.....there is a pretty rare set of conditions needed for fossilization.....
I don't think I'll reply in detail to everything. I'll just point out that fossils. regardless how you interpret them are very widespread. There are in fact few places of this planet that do NOT have fossils. Even if they made some petrified wood, is that the way it really formed? Time is the biggest enemy of fossil making. The is NO known mechanism for making fossils over long periods of time - period. Using fossils, any fossils, as evidence for evolution is a wishful fairy tale.
(....from multiple radiological clocks...)
To use any clock, you have to assume (believe = have faith) that your clock has always ticked at the same or a known rate over the total time measured. There is evidence that clocks based on atomic properties have drifted as much as by a factor of 300 million times since the "big bang". This drift is related to very fundamental properties of space itself changing as the universe expanded. The equations for atomic behavior include Planks constant. Evidence that evolutionists like to keep silent shows that the some of the so called "constants" are anything but constant over long time periods. There are few things in nature that are really constant other than change itself. So your clocks are based on faith.
(....pretty much hardcoded.....The instructions...)
These are software terms. Early computers were programmed by the way they were physically wired. When source code is compiled into machine code, there is no change in information content. Translating a story from English to French and then having that read onto a tape still doesn't change the content of the story. It is still software, information, an immaterial product shown to be arising ONLY from the activity of intellect, a mind. The software in the brain and DNA is different and vastly superior to anything we have yet invented or even imagined. Information, such as a novel or play cannot be explained by the chemistry of ink on paper of the letters of a language. Neither can the operation of the brain be grasped in any way by describing the wiring of neurons. Information is a distinct, nonphysical quantity that interacts with and controls physical matter and energy. The brain itself is physical, but its product is not. That's why even a separate large body of law dealing with INTELLECTUAL property is needed.
The universe obeys specific laws. All human laws, without exception always come from human minds. Why is it then such a leap to propose that the "natural" laws are also the product of a mind?
Evolution is a belief, not science. Science is about facts, observations and measurements. The interpretation of these facts is not always part of real science, but is guided by the basic world view of a scientist. They are all human and every human, even an atheist, has a specific world view, their basic belief system.
One of the cornerstones of Darwinian Evolution always brought up is the subject of fossils. It is a science fact that we find fossils all over the earth. However, nobody has ever made a fossil nor watched one form in nature. Today when a living thing dies, it decays. It never makes a fossil. I order to make one, the creature to be fossilized has to die quickly, along with all decay causing organisms and then be buried away from air. A massive catastrophe of water, such as the flood of Noah could make fossils, but no slow process we know anything about could.
Evolution is faith, in lots and lots of time. It basically substitutes billions and millions of years for the creative power of God. The evolutionist's God is time, lots of time. Without all that supposed time, evolution is a dead farce, pure belief, masquerading as science. Evolution is the atheists way of interpreting the facts of science according to their belief.
(...There is plenty of atheism to go around,...)
Indeed there is. An "a" in front of a word, originally from Greek or Latin means "without" or "not". Amoral means without moral, amuse means not to muse, that is to think. An atheist is therefore someone without God or belief in him. Even so, atheists do think and ask some important questions, such as their origins, purpose and destiny after death. Their answers to these are faith based just as much as any theist's is.
(.....The brain is the seat of our very being...)
That is definitely NOT a fact in any way shape of form. We simply do NOT know where the seat of consciousness is physically located nor even if it is physical. In computer terms, firmware is still software, only more intimately connected to a particular hardware. The most detailed physical examination of the circuits of a computer with tell you absolutely NOTHING about the software it is running. A Mac running OSX or WinXP will not change physically by so much as one atom while running one the other or both. That is why consciousness has no more to do with neurons and neurology than gates and registers have anything to do with the OS as such.
Our brain is of course vital to the execution of both the OS and the applications. An infant is born with a complete OS with little application software. That is all learned later -- programmed in as it were. The OS is in part determined by other software stored in the genetic code inherited from our ancestors. The brain is indeed a wonderful organ, hardware specifically designed to allow the efficient execution of unimaginably complex software. You, the real person lives inside a marvelous body for a short time. After that you WILL meet the programmer personally.
I think you misunderstood. We, unlike computers are not programmed deterministically, we do have a choice. That choice is to either believe God or not. Scientists merely discover what God our Creator has put into the dimensions of this physical space-time universe.
The FACTS of science and the Bible text as originally written never disagree. It is in the interpretation of both the facts and the text that differences arise. No fact of science disagrees with scripture. Evolution is faith in lots and lots of time. It basically substitutes billions and millions of years for the creative power of God. The evolutionist's God is time, lots of time. Without all that supposed time, evolution is a dead farce, pure belief, masquerading as science. Let me give you some examples to show that your faith is grounded in truth:
It is a science fact that we find fossils all over the earth. However, nobody has ever made a fossil nor watched one form in nature. Today when a living thing dies, it decays. It never makes a fossil. I order to make one, the creature to be fossilized has to die quickly, along with all decay causing organisms and then be buried away from air. A massive catastrophe of water, such as the flood of Noah could make fossils, but no slow process we know anything about could.
If the Universe were really billions of years old, the should no longer be such a thing as comets. However there are still plenty of them. So to get around this quandary, an evolutionist astronomer named Jan Oort came up with a hypothetical thing that has been named the Oort cloud where comets are supposed to originate. Of course, such a cloud has never been found. The God given Biblical model needs no such fictional entities. The never found dark matter and energy the evolution version of the big bang requires also are not needed if God indeed make the universe as outlined in Genesis.
.....Perhaps the material (the DNA) is subject to SPIRITUAL constraints...
The DNA is a carrier of information in the same way a disk is. The DNA is equivalent to the hardware and the information it stores is the software. Each of us is a software program executing in a hardware body. The former can exist on its own, but requires the latter to become manifest. Software is not physical. Neither is our soul, spirit or mind, whatever you want to call it, made from matter. Jesus tell us that God is Spirit. According to scripture, we too are living spirits, currently executing in mortal hardware. The promise is that one day that software, the real person will get loaded into immortal hardware, commensurate with our now already eternal spirit. The choice we have now is whether we will be with God or away from Him.
......The world doesn't fit what we would expect to find if religion were true........
