Never forget that, regardless of purpose, the end result of a vague, unenforceable law is not that it allows the cops to arrest everyone; that would be stupid. It's that it lets the cops arrest _anyone_. Police states and the like find it marvelously convenient to know that you can randomly point to anyone on the street and arrest them, secure in the knowledge that there is guaranteed to be _something_ on the books you can 'legitimately' hang them for. Makes it very easy to get rid of undesirables.
So, despite these numerous, continuous, public, repeated, nigh on flagrant violations of FCC decency standards, we have exactly what negative consequences resulting from them?
I mean, we can point to 3 Mile Island and Hanford and the Exxon Valdez for results of what comes of violations of regulations regarding nasty substances. And we can look at Union Carbide and Chernobyl for similar fuckups where the strict regulations more or less didn't exist. But just what was the _actual_ fallout (haha) from Janet's stunt?
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, "Does it break my bones or pick my pocket"? I would have to say No.
The FCC has already stated that 90%, yes 90% of ALL it's complaints are from one, single source...the Parents Television Council
Actually, it was more like 99.8%. The FCC received a good half million complaints, all but a few hundred of which were carbon copies of each other from the PTC.
Indeed. It had previously crossed my mind that the Cylons had originally had serious problems keeping their cloned humans under control. So they invent this mythology, implanted some false memories of a previous host body, and viola, instant ready-made army of suicide infiltrators who are utterly convinced that they cannot permanently die in the service of god.
You betray your ignorance, though the difference between scientific and popular terminology makes it somewhat understandable. String Theory is not a theory (I know, I know). It is not a theory because it remains unproven. A hypothesis _becomes_ a theory when all the available evidence supports it. String theory will either be raised into glorious theoryhood or fall into obscurity only when we can figure out a way to test it's validity. And we will be using the scientific definition, because the popular definition of 'theory' is inclusive of things like "Some wacky idea I came up with last night while I was stoned out of my gourd".
To say an idea is an 'unprovable theory' is like saying, "It's an idea with a great deal of supporting evidence, only without the supporting evidence". It cannot, by definition, exist. A circle with right angles cannot, by definition, exist. A 'filled up hole' cannot, by definition, exist.
Science is a very good way to describe and categorize everything that you can see or experience. It just doesn't have the right vocabulary for what you can't.
So if you can't see it, can't experience it, can't measure it, can't quantify it, can't observe it's effects in any way, just what on earth makes you think it's there in the first place? And what atheists can't figure out is why anyone would waste more than 10 seconds of their life entertaining the notion, much less going out and trying to change the world on it's basis, when there is, by definition, no way to know whether or not they're totally wrong? (String theory, IIRC, simply lacks a particle accelerator big enough to test it)
Otherwise, I don't care.... You really should not care. Not "I don't believe", not "I don't like it", not "You shouldn't believe it", just simple old "I don't care".
Shit, man, I'd like to shake your hand. I've been saying for _years_ that Apathy needs to be officially reclassified as a virtue!
Which just goes to show how stupid the prohibitions against them are. So the BSG writers invented a new word which has _exactly_ the same meanings as the naughty one ("Fraqqing Clyons!"; "Fraq you!"; "You fraqqed the VP?"; "You are really fraqqin' ugly"; etc, etc), has all the same connotations, has half the same phonemes, is used socially the same way, and probably has the same prohibitions against use in public or in front of minors in the fictional universe. But that word is OK by the FCC.
Everytime I hear about the FCC cracking down on that greatest of threats to our existence, profanity, I can't help but be reminded of that jackass I saw on TV once who greets people with 'heaveno' because 'hello' has the word 'hell' in it.
Pop quiz. How many states in the union legally bar Christians from holding public office? If you said 'none', you'd be right! How about Jews? Also none. How about Muslims? Again, none! How about Scientologists? Heaven's Gate cultists (if there were any left)? Pagans, Wiccans, Jedi, Zoroastrians? Not one state prohibits these people from holding public office.
