The problem with this and all other scenarios is that none of them explain where the INFORMATION codes carried came from. It is akin to making educated guesses how a CD or floppy is made, but not addressing in any way the huge amount of information, programming if you will, that is stored on these carriers. DNA and RNA are only carriers of data, they do not generate or produce it, any more than a CD or floppy disks spontaneously come with code and data. These have to originate in a MIND and then be recorded on the media or device by other specific methods. Why should living things obey any other rules? If you are rational, you HAVE to come to the conclusion that the intense activity of a mind is needed to produce even a single cell. It takes both energy and mind to produce order. Energy alone acting without direction from a mind is insufficient to bring about order out of disorder. The molecules of life are highly ordered structures.
......that a computer should slow down just because you upgraded your operating system........
This has always been true of Windows. For Mac OSX however, the opposite holds. OSX10.2 came with my 2001 PB G4. The new 10.4.x runs much faster on that old machine. MS makes most of their money selling Windows to PC makers. Obviously, they have to make people buy new computers to run their software.
....Don't know what would happen to the deals between Apple and the labels in such a case.........
I was always under the impression that public laws supersede private deals. Apple could just obey the new laws and ignore the relevant portions of the "deals" they made with the music companies. If Apple were sued by the music cartel, would any court not come down on the side of the prevailing laws and summarily dismiss any such suits against Apple?
I like the idea of buying higher quality, DRM music from iTunes. I think this is the beginning of the end of DRM for music, and eventually for all media.
.....in the currently accepted theory of abiogenesis......
The biggest problem with that theory, as with evolution in general is that it doesn't tell us where the information stored in the DNA molecule cones from. It takes proteins to make DNA, but it takes the information stored in the DNA to build the proteins. It's the ultimate chicken and egg problem.
It is the surface gravity that determines what gaseous elements are retained, as well as temperature. The core and temperature of Venus are also different. Even if early unicellular life could have developed in such a now poisonous atmosphere, it would preclude higher life forms.
I could give you a short list of 15 critical parameters needed for any planetary system that could sustain physical, carbon based life, such as we have here. The chances of another planet that meets ALL of these is essentially zero. The fact alone that the spectrum of the sunlight that reaches the earth's surface is finely tuned to the process to photosynthesis is totally selective. The photon energy and the binding energies of the molecules are perfectly matched. These binding energies are intrinsic to the atoms themselves. Therefore the light has to match these exactly right. A red giant or a blue dwarf would not work, even if ALL the other parameters (orbit, gravity etc) were right on. The Ozone layer also shields out the parts of the solar radiation that is harmful to life. We and our planet are unique in the universe. That is the point of my post here. SETI is a total waste.
....I think we will soon conclude that life is VERY COMMON in the universe and maybe even in our own back yard.........
There are many specifications of the earth and sun that must be just right. The orbit is only one. The mass of the planet is also critical. Making a smaller sun means the earth would need to be closer. At some point, the earth could no longer rotate independently, but its rotation would be the same as its orbit, such as Mercury. That would preclude life. Too massive of an earth would retain poisonous gases such as methane and ammonia. Venus is that way. A smaller planet would mean the loss of water into space. Mars is an example.
The spectrum of the sun and the chemical binding energies of photosynthesis are well matched to each other. A red giant or blue dwarf would not make a very efficient energy source for living things. The mass, chemical composition, rotation rate and other factors have to be "just so" in order for a planet to have life. If you would factor all this together, you would realize that our planet is unique and very special, a very carefully crafted spaceship.
.....Therefore, it's quite likely that many planets in the universe have stable periodic fluctuations.......
The mass and distance of the sun and earth are very critical and cannot be changed very much. Making a smaller sun means the earth would need to be closer. At some point, the earth could no longer rotate independently, but its rotation would be the same as its orbit, such as Mercury. That would preclude life, since one side would be very hot and the other extremely cold. Too massive of an earth would retain poisonous gases such as methane and ammonia. Venus is that way. A smaller planet would mean the loss of water into space. Mars is such a planet.
Putting the earth farther away would necessitate a bigger sun. Large stars go through larger swings of energy output than living systems can tolerate. The spectrum of the sun and the chemical binding energies of photosynthesis are well matched to each other. A red giant would not make a very efficient energy source for living things. The mass, chemical composition, rotation rate and other factors have to be "just so" in order for a planet to have life. If you would factor all this together, you would realize that our planet is unique and very special, a very carefully designed spaceship indeed.
.....and doesnt even have to be carbon based........
You are wrong there. The complex proteins found in living cells cannot be made with any other element. Silicon is the closest, but its binding energies are too high for really large, complex molecules such as in all life forms. As far as we know, the same elements exist throughout the universe as we have here on earth. Of course if you are talking about non-physical life forms then anything can be conjectured.
