From a distance you would not know that world was made of antimatter, since properties would be the same. Electromagnetic wavelengths absorbed / emitted would be the same. Anti-Sodium would have the same yellow emission line as Sodium.
Although I believe this is true, we are pretty sure that the observable universe contains a lot of matter and almost no anti-matter. Unfortunately I can't seem to find anything on how we tell them apart at the moment; it's probably something more exotic than emissions spectra - I would assume that anti-matter generates different EM radiation or something due to its different charge characteristics, but I don't know.
If I was in charge of these things, I would go back to the feelies of old - every version of the game, not just the super expensive ultra-collector's edition comes with some physical object(s) related to the game's backstory. It could be something as simple and cheap as a couple of bottle caps from Fallout, or a paper map, or a mini-sword keychain fob. In the game itself, there's an optional but really neat side-thing that depends on the feelies; for instance, Morrowind's paper map had little Xs that marked various non-obvious points of interest. With the bottle caps, you could have a serial number that results in winning an in-game pre-war lottery, or maybe have some special runes on the sword.
Hell, you could even do something awesome and elaborate - once the player beats the game using the special runes on their sword keychain fob, they get a special code and can mail in the sword to receive an upgraded version from ingame, depending on which ending they got. There's no way the pirates can crack that, and it'll give the people who enjoy playing your game a reward for actually buying it - and a way of showing off to all their friends that they beat your game.
That's really the basic problem with DRM: it's all stick, and no carrot. In a large market, the people who hit their customers with sticks will inevitably lose out to people who entice their customers with carrots.
I worked at a company for 8 years. I had set a policy that passwords were given to management in case something happened to me and my IT group. When they laid me off, I was locked out of everything, according to my own plan. The plan stated that if any admin with substantial rights were to leave the company, all keys and passwords must be changed immediately, preferably between the time they were brought into the office to told they were gone, and the time they walked out.
So you mean that someone who wasn't authorized to have the passwords didn't ask you to hand them over while on a speakerphone conversation with an unknown number of potentially unauthorized people on the other end? All totally in contravention of your password policy? Because that's what happened to Terry Childs.
Shit, man, I would pay ~$200 a year to guarantee that they'll keep on making Dr. Who and shows like Life on Mars. I don't think you realize how horrible television is in the States; I pay $60 a month for absolute shit with a couple of good shows mixed in. $200 a year is peanuts.
Mr Murdoch slammed Radio 2's effort to woo younger listeners by hiring presenters on "salaries no commercial competitor could afford".
Bollocks. If a private company had half the country listening, it's advertising revenue would MORE THAN cover the salaries of a bunch of presenters.
By "salaries no commercial competitor could afford", he means "salaries no commercial competitor is willing to pay". After all, no commercial company wants to pay its subjects an actual living wage - that's communism.
<glyph> For example - if you came in here asking "how do I use a jackhammer" we might ask "why do you need to use a jackhammer" <glyph> If the answer to the latter question is "to knock my grandmother's head off to let out the evil spirits that gave her cancer", then maybe the problem is actually unrelated to jackhammers
When someone comes in with a question like this, it is entirely worth asking what he's actually trying to accomplish - because writing ones and zeros directly to a hard disk platter is the deepest sort of black magic, and there's absolutely no reason why this is the only way to accomplish what he wants to do.
How did you even get that out of my post? C#-with-Linq has kinda first class functions (you have to wrap them in a properly typed Action or Func object, but the type inference usually manages that for you automatically), Java has some bullshit with reflection or whatever that basically amounts to deep voodoo. Ruby is just too magical and poorly documented for my taste, but I'm not claiming that it doesn't first-class functions.
It's not about which language is actually easier, it's about which language is currently in the limelight. Presumably this guy started using C when FORTRAN was too hard, FORTRAN when raw assembly was too hard, assembly when punched cards were too hard, and punched cards when talking to a group of forty computers was too hard.
Personally, I find Ruby to be by far the most confusing of all these languages, and C# with Linq to be more sensible than Java. Mmm, sweet delicious nearly first-class functions.
