A matter of reason surveys the current state of a question and seeks to generate a testable hypothesis. Whether there is or is not a God, is entirely a domain of faith for a religion where the will of a supremely powerful being is to not be directly observable. The conjecture of whether there is or is not a Judeo-Christian God is unprovable.
Everything is "unprovable" in the strictest sense of the word. For all you know, you're currently locked in a padded cell in an insane asylum, having a vivid delusion that you are reading this comment. You might not even be human -- what if you're a Baltaxian from the Zogar nebula having a bizarre dream about being a hairless ape? All you can prove is that you exist, via the famous conclusion "I think, therefore I am".
So, sure, you can say that the matter of God's existence is "unprovable", and I won't argue with that. Everything is unprovable.
However, in the real world, God's existence is every bit as questionable as the unicorns and leprechauns I mentioned earlier. In other words, there is absolutely no evidence of his existence -- which is itself sufficient to disbelieve in him -- not to mention a tremendous number of reasons to not believe.
When you propose the existence of an invisible, incorporeal, undetectable-to-all-known-devices-and-creatures, all-powerful, all-knowing, laws-of-physics-defying creature who is smart enough to have created the ENTIRE UNIVERSE but is stupid enough to care about all the stupid little things (like whether or not you get a tattoo) that the Bible says he cares about, the burden of evidence is very much on you.
I don't have to prove that God doesn't exist. Christians are the ones making the ridiculous claims, they are the ones who need to prove it. When I claim that the entire universe was in fact created by an all-powerful space duck with an insatiable appetite for spaghetti, then it's my turn to cough up some evidence.
When will you Atheists realise that your beliefs are just as much a religion as anthing you find in the Bible or the Quran?
Refusing to believe in something until evidence is submitted is a matter of reason, not religion or faith.
I don't believe in God. I don't believe in unicorns. I don't believe in Santa Claus. I don't believe in leprechauns. I don't believe in Brahma. I don't believe in alien abductions.
Chances are that you and I agree on all of those but the first. You probably also agree that the fact that you don't believe in unicorns is not a religious belief. Doesn't take a religious, faith-based belief to not believe in a stupid fairy tale, does it?
Now, please explain to me how the fact that I don't believe in unicorns is not a religious belief, but the fact that I don't believe in God is. Go ahead, I'm waiting.
I thought the standard unit of explosive power was the ton of dynamite...
Nope, it's tons of TNT, not dynamite. For some reason everybody seems to think that dynamite and TNT are the same thing, but dynamite is actually a nitroglycerin paste. TNT is entirely different.
Would you have to store the anti-matter, or create it as you need it? The first seems impossible, unless you has some kind of containment where the anti-matter doesn't actually touch anything. The other requires a massive amount of energy. Is this even plausible?
The only mechanisms we know of to create antimatter are UNBELIEVABLY power-hungry. The technology to manufacture even a mere gram of antimatter does not exist. So, the answer to your question -- we really have no idea. We can't manufacture meaningful amounts of antimatter at all, so the question of when it would get manufactured is something of a moot point.
What about the radiation involved? We've measured the rays that result from minor, single-atom collisions, but what happens when the collision is actually big enough to damage something?
IANANP (I am not a nuclear physicist), but I don't believe it would be significant. Nuclear weapons have two major sources of residual radiation (fallout): fission byproducts and induced radioactivity caused by neutron bombardment. Antimatter bombs wouldn't produce either. The radiation produced by a matter-antimatter reaction is high-energy gamma rays -- the explosion's extreme energy levels would probably manage to split or fuse a few atoms, and probably create very small amounts of radioactive material, but without fission byproducts or neutron flux you shouldn't see any large-scale radioactivity. The explosion would essentially look and behave just like a nuclear explosion (thermal pulse, mushroom cloud, shock wave, etc.) but without the fallout.
How do you propel something like this? Magnets? Or am I wrong in assuming anti-matter can't touch anything?
You are correct -- matter-antimatter collisions are bad news, and you can't allow the antimatter to touch any matter until the desired moment of explosion. Fortunately, antiprotons and antielectrons (positrons) are both electrically charged, and can therefore be magnetically contained in a vacuum to keep them from contacting any matter. A (very simple and dangerous) bomb design might be as simple as a containment shell with antimatter inside. You drop it on the target, the bomb ruptures and releases antimatter, BOOM.
