I think the one-off's he's talking about are things like the purchase tracking system that Finance installed on a workstation under someone's desk. IT was not aware of it being purchased and of course it has no way to export data into any of our other systems so we can integrate it with the rest of our financial systems.
Eventually we sucked it into our VMWare infrastructure to get it off of the desktop machine (no RAID disks, and the backup consisted of someone in accounting copying the database to a flash drive "periodically", which was anywhere from weekly to bi-monthly).
We're going to spend a bundle of money to get the data out of this system to import into our ERP system we're working on - had Finance come to us for this system in the first place, we would have pointed them to the add-on module for the accounting system they were already using. Oh, and it would have cost less than the system they purchased behind IT's back and would have saved them a lot of labor in double entering data. But the CFO swore by this system in his previous company so that's what they used.
Sometimes cheap routers are the way to go -- I replaced 2 Cisco routers at a remote site in a seaside warehouse (one due to a power surge when a generator failed, one due to water from a leaky roof) before switching to cheap Netgear routers at about 1/10 the cost. Redundancy? We had a spare configured and ready to go the foreman's truck toolbox and another at his house.
One of the Netgears even survived a similar water deluge to the one that took out the Cisco (but then the Netgear didn't have a fan to suck the water inside).
(before you ask why I didn't put them in a waterproof box, that apparently was not allowed under our lease - no permanent equipment was allowed and apparently a metal box on a shelf was "permanent" but a bare router was not)
Why would you lease lines from the telco rather than running encrypted links over the existing internet? If the idea is to be free of government interference, then leased lines won't accomplish that.
It will be interesting to see how far Google goes with their fiber-to-the-home initiative.
They are one of the few companies with the money to compete with the ingrained telcos and cable companies.
If they can get good penetration in a few major cities and purchase enough rights of ways (from power companies?) between them to run fiber, they can be a serious competitor.
And then, it will be curious to see how far their "do no evil" motto goes when it comes to giving equal access to competitors traffic.
You're a little terse, but if you really can't follow the logic it is thus:
Any network built on user-owned facilities is going to have a tiny fraction of the bandwidth capacity owned by large telecom companies who have huge economies of scale as well as being regulated monopolies in many cases. no group of end users is going to be able to build a high bandwidth network that scales across the country -- it's too capital intensive and even with unlimited capital in many cases they've have to rent telco facilities.
Satellite and Wimax and other wireless options are great solutions for limited use, but they won't scale far enough to make a nationwide (let alone worldwide) internet replacement. Wireless spectrum is a very limited commodity - fiber is virtually unlimited in comparison.
The fact is that we have only had "free" internet in the past because of the companies that own it being generous.
That's not true - no one is being generous, all of the telecom providers are compensated for the use of their infrastructure. Unless, of course, when you said "in the past", you meant back in the pre-AOL internet when only universities, some government agencies, and a few research oriented companies were online and most people that were online at the time *were* online due to the generosity of their university or employer.
It is true that such infrastructure is hugely expensive to build so requires many millions of users to pay for it (or fewer rich users, as in the Internet2, but even then they are buying facilities from the Telco's so don't have freedom from government interference).
How about launching a microsatellite to act as a repeater?
Not really affordable or feasible now, but find a sympathetic donor that works for one of the companies working on commercial space flight and perhaps in a few years you might be able to get a small constellation of satellite repeaters launched - enough to give a trans-ocean link going.
Though I don't really know how feasible this is even if you could get build and launch costs down to an "affordable" $50K - I don't think it would be feasible to get something up to a geostationary orbit so I'm thinking you'd need a constellation of satellites in low earth orbit - perhaps too many to make it feasible -- unless you're willing to accept part-time coverage, I think a LEO satellite takes an hour or two to orbit the earth so maybe you could send 15 minutes of data every couple hours. Iridium has around 65 satellites in orbit.
For longer distance connection, at the expense of speed, a regular phone line could be used, with modems at both ends.
That doesn't get you around the "central point of control" that is one of the weaknesses in the current internet -- the government can just ask the Telcom to cut your phone line when it has something to hide.
Plus, "expense of speed" is an understatement. Even compressed, a page like http://news.bbc.co.uk/ would take abount 3 minutes to load over a 28.8kbs modem. (which is about the highest speed I remember back when I actually owned a modem -- you won't get 56k on a point-to-point modem connection, that requires a digital connection on one end)
If you truly want to build a second internet, including all of the physical communications infrastructure, you'd have to ban large binaries otherwise it will just become a big music and movie sharing network.