His story doesn't make much sense, it's true - there's it doesn't make much sense for the cell phone company to point sector antennas directly at his apartment, unless they really wanted him to have good signal. What would be more sensible is if they are pointed directly at his apartment, but tilted down (which can be hard to see if they're really pointed directly at you). This would beam signal down onto the streets beneath where they are mounted, and not at his apartment.
It's interesting why that happens actually - if you run a small study on, say, acupuncture or homeopathy or intercessory prayer or wireless allergies or something else that will have a marginal effect and get a null result, you're not going to waste time publishing that; nobody will care, you won't be cited, and you'll have wasted all that time and effort. So you don't tell anyone about your null result.
If by a statistical fluke you get a controversial result, however, you're going to publish that shit so hard. Yes, your small sample size doesn't rule out a fluke, but that's okay - those results might be the basis for a larger study, which will cite you, and maybe some other people might read the paper too.
Note that this is not one scientist running small studies until he gets the result he wants; rather, what ends up happening is that one area becomes controversial, so maybe ten scientists get funding to run a small study on it. Eight of them find no result and shelve the data, but the other two get controversial results and publish. You never hear about negative results unless they're found in a large study, which will be published regardless.
You know what else would cost the government $0? Passing a law that says that your workplace has to pay to pave the roads and build bridges from your house to your office.
And yet for some reason they don't do that. Weird, isn't it? Maybe it's because with a system like that, small businesses would have a much harder time bootstrapping themselves due to the crippling cost of implementing their own road infrastructure, and entrepreneurs would have to use some pretty shitty roads because they left their last job.
It's almost like roads are something that is considered part of the infrastructure of a modern society, and thus something the government should be in charge of maintaining for the general good. Weird huh?
Actually, that gave me an idea - if you could create a sufficiently broad-spectrum laser, you could jam a drone's communications without turning yourself into a huge target. All you'd need to do is pump enough energy at the thing, and it wouldn't be able to talk to the base station any more; in fact, since the drone is specifically designed to pick up energy in some frequencies, you could potentially disable it by pushing so much juice into the antenna that the overload fries internal components. It would be kind of an EMP laser.
You could potentially use the same aural targetting scheme, too - every drone is going to use small, fast propellers to fly, and those suckers are really noisy, especially if you're swatting down home-made drones.
That said, "complicated" has nothing to do with "cpu cycles". It may do something very complicated and very computationally inexpensive.
Like what? Keep in mind that the crackers will, by definition, have access to both the plaintext (what their game sends to the server) and the ciphertext (what the server sends back to the game). They also know that the gamestate represented by the plaintext must be relatively close to the gamestate represented by the ciphertext. Further, in order to keep costs down, Ubisoft is going to want to compress both plain and ciphertexts as much as possible - which means that each one can represent even fewer states. I'm not sure it's possible to define a computationally inexpensive transformation that's also hard to reverse engineer in this situation.
Further, if they want to actually run a disassembler, they can find out exactly how the game prepares the plaintext and interprets the ciphertext (though it'll be in assembly, which makes things a bit harder).
We've just seen some of the leading proponents of AGW fudging data, destroying data, using personal influence in attempting to keep critical papers from being included in reports.
Please, oh please, source those statements. I would love to see them supported somewhere. Keep in mind that the CRU emails have been put into context on any number of occasions, and that context doesn't actually involve fudging data, destroying data, or using personal influence to accomplish or try to accomplish anything untoward.
... so I'm even more skeptical of the claims of "global warming is causing this bad snow", though it *could* hold some truth..I just think they're declaring a winner before the race has even begun
I see you are not a climatologist. I'm not either, but here's how it works from my understanding:
The amount of water the air can hold depends on how warm the air is.
The rate of absorption of water into the air over a body of water depends on how warm the air is.
The amount snowfall depends on how much water there is in the air.
So: warm air over bodies of water absorbs more water, faster. Once winter comes around and the temperature drops, all that extra water gets squeezed out of the air as snow (or rain, if it's not cold enough). Tadaa, an increase in the mean global temperature means more rain and snow in some areas.
If you actually look at the climate change graphs, you'll see that the mean temperature anomaly (the global warming everyone's talking about) is on the order of half a degree centigrade. Half a degree! Seasonal temperature variations are orders of magnitude greater than that. It certainly won't keep the snow from falling unless you've got very warm winters already, but it'll definitely affect the rate of water absorption into the atmosphere and the water carrying capacity of air.