You are making the same basic assumption that the original article makes: Namely that evolution is true and that special creation by God is false. The evolutionary world view requires a convoluted, contradictory theory why man is so incurably religious. The Biblical world view cuts through all that and simply states that we are made in the image of God. In the tone of the article, yes, indeed we are hardwired by the Creator to have a deep yearning for a connection to Him. I prefer to use the word "programmed" instaed. It is really that simple and the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Just as hardware and software are distinct, so too is the brain and the mind. Software can exist independent of any particular hardware. In the same way, the mind can be independent of the brain. Software in itself is immaterial and can exist in many locations simultaneously. It only requires hardware to be physically manifest to us right now. Mind, soul, spirit or whatever this immaterial thing is labeled is like that. It can exist on its own, but usually in our experience requires hardware in order for us to perceive its activity.
Is it really so surprising that triggering certain interrupts in the brain causes normally hidden software routines to execute? The operation of a computer is determined by its software alone, given properly functioning hardware. Modern Macs can switch back and forth between Windows and OSX. Why should it be so surprising that the basic functions of a human being should not also be controlled by immaterial software originally written by the programmer, God in this case. He simply decided to build "religion" deep into our operating system.
...I don't consider milking a small group of consumers with their over priced computers "taking MS on the desktop"......
I don't either. Its a big hardware market out there, but Apple is on the road to getting the most profitable slice thereof. They will take a big bite from both the computer makers and folks like Sony and the consumer electronics pie. It is possible that once DRM finally dies, Apple and MS will work together much more than they have in the past. If Apple and even Linux together do take 40% of the market, MS will still make a lot of $$$ from their office programs. Even now, it must be worthwhile for them to support the Mac. They may not be getting rich on the Mac side of their business, but they are not going broke either. MS has to be careful however, that the likes of Google don't steal their lunch.
If the geeks and computer lovers that so selflessly work on Linux would ever manage to put on ordinary user hats, rather than geek garb, Linux may also get about 20% of the computing pie, mostly in business. I have tried Linux and it is very good. However It requires too much knowledge about computing and computers to be ever used by Grandma and Grandpa, without the support of knowledgeable relative or friend.
.....all Microsoft has to do to kill Apple is stop producing Office for OS X.......
Why would MS want to do that? Their Mac Business is a nice little money machine. Apple may eventually get up to 20% or so of market, still no threat to MS. Also a not insignificant number of Mac users are installing Windows on their Apples, paying MS handsomely with full retail prices.
....I doubt Apple will ever gain significant market share as long as Mac OS X requires a Mac......
The point of the original article is that they don't have to get a huge market share. The just have to get the customers with real money. In 5 years they may have 20% or so, but it will be cream of the entire PC market. MS is not their competitor, but actually their ally, as long as MS keeps coming up with stuff like VISTA and as long as Windows of all flavors is still plagued by mountains of malware.
....If we could have our existing desktops shipped with OSX,......
You can. Just buy your boxes from Apple. Every one of them comes with OSX pre-installed. I'm sure that Apple will give a volume discount. You can even still run Windows for those few jobs where there is no OSX alternative yet.
.....in reality they are charging a HUGE premium for their operating system........
All businesses are primarily interested in making a profit. Apple just has convinced a sizable number of customers that Apple hardware is a better integrated solution worth paying a little extra for. In the end, it is the buyer that determines what anything will sell for. Apple is after those who know and are willing to pay for higher quality. For basic transportation buy a Toyota or Ford. For a little more, get a BMW or Mercedes if you can afford one. Apple is after those who can afford a higher quality computer. If you can't, buy a cheap Dell.
.....I suspect that if we had the voice of God come out of the sky and say "Man Made Global Warming is a myth" or "Man Made Global Warming is happening" it wouldn't have any impact on the debate today...........
More likely is that nobody would believe Him. He has in fact told us about severe Global warming caused by the sun. (Isaiah 30:26, Rev 16:8-9) It will be part of the process when God cleanses the world of evil and brings down the rule of man over earth and will send Jesus, the God-man back down here to take over the planet. Unfortunately, the question that Isaiah asked in 53:1 he would still ask if alive today.
Moderators may again kill the messenger by modding this post a troll.
.....The problem of global warming and increasing greenhouse gas levels needs to be addressed......
Now global warming appears to be a problem for Martians also. They better stop driving those gas guzzling SUV all over their planet also.
Of course for those who still do or have ever believed the ancient prophecies in the Bible might look at: Isaiah 30:26 and Revelation 16:8-9 Both of these have to do with the final period of human history. Could it be that we are approaching that time?
......It is somewhat spurious to claim that since we didn't OBSERVE a process that took 1 million years, that it simply didn't happen........
Science is measurement and observation. We observe that there are fossils. That is all we really know. As to their origin, that is pure interpretation. Nobody has ever seen one form, nor is there some ancient manuscript that describes how they were made. Both you and I are operating by faith about the origins of everything that we cannot directly observe or actually make it happen. Your example about walking across the US is a straw man which you then demolish. We can actually observe someone walking across the US. If someone offered to pay you $100 million to take such a walk, would you try? We don't have to guess about it. However we cannot observe the formation of fossils. All we know is that we find them all over. You and your fellow believers simply INTERPRET the evidence through your world view which leaves no room for an intelligent mind as the originator of life. Those of us who do believe in a designer interpret the real observed facts to point to a grand design with a purpose.
Suppose both of us are strolling along a beach and there stumble upon an old fashioned mechanical watch ticking away. Since we are good friends, we take this thing to our lab at home and carefully examine it. Neither of us nor anyone we know has ever seen one. No examination thereof will ever tell us how that watch came into existence and ended up on the beach. All that science will tell us about it is that it does what it does, but absolutely NOTHING about its origin. Then we start interpreting the things we find via our world view, our beliefs. You will have your beliefs and I will have mine. The data we can glean from the watch itself neither refutes nor substantiates either belief as correct.
Neither my idea of a designer nor yours about the millions of years can be established from the mere existence and study of the watch. Neither of us ever met the watchmaker nor were we there to actually see that watch come to be. All we KNOW is that it is here and operates in a certain way.
Neither you or me nor any other human alive has ever seen a fossil form. I was not there to watch the designer make them and you were not around millions of years ago to watch them form by some whatever way you imagine they came to be. You simply choose to believe in the supernatural ability of immense amounts of time to "somehow" have made fossils. I believe that an intelligent designer, the God and creator of all, made all the creatures we now find fossilized from the action of a great disastrous world wide flood.
