Something naked-eye visible would have to be pretty big. I've heard of at least one lunar observatory that has an open invitation to conspiracy theorists, though. They're welcome to come up and see a full demonstration of the lasers hitting the targets, a tour of the facilities to see how they work, and a live demonstration, apparantly all for free. That's a pretty big meatball to leave out on the chopping block, too, I doubt those demonstrations are cheap for them, since they don't usually do them every day. A truely dedicated group that just wanted to be assholes could probably bankrupt them just sending people up for demonstrations.
Nobody's ever taken up the offer, but there's a pretty obvious counter to it, which I think has already been used about the laser reflectors: They could just as easily have put it up there with an unmanned mission. Many conspiracy theorists don't dispute that unmanned missions take place, only that the manned Apollo missions did.
But nevertheless, we need more intellgent responses than talking about brothers losing in Mario Kart
It may seem silly, but there's a good reason for this kind of argument. It's the same sort of thing that everybody can relate too. Kid's now hit their brothers over Mario Kart. Ten years ago, they hit each other over the remote control, before that over action figures, ball games, just about anything. Short version: Brothers hit each other. Big deal. Gamers are just like everybody else.
and the differences between guns and controllers.
This isn't really a trivial argument, though. I've hunted. I bow hunt, but I've also used a rifles and pistols, as well as tried out some heavier guns on firing ranges (mostly high powered hunting rifles, I also got to fire a 50 caliber rifle once). The experience is unlike anything I've seen in any game. Even the most realistic games give the visual and audio feel of reality, but none of the very real and quite powerful tactile feeling a gun gives, and the sense they give of a gun is very different than what you actually get using a gun. Having done both, I don't see any way either one could help you prepare for the other.
Not only that, but the game industry should be as troubled as anyone that many of the last decade's most heinous tragedies have had some kind of connection to video games, even if it is as tenuous and silly as the 9-11 to Flight Simulator connection.
They should be troubled. Troubled that somebody has such a blind vendetta that they'd make such tenuous and silly accusations. The one fact about virtually all the allegedly video-game related crimes is that they are, all in all, not particularly unusual crimes in and of themselves. Even the most extreme, like Columbine, aren't new. Something simmilar happened in my state in the early 80's - it killed and hurt even more people, but was largely the same thing. A small group of social outcasts brought sawed-off shotguns to school in their jackets and started shooting at another group that had persecuted them previously. Ten, fifteen years ago, most wouldn't have raised an eyebrow from an experienced prosecutor.
About Blizzard and LucasArts: Blizzard has a strong history of very good games. Even the games that have issues, they do everything they can to fix them, and their most broken game in recent years, WoW, was only broken because it sold far better than they ever dared dream, not because it was an overall bad game.
LucasArt's big titles are mostly Star Wars, which is among the biggest brand names around. Time has been you could slap Star Wars on just about anything and see an increase in sales.
If you're playing games to the point that you're not interacting with people, there are other reasons you'd be violent. Antisocial people don't need video games to isolate themselves, and they certainly don't need them to inspire them to mail bombs to people. Did the Unabomber even have electricity, let alone Nintendo?
Something that got me in the interview with the lawyer last week is that it said video games "build up the synaptic pathways to kill. You learn to do in real life what you do in the games..." didn't make sense. The game would build certain pathways, but I would think you'd learn to do down down back forward high punch from muscle memory, not to actually rip somebody's head off with the spine still attached.
One of my life goals is to walk up to one of these people and make the hand motions to perform some sort of Mortal Kombat move, and then say, "If you were right, you'd be dead now."
The only website I've had problems with viewing in Firefox is Slashdot, ironically. Sometimes the stories overlap with the sidebar a bit, and sometimes the comments display off the side of the page in the black margin. That seems to have been largely fixed with 1.0.1, though, I've only had some minor oddities since then.
Re:Firefox has a small footprint?
on
Peeking at Netscape 8
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· Score: 5, Informative
Just to test things out, I dug my P200 out. It has 16 megs of RAM and runs windows 95. Firefox was a bit slow to load up on it, but works fine once loaded. My laptop is a P166 with 90-some-odd megs of RAM, and it runs Firefox without a hitch.
They're not regulating what the candidate says. They're just regulating how much money he can spend. Candidates are perfectly welcome to say whatever it is they have on their minds, be it on TV, the internet, or on the steps of city hall.
