Typically it's a projector and a blank wall/screen, not a 6 foot LCD - used for displaying notes for the teaching (much the same as many college professors do) or words to songs. It just happens to be a great way to watch a football game or play video games. Actually, I have been to many, mainly Christian fundamentalist, churches where it IS a 6 foot LCD or plasma TV which is located not in the main worship hall, but in an adjacent room, complete with sofas and comfy chairs.
But, that aside, if I were to claim I needed one for my home office, I would be expected to log business and non-business use of it and reduce my deduction accordingly. Yet a church gets it entirely tax free regardless of how it is used.
That large tv has legitimate uses, like displaying, oh, I don't know....religious content? Why should displaying religious content be exempt from taxes? Note that I said "demonstrable charitable purpose." What benefit does society get by making this activity tax free?
My wife and I were just talking about this, and agree that it's not because the sports bars have paid for it; after all, there's no "Huge National Association of Sports Bars" for Fox to collect a fee from. They haven't paid a fee. They've paid legislators. It's cheaper to buy new laws or threaten to buy new laws when necessary. Ever heard of the "National Restaurant Association", "American Beverage Institute," "American Beverage Licensees," and their international equivalents? The NFL has nowhere near the political clout of these organizations. When football's impact on the economy hits a trillion dollars annually, then congress might talk to them.
Im no churchgoer now, but its not like the TV was paid for by your taxes, but rather the people who attend the church as a way to promote social gathering. Now I suggest you go back to your basement and play WoW by yourself because apparently you have no clue what it means to socialize with other people. Why should "promoting social gatherings" be considered a proper charitable purpose for a non-profit entity? If that's a charitable purpose, shouldn't every bar and nightclub be a non-profit?
It's time for churches to start paying taxes on income they don't use for real charitable or educational purposes.
If I have a 60" TV, and no one is around to watch it, does it violate copyright? I am not the NFL, but this is my take. If you are watching it in your home that is perfectly permissible.
If you bring it to a park and let everyone watch, that is a public display and is probably a violation.
If you bring it to your place of business and use a "Super Bowl party" as a means to attract new customers, that is a violation unless your type of business has an exemption written into the law (which essentially means bars and restaurants). That applies even if your business is a non-profit.
I can't show movies to raise money for my non-profit (even if a donation is not required for viewing) unless I pay the copyright holders a fee. I don't see why a church should have a different set of rules.
This attitude that churches should not have to play by the same rules as everyone else drives me up the wall. Can we get rid of their tax exemption while we're at it? Or does this 52" TV have some demonstrable charitable purpose?
I was unaware that the whitehouse is what gives the president his power. I think it was a damn peice of paper. Or more specifically the words on said paper. Sorry, you're living in the past. What currently gives the president his power is the unwillingness of the people who are supposed to be keeping him under supervision and control (at least according to that piece of paper) to actually do so.
Look at the S&P 500 over 5 years. We're seeing a sharp correction, but it's not like we're even returning to 2005 levels, much less earlier. Actually, we're returning to 1999 levels. Look at the long duration graph.
nine out of ten people with schizophrenia admit to using pot. If you think that's bad, 98.7% of cancer patients drank milk at some point in their childhood.
In 83% of auto accidents where a pedestrian was killed or injured, the pedestrian was in a crosswalk.
Avoid milk, crosswalks and pot and you'll live forever.
I agree it depends on the definitions used for agnosticism and atheism. That's why it's important to use the correct ones.
Agnosticism is the belief that the existence/non-existence of god(s) is unknowable. Well, there are the correct definitions, and the ones people use when describing themselves. The vast majority of self described agnostics I know are theists. In their view the existence of one or more gods is a given, but the nature of these gods is unknown (i.e. no specific religion contains a true description of the nature of god(s)).
Most of the remainder are atheists who are unwilling to use the term "atheist" for fear of being branded as evil by the theistic majority. They believe that it is very unlikely that gods exists and therefore do not believe in them. But by calling themselves agnostic, theists can comfortably believe that the "agnostic" hasn't yet decided to believe in God, and is therefore a candidate for conversion rather than extermination.
From my experience, true agnostics (based upon the definition above) are a small fraction (<10%) of people who call themselves agnostic.
Now, lets say that gravity is instant. You turn on the gravity generator and the big honkin' flashlight. The receiver instantly notes the increase in gravity, and one year later sees the flashlight. How is causality violated? The receiver did not see the effect until the generator was activated. But it did see it faster than light. One of the "problems" with the real universe is that two things can only be said to happen at the same time if they also happen in the same place. If there is any space or time between two events, different observers will see them occuring at different places and/or different times.