We both attribute the existence of Grand Canyon to the action of water. You believe in the magic of immense periods of time and I believe in the occurrence of a vast global catastrophe over about a years time as chronicled in the Bible and other stories, of a great deluge.
.....Every hardware vendor who offers computers with preinstalled systems isnt doing less "designing" on the hardware-software-interface than Apple......
Really? Then why doesn't say Sony make their own OS rather than selling their creations with Windows? Apple is the ONLY hardware maker that makes their own OS. Why should Apple sell their engines for all the other vehicles? They don't prevent you from installing other engines in your vehicles. BMW doesn't sell their engines to the makers of the Yugo or even to Honda. Writing decent drivers is HARD. Lack of good drivers has been and still is a major issue for Windows. Buggy, poorly written drivers have been and still are a painful thorn in Windows users hide. For the makers of Windows hardware, writing drives is an expense, whereas Apple writes drivers only for the hardware they sell, which is their bread and butter. It is the software alone, that turns any computer from an expensive doorstop into a useful tool. Apple is the only company that seems to have fully grasped that basic fact. They rightly take pains to ensure that their crown jewel software will NOT work in someone else's cheap hardware. If they did, they'd be broke in a month. Apple's competitor is NOT MS, but the like of Dell, Hp Gateway etc. Why should they give or sell their OS to those people? If you want OSX, buy a Mac and get a complete computer SYSTEM. Otherwise make do with Windows or better, switch to Linux.
...On higher-end hardware, new versions of Windows (along with other OSes) are usually faster......
That is exactly the opposite of what I wrote. You apparently missed the phrase SAME hardware. I have an average 2001 PC. Win2K is significantly more responsive on that than WinXP-Sp2. Of course will any OS be faster on a modern 8 core machine. One would hope that VISTA would be able to take advantage of newer hardware. I was talking about the old iron. All Macs that came out since 2000 have had exactly the same graphics look. They used plain quartz, without the "extreme" part which came later. Apple makes the entire computer, so they can ensure that things "just work". I have a 2001 laptop G4 running OSX10.8, the current version. It runs a LOT faster with 10.4 than it did with the 10.1 I first upgraded to from the OS9 it came with.
I could and did put in more RAM and a bigger HD. How could a new video card be installed? Do PC laptops come with replaceable video subsystems? You could and did HAVE to upgrade your desktop video in order to take advantage of the new VISTA eye candy on that old computer. On an old iMac you'd see all the SAME eye candy as on the newer ones without *any* hardware changes. The new ones are of course much faster.
One way to compare OS is to find out how many lines of code there are within it. OSX is by far more efficient than any of the MS bloatware. Of course MS does have a bit of an excuse for that, since they have to get their thing to run on all sorts of different hardware. They can actually be admired that they do that as well as they do. Apple is not burdened with that problem and so their OS can always be leaner and more efficient. With OSX there are also none of the burdensome "activation" hassles and DRM embedded deeply in the OS itself. Apple has DRM in one Application -- iTunes. In the past, the PowerPC era, Macnuts would get in line around the block in order to get their mitts on the latest major OSX version. In that regard VISTA is a big thud. MS will do fine though, because they have a hammerlock on all the other PC makers. Eventually VISTA will take over anyway because there is no other choice when a person wants/needs a new Windows computer.
....Anyone that buys a Microsoft opperating system before the first update......
Very few people will actually update their existing computers. Early retail numbers of poor VISTA sales show this already. As in the past, most people will get VISTA with their next shiny new computer unless they buy a Mac. How many people are running XP on a computer that came new with Win98? Not many I'd bet.
....when you really look at Vista objectiveily its a huge improvement over xp and 2k....
The article seems to indicate otherwise. VISTA is newer but not compellingly better than XP. If MS had to rely on upgraders from XP and earlier, MS would go broke soon. However they have all hardware makers over a barrel, since it is as impossible to sell a computer without an OS as it would be to sell a car without an engine. So anyone who buys a new computer will be forced to also take the new VISTA engine. Therefore, MS will do just fine unless everyone buys Macs or switches to Linux. It is doubtful that will happen.
....You could make a case that it won't run great on hardware manufactured 2-3 years ago......
Each succeeding Windows generation always runs WORSE on the same hardware than the older one. If Wink2K runs fine on a 7 year old computer, WinXP is slower and VISTA may not run at all or very poorly on such an old dog. With OSX this is just the opposite. Each newer version runs faster on a vintage Mac of similar age, than the one before. Both OS like plenty of RAM. Luckily, RAM has gotten cheap and is easily retrofitted into most of those old computers. It is much harder or impossible to make an old computer significantly faster though. Compare ebay prices of 7 year old Macs with similar aged Windows boxes. Maybe the fact that the old dogs will still run the latest OSX has something to do with that, as well as the usually better quality in the first place. The 400Mhz iMacs Apple first introduced in July of 2000, will run the current OSX10.4 faster than any earlier versions of OSX and in its FULL capability of eye candy. Try to get VISTA ultimate with Aero to run on any PC box of that age. You may not change the computer in any way other than stuff it with as much RAM as it will take. Macs may be a bit more expensive, but in the long term they are a much better buy. Kind of like our Hondas.
...just inferior in terms of its availability.....
OSX is not an OS in the same way *any* flavor of Windows is or has ever been and will be. OSX and its hardware are one system unit, conceived and designed for and with each other and sold as a single computing device. No Windows system will ever do that until either MS begins making their won computers or the other hardware makers write their own specially tailored OS. Talking about OSX inferior availability is sheer nonsense.
....Also, I'm extremely skeptical of any new taxes.....
So am I! Let there be a law that says that the commerce system has to close the circle. That means anybody can take the device or item back to a seller and that seller would have to send it back to the maker. Yes it would add to the cost to close the goods distribution system, which is presently an open loop. Finally the gadget would get back to the manufacturer who could then decide what to do with it. Rebuild, re-use or recycle it. Every item sold after a certain date would be stamped with a return tag, making eligible to be returned, eventually to the maker thereof. No government involvement needed save for the passing of a well written set of laws closing the distribution system loop.
....Both of which are fairly widely accepted around the world as likely truth.....
We all know of course that the majority is always right, whether they are scientists or not. I believe that the word "evolution" is a rather wide term that should be narrowed. If all the experiments done with fruit flies, bacteria, and even mice are called "evolution", great. However, when that word gets extrapolated to the progression from bacteria -> flies-> mice and finally even humans it becomes religious faith. None of these monumental changes has ever been observed. Adding the faith-magic of time does NOT help here.