But if you ban large binaries, then you're already violating the net neutrality you were running away from.
And of course a simple binary ban wouldn't be sufficient - there are a multitude of ASCII-only encodings available. And I'm sure someone has already come up with a text based steganography method that lets you hide any data in an arbitrarily large body of text.
So then, you'll have to have per-user bandwidth constraints.
Perhaps within a city you can get by with relatively short-haul Wifi hops to give decent bandwidth throughout the city, but it's the long-haul hops that are going to be expensive - who's going to have the money to pay $8000/month for a 20 mile point-to-point T3 to bridge the gap to the nearest town?
I agree on the price issue. Why would I pay more for a digital magazine? I can toss a magazine in my backpack and read it on the train - when I'm done, I just toss it in the trash (or recycle bin), so it's not like the digital version is hugely more convenient.
I don't own an iPad but when I got a Kindle I was excited to trade in my paper magazines for a cheaper electronic version. Then I saw the prices. And selection. None of the magazines I regularly read are even available electronically. But even if they were, I wouldn't pay a price premium. For example, Time Magazine is $2.99/month for the Kindle, versus $30/year for the print version. Not only that, but Time won't even let me read the subscription I'm paying for on non-Kindle devices (like Kindle for PC, Kindle for Android, etc), it's only available on the actual Kindle device so if I want to pull out my phone while waiting in line at the DMV to read a few magazine articles, I'm out of luck. Remind me again why I should pay *more* money for this?
I had the exact same experience -- on a flight from SFO to HNL, the fasten seatbelt light was off for less than an hour on the entire flight.
Once someone got up to use the bathroom while the flight attendants had just started serving beverages. She firmly told him "There's a reason the fasten seat belt light is on sir, return to your seat!". However, an hour later the fasten seatbelt light was still on and, someone in front of me hit the flight attendant call button to ask for a beverage. The same flight attendant said "Come on back to the galley to pick it up".
They need to have 2 fasten seatbelt lights, one that means "We think you should sit down and buckle in because there might be turbulence" and one that means "Turbulence is highly likely all passengers and flight attendants must remain seated".
I've never understood why passengers have to sit down when the fasten seat belt light is on, but often flight attendants are pushing a 200 pound cart with a couple pots of scalding hot coffee on top of it down the aisles.
As has already been pointed out...it's because the real world is different than 3D TV. (which really just shows two 2D images to create a 3D effect, it's not true 3D)
In the real world the eye must focus to differing depths of fields as the binocular vision of the eyes converge onto the object.
With 3D TV, there is still binocular convergence, but the focal plane never changes. In effect, 3D TV is training the eye to never change focus regardless of cues from binocular vision.
For adults this likely doesn't matter, their eyes have already had years of training to focus properly in coordination with binocular vision and a few hours of 3D TV isn't going to undo the training. But this is less clear with young children - their eyes are still learning. At some point in their development it becomes a non-issue, but what is that point? 1 year? 4 years? 7 years? 10 years?
I don't plan on experimenting with my children to find out.
3D content 'delivers 3D images with different left and right images, [which] has a potential impact on the growth of children's eyes.'
This is not only false, but illogical as well.
Which part is false? The fact that it delivers different images to each eye, or that it can impact the deelopment of children's vision?
The first part is obviously true.
The second part is not so obvious -- availability of 3D TV in the home with hours of content is just now becoming mainsteam.
Because of this, uninformed people will watch the movie and accidentally (and usually repeatedly) try to change their focus and strain their eyes because the image does not change focus at all.
Isn't this the crux of the problem with children? Their eyes are still learning how to operate - if they are trained to focus independent of perceived depth, then that could affect their eye development.
What makes you think you have a free will? In any case, only your "freedom" to hurt other people is taken away. Which is the whole point of law, by the way. Are you opposed to the rule of law too?
A faithful Christian knows that he has free will because the bible says so. Which is more than a non-believer has. Who knows, life could all be a virtual world within The Matrix.
Oh, and I thought you said that "Life should be a positive experience, full of enjoyment of existing ideas and works, creation of new ones". I didn't know that only illegal or physically hurtful acts kept you from enjoying a positive life. What if me and my friends like to play loud heavy-metal music in the woods. The same woods where you like to meditate in quiet reflection. Don't you think god should prevent me from disrupting your peace and quiet? And shouldn't he prevent your complaints to keep the noise down from getting in the way of my pursuit of happiness? Even if there's no law against it? How will god reconcile this without removing someone's free will to enjoy positive experiences?
That's an obvious strawman, isn't it? None of those things end a life, either physically or metaphorically.