Hey, how about you quote what Phil Jones actually said? It's not hard, and yet somehow the words that came out of his mouth directly contradict what you claim he said.
B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
The trend is positive (i.e, there is generally warming), but it is not significant at the 95% level. Also, although Jones doesn't say this in his answer, if you run the same calculation from 1994 to the present, the trend is significant to the 95% level. And if you run the calculation from 1995 to 2010, when we have that data, I bet you it'll be statistically significant.
Basically, this is a case of the reporter doing his homework and asking a question that would get the response he wanted. After all, 1995 is kind of weirdly specific, isn't it? Why not, you know, "in the last fifteen years" or "last couple of decades"?
Yeah you know why they were disparaged? Because their paper was crap. The journal only published the paper because it was controversial; the actual science contained therein was useless.
Yes, the guys at the CRU were trying to keep that paper from being published because it went against the current scientific consensus - but the reason why it went against the current consensus is because the authors were wrong in the first place. The journal chose to publish a controversial and scientifically flawed paper, just because it was controversial.
If the server is doing any processing more complicated than accepting data from the client and sending it back on command, it will be brought to its knees on release day. The more complicated the operation it performs on the saved game, the more hardware Ubi has to pay for - and unless they want to have a lot of very pissed off legitimate purchasers on release day, they need to budget for peak load, not average load.
Just do one thing: whenever you get any sort of input that the user might have ever possibly touched, name it something like _untrusted. Once you've sanitized the contents of the variable (using whatever method's appropriate for what you're doing) only then put it into .
That assumes two things: that we are inherently sinless, and that sin is justified if it increases God's grace. I present Psalm 51:5 and Romans 6:1-2 to show that this is not the Christian teaching:
I did not in fact assume either of those things. When I said "innocents", I was using that as shorthand for "those who currently have a good chance of going to heaven". That does not necessarily mean children (though as I said, if you believe that baptism washes away inherent sins, it might). You could just as easily be going around killing saintly old priests as newborn infants; I just decided to use newborns as an example, since they are generally believed to be guaranteed a place in heaven if they die before they can do anything sinful (as you admitted).
Further, I did not say that killing them would increase God's grace; I was merely pointing out that if you believe Heaven is a better place than Earth, you should kill anyone who will most likely get into Heaven for their own benefit. After all, like I said, they may sin in the future and thus deny themselves entry into Heaven; however, if you kill them now, they will be guaranteed entry to Heaven. Isn't it worthwhile to force someone to go slightly more quickly to their eternal reward, than to stay here on Earth and still have a chance of messing things up?
I would argue that free will in a world where sin is not possible is not free will at all. A world where humans can not choose to ignore God is no different from a world where all are forced to worship Him. As I said before, it is more rewarding for parents when children do good of their own volition, rather than be required to do so, and it is the same with God. Again, God could create a world such as this (and did, if you consider the angels), but it would be shallow and not worth creating.
I think you do not understand the full extent of what "omnipotent" means. If you say "God cannot create a world in which sinning is impossible, but where free will exists and is deep and worth creating", you have just posited something that God cannot do. If there exists a thing that God cannot do, then God is not omnipotent. That is the point of my puppy-kicking example. God can create a world in which I can't kick puppies but still have free will, because that is the definition of omnipotence. The answer for all questions of the form "can God..." is yes for an omnipotent God.
Which means that despite being capable of creating a world without sin and horror and death and with free will, God for some reason chose to create this world. Which sort of brings His judgment into question.
Do you have an alternate scheme to allow free-will and prevent sin simultaneously?
No, but then I'm not omnipotent. However, because I can ask the question "can God create a world in which there is simultaneously free will and no sin", the answer is "yes" as long as God is omnipotent.
Well, here's as rigorous an explanation as I can give without your definitions:
1. Life only has the purpose you make of it because, fundamentally, you are the only person responsible for how you live your life. External factors influence you, but at the very base of things you and you alone are the only person responsible for your actions - and thus, you are the only person responsible for what your actions achieve.
