Another important mistake was with the word "customs" when the literal word was "statues"
Correction: The notes say "statutes".
The vaguest bit of description "tree.. decked in gold and silver" could apply to a Christmas tree, but the meaning is quite different: it's referring to carved figures worshiped as gods.
You make a good case. I agree, that's the most likely interpretation, and isn't the same thing as a Christmas tree. However, using symbols such as Christmas trees does have a pagan feel to it. It's not as bad, but similar to how many Christians have made Christ on the Cross an object of worship.
It only sounds pagan because you have no actual concept of what paganism is.
You're just inserting your definition of paganism. A dictionary reference:
"1: heathen 1; especially : a follower of a polytheistic religion (as in ancient Rome) 2: one who has little or no religion and who delights in sensual pleasures and material goods : an irreligious or hedonistic person 3: neo-pagan"
What's being discussed are religious practices from thousands of years ago. Try reading the reference to Jeremiah 10:1-5 and then explaining how paganism doesn't apply.
I've never used marijuana, but at this point I don't see its' continued illegality being beneficial. Legalize it [..] Do that and you just gutted much of the business of the cartels, put many of the street gangs and lowlife dealers out of business, and would prevent it from being cut with dangerous chemicals.
I assume what you are referring to would be "sacred oaks" or "asherah poles", which almost certainly would NOT have been fir, and I highly doubt that christians would have embraced THOSE for christmas given the clear biblical attacks on such concepts.
Are you really making a distinction between the type of tree? Wherever the idea of a Christmas tree happened to come from, it idea still reeks of paganism, and the reference to Jeremiah 10:1-5 seems spot on.
Apple has always been about proprietary and high-priced consumer items. I don't know where you're getting this, "Google is the new Apple," schtick from.
Anybody who works in video distribution knows that distribution may require a different license than just encoding. Encoding software does not and can not include that license.
That sounds pretty absurd to me. It's like if somebody patented a drug, and then the maker of the drug was charged twice, once to make, and second to distribute the drug, and then the doctor was charged for prescribing the drug.
You really can't distribute a file just because it is encoded in a certain format? Really?
Gnome 3 doesn't have access to the large amount of user test groups that Apple, Google or Microsoft do, and even the later companies don't do changes as radical as in Gnome Shell.
Just to pick on Microsoft, the Office 2007 changes were quite radical, and they're doing it again with Metro in Windows 8.
More 1984-style crap from Amazon and their Kindle, except that it isn't imposed on you by the government. Instead, consumers and publishers accept it in a Faustian agreement. I'm never going to buy a Kindle or electronic books from Amazon.
Do you understand how shares work? They are a percentage of the company. Every percentage you give away is less you own yourself. You said Jobs stole from Xerox, but the facts are Xerox willingly entered a business deal. That Xerox couldn't profit from their own technology and gave the store away is their fault.
While you are right that I don't have signatures on, I don't consider that a direct apology nor acknowledgment of the behavior that prompted me to end the debate. I'm tired of these little parlor games. Bye.
All content? Do you have the numbers to back that up? I bet you don't. Early on streaming Netflix had limited content, but there was a lot of it, including older stuff and indie stuff.
Also, if the major content guys were going to be extortionists, then agreeing to pay it gives their customers no choice except to accept an all-or-nothing deal. They could have gone with an a la carte model.
Netflix had the bully pulpit and could have stood up now instead of caving in and explained everything to their customers. Instead they thought they could push their customers around, raise their prices, and use the money to expand into Europe while also removing the convenience of having a single site for DVD rentals and online.
Even if their customers were going to get pissed off no matter what, there were better options than this.
I said I was done with this discussion as at the end you didn't provide counter-arguments and chose to engage in silly tactics instead, condescendingly assigning me "homework".
If you want an answer for this new line of inquiry then I expect an acknowledgment of this fact and an apology, as well as a promise to treat any future arguments in this debate with sincerity, respect, and intellectual honesty.
"Buying those rights is getting tougher, as studios are demanding more money for their valuable content. One analyst predicted earlier this year that Netflix's streaming content licensing costs will rise from $180 million in 2010 to a whopping $2 billion in 2012."
Then don't pay it, and explain to your customers why you aren't paying it, or offer a deal where customers can choose to pay or not in an a la carte model. What Netflix did was fucking stupid. They took the side of their business that was presumably profitable and liked by their customers, and decided to split it off into it's own thing. How fucking dumb can you get? Companies pay billions of dollars to acquire business like the original Netflix model, and they decided they were going to jettison it.
And rather than being honest with their customers, they tried to talk a bunch of corporate public relations bullshit that just pissed people off. It also looks like they were trying to extract cash from their customers so that they could expand into Europe, instead of using investment money for that.