How about atheists? Seven. There are seven states who have written into law or as part of their constiutions that no atheist may hold any public office. Arkansas goes so far as to forbid them from testifying in court. President Bush (Sr.) once said that he didn't think atheists ought to be considered citizens, implying that if he'd had the power, he'd have stripped them of their citizenship and done... *something* with them.
So tell me something. If you, hypothetically, had the goal of eliminating (or otherwise reducing to irrelevance) a large chunk of the population (~10%) that you just didn't like, what would you do first? Say...., deny them the ability to wield power to defend themselves? Knowing that this exact scenario has played out in history many, many times, don't you think that this whole pro-Christian, anti-Enlightenment process going on might perhaps be cause for concern? Christians have, after all, expressed a deep-seated hatred of non-christians in general and atheists in particular for a good 1500 years. They used to burn heretics at the stake, and nothing I hear from Falwell, Robertson, Bush & Co., and the whole religious right makes me think they've come very far since.
That's right, it's totally impossible to get long-term disability insurance. Oh, wait. I have it. And it costs me a hell of a lot less than 12% of my paycheck!
Uhh, were you aware that Republicans for the past 30 years have displayed all the fiscal responsiblity of a drunken sailor?
And there are in fact other parties besides the big two. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. You don't get to vote for a chimp and then complain when he starts slinging feces at you.
God is real. Go see for yourself if you don't believe me.
Ahahahahaha. Hahahahahaha. Ha. Haha. You christians, I swear, you're better than any stand-up comic routine.
You can start by figuring out what this Christianity thing is all about
Let's see, 5 years at a catholic school, and 20 more putting up with holier-than-thou christians like yourself. I think that qualifies me to say that Christianity, as it is practiced, is about hatred of others. Hatred of knowledge. Hatred of the body and of self. Complete xenophobia and neophobia. A total disdain for reality in favor of fantasy and wishful thinking. An archaic cult that escapes its terminal fate by dogmatically brainwashing its members from birth and simply killing off its opponents whenever they can get away with it.
You know nothing about Christianity. You know nothing about the teachings of Jesus.
Neither do most christians. Us non-religious have a bit of wisdom: "The easist way to turn a christian into an atheist is to have him actually read the entire Bible, cover to cover". I swear, it works like a charm. It is utterly shocking how few of you people know anything about your faith beyond the choice bits you get every week from your ordained PR minister. It is a vast, banal butchery, not unlike the barbaric history it emerged from.
Christianity promoting free thought? Oh, puleeeease... Might I recall for you of a piece of your own mythology? What was the first sin, the all-time worst one, the one that got mankind kicked out of Paradise forever? Eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Learning. And you have not improved any since then.
Here's where you start spouting off about "New Testament, not Old Testament". Oh, great. Then how come it's Christians who keep trying to get the 10 Commandments put in courtrooms? How come it's Christians who are trying to teach Genesis in classrooms? How come it's Christians who argue against gay marriage by quoting Leviticus? How come it was Christians who were so in favor of anti-miscegenation and segregation laws 50 years ago, and slavery 100 years before that? You want to impress us with your decent, moral, stand-up, Christian behavior? Then for Cthulhu's sake, start acting it already!
Exactly. Federalism is great when it works well. It allows for the Feds to establish the 'ground rules' under which the states can play. Slavery, civil rights for minorities and women, free speech cases, all examples where shit went on at the state level long enough for the highest authorities to finally put their foot down.
But this power's usefulness is also its weakness. It's so very tempting to use it to 'solve' the political issue-of-the-week. Enough knee-jerk reactions (like, say, the PATRIOT Act or Dubya's and Congress' reaction to the gay marriage thing) and you very quickly end up with a federal system that's as bad as the state ones it's supposed to smooth out.