First you were talking about having a Happy, Productive live, but now you are constraining yourself only to issues that can end a life or cause grievous harm? Surely someone incessantly stepping on your toes in your garden would get in the way of your enjoyment of life -- shouldn't god put a stop to that?
But they effectively obscure my original point -- why would god put a soul on this earth only to have it suffer it's entire existence?
Because life on earth is but a fleeting part of a soul's eternal existence? God allowed his son to be tortured on earth as well. Apparently he doesn't feel that a few days, years or decades of even excruciating pain is too much to ask in return for everlasting life in heaven.
Over 20 years ago I was in a car accident serious enough to need to be extricated by the fire department and I spent a month in the hospital. I spent over an hour in the car in extreme pain and faced a long, painful recovery, but over the years the pain faded and I can think back on the situation and see how it shaped my life, without focusing on the pain. If my soul lives for a 1000 years, the accident will be a tiny footnote in my life. If my soul lived to be 100,000 years even a 60 year lifetime of pain on earth would fade away.
That's rather selfish of you. How would she feel about her life? Really, between your first point and this one, I'm starting to think you draw enjoyment from the pain of others.
How is that selfish of me? To take the death of a loved one and using it as a reason to appreciate what I have in life?
I know she was thankful that she lived to see her granddaughter despite the pain and suffering that she lived through. At least that's what she said, perhaps you know better than I?
How do you "know" a thing that is false? You can "believe" in the afterlife, but you can't "know" it. Plus, the more you focus on the afterlife, the more you ignore life.
Because that's what a faith based religion is - *knowing* that something is true even if there is no proof. Much like some people *know* that there is no god, or *know* that life is just a cosmic coincidence, that life condensed from the vapors of a collosal explosion billions of years ago.
But as for me personally? I know no such thing as an all powerful god. I'm not even Christian.
Yeah, standard servers as far as I know. I've only run Linux servers so I don't know what the Windows side looks like. EC2 instances can use the EBS to store persistent data, so your EC2 instance can act just like your own virtual machine and retain data across reboots. Note that you get charged for EBS storage.
Or you can start fresh new instances whenever you want.
It's so cheap to get started, you may as well give it a try and see if it will work for you. I think they even have a starter pack that will give you some free resources to play with.
You want to run entire offices of computers over the Internet? Are you nuts? What happens when five of them start watching YouTube--that's right, all the clients stop responding.
Me? No, that's not what I was recommending. I was responding to the poster who asked if he could rent a single virtual desktop and I suggested he just rent a server from Amazon.
As someone who sits on the other side of the fence (not at your bank, though I have worked in banking), I'd like to point out that your IT department is under a lot of pressure to reduce costs - in most organizations, IT is overhead, it doesn't directly bring in revenue, so some businesses want to squeeze every last penny out of IT. It's easy for management to say "Hey, why do we have all of these IT guys lounging around at their desks, IT is running fine, let's cut their staff" - they rarely think that the reason IT is running so well is because they have all of those IT guys lounging around at their desks. In any case, when IT budgets are cut, then IT has to implement policies that let them support users while reducing IT resources.
A bank is subject to several regulatory bodies (FDIC, SOX, PCI, etc) that further complicates IT's job in trying to meet regulatory needs.
If you really feel that IT is getting in your way, then get your manager to communicate that to his manager -- otherwise management will never get the message. Don't assume that your IT department is incompetent and unable to provide quality services, they may have one hand tied behind their back by budget constraints and if the users never complain, they'll have no ammunition to get the budget to increase services.
I have to beg my users to enter helpdesk tickets when they are having problems printing to our archaic printer instead of just walking down 2 floors to print to another one -- if I can't show that the printer is causing problems, then I can't get the budget to buy a new one.
The banks already have the ability to prevent you from installing nonsupported apps on your workstation, but apparently they aren't doing that to you now. So if they moved to VDI then either they'll let you keep your standalone workstation, or they'll let you customize your VDI image to do what you need.
VDI doesn't have to mean the end of user customizable machines, nor does the ability to lock down a user's machine require VDI.
Why not just use a server? Amazon EC2 will rent you a "micro instance" Win2003/2008 server for 3 cents/hour ($21.60/month) or an Ubuntu server for 2 cents/hour ($14.40/month) plus a few bucks for storage.
But the only way to erase all human suffering would be to erase what makes us human -- our free will.
Would you be happier acting as a puppet for some God, where your every action is preapproved by him to assure that you do not cause suffering to another person?
