Yeah, but if "janitor steve" gets a virus, the IT department is liable and responsible to fix it and probably has the means to identify the virus and/or re-image the machine.

When your home machine craters and takes a few dozen other VPN nodes with it, they have to just sigh and say "damn users".

I worked in an office a number of years ago when the Nimda virus was floating around. We managed to keep it completely off the network for 3 days, but someone connected to an old archaic dialup system that was still active (and not firewalled) and infected the whole damn place, and I spent the next 80 hours not sleeping, trying to keep the business from going under because they had over 1000 computers that were totally useless bricks.

So... I gotta say that i see both sides.

That's an interesting point. The -istan countries were bent over and raped by Mother Russia.

This is a bit akin to saying.

"I have proof God doesn't exist. See, his priests are assholes! That proves it!"

While you might be right about Al Gore, it doesn't make the initial claim any less probable.

ROFL.

Leviticus has like 500 commandments to stone people.

Leviticus 20:27

"'A man or woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death. You are to stone them;"

Oye.

I think that's supposed to read

"are supposed to turn the other cheek"

The christianists in the bible belt haven't followed Jeebus for a long ass time.

Well, the list of things that couldn't be done isn't mine... but let me address a few for fun.

The concept of walking on water, for example, has references far older than the bible. It's a pretty common magic trick, if you're willing to swallow the claim it may be just a parlour trick (and this is all assuming, again, that the original observations are, in fact, true).

There are also a number of references to this trick having been performed on various types of shoals and reefs, where a boat may float at anchor, but a wise seaman could position it in such a way that he could virtually step off the side into only inches of water. You might assume that would be obviously visible to others, but if I recall, many who reported it were not seafaring people and may have rarely been out on open water.

There is an interesting anthropologic reference to the red sea. Anthropologists have traced the historical path of the jews out of Egypt. It's pretty well accepted that this would have happened, and it would have taken them very close tto a large bog type swamp. Locals used to map gaps in the swamp, where a person could walk clean across the entire area, but those who were not familiar with the area would wade into a bog and often drown (especially if wearing armour).

Again, assuming that this story is close to literal and isn't the great imagination of the storyteller, it's entirely plausible that they passed a swampy offshooot of the Red Sea, walked across a known land-bridge and watched the armies behind them perish in the bogs, figuratively "splitting" the red sea.

Of course, our vision of Charleton Heston holding his staff in front of a massive wall of water is spiffy and all, but there isn't much more than that to go on. :-)

As for resurrection, I have no idea, except it's not impossible to fake someone's death, especially given sufficient collaboration with outsiders and sufficient time to plan. It's also quite possible to make up such statements. As it has been said, nobody of any historical significance SAW any resurrected people. If I recall, the eye-witnesses were always "the faithful" and/or "random joe who couldn't possibly dispute the claim" which makes them a dubious claim as far as historical accuracy is concerned.

Isn't this fun?

I figured everyone carried around $10,000 worth of gear, c'mon, hurry up. :-)

Ahh fair enough.

If you do get into using the flash, do yourself a favor and get a good pack of gels. CTO, 1/2CTO and a set of 'full green' are required, others as needed.

But outdoors, where the flash is the easiest way to really make a photo "pop", you still won't get any burst mode out of it. :-P

I agree with this statement to a limited point.

It's topically accurate in context of the current discussion.

On a more relevant use of occam's razor, I would like to point out that the belief of the gospels as accurate and divine accounts of the events is the foundation of your faith, but merely an offshoot (and a trivial one, at best) of ours.

The fact that there is an impasse on this topic is a bit irrelevant, because I don't require these documents to have been written on a certain date by a certain person who witnessed a certain event that was inspired in a certain way and was worded in a certain fashion in a certain language which lead to a perfect translation for my own belief system to be self-supporting.

In fact, my own belief has really nothing to do with some ancient manuscripts.

If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all lived to 70-100 years old (as would have been required by the estimated dating of the original documents) AND sent these letters, we're still left with letters from 70-100 year old guys recounting magic tricks from their youth, 50-80 years earlier, all written 1,975 years ago as the sole basis for an entire belief system, which I'm still not convinced is even internally consistent.

I have to admit, when something like Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" was written, it was a pretty far fetched concept.

But the fact that something like 7 million individual examples have been found, none of which undermine the fundamental concept... and the fact that disparate studies, such as radioactive dating is brought in and almost exactly matches early guesses of the ages of things. And when theories about geologic formations of rocks are hatched independently but then exactly match with theories about the evolution of animals in such an environment and then later, those exact animals are found in the exact rock strata...

