.... However, this process of plants turning into the black stuff takes millions of years, much much slower than the rate at which it is currently being burned.....
That is what many BELIEVE. However the conditions of heat and immense pressure of deep burial without the presence of oxygen have been duplicated in labs. Oil and coal has been made in hours and days. The wooden pilings of old railroad trestles have been transformed into the beginning stages of coal. Anyone can make a form of coal without the high pressures by simply heating wood in the absence of oxygen. The stuff you get is called charCOAL. In WW2, some Germans ran their ordinary cars on wood by burning wood in low oxygen and running the vapors into the motor. The millions of years is a MYTH.
......liquified coal doesn't do anything towards solving the CO2 problem,.....
If it is indeed true that coal and oil came from dead plants and animals, then all that carbon now being released, as well as all that is still in the ground, must have been in the air. If all the fossil fuels are burned, then air ought to contain the same amount of CO2 it did before the plants grew and got buried. Why do we automatically assume that restoring the conditions of the time these fossil fuels were produced would be such a terrible thing?
....Maybe it's fortunated that the largest stock exchanges exist in areas predicted to be affected by increasing water levels.........
Most stock trading is done electronically these days. So maybe, if this global warming indeed causes some real ocean rises, the physical trading places can easily be moved.
....and then what do I do on those one or two days a year when I genuinely need to send an email to the ~40000 email addresses......
You could apply to the ISP for a business account and tell them you need to do this. They could then unblock your IP so you could send your email to those on your list at normal speed. Any ISP that caters to spammers could be blocked, so only legitimate users, such as you could get the ISP to allow your mail. It would be in the interest of ISP to block out spammers so their own domain doesn't get blocked by others.
....To what degree does AllofMp3 conduct business within the United States.....
Does a transaction that goes across an International border take place in the place where the buyer is or the seller? For sales taxes it is the buyer's place. If someone from Oregon where there is no sales buys something from California, there is no tax due. If someone in California buys something in Oregon, the buyer is supposed to pay sales tax or use tax to California. In practice nobody pays either place except for things like cars that must be registered.
Is the Allofmp3 situation not pretty much the same? Does the RIAA have a right to collect a "tax" on buyers of material from Allofmp3? Is it illegal to buy such material and have it shipped (by wire) to the US? If the material were a physical good, would US Customs confiscate it, like the did some German sausage my parents tried to bring us?
Why don't they sue them in a Russian court? Allofmp3 could just tear up whatever papers the they get from USA lawyers and courts into the smallest pieces they can manage. Then let the court figure out how to enforce their edict in Russia.
..... you need to make a conscious decision to send a letter in the USPS....
As if I did not get plenty of paper junk mail even though it costs the sender more than 5 or 10 cents. Why can't email servers be programmed to only accept mail from the same ip address at a slow measured rate? Then it would take a long time to send thousands of spam from any given computer. If the sending server only allowed two emails per minute from any given sender, than sender could only send 120 emails in an hour rather than thousands of even tens of thousands.
......much as was done with electricity deregulation.......
I got a real laugh out of that phrase. Just ask the folks in California about what happened to their electric bills after 'deregulation'. Their playing field is very level still, but sharply tilted in the favor of the likes of Enron.
.....hey don't have to, they can negotiate with each property owner for an easement and run their wires over private property rather than the community's right-of-way........
That is pure BS. The phone companies already are running their wires all over public rights of way. The have been for ages in most places. Unless there is an agreement that the phone company has to get the permission of the public each time they need to replace or update the existing wires, they should be able to replace the metallic wires with glass fibers. There is no need to ask anyone about that.
Unless there is an agreement with a city that the phone companies are only allowed to run ordinary phone conversations and nothing else, they should not have to ask anyone as to what kind of data they may carry.
As I have stated repeatedly, ALL information originates in a mind. Nobody has ever shown information originating any place else or in any other way. Everything anyone of us ever does first is formulated in one or more minds. Yes, we are very special. We have been given a mind by which to understand the laws of the Universe and get a glimpse into the mind of the Creator. You are not a purposeless piece of matter that self-organized out of the primordial slime, but a special creation originating in the mind a God who loves you and wants to have a relationship with you. We all are created in the image and likeness of God. That includes a mind, with which we can conceive cars and other creative arts, just as God created.
Why is it so far out to assert that the information in the Universe also arose in a great mind? Any time there is pattern, laws, organization, there is also information. Your cleaned up orderly house has more information than your messy one. It takes the application of mind AND energy create order and harmony; energy alone is not enough. Millions of mindless monkeys on typewriters will not produce a Shakespeare play, at least not in the time imagined to be the age of the cosmos.
The Universe from the very smallest to the very largest dimensions is an orderly place, a place of structure. All our laws are products of minds and so are the laws of physics the product of a great Mind -- God. He formulated the laws by which everything operates and then proceeded to use these to make it happen. Scientists assume (believe) that the laws and constants of physics have never changed. This like denying human legislators the right to modify their own laws. God outright tell us in His Word, the Bible that this assumption is false. There have been fundamental discontinuities in creation. Science can only explore the Universe and its laws as they are now. Nobody except God, knows for sure how things were in the distant past.
Well it doesn't support evolution either. Your second link stated among other things that the sun was much dimmer in the past. The energy output of a star has more to do with its mass than anything else. The sun's mass is constantly getting smaller as some of it is converted into energy. That means the sun should have been hotter in the past.
Darwin never had anything to say about how life got started. Matter and energy alone cannot produce anything approaching the complexity of living cells. It also takes information. I can give you all the parts for building a car. However if you don't also get the instructions, it is not likely you will make a running automobile. Probably you'd break vital part or put something in wrong way round and that would be the end of your effort. A few amino acids are still a LONG way from making a complex protein, let alone a living cell.
.....How do you know that there is "additional information" (whatever that means, you haven't defined it) in a living thing?.....
