That depends on which bible you mean....there are many.

Really? Lost to history?! Hardly....lost to the ignorant and uneducated maybe, but even atheists like me know full well Jesus the man was a Jew, and definitely not a European or "white". Roman/Italian artists knew this, but worked for a Roman church so portrayed him in their image.

Genetic purity?! Lol. I guess that means no one has EVER become Jewish, you're either born one by two pure Jewish parents or not. Hardly reality, and would reject nearly every person in Israel (or elsewhere). Just because there is a long standing religious/cultural taboo against marriage outside the culture, it still happens, as does conversion. Racial/genetic purity is a fallacy debunked by genetic testing.

Prophecy is a leap. No prophecy has been correctly interpreted until AFTER the events supposedly prophesied occurred. It's ridiculous to go back after the fact and claim "see, now that I know exactly how to interpret the unclear prophecy I couldn't decipher before, it's a 100% perfect prediction" but never be able to predict the future. That's the same nonsensical logic mediums use.

The second temple was also the third, since the true second temple was originally a rather modest structure constructed by a number of Jewish exile groups returning to the Levant from Babylon under the Achaemenid-appointed governor Zerubbabel. However, during the reign of Herod the Great, the Second Temple was completely refurbished, and the original structure was totally overhauled into the large and magnificent edifices and facades that are more recognizable. Logically, the third temple was the one destroyed by Romans, the second replaced by Herod but the new one was still called the second temple anyway. (To avoid contradicting prophecy? ;-) )

If the dome of the rock, the second most holy place in Islam, is destroyed, expect Jerusalem to follow soon after, as that will definitely start a religious war between nuclear powers.

Herodotus is credited with using the term Palestinian first, in the 5th century BCE as an ethnonym, making no distinction between Arabs, Jews, or other cultures inhabiting of the area. Romans adopted the term as the official administrative name for the region in the 2nd century CE, "Palestine" as a stand-alone term then came into widespread use, printed on coins, in inscriptions and even in rabbinic texts.

I think you are confused about the history, here's a primer...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judaism_in_the_Land_of_Israel

The area was populated by various people's including Jews until the Jewish–Roman wars of 66–136 CE, during which the Romans expelled most of the Jews from the area (well, really they arguably left voluntarily because they refused to be second class citizens barred from practicing their religion freely) and replaced it with the Roman province of Syria Palaestina, the Arabs were already there, not invaders or immigrants. When Assyrians (Mesopotamians) invaded in circa 722 BCE, they ruled empirically, meaning only the Jewish ruling elite left, returning in 538 BCE under Cyrus the Great....so no, the Arabs didn't just settle after the Jews were dispersed.

It's patently ridiculous to say the Arab nations were unprovoked, Jewish illegal immigration led to a hostile takeover of the region by illegal immigrants with rapid expansion of their territories into their neighbors continuing through today. The Jews defeated the Arabs thanks to American backing and exponentially better hardware. It was only their right if might makes right, and the Arab nations are under no obligation to let them keep what they stole any more than the Jews were obligated to let the Arab nations retain control in the first place. If Iran, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or any combination can take it, by your logic they have every right to do so.

I do agree, in the end there will be more conflict until the area becomes uninhabitable....largely because every religion's prophecies end with them in control, and no one wants to admit it's all nonsensical iron age tribalism at work.

I would be interested in seeing what the cost for the software and hardware creation services on that was. Also how do you go about repairs when one of those bargain basement contraptions break down?

When I started in games, we could create assets with polygons that had more than 3 vertices, as long as it was coplanar. This probably still works because when the switch from software rendering to hardware was going on, even the early cards like the S3 or 3DFX would automatically handle it by converting it into triangles.

it offers nothing new to a DJ's workflow while replacing one failure point with 2 new ones (battery and proprietary RF) and adds another stupid little box that's definitely going to cause problems during setup. DVSs are already a pain in the ass, have compromised sound quality, have latency issues, fail all the time (both user error and software/hardware errors) which is one of the many reasons why almost no touring DJs outside the turntablism/party rock world use them anymore. 99.9% of headliners and locals are USB/SD card and CDJ2000s.

the rane 12 is a much more robust and professional product that fills the same gap as this toy. also, i swear i saw this getting hyped around 5 years ago.

A big part of the Zero's reputation came from racking up kills in China against a lot of second-rate planes with poorly-trained pilots. After all, there was a reason that the Republic of China hired the American Volunteer Group to help out during the Second Sino-Japanese War – Chinese pilots had a hard time cutting it.