Over and over you talk about species. I never mentioned that word. The term I used is kind. It is not a scientific term. However a dog, cat and mouse are different kinds of creatures. Never has anyone found a migration across such a kind barrier. All three are mammals, yet they are distinct and always have been so. The bird examples you gave are still all birds. The coccus bacteria and spirochetes are two distinct kinds which do not interoperate. Fruit flies are still flies. If you want to call the innumerable variations within these various distinct groups "evolution", fine I'll go along with that because it is a verifiable observed fact. I'll go along with all of what you wrote about all the variations of species, even to the point that these species cannot interbreed any more.
What I won't agree to is to call the jumps from reptiles to mammals or birds also evolution and pretend such a belief is scientific. That is a stretch of the evolutionary principle that has never been observed or duplicated by any present day demonstrable process. The magic faith ingredient of immense time doesn't solve the problem that these sort of jumps are just not happening today. It is the theorizing of these immense jumps which are not observed which is a blatant fabrication.
Nobody today has ever made a fossil and it certainly does NOT happen slowly. Time is the worst enemy of making fossils. If you want to see how stratification and petrification happen, go and study what happened in 1982 at Mt. St. Helens Spirit Lake and the Toutle River. You will find a miniature Grand Canyon (strata and all) and uncounted trees buried upright at the bottom of what is left of Spirit Lake, some of them already partially petrified. This was the result of a local, but yet significant catastrophe, burying a vast forest in minutes and fractions thereof.
Anybody with half a brain, that has ever flown at 35,000 feet or so over the Grand Canyon, can see that the tiny trickle of the Colorado could have never sculpted the landscape unfolding below. Go to Google Earth and see. Only unimaginably huge amounts of rapidly rushing waters could do such a thing. My main point is that, yes we see all the erosion, but it was done quickly, in minutes and hours and days, rather than over millions of years. If you have ever seen a flash flood roar through what was only a minute before a dry wash, you'd understand how quickly the landscape can be rearranged by rushing water.
Nobody knows what caused such a flood. Here is a theory: The earth rotates at about a 1000 miles per hour. An external cause, such as a wandering massive body changes the angle of the axis suddenly. This stresses the crust and the oceans keep moving in the same way, rushing in one to two mile high tsunamis all over the planet, washing over the continents like a rock in the middle of a raging river. We know from seismic wave studies that the mantle of the earth contains a lot of water. Gravitational stress could certainly bring some of that to the surface temporarily. When the stress subsides, some or most of the water returns to whence it came, sort of like a sponge no longer squeezed. If the earth were smooth, it would be covered totally with water over a mile deep, even today. Why should a global flood be such an inconceivable event?
I have never said that genetic mutations are by deletion only. If you take a novel or play and move the letters or even the pages around, or even add some pages from other novels only by statistical means, you have not added to the total information. Information in itself is not physical, although it requires a physical medium to me manifest. No source other than mental has ever been found. Software has no mass, only it carrier does. Even if DNA is added, there is no added information, unless that DNA addition is does by an intelligent researcher applying the power of MIND to the process. I am not making anything up.
The Bible contains a lot of figurative and poetic language. It also talks about sunrises and sunsets. We still use such constructs today, even though we now know that it is the movement of the Earth that causes the appearance thereof.
If you would study a little history, especially about calendars, you would know that ancient calendars all applied exactly 360 days to a year and that this exact multiple worked fine for millennia. Then for reasons unknown they all changed, coincidentally all at about the time this event in Joshua was took place. There are also many stories in other ancient cultures about a long day.
The Bible tells us that God is very patient, but he hates sin and eventually deals with it. Sin creates death. Israel needed to remain in Egypt because God tells us that the measure of iniquity of the present inhabitants of the land God had promised Israel was not yet full. God gave those people 400 years to turn from their sins, which included child sacrifices. Finally He commanded Israel to wipe them out. They failed to obey God to fully do this and now to this day the descendants of these are a thorn in the side of Israel. God eventually considered the people mentioned in numbers 31 the same way a surgeon regards cancer, good normal cell that went bad.
When there is a cancer, a surgeon has to remove it ALL. Leaving only one cell means the disease will return. If left unchecked the patient dies from it. It may seem callous to compare people with cancer, but that is because we are so used to evil. We humans get kind of used to it in the same way the frog does in the water pot set on a burner, set to boil. Even though the frog easily could jump out, it will remain in the pot until cooked, if the heat is turned up slowly and imperceptibly. Evil that used to shock us at one time no longer bothers us much after a while.
The worst sin a person can do is to call God a liar through unbelief. That is how it began in the garden "Yea has God said...?" You HAVE choses to do that and this is much worse than blasphemy.
.....Why did all of the whales end up above the ichtyhosaurs? Do icthyousaurs sink faster than whales?.........
That is another topic, the arrangement of the fossils. I was talking about a more basic thing -- the existence of fossils in the first place. Tell me about how that happened and then we can discuss the layering thereof. I'll give you a hint: The layering of fossils is nor all that consistent in all the diverse places we find fossils. They are found however all over the planet. There are in fact few places that DON'T have fossils. The flood was not some tranquil overflowing like a giant bathtub, but a horrendous upheaval from raging, rapidly flowing waters all over the planet. Think of the power of a tsunami multiplied millions of times.
Making a blind copy of something, unless digital always decreases the information. In the case of digital and DNA (which is digital) the information content remains the same. That is the best that can be done. Two copies of Hamlet don't contain more information than one. In an activity of mind, you can make a copy of Hamlet and your added commentary about it is added information to the basic work. Information ONLY comes from a mind, NEVER anywhere else. Nobody has ever demonstrated a source of information other than a mind, an intelligent being.
....There's some central planner that makes sure......
To a degree true, but mostly it is the collective decisions of at least somewhat intelligent consumers that drives the suppliers of the things you mention. If nobody buys your widget, for whatever reasons there is no central planner that mandates that, but he suppliers for the ingredients for you widget will have to find other widget makers whose widgets also use these pieces, but which the consumer do collectively like and buy. Advertising is the main means by which widget makers try to get consumers to buy their creations. Most people call that the free market and it works fine mostly, but not every time. Sometimes it needs to be tweaked, but that is not always done legitimately. The ones who are allowed to create money out of thin air (Federal reserve and central bankers) are the main tweakers.
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.....there is a pretty rare set of conditions needed for fossilization.....
