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Joined: 09 Jul 2006
Posts: 11378
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 8:43 am
Post subject: Bitcoins! Cargo Cult Economy of the Future!
1. it is a fascinating sociological experiment
2. watch from afar, don't touch it or actually use bitcoin
3. scams scams scams scams scams and
bruce wagner
4. see #2.
5. scams scams scams scams
6. see #2
Heresiarch wrote:
Because I am between tech writing jobs and am apparently some kind of masochist:
A Bitcoin FAQ for GBS
-Short version-
Should I buy bitcoins?
But if they drop down to a dollar, then I can snap some up and
No. You are one of thousands of people who want to do this. Telling the thread that you are going to do this doesn't make you look smart.
How does this shit work? It doesn't make any sense!
No, it really doesn't. It's impossible to explain bitcoin in anything less than tl;dr terms so you should probably just not worry about it. Go do something useful instead of reading this awful thread full of socially inept people laughing at another group of socially inept people.
-Long version-
I really want to understand how bitcoin works. Please.
Okay, you asked for it. With some severe simplifications and a painfully neutral pov:
Bitcoin is a decentralized "cryptocurrency". It is a network of software that shares a common protocol designed to allow secure transfer of bitcoins between users. It uses distributed cryptography to verify transfers and balances.
Bitcoin is also the subculture that has sprung up around this software, which includes additional software that is not part of the core design. The most high-profile of these are trading services that allow users to buy and sell bitcoins using US dollars and other real-world currencies.
Bitcoins users have files called "wallets". This is sort of a misnomer, because these wallets do not actually contain anything except a cryptographic private key. One's bitcoin balance is actually recorded inside the distributed network, which is why you cannot edit your wallet file to give yourself more bitcoins. Bitcoins can be added to a particular balance using a public bitcoin address, which acts as a cryptographic public key. The private key is contained in the wallet, and bitcoins cannot be transferred
of a balance without that private key.
(If you don't understand public-key cryptography,
do some reading
because you can't understand bitcoin without it. While you're at it, read up on
cryptographic hash functions
Transfers between wallets are recorded in "blocks", which are verified by the distributed cryptography system. The act of verifying transactions and then adding those transactions to the historical "blockchain" is called "mining". Transactions are stored in the blockchain using cryptographic hashing methods which allow the entire blockchain to be independently verified for consistency and integrity. In order to make blockchain verification an attractive prospect, the design of bitcoin gives "bitcoin miners" two reasons to tie up their computing hardware to maintain the network, both based around competition.
The first reason is that bitcoin transfers can contain optional transaction fees which are paid to the miner that verifies the transaction. Paying a transaction fee makes it more likely that your transaction will be processed in a timely manner, because those transactions are more attractive to the miners.
The second reason is that mining gives the miner a chance of receiving a batch of newly created bitcoins. The more cryptographic power one brings to bear, the more likely it is that the next batch of new bitcoins will be yours. There are a fixed number of bitcoins which can ever be mined, and the difficulty of the cryptography will continue to increase over time.
An important aspect of mining is that the network is designed to handle one complete block (containing a specific number of transactions) every ten minutes. If more computing power is added to the distributed network, making the blocks take less time to process, the difficulty of the cryptography increases. The inverse is also true. This scaling difficulty is meant to help prevent a single user or group of users from gaining complete control over the network by using more computational power.
The distributed verification process determines the "truth" of a transaction block by whether or not the majority of the network (as measured by contributed cryptographic work) considers it valid. The original designer thought it unlikely that any one user or organization could acquire a majority of the network's cryptographic power and therefore "cheat" the system in some way.
Bitcoin verification power is typically measured in the speed at which a system can perform cryptographic hashes, which are required to verify the blockchain and to add transactions to it. The difficulty of the mining process is determined by the amount of "hashing" required to add a new block to the chain.
These are the core aspects of the original bitcoin design. In short, bitcoins are assigned to "wallet" addresses, with balances stored in a distributed "blockchain". The accuracy of the blockchain is verified by "miners", who have a vested interest in doing so through a reward system. Attacks (such as double-spending) are prevented by the distributed nature of the network, where any invalid transactions will be caught by other mining systems.
That was painful to read.
It was painful to write.
So what went wrong?
A lot of things, some of which are due to problems with the original design, and others which are due to problems with the bitcoin community.
Bitcoin was originally a proof-of-concept project by an anonymous crypto specialist who used the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto". It is unlikely that he was actually Japanese, but his identity still remains a mystery. Bitcoin was meant to be a testing ground for theories about how cryptocurrencies
work. Initially, bitcoin was a curiosity and there was little participation in the network, as bitcoins had no real-world worth.
This all changed as bitcoin was discovered by three types of people. First, there were the internet libertarian types who liked the idea of a currency that was not controlled by a government. For them, bitcoin represented an ideology. Second, there were people who wanted to use bitcoin as a semi-anonymous international currency for illegal transactions, such as drugs, weapons, or illicit pornography, as well as a possible method for laundering money. For them, bitcoin represented safety from the law. Third, there were people who viewed bitcoin as a method to get rich by getting in on the ground floor of a new kind of money. These people saw bitcoin as an investment.
The history of bitcoin is too complicated to go into detail here, but these three groups shaped the bitcoin network and community into what it is today, which is a gigantic goddamn mess of idiocy, greed, and bad decisions.
What happened to the neutral pov?
I'm tired.
Well, then where is bitcoin right now?
Right now, the bitcoin community has been overwhelmed by the use of bitcoin as, essentially, a commodity to be bought and sold. Individual bitcoiners may talk about the future of bitcoin as a currency, but the vast majority of bitcoin transactions today are the buying and selling of bitcoins themselves using real-world money, and not the buying of goods or services using bitcoins. There is an extremely limited number of things you can spend bitcoins on without first converting them to dollars (or whatever), and many of those are done through third-party bitcoin-to-dollars systems where the merchant never sees any bitcoins.
Bitcoins are purchased and sold much like other commodities such as gold, petroleum, and the like. Exchange services are set up, where people who wish to buy the commodity put forth "buy orders", where they offer to buy a certain amount of the commodity at a given price, and these buy orders are matched with "sell orders" put in by people who wish to sell that commodity.
There are several bitcoin exchanges that let one buy and sell bitcoins using dollars and other currencies, but the most important one is "mtgox". Amusingly, Mtgox started life as "Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange", an exchange service for virtual Magic: The Gathering cards.
When someone says "bitcoin is at $50" or something similar, usually they mean that the most recent buy order on mtgox was for $50 a bitcoin.
The market prices for bitcoin have historically tended to
rapidly inflate
and then crash spectacularly. Bitcoin's market value has dropped by 50% in less than a day on multiple occasions.
Regardless, true believers in bitcoin (typically the libertarians or the investors, who are sometimes one and the same) keep throwing more money at the speculative market, in the hopes that one day their currency will be treated with respect by the world, or at least they'll eventually make up for their losses. Neither scenario is likely.
Why is this funny?
Because we're children who like laughing at dumb people, and bitcoin people are a truly spectacular level of stupid.
So could bitcoin ever be a real currency?
No, for one simple reason. Bitcoin does not scale. The network is already creaking under the weight of relatively few transactions, and more importantly, the blockchain size is increasing rapidly. The blockchain file is currently several gigabytes in size, and the entire chain must be downloaded in order to mine or verify your own transactions. You can use a third-party service to store and transfer your bitcoins, but these services have historically tended to get hacked or just suddenly vanish, taking all your internet funny-money with it.
If bitcoin actually became popular as a currency and not just as a speculative commodity, the network would rapidly become even more unusably slow than it already is, and the blockchain would swell to an absurd and unmanageable size.
Some people seem legitimately angry about bitcoin.
Bitcoin would appear to be a mostly harmless way for idiots to throw money at each other, except for the fact that bitcoin mining has (not surprisingly) become an arms race to see who can get the most hashing power online.
The original design of bitcoin did not account for the possibility of specialized, expensive hardware which could make mining
that hardware almost useless. Certain kinds of ATI Radeon video cards proved so effective at performing bitcoin hashing that mining solely on a general-purpose PC CPU gives negligible results, due to the vastly increased hashing difficulty. Miners purchased huge amounts of these video cards to create custom (and often hilarous) "mining rigs", essentially converting electricity into heat and bitcoins.
The stakes have been raised again with the advent of specialized bitcoin-only
ASIC hardware
which is even more effective than the video cards were. The future of bitcoin mining appears to be in the hands of a small minority of users who can afford this specialized equipment, making the "distributed" nature of bitcoin something of a joke.
The bitcoin network now must use vast amounts of power, far out of proportion to its actual usefulness and typically generated by fossil fuel plants, just to maintain itself. It is a tremendous waste of actual real-world resources that could be better used on something important (like, for example, watching cat videos) and this makes some people actually angry at the situation.
Wait, what about this "BFL" thing, and who's "Atlas"? What the hell are you people talking about?
Look at all these fucking words I've already written. God, what a waste of effort.
Leperflesh wrote:
The issue is similar to that faced by daytraders who make dozens of trades on small fluctuations in price of some security per day; predicting floors and ceilings. There are all sorts of "technical analysis" techniques for doing this, most of which work just often enough for millions of people to rely on them, but break just often enough that millions of other people are quite sure they're useless (I'm one of the latter).