The problem with your example is that you seem to think that you know what time it is somewhere else. In actuality, observers moving at different velocities disagree about what time it is somewhere else. In your example, some observers will see* that the receiver detected the increased gravity before the generator was turned on and others will see that it detected the increased gravity after the generator was turned on.
If that were the case, observers that see the gravity receiver detect the increased gravity before the generator was turned on could use their gravitational wave transmitter to tell the sender not to turn on the gravity generator. That would be a violation of causality.
* "see" is a really bad word to use here because it implies light travel time is involved. By "see," I actually mean calculate, after taking into account any time delays caused by information propogation.
If anything the U.S. has gotten more and more secular as science and math education and achievement have declined. Leave it to Slashdot mod to claim this bullshit is insightful. Could it have anything to do with the conservatives encouraging the rich to pull their children (and more importantly their tax dollars) away from the public schools?
Nothing quite encourages a school to fail like limiting their funding (i.e. decreasing property taxes which used to be how public schools were funded in the U.S.). Now local schools have to rely on the state and federal government for funding. Praying would be a better bet. At least imaginary sky fairies can't reduce your budget.
Has any fellow European of mine ever come across any serious creationists? Is this solely an American phenomenon? Unfortunately not, and Europeans that tell you otherwise do so at their own peril. It's simply a matter of degree, and degree can always change.
Young earth creationism infects 50% of the population in the US. It currently infects 35% to 40% in Europe. The difference is only a decade at best. Fight it now while you still have a chance.
And one of the arguments against evolution (based on "science" rather than biblical arguments) is
First, the earth and sun must be considered as being in the universe which is by definition (from a physics standpoint) a closed system. Where then does the universe get this strange ability to defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Answer, it doesn't. Therefore, things on the earth always go from a state of order to disorder unless work not just energy is applied to reverse the disorder. I almost hate to tell you this, but whoever wrote that knows very little about science and absolutely nothing about thermodynamics. It is quite easy to calculate the change in entropy between the sunlight the earth receives and the entropy of the infrared radiation it emits. A sophomore physics major should be able to do it.
Without boring you with the math, the earth is one enormous engine for creating entropy. Nothing going on here, and nothing related to evolution, is, by any measure, a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
In fact, it's very easy to calculate the change in entropy between the food you eat and oxygen you inhale and the waste (solid, liquid, CO2, heat) you excrete. A sophomore chemistry major should be able to do it. It's very easy to show that YOU are an engine for creating vast amounts of entropy.
There is no process involved in life or evolution at any scale that results in a decrease in entropy. "The entropy argument" is total bullshit and any half-educated person should be able to see right through it. The second law of thermodynamics doesn't state that order is impossible, it just states that in order to create "order" greater amounts of "disorder" must be created. (I put those quotes because entropy is not really equivalent general definitions of order and disorder.)
Look up the work done in Space Vacuum Epitaxy Center, Houston. There is a design for buggy/rover that crawls over lunar regolith and builds a mat of solar cells on the surface. ( Google on Ignatiev, Freundlich, Lunar.. ) I'll look when they build a working model.
A small solar "digging" rover. It doesn't need to be fast, just reliable. It diggs regolith, and puts it in a bin.
The bin, once sufficiently full, will close up and heat up. The aluminium and oxygen can be separated. The aluminum, melted, could then be released (possibly through a mechanism designed to pump out plates.
The oxygen? Bring up some high tolerance balloons to store it. If it's so easy, let's see you do the same thing on earth.
You do realize you're talking about dissociating alumina and storing the molten aluminum, right? Inside a lightweight vehicle? 1.7 MJ/mol binding energy? Melting point of 2054C? (There is a reason that Aluminum used to be more expensive than gold.) Even the commercial aluminum extraction process requires dissolving the alumina in molten cryolite (sodium hexafluoroaluminate) at 980C and requires pre-extraction of the aluminum oxide from the other minerals present (which usually involves a multistep process using a sodium hydroxide solution) How much cryolite, sodium hydroxide, and water are you transporting to the moon?
At best you are talking 50 MJ/kg (14 kW hours/kg) for an industrial scale plant. I doubt you could achieve anywhere close to that in small scale. So if you were willing to pay the cost to get the international space station's solar arrays to the moon, you could extract a block of aluminum a foot on a side each day. Assuming you didn't want to do anything else with that power, of course. Like extract the oxygen (which formed an oxide with elements in the cryolite during the aluminum extraction process). Or the silica (which is disolved in the sodium hydroxide solution).
