Now this is important, so I'm gonna repeat it twice with increasing emphasis:
You don't need to license software you sell.
You don't need to license software you sell.
You don't need to license software you sell.
If you own the copyright, and don't give out any licenses, only you can make copies. Copyright law allows certain uses by anyone who buys a copy of software: installing it, running it, and making a backup. Very simple. No need to involve vicious packs of lawyers who piss off your customers and chew your profit margin to bits.
The standard practice of shrink-wrap licences is both unnecessary and legally questionable. Go ask a lawyer and he'll tell you that you should pay him more, every time, as long as he thinks you can make the payments (here's a hint: they ain't in it for the satisfaction of helping their fellow man). That's why everyone ends up with license who asks a lawyer, not because it's in their interest to have one, but because it's in the lawyer's interest to tell you to pay him for one.
Study the damned law yourself! Trust lawyers to tell you how much you should spend on lawyers, and you'll end up watching them suck you dry. (definitely don't trust me to tell you what to do. go check it out yourself. I could be lying, but I'm only telling you things you can easily check yourself)
The basic idea of mass-market busking is that you give stuff away and just ask for donations (and make it convenient for people to do so).
The theory behind it is that groups which pay more will have more buskers trying to please them and get their money, so there is a direct benefit for paying.
It makes the whole process open and honest. You can tell people "I want your money" because the only way you're going to get it is by making something they like well enough to pay for after having tried it. "I want your money" becomes equivalent to "I want to do something which benefits you", because you can't get their money by tricking them into paying for a bad product sight-unseen or slipping in bugs and making them pay for the fixes later.
Paying is effectively saying "I appreciate your work, and I want you to continue with it, but I'm also willing to make similar payments to others who do useful work for me". Instead of hearing about a great company going out of business and thinking "too bad, I wish they could have found some way to force us to pay them the money they needed, I guess they just had a bad revenue model" you can think "hmm, I value their services, how much am I willing to spend to keep them going?".
I think a lot more people will pay if it's okay for them to pay $20 or $5 or $0.50, instead of paying $50 or nothing. I think this article from the mushroom makes my point fairly well. And, of course, it makes sense to pay more than once, depending on how long you use the product.
It is efficient, because there are no middle-men involved. Product goes directly to customers, payment goes directly to producers. Forget advertising costs, the customers seek out worthwhile free stuff and tell their friends about it. No distributors, no salesmen, just programmers, artists, writers, and other creative people. It will probably only cost about a third, and in many cases less, to make and release products of the same quality.
And, of course, it allows you to open-source your product. The users will make it their business to pay only those people who are really responsible for the development, so anyone who puts a stupid little wrapper around your product might get a small amount of payment appropriate to his own effort, but generally won't manage to usurp the rewards for the bulk of the work.
Right now, there are two good services for buskware payments: e-gold and paypal. Paypal is extremely easy to use but only available to Americans; e-gold is less efficient, but internationally available (and, being a gold exchange rather than a dollar exchange, is more suitable for international trade). Both allow all accounts to both give and receive. They are compatible, because you can buy e-gold with paypal, and then send it out of the country, very simply.
Yes, it will probably take some time for everyone to come around, and get used to paying for some future benefit, rather than to access things they would otherwise be cut off from, but somebody's got to start it.
I've got just enough room on my keyboard tray for a keyboard an a mousepad. If I put the mousepad on the left, that centers the keyboard in front of me and puts the mouse in easy reach.
If I put the mousepad on the right, with my particular keyboard tray, that would mean I'd have to reach over awkwardly to type, and end up with some kind of RSI.
I used to have a wider desk-area, with the mouse off to the right, but constantly reaching for the mouse with my arm at an awkward angle was very uncomfortable and hard to be precise. Using it left-handed is at least better than that.
I still say the numerical keypad and cursor keys are exactly where the mouse should be.