The real problem is that the failure mode of antimatter weapons (at least ones that relied on pre-manufactured antimatter) is so damned dangerous. If the circuitry in a nuclear weapon fails, no biggie -- the bomb just doesn't detonate. Even in the worst case all that happens with a nuke is leakage of radioactive material. In fact, even an accidental critical mass isn't enough to produce a large-scale explosion -- unless you contain everything just right it just doesn't give you a big blast.
With an antimatter bomb, the opposite is true. You have to contain everything just right, because the second you don't, BOOM.
I never said that it automatically led to that conclusion. I was just pointing out that the lpm argument is meaningless, and then stating my own conclusions.
FWIW, my wife is a professional digital photographer. She shoots with a Nikon D1x (a "mere" 5.5MP). I have seen plenty of high-end-digital-against-35mm comparisons, and my preference has always been digital.
Your entire argument hinges on lpm measurements. These measurements are, of course, taken on high-contrast black and white targets -- typically 1000:1 contrast ratios.
Now, it is true that when you are taking pictures of closely spaced 1000:1 contrast black and white lines, film still kicks the crap out of digital. But suppose, just suppose, that the average photographer will NEVER IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE take such a picture. The performance in such circumstances might then be pretty meaningless, huh?
The simple fact is that film's resolution is highly contrast dependent. It shows extremely high resolution while dealing with extreme-contrast targets, but performs much worse in real-world conditions. Digital sensor resolution, on the other hand, is largely insensitive to contrast. For real-world scenes and not 1000:1 test targets, a 16MP sensor absolutely annihilates 35mm film in terms of overall image quality.
Except glass is actually a liquid, and flows quite readily on a scale of centuries, let alone millenia, and you wouldn't want groundwater carrying any surface contamination off those glass blocks.
Well, that's 450 megajoules per kilogram you'll need to put in. I believe you get _substantially_ more power than that out of fission reactions.
As soon as you figure out a way to focus all of the fuel's energy into lifting the payload, call NASA, because you're obviously smarter than all of their scientists put together.
Until then, you have forgotten the fact that rockets spend virtually all of their energy lifting the rocket itself (including its massive fuel supply), with only a tiny bit left over to lift the payload. That's why it's so incredibly expensive to put large payloads (think space shuttle) into orbit -- not only do you need to have enough fuel to lift the space shuttle, but then you need enough fuel to lift the fuel to lift the space shuttle, and then add more fuel to lift the fuel that's lifting the fuel...
,i>That might be a good rebuttal, except this law does not specifically discriminate between people sharing copyrighted media, and media which can be freely copied (public domain, creative commons, authors consent, etc).
From the bill:...imprisonment for a person who is not the copyright owner to knowingly electronically disseminate a commercial recording or audiovisual work without disclosing his or her true name and address...
No, there is no compelling reason for the average consumer to upgrade. However, the early adopters -- those of us who have already upgraded all of our equipment to support high-def -- are DYING for HD DVDs.
I have four HD displays in my house. I'm in the process of building my own movie theater with a 160" screen. It's absurd to me that the only way for me to get high-definition movies is to watch them on cable. I would re-buy most of my movies in high-def tomorrow if I could.
Its an oversimplification to ensure the parallel between the parabola of the plane (elipse that would hit the ground), and parabola of the space craft (elipse that misses the ground) are the same thing. They're the ones who called it a parabolic flight.
Not to be an ass, but you are aware that an ellipse and a parabola are two different curves, right?
If the plane is truly flying in a parabolic arc, then it is definitely not flying in an ellipse or any portion thereof. Likewise, the "ellipse that misses the ground" of the space craft is in no way a parabola.
Yes, the ellipse and parabola are closely related by virtue of both being conic sections, and a small portion of a spacecraft's orbit will be essentially parabolic, but they are not the same curve.
You don't suddenly leave the Earths gravitational field in orbit and start floating around. You just fall in a parabola that happens to miss the ground.