Living organisms, even so called "simple single cells" are incredibly complex. The more complicated an object, the more information is needed to build it. An airplane contains much more information than an oxcart. Living things store the information on construction and operation in the DNA which is analogous to a computer disk drive. Computers store binary and the DNA stores a four level digital code. Just as the code in a computer is distinct from the computer itself, so too is the code stored in the DNA. Information is what/. readers primarily deal with. The software and data stored in a computer or in DNA is immaterial and as such is not subject to the same constraints as material objects. Therefore software, information, is not subject to some of the limitations of material things.
The software determines the characteristics of the hardware in living things and in computers. Computers and living things contain two stores of information. One is the information in the computer's physical construction; the other is the OS, Applications and data. In living things, such as you, there is your body and all the knowledge it takes to build and operate it. Secondly, there is your mind that allows you to learn, think and then do all that you do based on these.
Everything, whether living or not is made from 92 known elements. The digital code in DNA represents the instruction on how to build and operate any particular life form, similar to the blueprints and instruction manuals for an airplane. Just as the instructions to build and operate any airplane originates in a human mind, so too, the instructions on how to build and run all living organisms originated in the mind of the creator - God. He also has given you a mind to understand and believe.
....What about a snow flake? A fairly complex beautiful structure......
Before you can ask about the very evident complexity, symmetry and order in a structure such as this, you have to consider that everything in this Universe operates according to consistent laws. We did not formulate these laws, nor can we do anything other than be subject to them. Unlike His moral law, God did not give us any choice about submitting to the laws of physics. The Snowflake and other crystals obey these laws as well. Just as all human laws arise in a mind, so too, the laws of physics came from a mind; the mind of the Creator God. These laws then are the information inherent in the inanimate creation. Living things contain vast quantities of additional information. There is no escaping it; there is a design and purpose evident in the Universe which means literally 'One Word', the Word issued from the mind of God. He is allowing us to discover these laws and use them for good. Too often, we use them for evil.
You have been given the immense privilege of seeking to know this one true God or you may ignore Him. The physical creation has not been given this high honor by its Creator, but must and does proclaim His greatness and splendor. Look into a telescope or microscope and you will see the intelligence of this Creator. We celebrate His coming this time of the year. We celebrate when the timeless, eternal Creator entered the fishbowl of His creation, limited Himself to time and space and became one of us. That is what Immanuel means "God with us". You too can be a wise man and seek Him, but He also allows you to choose to spurn His love through disbelief. May this Christmas be better than any other you have ever experienced as you ponder the reason for the season.
You wish it were so. Science is what can be experimentally determined in the lab or repeatedly observed and measured by anyone following the scientific method. First off what are your definitions of this thing called evolution? Is it the big bang? Is it the appearance of life from non-life? How about the progression from the goo by way of the zoo to you? Is that what you call evolution? The only kind of process that is also commonly called evolution is the FACT that bacteria, moths, birds and many other organisms can adapt to their environment. That is the ONLY facet of evolution that can be repeatedly duplicated and actually OBSERVED to be happening TODAY. That is what Darwin correctly observed and we still observe this today. Today's religion of evolution has been stretched far beyond what Darwin wrote in his seminal work, "Origin of the Species".
What really happened eons ago is pure conjecture and assumptions. There are many pseudo scientific words for faith or belief. I challenge you to open *any* so called scientific journal (dealing with origins) of any size at all and NOT find faith weasel words and phrases such as: If we assume; it is believed; speculates; the prevailing consensus is; could or may have; might be; thought to have; and other similar language whenever origins and the past are discussed. A sampling found all of the above expressions in many articles here:
In science we want to deal with what we KNOW, and can repeatedly demonstrate, not what we believe or what could and might have been or not. When you show up in a court room, you will be asked what you personally witnessed. Nobody was there when the first reptile supposedly learned how to fly and then became a bird. Neither has anyone ever seen a transition creature between one kind of animal to another. Natural selection is a proven and observable mechanism. However it only works if there is already something to select for. Any animal breeder practices this selection process, but it has its limits beyond these processes cannot go. We can breed an almost unlimited variety of dogs, but they are still, every single one of them, without exception dogs. The same is true for other animal groups. Nobody has ever shown how new information can be generated by the sole interaction of energy and matter through time. All information ONLY comes from a mind. No body has ever shown otherwise.
... it's a bit stupid to make such a fuss over half a page of a several hundred page book.....
That is not the issue. Evolution is just another religion that, like all religion, tries to answer four important questions that every thinking human asks at some point in their life:
1, Where did I come from? 2, Who am I, really? 3, What, if any, is the purpose of existence? 4, What will happen to me after I die
Unlike adherents of other religions, believers in evolution try to answer these questions only by reference to the things their finite little minds can understand. Thus they have elevated their own minds to deity. This is of course the ancient lie offered to Eve in the Garden: "You shall be as God". We are human, not Gods, responsible to Him. As created beings, we all better get that through out collective arrogant heads. Why is man so incurably religious? Could it possibly be that the Creator has placed within us a deep, burning, unquenchable yearning to intimately know Him? To me and many others, the answers provided in the Bible are far more satisfying than the tenets of any other religion, including the state religion of the USA, evolution.
....This is basic 10th grade biology class in a public school. Amino acids do form in natural circumstances....
Mr. Miller et al used an atmosphere devoid of oxygen. That is a very UNNATURAL circumstance.
There is lots of evidence that the earth's atmosphere has ALWAYS had oxygen in it. This oxygen would negate that by now throughly discredited experiment, since oxygen immediately destroys any complex compounds, such as amino acids.
....amino acids have been created in a laboratory setting.....
Exactly, by INTELLIGENT scientists guessing at the probable composition of the earth's atmosphere. Mr. Miller et al used an atmosphere devoid of oxygen. There is lots of evidence that the earth's atmosphere has ALWAYS had oxygen in it. This oxygen would negate that by now throughly discredited experiment, since oxygen immediately destroys any complex compounds, such as amino acids. Also, the experiment makes amino acids of opposite chirality (twist) of those needed for life. Oxygen is the most abundant element on the surface of this planet. Even to make an experiment that excludes this abundant element from the atmosphere is ridiculous. Yet this experiment, a blatant fakery and lie, which even evolutionists no longer believe is still found in many textbooks today.
