I third or fourth the trac. Its pretty easy to set up and is easy to use, once you get to its wiki syntax. I particularly like its code comparison features, showing revisions as they've changed so you can see why something stopped working after a merge.

I'm sorry you think I'm a nut. My belief is belief, yes. But its also grounded on logic and reasonability. As well as evidence from the Bible. I know it appears to be illogical in that I'm trying to argue from within a particular system of belief instead of arguing from outside the system to attempt to prove my point. But it actually is more logically correct to argue from the standpoint of internal consistency given that I actually do believe that God is really capable of total sovereignty. There is certainly more evidence than just the Bible to corroborate the existence of Jesus and his actions (Josephus, archeological clues, even the Koran). But because I believe that God is really capable of proving His own existence I rely most on the Bible to describe the truth.

As to your particular points/questions.

1)"how do we know which version of the Bible is his word?"
The version that most closely approximates the earliest manuscripts that most consistently agree. As far as English translations go, most scholars would agree that its either New American Standard Bible (NASB) or the English Standard Version (ESV). It turns out that there really aren't that many inconsistencies amongst the different copies we have access to now-a-days. Most of the differences are things like "the Lord Jesus Christ" vs. "Jesus Christ the Lord" it counts as a difference, but its really not meaningfully different. If you're serious about examining this topic, and I hope you are, take a listen to this presentation by Dr. Dan Wallace. It's excellent. Very academic from one of the world's leading scholars.

2)"You have just as much evidence the fairy exists as you do god."
Actually the main reason I believe in God is because there is an empty tomb where the body of Jesus was initially laid. Its empty because He rose from the dead which sort of serves as a receipt of payment for our sins, thus satisfying God's righteous wrath against those sins. Now if you're going to try and make the "the disciples stole the body" argument, I'm sad to say that the evidence is quite stacked against that one. (1) they were a rag-tag group of laborers who were dispersed and scared when their leader was killed and had no ability or courage to try and 'rescue his body' (2) The body was buried in a tomb with a huge rock rolled down hill, sealed by the Roman seal, and guarded by a bunch of Roman soldiers. See point 1, there's no way they were going to move the stone, break the seal, and defeat a bunch of guards. Matthew 27:57-64 describes all of this.

I hope that answers some of your questions. Please feel free to continue this thread if you want to discuss things further.

I don't understand what you mean. Are you saying that the Bible describes God, but is not His words given to us? How do you deal with 2 Timothy 3:16 "All scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness"? This verse seems pretty clearly saying that scripture comes from God and communicates His meaning. You say the Bible is a pointer to the "Word of God", are you saying there is some extra-Biblical revelation that is recorded elsewhere? Please don't mis-interpret my question as baiting you. I've just never heard your argument before and I'm trying to understand it.

It turns out that if God is really God then He is able to ensure that only His word is actually included in the Bible. We sort of throw this term 'God' around without realizing sometimes what that word means. In orthodox Christianity God is omnipotent (all powerful), omnipresent (everwhere & everywhen), and omniscient (all knowing). If God really has those attributes, then it follows that He would be able to make sure His book was exactly what He wanted it to be. When the authors of the Bible wrote the text they were led by the Holy Spirit to write God's words. When the church fathers got together to assemble the books of the Bible the Holy Spirit led them as well. When I read the Bible today, I can feel the Holy Spirit enlivening the words on the page. You ask how does someone decide what books are in the Bible? My answer is God decides.

I just spent 3 months doing cloud computing where we used a 'columner database' similar to big table. We got around the problems because the database was auto indexed lexigraphically by key and we'd make up different keys to help us index the data to find various 'cells' of data quickly and easily. It was beautiful because if we decided a day later that we wanted a new column, we just changed our keys to include the new column and it was there. That way we could quickly prototype, eventually settle on good 'table structure' for lack of a better term, and we could withdraw results very quickly. We could also add new columns much later if we needed to, like if we wanted to store totally different types of data in the same tables later.

The downside to this database is that its very inefficient for rapid transactions. So you would never use it for something like ebay, where the records change 'status' (from for sale to sold). But you could easily use it for something like craigslist or google which stores __lots__ of data that doesn't change.

I've been working on cloud at work and we broke it down this way.

Cloud as a service: Which is like you said a platform to deliver distributed processing on various tasks. For example, do all your virus scanning on a network service that provides virus scanning so that you don't have to bother with keeping virus defs up to date, and provides other benefits.

Cloud as computation engine: Which is where you use the cloud to actually do the compute intensive tasks sort of the way google uses it. Following our AV example, if you use the cloud to do calculations on how many machines have had virus X on it, and then store all the viruses in the cloud to compare their various similarities and evolution and deployment patterns, you might come up with some very interesting conclusions about the sources of malware and their future. This uses the cloud too as a database to store the results for easy query ala BigTable. So in effect you're doing more traditional 'beowulf' type calculations. (insert slashdot joke here about beowulf ;)

At work, I just finished a 3 month project where we tried to apply cloud processing power (using hadoop, and internally developed version of bigTable) against a difficult problem set. We were starting to get the hang of things and producing results by the time the project period ended. But the Killer concept we learned after about a month was:

Have good node-provisioning and management software.

We wrote a few python scripts to move config files around and do auto-provisioning, but I think we should have spent more time on this. Given the amount of headache we all had to do to keep the cloud up and running. Stuff would break, and it took us often a long time to figure out the problem and then do something about it.

The office that took on the project after we left, was told to spend some time creating a better system admin, provisioning software suite or give up the project. Its not exactly sexy work to fix the behind the curtain problems, but they will bite you if you don't spend some time on it up-front.

Wow, I don't think I've ever heard such a succinct defense of the 2nd amendment.

Well played sir.

I couldn't agree with you more. Why is it that congresspeople think they can circumvent or undermine the constitution?

It blows my mind, for example, that they're trying to make Washington D.C. a state. Article 1, Section 8: "To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places..."

The District is explicitly NOT a state. Without an Amendment, how can they even consider this legislation?