Then again, if people were to go around saying 2 + 2 = 5, or that the world is flat, and if acknowledgment of these positions was taught to children and practically required by politicians running for office, and historically used to enforce dogma on others and hold back science...
Then wouldn't people be justified in speaking out? For fuck's sake, it's 2011, and we've got people killing and enslaving each other over mythology. I say it's about time that we grow up and kill and enslave each other over legitimate reasons.
I'd love to see a cite for that. That quote didn't come up in a Google search. Honesty like that just doesn't happen from a company unless it's an fuckup.
Having owned both devices, what I liked about the PS3 was that it was well-engineered device.
The PS3 was quiet, whereas the DVD player on the 360 sounded like a jet engine. The failure rates for the 360 were horrible. The 360 hard drive was optional so games couldn't count on it being there. The 360 didn't have standard connections for stuff like HDMI, Bluetooth, or a hard drive that was replaceable with a commodity one. Oh yeah, and that monster brick hanging off the power cord of the 360. Not that big of a deal, but the PS3 managed without it.
A few years back I was modded into oblivion when I stated that I thought Dark Matter was utter BS, a way for some scientists to make the math work despite any real proof.
It's called a hypothesis, and it's one of the fundamental tools of science. They then do experiments and look for collaborating evidence to see if it's right. If you want to say dark matter is bullshit, you have to say why and argue the science. Being an armchair scientist gets you no credibility.
I'll mod posts as "Interesting" if I'm not an expert but the post appears to know what it's talking about. The distinction between all the "I" mods (Informative, Interesting, Insightful) is mostly useless anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
Another important mistake was with the word "customs" when the literal word was "statues"
Correction: The notes say "statutes".
The vaguest bit of description "tree .. decked in gold and silver" could apply to a Christmas tree, but the meaning is quite different: it's referring to carved figures worshiped as gods.
You make a good case. I agree, that's the most likely interpretation, and isn't the same thing as a Christmas tree. However, using symbols such as Christmas trees does have a pagan feel to it. It's not as bad, but similar to how many Christians have made Christ on the Cross an object of worship.
No argument from me. I just used cocaine as an example because of the money involved and it was easy to find a reference for.
Which is why Im going with the Wikipedia explaination that it hearkens back to the idea of a paradise tree.
What's in a name? From the Wikipedia article: "went with a flock of maidens and women, first sang and danced there and then set the tree aflame"
Its a LOT more plausible than that some christians decided to ignore all the zillions of condemnations for idolatrous trees in the OT.
Uh huh, like all the other things that Christians have ignored throughout history.
It only sounds pagan because you have no actual concept of what paganism is.
You're just inserting your definition of paganism. A dictionary reference:
"1: heathen 1; especially : a follower of a polytheistic religion (as in ancient Rome) 2: one who has little or no religion and who delights in sensual pleasures and material goods : an irreligious or hedonistic person 3: neo-pagan"
What's being discussed are religious practices from thousands of years ago. Try reading the reference to Jeremiah 10:1-5 and then explaining how paganism doesn't apply.
I've never used marijuana, but at this point I don't see its' continued illegality being beneficial. Legalize it [..] Do that and you just gutted much of the business of the cartels, put many of the street gangs and lowlife dealers out of business, and would prevent it from being cut with dangerous chemicals.
You're going to have to add in cocaine, too: Forget Taxing Marijuana; The Real Money's In Cocaine
I assume what you are referring to would be "sacred oaks" or "asherah poles", which almost certainly would NOT have been fir, and I highly doubt that christians would have embraced THOSE for christmas given the clear biblical attacks on such concepts.
Are you really making a distinction between the type of tree? Wherever the idea of a Christmas tree happened to come from, it idea still reeks of paganism, and the reference to Jeremiah 10:1-5 seems spot on.
That article says:
"There is always the possibility that this was just a way of magnifying the General's achievements, but it is also possible it is true."
Which is a pretty good statement. While it does seem likely that Israel is behind Stuxnet, that statement alone is not hard evidence.
Apple has always been about proprietary and high-priced consumer items. I don't know where you're getting this, "Google is the new Apple," schtick from.
"Ah, good old cognitive dissonance -- making people ignore evidence that doesn't match their conclusions since the dawn of man."
+1 for cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy
Anybody who works in video distribution knows that distribution may require a different license than just encoding. Encoding software does not and can not include that license.
That sounds pretty absurd to me. It's like if somebody patented a drug, and then the maker of the drug was charged twice, once to make, and second to distribute the drug, and then the doctor was charged for prescribing the drug.