The thing is, though, real securities (stocks, bonds, etc.), and real commodities (soybeans, gold), and real currencies (euros, yen) all move in response to actual real-world events which affect the underlying thing (companies, crops, supply of metals, the financial condition of a government). So you can watch the news and make trades based on headlines, and you can watch other traders who watch the news and make trades based on what other traders do, and you can watch the overall market and make trades on individual securities which have prices that tend to respond to the overall market, and so forth.
But bitcoins are different because there is no underlying thing. The number of new bitcoins per hour is relatively fixed, so there's no surprises there for the market to respond to. That means the main events that bitcoin prices can respond to are things like "mount gox broken into again: ten bazillion bitcoins may be stolen", "silk road being investigated by Interpol", and "a famous blogger mentioned Bitcoins in his article in a way possibly interpretable as positive". These news items do move the price, of course, but since there's no
real thing
behind bitcoins, there's no natural floor in price set by that real thing. Soybean futures may rise or crash, but the chances we'll suddenly stop producing soybeans altogether - or produce so many soybeans that they're now totally free - are pretty much zero. Whereas the chances that at some point absolutely nobody on Earth will still use a bitcoin for anything are somewhat greater than zero. And the natural ceiling on bitcoin prices is essentially equivalent to the greatest potential of fools and money to be parted.
So I think it'd be fair to say it's harder to predict ceilings and floors with bitcoin, and thus, more difficult to make money daytrading bitcoin in the long term.
forget about all of that
. Really, forget it, it's all irrelevant. All you need to know is that there does not exist a single way to trade bitcoins that is regulated. Every option for buying and selling bitcoins relies on unregulated intermediaries who, demonstratably, have a terrible record of reliability. You could be 100% certain that the price of bitcoin is about to go up for the next 30 minutes, buy into a position, and then see all your bitcoins locked up inside a shitty website for three hours while it's "down due to another DDOS" or whatever excuse. You could sell all your bitcoins at a huge profit, and then never get your money because the bullshit website run by amateurs that you have your money in finds its Polish bank account seized by authorities. There are several exchanges for bitcoins and they each have listed exchange rates that are utterly out of sync with each other. The fact that arbitrageurs do not very, very quickly resolve those differences demonstrates that they are fucked up; it means the costs, in terms of transactional fees but even more especially in terms of time, are so huge and problematic that people are not able to efficiently exploit a ten dollar difference in BTC price across two exchanges which persists for hours or even days.
Real securities, real commodities, real currencies are traded on incredibly reliable, government-regulated exchanges run by professionals with actual knowledge and experience, whose organizations are able to handle billions of dollars per day of other people's money entirely due to having established impeccable reputations for reliability and safety. Huge corporations and the world's richest individuals trust their wealth to these agencies because these agencies have proved themselves to be trustworthy again and again.
If you want to dabble in technical trading or whatever, do it someplace where your money isn't quite so likely to disappear into a black hole overnight due to gross incompetence or illegal activity or both, on the part of the unaccountable and often anonymous people running the exchange.
Last edited by Sam on Mon May 13, 2013 6:30 am; edited 2 times in total
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Joined: 02 Aug 2008
Posts: 7395
Location: California
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 9:10 am
Post subject:
wait wait wait
the blockchain for each bitcoin contains a record of every transaction that bitcoin was involved in?
how does that make this attractive to people trying to buy illegal stuff?
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Joined: 09 Jul 2006
Posts: 14432
Location: Unknown Kaddath
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 9:47 am
Post subject:
Because you can set up a ton of anonymous wallets or use online wallets as if they were shell companies, or proxy servers. Nobody has to know who's behind a particular wallet, and with enough wallets in the chain it can be like trying to peel back the layers of Tor.
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Joined: 24 Jul 2012
Posts: 1463
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 10:46 am
Post subject:
Arc Tempest wrote:
Another day,
another bitcoin scandal
And another:
And another:
And another for good measure:
I've pulled all my money out of the exchanges and got it wired back to me. My interest in bitcoin isn't completely doused, but the infrastructure surrounding it has left me with zero confidence that anyone involved actually knows what the fuck accountability is.
It blows my mind that people can run exchanges as a legitimate licensed business, then somehow not understand that they have to conform to anti-money laundering laws, then say it's not their fault when their bank accounts get closed.
This is essentially my attitude on the matter:
Monkey Mcdermott wrote:
I'd be shocked if it wasn't blatantly obvious that the whole thing is set up basically like a ponzi scheme designed for a handful of "in the know" folks to prey on stupid libertarians.
It really doesn't help that a single highly-invested individual selling out can cause the market to crash, then buy back in an hour later for cheaper and pull the market back up again.
WheelsOfConfusion wrote:
It's already gotten to the point where enthusiastic amateurs can't even "mine" bitcoins profitably, even with GPUs. ASICs are pretty much the only way you can own the hardware that does the work and still do better than break-even.
^This. And ASICs are extremely expensive and a good way to get scammed out of your money.
Crossposted because relevant to topic.
Although to be fair, I did make a 220% return on my investment.
The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. - William Gibson,
The Gernsback Continuum
Last edited by fritterdonut on Sat May 04, 2013 10:53 am; edited 1 time in total
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Joined: 10 Jul 2012
Posts: 734
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 10:50 am
Post subject:
From my understanding, Bitcoins were sort of an interesting idea crafted by someone as a PhD thesis/research. A sort of proof-of-concept.
Some folks took it and ran with it, to the point that the researcher has backed off/disavowed it? In a "THIS WAS NEVER INTENDED TO BE AN ACTUAL CURRENCY" sort of thing.
"No, but evil is still being --Is having reason-- Being reasonable! Mousie understands? Is always being reason. Is punishing world for not being... Like in head. Is always reason. World should be different, is reason."
-Ed, from Digger
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Joined: 24 Jul 2012
Posts: 1463
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 10:55 am
Post subject:
Felgraf wrote:
From my understanding, Bitcoins were sort of an interesting idea crafted by someone as a PhD thesis/research. A sort of proof-of-concept.
Some folks took it and ran with it, to the point that the researcher has backed off/disavowed it? In a "THIS WAS NEVER INTENDED TO BE AN ACTUAL CURRENCY" sort of thing.
The guy(s) who developed the original concept, who goes by "Satoshi Nakamoto", is anonymous. No one knows who he was, although there are guesses; despite the Japanese name he used British grammar and spelling, IIRC. He left I think 2 or 3 years into it, and hasn't been seen since. Not sure if they know why he left.
The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. - William Gibson,
The Gernsback Continuum
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Monkey Mcdermott
Joined: 09 Jul 2006
Posts: 3352
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 4:23 pm
Post subject:
The best part of this was listening to people who screech like shitflinging rhesus monkeys about the gold standard tortuously convince themselves that bitcoin, backed by basically nothing was so much better than cash backed by a sovereign nation.
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Joined: 24 Feb 2013
Posts: 4741
Location: Land of the Grumpuses
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 8:04 pm
Post subject:
Bitcoin makes less sense the more I hear about it....
::lesser crisis mode::
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Joined: 24 Jul 2012
Posts: 1463
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 8:23 pm
Post subject:
stripeypants wrote:
Bitcoin makes less sense the more I hear about it....
Easiest way is to think of it is as a very volatile, small market cap (~1 Billion USD) commodity. Essentially a useless form of a rare precious metal. Any value assigned to it is assigned to it arbitrarily by the userbase, not due to any kind of industrial demand.
Bitcoin is essentially the same as distributing pieces of paper that say "1 SinCoin", and saying that they are worth $10 USD each. Nothing is there to actually make them worth $10 USD each, except the time or effort it took to print them, and no industry needs them to produce a product - they only maintain that $10 USD parity if users continue to accept them at such a value.
In short: They are no better than the fiat currency they wish to replace, when it comes to actual, physical value; As Monkey said.
On that note, I suggest avoiding the bitcoin forums unless you have a bulk discount on brain bleach.
The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. - William Gibson,
The Gernsback Continuum
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Joined: 10 Jul 2006
Posts: 11274
Location: PDX
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 8:40 pm
Post subject:
fritterdonut wrote:
In short: They are no better than the fiat currency they wish to replace, when it comes to actual, physical value; As Monkey said.
By "no better" do you mean "considerably, undeniably, impractically, damn near unconscionably worse?"
"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. Ill do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." -
Baba Brinkman
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Joined: 24 Jul 2012
Posts: 1463
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 8:46 pm
Post subject:
Dogen wrote:
fritterdonut wrote:
In short: They are no better than the fiat currency they wish to replace, when it comes to actual, physical value; As Monkey said.
By "no better" do you mean "considerably, undeniably, impractically, damn near unconscionably worse?"
Pretty much.
The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. - William Gibson,
The Gernsback Continuum
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Dennis J. Squidbunny
Joined: 09 Jul 2006
Posts: 3879
Location: AUSTRALIA YOU FAKIR
Posted: Sun May 05, 2013 4:50 am
Post subject:
oh man I should have read this thread before I dropped $2500 on a facebook advertised 2/5gb bitcoin miner.
Once, at a local NOW meeting where I was the only male among about a dozen women, a feminism trivia contest was held. I came in third.
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Thy Brilliance
Joined: 09 Jul 2006
Posts: 3661
Location: Relative
Posted: Mon May 06, 2013 12:41 am
Post subject:
hi hi.