And the sheer volume of contradiction with these findings that a literal (or even semi-literal) reading of holy texts must endure...

I used to buy into the media crap about "we're just not quite sure". But when it comes down to it, a literal reading of the bible as an ancient factual text just deflates so completely that it's almost worthless.

That makes it very difficult to even approach the allegorical value, let alone the value as an exact, word-for-word account of historical events (not even bringing to bear, the religious significance).

Oye, so many holes, it's blinding to even try to approach all of them.

Do you believe the earth was flooded completely enough to wipe out all living things, just 6000 years ago?

Do you think a sufficient genetic pool of every animal on earth could fit on a boat... even a boat constructed with the best modern alloys and composites? For months? And then repopulate the entire earth (even the non-attached continents) in just a few decades?

Did you know that people who start from the basis of believing this book claim that the grand canyon was carved in 1 week and the end of the flood? :-P

Were dinosaur bones put there to fool me and the other unbelievers? Or is the entire old-book just an allegory?

Do you find it at all ironic that after hundreds of years of putting together a pretty good estimate about evolutionary heritage, that modern DNA sequencing and the concept of genetic drift would almost exactly corroborate these theories?

When I was shooting professionally, I shot almost exclusively with flash, at least indoors. I would wager to say that most photojournalists do this a fair bit, despite the modern sensor sensitivity.

I shoot with a D700 and a f/1.2 lens and still use a flash most of the time.

A gelled flash is the only way to go in producing superior photos in a limited timeframe.

The only type of shooting I find myself really using the high sensitivity of the digital to its fullest is actually action and sports. In fact, I"m totally at a loss why you would select a film camera as a better option for action, but nothing else. If anything, sports is the forte of digital SLRs, beyond all else.

Multiple translations = KJV, NIV, etc.

I've seen some pretty interesting discussions regarding the originality of the gospel texts being likely Aramaic and then later translated to Koine Greek, which actually explains away some of the contradictions or apparent logical gaps, but then leaves you with the concept of further translation errors...

I dunno, there's about a 500 year gap from "supposedly happened" to "have a consistent text".

In the era, that's a pretty substantial gap to justify undying faith upon.

But if you have undying faith, I'm sure you'll manage. :-)

I guess you would get a "giPad" which sounds like something much more smelly...

Oh yeah, and almost every manuscript from antiquity is regarded with a healthy dose of skepticism because of the likelihood of point-modifications by previous copies.

The more politically polarizing the text, the less it is treated as direct reference and the more is assumed about what might have been changed in the process. That's pretty standard anthropology.

But, of course, the KJV bible is the unaltered word of Jeebus.

http://www.av1611.org/kjv/fight.html#fight2

Yep.

ROFL.

I think we were just talking about "interpretation", weren't we?

I find it highly ironic that there are at least a dozen different sects (or uhm, denominations) where there are pretty vast differences in interpretation, all with "scripture" reference.

The fact that the bible specifically condones slavery and stoning might fly for Muslims, but not so much for Christians. I'm sure your particular sect's opinion is that some newer text says that these things don't apply anymore. I'm not quite sure how this justifies a variety of absurd crap like avoiding red meat on fridays during a certain month, but some believe that too.

Half of the world's Christian population buys the Lev 18:22 view of homosexuality but 99% of them reject the 11:22 view of unholy shellfish.

Srsly?

I won't even go into technicalities of translations, except that there are clearly a variety of issues that have been pointed out over the years, not the least of which is the fact that the "gospels" were written between 50 and 150 years after the events took place, after the authors had been traveling together preaching the story for their entire life as a means of livelihood. The fact that they are textually identical in a number of accounts (75-100 years after the fact?) simply reinforces the probability that it was all a carefully chosen fabrication from the authors, unless, of course, you choose to believe it was all divinely inspired, which really makes one question the areas of the four gospels that textually DISAGREE about certain events.

pfft.

I won't even go into some of the other same-era scrolls that have been found that directly contradict (like some of the Dead Sea scrolls, etc).

Just the whole stupid arc and flood story.. yeesh.

And God put dinosaur bones in the ground just to fool us, did he?

Or perhaps he was just being metaphorical when he was talking about creating things in 6 days?

I just don't get what sort of "research" is required here.

There, I fixed that for you.

uhm...

I think it would be "empowerment"

I'm can't think of any verbs that can't be nounded, but maybe my imagination is failing me. LOL

There are plenty of nous that can't be verbed easily. (such as noun and verb and door, etc)