One would think this was common knowledge, but from the posts on here, its clearly not.
Of course, one would also think that it's common knowledge that an orbit is an ellipse, not a parabola...
(And before somebody tries to out-pedantic me, yes I know that this is a simplification that ignores relativity and only holds for two-body systems...)
It will be at least $75/mo -- or possibly not flat rate. It may be $50/mo + $2/hr or something.
Who, exactly, would be the target audience here? I make $400,000 a year and I still consider that to be ridiculously expensive for a game. The fact that I can easily afford that doesn't blind me to the fact that it would be a stupid waste of money.
I may be alone in this, but I'm just not hyped up about Blu-ray technology. For me it seems like the SVHS of the DVD era. Since you need a HDTV and a high end home theatre setup to really enjoy it, I can't see the average consumer jumping all over this, especially since everybody already has their regular DVDs. I think it will be good for games that want to cram a lot of FMV on a disc, but for movies I'm just not sold.
So, because you don't have a high-end home theater setup, the technology is doomed to failure. Hmmm.
What about the millions of people that do have high-end home theaters? I have a dedicated movie theater in my house, along with two other high-definition displays, and am absolutely salivating over the prospect of high-definition DVDs. Standard DVDs just don't cut it on high-end displays.
Of course, back when CD players cost a thousand bucks, the average person couldn't see the point of them either...
Do the super-bit editions of dvds really make a big difference?
Superbit is not high-definition. Superbit DVDs are just less compressed than normal DVDs; they dump the extras in favor of more video bandwidth. They are otherwise still plain-old 720x480 DVDs.
Speaking as someone with three high-definition displays in his house, there is a HUGE, HUGE difference between DVD quality and true high-definition video, especially once you go past about 80" diagonal.
The most expensive universal remotes seem to cost $250 - and I bet they work a lot better than this
There are a number of remotes (well, the manufacturers refer to them as Home Automation Control Systems) costing WAAAAAY more than that. A friend of mine dumped $5,000 on Crestron automation.
For instance, _your_ $1000 remote controls are a ridiculous waste of resources, whereas _my_ $4000 bicycle was worth it because hey, feel that quality.
You spent $4,000 on a frickin' BICYCLE? That money could have gone to feed the hungry! Won't you think of the children?
wow a non-cheap bastard on slashdot, never thought i'd see the day! i hate the people here who not only derail the idea of buying anything costly, but also never seem to have money saved up. always reminds me that this is a FREE software site, which makes sense. these people are pathetic.
A lot of the folks around here are high school to college-aged kids. It's difficult to imagine spending $700 on a remote control when your annual income is less than $10,000. But hey, I worked at Wal-Mart once upon a time too...
I see his stuff and I think who in their right mind would want any of this?
You are going to have the materialistic mega rich who after buying this stuff are gonna confirm the fact that they are just out there to pump their lives full of materialistic crap pefore they die. May be priding them selves on how sophisticated and character filled they are by the amount of technological crap hey own.
Ah, yes. If you can't afford it, then it's by definition a waste of money. See Aesop's parable of the sour grapes.
I make a lot of money, and consequently have a lot of "materialistic crap", including two $1,000 remote controls (one for the living room, one for the home theater). While I'm sure that that seems like a terrible waste of money to you, keep in mind that the only reason you can afford a lot of the technology you can today (computers, televisions, etc.) is that the "materialist mega rich", a.k.a. early adopters, bought the stuff when it was ridiculously expensive and therefore helped to finance the R&D that made it affordable to the masses.
In ten years, when plasma TVs are a commodity item, I'm sure you'll still look down your nose at the idiots who spend $20,000 on them today. And I'm sure the thought "Hey, if they hadn't done that, the technology would have stagnated and I wouldn't have been able to afford mine" won't even cross your mind.
Society needs early adopters. Whether it's the latest and greatest $500 video card or a super-expensive remote control, if nobody buys it it will never become cheap enough for the common person to afford.
In your world, 'hdtv' might be 1280x1024, but in the world at least a few of us live in, HDTV (notice the caps) isn't, it's 960x540(assuming square pixels) and I imagine less than 24 bit color (All this analog stuff!). I don't know, but I would also guess that it's the same frame rate as regular old TV (~30 fps).