That stupid number pad, it's exactly where the mouse should be. If I want the keyboard square in front of me, with the mouse in a comfortable reaching position, I either have to use the mouse with my left or buy a special keyboard.
Given that a standard keyboard costs next to nothing (and that I had one already), and a special keyboard costs about $100, I went lefty.
I don't really like it. When I do any drawing or play games using the mouse, I switch to my right hand.
<sarcasm>But at least my right hand is free to use that conveniently located number pad.</sarcasm>
Forget the planet-destroyer, we've just built a system-destroyer! Woo hoo!
On second thought, forget that, go watch Gunbuster. They turn Jupiter into one big bomb and nuke the galaxy center!
In all seriousness, you're thinking of 1950's weapons. What do you think people will be fighting with 10,000 years from now?
If you think humans will never have the capability to destroy planets, you're not thinking far enough ahead. I think we could easily build a single bomb that would crack the crust and kill everything on the planet right now, in fact, I think we could have built it since the 1960's. Once we get going on the antimatter thing, we'll probably be able to vaporize the planet with one bomb.
Personally, I think we'll eventually cut up all the planets to build space stations. You get a hell of a lot more living space that way.
...while the future generations may find the "Rosetta Disk", it is far more likely that they will find one of the millions of discarded AOL disks, put this together with the WWF broadcasts they encounter in deep space after a long FTL trip, recognize their ancestors for the ignorant savages we are, and commit collective suicide as a species.
Saltines, now, those are deadly weapons. They've got sharp corners you could put an eye out with. Saltine manufacturers should be charged as a party to any cracker murder cases.
Their feeble pretence of producing a simple food product is almost as ridiculous as pointy Bic pens being simple writing implements. Who do you think started that saying, "The pen is mightier than the sword!"? It was their original ad campaign, when they first came out with their dirt cheap 99% plastic (undetectable by any metal detector) pointy stabbing weapons.
But users still must choose between high quality and source availability.
Nothing we do can remove that possibility, and nothing we do can remove the aid that open source projects give to proprietary competitors. Even if they can't include the code directly, they can always read it and know exactly how it was done, making it trivial to reproduce.
Is it better for the users to have no choice? I'd rather have the option of paying for the functionality in a proprietary version that might not otherwise be developed at all.
The benefits of source availability must stand on their own.
Oh? So you're willing to sign an affadavit certifying that this virtual machine is absolutely free of security holes and cannot be compromised?
If I wrote it with that in mind, of course I would. What kind of coward won't stand up and take responsibility for the quality of his own work?
A secure virtual machine for making arbitrary calculations can be very simple indeed; you only really need a few operations. It would be like signing a statement that you totaled a column of numbers correctly; you'd want to check it over until you're certain, and charge extra for the time and worry of that, but it's a simple enough task that you can eventually be certain that you're correct.
How do you think hardware designers ever get anything done? There's no magical difference that makes bug-free hardware possible and bug-free software impossible.
No chance of somebody inserting malicious code into the machine so that when I say "What's the VA stock price" the car-computer gets sent "Set cruise control to 5 trillion miles per hour. Set steering to target that cliff over there. Lock controls, set unlock password to '!seineew era sreenigne droF'"?
I never said anything about that. I was very clearly responding to "I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users." and talking about protecting the machine from the tasks (and the tasks from each other). I'm not talking about communications security (which, of course, can never be perfect, for physical reasons; all theoretical communications security models rely on the absolute physical security of certain things, which is impossible in real life), I'm talking about the security of one machine and the processes that run on it.
BTW, what kind of idiot would let their car be controlled by a distant server over a network? Lines get cut, solar flares disrupt communications, networks go down.
I don't know why this got moded up. You never made any arguments, just asserted that I was wrong, and threw in a few non sequitors.
I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users. (Yes, you can use sandboxing and other such strategies, but every security protocol is vulnerable.)
This is sheer and utter nonsense. A virtual machine can easily be simple enough to be bug-free and handle every kind of overflow without hurting the machine it's running on.