....What would such an orbit look like when there are 2 suns?......
Such a stable orbit is impossible if the stars are any closer than about 3.8 light years. Half of the stars in our galaxy (and most likely other galaxies) are closer than this. The parameters for a life supporting planet are extremely narrow. The mass, chemical makeup, rotation rate and a number of other specs must be right also. The size of the parent star is also critical. Our earth is a very rare and special place.
What Oort cloud? There is no such thing. It is a mathematical fiction that has never been observed, even with the most powerful telescopes. The reason that such a fiction even exists is because comets should long ago have evaporated into space, having a lifetime of a maximum of about 15,000 years. That of course contradicts the accepted religious evolutionary dogma of the billions and millions of years for the age of the Universe. Hence the proposed fiction of the Oort cloud. True science is observation and experimentation, not conjecturing even in mathematical terms, about things that don't exist. Doing such conjecturing belongs to religion, not science.
Even if such planets did form, none of them would harboring any life, at least not any life based on carbon. The irregular orbits of all possible planets would preclude any with a stable temperature range. The minimum star spacing for an earth like planet is about 3.8 light years. This specification disqualifies about half of all stars in our galaxy. The mass of any planet harboring life could also not be much different than that of our earth.
This means that the SETI program is a big waste of money. The likelihood of another planet like earth is very small.
....I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they licensed it to a couple of other manufacturers of premier hardware, such as HP or Lenovo.......
Why should they sell OSX to their competitors? Apple selling OSX to them would be like selling their soul to the devil. Software is the soul of hardware. Anyone can install a Microsoft soul into a Mac because Apple is only a hardware maker who also supplies their own software. You can totally erase OSX from a Mac and run Windows. It would then be just be like any other Windows box, except better than average.
.....Security wise, I am sorry to say MACs are no more secure......
Maybe theoretically, but not practically. There recently was an article right here on/. stating that there are over 1.2 million pieces of malware circulating on the Internet, every single one of them for Windows. Maybe theoretically, my Mac house can be broken into and robbed as easily or even more easily than your Windows house, but the fact is all houses getting robbed are still Windows houses. So then who is more secure, my Mac house or your Windows house?
Don't listen to self serving locksmith and vault salespeople such as Symantec or other security vendors who want to sell you performance robbing crapware that just is not needed on Macs. ONLY they and their ilk are spouting endless FUD that Macs are less secure than Windows.
......which only postulates that the energy of light, ie: its frequency, decreases as it travels in discreet steps.........
If the frequency of the light, that is its energy, changed, that would violate well established conservation laws. The energy of light doesn't change when it slows down in water or glass. So why should it change when it travels through the medium of free space? It is still unclear how the electrical an magnetic properties of space change as it expands. The large new accelerator now being built at CERN in Europe may give us new insight in some of this and other mysteries.
(....Meanwhile, there's evidence that atomic clocks are actually speeding up relative to the rotation of the earth......)
You are correct there. But the rotation of the earth is not controlled by gravity, but simple inertia. Tidal friction does slow this rotation as well as the orbit of the moon. The orbit of the earth around the sun however is determined by gravity and distance to the sun. The atomic clocks have slowed in relation to this.
Another evidence that the billions of years is bogus is the fact that there are still comets. Astronomers realize this and postulate fictions such as the Oort cloud as a source of new comets. The problem is that no such thing has ever been observed. Comets only last about 15000 years or less, before they are dispersed into space.
(..you'll do better just holding faith....)
Evolution is faith that present processes (including radioactivity) have always been as we observe them today. It is faith that fossils form over long periods of time. Time, lots of time is the magic faith ingredient of the religion of evolution. Nobody has ever made a fossil, nor observed one formed today, because dead bodies simply decay. The Evolution religion has pulled of a neat trick: Label it as science and get support from my taxes. This patently unconstitutional.
So, you can hold onto your faith that you have no higher purpose and descended from a rock or your ancestors crawled out of the primordial slime. I'll hold onto mine that I was created by a transcendent, intelligent God, who has a plan for His children.
........Besides which, you're essentially trying to say that just 6000 years ago, the vacuum of space was denser than plexiglass....
Actually just the opposite. Light travelled very much faster than today and radioactivity also proceeded at a proportional faster pace.
(....This also shows that much of the universe is speeding away from us at about 75% c......)
That is only true if the doppler assumption holds. It is this incredible assumed velocity of distant galaxies that makes it necessary to postulate dark matter and energy. The measured fact is that the red shift is QUANTIZED. This precludes the doppler effect as the cause of the red shift.