You really can't distribute a file just because it is encoded in a certain format? Really?
Gnome 3 doesn't have access to the large amount of user test groups that Apple, Google or Microsoft do, and even the later companies don't do changes as radical as in Gnome Shell.
Just to pick on Microsoft, the Office 2007 changes were quite radical, and they're doing it again with Metro in Windows 8.
More 1984-style crap from Amazon and their Kindle, except that it isn't imposed on you by the government. Instead, consumers and publishers accept it in a Faustian agreement. I'm never going to buy a Kindle or electronic books from Amazon.
The shares cost Apple NOTHING to hand over.
Do you understand how shares work? They are a percentage of the company. Every percentage you give away is less you own yourself. You said Jobs stole from Xerox, but the facts are Xerox willingly entered a business deal. That Xerox couldn't profit from their own technology and gave the store away is their fault.
While you are right that I don't have signatures on, I don't consider that a direct apology nor acknowledgment of the behavior that prompted me to end the debate. I'm tired of these little parlor games. Bye.
All content? Do you have the numbers to back that up? I bet you don't. Early on streaming Netflix had limited content, but there was a lot of it, including older stuff and indie stuff.
Also, if the major content guys were going to be extortionists, then agreeing to pay it gives their customers no choice except to accept an all-or-nothing deal. They could have gone with an a la carte model.
Netflix had the bully pulpit and could have stood up now instead of caving in and explained everything to their customers. Instead they thought they could push their customers around, raise their prices, and use the money to expand into Europe while also removing the convenience of having a single site for DVD rentals and online.
Even if their customers were going to get pissed off no matter what, there were better options than this.
I said I was done with this discussion as at the end you didn't provide counter-arguments and chose to engage in silly tactics instead, condescendingly assigning me "homework".
If you want an answer for this new line of inquiry then I expect an acknowledgment of this fact and an apology, as well as a promise to treat any future arguments in this debate with sincerity, respect, and intellectual honesty.
They're losing money because:
"Buying those rights is getting tougher, as studios are demanding more money for their valuable content. One analyst predicted earlier this year that Netflix's streaming content licensing costs will rise from $180 million in 2010 to a whopping $2 billion in 2012."
Then don't pay it, and explain to your customers why you aren't paying it, or offer a deal where customers can choose to pay or not in an a la carte model. What Netflix did was fucking stupid. They took the side of their business that was presumably profitable and liked by their customers, and decided to split it off into it's own thing. How fucking dumb can you get? Companies pay billions of dollars to acquire business like the original Netflix model, and they decided they were going to jettison it.
And rather than being honest with their customers, they tried to talk a bunch of corporate public relations bullshit that just pissed people off. It also looks like they were trying to extract cash from their customers so that they could expand into Europe, instead of using investment money for that.
Then again, if people were to go around saying 2 + 2 = 5, or that the world is flat, and if acknowledgment of these positions was taught to children and practically required by politicians running for office, and historically used to enforce dogma on others and hold back science...
Then wouldn't people be justified in speaking out? For fuck's sake, it's 2011, and we've got people killing and enslaving each other over mythology. I say it's about time that we grow up and kill and enslave each other over legitimate reasons.
After playing BioShock, I can't.
I'd love to see a cite for that. That quote didn't come up in a Google search. Honesty like that just doesn't happen from a company unless it's an fuckup.
At least Microsoft will actually tell you that they're trying to rip you off.
In what universe?
Having owned both devices, what I liked about the PS3 was that it was well-engineered device.
The PS3 was quiet, whereas the DVD player on the 360 sounded like a jet engine. The failure rates for the 360 were horrible. The 360 hard drive was optional so games couldn't count on it being there. The 360 didn't have standard connections for stuff like HDMI, Bluetooth, or a hard drive that was replaceable with a commodity one. Oh yeah, and that monster brick hanging off the power cord of the 360. Not that big of a deal, but the PS3 managed without it.
Sony did produce a superior console but pretty much shot themselves in the foot with the 12-18 month delay to the 360.
I don't think it was the delay so much as the sticker shock of $600, most of that probably coming from them pushing Blu-ray as the new media format.
A few years back I was modded into oblivion when I stated that I thought Dark Matter was utter BS, a way for some scientists to make the math work despite any real proof.
It's called a hypothesis, and it's one of the fundamental tools of science. They then do experiments and look for collaborating evidence to see if it's right. If you want to say dark matter is bullshit, you have to say why and argue the science. Being an armchair scientist gets you no credibility.
I'll mod posts as "Interesting" if I'm not an expert but the post appears to know what it's talking about. The distinction between all the "I" mods (Informative, Interesting, Insightful) is mostly useless anyways.