Build your own rails, pick up a drill/tap set at Home Depot (or wherever) for about $5... then just drill/tap the holes as you need them. Plastic garbage bag taped around the rail and a good vacuum cleaner to pick up the filings, and you don't even have to unmount all your hardware to do it. The rails themselves can be basic steel bar stock, or if cost/weight is a concern, use thick aluminum.
Then you can either buy premade rackmounts or build your own. I'm an audio guy, and audio rackmount equipment is usually 10" between rails, as opposed to 19" for computer equipment. Though some of the high-end stuff is 19" between rails.
Everyone I've seen that builds their own uses perspex or aluminum. Personally, were I to do this, I would get mini-ITX boards, with the Morex DC-DC power supplies. Run the whole rack on a big DC rectifier, and just patch in the 12V to each power supply. The units themselves are just six pieces of perspex; the top is on a hinge, the front (and possibly the back) is wider than the rest, to provide places to screw into the rails. Depending on your needs, you can PXE-boot them, and then you just need one computer for the whole thing with a big hard drive / RAID to hold the images on. Or you can just put a read-only operating system on a compact flash and put that in the mini-ITX. One version of the board even has the CF slot on it, so you don't need a converter to IDE.
You can get most of the hardware from mini-itx.com, though I've had better luck with idot.com in terms of pricing. The 12V rectifier can be gotten from industrial surplus, or if you're handy with a soldering iron, you can build your own from a heavy duty transformer and a few power rectifier diodes. As far as software, any Linux Live CD (ala Knoppix) can PXE boot or boot off CF. If you want Windows, search for Windows PE on google, and it'll come up with a list of companies that make read-only Windows distros. If none of those meet your needs, BartPE makes a utility to roll your own... just install it on a hard drive, configure it, then run the utility.
I seriously thought GMail was an April Fool's joke. Then I saw the story on CNN. And this one. I mean, who gives out a gigabyte of storage? Even with bulk pricing, that's still pretty expensive...
Another thing to keep in mind is that inverters are only so efficient... I think it's around the 70% mark.
There are tons of appliances manufactured to run off 12V, so if you keep your battery bank at that, you can wire your house for both 120V and 12V and run as much as you can off the 12V. I recommend automotive-lighter-plug-style sockets for those, as most 12V equipment is made to plug into the jacks in cars, RVs, etc.
Subliminal messages are in the range above conscious hearing. This is generally agreed to be 20KHz. Therefore, you would take the spoken portion, and boost it by 20KHz, then add in the music at the normal frequencies.
Don't forget the sample rate; according to nyquist, the sample rate must be at least twice the highest frequency represented. CD sample rate is 44 KHz... therefore this method CANNOT be used to record to CD; there isn't enough representational accuracy in the 20 - 22 KHz range
Quoth malachid69:
Hmmm. well you are still talking about a single stereo source to go through the headphones. Why would you need to change the sample rate?
It all comes down to the Nyquist Theorem, which basically states that in order to accurately represent any sound, it's frequency must be less than half the sample rate. Even for sounds less than half the sample rate, to get true high fidelity, they must be far less than half the sample rate, or the consequences are poor representation. I would imagine that any subliminal messaging occuring in the ultrasound spectrum would have to be relatively high fidelity, considering that the ear is not physically well-suited to pick up ultrasound...
Well, CDs are sampled at 44,100 Hz. As mentioned in the above "consequences" link, a 20 KHz tone would only be represented by 2.205 samples per period; not an incredibly high quality recording. The nuances, the voice itself, would be lost to the sampling process. The engineers that designed the CD spec chose it specifically for that feature; this is the lowest sample rate that can reproduce all the sounds audible to a human (up to about 16 KHz) without any appreciable loss in quality. Sounds just barely above the threshold are recorded, but the loss in quality becomes quite rapid as you approach 22 KHz. Above 22 KHz, any sound comes out as a bunch of mid-range noise, and nothing else.
If you use a strong password (one not in the dictionary)
Well, if you were to try every possible combination, it would take 185 days to crack any 8 letter or less password, given the quoted rate of 45 million password tries per second that the author quoted
So far as I'm aware, there hasn't been a link-layer security protocol for wireless made yet that hasn't been cracked. That's why I run ipsec.
A wireless network using Windows RADIUS is pretty secure; the vulnerability in WEP requires many packets to go down the pipe in order to be visible. RADIUS requires IEEE 802.1x authentication, and assigns each user their own rotating key based on that. Unless a user stays connected to the network for days at a time, it's theoretically unbreakable, as the key rotation is based on the PKI authentication, and therefore given the current key it is impossible to deduce the next one...