This ruling also won't have any effect. Talk on the internet is cheap. Give up a 30 second commercial spot on TV and you can pay for a pretty impressive amount of words on a webpage and even more emails.
The FEC doesn't have to regulate the servers. They just have to regulate the candidate. If your Dutch server over there is being used by a campaign and violates the election laws, then the candidate over here can still be forced out of the race, even if the server can't be shut down.
On a slightly related note, based on the political climate in the US from 2000 (I'd say around the incident with our airplane being forced down inside of Chinese airspace) to present, the political climate and the rhetoric comming from both parties over here's been such that I don't believe any serious candidate would use a foriegn server anyway.
I mean, what data are they collecting to do the searches. Just name or maybe address? SSN? Driver's license numbers and looking up many accident's we've been in while they're at it?
Yes, but if they get a particulary big asshole for a victim of one of those screwups, it means a lot worse than a little lawsuit. It means publicity, loud yelling on TV, and so forth, and a host of copy-cat lawsuits (both justified and not so much). If it comes down to a case where True.com loses their customers' trust on their one unique selling point (the background checks), they've basically lost their business model.
Anyway, the law strikes me as kind of stupid. Something I found noteworthy from the article is that True.com's searches apparantly don't catch criminals who are using fake names. This makes me wonder what data they search by.
Background searches just by name are possible, but they aren't reliable. For a simmilar slashdot thread, I decided to start putting my name into various sites, and now I know there's a sex offender in my state (Disclaimer: it's not me, so stfu) who happens to have my last name, a slightly different spelling of my first name, and my middle initial. If they're just doing this by name, am I going to get labled as a rapist? There are a lot of people with the same name (There's litterally a half a page in the Saginaw County phone book just for John, Jack, and J. Smiths), so there's the possibility of very humiliating false positives.
The solution of course would be for them to ask for social security numbers, and we know where that discussion usually leads.
You are correct about Exxon. They got fined a helluva lot. reference:
$900 million over 10 years to the state of Alaska in settlement of criminal charges.
$250 million in fines, of which $125 million was waived against public opposition.
$5 billion in punitive damages, which was overturned, however, in 2001
All in all, they did end up paying just over $1 billion in various fines, but they did $2.1 billion in damages.
The system is fines in proportion to damage, not wealth. A guy I went to high school with burned down eight newly built but vacant homes in his home town, total damages topping $900,000. He was fined $750,000 and put in jail for umteen years. The guy made barely $20,000 a year and had a family. If the fines were in proportion to wealth, then he would have been fined around $0.25 by measuring against Janet's boobies.
Maybe there are an infinite number, but there are 42 found. I'd list them here, but at least one of them is seven million digits and my 8 key is broken.
As I posted in a link above, they are non-intrusive. The game's already full of in-character advertisement for things like the Bronto Burger and varions expensive weapons and some strange billboards with the words PWNZ ME in big red letters and pictures of low level mobs called Leets dancing on them. Free players will just start seeing paid advertisements instead, and they'll also be made to fit the game's atmosphere (as much as a McDonalds commercial can fit into a 300th century warzone, I suppose).
Personally, I think they made it free first. Remember, it was originally only going to be free for a few weeks to draw people in. I think they extended the free period for a year when the advertisement offer came up.
In the original annoucnements for the free offer, the one caveat they added was that the offer cost them money. If too many people took advantage of it to the point that the drag on the servers made the game less enjoyable for paying players, they'd cut it short. That's something they stressed, although if it came to that I'll bet you a year's subscription cost that 90% of the free players didn't read that far down the page. Now at least the free offer won't be a big hole in their bandwidth, they're at least getting something out of it.
The summary here is inaccurate as to how the ads are going to be presented. It makes it sound as if they're chopping blocks out of the interface for them (and that's already a kinda crowded interface).
"These images will be similar to existing in-character advertisement already found in the game today, example of this would be Bronto Burger advertisements."
They'll be on billboards, which are all over the game as it is. The game already has in-game (while also in-character) advertisement for the expansion packs, as well as the Alienware billboard near the entrance to Old Athen (which from my understanding isn't an advertisement for Alienware computers, but for the Alien Invasion expansion pack), but they're changed to fit character. The dev posts sounds as if the real life ads being run will also be made to fit the game's background:
"We are also doing our utmost to ensure that these advertisements blend into the environment without being intrusive or break with the spirit of Anarchy Online. All of the advertisements that will be shown are going to be screened by Funcom personnel where we will weed out any advertisements that we feel are inappropriate before they get the chance to appear around Rubi-Ka."