How can god let you run free in the garden when you might accidentally step on someone else's foot, causing them pain and suffering? Or perhaps you will stand in front of the tree that someone else was just admiring, causing him discomfort. What if your laughter disrupts someone's meditation? Would you rather have god carefully choreograph your movements, guiding you exactly where he wants to to go to ensure that you don't encroach upon another's space?
Or, perhaps god should let you live out a virtual life in your own mind where you have the illusion of a happy life, but in reality it is a complete illusion manufactured in your own mind?
And are you really using a link to Bonsai Kitten to make your point? I guess god would also have to erase all humor from your Utopian existence just in case it offends someone. Of course, many people believe that animals have no soul, thus your point is invalid - he did not create the soul of the imaginary kitten.
As someone who has watched a close family member suffer through a serious illness and subsequently die, I wouldn't say that her death "brought me down" -- if anything, it made me appreciate those that are close to me and everything that appreciate everything that I have in life. Even during her worst struggles when she was unable to respond to any external stimuli, I don't feel that her life was useless at that point. Life on earth was never promised to be never-ending. People die, sometimes quietly, sometimes painfully, but death is inevitable.
Those that believe in a Christian god know that they are going to a better place after death on earth, so perhaps that's why pain and suffering on earth does not shake their faith - they know it is only temporary.
So in other words you fall into the category of people who don't have an answer to the question...
What are you talking about? I gave you one of many possible answers.
Here's another - when you take the entire bible into context, Jesus's words (as relayed through Mark) were not giving you carte blanche to ask for anything you can imagine, otherwise every little Christian girl's back yard would be full of pink unicorns.
Instead, when he said "whatever you want", he implied and assumed that the reader would know that he meant "within god's will", not literally anything at all. If it's within god's will, it will happen.
There are many possible answers to your question in the bible, if you really are seeking the answer you'll find it. If you're looking for some "smoking gun" of a huge contradiction to prove to believers that their faith is based on a fairy tale, you won't find it.
By choosing not to see what is in front of you, it seems that you're being as closed minded as those that believe that the bible is the inspired (or even literal) word of god. And this is exactly why rational discussion won't convince a believer that his god is not real - just as you see the obvious flaws in his belief, he sees the obvious flaws in your non-belief.
The bible is all about interpretation (just as our own laws are all about interpretation - otherwise we wouldn't need lawyers or a supreme court).
One possible interpretation is to take the verse literally "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." -- or rewritten "Ask for anything you want, if you believe that you have already received it, it will be yours".
This is a bit of verbal trickery . If you ask for riches and you look around and see that you have all of the riches you need to survive, then your prayers have been answered.
When you asked for your father's hand to be restored, god may have interpreted it that you were really asking that your father be able to lead a happy, fulfilling life. The hand is immaterial. Did you look at your father's life and really believe that he had a happy life? If yes, then your prayers were answered, if no, then you were so focused on the loss of the hand that you didn't see the big picture to see what your father really had.
My cousin lost an arm in a farming accident in his 20's and he's still farming 20 years later, has a great family, and is making a good living as an organic farmer, so it is possible to live a fulfilling life despite the loss of limb.
How come there was an evening and a morning before there were lights in the firmament to divide the day from the night?
There was light and darkness even before the sun and stars were created:
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
And if it took 5 days to create the earth, how come it only took one day to create many billions of stars and planets - when all those stars and planets are at least as complex as the earth is?
Why should it take more than a day for an omnipotent being to create billions upon billions of stars and planets? How long is it supposed to take? Maybe he took more care with earth since it would be the home of his living creation, man. It may be difficult for *you* to create a universe in a day, but then you probably can't make earth and sky out of nothing.
You can't argue against a faith based religion using science - if the bible said it took a day, it took a day.
Your daughter's question *is* answered in the bible -- I don't know which version of the bible your daughter and mother are reading, but the answer is in Genesis 1 in the KJV:
13And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
So it took him 1 day to create the stars (and presumably the planets, but since they weren't visible to the naked eye from earth there seems no need to mention them, perhaps god backfilled the universe with planets while humans were going about their business eating forbidden apples and such).
As for your second question, I don't recall anywhere in the bible where it says if you pray for something it will happen, no matter how miraculous. There is a lot of documented suffering in the bible, even to true believers, even god's own son was tortured (if you believe that new testament). God's job isn't to erase all human suffering (what kind of life would that be? I don't see how he could do that and still give humans free will?)
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I think the one-off's he's talking about are things like the purchase tracking system that Finance installed on a workstation under someone's desk. IT was not aware of it being purchased and of course it has no way to export data into any of our other systems so we can integrate it with the rest of our financial systems.