Not every security protocol is vulnerable, just those ones where the expense of perfect security wasn't justified by necessity (for example, when you want to sell a "secure" system, but you can hire marketers to hype it as secure more cheaply and effectively than you can hire programmers to make it secure).
...and add a line requiring that everybody who modifies the source must send them a copy on physical media. Preferably, for each user the modified version is distributed to.
This way, they could build their houses using archive cassettes as bricks, and shingle them with CD-Rs (how will they connect them? simple, the typical hacker easily spills enough sugary caffeinated drinks every year to stick his house together, they'd just have to be more careful about where they spill).
Don't you think the least these great altruists deserve? When somebody selflessly gives a gift to humanity, it only makes sense that everybody who benefits from their gift be legally obligated to give something back. Then they are free to be selfless and giving, without worrying about all the freeloaders who might be profiting from their altruistic, selfless gifts, created without any thought of reward.
Yeah, just like nobody ever adds on to XFree86. When was the last time you heard anything about that project? Nobody uses it, everybody wants to pay for the slight improvements in proprietary versions.
FreeBSD, too. The way people are free to make proprietary versions just slaughtered that project. It isn't nearly as stable or secure as something like Linux, and there hasn't been a new feature added in years.
Boy, the GPL certainly seems to be essential, given that there are no free software projects that have survived without it, and certainly no major ones. I'm sure glad it and all the other mutually incompatible licenses are around to keep us from mixing code between free software projects, so we're not just stuck with public domain code that anyone is free to use as they please without wasting their time worrying about legal issues.
Mars is a good place to settle because there's not much weather to worry about.
Sure the winds blow fast, but not hard (there's just not enough air). The biggest thing you have to worry about is long periods of overcast skies and poor visibility from the dust storms (better than the months-long winter-night of the arctic and antarctic).
You can pitch your giant tents or burrow in the low gravity and live indoors. Imagine giant buildings that are like a cross between a greenhouse and a mall, and I think you've got a fair idea of what Mars will be like for everyone but the first few pioneers (and there may never be uncomfortable pioneers; it makes more sense to me to just drop construction robots made in space from materials mined from asteroids).
Sure, the effort of moving people there is pretty rough, but practically everything else is easier once you get started. That's mostly due to the gravity; it'll be much easier to build huge buildings on Mars. I imagine there will be some pretty spectacular architecture due to this. Also, there probably won't be any natural disasters to worry about either, until we start terraforming.
In short, dead planets put up less of a fight.
You do realize you're spouting gibberish, right?
on
Calculating God
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· Score: 2
This thread is about how we can't meaningfully use the word "God". Listen to yourself, do you really think you've communicated anything at all to me? This is why religious wars happen.
It was only limited because they froze their coolant. With better equipment than what a few hackers can slap together in a few hours, direct liquid cooling might achieve the same result for long-term use.
(If you luk clos at tha thred I spelt it rite befor, wen I tokked abowt tha eggnawsticks an the divowtli rilijus fokes, so dun wine at mi abowt spelig)
The liquid nitrogen was clearly a bad idea, being colder than the gel point of Florinert, but the basic idea is sound. A small refrigeration unit cooling a small amount of Florinert to the temperature that worked best for them might be practical for normal use.
You don't need to cool the whole motherboard. If you can just get the main chip, the memory, and the video accelerator chips (and the other chips you need to make them talk to each other) into a tiny sealed case of the stuff, this could be in every high-performance home-computer.
Hell, they doubled the rated clock-speed with a decent liquid cooling system for about a thousand bucks. A mass-produced, much smaller, equivalent system could probably be as reliable as a CPU fan for under a hundred dollars, and make 900 MHz systems run at 1.5 GHz.
You sound like an athiest (see the problem?)
on
Calculating God
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· Score: 2
To me, that sounds like a definition of "God" that is nothing but another name for what is described by physics, or, in other words, the universe itself.