Also, it's not only "Likely" because of the free subscription, it is definitely because of it. Paying customers won't even see them:
"This is being done to maintain our ability to keep providing the best game for everyone while keeping the monthly fee as low as we can... I want to reassure everyone that the new advertisements that will be introduced to the game will only be affecting players that are taking advantage of our free offer. All paying subscribers will be shown in-character images in place of the advertisement."
Lastly, they did take the time to address privacy concerns. They assure users that they aren't sharing personal information, only registering that somebody watched an ad and which ad it was, not who watched it.
Aryan Dasyu is not native Hindu thought. The Aryan religion originated farther east, with a nomadic people from central Asia. They conquered the Indus and Hindu civilizations, and abolished their native religions for several hundred years.
It's the argument you'd hear, but probability doesn't really work quite like that. Assuming you do have a 10^-100 probability of life on one planet, each planet would be an independent case, not each life-bearing planet. There are probably millions of viable planets out there. Billions if not trillions or some other meaninglessly huge number if you go outside our galaxy. Each one of them would be an independent case, with probability of life not existing of 1-10^-100 (again, their numbers, which are dubious at best). It's a high probability that any given planet would have nothing, but the sheer number of planets makes up for it, to the point that the expected number of planets that do have life is quite high.
You'll never live if you think this way. There are a lot of reasons I want most of my life back, but it won't happen. Even if you're as determined a pessimist as I can be, it's better to think of how bad things could get screwed up tomorrow than how bad they were screwed up yesterday.
I was never what you would describe as a "fundie nut", but like you, I found a considerable portion of my life dominated by Christianity. I'm not sure how you came to change, and it's really not my place to ask. In my case, it was a slow slide. I'd be told to believe one thing on Sunday, and forced to believe something else for the next six days, only to be told - sometimes by the same set of people - that it was all wrong. Even when it wasn't taught to me, I came to a lot of those conclusions on my own, and it scared me at first. I read Morris, Hawthorne, and all those, thinking it would all make sense, and it made things worse. The proponents of what I thought I believed came through in their writings as charlatans and bigots.
I found the writings of Polkinghorne to be quite comforting when I finally came to grips with the fact that I just couldn't believe what I'd been told to anymore. On both sides of the evolution debate, Polkinghorne is probably the most level head I've ever read. I propose he's more familiar with theology than Morris or Hawthorne. He's not on par with Hawking in scientific knowledge, but he has a wealth of it, and like Hawking, he specializes in simplifying it for the everyday Joe without dumbing it down.
He's an Anglican, but also an evolutionist. Even if you're comfortable as an athiest, he might be just what you need to put those 19 years behind you. It may not make you believe in evolution or the big bang, it will certainly help you come to terms with them. I found after reading several of his books and and learning about other religions (Hinduism particularly, I have a post in reply to the grandparent down a few from yours about that) that it's possible to make a solid and satisfying worldview that is largely immune to scientific advancement. I don't think science will be able to come up with something that could force me to reassess that worldview, but equally important, any existing scientific theory could be overturned without overly upsetting it either.
It would cause minor chaos in Christianity, Judism, and Islam no doubt. I think in the long run, the religions would accept it because they have little choice. It would also probably expedite resolutions to many of their existing conflicts of belief. As St. Francis said, "If a nonbeliever cannot trust us in matters so meaningless as the motion of the sky or the turning of a leaf, how can they be expected to trust us in matters of eternal life?"
However, just to raise an interesting point, Hinduism would be largely unaffected by my understanding of the religion. I'm not Hindu, but I have a good friend who is, and we've discussed the philosophies of the religion quite extensively.
As he's explained to me, Hindu has yet to find itself in a real conflict with science. As his preist had taught him, evolution is an integral part of karmic transmigration, where (I apologize ahead of time for simplifying this to the point that it's almost meaningless. We discussed a lot of this, but I'm not entirely clear on the whole concept) "good" souls are reincarnated with a higher social status or such, and bad souls can find themselves at the other end of the food chain. As the world progressed, higher and more appropriate organisms had to appear to accomodate higher souls. This isn't exactly how the religion was a few hundred years ago, but it's a change of unknowns, not of absolutes.