Eventually we sucked it into our VMWare infrastructure to get it off of the desktop machine (no RAID disks, and the backup consisted of someone in accounting copying the database to a flash drive "periodically", which was anywhere from weekly to bi-monthly).
We're going to spend a bundle of money to get the data out of this system to import into our ERP system we're working on - had Finance come to us for this system in the first place, we would have pointed them to the add-on module for the accounting system they were already using. Oh, and it would have cost less than the system they purchased behind IT's back and would have saved them a lot of labor in double entering data. But the CFO swore by this system in his previous company so that's what they used.
Sometimes cheap routers are the way to go -- I replaced 2 Cisco routers at a remote site in a seaside warehouse (one due to a power surge when a generator failed, one due to water from a leaky roof) before switching to cheap Netgear routers at about 1/10 the cost. Redundancy? We had a spare configured and ready to go the foreman's truck toolbox and another at his house.
One of the Netgears even survived a similar water deluge to the one that took out the Cisco (but then the Netgear didn't have a fan to suck the water inside).
(before you ask why I didn't put them in a waterproof box, that apparently was not allowed under our lease - no permanent equipment was allowed and apparently a metal box on a shelf was "permanent" but a bare router was not)
Why would you lease lines from the telco rather than running encrypted links over the existing internet? If the idea is to be free of government interference, then leased lines won't accomplish that.
It will be interesting to see how far Google goes with their fiber-to-the-home initiative.
They are one of the few companies with the money to compete with the ingrained telcos and cable companies.
If they can get good penetration in a few major cities and purchase enough rights of ways (from power companies?) between them to run fiber, they can be a serious competitor.
And then, it will be curious to see how far their "do no evil" motto goes when it comes to giving equal access to competitors traffic.
You're a little terse, but if you really can't follow the logic it is thus:
Any network built on user-owned facilities is going to have a tiny fraction of the bandwidth capacity owned by large telecom companies who have huge economies of scale as well as being regulated monopolies in many cases. no group of end users is going to be able to build a high bandwidth network that scales across the country -- it's too capital intensive and even with unlimited capital in many cases they've have to rent telco facilities.
Satellite and Wimax and other wireless options are great solutions for limited use, but they won't scale far enough to make a nationwide (let alone worldwide) internet replacement. Wireless spectrum is a very limited commodity - fiber is virtually unlimited in comparison.
The fact is that we have only had "free" internet in the past because of the companies that own it being generous.
That's not true - no one is being generous, all of the telecom providers are compensated for the use of their infrastructure. Unless, of course, when you said "in the past", you meant back in the pre-AOL internet when only universities, some government agencies, and a few research oriented companies were online and most people that were online at the time *were* online due to the generosity of their university or employer.
It is true that such infrastructure is hugely expensive to build so requires many millions of users to pay for it (or fewer rich users, as in the Internet2, but even then they are buying facilities from the Telco's so don't have freedom from government interference).
Any suggestions to improve?
How about launching a microsatellite to act as a repeater?
Not really affordable or feasible now, but find a sympathetic donor that works for one of the companies working on commercial space flight and perhaps in a few years you might be able to get a small constellation of satellite repeaters launched - enough to give a trans-ocean link going.
Though I don't really know how feasible this is even if you could get build and launch costs down to an "affordable" $50K - I don't think it would be feasible to get something up to a geostationary orbit so I'm thinking you'd need a constellation of satellites in low earth orbit - perhaps too many to make it feasible -- unless you're willing to accept part-time coverage, I think a LEO satellite takes an hour or two to orbit the earth so maybe you could send 15 minutes of data every couple hours. Iridium has around 65 satellites in orbit.
For longer distance connection, at the expense of speed, a regular phone line could be used, with modems at both ends.
That doesn't get you around the "central point of control" that is one of the weaknesses in the current internet -- the government can just ask the Telcom to cut your phone line when it has something to hide.
Plus, "expense of speed" is an understatement. Even compressed, a page like http://news.bbc.co.uk/ would take abount 3 minutes to load over a 28.8kbs modem. (which is about the highest speed I remember back when I actually owned a modem -- you won't get 56k on a point-to-point modem connection, that requires a digital connection on one end)
If you truly want to build a second internet, including all of the physical communications infrastructure, you'd have to ban large binaries otherwise it will just become a big music and movie sharing network.
But if you ban large binaries, then you're already violating the net neutrality you were running away from.
