Internet discussion

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> the characters I have seen in that section. The internet has some
> wonderful areas and if used properly can be a great help. The reasons we
> use for TV do apply though since that this can waste a lot of time.

I think one issue is that television is used primarily for
entertainment.  The perception is also that the Internet is ued
primarily for entertainment purposes.  In terms of bandwidth used, this
is probably true.

But I, like Bro Robert Brown, use the Internet for professional
purposes.  For example, today I had to set up a rather weird network
configuration for testing purposes, and I had to do it *now*.  I could
have called the vendor's support organization and asked for the
appropriate patches that were necessary (of course, it was by reading
some web-accessible FAQ's that I even knew of the possibility of what I
was trying and the existance of these patches) and then waited while
they arrived via snail mail.  But this project I'm working on must be
completed this evening -- the product ships tomorrow afternoon (we
don't usually operate this way, it's a panic kind of situation).

So I access the developers' web page at Silicon Grahpics, type in my
I.D. and password, do a search for the latest patch, and voila, I'm
done.

In fact, there's a whole pile of stuff I simply would not have been
able to do if I didn't have the information available from the net.  An
especially good example is "How do you boot from an external disk on a
Silicon Graphics machine?"  Information on how to do this is not
available in the normal paper or online documentation, and my contacts
at SGI all tell me this is not possible.  But I found an obscure
reference on the net, and voila, it is done.  If I could not boot from
external disks, my job as a software engineer supporting multiple
O.S.'s on multiple hardware platforms would be VERY difficult!

This does bring up another question, though: should pragmatism be
the principle by which we decide issues of spirituality?   I'll
allow Bro Bassett to respond on that question :-)

Lord bless you all.

Richard Masoner