I don't think I'll reply in detail to everything. I'll just point out that fossils. regardless how you interpret them are very widespread. There are in fact few places of this planet that do NOT have fossils. Even if they made some petrified wood, is that the way it really formed? Time is the biggest enemy of fossil making. The is NO known mechanism for making fossils over long periods of time - period. Using fossils, any fossils, as evidence for evolution is a wishful fairy tale.
(....from multiple radiological clocks...)
To use any clock, you have to assume (believe = have faith) that your clock has always ticked at the same or a known rate over the total time measured. There is evidence that clocks based on atomic properties have drifted as much as by a factor of 300 million times since the "big bang". This drift is related to very fundamental properties of space itself changing as the universe expanded. The equations for atomic behavior include Planks constant. Evidence that evolutionists like to keep silent shows that the some of the so called "constants" are anything but constant over long time periods. There are few things in nature that are really constant other than change itself. So your clocks are based on faith.
(....pretty much hardcoded.....The instructions...)
These are software terms. Early computers were programmed by the way they were physically wired. When source code is compiled into machine code, there is no change in information content. Translating a story from English to French and then having that read onto a tape still doesn't change the content of the story. It is still software, information, an immaterial product shown to be arising ONLY from the activity of intellect, a mind. The software in the brain and DNA is different and vastly superior to anything we have yet invented or even imagined. Information, such as a novel or play cannot be explained by the chemistry of ink on paper of the letters of a language. Neither can the operation of the brain be grasped in any way by describing the wiring of neurons. Information is a distinct, nonphysical quantity that interacts with and controls physical matter and energy. The brain itself is physical, but its product is not. That's why even a separate large body of law dealing with INTELLECTUAL property is needed.
The universe obeys specific laws. All human laws, without exception always come from human minds. Why is it then such a leap to propose that the "natural" laws are also the product of a mind?
.....We find that both evolution is true.......
Evolution is a belief, not science. Science is about facts, observations and measurements. The interpretation of these facts is not always part of real science, but is guided by the basic world view of a scientist. They are all human and every human, even an atheist, has a specific world view, their basic belief system.
One of the cornerstones of Darwinian Evolution always brought up is the subject of fossils. It is a science fact that we find fossils all over the earth. However, nobody has ever made a fossil nor watched one form in nature. Today when a living thing dies, it decays. It never makes a fossil. I order to make one, the creature to be fossilized has to die quickly, along with all decay causing organisms and then be buried away from air. A massive catastrophe of water, such as the flood of Noah could make fossils, but no slow process we know anything about could.
Evolution is faith, in lots and lots of time. It basically substitutes billions and millions of years for the creative power of God. The evolutionist's God is time, lots of time. Without all that supposed time, evolution is a dead farce, pure belief, masquerading as science. Evolution is the atheists way of interpreting the facts of science according to their belief.
(...There is plenty of atheism to go around,...)
Indeed there is. An "a" in front of a word, originally from Greek or Latin means "without" or "not". Amoral means without moral, amuse means not to muse, that is to think. An atheist is therefore someone without God or belief in him. Even so, atheists do think and ask some important questions, such as their origins, purpose and destiny after death. Their answers to these are faith based just as much as any theist's is.
(.....The brain is the seat of our very being...)
That is definitely NOT a fact in any way shape of form. We simply do NOT know where the seat of consciousness is physically located nor even if it is physical. In computer terms, firmware is still software, only more intimately connected to a particular hardware. The most detailed physical examination of the circuits of a computer with tell you absolutely NOTHING about the software it is running. A Mac running OSX or WinXP will not change physically by so much as one atom while running one the other or both. That is why consciousness has no more to do with neurons and neurology than gates and registers have anything to do with the OS as such.
Our brain is of course vital to the execution of both the OS and the applications. An infant is born with a complete OS with little application software. That is all learned later -- programmed in as it were. The OS is in part determined by other software stored in the genetic code inherited from our ancestors. The brain is indeed a wonderful organ, hardware specifically designed to allow the efficient execution of unimaginably complex software. You, the real person lives inside a marvelous body for a short time. After that you WILL meet the programmer personally.
.....without choice or free will....
I think you misunderstood. We, unlike computers are not programmed deterministically, we do have a choice. That choice is to either believe God or not. Scientists merely discover what God our Creator has put into the dimensions of this physical space-time universe.
The FACTS of science and the Bible text as originally written never disagree. It is in the interpretation of both the facts and the text that differences arise. No fact of science disagrees with scripture. Evolution is faith in lots and lots of time. It basically substitutes billions and millions of years for the creative power of God. The evolutionist's God is time, lots of time. Without all that supposed time, evolution is a dead farce, pure belief, masquerading as science. Let me give you some examples to show that your faith is grounded in truth:
It is a science fact that we find fossils all over the earth. However, nobody has ever made a fossil nor watched one form in nature. Today when a living thing dies, it decays. It never makes a fossil. I order to make one, the creature to be fossilized has to die quickly, along with all decay causing organisms and then be buried away from air. A massive catastrophe of water, such as the flood of Noah could make fossils, but no slow process we know anything about could.
If the Universe were really billions of years old, the should no longer be such a thing as comets. However there are still plenty of them. So to get around this quandary, an evolutionist astronomer named Jan Oort came up with a hypothetical thing that has been named the Oort cloud where comets are supposed to originate. Of course, such a cloud has never been found. The God given Biblical model needs no such fictional entities. The never found dark matter and energy the evolution version of the big bang requires also are not needed if God indeed make the universe as outlined in Genesis.
.....Perhaps the material (the DNA) is subject to SPIRITUAL constraints...
The DNA is a carrier of information in the same way a disk is. The DNA is equivalent to the hardware and the information it stores is the software. Each of us is a software program executing in a hardware body. The former can exist on its own, but requires the latter to become manifest. Software is not physical. Neither is our soul, spirit or mind, whatever you want to call it, made from matter. Jesus tell us that God is Spirit. According to scripture, we too are living spirits, currently executing in mortal hardware. The promise is that one day that software, the real person will get loaded into immortal hardware, commensurate with our now already eternal spirit. The choice we have now is whether we will be with God or away from Him.
......The world doesn't fit what we would expect to find if religion were true........