There are two HDTV resolutions in current use, known as 720p and 1080i. 720p is 1280x720 60fps, and 1080i is 1920x1080 30fps (60 interlaced fields). Both of them are 24-bit truecolor.
I have no idea where you got 960x540 from, as it does not correspond to any HDTV resolution. I'm also not sure what the reference to "all this analog crap" is supposed to mean, as HDTV broadcasts are entirely digital.
Because none exists. Urea is a pretty small molecule, not much bigger than H2O. Filtering out a virus particle billions of atoms large is easy, filtering out individual molecules not much bigger than H2O is a very different story.
Where do people get this stupid (more importantly: wrong!) idea that religion is incompatible with science?
Science has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, a number of things that directly conflict with Biblical teachings. For instance, we know that the Earth is much older than the chronology in the Bible allows for. We know that man evolved from apelike ancestors. We know that Noah's flood did not occur.
And yet I know a number of people who will swear, based on no evidence whatsoever, that all of the world's scientists are wrong and the Bible tells the true story. In other words, they believe that nomadic herders who lived thousands of years ago knew the truth and that millions of modern scientists, the guys who invented computers and lasers and put men on the moon, have no idea what they are talking about.
It's possible, I must admit. Of course, it's also possible that there is an invisible unicorn standing right next to me. But I think that believing an old book over this incredible body of scientific knowledge, and worse yet trying to keep said scientific knowledge out of our classrooms in favor of religion, is both delusional and dangerous. Religion and science are very much enemies, unfortunately.
You may not personally have a problem with the idea of evolution or whatnot, but sadly there are a tremendous number of ignorant Christians who do, and they continue to oppose scientific advancement at every turn.
Slashdot Mirror
A matter of reason surveys the current state of a question and seeks to generate a testable hypothesis. Whether there is or is not a God, is entirely a domain of faith for a religion where the will of a supremely powerful being is to not be directly observable. The conjecture of whether there is or is not a Judeo-Christian God is unprovable.
Everything is "unprovable" in the strictest sense of the word. For all you know, you're currently locked in a padded cell in an insane asylum, having a vivid delusion that you are reading this comment. You might not even be human -- what if you're a Baltaxian from the Zogar nebula having a bizarre dream about being a hairless ape? All you can prove is that you exist, via the famous conclusion "I think, therefore I am".
So, sure, you can say that the matter of God's existence is "unprovable", and I won't argue with that. Everything is unprovable.
However, in the real world, God's existence is every bit as questionable as the unicorns and leprechauns I mentioned earlier. In other words, there is absolutely no evidence of his existence -- which is itself sufficient to disbelieve in him -- not to mention a tremendous number of reasons to not believe.
When you propose the existence of an invisible, incorporeal, undetectable-to-all-known-devices-and-creatures, all-powerful, all-knowing, laws-of-physics-defying creature who is smart enough to have created the ENTIRE UNIVERSE but is stupid enough to care about all the stupid little things (like whether or not you get a tattoo) that the Bible says he cares about, the burden of evidence is very much on you.
I don't have to prove that God doesn't exist. Christians are the ones making the ridiculous claims, they are the ones who need to prove it. When I claim that the entire universe was in fact created by an all-powerful space duck with an insatiable appetite for spaghetti, then it's my turn to cough up some evidence.
When will you Atheists realise that your beliefs are just as much a religion as anthing you find in the Bible or the Quran?
Refusing to believe in something until evidence is submitted is a matter of reason, not religion or faith.
I don't believe in God.
I don't believe in unicorns.
I don't believe in Santa Claus.
I don't believe in leprechauns.
I don't believe in Brahma.
I don't believe in alien abductions.
Chances are that you and I agree on all of those but the first. You probably also agree that the fact that you don't believe in unicorns is not a religious belief. Doesn't take a religious, faith-based belief to not believe in a stupid fairy tale, does it?
Now, please explain to me how the fact that I don't believe in unicorns is not a religious belief, but the fact that I don't believe in God is. Go ahead, I'm waiting.
I thought the standard unit of explosive power was the ton of dynamite...