On what grounds will Microsoft pull out the DMCA? It may be a law with several evil clauses (and a couple of good ones, like the safe harbor provisions), but it's not an all-purpose beating stick.
They've already been using the DMCA to kill modchip imports and websites... if the emulator lets one run pirated games the same as a modchip does, then I don't see why they wouldn't try to use it.
If the emulator developer is smart he'll make sure he's copy-protection compliant with the emulator; that is, he checks for a valid disc using the same mechanism as in the XBox...
I disagree that the USA is supposed to be about limitless opportunity and the liberation that brings.
America is about free, open markets, free speech, and self-regulated rulership. Unfortunately, in an age of globalization, for as long as there is a significant part of the world that is economically poor, where the standard of living that the American dollar (and the economy powering it) is significantly higher than is available locally, a completely open market is devastating to the American workforce. I do not believe that Microsoft, or indeed anyone operating under an NDA, is necessarily driving this; had the IT industry started and stayed open, the situation would still be the same.
The problem is that skilled labor from the international market is significantly cheaper than from the American market. The cause is uneven economic playing fields, not NDAs. The solution is to even the playing field; unfortunately, the best way to do that is to allow the outsourcing to continue. We pour enough money and knowledge into these economies and they'll bootstrap themselves up to a fair level, and the problem will take care of itself.
In the meantime, however, it's going to suck to be a skilled worker in America.
That means my classmates will be able to talk to their classmates in Hyderabad, India, who are busy replacing workers in Redmond. Five years and growning. Use Microsoft and help Bill make money for these guys, but mostly himself. It's the American thing to do!
Or you could do the evil commie thing and keep your money to yourself and help people all around the world by using free software. Hire that uneployed IT guy on your block and help a programmer make a living. You won't be sorry you did.
Sir, had I not already posted in this discussion I would mod you a troll.
Outsourcing and free software have nothing to do with each other.
There are outsourcing shops for both open source and closed source projects. AFAIK, there's no conclusive evidence that one is more prevalent than the other. It may shock you to learn however that Linux was developped by a European! Maybe we should all stop using it, we wouldn't want them to be succesful.
It may also shock you to learn that China, an "evil commie" nation, is considering a country-wide open source operating system rather than Microsoft. Considering this information, would it then be more ethical to use Windows for everything?
Or maybe, just maybe, I should choose the right tool for the right job, and as long as my decision doesn't help anyone actually murder anyone else, I should consider it an ethical decision?
More than half the guys list their positions as "technical evangelist."
If you want to reach more folks: Can we instead talk to a developer who wants to talk about the best way of doing things, rather than someone whose job is to come up with problems where MS is the solution?
I've met lots of Microsoft evangelists in the past. My company is a gold partner and EAP so we get tons of opportunities to do so. They are developers, and they are concerned with the best way of doing things. Their job seems to be more about vendor-unspecific wide technology adoption than particular Microsoft slanted adoption.
It goes without saying that these people got their positions by being very passionate about Microsoft products and technologies; I'm not arguing that. What I'm saying is that their passion is not limited to Microsoft products and technologies, and it would be uncharitable to assume that they have the rather unethical position of inventing problems for Microsoft products.
The grandparent was complaining about non-viewable pages in browsers other than WinIE
Since it is running on IIS they have to use.asp and probably some custom software.
Lots of factual errors with the above statement and what it implies:
IIS does not require.asp; that just happens to be the built in scripting language. I'm running JRUN (jsp / servlet container) on IIS on my laptop right now.
ASP does not automatically mean custom software. There's lots of great stuff out there for the diligent googler.
ASP does not force WinIE compliance. Nowhere anywhere in the ASP language is there any mechanism for outputting HTML tags as seperate from other output; therefore the HTML compliance is completely the responsibility of the programmer. Platform has nothing to do with it.
Just because it runs on IIS doesn't mean its not viewable in other browsers. There is nothing special in IIS to prevent other users from using the website; there are some peculiarities in their implementation of the HTTP/1.1 protocol which allow websites to load faster in WinIE because they broke the protocol for that special case, but the HTML is not forced into any particular mode.
Now, ASP.NET utilizing server-side controls is a bit different; but even there, it's supposed to degrade gracefully. That is, controls that render to the client as javascript in WinIE may require a round trip to the server in other browsers, but their behaviour will remain the same.
