Re: Dawkins
Really? Even most of the atheists I know find him and his works irritating biased and smug!
6847 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2010
As an actual 'bible-bashing' Christian, "contains principles and guidelines to be a good person” is not what the bible is about. That's a massively watered down, namby-pamby don't-want-to-offend-anyone interpretation tied to the middle-England idea of Jesus as a friendly white bloke with flowing blond locks who went round telling people nice things about themselves.
Having said that, "seriously awful things in the bible" is also rather disingenuous.
Neither of those are in the bible. At the very least you have paraphrased them. And you've done the usual thing of make some statement about the bible without providing references, knowing most people will blindly believe you (ironic in the circumstances).
That aside, you can play that game - cherry-picking sentences or shorter out of context - with just about any source. The papers like to do it all the time, as do politicians.
It wasn't insightful the first time either :)
I'd bet the majority commenting about the morality of the bible (whether in a positive or negative light) are doing so primarily based on what they remember from religious studies lessons as children.
Considering the majority of Christians haven't read the whole thing, and most lay-people people will happily believe just about anything you tell them about the bible/Christianity if you sound certain, I think it's a safe bet. Certainly most of what I thought the bible taught before I read it was either incorrect or came from somewhere else entirely.
It's hard to say the bible's place in the best-seller lists. Leaving aside bulk orders (which I think count?) there are so many versions. Probably a dozen or so 'mainstream' (NIV, NKJV, American standard, etc) of which many are published in different formats (plain bible, study bible, bible in a year, amplified bible). And that's before you get on to less rigid translations like The Message which are very popular but cannot really be classed as translations.
You'd have to combine the sales of dozens of different books to get a meaningful figure. Maybe this is done as a matter of course, I have no idea?
Interesting point. The goal of distributing the bible to as many people as possible must have driven advances in technologies such as printing, as well as in understanding many many languages... people learning obscure languages purely so they can provide a translation to those people.
I've worked in offices where anyone might need to do scanning. We didn't have a scanner on every PC. We had one PC with a scanner, which you'd jump on if you needed to scan something. If we'd been a business who did a lot of scanning it would've been different but then that's a special case in which case your whole argument is meaningless because we're talking about general IT, not any number of niches (programmers, architects, artists, scientists, etc)
Yes but in your example, you need one person with a PC used for such things, you don't need everyone to have a PC just in case they need to do some scanning.
Of course some people need a full PC interface either for performance or input/usability reasons - just as some people actually need 4-wheel drive or a pickup truck to drive around in day-to-day.
Yeah because clearly a)those are the ONLY two options and b)experiences online don't affect perception of the real world or vice versa.
Looking at a photo of a naked lady online circa 1995 dialup is very different from what is available now. And it's not like extreme/hard porn is any harder to find, potentially even easier, than soft stuff. If finding the hard stuff required special effort it might be different but kids are likely to stumble across pretty extreme stuff right off the bat.
My mum can (just about) figure how to install FireFox or Chrome - she had it on her old PC which my late father set up and knew she wanted it on the new one. But anything past that she has no idea - the settings menu is intrinsically a scary place to most people remember. :)
I'm sure there is truth in what you say but I think you overstate things. Many people are savvy enough to install FireFox (or Chrome) but simply install it and consider it installed. The proportion who know how to set their preferred search engine is likely higher on FF/Chrome than IE but I'd suggest is definitely not more than 50%.
Still worth a chunk of cash to MS, definitely.
It might hurt them but if as suggested, Mozilla couldn't function without Google's cash, would Google like to kill FF? Or do they not care what browser people use as long as all browsers are fast and support stadnards well - i.e. do they care about browser share or only that people are doing everything online?
The NowTV is actually on my (reasonably decent but not amazing) plasma TV but maybe that's irrelevant?
I was aware about the 24fps thing, but I thought other things mattered e.g. TVs boast of 600Hz (or whatever), 5ms response, etc.
Is it really the case that everyone sees that nasty judder even on top-end TVs then? I guess I thought all that fancy processing in a £2k tv compared to a £500 one magically fixed such things!
And - thanks for the great answer.
I've seen this both on TV and in cinemas - the camera pans quickly and you can't really see clearly what's happening, like it's not really that smooth.
I don't understand how that happens on a modern TV or projector - is it actually part of the recording, the display technology, or my eyes/brain? It's certainly worse in some cases - F1 on NowTV streaming for instance - but considering I see it in big budget movies in the cinema I am starting to wonder if it's me?!
It would be interesting to get figures on how many hours are spent watching films in cinemas per week, compared with TV. I don't know if the data is available but you could for instance find a 1-cinema town and ask how many tickets they sell per week, multiply by 2. Scale up based on town population Vs national population and compare to official TV viewing figures.
My total guess is cinema viewing is tiny in comparison, like 2% of TV watching 'man hours'. Anyone able to do some guesstimates or provide data?
As you say - SOME cases. But not to the extent most people bother buying dedicated HiFi equipment any more, they just use their phone or PC.TVs are still in the "everyone has one" phase, like HiFi was 20 years ago.
I'm not so sure TVs are on the way out but it's certainly a possibility.
Given the stuff you see is from people you told FB you were friends with, "how utterly stupid a large proportion of the population is" reflects more on your social circle than the population as a whole.
While I agree most of the population are stupid or boring (to me) I only make friends in real life with those who don't fit that description... why not follow the same rules online?
FB is FAR more useful and less annoying when you use it to network with people you'd actually talk to. If you open it up to people whose opinions you aren't interested in, of course it will seem rubbish.
Nominate as most arrogant comment of the day... if only they were as informed, smart and awesome as me they'd clearly take my viewpoint because that is objectively the only sensible viewpoint any right minded individual COULD take.
Get over yourself.
"Tie yourself and others into proprietary formats, and be at the whim of a single entity who's only purpose is to extract as much money from their customers as possible?"
Proprietary, open formats which are a recognised standard that other major players support?
Oh, no, a company who exists to make money. If only we could all work for free!
People who aren't paranoid I imagine, and the subset of geeks who aren't obsessed with the NSA.
Whether it only phones come when it hears it's name is quite relevant I think. The article suggests not but could just be inaccurate.
As for why: don't know. Being able to control music playback in your home, lighting, etc, could be neat. But that doesn't really require cloudy stuff, surely PC software can do it.
Seems to me one problem is simply the mic won't hear you unless you're in the right room. For this to be as transparent and useful as possible it needs to "just work" no matter where you are... so you can wander between rooms.
Why would sending a few analysed voice commands be an issue. It may be listening the whole time but is it like having Skype turned on all day, or only when it hears its name will it actually open a channel?
Either way, I rather think it is the point. It's a techy thing for techy folk.