Hmm... I'm a fairly skeptical and well-read person, with 10 years of university training in science (undergrad: physics & math with minor in philosophy; grad: theoretical physics, spontaneous symmetry breaking in quantum field theories).
I've also studied the Bible for many years, and I'm convinced it really is the Word of God. I didn't come to this conclusion easily. No other "holy" book has the verifiable historicity, archeological support, and prophetic track record as the Bible. It's just as relevant as to the world today as the interreligious middleeast conflicts and emergence of global government.
If you like to think, here is a question to ponder, in line with your statement: Why is it so crucial to God (theme appears over and over again throughout the Bible) that "The righteous man will live by faith."? Why not certain knowledge or something else?
Here's another: What is "the beginning of wisdom" according to the Bible? Why?
Microsoft is forcing the 12-year-old wxWindows project to change its name as well, on account of claimed infringement on its Windows(R) trademark. Probably as a defensive maneuver in its ongoing suit against Lin---s.com.
When things cooled down sufficiently, photons could travel free and atoms could form and expect to stay around. The transition where this occurred is called decoupling...
Technically this is called "recombination", whereas "decoupling" refers to any thermodynamic decoupling of distinct species when their interaction becomes negligible. (An example other than radiation-matter decoupling is neutrino decoupling from all other weakly-interacting massive fermions occurred at ~1 to 10 second, or ~10^10 K.)
Also, to be fair to the parent post, watching significant figures,
Not so. By mass roughly 74% of baryons formed in the Big Bang were Hydrogen nuclei, 26% Helium, and Lithium and other elements in trace amounts. This was actually a very important confirmed prediction, one of the "big three" empirical evidences supporting the big bang.
Well, the Greek/Latin myths are very interesting from an historical and cultural perspective, but are of no lasting consequence. Like most all pagan religions (with the possible exception of Wicca) they are only indirectly relevant to the contemporary world in which we find ourselves today; they largely died out as Christianity, under persecution in Jerusalem, swept westward (getting its early start in Jewish synagogues in asia minor and eastern europe).
Most people have believed throughout history that the True God, if he exists, should be eternally relevant and his works observable over time. (The difficulty for us is that he can work on vast time-scales compared to the typical human lifespan (or attention-span!))
I said the Jewish God was an *obvious* starting place for these basic reasons:
Over 3 billion nominal (mono-)theists (Jews, Christians, Muslims) trace their religious heritage to covenants made with Abraham of Genesis.
Throughout their history, and in accordance with their scripture, the Jews have been scattered, enslaved, conquered, slaughtered, etc. more than any other people on the face of the planet. And still today they retain their identity! Over the great span of recorded human history, Jerusalem (literally "City of Peace") has been the most fought-over city in the world. Armies of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Ptolemies, Seleucids, Romans (Jesus 1, Jesus 2), Byzantines, Persians, Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, British, Palestinians, and many others have waged war over her.
The Bible says this will continue until ALL nations rise up with the Anti-Christ against Israel in the battle of Armageddon, after which a lasting peace will finally be established by the true Christ (Messiah). How could such a tiny nation be at the "center of the world" for so long?
It is unprecedented in all of human history for a nation, language and culture to be revived after being scattered to the ends of the earth for 2000 years, in the way that Israel has been. Most conquered peoples assimilate into their conqueror's nations relatively quickly. But this was prophecied ahead of time. Speaking as a gentile Christian who loves the Jewish people, that there are still so many unbelieving Jews around for all the world to see is such a great boost to my faith, because it shows the Bible to be historically and prophetically trustworthy. Of course there is much more to this, but you have to study the Bible.
Despite what President Bush and John Ashcroft may say, the global war on terrorism is not being fought because "they hate our freedoms". At root, it is a religious struggle for control over the Holy Land. The Bible has a lot to say about the future, and to see the globalized political, economic, and religious landscapes all coming together in accordance with biblical prophecy blows me away.
(Once when I was a physics student at Caltech, the students invited Richard Feynman to come into our class to talk with us. One thing he stressed, and I never forgot it, was how vital PREDICTION was to our UNDERSTANDING. It is generally very hard to predict what will happen in novel circumstances, even highly controlled ones. Prediction is our tool to winnow out a posteriori truth. I had previously rejected the possibility of God. But once I was challenged to look into biblical prophecy, I found more evidence for the truth of the Bible than I had imagined was possible.)
Yes, there are many competing and contradictory claims out there, and anyone can make one up.
