, thanks for this great software.
Yes, that's right, but the trick requires some form of scripting that's blocked by the Disable/Prompts in the Internet Zone. If you get the prompt and say no, then it can't do anything.
If a whitelisted site has the exploit, then yes, you're stuffed, but in general these sorts of exploits would be found on spamvertised or cascaded/pr0n sites and therefore not whitelisted. It's not a completely watertight fix by any means, but this approach has kept my IE surfing trouble-free for several years.
What a bizarre response, given the last part of my statement (that my use of IE is secondary to Firefox). I wasn't aware that I was clinging to IE as if it were precious, and it certainly isn't stolen in any sense of the word (actual theft or the misuse of "theft" called piracy).
Unless you're referring to Proxomitron, rather than IE, which I use cos it's a damn good piece of software even if it isn't open source. If you know of an OSS alternative, I'll be happy to try it out. However Proxo still isn't stolen, so I really can't work out where you got that part from.
Ultimately I can't answer your last question. I use Firefox and Thunderbird, Emacs as my preferred editor and Linux, even if I do also use Windows and IE. So I'm neither hysterical nor scared of using free software.
although it requires a bit of messing around. IE - Tools - Options - Security.
select Internet Zone; click Custom Level; set just about everything to Disable or Prompt.
select Trusted Sites; click Sites; remove https requirement (because the use of https is no guarantee of safety). Then go to Custom Level, then set some items to Prompt, most to Enable.
This way, anything that isn't in your Trusted Sites list can't get up to any substantial shenanigans. When a page doesn't work, add the site to the Trusted Sites list.
Then, even if the page is one that attempts to initiate a cascade of pr0n sites that only open more up each time you close one, it may be able to open the first level of the cascade, but unless the cascaded ones are also on your Trusted list that's where the cascade will stop.
Some pages redirect you to another site; some have frames on different sites and so on, and this can get a bit tedious, but for the most part this makes IE6 invulnerable to Secunia's tests.
Also I only use IE for secondary browsing, where something REALLY won't work in Firefox, which is also protected by Proxomitron.
No, that's how you make foreigners understand plain English - speak loud and slowly, not forgetting to talk down to them as if they were 5 years old.
As for how I make international calls, well, it's the same at home and work - I pick up the phone, dial 00, then the country code, e.g. 1 for USA, then the local number without a leading zero, e.g. 213 555 4127. I think we have VOIP at work but I don't get involved in that side of things.
When will govts stop just saying that it will prevent terrorism and start saying how exactly?
Recently the UK government discussed returning motorbikes to having front number plates, which were removed because they were mounted on the front wheel sideways and in collisions with pedestrians the latter ended up with bits sliced off. The basis for the discussion was that it would stop terrorists and drug barons (and of course had nothing to do with the fact that front facing cash, er, safety cameras cannot identify motorbikes).
Now I don't know about anyone else but I really can't see how returning front number plates to motorbikes will do anything about drugs and terrorism. Perhaps they're hoping that drug barons and terrorists won't think to put front number plates on their motorbikes, and that therefore anyone without one must be one of these people?
It will of course make the whole policy completely ineffective when terrorists and drug barons start putting front plates back on their bikes. After all, it was a real bummer when they stopped going around in sandwich boards that had printed front and back I AM A DRUG DEALER, GET YOUR DRUGS HERE, and I HAVE A BOMB, PLEASE DON'T RUN AWAY.
Before you spend a fortune on fancy noise cancelling jobbies, pop into the local motorbike shop and pick up a bag of earplugs. They'll cost you a few quid for a bag of 20 pairs or so, and they're designed to quiet the noise from a helmet at 185mph, so it's bound to make a difference to orifice noise.
I used to sit next to one guy, his whole family had loud gobs. When he called home you could actually hear both sides of the telephone conversation (no exaggeration!) The earplugs didn't cancel the noise out completely; I was still stuck with the vibrations induced into my skull, but it cut out 99% of the audible stuff.
I used to wonder if a mike, an inverting amplifier and a speaker would create a quiet spot around me and double his output (obviously I'd have to power the circuit from the mains) for everyone else. Before I tried it though we had an office reorg and he ended up sitting next to some other poor sod.