Nope, it's tons of TNT, not dynamite. For some reason everybody seems to think that dynamite and TNT are the same thing, but dynamite is actually a nitroglycerin paste. TNT is entirely different.
Would you have to store the anti-matter, or create it as you need it? The first seems impossible, unless you has some kind of containment where the anti-matter doesn't actually touch anything. The other requires a massive amount of energy. Is this even plausible?
The only mechanisms we know of to create antimatter are UNBELIEVABLY power-hungry. The technology to manufacture even a mere gram of antimatter does not exist. So, the answer to your question -- we really have no idea. We can't manufacture meaningful amounts of antimatter at all, so the question of when it would get manufactured is something of a moot point.
What about the radiation involved? We've measured the rays that result from minor, single-atom collisions, but what happens when the collision is actually big enough to damage something?
IANANP (I am not a nuclear physicist), but I don't believe it would be significant. Nuclear weapons have two major sources of residual radiation (fallout): fission byproducts and induced radioactivity caused by neutron bombardment. Antimatter bombs wouldn't produce either. The radiation produced by a matter-antimatter reaction is high-energy gamma rays -- the explosion's extreme energy levels would probably manage to split or fuse a few atoms, and probably create very small amounts of radioactive material, but without fission byproducts or neutron flux you shouldn't see any large-scale radioactivity. The explosion would essentially look and behave just like a nuclear explosion (thermal pulse, mushroom cloud, shock wave, etc.) but without the fallout.
How do you propel something like this? Magnets? Or am I wrong in assuming anti-matter can't touch anything?
You are correct -- matter-antimatter collisions are bad news, and you can't allow the antimatter to touch any matter until the desired moment of explosion. Fortunately, antiprotons and antielectrons (positrons) are both electrically charged, and can therefore be magnetically contained in a vacuum to keep them from contacting any matter. A (very simple and dangerous) bomb design might be as simple as a containment shell with antimatter inside. You drop it on the target, the bomb ruptures and releases antimatter, BOOM.
The real problem is that the failure mode of antimatter weapons (at least ones that relied on pre-manufactured antimatter) is so damned dangerous. If the circuitry in a nuclear weapon fails, no biggie -- the bomb just doesn't detonate. Even in the worst case all that happens with a nuke is leakage of radioactive material. In fact, even an accidental critical mass isn't enough to produce a large-scale explosion -- unless you contain everything just right it just doesn't give you a big blast.
With an antimatter bomb, the opposite is true. You have to contain everything just right, because the second you don't, BOOM.
I never said that it automatically led to that conclusion. I was just pointing out that the lpm argument is meaningless, and then stating my own conclusions.
FWIW, my wife is a professional digital photographer. She shoots with a Nikon D1x (a "mere" 5.5MP). I have seen plenty of high-end-digital-against-35mm comparisons, and my preference has always been digital.
Lord, not this crap again.
Your entire argument hinges on lpm measurements. These measurements are, of course, taken on high-contrast black and white targets -- typically 1000:1 contrast ratios.
Now, it is true that when you are taking pictures of closely spaced 1000:1 contrast black and white lines, film still kicks the crap out of digital. But suppose, just suppose, that the average photographer will NEVER IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE take such a picture. The performance in such circumstances might then be pretty meaningless, huh?
The simple fact is that film's resolution is highly contrast dependent. It shows extremely high resolution while dealing with extreme-contrast targets, but performs much worse in real-world conditions. Digital sensor resolution, on the other hand, is largely insensitive to contrast. For real-world scenes and not 1000:1 test targets, a 16MP sensor absolutely annihilates 35mm film in terms of overall image quality.
Except glass is actually a liquid, and flows quite readily on a scale of centuries, let alone millenia, and you wouldn't want groundwater carrying any surface contamination off those glass blocks.
Christ, is that urban legend still around? No, glass is not a liquid.
Well, that's 450 megajoules per kilogram you'll need to put in. I believe you get _substantially_ more power than that out of fission reactions.
As soon as you figure out a way to focus all of the fuel's energy into lifting the payload, call NASA, because you're obviously smarter than all of their scientists put together.