There are at least 6 processes that are generally labeled "evolution". Only one of these has ever been observed. That is the adaptation of organisms to their environment. All the others, fossil formation, biogenesis, chemical and stellar evolution have NEVER been observed or duplicated in a lab. We have seen stars explode, but never form. The fact that planets spin in opposite directions and are of vastly different compositions, makes it impossible that they came from a common source, such as a primal star. The law of conservation of angular momentum demands that any matter ejected from a spinning object, such as a supposed parent star must ALL spin in the SAME direction.
Evolution is a religion that tries to explain the Universe without the activity of mind, the Mind of God. The very word 'Universe' means One Word. The creative Word "...and God said...".
....Nobody's editing the bible to keep up with the world.....
That's because nobody has ever discovered any FACTS that contradict it. No human discoveries in any branch of science or history have ever been at odds with what is stated in the original languages the Bible was written in. Now there have been plenty of conjectures and interpretations of facts and the Bible that have been at odds. One of the major errors made by science is assuming that things were always as we see them today. Since we don't have a time machine, we have no way of knowing for sure how things were.
For example, we assume that we can date rocks and other stuff by radioactivity. The underlying assumption (faith) is that the rate of radioactive decay has never varied from what we see it today. There is an increasing body of evidence that this is not so. It appears that some of the so called "constants" of physics have been far from being so. These "constants" determine the rate of radioactive decay among other things. Partly, it is from this uniformitarian assumption, that we get the idea of the immense ages of billions and billions of years.
Mr. Hubble first measured the red shift. That is a fact, there IS such a thing. But then he INTERPRETED this to be caused by the Doppler effect. Recent more accurate measurements show that this red shift is QUANTIZED. This negates Mr. Hubble's "accepted" explanation for the cause of this observed red shift. Unfortunately for the promulgators of billions and billions of years, it also makes the Universe much younger. Again, an interpretation based on an assumption, not the actual observed facts makes us imagine that the Universe is old. I believe that long before another 2000 years go by, the present idea of the age of the universe will have been thoroughly demolished and the new understanding be more in line with the chronology outlined in the Bible.
....The things which living organisms are made of (amino acids, lipids, sugars, various salts, water, etc) ARE naturally occurring......
There are no natural building blocks for even the simplest proteins occurring naturally, because even the simplest known protein is more complicated than a 747 airliner. A "simple cell" has more processes and functions going on inside than a city like LA or Tokyo. Evolution by natural selection implies there is something to select for. Natural selection only works for processes and mechanism where no new information has to be added. Evolution has some valid explanations for the adaptation of living things. Life requires not only matter and energy, but also information. This information is recorded in the DNA molecules in an analogous manner to information stored on a computer disk. It is software code arising in a mind. The instructions are for building living organisms. To make Airplanes and Zeppelins not only requires the proper parts, but also the instructions an how to assemble these parts into a working model. If someone gave you ALL pieces of say an automobile, all bolts, nuts, pistons, brake shoes etc, you, who possess an intelligent mind would still have a tough time to put that together and have it run if they not also provided detailed instructions. Evolutionists believe that complexity of life, many orders of magnitude greater than any human device ever conceived, happened without instructions.
The generation of information is the exclusive province of a mind. Everything we make and do begins in a human mind. Why is it so difficult to accept the perfectly reasonable premise that the complexities of living things also first began in a superb mind, the mind of God? Every human law has one or more legislators, who (usually) have sound minds. Why should it be any different with the laws of physics and life? You and I and the whole Universe and the laws it runs by, were first conceived of in a mind, the mind of God. Is that idea incompatible with science? I don't think so.
.....Predicting the weather for tomorrow is not the same as predicting long-term climate.......
No, it is much harder to predict long term weather than tomorrow's weather and we can't do either very well.
(....No, it doesn't, because it is too cold. Remember that water produced by ice melting is at the same temperature as the ice - you need to study the principles of latent heat.....)
So you are saying that cold water evaporates less than the ice covered ocean? It turns out that it can be and has been accurately MEASURED exactly how much water evaporates at any given temperature and pressure. Much more water evaporates off the areas that are now water, rather than ice. This extra moisture has to and eventually and indeed does precipitate. There is no need to conjecture about volcanic eruptions. Even the arctic and Antarctic waters, barely above freezing evaporate a huge amount of water, compared to the ice covered ocean and ice on land. Even ice and snow evaporate. The process is called sublimation, where a solid passed directly from solid to vapor, without becoming liquid.
(.....Yes, I am afraid it does. That is the way science works, and has always worked......)
Unfortunately it has. Scientists are human and as such are subject to the " my mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts syndrome. It would seem that one person can convince the scientific community if their arguments are good enough. It would be nice if this were the case, but I don't think human nature allows. Francis Bacon was unable to convince the scientistists of his time that the speed of light is finite. John Snow had mediocre success trying to convince the scientists of his time that germs caused disease rather than "miasma." Semmelweiss had practically no success trying to get doctors to wash their hands before delivering babies for pregnant mothers. Or, for a particularly telling example, consider Einstein's theory of relativity. Even TEN YEARS after he had proposed it, including what I think you will agree are rather good reasons, the scientific community refused to accept it. In 1921 when Einstein received the Nobel prize, relativity was not menationed at all! A more modern example is William Tift's work on quantization of red shift. Proposed and supported with evidence in 1977, it has been verified to increasing accuracy at least 4 times by separate scientists at Oxford, University of Arizona, Canadian National Research Center, and the Royal Observatory at Edinburgh. The last verification was in 2003, yet scientists still refuse to accept it. Why? Because it is real evidence that demolishes some key aspects of the "Big Bang" theory and the supposed age of the Universe.