Hmm. How do I run it? I downloaded it, added some spam sites, opened it in Incontinent Exploder, and it/displayed the HTML/. Damn. Why do browsers do that? I've seen Firebird do that as well - it opens an HTML file, it's obviously a well-formed HTML file because I can see the damn code, but it insists on displaying the HTML instead of interpreting it????
The only way to answer his question is by asking the similar question "How can I trust Internet Explorer" and see what answers he gives.
Obviously in this case it isn't much help, because he just says "because I work for MS", so obviously his answers are going to be biased.
But it does help for people who don't work for Microsoft. Ask yourself why you trust IE. Quantify it. Once it's quantified, we can then discuss whether or not Firefox can be trusted.
Obvious questions to ask are:
- if I need to check the code for security issues, back doors and so on, is that possible?
- was the code written by convicted criminals, and whichever way this is answered, is it more or less likely to contain the aforementioned back doors?
- how easy is it for hackers to exploit, referring to historical records (not opinions or FUD) of successful hack attacks, the number of 0wned zombies out there and so on....etc. I'm not an expert on this sort of stuff, so this list is by no means exhaustive, however, I'm pretty sure the approach is sound.
>>Miranda has no adverts, ever. >Neither does Trillian (both free and pro)
Actually, Free does. After you've used it long enough, it starts popping up a daily reminder that the Pro version exists; there's only an OK button, and that launches a browser with the Cerulean website. Damn irritating IMHO.
Trillian violates several Windows usability guidelines as well. I found it very odd at first. I'm sure you guys think it's perfectly logical, but it took me a while to get used to.
However, it wasn't that, but Trillian's nag screen that made me decide to switch to Gaim. Make sure v3 has a "No thanks and you don't need to keep asking every fscking day" button and you'll avoid losing more people like me. I don't like naggy software and avoid/crack it wherever possible (although the only option with Trillian was to crack the Pro version). I usually prefer FOSS to running cracked versions, and Gaim is usable now, so I switched.
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Yeah, sorry, that was a bit premature. I thought of checking the Wiki against the Alpha course week 1, but from memory most of it already seems to be there, and I'm under no illusions that I'm the first to have thought of this.
I doubt the evidence is hard to come by, and the Alpha course is far from magical; I just didn't spend more than a few minutes on Google and alphacourse.org. None of the Alpha material appears to be online as far as I can tell - not labelled as such, anyway. I'm sure lots of the original source material must be up there somewhere.
Personally, no I don't have a single document that proves the existence of Jesus or who I believe he is, except for the Bible of course. But my faith isn't based on historical records, it's based on day to day experience of an ongoing relationship with God, which is really what Christianity is all about - not that God is some far-off deity largely disinterested in humans except for a sadistic pleasure in punishment, but that he is close by and desiring a friendship with his creation. That's partially why I suggested an Alpha course - you'll meet God through his people, but you won't meet him through Google. And you won't even meet him through ancient documents, even if those documents were totally accepted as 100% true by everyone, which they never will be.
OK, I'll bite. I can't find it online although I'm sure it must be around somewhere. Find an Alpha course and attend. This stuff is covered in Week 1. Don't fear a hard sell - I've led a course and the leadership training is very clear that if people want to walk away, that's fine, and that it's primarily a course and about getting to know people, with evangelism listed under "if it happens that's great but that's not why we're here." The book will be on sale but if this really puts you off you'll be able to find someone who will lend or give you a (probably second hand) copy.
Most Alpha courses come with free nosh so at the very least you'll get a reasonable meal and a good argument out of it. If you want, it can go further, but if you don't, that's fine.
After Week 1 you'll have the references you need. Don't expect the documents themselves to be produced - there's no point, anyone totally anti would argue the documents have been tampered with anyway - but you'll have all you need to look them up and read them for yourself.
So now it's my turn to call shenanigans. Produce your reasoning why you believe those records are false.
Try explaining it to her with something she is familiar with - for example (not intending to be sexist) an oven - she probably doesn't get the knobs for the four rings mixed up, does she? Or the controls of a car - when she wants to indicate, does she get confused with that and put the windscreen wipers on instead?
Better still, have it loop through several possibilities after set amounts of time - for example, 5 seconds pops up a menu that asks if you want to click the icon, double-click it, triple click it while simultaneously patting your head and rubbin your belly, or whatever, then if you don't click on that, after 10 seconds it displays the context menu.