Until then, you have forgotten the fact that rockets spend virtually all of their energy lifting the rocket itself (including its massive fuel supply), with only a tiny bit left over to lift the payload. That's why it's so incredibly expensive to put large payloads (think space shuttle) into orbit -- not only do you need to have enough fuel to lift the space shuttle, but then you need enough fuel to lift the fuel to lift the space shuttle, and then add more fuel to lift the fuel that's lifting the fuel...
,i>That might be a good rebuttal, except this law does not specifically discriminate between people sharing copyrighted media, and media which can be freely copied (public domain, creative commons, authors consent, etc).
...imprisonment for a person who is not the copyright owner to knowingly electronically
From the bill:
disseminate a commercial recording or audiovisual work without disclosing his or her true name and address...
No, there is no compelling reason for the average consumer to upgrade. However, the early adopters -- those of us who have already upgraded all of our equipment to support high-def -- are DYING for HD DVDs.
I have four HD displays in my house. I'm in the process of building my own movie theater with a 160" screen. It's absurd to me that the only way for me to get high-definition movies is to watch them on cable. I would re-buy most of my movies in high-def tomorrow if I could.
Its an oversimplification to ensure the parallel between the parabola of the plane (elipse that would hit the ground), and parabola of the space craft (elipse that misses the ground) are the same thing. They're the ones who called it a parabolic flight.
Not to be an ass, but you are aware that an ellipse and a parabola are two different curves, right?
If the plane is truly flying in a parabolic arc, then it is definitely not flying in an ellipse or any portion thereof. Likewise, the "ellipse that misses the ground" of the space craft is in no way a parabola.
Yes, the ellipse and parabola are closely related by virtue of both being conic sections, and a small portion of a spacecraft's orbit will be essentially parabolic, but they are not the same curve.
You don't suddenly leave the Earths gravitational field in orbit and start floating around. You just fall in a parabola that happens to miss the ground.
One would think this was common knowledge, but from the posts on here, its clearly not.
Of course, one would also think that it's common knowledge that an orbit is an ellipse, not a parabola...
(And before somebody tries to out-pedantic me, yes I know that this is a simplification that ignores relativity and only holds for two-body systems...)
If the chips were loosing a lot of heat to resistance, the capacitors wouldn't be capable of maintaining their charge.
They don't maintain their charge. That's why DRAM has to be continually refreshed, unlike SRAM.
It will be at least $75/mo -- or possibly not flat rate. It may be $50/mo + $2/hr or something.
Who, exactly, would be the target audience here? I make $400,000 a year and I still consider that to be ridiculously expensive for a game. The fact that I can easily afford that doesn't blind me to the fact that it would be a stupid waste of money.
I may be alone in this, but I'm just not hyped up about Blu-ray technology. For me it seems like the SVHS of the DVD era. Since you need a HDTV and a high end home theatre setup to really enjoy it, I can't see the average consumer jumping all over this, especially since everybody already has their regular DVDs. I think it will be good for games that want to cram a lot of FMV on a disc, but for movies I'm just not sold.
So, because you don't have a high-end home theater setup, the technology is doomed to failure. Hmmm.
What about the millions of people that do have high-end home theaters? I have a dedicated movie theater in my house, along with two other high-definition displays, and am absolutely salivating over the prospect of high-definition DVDs. Standard DVDs just don't cut it on high-end displays.
Of course, back when CD players cost a thousand bucks, the average person couldn't see the point of them either...
Has HD really caught on?
Do the super-bit editions of dvds really make a big difference?
Superbit is not high-definition. Superbit DVDs are just less compressed than normal DVDs; they dump the extras in favor of more video bandwidth. They are otherwise still plain-old 720x480 DVDs.
Speaking as someone with three high-definition displays in his house, there is a HUGE, HUGE difference between DVD quality and true high-definition video, especially once you go past about 80" diagonal.
The most expensive universal remotes seem to cost $250 - and I bet they work a lot better than this
There are a number of remotes (well, the manufacturers refer to them as Home Automation Control Systems) costing WAAAAAY more than that. A friend of mine dumped $5,000 on Crestron automation.