The bitcoin exchange isn't going anywhere btw.
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Joined: 09 Jul 2006
Posts: 11072
Posted: Mon May 06, 2013 1:57 am
Post subject:
I wonder how much it's used for money laundering / tax evasion ("I don't say evasion, I say avoision")
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Joined: 09 Jul 2006
Posts: 11072
Posted: Mon May 06, 2013 1:58 am
Post subject:
stripeypants wrote:
Bitcoin makes less sense the more I hear about it....
Perhaps you've discovered a new physical principle (The Law of Pants)
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UPDATE: Cloudy? Watch a webcast here, here, or here.
It's been almost three years since those of us in North America saw a total lunar eclipse.Now the whole continent is in for another on Monday night and Tuesday morning, December 20-21. Earth's shadow will totally engulf the Moon from 2:41 to 3:53 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, or 11:41 p.m. to 12:53 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, as shown in the timetable below. The partial phases of the eclipse will last for a little more than an hour beforehand and afterward.
Unlike a solar eclipse, each stage of a lunar eclipse is visible to everyone on the Moon-facing side of Earth. Observers in Europe, West Africa, and South America will see part of the eclipse before it's interrupted by moonset and sunrise on the morning of the 21st. In East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, the eclipse is already in progress at sunset and moonrise on 21st local date.
The Moon will be at the northernmost part of the ecliptic, north of Orion between the feet of Gemini and the horns of Taurus. An eclipsed Moon is always full, so if the eclipse happens in the middle of the night for your location the eclipsed Moon will be about as close as it can ever be to straight overhead.
|Total Eclipse of the Moon, December 20–21, 2010
|Eclipse event
|Penumbra first seen?
|12:55 am
|11:55 pm
|10:55 pm
|9:55 pm
|Partial eclipse begins
|1:33 am
|12:33 am
|11:33 pm
|10:33 pm
|Total eclipse begins
|2:41 am
|1:41 am
|12:41 am
|11:41 pm
|3:17 am
|2:17 am
|1:17 am
|12:17 am
|Total eclipse ends
|3:53 am
|2:53 am
|1:53 am
|12:53 am
|Partial eclipse ends
|5:01 am
|4:01 am
|3:01 am
|2:01 am
|Penumbra last seen?
|5:35 am
|4:35 am
|3:35 am
|2:35 am
A total lunar eclipse has five distinct stages. It begins when the Moon first enters the penumbra, or pale outer fringe, of Earth's shadow. But this event is unobservable; the shading in the outer part of the penumbra is extremely slight. Not until the Moon's leading edge is about halfway across the penumbra does the first slight dimming become detectable to the eye.The second stage, partial eclipse, starts when the Moon's edge reaches the umbra, or Earth's inner shadow. Few sights in astronomy are more eerie and impressive than watching this black-red shadow creeping, minute by minute, across the bright lunar landscape. You'll soon notice that Earth's shadow has a curved edge — visible proof that the world we live on is round.
As more of the Moon slides into the umbra, look around the sky. You'll notice that a second, deeper night is falling around you — night within night. In fact, if you're far from city lights, hundreds of additional stars start appearing in what earlier was a bright, moonlight-washed sky. An hour or so into partial eclipse, only a final bright sliver of Moon remains outside the umbra — and the rest of it shows an eerie reddish glow.
The third stage, totality, begins when the last bit of Moon slips into the umbra. For this eclipse, totality lasts a generous 72 minutes.
Then, as the Moon continues moving eastward along its orbit, events unwind in reverse order. Totality ends when the Moon's leading edge reemerges into sunlight, returning once again to a partial eclipse (stage four). Then, after all of the Moon escapes the umbra, the dusky penumbral shading (stage five) gradually fades away, leaving the full Moon shining as brightly as if nothing had happened.Red in the Darkness
The umbra is the part of Earth's shadow where the Sun is blocked from the Moon completely. So why does the Moon here glow deep orange or red, rather than being completely blacked out?
That red light you see on the Moon during a lunar eclipse comes from all the sunrises and sunsets that ring the Earth at the time. Our atmosphere scatters and refracts (bends) the sunlight that grazes the rim of our globe, sending it into Earth's shadow. If you were an astronaut on the Moon, the situation would be obvious. You would see the Sun covered up by a dark Earth that was ringed all around with a thin, brilliant band of sunset- and sunrise-colored light.
On rare occasions the eclipsed Moon does go black. Other times it appears as bright and coppery orange as a fresh penny. And sometimes it turns brown like chocolate, or as dark red as dried blood. Two factors affect an eclipse's color and brightness. The first is simply how deeply the Moon goes into the umbra. The center of the umbra is much darker than its edges. This time the Moon will pass fairly deep through the umbra, and at mid-eclipse the Moon's southern limb almost reaches the umbra's center. The other factor is the state of Earth's atmosphere along the sunrise-sunset line. If the air is very clear, the eclipse is bright. But if a major volcanic eruption has polluted the stratosphere with thin haze, the eclipse will be dark red, ashen gray, or blood-black.
In addition, blue light refracted by Earth's clear, ozone-rich upper atmosphere can also add to the scene, especially near the umbra's edge, creating a subtle mix of changing colors. Such variable shading can give the eclipsed Moon a very three-dimensional appearance.
The next eclipse of the Moon is a deep total one on June 15, 2011, but North America misses out completely. Skywatchers on the West Coast can catch part of the following one, on the morning of December 10, 2011, until it's interrupted by moonset and sunrise. The next total lunar eclipse for the whole continent doesn't come until April 14-15, 2014 — an unusually long wait. So hope for good weather this time.
Extra-credit projects
- In a telescope, can you spot any faint stars close to the Moon during totality? Any star just to the Moon's east will soon be occulted (covered). Normally the full Moon is so bright that even in a telescope you can see only the brightest stars as they approach its edge. But during totality, even the smallest telescope may reveal faint stars coming right up to the colorful lunar disk and suddenly winking out as it covers them up.
- Roger Sinnott continues to collect amateurs' telescopic timings of when the edge of the umbra crosses lunar craters, as part of a decades-long project tracking slight unpredictability in the umbra's diameter. For crater maps, instructions, and where to report your timings, click here.
- John Westfall continues to collect timings of the four contacts, when the partial phase begins and ends before and after totality, made with the unaided eye. This information will help calibrate the historical timings made by mariners and others when this was one of the few ways to determine longitude at sea. For more information, click here.

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Turn in your Bible to Acts 25 and I just want to get us back in the study of Paul and Agrippa and Bernice. I never realized that there would be such a stir, but all the people who have been named Bernice had a terrible week. I want you to know that, but we're back to Acts 25 and Paul before the court of Festus not really a court in a technical sense, but a kingly court at this point because Agrippa and Bernice have arrived with all their entourage. The title of the section that we're looking at Acts 25:13 through 26:32, which is a large bulk of Scripture, but the section is Are You Trying to Convert Me? Chapter 26:28, keys us in on that title. When Paul is finished with his testimony king Agrippa says in effect, "Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian? Are you trying with so few words to convert me? And of course the answer to the apostle Paul was yes, that's obviously what I'm trying to do, not only you but everybody else in the room.
I told you at the beginning of our study of the life of Paul as a prisoner that he would give six major testimonies. This is the fifth. Repeatedly he is called upon to answer actuations. He has been accused of sedition. The Jews accused him of stirring up trouble against Rome. He has been accused of sectarianism, of being a religious heretic. He has been accused of sacrilege, of blaspheming God by desecrating the temple. He didn't do any of those things. He was totally exonerated on all counts by all courts because there was no evidence, there were no eyewitnesses, there was nothing that stood up in the court and yet even though he was innocent he maintains his prison status. And the reason is simple. The Roman governors now have him as a prisoner. Felix, even though he was innocent, wouldn't let him go because he knew that would upset the Jews and therefore upset the political applecart in Judea. Festus, then when he came to take the governorship found himself having Paul in custody, he too did not want to release him because he didn't want to upset the Jews for the Jews wanted him dead. And so in a sense, both of these governors had been blackmailed into keeping Paul a prisoner. Now Festus has run into a stone wall because the apostle Paul has appealed to Rome, since he couldn't get any justice in Caesarea, he decided to do what all Roman citizens had the right to do and that was appeal to Caesar and his case must be removed to Rome. The problem is that Festus has to send him now to Rome without any written accusation because he can't find anything to accuse him of. And so he's struggling with this terrible problem of sending a prisoner to Rome but not having anything to accuse him of that qualifies him to be a prisoner or to be a tried person.
Well at that particular time in the dilemma of Festus, King Agrippa who was a vassal king, Rome really rules, but they allow him to run the temple and appoint the priests, Herod Agrippa arrives on the scene paying a courtesy call to Festus and at this point Festus sees a possible way out. He figures if he can get Agrippa to listen to this man Agrippa may come up with some viable accusation that Festus can write down on paper and use to accuse Paul so that the trial in Rome will have some justification and Festus will be able to keep his balance in terms of the Jews and their attitude toward him.