Also, Hinduism integrates a belief in an eternal cycle of creation and destruction which mirrors itself at every level of existence, driven by Brama (creation) and Shiva (destruction), and blanced by Vishnu (preservation). The old die to make room for the young. Old technologies vanish to make room for new ones. Civilizations fall and rise. Cities are destroyed and rebuilt, buildings are demolished and replaced, species go extinct and new ones rise. Entire worlds die, and entire universes have arisen and vanished. Big Bang theory, stellar evolution, virtually every theologically controversial scientific theory fits quite nicely with the Hindu philosophy.
Now that I'm done with that, back on topic:
The case of extraterrestrial life, although he and I never discussed it, doesn't sound like it would produce any conflict. The significance is placed on life, not earth. By the constant cycle of birth and death, it would follow that Earth is not the first world, nor would it be the last. For that matter, this entire universe is just one in a series, and no more or less important than all the others. Life elsewhere may be very different than life here, and may live very different than it does here, but it's reasonable to expect it to live by certain simmilar rules: It would take in energy (if it didn't, it would be a perpetual motion machine of the first type, doing work (living) without energy input), it would reproduce (if it didn't, the odds would be vastly against its survival. A single creature would likely be wiped out eventually), and it would eventually die by some means. Whatever else it may do, it fits into Hindu belief fairly smoothly.
All in all, I think it's almost like the early Hindu's could see the future. Of the great religions, only they and Buddhism (which has its origins within Hinduism) put a special emphasis on one of the most universal laws ther are in science: Entropy.
Christianity, for example, asserts that the inexorable process or decay in the world is a result of the original human sin, and is not really natural. Many older religions (and even some Christian denominations) took the view that it was the acts of angry and vengeful God(s). These sorts of beliefs lead to an inability to come to terms with concepts like evolution, as it proposes that decay can only lead to more decay, and not new creation (this is among Henry Morris's primary disputes with evolution).
Hindu takes what I find a more reasonable and enlightened stance on the subject. Decay is not a punishment, but a mercy. If Shiva did not kill the old or sick, the world would become overcrowded with all manner of
Slashdot Mirror
Something naked-eye visible would have to be pretty big. I've heard of at least one lunar observatory that has an open invitation to conspiracy theorists, though. They're welcome to come up and see a full demonstration of the lasers hitting the targets, a tour of the facilities to see how they work, and a live demonstration, apparantly all for free. That's a pretty big meatball to leave out on the chopping block, too, I doubt those demonstrations are cheap for them, since they don't usually do them every day. A truely dedicated group that just wanted to be assholes could probably bankrupt them just sending people up for demonstrations.
Nobody's ever taken up the offer, but there's a pretty obvious counter to it, which I think has already been used about the laser reflectors: They could just as easily have put it up there with an unmanned mission. Many conspiracy theorists don't dispute that unmanned missions take place, only that the manned Apollo missions did.
But nevertheless, we need more intellgent responses than talking about brothers losing in Mario Kart
It may seem silly, but there's a good reason for this kind of argument. It's the same sort of thing that everybody can relate too. Kid's now hit their brothers over Mario Kart. Ten years ago, they hit each other over the remote control, before that over action figures, ball games, just about anything. Short version: Brothers hit each other. Big deal. Gamers are just like everybody else.
and the differences between guns and controllers.
This isn't really a trivial argument, though. I've hunted. I bow hunt, but I've also used a rifles and pistols, as well as tried out some heavier guns on firing ranges (mostly high powered hunting rifles, I also got to fire a 50 caliber rifle once). The experience is unlike anything I've seen in any game. Even the most realistic games give the visual and audio feel of reality, but none of the very real and quite powerful tactile feeling a gun gives, and the sense they give of a gun is very different than what you actually get using a gun. Having done both, I don't see any way either one could help you prepare for the other.
Not only that, but the game industry should be as troubled as anyone that many of the last decade's most heinous tragedies have had some kind of connection to video games, even if it is as tenuous and silly as the 9-11 to Flight Simulator connection.
They should be troubled. Troubled that somebody has such a blind vendetta that they'd make such tenuous and silly accusations. The one fact about virtually all the allegedly video-game related crimes is that they are, all in all, not particularly unusual crimes in and of themselves. Even the most extreme, like Columbine, aren't new. Something simmilar happened in my state in the early 80's - it killed and hurt even more people, but was largely the same thing. A small group of social outcasts brought sawed-off shotguns to school in their jackets and started shooting at another group that had persecuted them previously. Ten, fifteen years ago, most wouldn't have raised an eyebrow from an experienced prosecutor.