You are making the same basic assumption that the original article makes: Namely that evolution is true and that special creation by God is false. The evolutionary world view requires a convoluted, contradictory theory why man is so incurably religious. The Biblical world view cuts through all that and simply states that we are made in the image of God. In the tone of the article, yes, indeed we are hardwired by the Creator to have a deep yearning for a connection to Him. I prefer to use the word "programmed" instaed. It is really that simple and the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Just as hardware and software are distinct, so too is the brain and the mind. Software can exist independent of any particular hardware. In the same way, the mind can be independent of the brain. Software in itself is immaterial and can exist in many locations simultaneously. It only requires hardware to be physically manifest to us right now. Mind, soul, spirit or whatever this immaterial thing is labeled is like that. It can exist on its own, but usually in our experience requires hardware in order for us to perceive its activity.
Is it really so surprising that triggering certain interrupts in the brain causes normally hidden software routines to execute? The operation of a computer is determined by its software alone, given properly functioning hardware. Modern Macs can switch back and forth between Windows and OSX. Why should it be so surprising that the basic functions of a human being should not also be controlled by immaterial software originally written by the programmer, God in this case. He simply decided to build "religion" deep into our operating system.
...I don't consider milking a small group of consumers with their over priced computers "taking MS on the desktop"......
I don't either. Its a big hardware market out there, but Apple is on the road to getting the most profitable slice thereof. They will take a big bite from both the computer makers and folks like Sony and the consumer electronics pie. It is possible that once DRM finally dies, Apple and MS will work together much more than they have in the past. If Apple and even Linux together do take 40% of the market, MS will still make a lot of $$$ from their office programs. Even now, it must be worthwhile for them to support the Mac. They may not be getting rich on the Mac side of their business, but they are not going broke either. MS has to be careful however, that the likes of Google don't steal their lunch.
If the geeks and computer lovers that so selflessly work on Linux would ever manage to put on ordinary user hats, rather than geek garb, Linux may also get about 20% of the computing pie, mostly in business. I have tried Linux and it is very good. However It requires too much knowledge about computing and computers to be ever used by Grandma and Grandpa, without the support of knowledgeable relative or friend.
.....all Microsoft has to do to kill Apple is stop producing Office for OS X.......
Why would MS want to do that? Their Mac Business is a nice little money machine. Apple may eventually get up to 20% or so of market, still no threat to MS. Also a not insignificant number of Mac users are installing Windows on their Apples, paying MS handsomely with full retail prices.
....I doubt Apple will ever gain significant market share as long as Mac OS X requires a Mac......
The point of the original article is that they don't have to get a huge market share. The just have to get the customers with real money. In 5 years they may have 20% or so, but it will be cream of the entire PC market. MS is not their competitor, but actually their ally, as long as MS keeps coming up with stuff like VISTA and as long as Windows of all flavors is still plagued by mountains of malware.
....If we could have our existing desktops shipped with OSX, ......
You can. Just buy your boxes from Apple. Every one of them comes with OSX pre-installed. I'm sure that Apple will give a volume discount. You can even still run Windows for those few jobs where there is no OSX alternative yet.
.....in reality they are charging a HUGE premium for their operating system........
All businesses are primarily interested in making a profit. Apple just has convinced a sizable number of customers that Apple hardware is a better integrated solution worth paying a little extra for. In the end, it is the buyer that determines what anything will sell for. Apple is after those who know and are willing to pay for higher quality. For basic transportation buy a Toyota or Ford. For a little more, get a BMW or Mercedes if you can afford one. Apple is after those who can afford a higher quality computer. If you can't, buy a cheap Dell.
.....I suspect that if we had the voice of God come out of the sky and say "Man Made Global Warming is a myth" or "Man Made Global Warming is happening" it wouldn't have any impact on the debate today ...........
More likely is that nobody would believe Him. He has in fact told us about severe Global warming caused by the sun. (Isaiah 30:26, Rev 16:8-9) It will be part of the process when God cleanses the world of evil and brings down the rule of man over earth and will send Jesus, the God-man back down here to take over the planet. Unfortunately, the question that Isaiah asked in 53:1 he would still ask if alive today.
Moderators may again kill the messenger by modding this post a troll.
.....The problem of global warming and increasing greenhouse gas levels needs to be addressed......
Now global warming appears to be a problem for Martians also. They better stop driving those gas guzzling SUV all over their planet also.
Of course for those who still do or have ever believed the ancient prophecies in the Bible might look at: Isaiah 30:26 and Revelation 16:8-9 Both of these have to do with the final period of human history. Could it be that we are approaching that time?
......It is somewhat spurious to claim that since we didn't OBSERVE a process that took 1 million years, that it simply didn't happen........
Science is measurement and observation. We observe that there are fossils. That is all we really know. As to their origin, that is pure interpretation. Nobody has ever seen one form, nor is there some ancient manuscript that describes how they were made. Both you and I are operating by faith about the origins of everything that we cannot directly observe or actually make it happen. Your example about walking across the US is a straw man which you then demolish. We can actually observe someone walking across the US. If someone offered to pay you $100 million to take such a walk, would you try? We don't have to guess about it. However we cannot observe the formation of fossils. All we know is that we find them all over. You and your fellow believers simply INTERPRET the evidence through your world view which leaves no room for an intelligent mind as the originator of life. Those of us who do believe in a designer interpret the real observed facts to point to a grand design with a purpose.
Suppose both of us are strolling along a beach and there stumble upon an old fashioned mechanical watch ticking away. Since we are good friends, we take this thing to our lab at home and carefully examine it. Neither of us nor anyone we know has ever seen one. No examination thereof will ever tell us how that watch came into existence and ended up on the beach. All that science will tell us about it is that it does what it does, but absolutely NOTHING about its origin. Then we start interpreting the things we find via our world view, our beliefs. You will have your beliefs and I will have mine. The data we can glean from the watch itself neither refutes nor substantiates either belief as correct.
Neither my idea of a designer nor yours about the millions of years can be established from the mere existence and study of the watch. Neither of us ever met the watchmaker nor were we there to actually see that watch come to be. All we KNOW is that it is here and operates in a certain way.
Neither you or me nor any other human alive has ever seen a fossil form. I was not there to watch the designer make them and you were not around millions of years ago to watch them form by some whatever way you imagine they came to be. You simply choose to believe in the supernatural ability of immense amounts of time to "somehow" have made fossils. I believe that an intelligent designer, the God and creator of all, made all the creatures we now find fossilized from the action of a great disastrous world wide flood.
We both attribute the existence of Grand Canyon to the action of water. You believe in the magic of immense periods of time and I believe in the occurrence of a vast global catastrophe over about a years time as chronicled in the Bible and other stories, of a great deluge.