Now in the midst of this situation where Paul is giving testimony to Agrippa so that Agrippa might be able to come up with some accusation to help Festus out of his problem, in the midst of this what stands out is that more than the testimony Paul gives to defend himself is the testimony that he gives to Agrippa to try to convert Agrippa into a Christian. He actually targets in on Agrippa and attempts to get him to respond to the Gospel and even gives an invitation at the end. I don't think Paul had to come to this hearing because I think legally his appeal to Rome had to be honored, but I think he came because he saw it as an opportunity to preach the gospel. Festus looked at this thing as an opportunity to get an accusation. Agrippa looked at it as a curiosity. He wanted to hear this guy anyway. Paul looked at it as an opportunity to preach the gospel. And so it's the testimony of Paul in Caesarea in the Roman praetorian before Agrippa the king and Bernice and all their entourage and Festus and all the chief captains and all the famous and high up people in the city of Caesarea are there as well, so it's a very august body.
As we look at this thing we're reminded again of the one great passion that Paul had in situations like that and that is to preach the gospel. It didn't matter to him about his own security, it didn't matter to him about his own embarrassment, it didn't matter to him that people would think he was strange, it didn't matter that they might even think he was nuts, because that's exactly what they did think. But none of that bothered him at all. It didn't matter whether they put him in chains, put him in jail, or killed him. You see boldness is born of the consciousness that I am expendable. For the cause of Christ he believed it so he was bold.
One of the great passions of the apostle Paul we see illustrated here was the passion to preach the gospel. It didn't matter where he was or what the circumstances were that was his desire. And this goes back to what he said and I want you to turn to it. In II Corinthians 5 and this is the theology or the base of theology on which Paul operates in Acts 25 and 26. There are principles out of which he acts. The act of evangelizing in Acts 25 and 26 is based upon his attitudes revealed here. And he tells them to the Corinthians and to us as well.
II Corinthians 5:17, "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things are passed away, behold all things are become new." In the first place Paul believed that the gospel was a transforming fact. If any man be in Christ he is what, a new creation. Now because Paul believed that, that became motivation for him. You know when you have confidence in the product it tends to motivate you. He believed in what the gospel could accomplish; therefore, he was motivated by it. It's hard to sell something you're not convinced of isn't it? Hard to promote something you don't believe in. Well Paul believed in the transforming power of the gospel and that was the basis of his desire too proclaim it.
Now watch verse 18: "And all things are of God who has reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation." Now the word reconcile is the most interesting word. It literally means to bring back into proper adjustment. To bring back into proper adjustment. The New Testament uses it only of men, never of God. God never needs to be reconciled. God is never out of adjustment.
Some people would say, "Well God is reconciled to man." No. God is not reconciled to man. The proper use of the word is to be out of adjustment, to be brought back into proper adjustment. God is never out of adjustment. Man is out of adjustment. It is man that must be brought back into proper adjustment to God. That's the ministry of reconciliation. So, the Bible here tells us that we have been given the ministry of adjusting people rightly to God. We're in the business of converting people from maladjusted anti God, to well adjusted God oriented people. We're in the business of bringing men to the place where they can become in Christ a new creation with old things having passed away and all things becoming new.
Verse 19 says, "To wit that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation." He's given us this gospel message, which is the word of reconciliation and we're to carry it out, which is the ministry of reconciliation. We are ambassadors. An ambassador is a foreigner in a land representing the foreign government and that's what we are. We represent the government of God in a foreign land, don't we? We are ambassadors. And what does an ambassador do? What does the ministry of reconciliation involve? "As though God did beech you by us we beg you in Christ stead, be reconciled to God." It is a tremendous driving passionate activity that we must be engaged in. It is begging people to be converted. It is pleading with people. There's nothing wrong with begging people to come to Christ. That's what Paul says, "We beg you in Christ's stead be reconciled to God. Be rightly adjusted to God.
We have been committed then to this ministry, the ministry of reconciliation. And there must be connected with it a tremendous sense of urgency. For you'll notice verse 2 it says, or verse 1. Let's read them both of 6. "We then, as workers together with him, beseech you also that you receive not the grace of God in vain. For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I helped thee. Behold now is the accepted time, behold now is the day of salvation." And so Paul says we have been granted the word of reconciliation, that's the gospel of proper adjustment, we have been given the ministry of reconciliation, that's carrying the gospel of proper adjustment, and there is an urgency about it so that today is the day it must be done.
Now we are placed in this world to bring maladjusted men into adjustment with God and that involves conversion. When Agrippa said to Paul, "Are you trying to convert me?" He put his finger right on what is the goal and objective of every believer who confronts an unbeliever. We're in the business of converting people in the power of the Holy Spirit. You know as I mentioned before we can get so smug in our sanctification and so happy in our fellowship, and so blessed with what's going on among the Christians, and so oriented to the Christian community we forget the whole world of people that are going to hell constantly. And we must keep that perspective.
At the end of the gospel of Mark our Lord in laying down the simple commission said this, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." Can't be much simpler than that. At the end of the gospel of Luke in Chapter 24:46 he said to them, "Thus it is written and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and remission or forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And you are witnesses." You see the commission is clear as to what we are to do.
Going back to Acts Chapter 25 and 26, Paul understood his calling. He understood it from the very first day of his conversion. Look at 26:16, "When the Lord said rise," at the Damascus road there, "He said rise and stand on your feet, I've appeared to thee for a purpose, to make or appoint you a minister and a witness of these things, which you have seen and those things which I'll appear unto you, delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles unto whom now I send you, to open their eyes to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God." You see Paul says the Lord told me that I had been given a ministry of turning people from darkness to light, from Satan to God. It was a commitment to turn people, to convert people. Notice verse 17, "Delivering you from the people," that's the Jews, "And the Gentiles," the Gentiles, "Unto whom now I send you." Now watch. When you were saved God took you out of the world to send you back to the world, you see? Now notice it, "Delivering you from the people and the Gentiles unto whom I now send you." I took you out of the world to send you back to the world. Now that's the ministry committed to us. And I fear in my own heart that we as Christians, especially here when we can become so satisfied with learning and satisfied with fellowship and satisfied with unity and satisfied with growth, forget about the fact that we have been taken out of the world not to be cloistered like a bunch of monastics, but to be sent back to the world to try to transform people in the energy of the Holy Spirit.
This is the gospel call. This is the gospel commission. When the apostle Paul said, "Pray for me," in Ephesians 6:;19, he said, "And pray for me that utterance may be given to me that I may open my mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in bonds that in this I may speak boldly as I ought to speak." He says, "Pray for me because I ought to speak the gospel boldly." That's a prayer we ought to pray for each other, isn't it?
When Paul said to Timothy, "Do the work of an evangelist. Make full proof of the ministry," he was saying that in order for you to make full proof of the ministry you're going to have to do some evangelism. I always remember the kid that said to me, "I don't think I have the gift of evangelism." I said, That's interesting. Nobody has the gift of evangelism. You just have the command." It isn't an isolated gift, it's something that all of us do. Do the work of an evangelist. Change people. Were in the business of changing people's lives. As somebody says, "Are you trying to convert me?" Of course we are. What else, that's our call. We're doing it lovingly, I trust. We care. Paul's task was clear.
We find the apostle Paul has given this opportunity to preach the gospel before these very very highbrow people and he takes seizing the opportunity the marvelous privilege the Spirit of God gives him. Now as he begins his testimony, which as you remember is sort of entertainment for Agrippa, desperately important for Festus whose got to get an accusation, and tremendously opportunistic for Paul because he can proclaim the gospel. We saw last time beginning in 25:13, the consultation regarding his testimony. Festus spoke with Agrippa when he arrived with Bernice and he told him all about this prisoner that he had that the Jews wanted dead, but they couldn't find any justification to kill the guy 'cause it didn't seem like he'd done anything. The only thing he was guilty of was talking about somebody who was dead that he claimed to be alive somebody named Jesus. And Festus said to Agrippa, "Frankly Agrippa, I don't understand all this Jewish questions, verse 20, I don't understand. I'm perplexed about this whole set up of Jewish theology and I don't know what to do about it. Would you stick around tomorrow and listen to this guy and make some sense out of it and maybe I can write some accusation and sent it along to Rome? Agrippa says in verse 22, "I sure will. Tomorrow I'll do it." And he says, "Tomorrow you'll hear him." So the consultation regarding Paul's testimony. Secondly was the circumstances of his testimony. Verses 23 to 27. Remember what the scene was like? That the praetorian, the auditorium, the place of hearing where Festus was it used to be the Herod's palace. That place was just loaded with all of the higher ups and the king and Bernice came in and all the falderal and it was with great pomp, it says in verse 23, which is the word fantasia. It was just a colossal stupendous display of fancy this and fancy that and all the pomp that goes with the king and the whole big setting was there and into the thing marched the apostle Paul into such circumstances. And at that point Agrippa took charge and began the questioning of Paul and we come to point three the commencement of Paul's testimony, verse 1 of Chapter 26.