It's called the internet. It's beautiful. Self-service machines around the world are available in the comfort of your home, you can pay for the software and it gets sent to you magically within seconds (okay an hour or so if you've got a slow connection), available for your use.
OH SHE SAID ITS SO BIG STOP. Don't stop stop. Please don't stop stop.
Actually I was thinking about the kink factor. Maybe this explains why all the early porn spank photoshoots and stuff were so much more kinky than today; it all started with the telegraph.
I mean when every line of the porn story throbbing through your brain ends with the word "STOP" can you really be blamed for developping a rape fetish?
Subliminal messages are in the range above conscious hearing. This is generally agreed to be 20KHz. Therefore, you would take the spoken portion, and boost it by 20KHz, then add in the music at the normal frequencies.
Don't forget the sample rate; according to nyquist, the sample rate must be at least twice the highest frequency represented. CD sample rate is 44 KHz... therefore this method CANNOT be used to record to CD; there isn't enough representational accuracy in the 20 - 22 KHz range
That picture of the square on inverted catenaries has been a standard demo animation in Mathematica since I took freshman physics in 1996.
Yes, but he's characterizing all of the possibilities of shapes... some of the quite complicated... that can mesh together.
At the end of this effort I imagine he will publish a paper generalizing the formulas to characterize all the possible meshings of different shapes. Then someone else will take that and play around with it and make some widget that will change the world.
I'm still thinking about gears whose tooth count need not be derived from the radius. Right now, if you want a 3:1 gear ratio, then the diameter of one gear must be thrice that of the other gear. With this technology, we might be able to bring that down significantly... I just can't wait for the LEGO style set built out of that concept. It'll have a ton of different gears, all the exact same size, but with different teeth... they'll all mesh together perfectly.
We might finally be able to build a reliable Continually Variable Transmission whose belt doesn't need to be replaced quite so often...
Actually, this research does have real world applications.
In the early parts of the industrial age it was found that a certain shape of gear teeth (both along the axle of the gear, and the tooth's profile seen edge on), removed gear slip allowing for much smoother operation, to the point where bevelled gears are used in all car transmissions today.
This research may lead to innovative and new ways to mesh gears together; for instance, I could imagine one application to allow gears with teeth numbers that aren't strictly in ratio to their diameters to mesh properly. If that were the case, then we could make transmissions and gear boxes an order of magnitude or so smaller...
imagine it'd be quite entertaining to watch hordes of people walking into things and falling over because they were trying to play a game and walk down a street simultaneously
You forgot to mention balancing a laptop on one fore-arm while trying to play with the other hand...
Just a thought...
on
Usenet Audio
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How about contracting with an ISP that supports Multicast UDP? Multicast is not broadcast, though it offers similar bandwidth savings.
You send out one packet and pay for it once, the routers split it as appropriate as it spreads. Any router that doesn't support multicast gets one packet for each recipient that must be routed through that node; therefore all ISPs can save money on bandwidth by enabling multicast.
The only downside is that packet storms that bring down whole sections of the internet become available. But, since its UDP and therefore the application should be packet loss tolerant, a simple throttling mechanism can be used.
By then Skynet will be in control, let it be the "Machines" problem.
Fool, it is patently obvious by now that the future machine ruler of humanity will not be Skynet, but The Architect. By correctly changing the timeline in which the Terminator series of robots is created, we have moved to a future where our robot overlords are of a more intellectual demeanor.
Oh and this is how we end up scorching the sky; put enough nuclear cores in it, and we get a permanent cloud deck...
I'm celibate by popular demand you insensitive clod!
I believe you mean that you're celibate due to lack of popular demand...
Re:What happens when life IS found
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
I would like to point out, however, that the existance of life on other worlds does point to several very deep theological questions for Christians;
1. Does Original Sin apply to life froms not descended from Adam and Eve? If so, did they have their own Original Sin or did Original Sin apply to all life at once.
2. Did the Christ's sacrifice count for all life or only life on Earth? Does the Messiah spend his time bouncing from planet to planet, redeeming life on each planet singly, or was the sacrifice necessary only once?
Imagine, he could have licensed his software to the spammers and charged them an annual fee to use it. He could have been the "Microsoft" of the spamming industry.
I would like to point out that, due to dangerously unsecure settings on installation of their home software, Microsoft is already the "Microsoft" of the spamming industry...
Note: WinXP really is better. Win2003 is much better. But if we don't have Microsoft to pick on, just who ARE we gonna pick on?