Hm... didn't Sega make the Tazmanian Devil game? Maybe it would be them.
About Blizzard and LucasArts: Blizzard has a strong history of very good games. Even the games that have issues, they do everything they can to fix them, and their most broken game in recent years, WoW, was only broken because it sold far better than they ever dared dream, not because it was an overall bad game.
LucasArt's big titles are mostly Star Wars, which is among the biggest brand names around. Time has been you could slap Star Wars on just about anything and see an increase in sales.
Feel free, the more people that do it, the more the point will get accross.
If you're playing games to the point that you're not interacting with people, there are other reasons you'd be violent. Antisocial people don't need video games to isolate themselves, and they certainly don't need them to inspire them to mail bombs to people. Did the Unabomber even have electricity, let alone Nintendo?
Something that got me in the interview with the lawyer last week is that it said video games "build up the synaptic pathways to kill. You learn to do in real life what you do in the games..." didn't make sense. The game would build certain pathways, but I would think you'd learn to do down down back forward high punch from muscle memory, not to actually rip somebody's head off with the spine still attached.
One of my life goals is to walk up to one of these people and make the hand motions to perform some sort of Mortal Kombat move, and then say, "If you were right, you'd be dead now."
The only website I've had problems with viewing in Firefox is Slashdot, ironically. Sometimes the stories overlap with the sidebar a bit, and sometimes the comments display off the side of the page in the black margin. That seems to have been largely fixed with 1.0.1, though, I've only had some minor oddities since then.
Just to test things out, I dug my P200 out. It has 16 megs of RAM and runs windows 95. Firefox was a bit slow to load up on it, but works fine once loaded. My laptop is a P166 with 90-some-odd megs of RAM, and it runs Firefox without a hitch.
They're not regulating what the candidate says. They're just regulating how much money he can spend. Candidates are perfectly welcome to say whatever it is they have on their minds, be it on TV, the internet, or on the steps of city hall. This ruling also won't have any effect. Talk on the internet is cheap. Give up a 30 second commercial spot on TV and you can pay for a pretty impressive amount of words on a webpage and even more emails.
The FEC doesn't have to regulate the servers. They just have to regulate the candidate. If your Dutch server over there is being used by a campaign and violates the election laws, then the candidate over here can still be forced out of the race, even if the server can't be shut down.
On a slightly related note, based on the political climate in the US from 2000 (I'd say around the incident with our airplane being forced down inside of Chinese airspace) to present, the political climate and the rhetoric comming from both parties over here's been such that I don't believe any serious candidate would use a foriegn server anyway.
I mean, what data are they collecting to do the searches. Just name or maybe address? SSN? Driver's license numbers and looking up many accident's we've been in while they're at it?
I checked. He is.
Yes, but if they get a particulary big asshole for a victim of one of those screwups, it means a lot worse than a little lawsuit. It means publicity, loud yelling on TV, and so forth, and a host of copy-cat lawsuits (both justified and not so much). If it comes down to a case where True.com loses their customers' trust on their one unique selling point (the background checks), they've basically lost their business model.
Is that sig 12-point, though?
Anyway, the law strikes me as kind of stupid. Something I found noteworthy from the article is that True.com's searches apparantly don't catch criminals who are using fake names. This makes me wonder what data they search by.
Background searches just by name are possible, but they aren't reliable. For a simmilar slashdot thread, I decided to start putting my name into various sites, and now I know there's a sex offender in my state (Disclaimer: it's not me, so stfu) who happens to have my last name, a slightly different spelling of my first name, and my middle initial. If they're just doing this by name, am I going to get labled as a rapist? There are a lot of people with the same name (There's litterally a half a page in the Saginaw County phone book just for John, Jack, and J. Smiths), so there's the possibility of very humiliating false positives.
The solution of course would be for them to ask for social security numbers, and we know where that discussion usually leads.
I didn't say it was a good thing or a bad thing. I sad that's how it is, and it IS how it is.