2. You can only prove things to be true in mathematics, because your axioms are well-defined; by operating on them, you can reach conclusions that are absolutely true within the universe of your mathematics. We unfortunately do not have anything of the sort for reality, so you can't prove anything to be absolutely true. All you can do is gather evidence and form a statistical case one way or the other.
3. No, there's no life after death - besides wishful thinking, there's no reason to believe that your "you"-ness carries on in any way after your brain ceases to function.
4. Your lost loved ones are gone. They will not be back. Once you die, you will also be gone (see above). Fortunately, at that point you won't worry about seeing them any more.
5. Clearly there is the concept of justice in this world, because you use that word and know that it means something. However, justice is a thing humans do (and apparently some monkeys), so the only justice that exists is that which we make for ourselves as a society. It's not like justice is some actual tangible thing you can mine from a rock or distill from aether; if there is to be justice, it must come from us.
6. Good and evil are incredibly nebulous terms, especially since you're talking about "ultimately". Ultimately, the energy density everywhere in the universe will end up at a uniform random state; whether that's good or bad depends on your definition.
7. Human suffering is caused either by humans being bastards to each other, or nature being a bastard to humans. I'm not sure what other answer you would like for this.
From a secular and wordly viewpoint only. From the Christian viewpoint, eternal life is a reward, so why send them away from God's presence to return them to a mortal body? The death is only saddening for those who are still on this earth.
If you truly believe that, then the logical next step would be to go forth and kill innocents who are currently guaranteed God's presence. After all, if you kill them now, they are guaranteed to be brought into God's presence - but if you let them live, they may sin and be denied that glory. Of course, killing newly baptized infants (depending on your personal beliefs, of course) will guarantee you a place in Hell; just console yourself with the thought of all those souls for whom you have guaranteed heaven. Surely you don't value your soul over the souls of all those babes you could save from a lifetime of sin, do you?
You'll be like Jesus, except with more baby killing.
Again, I would say that an omnipotent being can allow a different outcome than he would desire. The cost, in this case, would be that of free will. One of the most common interpretations among Christian theologians is that children who love Him freely is more pleasing to God than those who are forced to worship him.
I never said anything about desire; I said that because God is omnipotent, He has the capacity to stop people from kicking puppies. If he does not stop the puppy kicking, then on the balance he approves of puppy kicking. You are saying that the benefit afforded to puppy kickers by allowing them to believe that they have free will is greater than the cost incurred by puppy kicking, which is why God desires that puppy kicking happen - the alternative is to remove the free will of puppy kickers. So God, in your opinion, says "allright guys, go ahead and kick all the puppies you want. It's bad, but it's more important that you think you have free will".
However, that is not the case. God, being omnipotent, can easily create a universe in which people both have free will and cannot kick puppies. (and if He can't do that, then He is not omnipotent.)
As a somewhat more concrete example: you would presumably argue that I have free will. If I have free will, then why can't I take off and fly right now? Why can't I turn purple? Why can't I flargle?
I have free will, but my free will is necessarily constrained by the reality in which I am embedded. Why, then, am I embedded in a reality in which I can't fly, but can kick puppies? Why is one of those things an infringement of my free will, and the other not?
So yes, God chooses to let people act in wicked ways, but He does so because the alternative would be worse, reducing us to mere puppets on strings.
I find this kind of hilarious, because you're about the tenth person to use this argument with me, and the thousandth I've seen use this same argument. It's a pretty common string of Catholic thought, apparently.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I believe this is true, we are pretty sure that the observable universe contains a lot of matter and almost no anti-matter. Unfortunately I can't seem to find anything on how we tell them apart at the moment; it's probably something more exotic than emissions spectra - I would assume that anti-matter generates different EM radiation or something due to its different charge characteristics, but I don't know.
Yes, but the childish dicks usually aren't the guys who are actually capable of cracking a game.
If I was in charge of these things, I would go back to the feelies of old - every version of the game, not just the super expensive ultra-collector's edition comes with some physical object(s) related to the game's backstory. It could be something as simple and cheap as a couple of bottle caps from Fallout, or a paper map, or a mini-sword keychain fob. In the game itself, there's an optional but really neat side-thing that depends on the feelies; for instance, Morrowind's paper map had little Xs that marked various non-obvious points of interest. With the bottle caps, you could have a serial number that results in winning an in-game pre-war lottery, or maybe have some special runes on the sword.