If the speed of light changed, and there is other evidence that it has slowed down about 4% since it was first measured, then all time keeping mechanisms using the atomic forces (electroweak and electromagnetic) would have to be corrected for this. There is evidence that even now, the clock using the atom as time keeping mechanism is still slowing against clocks that use gravity to keep time. Equations governing gravity, unlike those of the atom, have NO time dependent elements in them. Gravity depends ONLY on mass and distance, nothing else. Before the speed of light was actually measured to be finite, the prevailing "accepted" scientific dogma was that light speed was infinite. It took about 50 years before it became "accepted" that light had a definite velocity.
Therefore if you say that the universe is billions of years old, as measured by atomic time, you would be correct. However, that translates into a much smaller (in the thousands) number of gravity years as defined by the earth's orbit. There is a highly non-linear conversion between the two clocks.
(....So, you're saying that because light moves slower in air or water, this somehow effects time.....)
It affects the atomic clock we use to MEASURE time. The electrical and magnetic properties of free space are measured and determine the speed of light in the same way that these same parameters affect an electromagnetic wave in any other medium. The possibility that the idea of billions or even millions of years collapsing into the only thousands (not necessarily 6000) is like a big stink bomb with evolutionists.
......in order for radioactive decay rates to change, there would need to be some fundamental changes....
One of the "constants" is h Planck's constant that governs a number of atomic quantum processes, including radioactivity. It is inversely related to the speed of light c.
Astronomers measure something called the "red shift". The red shift itself is a measured fact. It's cause is commonly thought to be the doppler effect. This explanations however requires all sorts of convoluted constructs, such as dark matter and energy, which have NOT been observed. If this red shift is caused by the drift in the speed of light, then such conjectures fall away. There is NO known law of physics that requires that the speed of light be invariant. We KNOW that light can be speeded up and slowed down by the media it traverses. All age dating must be corrected for the drift of these constants. The red shift evidence points to the fact that this change has been about a factor of 300 million. This drift is however highly nonlinear over time.
Really? Has anyone actually found hard evidence of such an ancestor? Has anyone found even a fossil that has part characteristics of both? All Airplanes have wings and therefore they had a common ancestor; some kind of bird? Cars and oxcarts have wheels and therefore they also have a common ancestor, namely a log rolling down a hill? Maybe these man made things have common design features, based on the underlying laws of physics as discerned by intelligent human minds? Is it then not plausible that the same principles apply to the natural living things as to our man made and designed creations?
.....Question, did Zebras exist 70 million years ago? Did Tyrannosaurus Rex exist 350 million years ago? Did multicellular life exist 1 billion years ago?........
Did automobiles, airplanes, computers etc. exist 150 years ago? If not, where did they come from? Did they come about by unplanned natural processes not involving intelligent minds?
On the molecular and atomic levels, a single cell is far more complex than a Boeing 747. Nobody would suggest that such an airliner came into existence without effort of mind. Why should life then have come without processes of thought and planning?
The millions and billions of years evolutionists always conjecture about are also based on assumptions (faith) that the time measurements as well as time itself have always proceeded at the present rate. There is evidence that the fundamental constants upon which these clocks are based have not been anywhere near constant. Einstein has shown that time itself is not an absolute thing.
.....how did Noah have room for over 1.25-million different species of animals on his boat....
If you would read the Bible more carefully, you would realize that the word "species" is never mentioned. It is a fact that all of the world's dogs, for example, can be bread from two generic dogs, over not all that many centuries. There are many different species of sparrows, but they can all come from a single pair. The Bible uses the word "kinds" which is not an exact scientifically defined term.
.....My question is what color was the sky prior to Noah's flood?.....
You are asking the wrong question. It should be: "Did it not ever rain before the flood?" To make a rainbow, the color of the sky is irrelevant. It takes only rain drops and sunlight. Since the sun did shine before the flood, it must have been the absence of rain that prevented rainbows before the flood.
In order for rain to happen, two things are needed. 1) a low enough temperature and 2) some particles in the saturated air around which drops can form. If conditions before the flood were such that BOTH of these requirements never were met, then there would have been no rain. We are in fact told in Gen 2:5-6 "For the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground. 6 But there went up from the earth a mist and watered all the face of the ground."
Since you are ignorant by something as simple as to how a rainbow is formed, it doesn't surprise me that you show ignorance in your understanding of God and the Bible.
.....Why, for example, would an omniscient diety need to test believers.....
For you to even ask such a question shows ignorance and shallow thinking. Does a teacher test students for his own benefit? Does he not test them for the benefit of the student? God gives tests or allows testing so we can find out where we are lacking in education and character. If you find a wallet full of $100 bills on the sidewalk, you are the one that finds out something about your honesty and integrity, depending on what your actions are.
Noah did not have to go and gather animals, they came to him. Noah did not close up the ark, but God specifically did. Your underlying premise is that either God is a myth or that at best, is uninvolved in his creation.