.....Every hardware vendor who offers computers with preinstalled systems isnt doing less "designing" on the hardware-software-interface than Apple......
Really? Then why doesn't say Sony make their own OS rather than selling their creations with Windows? Apple is the ONLY hardware maker that makes their own OS. Why should Apple sell their engines for all the other vehicles? They don't prevent you from installing other engines in your vehicles. BMW doesn't sell their engines to the makers of the Yugo or even to Honda. Writing decent drivers is HARD. Lack of good drivers has been and still is a major issue for Windows. Buggy, poorly written drivers have been and still are a painful thorn in Windows users hide. For the makers of Windows hardware, writing drives is an expense, whereas Apple writes drivers only for the hardware they sell, which is their bread and butter. It is the software alone, that turns any computer from an expensive doorstop into a useful tool. Apple is the only company that seems to have fully grasped that basic fact. They rightly take pains to ensure that their crown jewel software will NOT work in someone else's cheap hardware. If they did, they'd be broke in a month. Apple's competitor is NOT MS, but the like of Dell, Hp Gateway etc. Why should they give or sell their OS to those people? If you want OSX, buy a Mac and get a complete computer SYSTEM. Otherwise make do with Windows or better, switch to Linux.
...On higher-end hardware, new versions of Windows (along with other OSes) are usually faster ......
That is exactly the opposite of what I wrote. You apparently missed the phrase SAME hardware. I have an average 2001 PC. Win2K is significantly more responsive on that than WinXP-Sp2. Of course will any OS be faster on a modern 8 core machine. One would hope that VISTA would be able to take advantage of newer hardware. I was talking about the old iron. All Macs that came out since 2000 have had exactly the same graphics look. They used plain quartz, without the "extreme" part which came later. Apple makes the entire computer, so they can ensure that things "just work". I have a 2001 laptop G4 running OSX10.8, the current version. It runs a LOT faster with 10.4 than it did with the 10.1 I first upgraded to from the OS9 it came with.
I could and did put in more RAM and a bigger HD. How could a new video card be installed? Do PC laptops come with replaceable video subsystems? You could and did HAVE to upgrade your desktop video in order to take advantage of the new VISTA eye candy on that old computer. On an old iMac you'd see all the SAME eye candy as on the newer ones without *any* hardware changes. The new ones are of course much faster.
One way to compare OS is to find out how many lines of code there are within it. OSX is by far more efficient than any of the MS bloatware. Of course MS does have a bit of an excuse for that, since they have to get their thing to run on all sorts of different hardware. They can actually be admired that they do that as well as they do. Apple is not burdened with that problem and so their OS can always be leaner and more efficient. With OSX there are also none of the burdensome "activation" hassles and DRM embedded deeply in the OS itself. Apple has DRM in one Application -- iTunes. In the past, the PowerPC era, Macnuts would get in line around the block in order to get their mitts on the latest major OSX version. In that regard VISTA is a big thud. MS will do fine though, because they have a hammerlock on all the other PC makers. Eventually VISTA will take over anyway because there is no other choice when a person wants/needs a new Windows computer.
....Anyone that buys a Microsoft opperating system before the first update......
Very few people will actually update their existing computers. Early retail numbers of poor VISTA sales show this already. As in the past, most people will get VISTA with their next shiny new computer unless they buy a Mac. How many people are running XP on a computer that came new with Win98? Not many I'd bet.
....when you really look at Vista objectiveily its a huge improvement over xp and 2k....
The article seems to indicate otherwise. VISTA is newer but not compellingly better than XP. If MS had to rely on upgraders from XP and earlier, MS would go broke soon. However they have all hardware makers over a barrel, since it is as impossible to sell a computer without an OS as it would be to sell a car without an engine. So anyone who buys a new computer will be forced to also take the new VISTA engine. Therefore, MS will do just fine unless everyone buys Macs or switches to Linux. It is doubtful that will happen.
....You could make a case that it won't run great on hardware manufactured 2-3 years ago......
Each succeeding Windows generation always runs WORSE on the same hardware than the older one. If Wink2K runs fine on a 7 year old computer, WinXP is slower and VISTA may not run at all or very poorly on such an old dog. With OSX this is just the opposite. Each newer version runs faster on a vintage Mac of similar age, than the one before. Both OS like plenty of RAM. Luckily, RAM has gotten cheap and is easily retrofitted into most of those old computers. It is much harder or impossible to make an old computer significantly faster though. Compare ebay prices of 7 year old Macs with similar aged Windows boxes. Maybe the fact that the old dogs will still run the latest OSX has something to do with that, as well as the usually better quality in the first place. The 400Mhz iMacs Apple first introduced in July of 2000, will run the current OSX10.4 faster than any earlier versions of OSX and in its FULL capability of eye candy. Try to get VISTA ultimate with Aero to run on any PC box of that age. You may not change the computer in any way other than stuff it with as much RAM as it will take. Macs may be a bit more expensive, but in the long term they are a much better buy. Kind of like our Hondas.
...just inferior in terms of its availability.....
OSX is not an OS in the same way *any* flavor of Windows is or has ever been and will be. OSX and its hardware are one system unit, conceived and designed for and with each other and sold as a single computing device. No Windows system will ever do that until either MS begins making their won computers or the other hardware makers write their own specially tailored OS. Talking about OSX inferior availability is sheer nonsense.
....Also, I'm extremely skeptical of any new taxes.....
So am I! Let there be a law that says that the commerce system has to close the circle. That means anybody can take the device or item back to a seller and that seller would have to send it back to the maker. Yes it would add to the cost to close the goods distribution system, which is presently an open loop. Finally the gadget would get back to the manufacturer who could then decide what to do with it. Rebuild, re-use or recycle it. Every item sold after a certain date would be stamped with a return tag, making eligible to be returned, eventually to the maker thereof. No government involvement needed save for the passing of a well written set of laws closing the distribution system loop.
....Both of which are fairly widely accepted around the world as likely truth.....
We all know of course that the majority is always right, whether they are scientists or not. I believe that the word "evolution" is a rather wide term that should be narrowed. If all the experiments done with fruit flies, bacteria, and even mice are called "evolution", great. However, when that word gets extrapolated to the progression from bacteria -> flies-> mice and finally even humans it becomes religious faith. None of these monumental changes has ever been observed. Adding the faith-magic of time does NOT help here.