Hell, you could even do something awesome and elaborate - once the player beats the game using the special runes on their sword keychain fob, they get a special code and can mail in the sword to receive an upgraded version from ingame, depending on which ending they got. There's no way the pirates can crack that, and it'll give the people who enjoy playing your game a reward for actually buying it - and a way of showing off to all their friends that they beat your game.
That's really the basic problem with DRM: it's all stick, and no carrot. In a large market, the people who hit their customers with sticks will inevitably lose out to people who entice their customers with carrots.
So you mean that someone who wasn't authorized to have the passwords didn't ask you to hand them over while on a speakerphone conversation with an unknown number of potentially unauthorized people on the other end? All totally in contravention of your password policy? Because that's what happened to Terry Childs.
Shit, man, I would pay ~$200 a year to guarantee that they'll keep on making Dr. Who and shows like Life on Mars. I don't think you realize how horrible television is in the States; I pay $60 a month for absolute shit with a couple of good shows mixed in. $200 a year is peanuts.
By "salaries no commercial competitor could afford", he means "salaries no commercial competitor is willing to pay". After all, no commercial company wants to pay its subjects an actual living wage - that's communism.
This bash quote is, I think, appropriate:
When someone comes in with a question like this, it is entirely worth asking what he's actually trying to accomplish - because writing ones and zeros directly to a hard disk platter is the deepest sort of black magic, and there's absolutely no reason why this is the only way to accomplish what he wants to do.
How did you even get that out of my post? C#-with-Linq has kinda first class functions (you have to wrap them in a properly typed Action or Func object, but the type inference usually manages that for you automatically), Java has some bullshit with reflection or whatever that basically amounts to deep voodoo. Ruby is just too magical and poorly documented for my taste, but I'm not claiming that it doesn't first-class functions.
No no no, you've got it all wrong. If we agree with them, they're not terrorists - they're freedom fighters. Duh.
Wooosh.
It's not about which language is actually easier, it's about which language is currently in the limelight. Presumably this guy started using C when FORTRAN was too hard, FORTRAN when raw assembly was too hard, assembly when punched cards were too hard, and punched cards when talking to a group of forty computers was too hard.
Personally, I find Ruby to be by far the most confusing of all these languages, and C# with Linq to be more sensible than Java. Mmm, sweet delicious nearly first-class functions.
His story doesn't make much sense, it's true - there's it doesn't make much sense for the cell phone company to point sector antennas directly at his apartment, unless they really wanted him to have good signal. What would be more sensible is if they are pointed directly at his apartment, but tilted down (which can be hard to see if they're really pointed directly at you). This would beam signal down onto the streets beneath where they are mounted, and not at his apartment.
It's interesting why that happens actually - if you run a small study on, say, acupuncture or homeopathy or intercessory prayer or wireless allergies or something else that will have a marginal effect and get a null result, you're not going to waste time publishing that; nobody will care, you won't be cited, and you'll have wasted all that time and effort. So you don't tell anyone about your null result.
If by a statistical fluke you get a controversial result, however, you're going to publish that shit so hard. Yes, your small sample size doesn't rule out a fluke, but that's okay - those results might be the basis for a larger study, which will cite you, and maybe some other people might read the paper too.
Note that this is not one scientist running small studies until he gets the result he wants; rather, what ends up happening is that one area becomes controversial, so maybe ten scientists get funding to run a small study on it. Eight of them find no result and shelve the data, but the other two get controversial results and publish. You never hear about negative results unless they're found in a large study, which will be published regardless.
You know what else would cost the government $0? Passing a law that says that your workplace has to pay to pave the roads and build bridges from your house to your office.
And yet for some reason they don't do that. Weird, isn't it? Maybe it's because with a system like that, small businesses would have a much harder time bootstrapping themselves due to the crippling cost of implementing their own road infrastructure, and entrepreneurs would have to use some pretty shitty roads because they left their last job.
It's almost like roads are something that is considered part of the infrastructure of a modern society, and thus something the government should be in charge of maintaining for the general good. Weird huh?
Weird isn't it? It sounds almost like democracy.