The commencement of Paul's testimony: Now this is basically where we left off last time. Then Agrippa said to Paul, "Thou art permitted to speak for thyself. Then Paul stretched forth the hand, and answered for himself." Now he begins his testimony here and it begins with a courtesy. He's very courteous and I think rightly so. He's not flattery. He's just being courteous and what he says is true. "I think myself happy, king Agrippa, because I shall answer for myself this day before thee concerning all the things of which I'm accused of the Jews." Why are you so happy about it, Paul? "Especially because I know thee to be an expert in all customs and question, which are among the Jews. Wherefore I beseech thee to hear me patiently." He says, "Agrippa I'm really happy to talk to you because you know you're an expert in all of this," and I think in his mind, as I mentioned last time, he felt that Agrippa would be objective. The Jerusalem leaders and the Jerusalem Jews were so biased, they were so hateful of Rome, they despised Rome, they hated Paul desperately, but here was Agrippa, though he was a Jew, a man who had been educated in Rome, a man whose total allegiance was toward Rome, a man who played politics with Israel but really down in his heart he was a Roman. And Paul felt number one, this guy being Jewish will understand the character of my argument. Number two being Roman he'll be more objective in evaluating it. He won't be swayed by the terrible Jewish hatred of Jesus Christ, by the terrible Jewish antagonism. So he felt he maybe had a live one on the wire. Maybe he had a guy who could actually have his life changed, a person who was an open part who could hear the gospel and so he uses this as an opportunity to try to convert Agrippa. And in it he gives his testimony.
Now mark this. His message keys around this: Christ is the Messiah as proven by his resurrection. His resurrection is proven by my transformed life. And in this thing he goes through how his life was transformed when he met Christ on the road to Damascus and in effect he's saying, "Listen I couldn't argue when the Lord Jesus Christ himself, alive from the dead struck me down on the road to Damascus, changed my life, commissioned me into the ministry, how could I argue against that? He has to be the Messiah. He has to be the Savior. That's his whole argument. And we'll see it unfold this time and the next time we study together. All right let's look and see what happens following the courtesy. Paul then begins to give his testimony and he wants to give his testimony from the first because he wants the people to see the change in his life that Christ made. One of the great proofs of Christianity is it not is the transformed life. Don't you remember that Paul said that in II Corinthians 5:17, which you read. "If any man be in Christ he is a new creation." This is one of the great motives of evangelism. This is one of the great testimonies of the gospel what Christ has done in a life. And he's saying, "Agrippa, I want you to know what this Jesus did." Now Agrippa didn't need to hear the facts of Jesus dying and so forth. He knew all that. He needed to hear what Christ had done in his resurrection power and so that's what Paul wants to tell him and everybody else who hears. So he begins with his conduct. Look at verses 4 and 5. He describes his early life. "My manner of life from my youth, which was a first among mine own nation at Jerusalem, know all the Jews who knew me from the beginning, if they would testify that after the strict sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee." He says you know from the earliest years of my life I was educated at Jerusalem. And all the Jews know this. And if they had the courage to testify they would have to admit that I belonged to the strictest sect of our religion. I lived a Pharisee. Now Pharisee was the strict legalist and he was even at the strict end of the strict legalists. He was a right-wing right-wing Pharisee. So he says my manner of life from my youth I was trained in Orthodox Judaism right here in Jerusalem and all the Jews know this. They know I sat at the feet of Gamaliel. They know that after the strictest sect, and Paul does something here in using the word strictest that Greek writers are allowed to, to that you're never allowed to do in English comp. He uses a double superlative. And a double superlative really lays heavy emphasis in the Greek. What he says is I belong to the most strictest sect. He is laying tremendous weight on this emphasis. He stresses that if anybody ever lived who was convinced that Judaism was the final word of God it was me. I belonged to the farthest farthest farthest extreme legal view and everybody knows I did. You see what he was doing? He's setting them up for the transformation. He's showing them how zealous he was as a Jew in order that they might understand the tremendous cataclysmic effect of the transformation that occurred at Damascus.
And so Paul stresses I believe in the strictest way in all the facets of Judaism, I was a Pharisee. Having talked about the conduct of his past life he now goes into his condemnation, verses 6 to 8. "And now I stand and am condemned or judged. I'm condemned for the hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers." He says, "I was raised a Jew. I was a Pharisee and now I am being condemned and you know why I am being condemned? I am being condemned for believing the promises that God made to the Jewish fathers."
You say well is this hope? Look at it in verse 6. "For the hope of the promise." Listen what was the Jewish hope? The Jewish hope is this: and this is the context here, the Jewish hope was the coming of Messiah. The hope of every Jew was Messiah would come and deliver Israel. Why Israel had been struggling against bondage from Egypt right up until this time they were still under Rome. They had had some years of independence. They had had some years of successes and enlargement under David. But for the most part they knew nothing but fighting and struggling and slavery. And certainly from the time of 586 B.C. from the time of the Gentiles right on through they had known abject slavery and ruling first by Babylon and then by the Persians and then by the Greeks and now by the Romans. And they longed for the hope to come, the Messiah to come, and they believed this: that when Messiah came He would set up His kingdom and that even the dead Jews would be resurrected to enjoy that kingdom. They believed that. That was their hope. Why Job even way back said, "Though my body be consumed the worms destroy this body, he said, thought my range be consumed within me yet in my flesh shall I see God whom I shall see for myself and not another." See they knew all along there was a resurrection. The resurrection was their hope that Messiah would come deliver Israel, set up His kingdom, raise the dead Jews to enjoy the kingdom.
Friends, that's going to happen isn't it? They were anticipating it in the past. So he says, "I'm being condemned for believing what all the Jews believe," which is true. He just believed what everybody believed who was at all faithful to Judaism. Now verse 7 he goes further. "Unto which promise our twelve tribes, earnestly serving God say and night, hope to come." He says, "Look, this isn't anything that I've invented. Our whole twelve tribes agree to this." Want to know something interesting about that statement? Twelve tribes, that proves that Paul was not a British Israelite. Paul didn't believe there were only two tribes and the other ten were lost. You say, "What's that?" Well that's that stuff that's propagated by Herbert W. Armstrong, Garner Ted Armstrong and the World Tomorrow and a few other heretics. Incidentally if you're listening to that man you can probably list about 20 heresies. He doesn't just have one, the worst being salvation by works. But they teach that the ten tribes that went north, the Israel part of the divided kingdom, migrated to England and became the British people and that we; therefore, are descendents of the British; therefore, all the promises given to Israel are fulfilled to the British and to the Americans. What it is is a mask for anti-Semitism. But Paul didn't believe that because Paul says that the twelve tribes are still together and that's what the Bible teaches. That before those ten tribes had migrated away individual members of all those ten tribes had filtered down into the two tribes in the south so that the two tribes really became a composite of all the twelve. So that even though the people of the north left the twelve tribes are intact in the south.
So Paul says that the twelve tribes still earnestly hope for the coming of Messiah. So he says this is a total Jewish hope. This doesn't just belong to me. I'm only believing what all the Jews have believed, all twelve tribes, and now I'm being condemned for it. Verse 7 in the middle, "For which hope's sake, king Agrippa, I am accused by the Jews." I'm being accused for Messianic hope. Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead? You certainly can't be hung up on the fact that God raised the dead. I mean that's something we've all believed. Why am I suffering this abuse and condemnation for simply believing what has always been believed? Common Jewish hope in the resurrection, that's not incredible. Can the Pharisees argue against the resurrection? Can the Pharisees say that I am condemned because I believe in the resurrection? Of course not. Well Agrippa is probably at this time saying, "Sure, sure, Paul we know that. That's it alright to believe in the resurrection, but what we don't buy is that Jesus is the resurrected Messiah." You know Paul knew that's what Agrippa would think. He knew that. He knew Agrippa would be thinking along that line. He knew that the Jews did believe in the resurrection but that they wouldn't accept the resurrection of Jesus. And one of the most startling acts of willful rejection anywhere in Scripture you have Matthew 28:11. Just listen: this is after the resurrection, "And when they were going behold some of the watch, some of the Roman soldiers who were guarding the tomb, came to the city showed the chief priests all that was done." The Romans came in and said, "I hate to tell you this, but there was a resurrection." "And the chief priests got assembled with the elders and took much counsel and gave much money to the soldiers." Now if you know anything about how the Jews hated the Romans you know they wouldn't want to give them any money. They would have despised the fact of giving them money. You say, "Why did they do it?" What do you think it was? Bribery! They said, "Say this: his disciples came by night and stole him while we slept." Now that's a real bright statement. If they were asleep how could they possibly testify that while they were asleep the disciples came and stole the body? They bought them off. And if you get in trouble with the Roman governor for sleeping we'll take care of that. "So they took the money and did as they were taught and this is the saying commonly reported among the Jews until this day." They still believe it. And it tells in the Bible how it all started. The soldiers were bribed. Willful rejection! So it might have been fine for Agrippa to say, "That's great, Paul. I believe in the resurrection. That's a Jewish hope, that's great, but we just don't believe Jesus rose from the dead." And so that launches Paul knowing that Agrippa's thinking that, and Paul was the master of analyzing the response and then reacting to it.
Look at the book of Romans. He answers all the questions that you're thinking but never ask. The same thing happens here. He knows that Agrippa's question is regarding Jesus, not the totality of the resurrection. So we come down to the fourth concept at the beginning of his testimony, the confession. Now watch verse 9. "I verily thought within myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth." He says Agrippa, in effect I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that's fine, Paul, we're not hassled with the resurrection, its just Jesus Christ that bothers us. And he says, "You know, I had the same problem Agrippa. I thought that it was right to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. I used to, why 25 years ago I was in the same boat you're in. I thought the same way. I understand how you feel, Agrippa." Well you know that's really devastating when you can read a man's mind. Of course that's part of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And Paul pours out his heart in confession. And I know this is a painful thing for him. If anything in his life sort of rang in his conscience is the fact that he had slaughtered Christians, that he had compelled Christians to blaspheme the name of Christ. Even though he was redeemed that thing was always in his mind that he had done that. And so this is confession. Verse 9, "I used to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Which thing I did in Jerusalem and many of the saints that I shut up in prison having received authority from the chief priests, he indicts them, and when they were put to death I gave my vote, literally, my vote against them and the Greek word is the word for the little pebble that was used in the Sanhedrin to cast a vote, which indicates probably that Paul is referring to the fact that he was a member of the Sanhedrin and he actually voted in the death of Christians.