(.....controlled by such a wrathful diety.....)
Most people, you being one, criticize the Bible, having never read it, let alone carefully studied it with an open mind. If you had, you would read passages like:
Exodus 34:6-7 And the LORD passed by before him and proclaimed, Jehovah! Jehovah God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty , visiting the iniquity of fathers on the sons, and on the sons of sons, to the third and to the fourth generation.
God hates evil, but loves people. The absence of good is evil, just as the absence of light is darkness. God lets us choose, but also tells us what the consequences of our choices will be. Noah warned his generation for 120 years. Finally the flood did come. It is predicted that the next world wide judgment will be by fire. We have developed the technology to destroy the world by nuclear fire. It was used to wipe out two cities and will be used again.
.....That evolution happens is a known fact.......
That depends on your definition of evolution. If you say an example of evolution is shown be how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, then that is a fact. They may in fact adapt, if you will, "evolve", to the point where they cannot interbreed any longer.
If you are saying that evolution is how reptiles became birds or monkeys became human, then that is faith. The immunity of bacteria and the breeding of dogs is fact that has been called evolution. Then this gets extended beyond the breaking point, with no evidence whatsoever for any of the large changes (even in tiny jumps) needed to turn a fish to a reptile and other transformations of totally different kinds of living things. Science is based on observation and experiment, not conjecture of what might have happened in the past to explain what we see today. There are no intermediates between a dog and a cat, reptile or fish or bird. They are distinct kinds of creatures and there will NEVER be a semi-dog or a semi-cat, half one and half the other, at least not without the intelligent interference of man.
Evolution is based on some fundamental assumptions (beliefs, faith) about time and space and the measurements of parameters thereof. If these assumptions are false (and there is evidence they are) then the whole house of evolutionary cards collapses in a heap.
Evolutionists are also totally ignorant about the nature on origin of information. Where does the immense amount of information coded in the DNA come from? This information is software, detailed code in how to build the particular life form. In computers, software comes from a mind. Where do the software instructions come from to build even a single cell?
....I'll give you the option for divine creation if you give me the option for evolution.......
The constitution guarantees that you can believe either one or anything else you want. The government is not supposed to prefer one religion above another. However, the evolutionary religion has managed to sell itself as science and illegally gets billions of dollars of tax money. Maybe it is time the ACLU sued the government for supporting religion.
......draws into question the previous belief........
All evolutionary thinking is nothing but a belief system masquerading as science. It is based on the assumption (belief) that time itself as well as our measurement thereof is correct and absolutely constant. If is a belief that fossils were somehow made over vast periods time by unknown processes that nobody has ever duplicated, even today. Nobody has EVER made a fossil. NO fossils are being made anywhere today, especially by any slow, gradual process, sometimes imagined by evolutionists. When an organism dies today, it becomes food for others. We call this decay. To prevent this, a dead body needs to be put in an environment that prevents all microorganisms from feeding on the remains and oxygen must be excluded. This has to happen very quickly. A sudden disastrous upheaval such as the Biblical flood could certainly account for fossils.
Rocks are dated by their radioactivity. The unwarranted assumption (faith) is that such radioactive decay rates have never varied over the vast periods of time evolutionists need in order to make their assertions seem plausible. Radioactive decay is a process that comes from the properties of the various kinds of atoms. This rate of decay is governed by certain "constants". There is NO known law of physics that mandates that these all remain invariant over the vast periods of time involved. It is assumed (believed, faith) that these constants, and therefore the radioactive decay rate has always been what it is today. There is evidence that some of these so called "constants" have changed greatly since the beginning of time.
Until the 1800s, the term "dinosaur" was invented. In all the preceding centuries these same creatures were known as "dragons". Every culture has tales of and depictions of these fearsome beasts that are quite consistent across time and civilizations. There are mountains of recorded history of humans having feared and fought these huge creatures.
The biblical record states that the animals come to Noah. It wouldn't be cheating if all those animals were babies or at least very young. There is nothing that says they had to be fully grown. Such little animals would eat much less and eventually grow up to reproduce.
......Having a single unit that does everything I want it to would be a lot more convenient.......
But when the battery on your iPod dies, your entertainment ceases for a while. However, when your phone battery goes dead, it can be a matter of life and death. My iPod either sits by my bed to provide music to fall asleep by or in a dock in the car. Battery life is therefore not all that critical. The phone is always in my pocket and when its battery fails, it is a much bigger problem. A swiss army knife is useful, but a dedicated tool for its various functions is usually much better. If the entertainment use impacts the working of the phone, then having two distinct devices is much better.
Slashdot Mirror
....is the "RNA World" hypothesis.....