But the Truth is out there too, and life is all about weighing evidences of claims and making decisions about what is worth putting faith in.
Everyone puts faith in somethings, and acts on that faith. If not in God, then perhaps quantum chromodynamics, or a spouse, or an investment in the American economic system. And we eventually face the consequences of our faith-based choices. Therefore it is a "waste" to put faith in a lie.
The real, living God does ask for faith, but not blind faith. He has given a lot of evidence, but requires you to seek it out for yourself. The act of seeking for evidence is an act of faith, which God will honor if you do it with all your heart.
If anyone wants evidence for God, an obvious place to start looking would be the history of Israel and the Jewish people. If you are interested in science, here are other reasons to believe in the Bible.
Nobody can be absolutely certain that there is no God. But even if there exists in your mind a remote chance that the Bible could be right and you will face His judgment some day, it seems irrational to me to piss Him off ahead of time for no reason. Why would a rational being do so?
Isn't it because, deep down, you just hate God? Romans 8 says that you do: it says that the mind of natural man is hostile to God (at war against Him). Jesus said, "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it has hated me before it hated you."
But if you will face ultimate judgement, wouldn't it be better to face a friend rather than an enemy? How much does it cost you to make a friend? Now may prove to be a good time to go back and re-read that Bible verse (John 3:16) very carefully.
Of course, the mass matters little if you have a pen that is properly balanced, ie the center of mass is down near the tip.
Actually it's not the location of the center of mass that is directly relevant. Rather it is the *moment of inertia* about an axis through the tip (and orthogonal to the pen) that should be small. The *implication* of this latter condition is that the center of mass be near the tip.
Yes, it is correct that at most one of the i,j,k can be zero to nontrivially fit the boundary conditions for electromagnetic standing waves in a vacuum bounded by a perfect rectangular conductor. There is a TM 010 mode for a cylindrical cavity, however. (The schroedinger equation is even more restrictive than Maxwell, as none of the i,j,k can be zero even in the ground state of an infinite potential well.)
The article states, "The distance between the hot spots is half the wavelength of the microwaves..." which would only really be true for the 200 mode, if it existed. It doesn't; so the article is even more wrong.
Even in the simplest case, where just one mode is excited, one must remember that for each mode there are two possible polarisations.
This is not entirely correct either. If one of the i,j,k is zero, there is no choice left for the polarization. It is completely fixed by k dot E = 0 and kz=0.
In any case, I agree that it is unrealistic to presume that a conventional oven only excites a single mode. But my main point is more serious: you cannot independently *measure* the speed of light using this method at all.
Another interesting and tangentially-related problem in physics is the very use of the phrase "the speed of light" when the intended meaning is actually "c". Let me explain why this potential confusion has always bothered me...
The constant "c" is an (exactly defined) fundamental constant of nature, and in the context of relativity theory is actually only a geometrical parameter of spacetime. In this context it merely connects space and c*time together and has nothing whatsoever to do with "the speed of light".
Conversely, "speed of light" is not always necessarily a fundamental constant. When electromagnetic radiation passes through a medium with a nontrivial index of refraction, dipole oscillations are induced in the material that have the cumulative effect of reducing the propagation speed of the waves. In this case, the "speed of light" is strictly less than "c".
And even when photons of light travel in a perfect vacuum, the propogation speed is equal to "c" *only* if the mass of the photon is *exactly* zero. In the current standard electroweak theory, the photon is a goldstone boson and therefore is in fact massless. (I am oversimplifying here.) But there have been many alternative theoretical proposals in which spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking causes the photon to aquire a small, but non-zero mass.
If one of these alternative proposals to the standard model is confirmed, then it will always be true that "the speed of light" is strictly less than "c" -- even in a vacuum!
The two concepts can be and should be separated. The current identification between them is tenuous and always will be, because it is only a matter of our limited experimental precision that "the speed of light" == "c" , especially when measuring it with a microwave oven;-) (sorry)
First of all, let's not forget that the speed of light is a defined quantity:
c=299,792,458 m/s (
exactly).
A microwave oven is a resonant cavity, and the resonant frequencies for the modes (TE/TM) are given by
omega(i, j, k) = pi * c * sqrt( (i/A)^2 + (j/B)^2 + (k/C)^2 );
where A,B,C are the dimensions of the cavity and i,j,k are non-negative integers (not all zero) which specify the mode.
This experiment does not "measure" the speed of light. All this "experiment" does is tries to isolate out a specific mode (i = 2, j = k = 0) and verifies that the frequecy rating printed on the back of the oven corresponds to this mode (which is still a cool thing to do).