......the other proposals for the development of life on earth are conjectures......
ALL proposals for the development of life on earth are conjectures! Just because something is labeled as science doesn't make it so. Nobody KNOWS how life got started. Evolutionists BELIEVE it got started by randomness. Christian and other religions equally BELIEVE in an intelligent Creator. Everything we humans make from Airplanes to Zeppelins requires thought and planning. Evolutionists believe that this thinking process was not needed in the case of life.
To make life, requires matter and energy. Evolutionists will not concede that just as in human creativity, there is one more, vital ingredient and that is thought, planning and imagination. These are all activities of MIND. Human minds involved for Airplanes and things and a vastly superior MIND, the mind of God involved in the making of life. Nobody can prove where the universe came from. Both so called scientists and those of any religion only can BELIEVE one thing or other.
.....As the ice melts, it is revealing less reflecting water.......
An off that non-reflecting water more moisture evaporates which falls as more snow on the land, making more ice. Thus the negative feedback keeps the water level the same or makes it even less.
(.....Toba 70,000 years ago,......) Stop conjecturing about how things were ages ago when nobody was around to actually OBSSERVE what really happened. How does anyone know that it was that volcanic eruption and not one of many other causes that made a mini ice age? Confine your discussion to what we can see happening now or can duplicate in the lab. The Krakatoa eruption caused a cold summer and crop failures for a year. We have historical records written by people who experienced this.
(.....This is why statistical ensembles are run.....) I am sure that being on/. you have heard of GIGO. (Garbage in - Garbage out) That applies to statistics also. How does anyone know that the underlying input assumptions are correct? Talk about faith! We live here on the West Coast. The weather reports today are LESS accurate than they were in the 50s and before. Back then the Weather Bureau would say confidently: "You are going to get rain tomorrow or the day after, lots of it, get the sandbags out". That is exactly what happened, lots of rain and flooding rivers. Today all they can guess is there is a xx% chance of rain. Now the weather predictors rely on satellites and fancy computing systems and get it wrong far more often than they used to back when there were weather ships stationed a few hundred miles out in the ocean. These ships had real people on them that actually OBSERVED what the weather was like and phoned their observations to the central office. If nobody can yet reliably predict the short term or seasonal weather, despite all the advanced computing, what gives you such confidence that long term climate predictions, such as global warming are any more reliable? I cannot prove that the climate scientists are wrong and you cannot prove them right. The humbling fact is that we humans simply cannot predict the future accurately, and that includes the weather, for tomorrow, the next year or the next millennium. Just because the majority of any group, including scientists, believes something is true, does not make it so.
.....The mechanisms you suggest for negative feedback simply haven't worked in the past - why should they work now.....
Please give me some examples of positive feedback in nature occurring, today, things that we can observe happening now or experiments that can be done in a lab. Don't always come with conjecture about the distant past. There is compelling evidence that our planet was warmer and cooler in the past than today, but there is no way that the assertion of positive feedback occurring can be inferred from that. Negative feedback processes are common in both natural and manmade systems for the precise reason of stability. Even in a positive feedback situation, such as an oscillator, negative feedback eventually predominates to limit the amplitude of the oscillations.
A large disturbance of the climate, such as a meteor hit will cause the climate to stabilize in a relatively short time. The Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 had a significant effect on the earth's climate for only a short time. The reason that the output of the sun is many times more stable than the power in the outlets of your house is that a very finely tuned negative feedback system between its gravity and the fusion reaction keeps it that way. Your own body temperature and other vital processes are regulated by complex multi-loop negative feedback.
(.....Simple minded computer models aren't being used....)
The computer programs used make many assumptions and simplifications of the incredibly complex feedback interactions involved. There are basically two reasons. One is that even the most powerful supercomputers are nowhere good enough to calculate the equations that we know apply. The second is that we have trouble determining what the value of many of the input variables should be. Bottom line: Climate prediction is a dubious science with a large dose of faith.
....methane is an extremely strong greenhouse gas.....
All green houses and all so called green house gases and agents can only keep solar energy in that has been absorbed. As the average temperature of the atmosphere rises, more water evaporates. This water eventually makes for more and much thicker clouds which are excellent reflectors of light. Light from the sun that is reflected back into space cannot warm anything. If nothing gets warmed, then all the greenhouse gases have no heat to trap. This reflection effect combined with the higher water content of the atmosphere has the tendency to put the brakes onto global warming. If the greenhouse gases doubled or tripled the rise in temperature and the ice meltdown is not anywhere near what it is imagined to be by simple minded computer models. Climate is an exceedingly complex negative feedback system, with many of its parameters unknown and very hard to determine. However, negative feedback tends to make for stability of any system. That includes the earth's average temperature control system.
....You do realize that the Antarctica is on land and not a floating ice berg right?........
Yes indeed you are right of course. However I said that in my original post that melting ice from land will increase the water level, but only slightly. However, to melt all that ice in the polar regions and high altitudes would require a huge average increase of temperatures on the entire planet. That is not likely nor projected to happen. As temperature rises in the oceans, more water evaporates and the now warmer atmosphere can hold immensely more water. This added water also means more clouds which reflect sunlight and thus have a negative feedback effect on the warming. At some point things would balance. To quantify all these interacting variables is tough exactly to predict. Present predictions based on simple calculation of land ice and ocean volumes does not take these feedback effects into account. We know from engineering that negative feedback tends to stabilize any system. Because of the laws of physics, the climate of the earth is an extremely complex negative feedback control system many of whose parameter are unknown and hard to measure. It is however precisely because of these laws, including the unique properties of water that make life possible and make the long term climate as stable as it is.
Water is the ONLY naturally occurring substance that EXPANDS in volume upon passing from a liquid to a solid. If water became more dense as it froze, the ice would sink to the bottom of all bodies of water. That would mean most of the earth's water would be ice and life would be difficult or impossible.
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.... However, this process of plants turning into the black stuff takes millions of years, much much slower than the rate at which it is currently being burned.....