And of course a simple binary ban wouldn't be sufficient - there are a multitude of ASCII-only encodings available. And I'm sure someone has already come up with a text based steganography method that lets you hide any data in an arbitrarily large body of text.
So then, you'll have to have per-user bandwidth constraints.
Perhaps within a city you can get by with relatively short-haul Wifi hops to give decent bandwidth throughout the city, but it's the long-haul hops that are going to be expensive - who's going to have the money to pay $8000/month for a 20 mile point-to-point T3 to bridge the gap to the nearest town?
I agree on the price issue. Why would I pay more for a digital magazine? I can toss a magazine in my backpack and read it on the train - when I'm done, I just toss it in the trash (or recycle bin), so it's not like the digital version is hugely more convenient.
I don't own an iPad but when I got a Kindle I was excited to trade in my paper magazines for a cheaper electronic version. Then I saw the prices. And selection. None of the magazines I regularly read are even available electronically. But even if they were, I wouldn't pay a price premium. For example, Time Magazine is $2.99/month for the Kindle, versus $30/year for the print version. Not only that, but Time won't even let me read the subscription I'm paying for on non-Kindle devices (like Kindle for PC, Kindle for Android, etc), it's only available on the actual Kindle device so if I want to pull out my phone while waiting in line at the DMV to read a few magazine articles, I'm out of luck. Remind me again why I should pay *more* money for this?
I had the exact same experience -- on a flight from SFO to HNL, the fasten seatbelt light was off for less than an hour on the entire flight.
Once someone got up to use the bathroom while the flight attendants had just started serving beverages. She firmly told him "There's a reason the fasten seat belt light is on sir, return to your seat!". However, an hour later the fasten seatbelt light was still on and, someone in front of me hit the flight attendant call button to ask for a beverage. The same flight attendant said "Come on back to the galley to pick it up".
They need to have 2 fasten seatbelt lights, one that means "We think you should sit down and buckle in because there might be turbulence" and one that means "Turbulence is highly likely all passengers and flight attendants must remain seated".
I've never understood why passengers have to sit down when the fasten seat belt light is on, but often flight attendants are pushing a 200 pound cart with a couple pots of scalding hot coffee on top of it down the aisles.
Why would you do this when you can book right on Expedia or Orbitz for the same price as booking direct on the airline's site?
As has already been pointed out...it's because the real world is different than 3D TV. (which really just shows two 2D images to create a 3D effect, it's not true 3D)
In the real world the eye must focus to differing depths of fields as the binocular vision of the eyes converge onto the object.
With 3D TV, there is still binocular convergence, but the focal plane never changes. In effect, 3D TV is training the eye to never change focus regardless of cues from binocular vision.
For adults this likely doesn't matter, their eyes have already had years of training to focus properly in coordination with binocular vision and a few hours of 3D TV isn't going to undo the training. But this is less clear with young children - their eyes are still learning. At some point in their development it becomes a non-issue, but what is that point? 1 year? 4 years? 7 years? 10 years?
I don't plan on experimenting with my children to find out.
From TFA:
3D content 'delivers 3D images with different left and right images, [which] has a potential impact on the growth of children's eyes.'
This is not only false, but illogical as well.
Which part is false? The fact that it delivers different images to each eye, or that it can impact the deelopment of children's vision?
The first part is obviously true.
The second part is not so obvious -- availability of 3D TV in the home with hours of content is just now becoming mainsteam.
Because of this, uninformed people will watch the movie and accidentally (and usually repeatedly) try to change their focus and strain their eyes because the image does not change focus at all.
Isn't this the crux of the problem with children? Their eyes are still learning how to operate - if they are trained to focus independent of perceived depth, then that could affect their eye development.
What makes you think you have a free will? In any case, only your "freedom" to hurt other people is taken away. Which is the whole point of law, by the way. Are you opposed to the rule of law too?
A faithful Christian knows that he has free will because the bible says so. Which is more than a non-believer has. Who knows, life could all be a virtual world within The Matrix.
Oh, and I thought you said that "Life should be a positive experience, full of enjoyment of existing ideas and works, creation of new ones". I didn't know that only illegal or physically hurtful acts kept you from enjoying a positive life. What if me and my friends like to play loud heavy-metal music in the woods. The same woods where you like to meditate in quiet reflection. Don't you think god should prevent me from disrupting your peace and quiet? And shouldn't he prevent your complaints to keep the noise down from getting in the way of my pursuit of happiness? Even if there's no law against it? How will god reconcile this without removing someone's free will to enjoy positive experiences?