.....It is now clearly a new species .......
Over and over you talk about species. I never mentioned that word. The term I used is kind. It is not a scientific term. However a dog, cat and mouse are different kinds of creatures. Never has anyone found a migration across such a kind barrier. All three are mammals, yet they are distinct and always have been so. The bird examples you gave are still all birds. The coccus bacteria and spirochetes are two distinct kinds which do not interoperate. Fruit flies are still flies. If you want to call the innumerable variations within these various distinct groups "evolution", fine I'll go along with that because it is a verifiable observed fact. I'll go along with all of what you wrote about all the variations of species, even to the point that these species cannot interbreed any more.
What I won't agree to is to call the jumps from reptiles to mammals or birds also evolution and pretend such a belief is scientific. That is a stretch of the evolutionary principle that has never been observed or duplicated by any present day demonstrable process. The magic faith ingredient of immense time doesn't solve the problem that these sort of jumps are just not happening today. It is the theorizing of these immense jumps which are not observed which is a blatant fabrication.
Nobody today has ever made a fossil and it certainly does NOT happen slowly. Time is the worst enemy of making fossils. If you want to see how stratification and petrification happen, go and study what happened in 1982 at Mt. St. Helens Spirit Lake and the Toutle River. You will find a miniature Grand Canyon (strata and all) and uncounted trees buried upright at the bottom of what is left of Spirit Lake, some of them already partially petrified. This was the result of a local, but yet significant catastrophe, burying a vast forest in minutes and fractions thereof.
Anybody with half a brain, that has ever flown at 35,000 feet or so over the Grand Canyon, can see that the tiny trickle of the Colorado could have never sculpted the landscape unfolding below. Go to Google Earth and see. Only unimaginably huge amounts of rapidly rushing waters could do such a thing. My main point is that, yes we see all the erosion, but it was done quickly, in minutes and hours and days, rather than over millions of years. If you have ever seen a flash flood roar through what was only a minute before a dry wash, you'd understand how quickly the landscape can be rearranged by rushing water.
Nobody knows what caused such a flood. Here is a theory: The earth rotates at about a 1000 miles per hour. An external cause, such as a wandering massive body changes the angle of the axis suddenly. This stresses the crust and the oceans keep moving in the same way, rushing in one to two mile high tsunamis all over the planet, washing over the continents like a rock in the middle of a raging river. We know from seismic wave studies that the mantle of the earth contains a lot of water. Gravitational stress could certainly bring some of that to the surface temporarily. When the stress subsides, some or most of the water returns to whence it came, sort of like a sponge no longer squeezed. If the earth were smooth, it would be covered totally with water over a mile deep, even today. Why should a global flood be such an inconceivable event?
I have never said that genetic mutations are by deletion only. If you take a novel or play and move the letters or even the pages around, or even add some pages from other novels only by statistical means, you have not added to the total information. Information in itself is not physical, although it requires a physical medium to me manifest. No source other than mental has ever been found. Software has no mass, only it carrier does. Even if DNA is added, there is no added information, unless that DNA addition is does by an intelligent researcher applying the power of MIND to the process. I am not making anything up.
....He has fixed the earth firm, immovable.....
The Bible contains a lot of figurative and poetic language. It also talks about sunrises and sunsets. We still use such constructs today, even though we now know that it is the movement of the Earth that causes the appearance thereof.
If you would study a little history, especially about calendars, you would know that ancient calendars all applied exactly 360 days to a year and that this exact multiple worked fine for millennia. Then for reasons unknown they all changed, coincidentally all at about the time this event in Joshua was took place. There are also many stories in other ancient cultures about a long day.
The Bible tells us that God is very patient, but he hates sin and eventually deals with it. Sin creates death. Israel needed to remain in Egypt because God tells us that the measure of iniquity of the present inhabitants of the land God had promised Israel was not yet full. God gave those people 400 years to turn from their sins, which included child sacrifices. Finally He commanded Israel to wipe them out. They failed to obey God to fully do this and now to this day the descendants of these are a thorn in the side of Israel. God eventually considered the people mentioned in numbers 31 the same way a surgeon regards cancer, good normal cell that went bad.
When there is a cancer, a surgeon has to remove it ALL. Leaving only one cell means the disease will return. If left unchecked the patient dies from it. It may seem callous to compare people with cancer, but that is because we are so used to evil. We humans get kind of used to it in the same way the frog does in the water pot set on a burner, set to boil. Even though the frog easily could jump out, it will remain in the pot until cooked, if the heat is turned up slowly and imperceptibly. Evil that used to shock us at one time no longer bothers us much after a while.
The worst sin a person can do is to call God a liar through unbelief. That is how it began in the garden "Yea has God said...?" You HAVE choses to do that and this is much worse than blasphemy.
.....Why did all of the whales end up above the ichtyhosaurs? Do icthyousaurs sink faster than whales?.........
That is another topic, the arrangement of the fossils. I was talking about a more basic thing -- the existence of fossils in the first place. Tell me about how that happened and then we can discuss the layering thereof. I'll give you a hint: The layering of fossils is nor all that consistent in all the diverse places we find fossils. They are found however all over the planet. There are in fact few places that DON'T have fossils. The flood was not some tranquil overflowing like a giant bathtub, but a horrendous upheaval from raging, rapidly flowing waters all over the planet. Think of the power of a tsunami multiplied millions of times.
Making a blind copy of something, unless digital always decreases the information. In the case of digital and DNA (which is digital) the information content remains the same. That is the best that can be done. Two copies of Hamlet don't contain more information than one. In an activity of mind, you can make a copy of Hamlet and your added commentary about it is added information to the basic work. Information ONLY comes from a mind, NEVER anywhere else. Nobody has ever demonstrated a source of information other than a mind, an intelligent being.
....There's some central planner that makes sure ......
To a degree true, but mostly it is the collective decisions of at least somewhat intelligent consumers that drives the suppliers of the things you mention. If nobody buys your widget, for whatever reasons there is no central planner that mandates that, but he suppliers for the ingredients for you widget will have to find other widget makers whose widgets also use these pieces, but which the consumer do collectively like and buy. Advertising is the main means by which widget makers try to get consumers to buy their creations. Most people call that the free market and it works fine mostly, but not every time. Sometimes it needs to be tweaked, but that is not always done legitimately. The ones who are allowed to create money out of thin air (Federal reserve and central bankers) are the main tweakers.