That is what many BELIEVE. However the conditions of heat and immense pressure of deep burial without the presence of oxygen have been duplicated in labs. Oil and coal has been made in hours and days. The wooden pilings of old railroad trestles have been transformed into the beginning stages of coal. Anyone can make a form of coal without the high pressures by simply heating wood in the absence of oxygen. The stuff you get is called charCOAL. In WW2, some Germans ran their ordinary cars on wood by burning wood in low oxygen and running the vapors into the motor. The millions of years is a MYTH.
......liquified coal doesn't do anything towards solving the CO2 problem,.....
If it is indeed true that coal and oil came from dead plants and animals, then all that carbon now being released, as well as all that is still in the ground, must have been in the air. If all the fossil fuels are burned, then air ought to contain the same amount of CO2 it did before the plants grew and got buried. Why do we automatically assume that restoring the conditions of the time these fossil fuels were produced would be such a terrible thing?
....Maybe it's fortunated that the largest stock exchanges exist in areas predicted to be affected by increasing water levels.........
Most stock trading is done electronically these days. So maybe, if this global warming indeed causes some real ocean rises, the physical trading places can easily be moved.
....and then what do I do on those one or two days a year when I genuinely need to send an email to the ~40000 email addresses......
You could apply to the ISP for a business account and tell them you need to do this. They could then unblock your IP so you could send your email to those on your list at normal speed. Any ISP that caters to spammers could be blocked, so only legitimate users, such as you could get the ISP to allow your mail. It would be in the interest of ISP to block out spammers so their own domain doesn't get blocked by others.
....To what degree does AllofMp3 conduct business within the United States.....
Does a transaction that goes across an International border take place in the place where the buyer is or the seller? For sales taxes it is the buyer's place. If someone from Oregon where there is no sales buys something from California, there is no tax due. If someone in California buys something in Oregon, the buyer is supposed to pay sales tax or use tax to California. In practice nobody pays either place except for things like cars that must be registered.
Is the Allofmp3 situation not pretty much the same? Does the RIAA have a right to collect a "tax" on buyers of material from Allofmp3? Is it illegal to buy such material and have it shipped (by wire) to the US? If the material were a physical good, would US Customs confiscate it, like the did some German sausage my parents tried to bring us?
Why don't they sue them in a Russian court? Allofmp3 could just tear up whatever papers the they get from USA lawyers and courts into the smallest pieces they can manage. Then let the court figure out how to enforce their edict in Russia.
..... you need to make a conscious decision to send a letter in the USPS....
As if I did not get plenty of paper junk mail even though it costs the sender more than 5 or 10 cents. Why can't email servers be programmed to only accept mail from the same ip address at a slow measured rate? Then it would take a long time to send thousands of spam from any given computer. If the sending server only allowed two emails per minute from any given sender, than sender could only send 120 emails in an hour rather than thousands of even tens of thousands.
......much as was done with electricity deregulation.......
I got a real laugh out of that phrase. Just ask the folks in California about what happened to their electric bills after 'deregulation'. Their playing field is very level still, but sharply tilted in the favor of the likes of Enron.
.....hey don't have to, they can negotiate with each property owner for an easement and run their wires over private property rather than the community's right-of-way........
That is pure BS. The phone companies already are running their wires all over public rights of way. The have been for ages in most places. Unless there is an agreement that the phone company has to get the permission of the public each time they need to replace or update the existing wires, they should be able to replace the metallic wires with glass fibers. There is no need to ask anyone about that.
Unless there is an agreement with a city that the phone companies are only allowed to run ordinary phone conversations and nothing else, they should not have to ask anyone as to what kind of data they may carry.
......How does information originate?.....
As I have stated repeatedly, ALL information originates in a mind. Nobody has ever shown information originating any place else or in any other way. Everything anyone of us ever does first is formulated in one or more minds. Yes, we are very special. We have been given a mind by which to understand the laws of the Universe and get a glimpse into the mind of the Creator. You are not a purposeless piece of matter that self-organized out of the primordial slime, but a special creation originating in the mind a God who loves you and wants to have a relationship with you. We all are created in the image and likeness of God. That includes a mind, with which we can conceive cars and other creative arts, just as God created.
Why is it so far out to assert that the information in the Universe also arose in a great mind? Any time there is pattern, laws, organization, there is also information. Your cleaned up orderly house has more information than your messy one. It takes the application of mind AND energy create order and harmony; energy alone is not enough. Millions of mindless monkeys on typewriters will not produce a Shakespeare play, at least not in the time imagined to be the age of the cosmos.
The Universe from the very smallest to the very largest dimensions is an orderly place, a place of structure. All our laws are products of minds and so are the laws of physics the product of a great Mind -- God. He formulated the laws by which everything operates and then proceeded to use these to make it happen. Scientists assume (believe) that the laws and constants of physics have never changed. This like denying human legislators the right to modify their own laws. God outright tell us in His Word, the Bible that this assumption is false. There have been fundamental discontinuities in creation. Science can only explore the Universe and its laws as they are now. Nobody except God, knows for sure how things were in the distant past.
.....That does not support creationism....
Well it doesn't support evolution either. Your second link stated among other things that the sun was much dimmer in the past. The energy output of a star has more to do with its mass than anything else. The sun's mass is constantly getting smaller as some of it is converted into energy. That means the sun should have been hotter in the past.
Darwin never had anything to say about how life got started. Matter and energy alone cannot produce anything approaching the complexity of living cells. It also takes information. I can give you all the parts for building a car. However if you don't also get the instructions, it is not likely you will make a running automobile. Probably you'd break vital part or put something in wrong way round and that would be the end of your effort. A few amino acids are still a LONG way from making a complex protein, let alone a living cell.
.....How do you know that there is "additional information" (whatever that means, you haven't defined it) in a living thing?.....
/. readers primarily deal with. The software and data stored in a computer or in DNA is immaterial and as such is not subject to the same constraints as material objects. Therefore software, information, is not subject to some of the limitations of material things.