That's an obvious strawman, isn't it? None of those things end a life, either physically or metaphorically.
First you were talking about having a Happy, Productive live, but now you are constraining yourself only to issues that can end a life or cause grievous harm? Surely someone incessantly stepping on your toes in your garden would get in the way of your enjoyment of life -- shouldn't god put a stop to that?
But they effectively obscure my original point -- why would god put a soul on this earth only to have it suffer it's entire existence?
Because life on earth is but a fleeting part of a soul's eternal existence? God allowed his son to be tortured on earth as well. Apparently he doesn't feel that a few days, years or decades of even excruciating pain is too much to ask in return for everlasting life in heaven.
Over 20 years ago I was in a car accident serious enough to need to be extricated by the fire department and I spent a month in the hospital. I spent over an hour in the car in extreme pain and faced a long, painful recovery, but over the years the pain faded and I can think back on the situation and see how it shaped my life, without focusing on the pain. If my soul lives for a 1000 years, the accident will be a tiny footnote in my life. If my soul lived to be 100,000 years even a 60 year lifetime of pain on earth would fade away.
That's rather selfish of you. How would she feel about her life? Really, between your first point and this one, I'm starting to think you draw enjoyment from the pain of others.
How is that selfish of me? To take the death of a loved one and using it as a reason to appreciate what I have in life?
I know she was thankful that she lived to see her granddaughter despite the pain and suffering that she lived through. At least that's what she said, perhaps you know better than I?
How do you "know" a thing that is false? You can "believe" in the afterlife, but you can't "know" it. Plus, the more you focus on the afterlife, the more you ignore life.
Because that's what a faith based religion is - *knowing* that something is true even if there is no proof. Much like some people *know* that there is no god, or *know* that life is just a cosmic coincidence, that life condensed from the vapors of a collosal explosion billions of years ago.
But as for me personally? I know no such thing as an all powerful god. I'm not even Christian.
Yeah, standard servers as far as I know. I've only run Linux servers so I don't know what the Windows side looks like. EC2 instances can use the EBS to store persistent data, so your EC2 instance can act just like your own virtual machine and retain data across reboots. Note that you get charged for EBS storage.
Or you can start fresh new instances whenever you want.
It's so cheap to get started, you may as well give it a try and see if it will work for you. I think they even have a starter pack that will give you some free resources to play with.
You want to run entire offices of computers over the Internet? Are you nuts? What happens when five of them start watching YouTube--that's right, all the clients stop responding.
Me? No, that's not what I was recommending. I was responding to the poster who asked if he could rent a single virtual desktop and I suggested he just rent a server from Amazon.
As someone who sits on the other side of the fence (not at your bank, though I have worked in banking), I'd like to point out that your IT department is under a lot of pressure to reduce costs - in most organizations, IT is overhead, it doesn't directly bring in revenue, so some businesses want to squeeze every last penny out of IT. It's easy for management to say "Hey, why do we have all of these IT guys lounging around at their desks, IT is running fine, let's cut their staff" - they rarely think that the reason IT is running so well is because they have all of those IT guys lounging around at their desks. In any case, when IT budgets are cut, then IT has to implement policies that let them support users while reducing IT resources.
A bank is subject to several regulatory bodies (FDIC, SOX, PCI, etc) that further complicates IT's job in trying to meet regulatory needs.
If you really feel that IT is getting in your way, then get your manager to communicate that to his manager -- otherwise management will never get the message. Don't assume that your IT department is incompetent and unable to provide quality services, they may have one hand tied behind their back by budget constraints and if the users never complain, they'll have no ammunition to get the budget to increase services.
I have to beg my users to enter helpdesk tickets when they are having problems printing to our archaic printer instead of just walking down 2 floors to print to another one -- if I can't show that the printer is causing problems, then I can't get the budget to buy a new one.
The banks already have the ability to prevent you from installing nonsupported apps on your workstation, but apparently they aren't doing that to you now. So if they moved to VDI then either they'll let you keep your standalone workstation, or they'll let you customize your VDI image to do what you need.
VDI doesn't have to mean the end of user customizable machines, nor does the ability to lock down a user's machine require VDI.
Why not just use a server? Amazon EC2 will rent you a "micro instance" Win2003/2008 server for 3 cents/hour ($21.60/month) or an Ubuntu server for 2 cents/hour ($14.40/month) plus a few bucks for storage.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
Just don't do anything I/O or bandwidth intensive since you also pay for I/O and bandwidth.
But the only way to erase all human suffering would be to erase what makes us human -- our free will.