But as I suggest, do try this at home so you can show us how easy it is.
BOINC has progressed quite a bit since then. It now does provide a list of projects you can sign up for. The old "48 digit authenticator" nonsense is gone, and, in addition, there are account managers that enable you to manage multiple computers and which projects they run from a central location.
Informative? BOINC has always run applications at nice 19 on unix and at low priority on windows. It also has the option of watching every tty and the mouse for input in order to stop processing if anyone is in an interactive session. The parent poster has no idea what they are talking about.
I would happily split my PS3 processing power between SETI and Folding - but the only client offered (that I can find) is Folding. I've always wondered why there is no SETI client as well, does anyone know the story there?
I'm familiar with the story. It's a combination of SETI@home's lack of funding and Sony's fear of the GPL. Basically SETI@home is operating on less than a shoestring budget and can't afford to hire a developer to do a PS3 port. Despite the fact that SETI@home is open source, no volunteer porter has appeared, probably because a port to the Cell processor is nontrivial to say the least.
People from SETI@home and BOINC did meet with Sony's PS3 division to discuss a PS3 port of BOINC and SETI@home and tentative agreement that Sony would do the port was reached. That is, until the lawyers got involved. Apparently Sony's lawyers had heard some FUD about the "viral" nature of the GPL and decided that if they did the port Sony would need to release the PS3 operating system and Cell scheduling libraries under the GPL. Berkeley offered a non-GPL license (with FFTW and other GPL components stripped) but by the time the lawyers agreed to that, the PS3 division had moved on to other tasks and the porting project died.
If you know someone willing to take on a PS3 port, I'm sure that the folks at SETI@home would love to have one.
1,000,000pcs each consuming 400W running 24/7 for a year would use:
The conversion factor from kWh of mains electricity to kgCO2 is 0.43.
That gives you : 1,507,752,000 kgCO2.
My calculations may be wrong, but its a big number:)
But remember that that those million PCs are probably going to be on anyway, and the difference between idle and full power (but screen off) consumption is more like 40W, not 400W. So you've overestimated by at least a factor of 10, so it 150,000 metric tons of CO2 per year, or the amount emitted by 28,000 cars used in an average manner. It still sounds like a lot, but....
If every one of the 120 million households in the US replaced a single 60W incandescent bulb with a 15W compact fluorescent, it would save about 8 million metric tons of CO2 emission per year.
In other words, if you want to run SETI@home (or any other distributed computing project), but feel guilty about using the energy, you can recoup that energy and more by replacing a couple incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. Actually, you should do that anyway.
Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.
Distributed computing isn't an either/or proposition. Right now the BOINC infrastructure hosts at least 42 projects, and at least three of those are health related (malariacontrol.net, rosetta@home, predictor@home). When a volunteer starts BOINC and joins a project, they are presented with a list of many projects.
If SETI@home gets the 3 to 5 fold increase in volunteers that they hope for, it's a very good bet that every other BOINC based project will see significant increases in their volunteer base.
There are certainly far more than a million internet connected CPUs that are on and idle tonight. Anyone want to guess at the actual number? 10 million? 50 million? 100 million? A few percent of those would more than do all of the jobs that are available on all of the distributed computing projects that are out there.
It's not entirely surprising that you weren't able to get through, since SETI@home is essentially three guys who get a lot of email...
Suggestion: Try out the SETI@home help forum. If that doesn't work, email Eric Korpela, the SETI@home Project Scientist. I won't put his email address here, but a google search will reveal it. He's had the same email address for a very long time. He'll probably be able to give you a hand once you get past his challenge/response spam filter.
Oh please. I laugh out loud whenever I hear this assertion. Please list all of the musicians and bands who've made it big without the assistance of one the studios at some point in their career. Compare that to the ones who did. That's what I thought.
You are assuming that it's important for musicians and bands to "make it big" which further leads to the assumption that there is something rare or unusual in the amount of talent that most "big" artists have.
The counter argument would be that musical talent is far more common than you think and that people's entertainment needs could easily be served by artists that haven't "made it big."
Somehow humanity survived for thousands of years without a steady stream of music superstars whose products were accessible to the general public.