You see, the manufacturer already implicitly *used* the value of c above in designing the oven and calculating the value of the number printed on the back of it, so the "experiment" is not capable of making a (independent) measurement of c.
Lest you think I am nitpicking, this kind of problem plagues us physicists all the time!
Two years ago, a healthy Jesse Sullivan, 56, was at his job repairing utility lines when he accidentally touched a live wire, costing him both his arms up to his shoulders.
It's great that Mr. Sullivan survived his accident and could benefit from bionics. Electricity can be very beneficial but also very dangerous (warning: extremely graphic images). Technology is great, but it always has a dark side -- so be careful out there folks!
oops. Must have been 2.2 at that time. I remember having lots of installation problems when first starting out. But I do remember using Slackware 3.2 for over a year before trying out other distros...
Red Hat Linux 9 (Shrike) April 30, 2004
Red Hat Linux 8.0 (Psyche) December 31, 2003
Red Hat Linux 7.3 (Valhalla) December 31, 2003
Red Hat Linux 7.2 (Enigma) December 31, 2003
Red Hat Linux 7.1 (Seawolf) December 31, 2003
You don't back-port all those OpenSSH security fixes yourself, do you?:-)
It's nice to hear that Slackware is still going strong with the 9.1 release. (I started out running (GNU/)Linux with Slackware 3.2 in 1995-ish, so they've always had a special place in my heart -sniff-.)
Now I mostly use RedHat, which reminds me... does anyone have any idea (roughly) when *RedHat* 9.1 is due out?
Going to have to start upgrading some of these RedHat boxen before support dries up after New Years:-(
Publishers and lawyers like to describe copyright as ``intellectual property''---a term that also includes patents, trademarks, and other more obscure areas of law. These laws have so little in common, and differ so much, that it is ill- advised to generalize about them. It is best to talk specifically about ``copyright,'' or about ``patents,'' or about ``trademarks.''
The term ``intellectual property'' carries a hidden assumption---that the way to think about all these disparate issues is based on an analogy with physical objects, and our ideas of physical property.
When it comes to copying, this analogy disregards the crucial difference between material objects and information: information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can't be. Basing your thinking on this analogy is tantamount to ignoring that difference. (Even the US legal system does not entirely accept the analogy, since it does not treat copyrights or patents like physical object property rights.)
If you don't want to limit yourself to this way of thinking, it is best to avoid using the term ``intellectual property'' in your words and thoughts.
``Intellectual property'' is also an unwise generalization. The term is a catch-all that lumps together several disparate legal systems, including copyright, patents, trademarks, and others, which have very little in common. These systems of law originated separately, cover different activities, operate in different ways, and raise different public policy issues. If you learn a fact about copyright law, you would do well to assume it does not apply to patent law, since that is almost always so.
Since these laws are so different, the term ``intellectual property'' is an invitation to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager common aspect of these disparate laws, which is that they establish monopolies that can be bought and sold, and ignore their substance--the different restrictions they place on the public and the different consequences that result. At that broad level, you can't even see the specific public policy issues raised by copyright law, or the different issues raised by patent law, or any of the others. Thus, any opinion about ``intellectual property'' is almost surely foolish.
If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, copyrights and trademarks, or even learn what these laws require, the first step is to forget that you ever heard the term ``intellectual property'' and treat them as unrelated subjects. To give clear information and encourage clear thinking, never speak or write about ``intellectual property''; instead, present the topic as copyright, patents, or whichever specific law you are discussing.
According to Professor Mark Lemley of the University of Texas Law School, the widespread use of term "intellectual property" is a recent fad, arising from the 1967 founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization. (See footnote 123 in his March 1997 book review, in the Texas Law Review, of Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property by James Boyle.) WIPO represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents and trademarks, and lobbies governments to increase their power. One WIPO treaty follows the lines of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been used to censor useful free software packages in the US. See http://www.wipout.net/ for a counter-WIPO campaign.
Hi. This is mostly a fair criticism, and I should have been more precise since I have studied the natural philosophy of the ancient Greeks like Anaxagoras, Eudoxus, Aristarchus, Pythagorus, Eratosthenes, etc. But these were Greek intellectuals of the era; it's doubtful that John, a commmon Galilean man, was fully aware of thier achievements. Furthermore, as you must realize, this is irrelevant to the main point of the post.
What is not fair is the "sillinesses" label without any attempt at refutation or alternative explanation of the main point.