The problem with this and all other scenarios is that none of them explain where the INFORMATION codes carried came from. It is akin to making educated guesses how a CD or floppy is made, but not addressing in any way the huge amount of information, programming if you will, that is stored on these carriers. DNA and RNA are only carriers of data, they do not generate or produce it, any more than a CD or floppy disks spontaneously come with code and data. These have to originate in a MIND and then be recorded on the media or device by other specific methods. Why should living things obey any other rules? If you are rational, you HAVE to come to the conclusion that the intense activity of a mind is needed to produce even a single cell. It takes both energy and mind to produce order. Energy alone acting without direction from a mind is insufficient to bring about order out of disorder. The molecules of life are highly ordered structures.
......that a computer should slow down just because you upgraded your operating system........
This has always been true of Windows. For Mac OSX however, the opposite holds. OSX10.2 came with my 2001 PB G4. The new 10.4.x runs much faster on that old machine. MS makes most of their money selling Windows to PC makers. Obviously, they have to make people buy new computers to run their software.
....Don't know what would happen to the deals between Apple and the labels in such a case.........
I was always under the impression that public laws supersede private deals. Apple could just obey the new laws and ignore the relevant portions of the "deals" they made with the music companies. If Apple were sued by the music cartel, would any court not come down on the side of the prevailing laws and summarily dismiss any such suits against Apple?
I like the idea of buying higher quality, DRM music from iTunes. I think this is the beginning of the end of DRM for music, and eventually for all media.
.....in the currently accepted theory of abiogenesis......
The biggest problem with that theory, as with evolution in general is that it doesn't tell us where the information stored in the DNA molecule cones from. It takes proteins to make DNA, but it takes the information stored in the DNA to build the proteins. It's the ultimate chicken and egg problem.
It is the surface gravity that determines what gaseous elements are retained, as well as temperature. The core and temperature of Venus are also different. Even if early unicellular life could have developed in such a now poisonous atmosphere, it would preclude higher life forms.
I could give you a short list of 15 critical parameters needed for any planetary system that could sustain physical, carbon based life, such as we have here. The chances of another planet that meets ALL of these is essentially zero. The fact alone that the spectrum of the sunlight that reaches the earth's surface is finely tuned to the process to photosynthesis is totally selective. The photon energy and the binding energies of the molecules are perfectly matched. These binding energies are intrinsic to the atoms themselves. Therefore the light has to match these exactly right. A red giant or a blue dwarf would not work, even if ALL the other parameters (orbit, gravity etc) were right on. The Ozone layer also shields out the parts of the solar radiation that is harmful to life. We and our planet are unique in the universe. That is the point of my post here. SETI is a total waste.
....I think we will soon conclude that life is VERY COMMON in the universe and maybe even in our own back yard.........
There are many specifications of the earth and sun that must be just right. The orbit is only one. The mass of the planet is also critical. Making a smaller sun means the earth would need to be closer. At some point, the earth could no longer rotate independently, but its rotation would be the same as its orbit, such as Mercury. That would preclude life. Too massive of an earth would retain poisonous gases such as methane and ammonia. Venus is that way. A smaller planet would mean the loss of water into space. Mars is an example.
The spectrum of the sun and the chemical binding energies of photosynthesis are well matched to each other. A red giant or blue dwarf would not make a very efficient energy source for living things. The mass, chemical composition, rotation rate and other factors have to be "just so" in order for a planet to have life. If you would factor all this together, you would realize that our planet is unique and very special, a very carefully crafted spaceship.
.....Therefore, it's quite likely that many planets in the universe have stable periodic fluctuations.......
The mass and distance of the sun and earth are very critical and cannot be changed very much. Making a smaller sun means the earth would need to be closer. At some point, the earth could no longer rotate independently, but its rotation would be the same as its orbit, such as Mercury. That would preclude life, since one side would be very hot and the other extremely cold. Too massive of an earth would retain poisonous gases such as methane and ammonia. Venus is that way. A smaller planet would mean the loss of water into space. Mars is such a planet.
Putting the earth farther away would necessitate a bigger sun. Large stars go through larger swings of energy output than living systems can tolerate. The spectrum of the sun and the chemical binding energies of photosynthesis are well matched to each other. A red giant would not make a very efficient energy source for living things. The mass, chemical composition, rotation rate and other factors have to be "just so" in order for a planet to have life. If you would factor all this together, you would realize that our planet is unique and very special, a very carefully designed spaceship indeed.
.....and doesnt even have to be carbon based........
You are wrong there. The complex proteins found in living cells cannot be made with any other element. Silicon is the closest, but its binding energies are too high for really large, complex molecules such as in all life forms. As far as we know, the same elements exist throughout the universe as we have here on earth. Of course if you are talking about non-physical life forms then anything can be conjectured.