The Wildcat was deficient in many ways versus the Zero, but it still had superior firepower via ammo loadout. The Zero carried very few 20mm rounds, most of it's ammo was 7.7mm. There are records of Japanese pilots unloading all their 7.7mm ammo on a Wildcat and it was still flyable. On the flip side, the Wildcat had an ample supply of .50 cal.

Stanley "Swede" Vejtasa was able to score seven kills against Japanese planes in one day with a Wildcat.

Yes, the discovery of the Akutan Zero helped the United States beat this plane. But MilitaryFactory.com notes that the Hellcat's first flight was on June 26, 1942 – three weeks after the raid on Dutch Harbor that lead to the fateful crash-landing of the Mitsubishi A6M flown by Tadayoshi Koga.

Marine Captain Kenneth Walsh described how he knew to roll to the right at high speed to lose a Zero on his tail. Walsh would end World War II with 17 kills. The Zero also had trouble in dives, thanks to a bad carburetor.

We were behind in technology for many reasons, but once the Hellcat started replacing the Wildcat, the Japanese Air Superiority was over. Even if they had maintained a lead in technology, as Russia showed in WW2, quantity has a quality all of it's own. We were always going to be able to field more pilots and planes than Japan would be able to.

As far as Soviet rockets, once we were stunned by the launch of Sputnik, we kicked into high gear. You can say what you will of reliability, consistency, and dependability, but exactly how many manned Soviet missions landed on the moon and returned? Other than Buran, which was almost a copy of our Space Shuttle, how many shuttles did the USSR field?

The Soviets did build some things that were very sophisticated and were, for a while, better than what we could field. The Mig-31 is a great example. We briefly lagged behind but have a much superior air capability now. The only advantages the Mig and Sukhoi have is speed, they can fire all their missiles and flee. If they are engaged however, they will lose if pilots are equally skilled.

As @newtboy has said, I am sure that Russia and China are working on military advancements, but the technology simply doesn't exist to make a Hypersonic missile possible at this point.

China is fielding a man portable rifle that can inflict pain, not kill, and there is no hard evidence that it works.

There is no proof that the Chinese have figured out the technology for an operational rail gun on land, let alone the sea. We also have created successful railguns, the problem is POWERING them repeatedly, especially onboard a ship. If they figured out a power source that will pull it off, then it is possible, but there is no concrete proof other than a photo of a weapon attached to a ship. Our experts are guessing they might have it functional by 2025, might...

China has shown that long range QEEC is possible. It has been around but they created the first one capable of doing it from space. The problem is, they had to jury rig it. Photons, or light, can only go through about 100 kilometers of optic fiber before getting too dim to reliably carry data. As a result, the signal needs to be relayed by a node, which decrypts and re-encrypts the data before passing it on. This process makes the nodes susceptible to hacking. There are 32 of these nodes for the Beijing-Shanghai quantum link alone.

The main issue with warfare today is that it really doesn't matter unless the battle is between one of the big 3. Which means that ANY action could provoke Nuclear conflict. Is Russia going to hypersonic missile one of our carriers without Nukes become an option on the table as a retaliation? Is China going to railgun a ship and risk nuclear war?

Hell no, no more than we would expect to blow up some major Russian or Chinese piece of military hardware without severe escalation! Which means we can create all the technological terrors we like, because we WON'T use them unless they somehow provide us a defense against nuclear annihilation.

So just like China and Russia steal stuff from us to build military hardware to counter ours, if they create something that is significantly better, we will began trying to duplicate it. The only thing which would screw this system to hell is if one of us actually did begin developing a successful counter measure to nukes. If that happens, both of the other nations are quite likely to threaten IMMEDIATE thermonuclear war to prevent that country from developing enough of the counter measures to break the tie.

I actually used an old Intellimouse Explorer 2.0 from 2003 today -- it's in my laptop bag for those times when the trackpad just doesn't cut it.

Still works pretty well. The button hardware switches are a bit old and some of them produce signals that are too noisy for the signal bounce processing chips to filter out. So, the wheel button registers a single click as a double basically 100% of the time (PITA when using it to open new tabs in a browser), and the "forward" button does the same 50% of the time (much less frequently an issue). Not half bad for 15 year old hardware, really.

After these phased out of popularity, I switched loyalties to Logitech and then more recently Razer. But the hand feel of the chassis (which will be the exact same for this reboot version) of the Explorer was really quite excellent. Might have to look for one!

Meh, padlocks are not for securing valuable property or for securing property against someone with any sort of tools at all. They are for preventing opportunistic theft. 30 seconds to defeat the lock is plenty long enough for that. Of course, that is a pretty stupid design, so good video nonetheless. If I owned one already, a little solder or permanent loctite on the inner screws would probably do the trick.