There are many predictions in the Bible that are being understood and fulfilled in our own time, such as attempts at peace agreements in Israel, growing alignments between Christians and Jews, gradual consolidation of global political power, emergence of a controlled world economy (leading to a single currency and the "Mark of the Beast"), and a general increase in wickedness and rebelion agaist God, to state a few.
Read the Bible -- you'll be surprised what's in there!
I am always amazed that these predictions were made some 2000 years ago, before we had the foggiest notions about astronomy, astrophysics, or even the fact that the earth was spherical!!
The physical sequence of events: impact of a large meteorite into the sea and more prolonged, secondary impacts of smaller objects surrounding its core, the subsequent shockwaves, earthquake, blanketing of the sky by dust and debris thrown up from the main impact, contamination of the water cycle, etc.
When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour... Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake...
...and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.
...and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water--the name of the star is [Bitterness]. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter. (Revelation 8)
Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth, so tremendous was the quake... and the cities of the nations collapsed... Every island fled away and the mountains could not be found. From the sky huge hailstones of about a hundred pounds each fell upon men. And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because the plague was so terrible. (Revelation 16)
There was a great earthquake... The sky receded like a scroll, rolling up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?" (Revelation 6)
God is going to wipe us out the same way he did the dinosaurs!
It's scary to think that this comet is up there right now, orbiting silently, following the laws of celestial mechanics, until the pre-determined time..............!
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... I'm a fairly skeptical and well-read person, with 10 years of university training in science (undergrad: physics & math with minor in philosophy; grad: theoretical physics, spontaneous symmetry breaking in quantum field theories).
I've also studied the Bible for many years, and I'm convinced it really is the Word of God. I didn't come to this conclusion easily. No other "holy" book has the verifiable historicity, archeological support, and prophetic track record as the Bible. It's just as relevant as to the world today as the interreligious middleeast conflicts and emergence of global government.
If you like to think, here is a question to ponder, in line with your statement: Why is it so crucial to God (theme appears over and over again throughout the Bible) that "The righteous man will live by faith."? Why not certain knowledge or something else?
Here's another: What is "the beginning of wisdom" according to the Bible? Why?
Peace to you.
Microsoft is forcing the 12-year-old wxWindows project to change its name as well, on account of claimed infringement on its Windows(R) trademark. Probably as a defensive maneuver in its ongoing suit against Lin---s.com.
Technically this is called "recombination", whereas "decoupling" refers to any thermodynamic decoupling of distinct species when their interaction becomes negligible. (An example other than radiation-matter decoupling is neutrino decoupling from all other weakly-interacting massive fermions occurred at ~1 to 10 second, or ~10^10 K.)
Also, to be fair to the parent post, watching significant figures,
Not so. By mass roughly 74% of baryons formed in the Big Bang were Hydrogen nuclei, 26% Helium, and Lithium and other elements in trace amounts. This was actually a very important confirmed prediction, one of the "big three" empirical evidences supporting the big bang.
Please also see this post and this one above.
Most people have believed throughout history that the True God, if he exists, should be eternally relevant and his works observable over time. (The difficulty for us is that he can work on vast time-scales compared to the typical human lifespan (or attention-span!))
I said the Jewish God was an *obvious* starting place for these basic reasons:
Over 3 billion nominal (mono-)theists (Jews, Christians, Muslims) trace their religious heritage to covenants made with Abraham of Genesis.
Throughout their history, and in accordance with their scripture, the Jews have been scattered, enslaved, conquered, slaughtered, etc. more than any other people on the face of the planet. And still today they retain their identity! Over the great span of recorded human history, Jerusalem (literally "City of Peace") has been the most fought-over city in the world. Armies of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Ptolemies, Seleucids, Romans (Jesus 1, Jesus 2), Byzantines, Persians, Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, British, Palestinians, and many others have waged war over her. The Bible says this will continue until ALL nations rise up with the Anti-Christ against Israel in the battle of Armageddon, after which a lasting peace will finally be established by the true Christ (Messiah). How could such a tiny nation be at the "center of the world" for so long?
It is unprecedented in all of human history for a nation, language and culture to be revived after being scattered to the ends of the earth for 2000 years, in the way that Israel has been. Most conquered peoples assimilate into their conqueror's nations relatively quickly. But this was prophecied ahead of time. Speaking as a gentile Christian who loves the Jewish people, that there are still so many unbelieving Jews around for all the world to see is such a great boost to my faith, because it shows the Bible to be historically and prophetically trustworthy. Of course there is much more to this, but you have to study the Bible.