And so I have my vote against them. Verse 11, "And I punished often in every synagogue and compelled them to blaspheme." In other words he tried to force the Christians to recant their faith, to blaspheme God or else kill them. And being exceedingly mad against them I persecuted them even to foreign cities. I mean this guy was the chief officer of the Jewish inquisition. He was after Christians. He was a mad man. The Bible says he was breathing in threatening and slaughtering; he was like a huffing puffing dragon slaughtering Christians. He hated it he despised it. By compelled them to blaspheme. No wonder he saw himself as the chief of sinners spending years doing that, and if they wouldn't blaspheme he made them martyrs.
So he says, "Listen Agrippa, I'm being condemned for believing what all Jews believe and I know it isn't just that it's Jesus Christ, and I know how it is because I used to feel that way about Christ and I didn't believe He was the Messiah and I was really strong. I went out under the authority of the Jews and I slaughtered Christians." And then it happened. In verse 12, begins his conversion. This is the dramatic high point of the commencement of his testimony. He was persecuting them in foreign cities and one of the foreign cities he was heading for was Damascus, a city that still exists and we were there last summer, many memories there. "Whereupon as I went to Damascus with authority and commission from the chief priests, at midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven above the brightness of the sun." My friends, that's bright because the sun at midday in the Middle East is really really bright. And above the midday sun he saw a light, "shining round about me and them who journeyed with me." We were drowned in this light beyond the light of the sun. "And when we were all fallen to the earth I heard a voice speaking to me saying in the Hebrew," or the common language Aramaic, "Saul, Saul, why are you continuing to persecute Me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads." What it really as like saying Saul, give up, you can't win. Why are you continuing to do this against such odds? The implication here is that Paul was terribly unsuccessful, that he had a miserable time trying to get Christians to recant and blaspheme. Unsuccessful! He was fighting something that he was supposed to be submitting to. It was a losing battle. He was smashing his head against a stone wall. He was trying to kick against the goads. Goads were little sharp things. Let me give you a little idea of what they were. When a young ox was first being trained to be tied up to a yoke to pull a single plow, one ox on a single plow, the ox upon being tied would kick naturally trying to throw off the yoke. And so the farmer would have a long stick and the end would be sharpened down, very hard wood, to a point like a pume, like a spear. And when the ox began to kick he merely took the stick and held it behind the heels of the ox in the yoke. And as the ox kicked it just rammed its heel right up the spear. And after a while the ox would stop doing that. It wasn't a dumb ox. And then there were occasions when a team of oxen would be attached to a wagon or a multiple plow. And they would hand on the front of the plow a long board stretching all the way across running right behind the heels of the oxen. It would be filled with spikes. And as they would kick they would just puncture their heels and soon they would cease kicking. This is how a young ox learned submission, the hard way. Paul was a young ox. He was learning the hard way that you can't keep kicking against Jesus Christ without getting stuck. You know you can imagine that there wasn't a person on the earth more miserable than Paul at this time, trying to fight what he was supposed submit to. So Paul says, "I'm just walking along to Damascus there, and at midday the light shines and a voice says, 'Saul, Saul, why do you continue to fight this thing? Give up.' And I said, 'Who art Thou, Lord?' And he said, 'I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.'" Now it doesn't say what happened at that point, but I can imagine that a buzz went through that crowd. Jesus? Alive? He's dead. The disciples stole his body. That was the testimony. Jesus talked to him? He's out of his mind. He's a fool. Paul simply in verse 15 brings down a sledgehammer blow on the whole scene. "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting." And so Paul shares his conversion. Now watch beginning in verse 16 his commission. And here in this is the fullness of the transformation, now watch. Verse 16: "But rise, and stand upon thy feet," and by this time you know Paul was lying on the ground blinded, "Stand up for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to appoint thee a minister and a witness both of these things, which thou has seen, and of those things in which I will appear unto thee." The Lord said, "Get up Paul. I just made you a minister. You have been made a witness." And then he says in verse 17, "Delivering you from the people, from the Gentiles unto whom now I send you." The word I send, apostello, from which we get the word apostle. "Get up Paul, I just made you an apostle."
And you remember an apostle was someone who had to be appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ personally. Called of God to be an apostle involved a direct choice by our Lord Jesus Christ. And here in the case of Paul he is made an apostle by the Lord himself. When people say, "Are there apostles today?" The answer is, "No." Because Christ is not here to appoint them. There are people who are sent to preach, but not in terms of foundational apostles.
Now an apostle also had to be an eyewitness of the resurrection. In Acts 1 it says, "Wherefore of these men who have accompanied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John to the same day he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection." Judas was disqualified; they were trying to choose the next disciple. They said, "Whoever it is he must be a witness of the resurrection." A true apostle had to see the resurrected Christ. Notice back now in verse 16, "I make you a minister and a witness of these things, which you have," what? "Seen." He saw the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, the resurrected Christ appeared to him on the Damascus road in a brilliant glorious face brighter than the sun, and twice after that he says, "And of those things in which I will appear to you." He appeared again to him in the temple in the trance in Jerusalem, again to him in the jail cell right at Jerusalem and told him he was going to go to Rome. He saw the Lord Christ at least three times by the time we arrive right here in Chapter 25 of Acts. He fit the qualifications. He says, "I am calling you as an apostle, a minister, and a witness." As a minister concept as a servant, someone who serves. A witness, someone who sees something, and who tells about it. And that's really all that Christian testimony has to be. It has to come out of the crucible of my own experience.
He says in verse 17, "Delivering thee from the people." That's a proper term really for the Jews. The people means the Jews and from the Gentiles or the pagans unto whom now I send thee." Now here you have the cycle saved out of the world to go back to the world. One of the things I have never understood in church history in connection with the Roman Catholic Church has been the cloistering of individuals, the monastic societies. Now whether they be convents, closed convents for nuns, or whether they be monks placed way off in monasteries, ministry to the Lord Jesus Christ involves ministry to people. And to say that you go off in absolute isolation to serve the Lord is a contradiction in terms. To offer a cup of cold water to a stranger is to minister to Christ, isn't it? We do it in his name we do it unto Me, he said. Serving people is serving Him and we were saved out of the world not to be left out of the world but to be sent back into the world. Now you look at your job that way when you go to work on Monday morning. You recognize yourself as having been commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ sent to that community of people to expose them to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to transform them from darkness to light. You're a missionary, you're a sent one. And in many ways you touch the world to a greater degree than I do, and yet people think of me as a minister and yet my contacts in the world are more limited than yours are. You're an ambassador and committed unto you is the ministry of reconciliation. You're to get people into the right adjustment.
Now notice what he says his message was to be, and this is such a marvelous verse we could spend long time talking about just this, we won't though. Here's what I was to say. Here was the gospel to present to open their eyes. Notice in verse 18 and that really is the starting of the gospel. The first thing you have to do with unsaved people is open their eyes 'cause their eyes are blind. Israel's were blind. Jesus even said about them, "It's the case of the blind leading the blind, they're both going to fall into the ditch." You see, when the word of God comes along men all of a sudden see what they never saw before, and what they usually see is sin. I think the key to opening a man's eyes is to uncover the blindness of sin, to take off the scales so he can see his sin. The word of God in the hands of the Spirit of God opens men's eyes. The Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin, righteousness and judgment.