Then the same would apply for those menus that pop up - move the mouse over one of the options and leave it there, after 5 seconds you'd get the "do you want to click this menu option" etc menu pop up.
That's when we're not locking the key up and throwing the prisoner away.
That's 4.2 bits per digit on average, slightly worse than BCD "compression" (storing it as 0x14, 0x15, 0x92, 0x65, 0x35,...)
> P.S. Before the grammar nzi's strike
It's "grammar Nazis", not "grammar nzi's."
> BTW, I don't see any reason why fertilization for research only is a problem at all.
Depends where you view life as starting. There are arguments all over where a foetus actually becomes a life; my own opinion (stress OPINION) is that fertilisation is the point where that life begins, and if you extinguish that spark, then you eliminate up to 100-odd years of useful contribution to the human race by denying that spark the right to life.
So my problem with fertilisation for research is the same as your problem with research on foetuses/children/teenagers/adults beyond where you feel that point exists.
> If this is about abortion, why not oppose abortion, rather than research?
Yeah, right. You tried opposing abortion recently? If you're not female you get slapped down straight away because "you can't possibly know" and all that.
Then just about any reasonable objection gets slapped down for being extremist, no matter how moderately expressed. Or you get called a religious nut.
Resisting abortion appears to be futile. This leaves opposition to anything derived from abortion, such as stem cell research.
That first one isn't so weird, there's one on Dali's Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.
Yeah, but BitTorrent helps. If you sit there trying to insert a DVD into a telephone socket you're not going to get very far.
> If things get somewhat heated I am tempted to say "there is no mention in the scriptures stating the Book of Genesis is a scientific paper."
Well, it isn't. It was written way before the current scientific process was developed; plus, it was written with a global audience in mind, not a highly trained audience. If it had been a scientific paper then it would have been meaningless until recently and would have failed in its objective to give people an outline on how God created the world.
No, as ssj says below, the programmer passed away last year aged 30-something, I know no details but it sounded rather unexpected. He never released the source so my guess is his family (if they care) will probably honour that and keep it closed. Also there were some bad vibes over the software, someone pi**ed him off or something so he stopped working on it. Damn shame IMHO. Scott Lemmon, wherever you are, thanks for this great software.
Yes, that's right, but the trick requires some form of scripting that's blocked by the Disable/Prompts in the Internet Zone. If you get the prompt and say no, then it can't do anything.
If a whitelisted site has the exploit, then yes, you're stuffed, but in general these sorts of exploits would be found on spamvertised or cascaded/pr0n sites and therefore not whitelisted. It's not a completely watertight fix by any means, but this approach has kept my IE surfing trouble-free for several years.
What a bizarre response, given the last part of my statement (that my use of IE is secondary to Firefox). I wasn't aware that I was clinging to IE as if it were precious, and it certainly isn't stolen in any sense of the word (actual theft or the misuse of "theft" called piracy).
Unless you're referring to Proxomitron, rather than IE, which I use cos it's a damn good piece of software even if it isn't open source. If you know of an OSS alternative, I'll be happy to try it out. However Proxo still isn't stolen, so I really can't work out where you got that part from.
Ultimately I can't answer your last question. I use Firefox and Thunderbird, Emacs as my preferred editor and Linux, even if I do also use Windows and IE. So I'm neither hysterical nor scared of using free software.
although it requires a bit of messing around. IE - Tools - Options - Security.
select Internet Zone; click Custom Level; set just about everything to Disable or Prompt.
select Trusted Sites; click Sites; remove https requirement (because the use of https is no guarantee of safety). Then go to Custom Level, then set some items to Prompt, most to Enable.
This way, anything that isn't in your Trusted Sites list can't get up to any substantial shenanigans. When a page doesn't work, add the site to the Trusted Sites list.
Then, even if the page is one that attempts to initiate a cascade of pr0n sites that only open more up each time you close one, it may be able to open the first level of the cascade, but unless the cascaded ones are also on your Trusted list that's where the cascade will stop.
Some pages redirect you to another site; some have frames on different sites and so on, and this can get a bit tedious, but for the most part this makes IE6 invulnerable to Secunia's tests.
Also I only use IE for secondary browsing, where something REALLY won't work in Firefox, which is also protected by Proxomitron.