Despite what President Bush and John Ashcroft may say, the global war on terrorism is not being fought because "they hate our freedoms". At root, it is a religious struggle for control over the Holy Land. The Bible has a lot to say about the future, and to see the globalized political, economic, and religious landscapes all coming together in accordance with biblical prophecy blows me away. (Once when I was a physics student at Caltech, the students invited Richard Feynman to come into our class to talk with us. One thing he stressed, and I never forgot it, was how vital PREDICTION was to our UNDERSTANDING. It is generally very hard to predict what will happen in novel circumstances, even highly controlled ones. Prediction is our tool to winnow out a posteriori truth. I had previously rejected the possibility of God. But once I was challenged to look into biblical prophecy, I found more evidence for the truth of the Bible than I had imagined was possible.)
Yes, there are many competing and contradictory claims out there, and anyone can make one up. But the Truth is out there too, and life is all about weighing evidences of claims and making decisions about what is worth putting faith in.
Everyone puts faith in somethings, and acts on that faith. If not in God, then perhaps quantum chromodynamics, or a spouse, or an investment in the American economic system. And we eventually face the consequences of our faith-based choices. Therefore it is a "waste" to put faith in a lie.
The real, living God does ask for faith, but not blind faith. He has given a lot of evidence, but requires you to seek it out for yourself. The act of seeking for evidence is an act of faith, which God will honor if you do it with all your heart.
If anyone wants evidence for God, an obvious place to start looking would be the history of Israel and the Jewish people. If you are interested in science, here are other reasons to believe in the Bible.
Nobody can be absolutely certain that there is no God. But even if there exists in your mind a remote chance that the Bible could be right and you will face His judgment some day, it seems irrational to me to piss Him off ahead of time for no reason. Why would a rational being do so?
Isn't it because, deep down, you just hate God? Romans 8 says that you do: it says that the mind of natural man is hostile to God (at war against Him). Jesus said, "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it has hated me before it hated you."
But if you will face ultimate judgement, wouldn't it be better to face a friend rather than an enemy? How much does it cost you to make a friend? Now may prove to be a good time to go back and re-read that Bible verse (John 3:16) very carefully.
Actually it's not the location of the center of mass that is directly relevant. Rather it is the *moment of inertia* about an axis through the tip (and orthogonal to the pen) that should be small. The *implication* of this latter condition is that the center of mass be near the tip.
My comment above was not meant to be posted anonymously.
The article states, "The distance between the hot spots is half the wavelength of the microwaves..." which would only really be true for the 200 mode, if it existed. It doesn't; so the article is even more wrong.
Even in the simplest case, where just one mode is excited, one must remember that for each mode there are two possible polarisations.
This is not entirely correct either. If one of the i,j,k is zero, there is no choice left for the polarization. It is completely fixed by k dot E = 0 and kz=0.
In any case, I agree that it is unrealistic to presume that a conventional oven only excites a single mode. But my main point is more serious: you cannot independently *measure* the speed of light using this method at all.
The constant "c" is an (exactly defined) fundamental constant of nature, and in the context of relativity theory is actually only a geometrical parameter of spacetime. In this context it merely connects space and c*time together and has nothing whatsoever to do with "the speed of light".
Conversely, "speed of light" is not always necessarily a fundamental constant. When electromagnetic radiation passes through a medium with a nontrivial index of refraction, dipole oscillations are induced in the material that have the cumulative effect of reducing the propagation speed of the waves. In this case, the "speed of light" is strictly less than "c".
And even when photons of light travel in a perfect vacuum, the propogation speed is equal to "c" *only* if the mass of the photon is *exactly* zero. In the current standard electroweak theory, the photon is a goldstone boson and therefore is in fact massless. (I am oversimplifying here.) But there have been many alternative theoretical proposals in which spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking causes the photon to aquire a small, but non-zero mass.
If one of these alternative proposals to the standard model is confirmed, then it will always be true that "the speed of light" is strictly less than "c" -- even in a vacuum!
The two concepts can be and should be separated. The current identification between them is tenuous and always will be, because it is only a matter of our limited experimental precision that "the speed of light" == "c" , especially when measuring it with a microwave oven ;-) (sorry)
A microwave oven is a resonant cavity, and the resonant frequencies for the modes (TE/TM) are given by
where A,B,C are the dimensions of the cavity and i,j,k are non-negative integers (not all zero) which specify the mode.