Slashdot Mirror
But, that aside, if I were to claim I needed one for my home office, I would be expected to log business and non-business use of it and reduce my deduction accordingly. Yet a church gets it entirely tax free regardless of how it is used.
It's time for churches to start paying taxes on income they don't use for real charitable or educational purposes.
If you bring it to a park and let everyone watch, that is a public display and is probably a violation.
If you bring it to your place of business and use a "Super Bowl party" as a means to attract new customers, that is a violation unless your type of business has an exemption written into the law (which essentially means bars and restaurants). That applies even if your business is a non-profit.
I can't show movies to raise money for my non-profit (even if a donation is not required for viewing) unless I pay the copyright holders a fee. I don't see why a church should have a different set of rules.
Because we're too busy printing $200 billion we don't have as an "economic stimulus package."
In 83% of auto accidents where a pedestrian was killed or injured, the pedestrian was in a crosswalk.
Avoid milk, crosswalks and pot and you'll live forever.
Agnosticism is the belief that the existence/non-existence of god(s) is unknowable. Well, there are the correct definitions, and the ones people use when describing themselves. The vast majority of self described agnostics I know are theists. In their view the existence of one or more gods is a given, but the nature of these gods is unknown (i.e. no specific religion contains a true description of the nature of god(s)).
Most of the remainder are atheists who are unwilling to use the term "atheist" for fear of being branded as evil by the theistic majority. They believe that it is very unlikely that gods exists and therefore do not believe in them. But by calling themselves agnostic, theists can comfortably believe that the "agnostic" hasn't yet decided to believe in God, and is therefore a candidate for conversion rather than extermination.
From my experience, true agnostics (based upon the definition above) are a small fraction (<10%) of people who call themselves agnostic.
The problem with your example is that you seem to think that you know what time it is somewhere else. In actuality, observers moving at different velocities disagree about what time it is somewhere else. In your example, some observers will see* that the receiver detected the increased gravity before the generator was turned on and others will see that it detected the increased gravity after the generator was turned on.
If that were the case, observers that see the gravity receiver detect the increased gravity before the generator was turned on could use their gravitational wave transmitter to tell the sender not to turn on the gravity generator. That would be a violation of causality.
* "see" is a really bad word to use here because it implies light travel time is involved. By "see," I actually mean calculate, after taking into account any time delays caused by information propogation.
Nothing quite encourages a school to fail like limiting their funding (i.e. decreasing property taxes which used to be how public schools were funded in the U.S.). Now local schools have to rely on the state and federal government for funding. Praying would be a better bet. At least imaginary sky fairies can't reduce your budget.
Young earth creationism infects 50% of the population in the US. It currently infects 35% to 40% in Europe. The difference is only a decade at best. Fight it now while you still have a chance.
I almost hate to tell you this, but whoever wrote that knows very little about science and absolutely nothing about thermodynamics. It is quite easy to calculate the change in entropy between the sunlight the earth receives and the entropy of the infrared radiation it emits. A sophomore physics major should be able to do it.
Without boring you with the math, the earth is one enormous engine for creating entropy. Nothing going on here, and nothing related to evolution, is, by any measure, a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
In fact, it's very easy to calculate the change in entropy between the food you eat and oxygen you inhale and the waste (solid, liquid, CO2, heat) you excrete. A sophomore chemistry major should be able to do it. It's very easy to show that YOU are an engine for creating vast amounts of entropy.
There is no process involved in life or evolution at any scale that results in a decrease in entropy. "The entropy argument" is total bullshit and any half-educated person should be able to see right through it. The second law of thermodynamics doesn't state that order is impossible, it just states that in order to create "order" greater amounts of "disorder" must be created. (I put those quotes because entropy is not really equivalent general definitions of order and disorder.)
A small solar "digging" rover. It doesn't need to be fast, just reliable. It diggs regolith, and puts it in a bin.
The bin, once sufficiently full, will close up and heat up. The aluminium and oxygen can be separated. The aluminum, melted, could then be released (possibly through a mechanism designed to pump out plates.
The oxygen? Bring up some high tolerance balloons to store it.
If it's so easy, let's see you do the same thing on earth.
You do realize you're talking about dissociating alumina and storing the molten aluminum, right? Inside a lightweight vehicle? 1.7 MJ/mol binding energy? Melting point of 2054C? (There is a reason that Aluminum used to be more expensive than gold.) Even the commercial aluminum extraction process requires dissolving the alumina in molten cryolite (sodium hexafluoroaluminate) at 980C and requires pre-extraction of the aluminum oxide from the other minerals present (which usually involves a multistep process using a sodium hydroxide solution) How much cryolite, sodium hydroxide, and water are you transporting to the moon?