....What would such an orbit look like when there are 2 suns?......
Such a stable orbit is impossible if the stars are any closer than about 3.8 light years. Half of the stars in our galaxy (and most likely other galaxies) are closer than this. The parameters for a life supporting planet are extremely narrow. The mass, chemical makeup, rotation rate and a number of other specs must be right also. The size of the parent star is also critical. Our earth is a very rare and special place.
....like their Oort cloud.....
What Oort cloud? There is no such thing. It is a mathematical fiction that has never been observed, even with the most powerful telescopes. The reason that such a fiction even exists is because comets should long ago have evaporated into space, having a lifetime of a maximum of about 15,000 years. That of course contradicts the accepted religious evolutionary dogma of the billions and millions of years for the age of the Universe. Hence the proposed fiction of the Oort cloud. True science is observation and experimentation, not conjecturing even in mathematical terms, about things that don't exist. Doing such conjecturing belongs to religion, not science.
.....In between, no planets will form.......
Even if such planets did form, none of them would harboring any life, at least not any life based on carbon. The irregular orbits of all possible planets would preclude any with a stable temperature range. The minimum star spacing for an earth like planet is about 3.8 light years. This specification disqualifies about half of all stars in our galaxy. The mass of any planet harboring life could also not be much different than that of our earth.
This means that the SETI program is a big waste of money. The likelihood of another planet like earth is very small.
....I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they licensed it to a couple of other manufacturers of premier hardware, such as HP or Lenovo.......
Why should they sell OSX to their competitors? Apple selling OSX to them would be like selling their soul to the devil. Software is the soul of hardware. Anyone can install a Microsoft soul into a Mac because Apple is only a hardware maker who also supplies their own software. You can totally erase OSX from a Mac and run Windows. It would then be just be like any other Windows box, except better than average.
.....Security wise, I am sorry to say MACs are no more secure......
/. stating that there are over 1.2 million pieces of malware circulating on the Internet, every single one of them for Windows. Maybe theoretically, my Mac house can be broken into and robbed as easily or even more easily than your Windows house, but the fact is all houses getting robbed are still Windows houses. So then who is more secure, my Mac house or your Windows house?
Maybe theoretically, but not practically. There recently was an article right here on
Don't listen to self serving locksmith and vault salespeople such as Symantec or other security vendors who want to sell you performance robbing crapware that just is not needed on Macs. ONLY they and their ilk are spouting endless FUD that Macs are less secure than Windows.
......which only postulates that the energy of light, ie: its frequency, decreases as it travels in discreet steps.........
If the frequency of the light, that is its energy, changed, that would violate well established conservation laws. The energy of light doesn't change when it slows down in water or glass. So why should it change when it travels through the medium of free space? It is still unclear how the electrical an magnetic properties of space change as it expands. The large new accelerator now being built at CERN in Europe may give us new insight in some of this and other mysteries.
(....Meanwhile, there's evidence that atomic clocks are actually speeding up relative to the rotation of the earth......)
You are correct there. But the rotation of the earth is not controlled by gravity, but simple inertia. Tidal friction does slow this rotation as well as the orbit of the moon. The orbit of the earth around the sun however is determined by gravity and distance to the sun. The atomic clocks have slowed in relation to this.
Another evidence that the billions of years is bogus is the fact that there are still comets. Astronomers realize this and postulate fictions such as the Oort cloud as a source of new comets. The problem is that no such thing has ever been observed. Comets only last about 15000 years or less, before they are dispersed into space.
(..you'll do better just holding faith....)
Evolution is faith that present processes (including radioactivity) have always been as we observe them today. It is faith that fossils form over long periods of time. Time, lots of time is the magic faith ingredient of the religion of evolution. Nobody has ever made a fossil, nor observed one formed today, because dead bodies simply decay. The Evolution religion has pulled of a neat trick: Label it as science and get support from my taxes. This patently unconstitutional.
So, you can hold onto your faith that you have no higher purpose and descended from a rock or your ancestors crawled out of the primordial slime. I'll hold onto mine that I was created by a transcendent, intelligent God, who has a plan for His children.
........Besides which, you're essentially trying to say that just 6000 years ago, the vacuum of space was denser than plexiglass....
Actually just the opposite. Light travelled very much faster than today and radioactivity also proceeded at a proportional faster pace.
(....This also shows that much of the universe is speeding away from us at about 75% c......)
That is only true if the doppler assumption holds. It is this incredible assumed velocity of distant galaxies that makes it necessary to postulate dark matter and energy. The measured fact is that the red shift is QUANTIZED. This precludes the doppler effect as the cause of the red shift.