Actually, that gave me an idea - if you could create a sufficiently broad-spectrum laser, you could jam a drone's communications without turning yourself into a huge target. All you'd need to do is pump enough energy at the thing, and it wouldn't be able to talk to the base station any more; in fact, since the drone is specifically designed to pick up energy in some frequencies, you could potentially disable it by pushing so much juice into the antenna that the overload fries internal components. It would be kind of an EMP laser.
You could potentially use the same aural targetting scheme, too - every drone is going to use small, fast propellers to fly, and those suckers are really noisy, especially if you're swatting down home-made drones.
Like what? Keep in mind that the crackers will, by definition, have access to both the plaintext (what their game sends to the server) and the ciphertext (what the server sends back to the game). They also know that the gamestate represented by the plaintext must be relatively close to the gamestate represented by the ciphertext. Further, in order to keep costs down, Ubisoft is going to want to compress both plain and ciphertexts as much as possible - which means that each one can represent even fewer states. I'm not sure it's possible to define a computationally inexpensive transformation that's also hard to reverse engineer in this situation.
Further, if they want to actually run a disassembler, they can find out exactly how the game prepares the plaintext and interprets the ciphertext (though it'll be in assembly, which makes things a bit harder).
Please, oh please, source those statements. I would love to see them supported somewhere. Keep in mind that the CRU emails have been put into context on any number of occasions, and that context doesn't actually involve fudging data, destroying data, or using personal influence to accomplish or try to accomplish anything untoward.
I see you are not a climatologist. I'm not either, but here's how it works from my understanding:
So: warm air over bodies of water absorbs more water, faster. Once winter comes around and the temperature drops, all that extra water gets squeezed out of the air as snow (or rain, if it's not cold enough). Tadaa, an increase in the mean global temperature means more rain and snow in some areas.
If you actually look at the climate change graphs, you'll see that the mean temperature anomaly (the global warming everyone's talking about) is on the order of half a degree centigrade. Half a degree! Seasonal temperature variations are orders of magnitude greater than that. It certainly won't keep the snow from falling unless you've got very warm winters already, but it'll definitely affect the rate of water absorption into the atmosphere and the water carrying capacity of air.
Hey, how about you quote what Phil Jones actually said? It's not hard, and yet somehow the words that came out of his mouth directly contradict what you claim he said.
The trend is positive (i.e, there is generally warming), but it is not significant at the 95% level. Also, although Jones doesn't say this in his answer, if you run the same calculation from 1994 to the present, the trend is significant to the 95% level. And if you run the calculation from 1995 to 2010, when we have that data, I bet you it'll be statistically significant.
Basically, this is a case of the reporter doing his homework and asking a question that would get the response he wanted. After all, 1995 is kind of weirdly specific, isn't it? Why not, you know, "in the last fifteen years" or "last couple of decades"?
Yeah you know why they were disparaged? Because their paper was crap. The journal only published the paper because it was controversial; the actual science contained therein was useless.
Yes, the guys at the CRU were trying to keep that paper from being published because it went against the current scientific consensus - but the reason why it went against the current consensus is because the authors were wrong in the first place. The journal chose to publish a controversial and scientifically flawed paper, just because it was controversial.
If the server is doing any processing more complicated than accepting data from the client and sending it back on command, it will be brought to its knees on release day. The more complicated the operation it performs on the saved game, the more hardware Ubi has to pay for - and unless they want to have a lot of very pissed off legitimate purchasers on release day, they need to budget for peak load, not average load.
Just do one thing: whenever you get any sort of input that the user might have ever possibly touched, name it something like _untrusted. Once you've sanitized the contents of the variable (using whatever method's appropriate for what you're doing) only then put it into .
I did not in fact assume either of those things. When I said "innocents", I was using that as shorthand for "those who currently have a good chance of going to heaven". That does not necessarily mean children (though as I said, if you believe that baptism washes away inherent sins, it might). You could just as easily be going around killing saintly old priests as newborn infants; I just decided to use newborns as an example, since they are generally believed to be guaranteed a place in heaven if they die before they can do anything sinful (as you admitted).