And so when we open men's eyes we reveal to them the truth of salvation. He goes further than that. It's not just a matter of opening their eyes; it's a matter of changing their lives from turning them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to the power of God. Now what do you see in that? You see conversion, don't you? Transformation, change, new creation. You take them out of darkness and place them in light. You take them out of the power of Satan placing them in the power of God. A person without the Lord Jesus Christ lives in darkness. His mind is darkened. Ephesians tells us his mind is absolutely darkened and alienated. These words are very very powerful words. Listen to this: Ephesians 4:18, "Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance in them because of the blindness of their heart, being past feeling of giving themselves over to lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness." What is he saying? Their understanding is darkened. They're alienated from the life of God. They're ignorant. They're blind. They're past feeling. They're given over to sin. They work uncleanness. Here's the blindness of sin. And we come along and our objective is to take the word of God and try to tear the scales of blindness and show them what's true. You see you can't really truly evangelize unless you have some information, unless you have some truth to reveal. Open their eyes. The gospel then having opened their eyes to the truth is to transform them from darkness to light. You notice the absolute opposites? Salvation isn't giving you more light. There's this guy I hear on Sunday mornings. I don't know who he is and he comes on with about 15 minutes of dribble about just platitudes, just little dumb platitudes. And he's always saying we need more light, more light, and you say, you don't need more light, my friend, you need light, any light. It is not a case of more light, it is a case of light. The unsaved man is darkness. Everything he does is darkness. His understanding is dark. His will is dark. Everything is dark. He doesn't need more light he needs light. It is an absolute transformation from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of His dear Son. As Paul said it to the Colossians 1:12 and he calls it an inheritance of light. Boy you walk in the light and see things as they are, you see the truth of God, your path is clear, you understand what God is doing, you understand what God is saying, that happens in a miraculous moment. The opposite of darkness. Then he says the gospel not only transforms men from darkness to light but from the power of Satan to the power of God. Every man in the world is under the power of Satan or the power of God. Do you know that? There's no such thing as a free man. You just choose who your master will be. It's either Satan or God. And you know people think, "I'm free to do my own thing, go my own way, do what I want to do." It isn't true. In Ephesians 2 it says, "And you who were dead in trespasses and sins, you who walked according to the course of this world according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that worked in the children of disobedience. Anybody disobedient to the gospel, any human being in the world other than a Christian is guided by the spirit that works in him. That spirit is the prince of the power of the air, Satan. Salvation means that you transfer that man from Satan's power to God's power. That's total transformation. He doesn't need more of God. He doesn't need more information. He needs a total rebirth. And then in addition he says my message was this: to tell that they may receive forgiveness of sins." Boy I imagine ol' Bernice was wiggling around at that point. I imagine Agrippa was going like this. Paul was a penetrating person. I can't be Paul, but maybe it doesn't come across like he said it, but when he said that they may receive forgiveness of sins, I can see a long stare and a long pause because Agrippa and Bernice knew enough to know that what they did was sin. They knew it not only because they knew the Scriptures, the Old Testament, but they knew it because they knew their conscience. And in a sense Paul was saying, "Forgiveness is available, Agrippa. Whatever you and Bernice have done, whatever you are, that's our message." I'm telling you that's an exciting message to be able to give the world, isn't it? To be able to say to somebody who is a Christian, "My little children He has forgiven you all your trespasses for His name's sake." Oh what a blessed thought. That's what Paul meant when he said, "Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impugn iniquity. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord charges no sin." You say, "But surely even if you're a Christian God will lay some sin at your feet." Not at all. "Who shall lay any charge to God's elect? It is God that justifies. Shall Christ? Nay. Shall Christ accuse the one He died to save? No. Shall Christ accuse you of the sin He died and bore? No. There's no accusation against you. Forgiveness is full and free and complete. In addition to the moment transformation from darkness to light, power to Satan to God, forgiveness of sin, there's the future. He gives you an inheritance among them who are sanctified. The word sanctified means holy. You know another marvelous thing about becoming a Christian is the future promise of an inheritance undefiled and reserved for us. Isn't that marvelous? An inheritance with God. And then he gives the way you can attain it. Look at the end of verse 18. It's all yours Agrippa by what? faith that is in Me. Jesus said to Paul that day, Paul you go and you preach "to open their eyes, to turn them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to the power of God, that they may receive forgiveness of sin and inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith that is in Me." You tell them that if they believe in Me it is all theirs. And so Paul quotes to Agrippa the words of Jesus, the words of our Lord as they were given to him in Damascus. There's only one way to know those things and that's by faith. The simple gospel of Jesus Christ that we're called on to preach is the gospel of Ephesians 2:8-9, "For by grace are you saved through faith, that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast." So he says, "Agrippa, look what happened to me. I was a Jew of all the Jews. I was zealous not only for Judaism, but I was killing Christians and trying to get them to blaspheme. One day I was walking on the way to the Damascus road and the light shone in the middle of the day brighter than the sun itself. It smashed me down and I heard a voice and it said, 'Why don't you quit fighting me, Paul?' And I said, 'Who are you Lord?' And I heard it was Jesus. And then this Jesus said, 'Arise for I have made you a minister and a witness,' and then He commissioned me to preach and He told me what I was to say." And then verse 19, "Where upon O king Agrippa I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision." Agrippa, how could I disobey a voice from heaven? How could I disobey? So we see the commencement of Paul's testimony.
Going back to the thought we had at the very beginning Paul said I am a minister of reconciliation. I obey the Lord in that. Then he said to you, listen, "We are all ambassadors for Christ. We are to beg men to be reconciled to God." It has been committed unto us the word of reconciliation and the ministry of recon illation and I ask you will you be disobedient? Paul says, "I will not be." I pray that you and I will not be disobedient, but that we too will be faithful ministers of right adjustment. The goal and objective of our lives as it touches the life of an unsaved person would be to convert them to Jesus Christ.
Father thank you this morning for giving us the time to share together in the word and thank you for the joy we know just because we touch Thee when we touch this book. Our hearts are open to this book, they're open to Thee. How blessed we are, how rich we feel, but Father in all that we feel and all that we sense of what is ours in Christ, help us to sense great obligation. Thank you for the faithful ones in this congregation who are so zealous and so eager and so compassionate in sharing the gospel. And thank you for the many who sit in this auditorium this morning because somebody sitting near them cared and told them of Christ. Thank you for others Father now who are being witnessed to and who are contemplating our Lord Christ. Lord, challenge us with the ministry of reconciliation. Paul said I am not disobedient. May we say it as well. In Jesus' name. Amen.
This article is also available and sold as a booklet.
This sermon series includes the following messages:
Please contact the publisher to obtain copies of this resource.Publisher Information


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Reviewed By William B (Covington, WA) Reviewed for a 2002 Chevy Silverado —8/6/2009 2:37 PM
Nice mat, like not having the edges turned up, like the factory type. Don't put in car when you 1st get it, smells bad. Put outside for several days. Expensive for what you are getting. Like having the little holes to catch any liquids that ;may spill.


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Leaders from across the state say that Louisiana's public higher education system is in a precarious position after four straight years of budget cuts.
Gov. Bobby Jindal and the state Legislature have cut more than $425 million from higher education budgets since 2008 as they maneuvered to balance state budgets.
Of particular concern is the rapidly changing landscape in higher education. Since April, two system presidents and three campus leaders have either retired, been dismissed or announced an upcoming retirement.
Experts say attrition at the lower levels is a bigger danger as department heads, deans and faculty are beginning to search outside Louisiana to states with more stable budget situations.
Higher education leaders also say colleges across the country are starting to look at Louisiana as fertile ground to pick off some of the state's top talent.
When research faculty are recruited away or leave voluntarily, they often take millions dollars of research grants with them. That hurts universities in national rankings and compounds the "knowledge drain" that typically accompanies year-after-year budget cuts.
Former LSU Chancellor Michael Martin said Louisiana's dire budget outlook led other schools to target him in the months before August when he left the Baton Rouge campus to lead the Colorado State University system.
On Friday, Martin said he's heard from several people at LSU who have asked him to be a reference as they look for new jobs.
"There's always going to be people leaving, but what we're seeing at LSU is people making lots of lateral moves," Martin said. "The image of Louisiana among higher ed folks is of a state still struggling. It makes Louisiana vulnerable. I hope people choose to stay because LSU really is a fine institution."
Since the beginning of the year, the voluntary departures at LSU include a Baton Rouge chancellor, the College of Science dean, the business school dean and, most recently, Chief Financial Officer Eric Monday, who was recruited away by the University of Kentucky last week after nearly two decades, two degrees and nine administrative positions at LSU.
Throughout the past several years, LSU has lost five faculty members in geology and geophysics to industry and other universities; two biological science faculty members to schools in Ohio and California; and one of their leading faculty members in computational chemistry who took with him a $20 million grant.
LSU system President and Baton Rouge Chancellor William Jenkins on Thursday said he could think of nine or 10 research faculty off the top of his head who have left recently and taken with them as much as $16 million in research grants.
"People are watching us and coming after our best," Jenkins said.
Terry McConathy, vice president for Academic Affairs at Louisiana Tech University, acknowledges that turnover in higher education is fairly common. And while she wouldn't yet characterize the significant numbers of faculty leaving for other states as a trend, McConathy said the departures could soon pose another problem.
"When you begin to lose your researchers, you run the risk of losing the students who follow them," McConathy said. "A university needs a critical mass of faculty, students and research. You can't separate any one of those components out."
At Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, $38 million in budget cuts in the past four years has led to a dramatic reshaping as the university has gone from 10 academic deans to five and 24 department heads to nine.
SLU President John Crain said the financial instability puts the university's ability to earn accreditation at risk and is impacting academic quality.
"Even in those cases where we can afford to fill a position, it's been increasingly difficult to recruit people to come here. Other times, we've had very few applicants apply for a position," Crain said. "It's very disheartening."
Barry Erwin, head of the Council for A Better Louisiana, which lobbies on public policy, said Louisiana has a good example of how to protect higher education next door in Texas.
Texas state Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas heads his state's Committee on Higher Education. He said Texas has had its share of financial troubles, most recently in 2011 when the Legislature cut higher education funding by 9 percent to help fill a $20 billion hole in the budget.
But Branch said his state has taken other steps to preserve the quality of higher education. Texas has been able to pump $195 million into higher education over the last four years through its matching funds program, he said.
By setting aside $83 million for the program, the Texas Legislature made it easier for university presidents to "go out and sell donors on the idea" that the bigger the gift, the more likely to get it matched 100 percent by the state, he said.
"We needed to encourage private sector giving," Branch said. "We attracted $112 million in private funding through that program."
Texas also was able to cobble together $600 million over the years and dedicate it as an incentive to eight public colleges that legislators determined had the potential to join the country's elite institutions.
Branch said schools that hit certain targets including graduation rates and the number of doctorate degrees awarded are eligible to grab some of those dollars.