You are correct about Exxon. They got fined a helluva lot. reference: $900 million over 10 years to the state of Alaska in settlement of criminal charges. $250 million in fines, of which $125 million was waived against public opposition. $5 billion in punitive damages, which was overturned, however, in 2001 All in all, they did end up paying just over $1 billion in various fines, but they did $2.1 billion in damages. The system is fines in proportion to damage, not wealth. A guy I went to high school with burned down eight newly built but vacant homes in his home town, total damages topping $900,000. He was fined $750,000 and put in jail for umteen years. The guy made barely $20,000 a year and had a family. If the fines were in proportion to wealth, then he would have been fined around $0.25 by measuring against Janet's boobies.
Maybe there are an infinite number, but there are 42 found. I'd list them here, but at least one of them is seven million digits and my 8 key is broken.
As I posted in a link above, they are non-intrusive. The game's already full of in-character advertisement for things like the Bronto Burger and varions expensive weapons and some strange billboards with the words PWNZ ME in big red letters and pictures of low level mobs called Leets dancing on them. Free players will just start seeing paid advertisements instead, and they'll also be made to fit the game's atmosphere (as much as a McDonalds commercial can fit into a 300th century warzone, I suppose).
Personally, I think they made it free first. Remember, it was originally only going to be free for a few weeks to draw people in. I think they extended the free period for a year when the advertisement offer came up.
In the original annoucnements for the free offer, the one caveat they added was that the offer cost them money. If too many people took advantage of it to the point that the drag on the servers made the game less enjoyable for paying players, they'd cut it short. That's something they stressed, although if it came to that I'll bet you a year's subscription cost that 90% of the free players didn't read that far down the page. Now at least the free offer won't be a big hole in their bandwidth, they're at least getting something out of it.
The summary here is inaccurate as to how the ads are going to be presented. It makes it sound as if they're chopping blocks out of the interface for them (and that's already a kinda crowded interface).
According to this post by the developers:
"These images will be similar to existing in-character advertisement already found in the game today, example of this would be Bronto Burger advertisements."
They'll be on billboards, which are all over the game as it is. The game already has in-game (while also in-character) advertisement for the expansion packs, as well as the Alienware billboard near the entrance to Old Athen (which from my understanding isn't an advertisement for Alienware computers, but for the Alien Invasion expansion pack), but they're changed to fit character. The dev posts sounds as if the real life ads being run will also be made to fit the game's background:
"We are also doing our utmost to ensure that these advertisements blend into the environment without being intrusive or break with the spirit of Anarchy Online. All of the advertisements that will be shown are going to be screened by Funcom personnel where we will weed out any advertisements that we feel are inappropriate before they get the chance to appear around Rubi-Ka."
Also, it's not only "Likely" because of the free subscription, it is definitely because of it. Paying customers won't even see them:
"This is being done to maintain our ability to keep providing the best game for everyone while keeping the monthly fee as low as we can... I want to reassure everyone that the new advertisements that will be introduced to the game will only be affecting players that are taking advantage of our free offer. All paying subscribers will be shown in-character images in place of the advertisement."
Lastly, they did take the time to address privacy concerns. They assure users that they aren't sharing personal information, only registering that somebody watched an ad and which ad it was, not who watched it.
They also might want to think about changing their logo. Come on, at least have a different number of curlicues on the wind gust than Windwaker does.
Aryan Dasyu is not native Hindu thought. The Aryan religion originated farther east, with a nomadic people from central Asia. They conquered the Indus and Hindu civilizations, and abolished their native religions for several hundred years.
It's the argument you'd hear, but probability doesn't really work quite like that. Assuming you do have a 10^-100 probability of life on one planet, each planet would be an independent case, not each life-bearing planet. There are probably millions of viable planets out there. Billions if not trillions or some other meaninglessly huge number if you go outside our galaxy. Each one of them would be an independent case, with probability of life not existing of 1-10^-100 (again, their numbers, which are dubious at best). It's a high probability that any given planet would have nothing, but the sheer number of planets makes up for it, to the point that the expected number of planets that do have life is quite high.
I want 19 years of my life back...
You'll never live if you think this way. There are a lot of reasons I want most of my life back, but it won't happen. Even if you're as determined a pessimist as I can be, it's better to think of how bad things could get screwed up tomorrow than how bad they were screwed up yesterday.
I was never what you would describe as a "fundie nut", but like you, I found a considerable portion of my life dominated by Christianity. I'm not sure how you came to change, and it's really not my place to ask. In my case, it was a slow slide. I'd be told to believe one thing on Sunday, and forced to believe something else for the next six days, only to be told - sometimes by the same set of people - that it was all wrong. Even when it wasn't taught to me, I came to a lot of those conclusions on my own, and it scared me at first. I read Morris, Hawthorne, and all those, thinking it would all make sense, and it made things worse. The proponents of what I thought I believed came through in their writings as charlatans and bigots.