Or maybe you've just been watching too much Star Wars ("'God'...is defined...as...THE force..."). ^_^
Exactly. As Heinlein would say...
on
Calculating God
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· Score: 2
...it's a symbol without a referent.
Nobody can talk about God because nobody can point to a thing and say "There! That's God, that's exactly what God is! That's what I'm talking about."
Instead you get a lot of self-contradictory and logically flawed babble.
To make it worse, terribly few people seem equipped to argue semantics.
Most people think questions like "Can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" are facetious, when they get to the heart of what "God" means.
For example, the above question is about the definition of omnipotent. Would a thing you call "God" have absolute power over himself, the power to abandon omnipotence by making a thing greater than himself, or just absolute power over the physical universe we observe, him not being in or of the "universe" proper.
If what you speak of as "God" is of the physical universe, could an extremely powerful alien with advanced technology be "God"? How about an extremely powerful alien who created the universe and holds it in a container on his "shelf", like we might keep an ant farm?
Is "God" the anthromorphisation of the effects of religion?
There are a whole pile of these questions, and if you can't answer them, even you don't know what you're referring to when you say "God". Devout believers of different religions, agnostics, and atheists arguing with each other might all hold the same view, but just be talking about completely different things.
I was clearly thinking about the people who post links to grammer.com on slashdot, like me. If you tried to extract any meaning from the post, you overestimated me. Duh.
By "clearly thinking" I don't mean to imply I was thinking clearly. I must not be, because consumers of stupidity doesn't make sense, but then, neither does falling all over myself. I'm going to go try that now, it sounds like fun, and it counts on my quota of three impossible things I always do before breakfast (and I'm getting pretty damned hungry -- it's past midnight here, and so far I've only figured out what women really want and squeezed the toothpaste back into the tube once I was done with it).
Slashdot Mirror
Now this is important, so I'm gonna repeat it twice with increasing emphasis:
You don't need to license software you sell.
You don't need to license software you sell.
You don't need to license software you sell.
If you own the copyright, and don't give out any licenses, only you can make copies. Copyright law allows certain uses by anyone who buys a copy of software: installing it, running it, and making a backup. Very simple. No need to involve vicious packs of lawyers who piss off your customers and chew your profit margin to bits.
The standard practice of shrink-wrap licences is both unnecessary and legally questionable. Go ask a lawyer and he'll tell you that you should pay him more, every time, as long as he thinks you can make the payments (here's a hint: they ain't in it for the satisfaction of helping their fellow man). That's why everyone ends up with license who asks a lawyer, not because it's in their interest to have one, but because it's in the lawyer's interest to tell you to pay him for one.
Study the damned law yourself! Trust lawyers to tell you how much you should spend on lawyers, and you'll end up watching them suck you dry. (definitely don't trust me to tell you what to do. go check it out yourself. I could be lying, but I'm only telling you things you can easily check yourself)
The basic idea of mass-market busking is that you give stuff away and just ask for donations (and make it convenient for people to do so).
The theory behind it is that groups which pay more will have more buskers trying to please them and get their money, so there is a direct benefit for paying.
It makes the whole process open and honest. You can tell people "I want your money" because the only way you're going to get it is by making something they like well enough to pay for after having tried it. "I want your money" becomes equivalent to "I want to do something which benefits you", because you can't get their money by tricking them into paying for a bad product sight-unseen or slipping in bugs and making them pay for the fixes later.
Paying is effectively saying "I appreciate your work, and I want you to continue with it, but I'm also willing to make similar payments to others who do useful work for me". Instead of hearing about a great company going out of business and thinking "too bad, I wish they could have found some way to force us to pay them the money they needed, I guess they just had a bad revenue model" you can think "hmm, I value their services, how much am I willing to spend to keep them going?".
I think a lot more people will pay if it's okay for them to pay $20 or $5 or $0.50, instead of paying $50 or nothing. I think this article from the mushroom makes my point fairly well. And, of course, it makes sense to pay more than once, depending on how long you use the product.