Living organisms, even so called "simple single cells" are incredibly complex. The more complicated an object, the more information is needed to build it. An airplane contains much more information than an oxcart. Living things store the information on construction and operation in the DNA which is analogous to a computer disk drive. Computers store binary and the DNA stores a four level digital code. Just as the code in a computer is distinct from the computer itself, so too is the code stored in the DNA. Information is what
The software determines the characteristics of the hardware in living things and in computers. Computers and living things contain two stores of information. One is the information in the computer's physical construction; the other is the OS, Applications and data. In living things, such as you, there is your body and all the knowledge it takes to build and operate it. Secondly, there is your mind that allows you to learn, think and then do all that you do based on these.
Everything, whether living or not is made from 92 known elements. The digital code in DNA represents the instruction on how to build and operate any particular life form, similar to the blueprints and instruction manuals for an airplane. Just as the instructions to build and operate any airplane originates in a human mind, so too, the instructions on how to build and run all living organisms originated in the mind of the creator - God. He also has given you a mind to understand and believe.
....What about a snow flake? A fairly complex beautiful structure......
Before you can ask about the very evident complexity, symmetry and order in a structure such as this, you have to consider that everything in this Universe operates according to consistent laws. We did not formulate these laws, nor can we do anything other than be subject to them. Unlike His moral law, God did not give us any choice about submitting to the laws of physics. The Snowflake and other crystals obey these laws as well. Just as all human laws arise in a mind, so too, the laws of physics came from a mind; the mind of the Creator God. These laws then are the information inherent in the inanimate creation. Living things contain vast quantities of additional information. There is no escaping it; there is a design and purpose evident in the Universe which means literally 'One Word', the Word issued from the mind of God. He is allowing us to discover these laws and use them for good. Too often, we use them for evil.
You have been given the immense privilege of seeking to know this one true God or you may ignore Him. The physical creation has not been given this high honor by its Creator, but must and does proclaim His greatness and splendor. Look into a telescope or microscope and you will see the intelligence of this Creator. We celebrate His coming this time of the year. We celebrate when the timeless, eternal Creator entered the fishbowl of His creation, limited Himself to time and space and became one of us. That is what Immanuel means "God with us". You too can be a wise man and seek Him, but He also allows you to choose to spurn His love through disbelief. May this Christmas be better than any other you have ever experienced as you ponder the reason for the season.
Merry Christmas and a truly Happy New Year
Armin
.....Evolution is science.....
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You wish it were so. Science is what can be experimentally determined in the lab or repeatedly observed and measured by anyone following the scientific method. First off what are your definitions of this thing called evolution? Is it the big bang? Is it the appearance of life from non-life? How about the progression from the goo by way of the zoo to you? Is that what you call evolution? The only kind of process that is also commonly called evolution is the FACT that bacteria, moths, birds and many other organisms can adapt to their environment. That is the ONLY facet of evolution that can be repeatedly duplicated and actually OBSERVED to be happening TODAY. That is what Darwin correctly observed and we still observe this today. Today's religion of evolution has been stretched far beyond what Darwin wrote in his seminal work, "Origin of the Species".
What really happened eons ago is pure conjecture and assumptions. There are many pseudo scientific words for faith or belief. I challenge you to open *any* so called scientific journal (dealing with origins) of any size at all and NOT find faith weasel words and phrases such as: If we assume; it is believed; speculates; the prevailing consensus is; could or may have; might be; thought to have; and other similar language whenever origins and the past are discussed. A sampling found all of the above expressions in many articles here:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dinosaur
In science we want to deal with what we KNOW, and can repeatedly demonstrate, not what we believe or what could and might have been or not. When you show up in a court room, you will be asked what you personally witnessed. Nobody was there when the first reptile supposedly learned how to fly and then became a bird. Neither has anyone ever seen a transition creature between one kind of animal to another. Natural selection is a proven and observable mechanism. However it only works if there is already something to select for. Any animal breeder practices this selection process, but it has its limits beyond these processes cannot go. We can breed an almost unlimited variety of dogs, but they are still, every single one of them, without exception dogs. The same is true for other animal groups. Nobody has ever shown how new information can be generated by the sole interaction of energy and matter through time. All information ONLY comes from a mind. No body has ever shown otherwise.
... it's a bit stupid to make such a fuss over half a page of a several hundred page book.....
That is not the issue. Evolution is just another religion that, like all religion, tries to answer four important questions that every thinking human asks at some point in their life:
1, Where did I come from?
2, Who am I, really?
3, What, if any, is the purpose of existence?
4, What will happen to me after I die
Unlike adherents of other religions, believers in evolution try to answer these questions only by reference to the things their finite little minds can understand. Thus they have elevated their own minds to deity. This is of course the ancient lie offered to Eve in the Garden: "You shall be as God". We are human, not Gods, responsible to Him. As created beings, we all better get that through out collective arrogant heads. Why is man so incurably religious? Could it possibly be that the Creator has placed within us a deep, burning, unquenchable yearning to intimately know Him? To me and many others, the answers provided in the Bible are far more satisfying than the tenets of any other religion, including the state religion of the USA, evolution.
....This is basic 10th grade biology class in a public school. Amino acids do form in natural circumstances....
Mr. Miller et al used an atmosphere devoid of oxygen. That is a very UNNATURAL circumstance.
There is lots of evidence that the earth's atmosphere has ALWAYS had oxygen in it. This oxygen would negate that by now throughly discredited experiment, since oxygen immediately destroys any complex compounds, such as amino acids.
See the rest of my reply down this chain.
....amino acids have been created in a laboratory setting.....