Slashdot Mirror
Build your own rails, pick up a drill/tap set at Home Depot (or wherever) for about $5... then just drill/tap the holes as you need them. Plastic garbage bag taped around the rail and a good vacuum cleaner to pick up the filings, and you don't even have to unmount all your hardware to do it. The rails themselves can be basic steel bar stock, or if cost/weight is a concern, use thick aluminum.
Then you can either buy premade rackmounts or build your own. I'm an audio guy, and audio rackmount equipment is usually 10" between rails, as opposed to 19" for computer equipment. Though some of the high-end stuff is 19" between rails.
Everyone I've seen that builds their own uses perspex or aluminum. Personally, were I to do this, I would get mini-ITX boards, with the Morex DC-DC power supplies. Run the whole rack on a big DC rectifier, and just patch in the 12V to each power supply. The units themselves are just six pieces of perspex; the top is on a hinge, the front (and possibly the back) is wider than the rest, to provide places to screw into the rails. Depending on your needs, you can PXE-boot them, and then you just need one computer for the whole thing with a big hard drive / RAID to hold the images on. Or you can just put a read-only operating system on a compact flash and put that in the mini-ITX. One version of the board even has the CF slot on it, so you don't need a converter to IDE.
You can get most of the hardware from mini-itx.com, though I've had better luck with idot.com in terms of pricing. The 12V rectifier can be gotten from industrial surplus, or if you're handy with a soldering iron, you can build your own from a heavy duty transformer and a few power rectifier diodes. As far as software, any Linux Live CD (ala Knoppix) can PXE boot or boot off CF. If you want Windows, search for Windows PE on google, and it'll come up with a list of companies that make read-only Windows distros. If none of those meet your needs, BartPE makes a utility to roll your own... just install it on a hard drive, configure it, then run the utility.
I seriously thought GMail was an April Fool's joke. Then I saw the story on CNN. And this one. I mean, who gives out a gigabyte of storage? Even with bulk pricing, that's still pretty expensive...
Another thing to keep in mind is that inverters are only so efficient... I think it's around the 70% mark.
There are tons of appliances manufactured to run off 12V, so if you keep your battery bank at that, you can wire your house for both 120V and 12V and run as much as you can off the 12V. I recommend automotive-lighter-plug-style sockets for those, as most 12V equipment is made to plug into the jacks in cars, RVs, etc.
If you are asking where the gravity get its force, well, that is a deeper question for which we would have to leave 7th grade physics.
I thought that was the fundamental question in physics today; the Grand Unified Theory is supposed to explain exactly how gravity works, is it not?
Quoth the parent and grandparent:
Subliminal messages are in the range above conscious hearing. This is generally agreed to be 20KHz. Therefore, you would take the spoken portion, and boost it by 20KHz, then add in the music at the normal frequencies.
Don't forget the sample rate; according to nyquist, the sample rate must be at least twice the highest frequency represented. CD sample rate is 44 KHz... therefore this method CANNOT be used to record to CD; there isn't enough representational accuracy in the 20 - 22 KHz range
Quoth malachid69:
Hmmm. well you are still talking about a single stereo source to go through the headphones. Why would you need to change the sample rate?
It all comes down to the Nyquist Theorem, which basically states that in order to accurately represent any sound, it's frequency must be less than half the sample rate. Even for sounds less than half the sample rate, to get true high fidelity, they must be far less than half the sample rate, or the consequences are poor representation. I would imagine that any subliminal messaging occuring in the ultrasound spectrum would have to be relatively high fidelity, considering that the ear is not physically well-suited to pick up ultrasound...
Well, CDs are sampled at 44,100 Hz. As mentioned in the above "consequences" link, a 20 KHz tone would only be represented by 2.205 samples per period; not an incredibly high quality recording. The nuances, the voice itself, would be lost to the sampling process. The engineers that designed the CD spec chose it specifically for that feature; this is the lowest sample rate that can reproduce all the sounds audible to a human (up to about 16 KHz) without any appreciable loss in quality. Sounds just barely above the threshold are recorded, but the loss in quality becomes quite rapid as you approach 22 KHz. Above 22 KHz, any sound comes out as a bunch of mid-range noise, and nothing else.
If you use a strong password (one not in the dictionary)
Well, if you were to try every possible combination, it would take 185 days to crack any 8 letter or less password, given the quoted rate of 45 million password tries per second that the author quoted
So far as I'm aware, there hasn't been a link-layer security protocol for wireless made yet that
hasn't been cracked. That's why I run ipsec.