This experiment does not "measure" the speed of light. All this "experiment" does is tries to isolate out a specific mode (i = 2, j = k = 0) and verifies that the frequecy rating printed on the back of the oven corresponds to this mode (which is still a cool thing to do).
You see, the manufacturer already implicitly *used* the value of c above in designing the oven and calculating the value of the number printed on the back of it, so the "experiment" is not capable of making a (independent) measurement of c.
Lest you think I am nitpicking, this kind of problem plagues us physicists all the time!
It's great that Mr. Sullivan survived his accident and could benefit from bionics. Electricity can be very beneficial but also very dangerous (warning: extremely graphic images). Technology is great, but it always has a dark side -- so be careful out there folks!
oops. Must have been 2.2 at that time. I remember having lots of installation problems when first starting out. But I do remember using Slackware 3.2 for over a year before trying out other distros...
You don't back-port all those OpenSSH security fixes yourself, do you? :-)
Now I mostly use RedHat, which reminds me... does anyone have any idea (roughly) when *RedHat* 9.1 is due out?
Going to have to start upgrading some of these RedHat boxen before support dries up after New Years :-(
Publishers and lawyers like to describe copyright as ``intellectual property''---a term that also includes patents, trademarks, and other more obscure areas of law. These laws have so little in common, and differ so much, that it is ill- advised to generalize about them. It is best to talk specifically about ``copyright,'' or about ``patents,'' or about ``trademarks.''
The term ``intellectual property'' carries a hidden assumption---that the way to think about all these disparate issues is based on an analogy with physical objects, and our ideas of physical property.
When it comes to copying, this analogy disregards the crucial difference between material objects and information: information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can't be. Basing your thinking on this analogy is tantamount to ignoring that difference. (Even the US legal system does not entirely accept the analogy, since it does not treat copyrights or patents like physical object property rights.)
If you don't want to limit yourself to this way of thinking, it is best to avoid using the term ``intellectual property'' in your words and thoughts.
``Intellectual property'' is also an unwise generalization. The term is a catch-all that lumps together several disparate legal systems, including copyright, patents, trademarks, and others, which have very little in common. These systems of law originated separately, cover different activities, operate in different ways, and raise different public policy issues. If you learn a fact about copyright law, you would do well to assume it does not apply to patent law, since that is almost always so.
Since these laws are so different, the term ``intellectual property'' is an invitation to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager common aspect of these disparate laws, which is that they establish monopolies that can be bought and sold, and ignore their substance--the different restrictions they place on the public and the different consequences that result. At that broad level, you can't even see the specific public policy issues raised by copyright law, or the different issues raised by patent law, or any of the others. Thus, any opinion about ``intellectual property'' is almost surely foolish.
If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, copyrights and trademarks, or even learn what these laws require, the first step is to forget that you ever heard the term ``intellectual property'' and treat them as unrelated subjects. To give clear information and encourage clear thinking, never speak or write about ``intellectual property''; instead, present the topic as copyright, patents, or whichever specific law you are discussing.
According to Professor Mark Lemley of the University of Texas Law School, the widespread use of term "intellectual property" is a recent fad, arising from the 1967 founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization. (See footnote 123 in his March 1997 book review, in the Texas Law Review, of Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property by James Boyle.) WIPO represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents and trademarks, and lobbies governments to increase their power. One WIPO treaty follows the lines of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been used to censor useful free software packages in the US. See http://www.wipout.net/ for a counter-WIPO campaign.
What is not fair is the "sillinesses" label without any attempt at refutation or alternative explanation of the main point.
There are many predictions in the Bible that are being understood and fulfilled in our own time, such as attempts at peace agreements in Israel, growing alignments between Christians and Jews, gradual consolidation of global political power, emergence of a controlled world economy (leading to a single currency and the "Mark of the Beast"), and a general increase in wickedness and rebelion agaist God, to state a few.
Read the Bible -- you'll be surprised what's in there!
I am always amazed that these predictions were made some 2000 years ago, before we had the foggiest notions about astronomy, astrophysics, or even the fact that the earth was spherical!!
The physical sequence of events: impact of a large meteorite into the sea and more prolonged, secondary impacts of smaller objects surrounding its core, the subsequent shockwaves, earthquake, blanketing of the sky by dust and debris thrown up from the main impact, contamination of the water cycle, etc.
God is going to wipe us out the same way he did the dinosaurs!
It's scary to think that this comet is up there right now, orbiting silently, following the laws of celestial mechanics, until the pre-determined time..............!
heh heh, check out today's Dilbe rt.