Exactly, by INTELLIGENT scientists guessing at the probable composition of the earth's atmosphere. Mr. Miller et al used an atmosphere devoid of oxygen. There is lots of evidence that the earth's atmosphere has ALWAYS had oxygen in it. This oxygen would negate that by now throughly discredited experiment, since oxygen immediately destroys any complex compounds, such as amino acids. Also, the experiment makes amino acids of opposite chirality (twist) of those needed for life. Oxygen is the most abundant element on the surface of this planet. Even to make an experiment that excludes this abundant element from the atmosphere is ridiculous. Yet this experiment, a blatant fakery and lie, which even evolutionists no longer believe is still found in many textbooks today.
There are at least 6 processes that are generally labeled "evolution". Only one of these has ever been observed. That is the adaptation of organisms to their environment. All the others, fossil formation, biogenesis, chemical and stellar evolution have NEVER been observed or duplicated in a lab. We have seen stars explode, but never form. The fact that planets spin in opposite directions and are of vastly different compositions, makes it impossible that they came from a common source, such as a primal star. The law of conservation of angular momentum demands that any matter ejected from a spinning object, such as a supposed parent star must ALL spin in the SAME direction.
Evolution is a religion that tries to explain the Universe without the activity of mind, the Mind of God. The very word 'Universe' means One Word. The creative Word "...and God said...".
....Nobody's editing the bible to keep up with the world.....
That's because nobody has ever discovered any FACTS that contradict it. No human discoveries in any branch of science or history have ever been at odds with what is stated in the original languages the Bible was written in. Now there have been plenty of conjectures and interpretations of facts and the Bible that have been at odds. One of the major errors made by science is assuming that things were always as we see them today. Since we don't have a time machine, we have no way of knowing for sure how things were.
For example, we assume that we can date rocks and other stuff by radioactivity. The underlying assumption (faith) is that the rate of radioactive decay has never varied from what we see it today. There is an increasing body of evidence that this is not so. It appears that some of the so called "constants" of physics have been far from being so. These "constants" determine the rate of radioactive decay among other things. Partly, it is from this uniformitarian assumption, that we get the idea of the immense ages of billions and billions of years.
Mr. Hubble first measured the red shift. That is a fact, there IS such a thing. But then he INTERPRETED this to be caused by the Doppler effect. Recent more accurate measurements show that this red shift is QUANTIZED. This negates Mr. Hubble's "accepted" explanation for the cause of this observed red shift. Unfortunately for the promulgators of billions and billions of years, it also makes the Universe much younger. Again, an interpretation based on an assumption, not the actual observed facts makes us imagine that the Universe is old. I believe that long before another 2000 years go by, the present idea of the age of the universe will have been thoroughly demolished and the new understanding be more in line with the chronology outlined in the Bible.
....The things which living organisms are made of (amino acids, lipids, sugars, various salts, water, etc) ARE naturally occurring......
There are no natural building blocks for even the simplest proteins occurring naturally, because even the simplest known protein is more complicated than a 747 airliner. A "simple cell" has more processes and functions going on inside than a city like LA or Tokyo. Evolution by natural selection implies there is something to select for. Natural selection only works for processes and mechanism where no new information has to be added. Evolution has some valid explanations for the adaptation of living things. Life requires not only matter and energy, but also information. This information is recorded in the DNA molecules in an analogous manner to information stored on a computer disk. It is software code arising in a mind. The instructions are for building living organisms. To make Airplanes and Zeppelins not only requires the proper parts, but also the instructions an how to assemble these parts into a working model. If someone gave you ALL pieces of say an automobile, all bolts, nuts, pistons, brake shoes etc, you, who possess an intelligent mind would still have a tough time to put that together and have it run if they not also provided detailed instructions. Evolutionists believe that complexity of life, many orders of magnitude greater than any human device ever conceived, happened without instructions.
The generation of information is the exclusive province of a mind. Everything we make and do begins in a human mind. Why is it so difficult to accept the perfectly reasonable premise that the complexities of living things also first began in a superb mind, the mind of God? Every human law has one or more legislators, who (usually) have sound minds. Why should it be any different with the laws of physics and life? You and I and the whole Universe and the laws it runs by, were first conceived of in a mind, the mind of God. Is that idea incompatible with science? I don't think so.
.....Predicting the weather for tomorrow is not the same as predicting long-term climate.......
No, it is much harder to predict long term weather than tomorrow's weather and we can't do either very well.
(....No, it doesn't, because it is too cold. Remember that water produced by ice melting is at the same temperature as the ice - you need to study the principles of latent heat.....)
So you are saying that cold water evaporates less than the ice covered ocean? It turns out that it can be and has been accurately MEASURED exactly how much water evaporates at any given temperature and pressure. Much more water evaporates off the areas that are now water, rather than ice. This extra moisture has to and eventually and indeed does precipitate. There is no need to conjecture about volcanic eruptions. Even the arctic and Antarctic waters, barely above freezing evaporate a huge amount of water, compared to the ice covered ocean and ice on land. Even ice and snow evaporate. The process is called sublimation, where a solid passed directly from solid to vapor, without becoming liquid.
(.....Yes, I am afraid it does. That is the way science works, and has always worked......)
Unfortunately it has. Scientists are human and as such are subject to the " my mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts syndrome. It would seem that one person can convince the scientific community if their arguments are good enough. It would be nice if this were the case, but I don't think human nature allows. Francis Bacon was unable to convince the scientistists of his time that the speed of light is finite. John Snow had mediocre success trying to convince the scientists of his time that germs caused disease rather than "miasma." Semmelweiss had practically no success trying to get doctors to wash their hands before delivering babies for pregnant mothers. Or, for a particularly telling example, consider Einstein's theory of relativity. Even TEN YEARS after he had proposed it, including what I think you will agree are rather good reasons, the scientific community refused to accept it. In 1921 when Einstein received the Nobel prize, relativity was not menationed at all! A more modern example is William Tift's work on quantization of red shift. Proposed and supported with evidence in 1977, it has been verified to increasing accuracy at least 4 times by separate scientists at Oxford, University of Arizona, Canadian National Research Center, and the Royal Observatory at Edinburgh. The last verification was in 2003, yet scientists still refuse to accept it. Why? Because it is real evidence that demolishes some key aspects of the "Big Bang" theory and the supposed age of the Universe.