It's almost like Congress should have been required to have a 2/3rds majority for _any_ law, not just ammendments. When you consider the number of people affected and the sheer power involved in any decision at the highest levels of government, none should be made quickly or lightly.
Are you claiming that it is a government agency that sets movie and game ratings? Ever actually read the caption with the rating? In says, "This film has been rated (whatever) by the Motion Pictures Associastion of America". Now, while the MPAA has certainly tried to give itself the power of law, it is not (yet) a government agency. Their assigned ratings are entirely voluntary and it is left to the theaters and movie stores to decide to enforce them.
especially the part where they would confirm the contents of the file before issuing C&D orders
That _is_ pretty cool. And as a computer programmer, I'm kind of interested in how they do it. Since, you know, it's pretty much impossible to reliably and automatically determine the content type, much less whether or not it's copyrighted, based on a sniff of a few blocks in the middle of the file. They gonna download the whole damned file? Any idea how many terabytes of storage they're gonna need for that, and the manpower to sift through it all? And what if they can't even get the whole file? Some video codecs will play like that, others will not.
What's that you say, they're going to use keyword searching? Gee, we all know how well that's worked in the past. And furthermore, aren't the filenames stored in the torrent file itself, and not actually transfered via BitTorrent? So that's out.
So what, praytell, are they actually going to do? Monitor port usage? Considering that BitTorrent is the P2P protocol with the most substancial non-infringement use and doesn't require specific ports to boot, that won't work either.
So, we've got an ISP making bogus claims about their ability to 'fairly' screw over their own customers on the basis of a lousy law purchased by an industry cartel that constantly sues people with little or no evidence and has tried to declare itself officially above the law, and you respect them for it?
You are forgetting the 2nd rule of power (the 1st, of course, is to perpetuate itself). Do not ever give an order unless you are ready, willing, and able to deal with it being disobeyed. Restrictive copyright in general and the DMCA in particular are orders that will _always_ be ignored, and indeed people are doing so by the tens of millions. Whether or not the law is a good idea, it must give way to practicality. If you are not prepared to take 100 million people to court to stop them from copying bits, then you need to rethink the means your are willing to use and come up with some ends that are actually acheivable.
"Thou shalt not duplicate information" just doesn't cut it with computers around.
People like you, sir, are half the problem. Any Christian who speaks on the subject is an idiot in your world.
You're not an idiot on the topic because you're christian. You're an idiot on the topic because you say idiotic things like...
Whereas Evolution (capital E) says "Ah-ha, we rock, and here's how the fossil record is gonna prove it," but the fossil record really isn't doing such a bang-up job so far
This is typical Creationist bullshit; they figure that because they have to make stuff up and selectively ignore facts, scientists must be doing it too. Well gee whiz, they aren't.
Idiot arrogant Christians had the monopoly on genesis theory
You are an idiot on the topic because you actually referred to Genesis as a theory. It's not. It's not even close. It's not even a hypothesis. It's a mythology, and a pretty lousy one at that.
then scientists got mad enough to say "Yer mom!" and now everyone's shouting their best come-back jokes at each other
You are an idiot on the topic because you know absolutely nothing about how scientists work and just how brutal they are to each other about veracity and evidence. You assume that because your Christian friends have nothing better than insults and death threats, scientists must not either. Half an hour on, say, talkorigins.org pretty much debunks every statement you uttered.
I don't even really think Evolution happened
Thank you for sharing your wisdom with the rest of us. Unfortunately, "I think" all by itself doesn't cut it in any scientific field I know of, so we'll leave your wholly unsupported opinions outside the door where they belong.
