It's not as well known as it deserves to be, but the early Christians were actually a very diverse group. What we now call Gnosticism was representative of many if not most of them.

Sadly it was systematically stamped out, largely in part because there is such great power in organized religion and adherence to its dogmas.

Excluded, "non-canonical" books like the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Enoch, and the Gospel of Judas are really fascinating to read.

That's both sad and amusing. Having read and learned about the Bible, I can tell you this much: the geneologies in Genesis and elsewhere are not complete and exhuastive. They do not claim to be complete and exhaustive. Nowhere in the Bible is it so much as implied that they are.

The standard ancient Hebrew practice of listing such geneologies is to list only the most famous/notable ancestors. More mediocre and lesser-known ancestors are left out deliberately because they were not considered worthy of mention. Thus there are large gaps of unknown time in the geneologies listed in Genesis and elsewhere. Nothing to the contrary is ever claimed. This fact is not even difficult to find out, except that it does depend on doing your own homework instead of letting the TV and the culture do the thinking for you. The main point of all the geneologies in the Bible is to establish that the line of King David was known (old testament) and is the same line from which Yeshua (new testament) is descended, which is important because various prophecies concerning the Messiah predicted this (e.g. Isaiah).

To infer some kind of final ultimate Age of Humanity or Age of The Earth from this is madness. The Bible never represents it as such, and anyone claiming it does is simply unfamiliar with the very book (and ancient Hebrew culture) they are claiming to understand. The Bible makes no claims whatsoever concerning things like how long ago Adam lived, how long ago Noah lived, how long ago the Flood was, etc.

Most self-described Christians don't know this and that's just plain fucking lazy, to be frank with you. You believe this is the WORD OF GOD and yet you can't be bothered to learn a few easily researched facts about it?? This is what happens when people always have some excuse for why they won't do their own thinking and their own learning.

If you are conducting the surveillance of me necessary to make that determination, then your surveillance is faulty. I merely gave an example scenario and I don't share this puerile urge to make everything into a personal matter. So I wrote in such a way that I made no claims about my own programming skill or lack thereof, in order to provide a hypothetical. What I wrote is equally true whether I've never seen a compiler before or whether I am an advanced expert.

The hostility you have makes you appear stupid because it prevents you from thinking of such things. After all, such things might make me seem reasonable and level-headed. That would be like giving aid and comfort to The Enemy, right?

At no point did I say that anyone should or shouldn't work on this project. Re-read it yourself if you doubt I know what I wrote. To paraphrase: what I said is that it's an unusually important project and therefore the work involves higher stakes. No one is really going to care very much if you screw up a free single-player solitaire game. If you screw up SSL, that can impact many other people in negative ways. By saying that I am hardly keeping competent people from their jobs, though it's flattering that you would ascribe to me such power.

This isn't difficult to acknowledge; at least, it certainly shouldn't be. Is there something about saying it that makes you so angry? Were you built up by praise you didn't really earn and are coming to realize how fragile a foundation that really is, or what (by means of my "platitudes")? Beware of hating someone for no good reason, someone who means well by you and wants good things for you. It's one of the more toxic ways you can pollute yourself.

Ever heard of the principle of non-resistance? If he really was trolling then my post will affect him more than it could affect anyone else.

I don't really think he was. I think he made an emotional outburst reflecting his view of an unpleasant (but improving) situation. That can seem like trolling especially when it turns into a big story (among techies anyway) like this did. But I don't claim to know his heart and I could be wrong, in which case the above applies.

If you think the NSA (and others -- looking at you, GCHQ) isn't playing by the same game as gov.cn, you're deluded.

While I find that's pretty infuriating, I do think that if you're forced to have U-Verse (e.g.: alternatives suck speed wise), then it's probably recommended to have another (non-vulnerable) router between you and the 2-wire and to turn off the wifi radio.

I don't see Apple in that list. However, that doesn't mean it's certainly not impacted. Does anyone have any guess about this?

And when you know for a fact that those instructions will be handled by a department that is not interested in communicating honestly with the customer, especially if doing so might convey a sense that the product is dangerous?

It's not a fallacy, because we use words and correlations between words to convey nuance. Otherwise things get so slippery that you can claim you meant anything.

A free but limited version and a full, paid one is completely reasonable. There's several ways to do it too, but I think perhaps the best division is between the casual and the dedicated user. Casual users are unlikely to pay if forced, but they can still be good advocates for the app, so it may be worth it making sure they still have something to use.

I also like the Carcassonne/Ascension model: DLC game expansions within the game as IAP. That's how to do IAP right, not this "buy my virtual coin" bullshit. Whenever I see an awesome looking game, I immediately check to see if anything looks "coin-like" on their IAP list. Any scent of that kind of BS puts the game into "ignore forever" state.

I'm not looking to crop-share on your farmville, developers. It's really a pity that Apple never bothered in reigning in this app business model.

Not necessarily - imagine software that controls a physical device, which has safety concerns. There's a simple and elegant check that can be performed that catches 90% of the dangerous use-cases, or there's a really hideously complex set of layered checks that will catch 99% of them. You have two days to ship or you're fired. Which do you include?

Other way around, actually. 'Morals' -> 'mores', which is about customs and expected public behaviors; 'ethics' -> 'ethos', which is about internal guiding principles.

And every employer I've developed code for has told me the same thing: shut up and get back to work.

Ultimately, in order to address the ethical considerations of programming, we would need a work culture that supports it. Otherwise it simply becomes another "know which side your bread is buttered on" lesson.

Public schooling was never intended to encourage curiosity and deep understanding. People like that would be too difficult to manipulate via advertising, PR, carefully cherry-picked news, and other forms of propaganda. No one in politics or business wants that.

Okay, well, the root post of this discussion - the one I first responded to, said:

My response was to that scenario. If you're going to stop engaging with that scenario, do so explicitly, rather than trying to sneak in assumptions that are impossible in that scenario just to score points.