A wireless network using Windows RADIUS is pretty secure; the vulnerability in WEP requires many packets to go down the pipe in order to be visible. RADIUS requires IEEE 802.1x authentication, and assigns each user their own rotating key based on that. Unless a user stays connected to the network for days at a time, it's theoretically unbreakable, as the key rotation is based on the PKI authentication, and therefore given the current key it is impossible to deduce the next one...
(numbers fail me at the moment.. though something tells me that it may be in the many hundreds of megs captured).
Any WEP implementation can be broken with about a million packets, so says the documentation for AirSnort.
On what grounds will Microsoft pull out the DMCA? It may be a law with several evil clauses (and a couple of good ones, like the safe harbor provisions), but it's not an all-purpose beating stick.
They've already been using the DMCA to kill modchip imports and websites... if the emulator lets one run pirated games the same as a modchip does, then I don't see why they wouldn't try to use it.
If the emulator developer is smart he'll make sure he's copy-protection compliant with the emulator; that is, he checks for a valid disc using the same mechanism as in the XBox...
I disagree that the USA is supposed to be about limitless opportunity and the liberation that brings.
America is about free, open markets, free speech, and self-regulated rulership. Unfortunately, in an age of globalization, for as long as there is a significant part of the world that is economically poor, where the standard of living that the American dollar (and the economy powering it) is significantly higher than is available locally, a completely open market is devastating to the American workforce. I do not believe that Microsoft, or indeed anyone operating under an NDA, is necessarily driving this; had the IT industry started and stayed open, the situation would still be the same.
The problem is that skilled labor from the international market is significantly cheaper than from the American market. The cause is uneven economic playing fields, not NDAs. The solution is to even the playing field; unfortunately, the best way to do that is to allow the outsourcing to continue. We pour enough money and knowledge into these economies and they'll bootstrap themselves up to a fair level, and the problem will take care of itself.
In the meantime, however, it's going to suck to be a skilled worker in America.
That means my classmates will be able to talk to their classmates in Hyderabad, India, who are busy replacing workers in Redmond. Five years and growning. Use Microsoft and help Bill make money for these guys, but mostly himself. It's the American thing to do!
Or you could do the evil commie thing and keep your money to yourself and help people all around the world by using free software. Hire that uneployed IT guy on your block and help a programmer make a living. You won't be sorry you did.
Sir, had I not already posted in this discussion I would mod you a troll.
Outsourcing and free software have nothing to do with each other.
There are outsourcing shops for both open source and closed source projects. AFAIK, there's no conclusive evidence that one is more prevalent than the other. It may shock you to learn however that Linux was developped by a European! Maybe we should all stop using it, we wouldn't want them to be succesful.
It may also shock you to learn that China, an "evil commie" nation, is considering a country-wide open source operating system rather than Microsoft. Considering this information, would it then be more ethical to use Windows for everything?
Or maybe, just maybe, I should choose the right tool for the right job, and as long as my decision doesn't help anyone actually murder anyone else, I should consider it an ethical decision?
More than half the guys list their positions as "technical evangelist."
If you want to reach more folks: Can we instead talk to a developer who wants to talk about the best way of doing things, rather than someone whose job is to come up with problems where MS is the solution?
I've met lots of Microsoft evangelists in the past. My company is a gold partner and EAP so we get tons of opportunities to do so. They are developers, and they are concerned with the best way of doing things. Their job seems to be more about vendor-unspecific wide technology adoption than particular Microsoft slanted adoption.
It goes without saying that these people got their positions by being very passionate about Microsoft products and technologies; I'm not arguing that. What I'm saying is that their passion is not limited to Microsoft products and technologies, and it would be uncharitable to assume that they have the rather unethical position of inventing problems for Microsoft products.
Since it is running on IIS they have to use
Lots of factual errors with the above statement and what it implies:
Just because it runs on IIS doesn't mean its not viewable in other browsers. There is nothing special in IIS to prevent other users from using the website; there are some peculiarities in their implementation of the HTTP/1.1 protocol which allow websites to load faster in WinIE because they broke the protocol for that special case, but the HTML is not forced into any particular mode.
Now, ASP.NET utilizing server-side controls is a bit different; but even there, it's supposed to degrade gracefully. That is, controls that render to the client as javascript in WinIE may require a round trip to the server in other browsers, but their behaviour will remain the same.
It's called the internet. It's beautiful. Self-service machines around the world are available in the comfort of your home, you can pay for the software and it gets sent to you magically within seconds (okay an hour or so if you've got a slow connection), available for your use.
And you never had to put on pants.