Would you be happier acting as a puppet for some God, where your every action is preapproved by him to assure that you do not cause suffering to another person?
How can god let you run free in the garden when you might accidentally step on someone else's foot, causing them pain and suffering? Or perhaps you will stand in front of the tree that someone else was just admiring, causing him discomfort. What if your laughter disrupts someone's meditation? Would you rather have god carefully choreograph your movements, guiding you exactly where he wants to to go to ensure that you don't encroach upon another's space?
Or, perhaps god should let you live out a virtual life in your own mind where you have the illusion of a happy life, but in reality it is a complete illusion manufactured in your own mind?
And are you really using a link to Bonsai Kitten to make your point? I guess god would also have to erase all humor from your Utopian existence just in case it offends someone. Of course, many people believe that animals have no soul, thus your point is invalid - he did not create the soul of the imaginary kitten.
As someone who has watched a close family member suffer through a serious illness and subsequently die, I wouldn't say that her death "brought me down" -- if anything, it made me appreciate those that are close to me and everything that appreciate everything that I have in life. Even during her worst struggles when she was unable to respond to any external stimuli, I don't feel that her life was useless at that point. Life on earth was never promised to be never-ending. People die, sometimes quietly, sometimes painfully, but death is inevitable.
Those that believe in a Christian god know that they are going to a better place after death on earth, so perhaps that's why pain and suffering on earth does not shake their faith - they know it is only temporary.
So in other words you fall into the category of people who don't have an answer to the question...
What are you talking about? I gave you one of many possible answers.
Here's another - when you take the entire bible into context, Jesus's words (as relayed through Mark) were not giving you carte blanche to ask for anything you can imagine, otherwise every little Christian girl's back yard would be full of pink unicorns.
Instead, when he said "whatever you want", he implied and assumed that the reader would know that he meant "within god's will", not literally anything at all. If it's within god's will, it will happen.
There are many possible answers to your question in the bible, if you really are seeking the answer you'll find it. If you're looking for some "smoking gun" of a huge contradiction to prove to believers that their faith is based on a fairy tale, you won't find it.
By choosing not to see what is in front of you, it seems that you're being as closed minded as those that believe that the bible is the inspired (or even literal) word of god. And this is exactly why rational discussion won't convince a believer that his god is not real - just as you see the obvious flaws in his belief, he sees the obvious flaws in your non-belief.
The bible is all about interpretation (just as our own laws are all about interpretation - otherwise we wouldn't need lawyers or a supreme court).
One possible interpretation is to take the verse literally "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." -- or rewritten "Ask for anything you want, if you believe that you have already received it, it will be yours".
This is a bit of verbal trickery . If you ask for riches and you look around and see that you have all of the riches you need to survive, then your prayers have been answered.
When you asked for your father's hand to be restored, god may have interpreted it that you were really asking that your father be able to lead a happy, fulfilling life. The hand is immaterial. Did you look at your father's life and really believe that he had a happy life? If yes, then your prayers were answered, if no, then you were so focused on the loss of the hand that you didn't see the big picture to see what your father really had.
My cousin lost an arm in a farming accident in his 20's and he's still farming 20 years later, has a great family, and is making a good living as an organic farmer, so it is possible to live a fulfilling life despite the loss of limb.
How come there was an evening and a morning before there were lights in the firmament to divide the day from the night?
There was light and darkness even before the sun and stars were created:
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
And if it took 5 days to create the earth, how come it only took one day to create many billions of stars and planets - when all those stars and planets are at least as complex as the earth is?
Why should it take more than a day for an omnipotent being to create billions upon billions of stars and planets? How long is it supposed to take? Maybe he took more care with earth since it would be the home of his living creation, man. It may be difficult for *you* to create a universe in a day, but then you probably can't make earth and sky out of nothing.
You can't argue against a faith based religion using science - if the bible said it took a day, it took a day.
Your daughter's question *is* answered in the bible -- I don't know which version of the bible your daughter and mother are reading, but the answer is in Genesis 1 in the KJV:
13And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
So it took him 1 day to create the stars (and presumably the planets, but since they weren't visible to the naked eye from earth there seems no need to mention them, perhaps god backfilled the universe with planets while humans were going about their business eating forbidden apples and such).
As for your second question, I don't recall anywhere in the bible where it says if you pray for something it will happen, no matter how miraculous. There is a lot of documented suffering in the bible, even to true believers, even god's own son was tortured (if you believe that new testament). God's job isn't to erase all human suffering (what kind of life would that be? I don't see how he could do that and still give humans free will?)