Fire and Knowledge

Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs

Interesting!

Sorry for the lack of updates the last couple days. My wife and I are in FL enjoying a sunny vacation.

Right now I’m reading a book entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman. Every person should read this book. It is an amazing eye-opener to the devastating effects that television has had on our culture. It should be on every person’s bookshelf and read more than once.

“America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations. ‘The Founding Fathers,’ [Richard Hofstadter] writes, ‘were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.’ A society shaped by such men does not easily move in contrary directions. We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.”
–Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 41

Ballmer: Linux May Violate 228 Patents

CEO Steve Ballmer told attendees that Linux violates over 228 patents, and “somebody will come and look for money owing to the rights for that intellectual property,”

I wonder if Ballmer can spell FUD?

Microsoft Denies Piracy Accusations

Despite all of its anti-piracy bravado, Microsoft found itself on the receiving end of accusations that it used an illegal copy of Sound Forge to edit WAV sound files that shipped as part of the Windows Media Player Tour in Windows XP.

Oh, the irony of this accusation is killing me!

Sin

Now with quotes, reorganization, external resources, and bullets.

I love Spurgeon. And I love Iain Murray’s book on him entitled The Forgotten Spurgeon. It lit my heart on fire the first time I read it. Here is one of the many wonderful quotes from Spurgeon contained in that little book:

“Brethren, in all our hearts there is this natural enmity to God and to the sovereignty of His grace . . . . I have known men bit their lip and grind their teeth in rage when I have been preaching the sovereignty of God . . . . The doctrinaires of today will allow a God, but he must not be a King: that is to say, they choose a god who is no god, and rather the servant than the ruler of men . . . . The fact that conversion and salvation are of God, is [a] humbling truth. It is because of its humbling character that men do not like it. To be told that God must save me if I am to be saved, and that I am in his hand, as clay is in the hands of a potter, ‘I do not like it’ saith one. Well, I thought you would not; whoever dreamed you would?” (60)

Google Scholar

“Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.”

Very cool. This should be well recieved by the academic community.