OH SHE SAID ITS SO BIG STOP.
Don't stop stop. Please don't stop stop.
Actually I was thinking about the kink factor. Maybe this explains why all the early porn spank photoshoots and stuff were so much more kinky than today; it all started with the telegraph.
I mean when every line of the porn story throbbing through your brain ends with the word "STOP" can you really be blamed for developping a rape fetish?
Subliminal messages are in the range above conscious hearing. This is generally agreed to be 20KHz. Therefore, you would take the spoken portion, and boost it by 20KHz, then add in the music at the normal frequencies.
Don't forget the sample rate; according to nyquist, the sample rate must be at least twice the highest frequency represented. CD sample rate is 44 KHz... therefore this method CANNOT be used to record to CD; there isn't enough representational accuracy in the 20 - 22 KHz range
That picture of the square on inverted catenaries has been a standard demo animation in Mathematica since I took freshman physics in 1996.
Yes, but he's characterizing all of the possibilities of shapes... some of the quite complicated... that can mesh together.
At the end of this effort I imagine he will publish a paper generalizing the formulas to characterize all the possible meshings of different shapes. Then someone else will take that and play around with it and make some widget that will change the world.
I'm still thinking about gears whose tooth count need not be derived from the radius. Right now, if you want a 3:1 gear ratio, then the diameter of one gear must be thrice that of the other gear. With this technology, we might be able to bring that down significantly... I just can't wait for the LEGO style set built out of that concept. It'll have a ton of different gears, all the exact same size, but with different teeth... they'll all mesh together perfectly.
We might finally be able to build a reliable Continually Variable Transmission whose belt doesn't need to be replaced quite so often...
Actually, this research does have real world applications.
In the early parts of the industrial age it was found that a certain shape of gear teeth (both along the axle of the gear, and the tooth's profile seen edge on), removed gear slip allowing for much smoother operation, to the point where bevelled gears are used in all car transmissions today.
This research may lead to innovative and new ways to mesh gears together; for instance, I could imagine one application to allow gears with teeth numbers that aren't strictly in ratio to their diameters to mesh properly. If that were the case, then we could make transmissions and gear boxes an order of magnitude or so smaller...
imagine it'd be quite entertaining to watch hordes of people walking into things and falling over because they were trying to play a game and walk down a street simultaneously
You forgot to mention balancing a laptop on one fore-arm while trying to play with the other hand...
How about contracting with an ISP that supports Multicast UDP? Multicast is not broadcast, though it offers similar bandwidth savings.
You send out one packet and pay for it once, the routers split it as appropriate as it spreads. Any router that doesn't support multicast gets one packet for each recipient that must be routed through that node; therefore all ISPs can save money on bandwidth by enabling multicast.
The only downside is that packet storms that bring down whole sections of the internet become available. But, since its UDP and therefore the application should be packet loss tolerant, a simple throttling mechanism can be used.
You'll have at least a few years where the cost of raw oil slowly rises, probably with periodic price shocks.
In 1997, I could buy gasoline for $0.99 a gallon.
Today, at the same gas station, I spend $1.69.
The cost has been slowly rising the whole time, with periodic rapid increases of $0.10 - $0.20 at a time...
Does that count?
By then Skynet will be in control, let it be the "Machines" problem.
Fool, it is patently obvious by now that the future machine ruler of humanity will not be Skynet, but The Architect. By correctly changing the timeline in which the Terminator series of robots is created, we have moved to a future where our robot overlords are of a more intellectual demeanor.
Oh and this is how we end up scorching the sky; put enough nuclear cores in it, and we get a permanent cloud deck...
I'm celibate by popular demand you insensitive clod!
I believe you mean that you're celibate due to lack of popular demand...
I would like to point out, however, that the existance of life on other worlds does point to several very deep theological questions for Christians;
1. Does Original Sin apply to life froms not descended from Adam and Eve? If so, did they have their own Original Sin or did Original Sin apply to all life at once.
2. Did the Christ's sacrifice count for all life or only life on Earth? Does the Messiah spend his time bouncing from planet to planet, redeeming life on each planet singly, or was the sacrifice necessary only once?
Imagine, he could have licensed his software to the spammers and charged them an annual fee to use it. He could have been the "Microsoft" of the spamming industry.
I would like to point out that, due to dangerously unsecure settings on installation of their home software, Microsoft is already the "Microsoft" of the spamming industry...
Note: WinXP really is better. Win2003 is much better. But if we don't have Microsoft to pick on, just who ARE we gonna pick on?