It is efficient, because there are no middle-men involved. Product goes directly to customers, payment goes directly to producers. Forget advertising costs, the customers seek out worthwhile free stuff and tell their friends about it. No distributors, no salesmen, just programmers, artists, writers, and other creative people. It will probably only cost about a third, and in many cases less, to make and release products of the same quality.
And, of course, it allows you to open-source your product. The users will make it their business to pay only those people who are really responsible for the development, so anyone who puts a stupid little wrapper around your product might get a small amount of payment appropriate to his own effort, but generally won't manage to usurp the rewards for the bulk of the work.
Right now, there are two good services for buskware payments: e-gold and paypal. Paypal is extremely easy to use but only available to Americans; e-gold is less efficient, but internationally available (and, being a gold exchange rather than a dollar exchange, is more suitable for international trade). Both allow all accounts to both give and receive. They are compatible, because you can buy e-gold with paypal, and then send it out of the country, very simply.
Yes, it will probably take some time for everyone to come around, and get used to paying for some future benefit, rather than to access things they would otherwise be cut off from, but somebody's got to start it.
I've got just enough room on my keyboard tray for a keyboard an a mousepad. If I put the mousepad on the left, that centers the keyboard in front of me and puts the mouse in easy reach.
If I put the mousepad on the right, with my particular keyboard tray, that would mean I'd have to reach over awkwardly to type, and end up with some kind of RSI.
I used to have a wider desk-area, with the mouse off to the right, but constantly reaching for the mouse with my arm at an awkward angle was very uncomfortable and hard to be precise. Using it left-handed is at least better than that.
I still say the numerical keypad and cursor keys are exactly where the mouse should be.
That stupid number pad, it's exactly where the mouse should be. If I want the keyboard square in front of me, with the mouse in a comfortable reaching position, I either have to use the mouse with my left or buy a special keyboard.
Given that a standard keyboard costs next to nothing (and that I had one already), and a special keyboard costs about $100, I went lefty.
I don't really like it. When I do any drawing or play games using the mouse, I switch to my right hand.
<sarcasm>But at least my right hand is free to use that conveniently located number pad.</sarcasm>
Forget the planet-destroyer, we've just built a system-destroyer! Woo hoo!
On second thought, forget that, go watch Gunbuster. They turn Jupiter into one big bomb and nuke the galaxy center!
In all seriousness, you're thinking of 1950's weapons. What do you think people will be fighting with 10,000 years from now?
If you think humans will never have the capability to destroy planets, you're not thinking far enough ahead. I think we could easily build a single bomb that would crack the crust and kill everything on the planet right now, in fact, I think we could have built it since the 1960's. Once we get going on the antimatter thing, we'll probably be able to vaporize the planet with one bomb.
Personally, I think we'll eventually cut up all the planets to build space stations. You get a hell of a lot more living space that way.
E=MC^2
(fission, fusion, or antimatter, it doesn't look too good for a planet with a technological society on it)
...while the future generations may find the "Rosetta Disk", it is far more likely that they will find one of the millions of discarded AOL disks, put this together with the WWF broadcasts they encounter in deep space after a long FTL trip, recognize their ancestors for the ignorant savages we are, and commit collective suicide as a species.
Now it has to be www10, not partners, so of course it got moded up.
They aren't dangerous.
Saltines, now, those are deadly weapons. They've got sharp corners you could put an eye out with. Saltine manufacturers should be charged as a party to any cracker murder cases.
Their feeble pretence of producing a simple food product is almost as ridiculous as pointy Bic pens being simple writing implements. Who do you think started that saying, "The pen is mightier than the sword!"? It was their original ad campaign, when they first came out with their dirt cheap 99% plastic (undetectable by any metal detector) pointy stabbing weapons.
But users still must choose between high quality and source availability.
Nothing we do can remove that possibility, and nothing we do can remove the aid that open source projects give to proprietary competitors. Even if they can't include the code directly, they can always read it and know exactly how it was done, making it trivial to reproduce.