I'm just another wacko Christian who learned about evil Evolution from other wackos on Sunday morning
Well you certainly bear all the trademark characteristics of one: 1) continually makes claims that have been debunked for decades and on this very forum; 2) considers faith to be as important, if not moreso, to knowledge as evidence; 3) misuses scientific language in an attempt to give their beliefs legitimacy; 4) demonstrates a considerable ignorance of the current state and practical applications of evolutionary theory; 5) makes laughable attempts to rationalize 3000 year-old fairy tales to match available evidence; and 6) suggests that scientists have no motives beyond stealing god's thunder by any means necessary. It was, IMHO, a fairly reasonable deduction. If I was wrong, and you actually had a high school biology teacher who didn't spout scripture all year, then I do apologize for that mistake. But my assessment about you being an idiot when it comes to evolution still stands.
Ding Ding Ding Ding!!!!
Creationist trying his inept hand at the "Violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics" argument! Since this has been busted up on every evolution forum, FAQ, and textboox ever written, it's safe bet that he learned all about evolution from bible school.
Since he clearly can't be troubled to look the refutations up himself, I'll give him the short version: Is the Earth's surface a closed system, or is there significant amounts of energy being pumped into it from an external source, possibly in the form of electromagnetic radiation?
Meh, RNA is fantastically complex compared to what the ancestor self-replicator likely was. Possibly a lipid-bound peptide, 2 or 3 dozen amino acids long.
I'm not even sure it should be limited to only Earth-like planets.
Indeed. Consider some of the disgusting conditions simple lifeforms are willing to put up with here on earth: extremophiles tha thrive in boiling water, lithovores feeding on rock miles underground, bacteria that can withstand radiation dosages 1000's of tims of what would kill a human. Combined with evidence suggesting that chemical self-replication developed fast on early Earth, it seems that anywhere life _can_ form, it _will_ form. The only common requirement we've been able to ascertain so far is liquid water.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd hardly call "ROT13" an encryption method. I'm sure a company that used it would _never_ sue if someone broke it. Oh, wait...
I've been looking through the archives and I can't seem to find that one. Do you recall what is was called?
Never forget that, regardless of purpose, the end result of a vague, unenforceable law is not that it allows the cops to arrest everyone; that would be stupid. It's that it lets the cops arrest _anyone_. Police states and the like find it marvelously convenient to know that you can randomly point to anyone on the street and arrest them, secure in the knowledge that there is guaranteed to be _something_ on the books you can 'legitimately' hang them for. Makes it very easy to get rid of undesirables.
Religious courts have been known to ignore even that. Exhibit A
So, despite these numerous, continuous, public, repeated, nigh on flagrant violations of FCC decency standards, we have exactly what negative consequences resulting from them?
I mean, we can point to 3 Mile Island and Hanford and the Exxon Valdez for results of what comes of violations of regulations regarding nasty substances. And we can look at Union Carbide and Chernobyl for similar fuckups where the strict regulations more or less didn't exist. But just what was the _actual_ fallout (haha) from Janet's stunt?
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, "Does it break my bones or pick my pocket"? I would have to say No.
The FCC has already stated that 90%, yes 90% of ALL it's complaints are from one, single source...the Parents Television Council
Actually, it was more like 99.8%. The FCC received a good half million complaints, all but a few hundred of which were carbon copies of each other from the PTC.
The 3 Laws of Thermodynamics
1) You can't win.
2) You can't break even.
3) You can't quit the game.
Logic can be used to prove or disprove *anything*. Ahhh, but can it be used to prove that statement?
Indeed. It had previously crossed my mind that the Cylons had originally had serious problems keeping their cloned humans under control. So they invent this mythology, implanted some false memories of a previous host body, and viola, instant ready-made army of suicide infiltrators who are utterly convinced that they cannot permanently die in the service of god.
3) Where shall we go for lunch?
Which, coincidentally, is also answered splendidly by Sci-Fi in general and Doug Adams (takes off hat) in particular.
You betray your ignorance, though the difference between scientific and popular terminology makes it somewhat understandable. String Theory is not a theory (I know, I know). It is not a theory because it remains unproven. A hypothesis _becomes_ a theory when all the available evidence supports it. String theory will either be raised into glorious theoryhood or fall into obscurity only when we can figure out a way to test it's validity. And we will be using the scientific definition, because the popular definition of 'theory' is inclusive of things like "Some wacky idea I came up with last night while I was stoned out of my gourd".