Mostly though, The lock company lost me at $100 for the lock. A traditional dial is not *that* hard to work and I'd be worried about false negatives and dead batteries even with a high-quality finger print reader. Just buy a $10 padlock at the hardware store to lock up your garbage cans, or proper u-lock or quality cable to lock up your $600 bicycle (ie, something that will require 15 minutes to defeat).

Could be a $200 receiver/amp and $200 floorstanders with $2 Chinese drivers. Only bragging if it's decent hardware.

Nope. It switches for me on the same hardware. Also good headphones will go a lot lower than most speakers especially computer speakers. When you have a 5-6" midrange driver in a "subwoofer" attempting to produce sub 40hz tones it doesn't tend to work very well .

By far the best class I took while getting my Computer Science degree was "Software Engineering Project". We got assigned a project and divided up into teams including CS, CIS, and MIS majors. The MIS people managed and divided up assignments, and the CS people handled different aspects of the programming, like data structures / algorithms / UI / whatever.

This looks like an extremely fun and interesting extension of that. There's CS guys programming, EE guys doing hardware / sensors / haptic panels, full-on Engineering guys doing fluid dynamics, etc.

Destin seems like a great "jack of all trades" type that can get in there and ask really smart questions off the cuff. All the guys geeking out and being impressed with his intuitions and yet hesitant to confirm anything is hilarious to watch.

The funny thing was that after the genesis, they almost always neglected to have a solid library of games available for their hardware. The game gear was incredibly more capable than the gameboy, but they didn't support it with titles. Same as the nomad. If they could have managed to swing one of their portables into being a viable nintendo competitor, they might still be around.

Slashdot had a post about an upcoming (about 1 year out) phone that can run pretty standard Linux distros. I took interest because I'm very annoyed about how UNconfigurable android is.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S2, very old by now, but hardware wise it still works fine. Software wise, it is shit. Android apps are massively bloated compared to when the phone was new, so the "system" partition of the phone is too small to install anything other than like 1-2 apps. From what I can tell, rooting might not help because there are still standard partitioning requirements? I dunno. Anyway, it is a big mess compared to a desktop, where I can partition things any way I want (which works great if you know what you are doing).

Anyway, I don't want to shill for Purism, the company that will be making the phone in the Slashdot article (for one thing, the phone is still a year or so away from final production), but they seem to be doing things right. They DO have some laptops on the market now, which apparently include a relevant feature mentioned in the write-up about their upcoming phone: hardware kill switches for the microphone, camera, and WiFi/Bluetooth.

If you read the ToS (hah! as if) for things like Facebook's app or the phones / OS themselves, you might see that you are "agreeing" to this kind of data collectionspying. If that sets the bar for "good" behavior, imagine what the bad guys (NSA, other agencies, state actors, unscrupulous advertisers, malware producers, etc.) can and will do. That's why any software solution is dubious. That's why electrical tape over your webcam is better than assuming that the record light is trustworthy. That's why a hardware kill switch is a good feature if you're concerned about this (like me).

Here's links to:
an article about the hardware kill switches in Purism's laptops, and
an article about their upcoming phone the Librem 5

I don't own any of their hardware. I don't like paid shills. That being said, I'm interested in what they are doing.

What this company (snapperstech.com) did is put together an upgraded control "rig" to manipulate facial expressions, taking into account muscle limits and interactions, skin elasticity, etc.

A little more info in the video's YT desc :
-Adaptive rig: which allows combining any number of expressions using optimized list of blendshapes.
-Real facial muscles constraints: the advanced rig logic simulates real facial muscles constraints.
-Advanced skin shader (for Maya and Unreal): holds up to 16 wrinkles maps and 16 dynamic diffuse maps with micro details and pores stretching.
-Easy to manipulate using facial controllers and/or GUI.
-Compatible with all game engines and animation packages.
-Smooth transition between all the expressions.
-Adjustment layer: freeform manipulation of multiple regions of the face to create unlimited variations of the same expression.

The real-time rendering part is achieved by the Unreal engine itself. The final rendering performance still relies mainly on the hardware used.

The thing I can't quite figure out is...why do hardware makers continue to play in the Android sandbox? Aren't margins per device near zero or even, in the case of some the Chinese manufactures, weirdly negative?

Yes, I know Samsung makes money as a corporation, but on the phone business alone?

I'll totally dig on a future sport where cars all race themselves. They should also have robots to handle pit stops as well.

The prize goes to whoever has the best performing software and hardware.