Is it better for the users to have no choice? I'd rather have the option of paying for the functionality in a proprietary version that might not otherwise be developed at all.
The benefits of source availability must stand on their own.
The point is that development still goes on.
Who cares whether everybody uses it? Enough people obviously use it, and respect free software principles, to keep developing it.
Oh? So you're willing to sign an affadavit certifying that this virtual machine is absolutely free of security holes and cannot be compromised?
If I wrote it with that in mind, of course I would. What kind of coward won't stand up and take responsibility for the quality of his own work?
A secure virtual machine for making arbitrary calculations can be very simple indeed; you only really need a few operations. It would be like signing a statement that you totaled a column of numbers correctly; you'd want to check it over until you're certain, and charge extra for the time and worry of that, but it's a simple enough task that you can eventually be certain that you're correct.
How do you think hardware designers ever get anything done? There's no magical difference that makes bug-free hardware possible and bug-free software impossible.
No chance of somebody inserting malicious code into the machine so that when I say "What's the VA stock price" the car-computer gets sent "Set cruise control to 5 trillion miles per hour. Set steering to target that cliff over there. Lock controls, set unlock password to '!seineew era sreenigne droF'"?
I never said anything about that. I was very clearly responding to "I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users." and talking about protecting the machine from the tasks (and the tasks from each other). I'm not talking about communications security (which, of course, can never be perfect, for physical reasons; all theoretical communications security models rely on the absolute physical security of certain things, which is impossible in real life), I'm talking about the security of one machine and the processes that run on it.
BTW, what kind of idiot would let their car be controlled by a distant server over a network? Lines get cut, solar flares disrupt communications, networks go down.
I don't know why this got moded up. You never made any arguments, just asserted that I was wrong, and threw in a few non sequitors.
I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users. (Yes, you can use sandboxing and other such strategies, but every security protocol is vulnerable.)
This is sheer and utter nonsense. A virtual machine can easily be simple enough to be bug-free and handle every kind of overflow without hurting the machine it's running on.
Not every security protocol is vulnerable, just those ones where the expense of perfect security wasn't justified by necessity (for example, when you want to sell a "secure" system, but you can hire marketers to hype it as secure more cheaply and effectively than you can hire programmers to make it secure).
...and add a line requiring that everybody who modifies the source must send them a copy on physical media. Preferably, for each user the modified version is distributed to.
This way, they could build their houses using archive cassettes as bricks, and shingle them with CD-Rs (how will they connect them? simple, the typical hacker easily spills enough sugary caffeinated drinks every year to stick his house together, they'd just have to be more careful about where they spill).
Don't you think the least these great altruists deserve? When somebody selflessly gives a gift to humanity, it only makes sense that everybody who benefits from their gift be legally obligated to give something back. Then they are free to be selfless and giving, without worrying about all the freeloaders who might be profiting from their altruistic, selfless gifts, created without any thought of reward.
they would run GPL software into the ground
Yeah, just like nobody ever adds on to XFree86. When was the last time you heard anything about that project? Nobody uses it, everybody wants to pay for the slight improvements in proprietary versions.
FreeBSD, too. The way people are free to make proprietary versions just slaughtered that project. It isn't nearly as stable or secure as something like Linux, and there hasn't been a new feature added in years.
Boy, the GPL certainly seems to be essential, given that there are no free software projects that have survived without it, and certainly no major ones. I'm sure glad it and all the other mutually incompatible licenses are around to keep us from mixing code between free software projects, so we're not just stuck with public domain code that anyone is free to use as they please without wasting their time worrying about legal issues.
Now, I'm going to have breakfast! -_^
Mars is a good place to settle because there's not much weather to worry about.
Sure the winds blow fast, but not hard (there's just not enough air). The biggest thing you have to worry about is long periods of overcast skies and poor visibility from the dust storms (better than the months-long winter-night of the arctic and antarctic).