......the other proposals for the development of life on earth are conjectures......
ALL proposals for the development of life on earth are conjectures! Just because something is labeled as science doesn't make it so. Nobody KNOWS how life got started. Evolutionists BELIEVE it got started by randomness. Christian and other religions equally BELIEVE in an intelligent Creator. Everything we humans make from Airplanes to Zeppelins requires thought and planning. Evolutionists believe that this thinking process was not needed in the case of life.
To make life, requires matter and energy. Evolutionists will not concede that just as in human creativity, there is one more, vital ingredient and that is thought, planning and imagination. These are all activities of MIND. Human minds involved for Airplanes and things and a vastly superior MIND, the mind of God involved in the making of life. Nobody can prove where the universe came from. Both so called scientists and those of any religion only can BELIEVE one thing or other.
.....As the ice melts, it is revealing less reflecting water.......
/. you have heard of GIGO. (Garbage in - Garbage out) That applies to statistics also. How does anyone know that the underlying input assumptions are correct? Talk about faith! We live here on the West Coast. The weather reports today are LESS accurate than they were in the 50s and before. Back then the Weather Bureau would say confidently: "You are going to get rain tomorrow or the day after, lots of it, get the sandbags out". That is exactly what happened, lots of rain and flooding rivers. Today all they can guess is there is a xx% chance of rain. Now the weather predictors rely on satellites and fancy computing systems and get it wrong far more often than they used to back when there were weather ships stationed a few hundred miles out in the ocean. These ships had real people on them that actually OBSERVED what the weather was like and phoned their observations to the central office. If nobody can yet reliably predict the short term or seasonal weather, despite all the advanced computing, what gives you such confidence that long term climate predictions, such as global warming are any more reliable? I cannot prove that the climate scientists are wrong and you cannot prove them right. The humbling fact is that we humans simply cannot predict the future accurately, and that includes the weather, for tomorrow, the next year or the next millennium. Just because the majority of any group, including scientists, believes something is true, does not make it so.
An off that non-reflecting water more moisture evaporates which falls as more snow on the land, making more ice. Thus the negative feedback keeps the water level the same or makes it even less.
(.....Toba 70,000 years ago,......)
Stop conjecturing about how things were ages ago when nobody was around to actually OBSSERVE what really happened. How does anyone know that it was that volcanic eruption and not one of many other causes that made a mini ice age? Confine your discussion to what we can see happening now or can duplicate in the lab. The Krakatoa eruption caused a cold summer and crop failures for a year. We have historical records written by people who experienced this.
(.....This is why statistical ensembles are run.....)
I am sure that being on
.....The mechanisms you suggest for negative feedback simply haven't worked in the past - why should they work now.....
Please give me some examples of positive feedback in nature occurring, today, things that we can observe happening now or experiments that can be done in a lab. Don't always come with conjecture about the distant past. There is compelling evidence that our planet was warmer and cooler in the past than today, but there is no way that the assertion of positive feedback occurring can be inferred from that. Negative feedback processes are common in both natural and manmade systems for the precise reason of stability. Even in a positive feedback situation, such as an oscillator, negative feedback eventually predominates to limit the amplitude of the oscillations.
A large disturbance of the climate, such as a meteor hit will cause the climate to stabilize in a relatively short time. The Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 had a significant effect on the earth's climate for only a short time. The reason that the output of the sun is many times more stable than the power in the outlets of your house is that a very finely tuned negative feedback system between its gravity and the fusion reaction keeps it that way. Your own body temperature and other vital processes are regulated by complex multi-loop negative feedback.
(.....Simple minded computer models aren't being used....)
The computer programs used make many assumptions and simplifications of the incredibly complex feedback interactions involved. There are basically two reasons. One is that even the most powerful supercomputers are nowhere good enough to calculate the equations that we know apply. The second is that we have trouble determining what the value of many of the input variables should be. Bottom line: Climate prediction is a dubious science with a large dose of faith.
....methane is an extremely strong greenhouse gas.....
All green houses and all so called green house gases and agents can only keep solar energy in that has been absorbed. As the average temperature of the atmosphere rises, more water evaporates. This water eventually makes for more and much thicker clouds which are excellent reflectors of light. Light from the sun that is reflected back into space cannot warm anything. If nothing gets warmed, then all the greenhouse gases have no heat to trap. This reflection effect combined with the higher water content of the atmosphere has the tendency to put the brakes onto global warming. If the greenhouse gases doubled or tripled the rise in temperature and the ice meltdown is not anywhere near what it is imagined to be by simple minded computer models. Climate is an exceedingly complex negative feedback system, with many of its parameters unknown and very hard to determine. However, negative feedback tends to make for stability of any system. That includes the earth's average temperature control system.
....You do realize that the Antarctica is on land and not a floating ice berg right?........
Yes indeed you are right of course. However I said that in my original post that melting ice from land will increase the water level, but only slightly. However, to melt all that ice in the polar regions and high altitudes would require a huge average increase of temperatures on the entire planet. That is not likely nor projected to happen. As temperature rises in the oceans, more water evaporates and the now warmer atmosphere can hold immensely more water. This added water also means more clouds which reflect sunlight and thus have a negative feedback effect on the warming. At some point things would balance. To quantify all these interacting variables is tough exactly to predict. Present predictions based on simple calculation of land ice and ocean volumes does not take these feedback effects into account. We know from engineering that negative feedback tends to stabilize any system. Because of the laws of physics, the climate of the earth is an extremely complex negative feedback control system many of whose parameter are unknown and hard to measure. It is however precisely because of these laws, including the unique properties of water that make life possible and make the long term climate as stable as it is.
Water is the ONLY naturally occurring substance that EXPANDS in volume upon passing from a liquid to a solid. If water became more dense as it froze, the ice would sink to the bottom of all bodies of water. That would mean most of the earth's water would be ice and life would be difficult or impossible.