"That was a good way for us to re-purpose an existing pool of money, Branch said.
While Texas and this state have different approaches to funding public universities, Louisiana State Commissioner of Higher Education Jim Purcell said he's recently gotten encouraging signs from the Jindal administration that colleges could be spared mid-year budget cuts this time around.
Mid-year budget reductions to higher education have become the norm in recent years, when state sales tax collections fell short of what Jindal and the Legislature hoped for.
Being spared a mid-year cut should free universities to focus on creating efficiencies between now and next year's budget including contracting with local industries to generate additional revenue, he said.
Schools can do a lot, Purcell said, to expand curricula to address worker shortages in different parts of the state.
"Every campus and every system is affected by uncertainty ... we'll be working with the different boards next week on those kinds of ideas where we can increase efficiencies."


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LoaderOptimization Enumeration
The .NET API Reference documentation has a new home. Visit the .NET API Browser on docs.microsoft.com to see the new experience.
An enumeration used with the LoaderOptimizationAttribute class to specify loader optimizations for an executable.
Assembly: mscorlib (in mscorlib.dll)
|Member name
Obsolete. Ignored by the common language runtime.
Obsolete. Do not use. This mask selects the domain-related values, screening out the unused DisallowBindings flag.
Indicates that the application will probably have many domains that use the same code, and the loader must share maximal internal resources across application domains.
Indicates that the application will probably host unique code in multiple domains, and the loader must share resources across application domains only for globally available (strong-named) assemblies that have been added to the global assembly cache.
Indicates that no optimizations for sharing internal resources are specified. If the default domain or hosting interface specified an optimization, then the loader uses that; otherwise, the loader uses SingleDomain.
Indicates that the application will probably have a single domain, and loader must not share internal resources across application domains.
The meaning of MultiDomainHost changed in the .NET Framework version 2.0. The loader now shares resources across application domains only for assemblies that have been added to the global assembly cache.
If custom code access security policy is set for the AppDomain, by using the SetAppDomainPolicy property, and the AppDomain is created using the MultiDomain flag, the effect is the same as specifying the MultiDomainHost flag; that is, only assemblies in the GAC are shared. When this occurs, the loader does not throw an exception and the application does not experience the performance gains associated with the MultiDomain flag.
For more information on assembly sharing and domain-neutral assembly loading, see Application Domains and Assemblies.
Available since 1.1
Available since 2.0
Windows Phone Silverlight
Available since 7.0


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Hi All,
Not much to report this week but I have the pleasure of bringing you the names of the winners of the mid week Ritter Sport competition. The winners were Sally (comment #5), Alan (comment #30) and Phil (comment #42) - please can you guys send me your adresses so I can send on your Ritter winnings.
The good news for the rest of you is that I still have lots of samples left to give away! So look out for more competitions coming very soon.
Now to clear up the matter of Jim's ChocolateMission Shop. You will see on the left hand sidebar of the site I have created an affiliate store on Amazon. I do have plans down the line to enter a far more developed store, but for the minute this very basic store will be helping fund my ChocolateMission. Take a look a look at whats on offer HERE. Keep your eyes peeled for a more developed store opening later this year.
Just as a reminder - keep an eye on the Hotel Chocolat site (SEE HERE) - they are starting to put up their End of Season clearance lines.
Have great weeks guys and girls
News from the chocolate market
* News continues to rumble on about that chap who bought a large portion of the world's cocoa ... See HERE
* Cadbury finally got around to informing everyone of their exclusive Morrisons' Bar of Plenty bar ... See HERE .... REVIEW HERE
* Seemingly I missed out on celebrating National milk chocolate day ... See HERE
* Divine have launched a new Orange & Ginger variant ... See HERE
* These guys set a new record for eating 3 Mars bars in under a minute - the thought of that makes me feel pretty ill .... See HERE
Have I missed anything? Please share your stories!!!
Updated Reviews
Only the one this week ... Fry's Peppermint Cream
Posts from other blogs I enjoyed this week
* TheImpulsiveBuy - I've got a real thing for granola at the moment. Marvo checked out these dark chocolate and peanut butter Nature Valley thin granola bars ... See HERE
* GiGiReviews - Gi was on top form again this week reviewing some very HobNob like looking Archway Iced Oatmeal Cookies ... See HERE
* Foodstufffinds - Cin tracked down the new chocolate flavoured Weetabix. I can highly recommend them myself! They are very tasty ... See HERE
* JapaneseSnackReviews - Only the Japanese would think of making Lemon Tea flavoured cookies :D ... See HERE
* Chocablog - Simon tried out the very cool sound Zotter Butter Caramel. I hope Mr Zotter sends me one along soon ... See HERE
* ZOMGCandy - Rosa wrote a great double post review this week documenting her thoughts on Ritter Sports Mini Chocolate Collection - its well worth a read ... See HERE


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Dear All,
Would anybody be able to give me and my daughter a lift from Ilkley to Haworth on Sunday. My wife is coming over later but its a bit tight for her to get there for the Curley/ Wurley runs.
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May is Older Americans Month in county
BROOKVILLE — Tuesday, the Jefferson County Commissioners proclaimed the month of May as Older Americans Month.
More than 4,000 people aged 60 and older live in Jefferson County, and this proclamation is designed to recognize their involvement in the lives of the county's residents.
Mikki Oakes, director of the Area Agency on Aging's Development and Community Relations, thanked the commissioners for their efforts in connecting to the community.
"We appreciate the commissioners' support of our seniors here in Jefferson County," she said.
The proclamation reads that the community can provide recognition and respect to older Americans by:
• Increasing their opportunities to remain in their communities as active and engaged citizens.
• Providing services, technologies and support systems that allow seniors to foster and maintain connections within the community.
• Emphasizing the value of elders by publicly recognizing their contributions to the diversity, strength and unity of the community.
Oakes also invited the commissioners and the public to the grand opening of the Heritage House Cafe June 15.
Although the cafe officially opened during the first week in February, some kinks needed to be worked out to prepare for a ribbon-cutting ceremony and open house next month.
"We want to attract some of the baby boomers into the center to increase participation," Oakes said.
From noon to 2 p.m. and 4 to 6 p.m. June 15, everyone is invited to the Heritage House Cafe to get a taste of what the center offers.
According to Oakes, although the county's Area Agency on Aging would mainly like to target senior citizens, all are welcome to attend the open house and to become involved in the agency's various centers.
"We want the younger generation to understand that it's not just for old people," she said. "Our centers are very much full of different activities like Zumba and art classes. Yes, we still have bingo, but we are implementing newer activities."
In addition to next month's open house, the Jefferson County Area Agency on Aging is celebrating its 35th anniversary with its annual senior fair and picnic.
More than 20 vendors will be present with demonstrations and screenings.
"We want it to be a blowout this year because it is our 35th year," Oakes said.


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I like the Pueblo idea. Maybe make it an over night thing, then take a drive through the west side of the state on the way back or something?
Pueblo has a killer track with great variety of speed and turns. A friend of mine that races a lot says it's the best around. Jon and I saw One Lap of America there a month or two ago and were both very impressed. Anyway, I'm a big proponent of holding the event at Pueblo, and I think Jon would probably say the same thing. It's about the same price as SCR, and I think scheduling the Pueblo track would be easier than at SCR.How does everyone feel about this? I'm thinking we should set something up for September or October to keep the heat to a minimum.
"Oh, can you get three dates for my friends?" What movie was that from?
Quote from: "Chas""Oh, can you get three dates for my friends?" What movie was that from? Animal House
How about nurses? will it be open to nurses?Sorry, couldn't help it!Rian
Has any more investigation gone into looking a the track at Mead?


text: I'm a season pass holder at Meadows and looking for someone to ski\board with. I'm an advance intermediate skier and get a bit tired of skiing by myself sometimes. No skiing for me this weekend but the weekend of the 18th looks good and possibly I can get away during the week every so often. Thanks! Ken


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Small Business Server from Microsoft combines all the functionality of many enterprise class package and bundles them into an affordable system specifically designed for small business
IBIT staff have been working with Small Business Server (SBS) since it's very first release and have seen it mature into an excellent platform
It's latest incarnation is Small Business Server 2008
Key Functionality
Remote Working
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Whether it's at home, on the road, on the train or on the beach SBS has you covered. You have the capability to remotely control your PC as if you were sat in front it, access important information on your laptop as though you were in the office or grab emails on your phone or from any web browser
The remote functionality is both powerful and flexible to fit in with the way you want to work
E-mail Server
Powered by Exchange Server 2007, SBS provides an enterprise class mail server directly to your business. Combinded with Microsoft Outlook you have a full productivity solution at your fingertips that can keep track of your contacts, calendar, tasks and easily collaborate with the rest of your team
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Shared Printing
Why put a printer on every desk? Save money on running multiple printers by allowing staff to share printers
File Sharing
Store all your files in a central place so everyone knows where there are. You can also set security on files and folder so that sensitive information is only accessible to authorised staff
Save paper!
Send faxes straight from your PC instead of printing them off just to put into the fax machine
Receive faxes via the server, save them to a folder or email account so you don't need to print each one out
Premium Edition
Small Busines Server comes in standard and premium edtions
Use premium edition to extend your SBS with SQL Server for powerful business applications. Make use of the bundled second server license to run a terminal server. Flexibility is key here