If the speed of light changed, and there is other evidence that it has slowed down about 4% since it was first measured, then all time keeping mechanisms using the atomic forces (electroweak and electromagnetic) would have to be corrected for this. There is evidence that even now, the clock using the atom as time keeping mechanism is still slowing against clocks that use gravity to keep time. Equations governing gravity, unlike those of the atom, have NO time dependent elements in them. Gravity depends ONLY on mass and distance, nothing else. Before the speed of light was actually measured to be finite, the prevailing "accepted" scientific dogma was that light speed was infinite. It took about 50 years before it became "accepted" that light had a definite velocity.
Therefore if you say that the universe is billions of years old, as measured by atomic time, you would be correct. However, that translates into a much smaller (in the thousands) number of gravity years as defined by the earth's orbit. There is a highly non-linear conversion between the two clocks.
(....So, you're saying that because light moves slower in air or water, this somehow effects time.....)
It affects the atomic clock we use to MEASURE time. The electrical and magnetic properties of free space are measured and determine the speed of light in the same way that these same parameters affect an electromagnetic wave in any other medium. The possibility that the idea of billions or even millions of years collapsing into the only thousands (not necessarily 6000) is like a big stink bomb with evolutionists.
......in order for radioactive decay rates to change, there would need to be some fundamental changes....
One of the "constants" is h Planck's constant that governs a number of atomic quantum processes, including radioactivity. It is inversely related to the speed of light c.
Astronomers measure something called the "red shift". The red shift itself is a measured fact. It's cause is commonly thought to be the doppler effect. This explanations however requires all sorts of convoluted constructs, such as dark matter and energy, which have NOT been observed. If this red shift is caused by the drift in the speed of light, then such conjectures fall away. There is NO known law of physics that requires that the speed of light be invariant. We KNOW that light can be speeded up and slowed down by the media it traverses. All age dating must be corrected for the drift of these constants. The red shift evidence points to the fact that this change has been about a factor of 300 million. This drift is however highly nonlinear over time.
.....Dogs and cats had a common ancestor.....
Really? Has anyone actually found hard evidence of such an ancestor? Has anyone found even a fossil that has part characteristics of both? All Airplanes have wings and therefore they had a common ancestor; some kind of bird? Cars and oxcarts have wheels and therefore they also have a common ancestor, namely a log rolling down a hill? Maybe these man made things have common design features, based on the underlying laws of physics as discerned by intelligent human minds? Is it then not plausible that the same principles apply to the natural living things as to our man made and designed creations?
.....Question, did Zebras exist 70 million years ago? Did Tyrannosaurus Rex exist 350 million years ago? Did multicellular life exist 1 billion years ago?........
Did automobiles, airplanes, computers etc. exist 150 years ago? If not, where did they come from? Did they come about by unplanned natural processes not involving intelligent minds?
On the molecular and atomic levels, a single cell is far more complex than a Boeing 747. Nobody would suggest that such an airliner came into existence without effort of mind. Why should life then have come without processes of thought and planning?
The millions and billions of years evolutionists always conjecture about are also based on assumptions (faith) that the time measurements as well as time itself have always proceeded at the present rate. There is evidence that the fundamental constants upon which these clocks are based have not been anywhere near constant. Einstein has shown that time itself is not an absolute thing.
.....how did Noah have room for over 1.25-million different species of animals on his boat....
If you would read the Bible more carefully, you would realize that the word "species" is never mentioned. It is a fact that all of the world's dogs, for example, can be bread from two generic dogs, over not all that many centuries. There are many different species of sparrows, but they can all come from a single pair. The Bible uses the word "kinds" which is not an exact scientifically defined term.
.....My question is what color was the sky prior to Noah's flood?.....
You are asking the wrong question. It should be: "Did it not ever rain before the flood?" To make a rainbow, the color of the sky is irrelevant. It takes only rain drops and sunlight. Since the sun did shine before the flood, it must have been the absence of rain that prevented rainbows before the flood.
In order for rain to happen, two things are needed. 1) a low enough temperature and 2) some particles in the saturated air around which drops can form. If conditions before the flood were such that BOTH of these requirements never were met, then there would have been no rain. We are in fact told in Gen 2:5-6 "For the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground. 6 But there went up from the earth a mist and watered all the face of the ground."
Since you are ignorant by something as simple as to how a rainbow is formed, it doesn't surprise me that you show ignorance in your understanding of God and the Bible.
.....Why, for example, would an omniscient diety need to test believers.....
.....)
For you to even ask such a question shows ignorance and shallow thinking. Does a teacher test students for his own benefit? Does he not test them for the benefit of the student? God gives tests or allows testing so we can find out where we are lacking in education and character. If you find a wallet full of $100 bills on the sidewalk, you are the one that finds out something about your honesty and integrity, depending on what your actions are.