... You really should not care. Not "I don't believe", not "I don't like it", not "You shouldn't believe it", just simple old "I don't care".
To say an idea is an 'unprovable theory' is like saying, "It's an idea with a great deal of supporting evidence, only without the supporting evidence". It cannot, by definition, exist. A circle with right angles cannot, by definition, exist. A 'filled up hole' cannot, by definition, exist.
Science is a very good way to describe and categorize everything that you can see or experience. It just doesn't have the right vocabulary for what you can't.
So if you can't see it, can't experience it, can't measure it, can't quantify it, can't observe it's effects in any way, just what on earth makes you think it's there in the first place? And what atheists can't figure out is why anyone would waste more than 10 seconds of their life entertaining the notion, much less going out and trying to change the world on it's basis, when there is, by definition, no way to know whether or not they're totally wrong? (String theory, IIRC, simply lacks a particle accelerator big enough to test it)
Otherwise, I don't care.
Shit, man, I'd like to shake your hand. I've been saying for _years_ that Apathy needs to be officially reclassified as a virtue!
Which just goes to show how stupid the prohibitions against them are. So the BSG writers invented a new word which has _exactly_ the same meanings as the naughty one ("Fraqqing Clyons!"; "Fraq you!"; "You fraqqed the VP?"; "You are really fraqqin' ugly"; etc, etc), has all the same connotations, has half the same phonemes, is used socially the same way, and probably has the same prohibitions against use in public or in front of minors in the fictional universe. But that word is OK by the FCC.
Everytime I hear about the FCC cracking down on that greatest of threats to our existence, profanity, I can't help but be reminded of that jackass I saw on TV once who greets people with 'heaveno' because 'hello' has the word 'hell' in it.
Pop quiz. How many states in the union legally bar Christians from holding public office? If you said 'none', you'd be right! How about Jews? Also none. How about Muslims? Again, none! How about Scientologists? Heaven's Gate cultists (if there were any left)? Pagans, Wiccans, Jedi, Zoroastrians? Not one state prohibits these people from holding public office.
... *something* with them.
How about atheists? Seven. There are seven states who have written into law or as part of their constiutions that no atheist may hold any public office. Arkansas goes so far as to forbid them from testifying in court. President Bush (Sr.) once said that he didn't think atheists ought to be considered citizens, implying that if he'd had the power, he'd have stripped them of their citizenship and done
So tell me something. If you, hypothetically, had the goal of eliminating (or otherwise reducing to irrelevance) a large chunk of the population (~10%) that you just didn't like, what would you do first? Say...., deny them the ability to wield power to defend themselves? Knowing that this exact scenario has played out in history many, many times, don't you think that this whole pro-Christian, anti-Enlightenment process going on might perhaps be cause for concern? Christians have, after all, expressed a deep-seated hatred of non-christians in general and atheists in particular for a good 1500 years. They used to burn heretics at the stake, and nothing I hear from Falwell, Robertson, Bush & Co., and the whole religious right makes me think they've come very far since.
That's right, it's totally impossible to get long-term disability insurance. Oh, wait. I have it. And it costs me a hell of a lot less than 12% of my paycheck!
I voted Republican for economic reasons only
Uhh, were you aware that Republicans for the past 30 years have displayed all the fiscal responsiblity of a drunken sailor?
And there are in fact other parties besides the big two. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. You don't get to vote for a chimp and then complain when he starts slinging feces at you.
God is real. Go see for yourself if you don't believe me.
Ahahahahaha. Hahahahahaha. Ha. Haha. You christians, I swear, you're better than any stand-up comic routine.