> Mine is set to send IE6.0 WinXP even though I am probably using Lynx on an iPod.
Probably? Don't you know?
No, that's how you make foreigners understand plain English - speak loud and slowly, not forgetting to talk down to them as if they were 5 years old.
As for how I make international calls, well, it's the same at home and work - I pick up the phone, dial 00, then the country code, e.g. 1 for USA, then the local number without a leading zero, e.g. 213 555 4127. I think we have VOIP at work but I don't get involved in that side of things.
When will govts stop just saying that it will prevent terrorism and start saying how exactly?
Recently the UK government discussed returning motorbikes to having front number plates, which were removed because they were mounted on the front wheel sideways and in collisions with pedestrians the latter ended up with bits sliced off. The basis for the discussion was that it would stop terrorists and drug barons (and of course had nothing to do with the fact that front facing cash, er, safety cameras cannot identify motorbikes).
Now I don't know about anyone else but I really can't see how returning front number plates to motorbikes will do anything about drugs and terrorism. Perhaps they're hoping that drug barons and terrorists won't think to put front number plates on their motorbikes, and that therefore anyone without one must be one of these people?
It will of course make the whole policy completely ineffective when terrorists and drug barons start putting front plates back on their bikes. After all, it was a real bummer when they stopped going around in sandwich boards that had printed front and back I AM A DRUG DEALER, GET YOUR DRUGS HERE, and I HAVE A BOMB, PLEASE DON'T RUN AWAY.
Before you spend a fortune on fancy noise cancelling jobbies, pop into the local motorbike shop and pick up a bag of earplugs. They'll cost you a few quid for a bag of 20 pairs or so, and they're designed to quiet the noise from a helmet at 185mph, so it's bound to make a difference to orifice noise.
I used to sit next to one guy, his whole family had loud gobs. When he called home you could actually hear both sides of the telephone conversation (no exaggeration!) The earplugs didn't cancel the noise out completely; I was still stuck with the vibrations induced into my skull, but it cut out 99% of the audible stuff.
I used to wonder if a mike, an inverting amplifier and a speaker would create a quiet spot around me and double his output (obviously I'd have to power the circuit from the mains) for everyone else. Before I tried it though we had an office reorg and he ended up sitting next to some other poor sod.
Hmm. How do I run it? I downloaded it, added some spam sites, opened it in Incontinent Exploder, and it /displayed the HTML/. Damn. Why do browsers do that? I've seen Firebird do that as well - it opens an HTML file, it's obviously a well-formed HTML file because I can see the damn code, but it insists on displaying the HTML instead of interpreting it????
The only way to answer his question is by asking the similar question "How can I trust Internet Explorer" and see what answers he gives.
...etc. I'm not an expert on this sort of stuff, so this list is by no means exhaustive, however, I'm pretty sure the approach is sound.
Obviously in this case it isn't much help, because he just says "because I work for MS", so obviously his answers are going to be biased.
But it does help for people who don't work for Microsoft. Ask yourself why you trust IE. Quantify it. Once it's quantified, we can then discuss whether or not Firefox can be trusted.
Obvious questions to ask are:
- if I need to check the code for security issues, back doors and so on, is that possible?
- was the code written by convicted criminals, and whichever way this is answered, is it more or less likely to contain the aforementioned back doors?
- how easy is it for hackers to exploit, referring to historical records (not opinions or FUD) of successful hack attacks, the number of 0wned zombies out there and so on.
>>Miranda has no adverts, ever.
>Neither does Trillian (both free and pro)
Actually, Free does. After you've used it long enough, it starts popping up a daily reminder that the Pro version exists; there's only an OK button, and that launches a browser with the Cerulean website. Damn irritating IMHO.
Trillian violates several Windows usability guidelines as well. I found it very odd at first. I'm sure you guys think it's perfectly logical, but it took me a while to get used to.
However, it wasn't that, but Trillian's nag screen that made me decide to switch to Gaim. Make sure v3 has a "No thanks and you don't need to keep asking every fscking day" button and you'll avoid losing more people like me. I don't like naggy software and avoid/crack it wherever possible (although the only option with Trillian was to crack the Pro version). I usually prefer FOSS to running cracked versions, and Gaim is usable now, so I switched.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how this one turns out.
"to consume the verses" typo? "to consume single-handedly the food listed in the verses" is what I meant...