Further, I did not say that killing them would increase God's grace; I was merely pointing out that if you believe Heaven is a better place than Earth, you should kill anyone who will most likely get into Heaven for their own benefit. After all, like I said, they may sin in the future and thus deny themselves entry into Heaven; however, if you kill them now, they will be guaranteed entry to Heaven. Isn't it worthwhile to force someone to go slightly more quickly to their eternal reward, than to stay here on Earth and still have a chance of messing things up?
I think you do not understand the full extent of what "omnipotent" means. If you say "God cannot create a world in which sinning is impossible, but where free will exists and is deep and worth creating", you have just posited something that God cannot do. If there exists a thing that God cannot do, then God is not omnipotent. That is the point of my puppy-kicking example. God can create a world in which I can't kick puppies but still have free will, because that is the definition of omnipotence. The answer for all questions of the form "can God..." is yes for an omnipotent God.
Which means that despite being capable of creating a world without sin and horror and death and with free will, God for some reason chose to create this world. Which sort of brings His judgment into question.
No, but then I'm not omnipotent. However, because I can ask the question "can God create a world in which there is simultaneously free will and no sin", the answer is "yes" as long as God is omnipotent.
Well, here's as rigorous an explanation as I can give without your definitions:
1. Life only has the purpose you make of it because, fundamentally, you are the only person responsible for how you live your life. External factors influence you, but at the very base of things you and you alone are the only person responsible for your actions - and thus, you are the only person responsible for what your actions achieve.
2. You can only prove things to be true in mathematics, because your axioms are well-defined; by operating on them, you can reach conclusions that are absolutely true within the universe of your mathematics. We unfortunately do not have anything of the sort for reality, so you can't prove anything to be absolutely true. All you can do is gather evidence and form a statistical case one way or the other.
3. No, there's no life after death - besides wishful thinking, there's no reason to believe that your "you"-ness carries on in any way after your brain ceases to function.
4. Your lost loved ones are gone. They will not be back. Once you die, you will also be gone (see above). Fortunately, at that point you won't worry about seeing them any more.
5. Clearly there is the concept of justice in this world, because you use that word and know that it means something. However, justice is a thing humans do (and apparently some monkeys), so the only justice that exists is that which we make for ourselves as a society. It's not like justice is some actual tangible thing you can mine from a rock or distill from aether; if there is to be justice, it must come from us.
6. Good and evil are incredibly nebulous terms, especially since you're talking about "ultimately". Ultimately, the energy density everywhere in the universe will end up at a uniform random state; whether that's good or bad depends on your definition.
7. Human suffering is caused either by humans being bastards to each other, or nature being a bastard to humans. I'm not sure what other answer you would like for this.
If you truly believe that, then the logical next step would be to go forth and kill innocents who are currently guaranteed God's presence. After all, if you kill them now, they are guaranteed to be brought into God's presence - but if you let them live, they may sin and be denied that glory. Of course, killing newly baptized infants (depending on your personal beliefs, of course) will guarantee you a place in Hell; just console yourself with the thought of all those souls for whom you have guaranteed heaven. Surely you don't value your soul over the souls of all those babes you could save from a lifetime of sin, do you?
You'll be like Jesus, except with more baby killing.
I never said anything about desire; I said that because God is omnipotent, He has the capacity to stop people from kicking puppies. If he does not stop the puppy kicking, then on the balance he approves of puppy kicking. You are saying that the benefit afforded to puppy kickers by allowing them to believe that they have free will is greater than the cost incurred by puppy kicking, which is why God desires that puppy kicking happen - the alternative is to remove the free will of puppy kickers. So God, in your opinion, says "allright guys, go ahead and kick all the puppies you want. It's bad, but it's more important that you think you have free will".
However, that is not the case. God, being omnipotent, can easily create a universe in which people both have free will and cannot kick puppies. (and if He can't do that, then He is not omnipotent.)
As a somewhat more concrete example: you would presumably argue that I have free will. If I have free will, then why can't I take off and fly right now? Why can't I turn purple? Why can't I flargle?
I have free will, but my free will is necessarily constrained by the reality in which I am embedded. Why, then, am I embedded in a reality in which I can't fly, but can kick puppies? Why is one of those things an infringement of my free will, and the other not?
I find this kind of hilarious, because you're about the tenth person to use this argument with me, and the thousandth I've seen use this same argument. It's a pretty common string of Catholic thought, apparently.