You can start by figuring out what this Christianity thing is all about
Let's see, 5 years at a catholic school, and 20 more putting up with holier-than-thou christians like yourself. I think that qualifies me to say that Christianity, as it is practiced, is about hatred of others. Hatred of knowledge. Hatred of the body and of self. Complete xenophobia and neophobia. A total disdain for reality in favor of fantasy and wishful thinking. An archaic cult that escapes its terminal fate by dogmatically brainwashing its members from birth and simply killing off its opponents whenever they can get away with it.
You know nothing about Christianity. You know nothing about the teachings of Jesus.
Neither do most christians. Us non-religious have a bit of wisdom: "The easist way to turn a christian into an atheist is to have him actually read the entire Bible, cover to cover". I swear, it works like a charm. It is utterly shocking how few of you people know anything about your faith beyond the choice bits you get every week from your ordained PR minister. It is a vast, banal butchery, not unlike the barbaric history it emerged from.
Christianity promoting free thought? Oh, puleeeease... Might I recall for you of a piece of your own mythology? What was the first sin, the all-time worst one, the one that got mankind kicked out of Paradise forever? Eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Learning. And you have not improved any since then.
Here's where you start spouting off about "New Testament, not Old Testament". Oh, great. Then how come it's Christians who keep trying to get the 10 Commandments put in courtrooms? How come it's Christians who are trying to teach Genesis in classrooms? How come it's Christians who argue against gay marriage by quoting Leviticus? How come it was Christians who were so in favor of anti-miscegenation and segregation laws 50 years ago, and slavery 100 years before that? You want to impress us with your decent, moral, stand-up, Christian behavior? Then for Cthulhu's sake, start acting it already!
Rather difficult to do when you are a student in a classroom, don't you think?
Exactly. Federalism is great when it works well. It allows for the Feds to establish the 'ground rules' under which the states can play. Slavery, civil rights for minorities and women, free speech cases, all examples where shit went on at the state level long enough for the highest authorities to finally put their foot down.
But this power's usefulness is also its weakness. It's so very tempting to use it to 'solve' the political issue-of-the-week. Enough knee-jerk reactions (like, say, the PATRIOT Act or Dubya's and Congress' reaction to the gay marriage thing) and you very quickly end up with a federal system that's as bad as the state ones it's supposed to smooth out.
It's almost like Congress should have been required to have a 2/3rds majority for _any_ law, not just ammendments. When you consider the number of people affected and the sheer power involved in any decision at the highest levels of government, none should be made quickly or lightly.
Are you claiming that it is a government agency that sets movie and game ratings? Ever actually read the caption with the rating? In says, "This film has been rated (whatever) by the Motion Pictures Associastion of America". Now, while the MPAA has certainly tried to give itself the power of law, it is not (yet) a government agency. Their assigned ratings are entirely voluntary and it is left to the theaters and movie stores to decide to enforce them.
Now if only your name was Eric. /Obscure
especially the part where they would confirm the contents of the file before issuing C&D orders
That _is_ pretty cool. And as a computer programmer, I'm kind of interested in how they do it. Since, you know, it's pretty much impossible to reliably and automatically determine the content type, much less whether or not it's copyrighted, based on a sniff of a few blocks in the middle of the file. They gonna download the whole damned file? Any idea how many terabytes of storage they're gonna need for that, and the manpower to sift through it all? And what if they can't even get the whole file? Some video codecs will play like that, others will not.
What's that you say, they're going to use keyword searching? Gee, we all know how well that's worked in the past. And furthermore, aren't the filenames stored in the torrent file itself, and not actually transfered via BitTorrent? So that's out.
So what, praytell, are they actually going to do? Monitor port usage? Considering that BitTorrent is the P2P protocol with the most substancial non-infringement use and doesn't require specific ports to boot, that won't work either.
So, we've got an ISP making bogus claims about their ability to 'fairly' screw over their own customers on the basis of a lousy law purchased by an industry cartel that constantly sues people with little or no evidence and has tried to declare itself officially above the law, and you respect them for it?