Noah did not have to go and gather animals, they came to him. Noah did not close up the ark, but God specifically did. Your underlying premise is that either God is a myth or that at best, is uninvolved in his creation.
(.....controlled by such a wrathful diety
Most people, you being one, criticize the Bible, having never read it, let alone carefully studied it with an open mind. If you had, you would read passages like:
Exodus 34:6-7 And the LORD passed by before him and proclaimed, Jehovah! Jehovah God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty , visiting the iniquity of fathers on the sons, and on the sons of sons, to the third and to the fourth generation.
God hates evil, but loves people. The absence of good is evil, just as the absence of light is darkness. God lets us choose, but also tells us what the consequences of our choices will be. Noah warned his generation for 120 years. Finally the flood did come. It is predicted that the next world wide judgment will be by fire. We have developed the technology to destroy the world by nuclear fire. It was used to wipe out two cities and will be used again.
.....That evolution happens is a known fact.......
That depends on your definition of evolution. If you say an example of evolution is shown be how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, then that is a fact. They may in fact adapt, if you will, "evolve", to the point where they cannot interbreed any longer.
If you are saying that evolution is how reptiles became birds or monkeys became human, then that is faith. The immunity of bacteria and the breeding of dogs is fact that has been called evolution. Then this gets extended beyond the breaking point, with no evidence whatsoever for any of the large changes (even in tiny jumps) needed to turn a fish to a reptile and other transformations of totally different kinds of living things. Science is based on observation and experiment, not conjecture of what might have happened in the past to explain what we see today. There are no intermediates between a dog and a cat, reptile or fish or bird. They are distinct kinds of creatures and there will NEVER be a semi-dog or a semi-cat, half one and half the other, at least not without the intelligent interference of man.
Evolution is based on some fundamental assumptions (beliefs, faith) about time and space and the measurements of parameters thereof. If these assumptions are false (and there is evidence they are) then the whole house of evolutionary cards collapses in a heap.
Evolutionists are also totally ignorant about the nature on origin of information. Where does the immense amount of information coded in the DNA come from? This information is software, detailed code in how to build the particular life form. In computers, software comes from a mind. Where do the software instructions come from to build even a single cell?
....I'll give you the option for divine creation if you give me the option for evolution.......
The constitution guarantees that you can believe either one or anything else you want. The government is not supposed to prefer one religion above another. However, the evolutionary religion has managed to sell itself as science and illegally gets billions of dollars of tax money. Maybe it is time the ACLU sued the government for supporting religion.
......draws into question the previous belief ........
All evolutionary thinking is nothing but a belief system masquerading as science. It is based on the assumption (belief) that time itself as well as our measurement thereof is correct and absolutely constant. If is a belief that fossils were somehow made over vast periods time by unknown processes that nobody has ever duplicated, even today. Nobody has EVER made a fossil. NO fossils are being made anywhere today, especially by any slow, gradual process, sometimes imagined by evolutionists. When an organism dies today, it becomes food for others. We call this decay. To prevent this, a dead body needs to be put in an environment that prevents all microorganisms from feeding on the remains and oxygen must be excluded. This has to happen very quickly. A sudden disastrous upheaval such as the Biblical flood could certainly account for fossils.
Rocks are dated by their radioactivity. The unwarranted assumption (faith) is that such radioactive decay rates have never varied over the vast periods of time evolutionists need in order to make their assertions seem plausible. Radioactive decay is a process that comes from the properties of the various kinds of atoms. This rate of decay is governed by certain "constants". There is NO known law of physics that mandates that these all remain invariant over the vast periods of time involved. It is assumed (believed, faith) that these constants, and therefore the radioactive decay rate has always been what it is today. There is evidence that some of these so called "constants" have changed greatly since the beginning of time.
Until the 1800s, the term "dinosaur" was invented. In all the preceding centuries these same creatures were known as "dragons". Every culture has tales of and depictions of these fearsome beasts that are quite consistent across time and civilizations. There are mountains of recorded history of humans having feared and fought these huge creatures.
....Saying God made them diet is cheating!......
The biblical record states that the animals come to Noah. It wouldn't be cheating if all those animals were babies or at least very young. There is nothing that says they had to be fully grown. Such little animals would eat much less and eventually grow up to reproduce.
......Having a single unit that does everything I want it to would be a lot more convenient.......
But when the battery on your iPod dies, your entertainment ceases for a while. However, when your phone battery goes dead, it can be a matter of life and death. My iPod either sits by my bed to provide music to fall asleep by or in a dock in the car. Battery life is therefore not all that critical. The phone is always in my pocket and when its battery fails, it is a much bigger problem. A swiss army knife is useful, but a dedicated tool for its various functions is usually much better. If the entertainment use impacts the working of the phone, then having two distinct devices is much better.