For instance, _your_ $1000 remote controls are a ridiculous waste of resources, whereas _my_ $4000 bicycle was worth it because hey, feel that quality.
You spent $4,000 on a frickin' BICYCLE? That money could have gone to feed the hungry! Won't you think of the children?
wow a non-cheap bastard on slashdot, never thought i'd see the day! i hate the people here who not only derail the idea of buying anything costly, but also never seem to have money saved up. always reminds me that this is a FREE software site, which makes sense. these people are pathetic.
A lot of the folks around here are high school to college-aged kids. It's difficult to imagine spending $700 on a remote control when your annual income is less than $10,000. But hey, I worked at Wal-Mart once upon a time too...
Finally, the second is defined as the time it takes a certain amount of radioactive material to decay
No, it is defined by the frequency of oscillation between two energy states of Cesium-133.
I see his stuff and I think who in their right mind would want any of this?
You are going to have the materialistic mega rich who after buying this stuff are gonna confirm the fact that they are just out there to pump their lives full of materialistic crap pefore they die. May be priding them selves on how sophisticated and character filled they are by the amount of technological crap hey own.
Ah, yes. If you can't afford it, then it's by definition a waste of money. See Aesop's parable of the sour grapes.
I make a lot of money, and consequently have a lot of "materialistic crap", including two $1,000 remote controls (one for the living room, one for the home theater). While I'm sure that that seems like a terrible waste of money to you, keep in mind that the only reason you can afford a lot of the technology you can today (computers, televisions, etc.) is that the "materialist mega rich", a.k.a. early adopters, bought the stuff when it was ridiculously expensive and therefore helped to finance the R&D that made it affordable to the masses.
In ten years, when plasma TVs are a commodity item, I'm sure you'll still look down your nose at the idiots who spend $20,000 on them today. And I'm sure the thought "Hey, if they hadn't done that, the technology would have stagnated and I wouldn't have been able to afford mine" won't even cross your mind.
Society needs early adopters. Whether it's the latest and greatest $500 video card or a super-expensive remote control, if nobody buys it it will never become cheap enough for the common person to afford.
Japan has different HDTV standards than the rest of the world. As most of Slashdot's readership is American/European, I didn't bother to mention that.
In your world, 'hdtv' might be 1280x1024, but in the world at least a few of us live in, HDTV (notice the caps) isn't, it's 960x540(assuming square pixels) and I imagine less than 24 bit color (All this analog stuff!). I don't know, but I would also guess that it's the same frame rate as regular old TV (~30 fps).
There are two HDTV resolutions in current use, known as 720p and 1080i. 720p is 1280x720 60fps, and 1080i is 1920x1080 30fps (60 interlaced fields). Both of them are 24-bit truecolor.
I have no idea where you got 960x540 from, as it does not correspond to any HDTV resolution. I'm also not sure what the reference to "all this analog crap" is supposed to mean, as HDTV broadcasts are entirely digital.
Because none exists. Urea is a pretty small molecule, not much bigger than H2O. Filtering out a virus particle billions of atoms large is easy, filtering out individual molecules not much bigger than H2O is a very different story.
Where do people get this stupid (more importantly: wrong!) idea that religion is incompatible with science?
Science has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, a number of things that directly conflict with Biblical teachings. For instance, we know that the Earth is much older than the chronology in the Bible allows for. We know that man evolved from apelike ancestors. We know that Noah's flood did not occur.
And yet I know a number of people who will swear, based on no evidence whatsoever, that all of the world's scientists are wrong and the Bible tells the true story. In other words, they believe that nomadic herders who lived thousands of years ago knew the truth and that millions of modern scientists, the guys who invented computers and lasers and put men on the moon, have no idea what they are talking about.
It's possible, I must admit. Of course, it's also possible that there is an invisible unicorn standing right next to me. But I think that believing an old book over this incredible body of scientific knowledge, and worse yet trying to keep said scientific knowledge out of our classrooms in favor of religion, is both delusional and dangerous. Religion and science are very much enemies, unfortunately.
You may not personally have a problem with the idea of evolution or whatnot, but sadly there are a tremendous number of ignorant Christians who do, and they continue to oppose scientific advancement at every turn.