You are forgetting the 2nd rule of power (the 1st, of course, is to perpetuate itself). Do not ever give an order unless you are ready, willing, and able to deal with it being disobeyed. Restrictive copyright in general and the DMCA in particular are orders that will _always_ be ignored, and indeed people are doing so by the tens of millions. Whether or not the law is a good idea, it must give way to practicality. If you are not prepared to take 100 million people to court to stop them from copying bits, then you need to rethink the means your are willing to use and come up with some ends that are actually acheivable.
"Thou shalt not duplicate information" just doesn't cut it with computers around.
People like you, sir, are half the problem. Any Christian who speaks on the subject is an idiot in your world.
You're not an idiot on the topic because you're christian. You're an idiot on the topic because you say idiotic things like...
Whereas Evolution (capital E) says "Ah-ha, we rock, and here's how the fossil record is gonna prove it," but the fossil record really isn't doing such a bang-up job so far
This is typical Creationist bullshit; they figure that because they have to make stuff up and selectively ignore facts, scientists must be doing it too. Well gee whiz, they aren't.
Idiot arrogant Christians had the monopoly on genesis theory
You are an idiot on the topic because you actually referred to Genesis as a theory. It's not. It's not even close. It's not even a hypothesis. It's a mythology, and a pretty lousy one at that.
then scientists got mad enough to say "Yer mom!" and now everyone's shouting their best come-back jokes at each other
You are an idiot on the topic because you know absolutely nothing about how scientists work and just how brutal they are to each other about veracity and evidence. You assume that because your Christian friends have nothing better than insults and death threats, scientists must not either. Half an hour on, say, talkorigins.org pretty much debunks every statement you uttered.
I don't even really think Evolution happened
Thank you for sharing your wisdom with the rest of us. Unfortunately, "I think" all by itself doesn't cut it in any scientific field I know of, so we'll leave your wholly unsupported opinions outside the door where they belong.
I'm just another wacko Christian who learned about evil Evolution from other wackos on Sunday morning
Well you certainly bear all the trademark characteristics of one: 1) continually makes claims that have been debunked for decades and on this very forum; 2) considers faith to be as important, if not moreso, to knowledge as evidence; 3) misuses scientific language in an attempt to give their beliefs legitimacy; 4) demonstrates a considerable ignorance of the current state and practical applications of evolutionary theory; 5) makes laughable attempts to rationalize 3000 year-old fairy tales to match available evidence; and 6) suggests that scientists have no motives beyond stealing god's thunder by any means necessary. It was, IMHO, a fairly reasonable deduction. If I was wrong, and you actually had a high school biology teacher who didn't spout scripture all year, then I do apologize for that mistake. But my assessment about you being an idiot when it comes to evolution still stands.
Ding Ding Ding Ding!!!! Creationist trying his inept hand at the "Violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics" argument! Since this has been busted up on every evolution forum, FAQ, and textboox ever written, it's safe bet that he learned all about evolution from bible school. Since he clearly can't be troubled to look the refutations up himself, I'll give him the short version: Is the Earth's surface a closed system, or is there significant amounts of energy being pumped into it from an external source, possibly in the form of electromagnetic radiation?
Meh, RNA is fantastically complex compared to what the ancestor self-replicator likely was. Possibly a lipid-bound peptide, 2 or 3 dozen amino acids long.
The Abiogenesis FAQ
I'm not even sure it should be limited to only Earth-like planets. Indeed. Consider some of the disgusting conditions simple lifeforms are willing to put up with here on earth: extremophiles tha thrive in boiling water, lithovores feeding on rock miles underground, bacteria that can withstand radiation dosages 1000's of tims of what would kill a human. Combined with evidence suggesting that chemical self-replication developed fast on early Earth, it seems that anywhere life _can_ form, it _will_ form. The only common requirement we've been able to ascertain so far is liquid water.