You can pitch your giant tents or burrow in the low gravity and live indoors. Imagine giant buildings that are like a cross between a greenhouse and a mall, and I think you've got a fair idea of what Mars will be like for everyone but the first few pioneers (and there may never be uncomfortable pioneers; it makes more sense to me to just drop construction robots made in space from materials mined from asteroids).
Sure, the effort of moving people there is pretty rough, but practically everything else is easier once you get started. That's mostly due to the gravity; it'll be much easier to build huge buildings on Mars. I imagine there will be some pretty spectacular architecture due to this. Also, there probably won't be any natural disasters to worry about either, until we start terraforming.
In short, dead planets put up less of a fight.
This thread is about how we can't meaningfully use the word "God". Listen to yourself, do you really think you've communicated anything at all to me? This is why religious wars happen.
It was only limited because they froze their coolant. With better equipment than what a few hackers can slap together in a few hours, direct liquid cooling might achieve the same result for long-term use.
But then, who ever said they weren't?
(If you luk clos at tha thred I spelt it rite befor, wen I tokked abowt tha eggnawsticks an the divowtli rilijus fokes, so dun wine at mi abowt spelig)
Haha, I am the athiest of them all!
The liquid nitrogen was clearly a bad idea, being colder than the gel point of Florinert, but the basic idea is sound. A small refrigeration unit cooling a small amount of Florinert to the temperature that worked best for them might be practical for normal use.
You don't need to cool the whole motherboard. If you can just get the main chip, the memory, and the video accelerator chips (and the other chips you need to make them talk to each other) into a tiny sealed case of the stuff, this could be in every high-performance home-computer.
Hell, they doubled the rated clock-speed with a decent liquid cooling system for about a thousand bucks. A mass-produced, much smaller, equivalent system could probably be as reliable as a CPU fan for under a hundred dollars, and make 900 MHz systems run at 1.5 GHz.
To me, that sounds like a definition of "God" that is nothing but another name for what is described by physics, or, in other words, the universe itself.
Or maybe you've just been watching too much Star Wars ("'God'...is defined...as...THE force..."). ^_^
...it's a symbol without a referent.
Nobody can talk about God because nobody can point to a thing and say "There! That's God, that's exactly what God is! That's what I'm talking about."
Instead you get a lot of self-contradictory and logically flawed babble.
To make it worse, terribly few people seem equipped to argue semantics.
Most people think questions like "Can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" are facetious, when they get to the heart of what "God" means.
For example, the above question is about the definition of omnipotent. Would a thing you call "God" have absolute power over himself, the power to abandon omnipotence by making a thing greater than himself, or just absolute power over the physical universe we observe, him not being in or of the "universe" proper.
If what you speak of as "God" is of the physical universe, could an extremely powerful alien with advanced technology be "God"? How about an extremely powerful alien who created the universe and holds it in a container on his "shelf", like we might keep an ant farm?
Is "God" the anthromorphisation of the effects of religion?
There are a whole pile of these questions, and if you can't answer them, even you don't know what you're referring to when you say "God". Devout believers of different religions, agnostics, and atheists arguing with each other might all hold the same view, but just be talking about completely different things.
I was clearly thinking about the people who post links to grammer.com on slashdot, like me. If you tried to extract any meaning from the post, you overestimated me. Duh.
By "clearly thinking" I don't mean to imply I was thinking clearly. I must not be, because consumers of stupidity doesn't make sense, but then, neither does falling all over myself. I'm going to go try that now, it sounds like fun, and it counts on my quota of three impossible things I always do before breakfast (and I'm getting pretty damned hungry -- it's past midnight here, and so far I've only figured out what women really want and squeezed the toothpaste back into the tube once I was done with it).
People in stone houses shouldn't throw glass.
No wait, stoned people in glasses shouldn't throw houseparties.
No, that's not it, housepeople should use stonewear not glasses.
Forget it. I may not make sense, but at least I grammar right.