I found the writings of Polkinghorne to be quite comforting when I finally came to grips with the fact that I just couldn't believe what I'd been told to anymore. On both sides of the evolution debate, Polkinghorne is probably the most level head I've ever read. I propose he's more familiar with theology than Morris or Hawthorne. He's not on par with Hawking in scientific knowledge, but he has a wealth of it, and like Hawking, he specializes in simplifying it for the everyday Joe without dumbing it down.
He's an Anglican, but also an evolutionist. Even if you're comfortable as an athiest, he might be just what you need to put those 19 years behind you. It may not make you believe in evolution or the big bang, it will certainly help you come to terms with them. I found after reading several of his books and and learning about other religions (Hinduism particularly, I have a post in reply to the grandparent down a few from yours about that) that it's possible to make a solid and satisfying worldview that is largely immune to scientific advancement. I don't think science will be able to come up with something that could force me to reassess that worldview, but equally important, any existing scientific theory could be overturned without overly upsetting it either.
It would cause minor chaos in Christianity, Judism, and Islam no doubt. I think in the long run, the religions would accept it because they have little choice. It would also probably expedite resolutions to many of their existing conflicts of belief. As St. Francis said, "If a nonbeliever cannot trust us in matters so meaningless as the motion of the sky or the turning of a leaf, how can they be expected to trust us in matters of eternal life?"
However, just to raise an interesting point, Hinduism would be largely unaffected by my understanding of the religion. I'm not Hindu, but I have a good friend who is, and we've discussed the philosophies of the religion quite extensively.
As he's explained to me, Hindu has yet to find itself in a real conflict with science. As his preist had taught him, evolution is an integral part of karmic transmigration, where (I apologize ahead of time for simplifying this to the point that it's almost meaningless. We discussed a lot of this, but I'm not entirely clear on the whole concept) "good" souls are reincarnated with a higher social status or such, and bad souls can find themselves at the other end of the food chain. As the world progressed, higher and more appropriate organisms had to appear to accomodate higher souls. This isn't exactly how the religion was a few hundred years ago, but it's a change of unknowns, not of absolutes.
Also, Hinduism integrates a belief in an eternal cycle of creation and destruction which mirrors itself at every level of existence, driven by Brama (creation) and Shiva (destruction), and blanced by Vishnu (preservation). The old die to make room for the young. Old technologies vanish to make room for new ones. Civilizations fall and rise. Cities are destroyed and rebuilt, buildings are demolished and replaced, species go extinct and new ones rise. Entire worlds die, and entire universes have arisen and vanished. Big Bang theory, stellar evolution, virtually every theologically controversial scientific theory fits quite nicely with the Hindu philosophy.
Now that I'm done with that, back on topic:
The case of extraterrestrial life, although he and I never discussed it, doesn't sound like it would produce any conflict. The significance is placed on life, not earth. By the constant cycle of birth and death, it would follow that Earth is not the first world, nor would it be the last. For that matter, this entire universe is just one in a series, and no more or less important than all the others. Life elsewhere may be very different than life here, and may live very different than it does here, but it's reasonable to expect it to live by certain simmilar rules: It would take in energy (if it didn't, it would be a perpetual motion machine of the first type, doing work (living) without energy input), it would reproduce (if it didn't, the odds would be vastly against its survival. A single creature would likely be wiped out eventually), and it would eventually die by some means. Whatever else it may do, it fits into Hindu belief fairly smoothly.
All in all, I think it's almost like the early Hindu's could see the future. Of the great religions, only they and Buddhism (which has its origins within Hinduism) put a special emphasis on one of the most universal laws ther are in science: Entropy.
Christianity, for example, asserts that the inexorable process or decay in the world is a result of the original human sin, and is not really natural. Many older religions (and even some Christian denominations) took the view that it was the acts of angry and vengeful God(s). These sorts of beliefs lead to an inability to come to terms with concepts like evolution, as it proposes that decay can only lead to more decay, and not new creation (this is among Henry Morris's primary disputes with evolution).
Hindu takes what I find a more reasonable and enlightened stance on the subject. Decay is not a punishment, but a mercy. If Shiva did not kill the old or sick, the world would become overcrowded with all manner of