At best you are talking 50 MJ/kg (14 kW hours/kg) for an industrial scale plant. I doubt you could achieve anywhere close to that in small scale. So if you were willing to pay the cost to get the international space station's solar arrays to the moon, you could extract a block of aluminum a foot on a side each day. Assuming you didn't want to do anything else with that power, of course. Like extract the oxygen (which formed an oxide with elements in the cryolite during the aluminum extraction process). Or the silica (which is disolved in the sodium hydroxide solution).
But as I suggest, do try this at home so you can show us how easy it is.
The new discussion code screwed me, so I'm undoing my mods...
BOINC has progressed quite a bit since then. It now does provide a list of projects you can sign up for. The old "48 digit authenticator" nonsense is gone, and, in addition, there are account managers that enable you to manage multiple computers and which projects they run from a central location.
Informative? BOINC has always run applications at nice 19 on unix and at low priority on windows. It also has the option of watching every tty and the mouse for input in order to stop processing if anyone is in an interactive session. The parent poster has no idea what they are talking about.
I'm familiar with the story. It's a combination of SETI@home's lack of funding and Sony's fear of the GPL. Basically SETI@home is operating on less than a shoestring budget and can't afford to hire a developer to do a PS3 port. Despite the fact that SETI@home is open source, no volunteer porter has appeared, probably because a port to the Cell processor is nontrivial to say the least.
People from SETI@home and BOINC did meet with Sony's PS3 division to discuss a PS3 port of BOINC and SETI@home and tentative agreement that Sony would do the port was reached. That is, until the lawyers got involved. Apparently Sony's lawyers had heard some FUD about the "viral" nature of the GPL and decided that if they did the port Sony would need to release the PS3 operating system and Cell scheduling libraries under the GPL. Berkeley offered a non-GPL license (with FFTW and other GPL components stripped) but by the time the lawyers agreed to that, the PS3 division had moved on to other tasks and the porting project died.
If you know someone willing to take on a PS3 port, I'm sure that the folks at SETI@home would love to have one.
The conversion factor from kWh of mains electricity to kgCO2 is 0.43.
That gives you : 1,507,752,000 kgCO2.
My calculations may be wrong, but its a big number
But remember that that those million PCs are probably going to be on anyway, and the difference between idle and full power (but screen off) consumption is more like 40W, not 400W. So you've overestimated by at least a factor of 10, so it 150,000 metric tons of CO2 per year, or the amount emitted by 28,000 cars used in an average manner. It still sounds like a lot, but....
If every one of the 120 million households in the US replaced a single 60W incandescent bulb with a 15W compact fluorescent, it would save about 8 million metric tons of CO2 emission per year.
In other words, if you want to run SETI@home (or any other distributed computing project), but feel guilty about using the energy, you can recoup that energy and more by replacing a couple incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. Actually, you should do that anyway.
Distributed computing isn't an either/or proposition. Right now the BOINC infrastructure hosts at least 42 projects, and at least three of those are health related (malariacontrol.net, rosetta@home, predictor@home). When a volunteer starts BOINC and joins a project, they are presented with a list of many projects.
If SETI@home gets the 3 to 5 fold increase in volunteers that they hope for, it's a very good bet that every other BOINC based project will see significant increases in their volunteer base.
There are certainly far more than a million internet connected CPUs that are on and idle tonight. Anyone want to guess at the actual number? 10 million? 50 million? 100 million? A few percent of those would more than do all of the jobs that are available on all of the distributed computing projects that are out there.
Suggestion: Try out the SETI@home help forum. If that doesn't work, email Eric Korpela, the SETI@home Project Scientist. I won't put his email address here, but a google search will reveal it. He's had the same email address for a very long time. He'll probably be able to give you a hand once you get past his challenge/response spam filter.
Oh please. I laugh out loud whenever I hear this assertion. Please list all of the musicians and bands who've made it big without the assistance of one the studios at some point in their career. Compare that to the ones who did. That's what I thought.
You are assuming that it's important for musicians and bands to "make it big" which further leads to the assumption that there is something rare or unusual in the amount of talent that most "big" artists have.
The counter argument would be that musical talent is far more common than you think and that people's entertainment needs could easily be served by artists that haven't "made it big."
Somehow humanity survived for thousands of years without a steady stream of music superstars whose products were accessible to the general public.