......Apple's already got that covered. The basic Mac mini is $499....
MacMall sells this for $474, but gives an extra $20 rebate, a free printer and a 4x5 graphics tablet.
Instead of a crappy MS XP home you get a real OS, better than XP-professional and you also get the iLife programs.
Add the same keyboard, monitor, speakers and mouse as listed and you get a media capable computer that'll also work great for browsing the web and simple office jobs. The mini is silent, but how much noise does that 300 watt power supply make? The mini is run by a small 85 watt power supply.
Sometime this year the new Intel powered mini will make this so called "Ultimate Budget Box" totally obsolete and expensive.
.....the collected knowledge of the world is at our fingertips.....
The problem is that knowledge and wisdom are not synonymous. If they were, war and strife would end and the great economic disparity among the people of this planet would not be nearly as huge. The reason history repeats is that man learns nothing from history. I doubt that Google and the Internet will change that sad fact.
....Are you saying that there are enough people who would buy it if it wasn't DRM'ed,.....
I think the iTunes music store shows that people ARE willing to pay a reasonable price for the content they want. The iTunes DRM is relatively benign and conveniently allows what most users want to do with the content. Do you really think that Apple would sell significantly fewer songs and videos if there were no DRM at all? I think it might be just the opposite. There are many for whom DRM is a slap in the face, impugning their basic honesty and integrity and they therefore avoid it like the plague. Just as there are some who help themselves to store merchandise and walk out without paying, there will always be some who will get content without paying for it. Even so, most stores make money from the vast majority of honest folk who stop at the cash register.
In the same way, I think the content makers would not lose if they eliminated DRM with its attendant extra costs and the negative effects (Sony rootkit?) of painting their customers as dishonest thieves. I suspect that Sony lost more money and customer goodwill from that episode than they ever might have saved through their DRM efforts.
DRM has never stopped and never will stop the criminal copyright infringers who copy things wholesale and then try to sell it on the streets. These guys should be sought out, thrown in jail and sued into financial oblivion.
....they could lock up a user's entire library before they knew it was possible. Sure it will be hackable but not legally and not easy enough for the majority of users.....
If suddenly millions of such HD DVD owners discovered that none of the content they purchased works any longer, they would start looking for ways to get around that artificial DRM restriction. Just like anyone who wants to today, can get tools to decrypt existing movies and songs, this will also be true of the new DRM schemes. When these millions of voters learn that it actually their government that is the real reason why their movies suddenly don't play any longer because of the laws (DMCA and mandated equipment designs) that these companies have bought from corrupt politicians, these laws will be repealed or ignored.
Since the content must eventually reach the eyes and ears of the consumers, it can also be copied. The content creators know this and are using the laws and courts to support their old, outdated business models. The horse industry tried this for a short time when the horseless carriage came. All bits are copyable and there can NEVER be an artificial restriction that will change this. Existing businesses that will not adapt to changing technology and markets have always tried to use governmental force to protect their business models.
If the government had not protected these old business models, they probably would have changed by now and the content creators would have figured out by now how to make money from the new technology. In the past, the government largely refused to protect content makers from the new emerging technologies such as audio and video recording for consumers. As a result, the content distributers have profited immensely from the new business models they came up with, whereas the actual creators have gotten an increasingly smaller portion of the revenue.
Once these artificial government business model supports are eliminated, DRM will permanently disappear. The real "pirates" are not stopped by any DRM in any case.
.....And this is exactally why I do not subscribe to the VOIP bandwagon yet......
Was the original Internet design not meant for transferring computer files from one system to another? In that application it doesn't really matter if a few packets arrive late, out of order or not al all. The computers sort all that out between themselves until the data has been correctly transferred and recorded. In real time data, such as audio for phones this packet loss or mixup cannot be tolerated. Does this mean that the fundamental design of the Internet has to be changed to truly accommodate real time transmission of phone conversations? For streaming audio or video, the computer can arrange the data into a sufficiently large buffer to make up for packet loss and mixups. It seems that the present Internet is inherently ill suited for time critical data transmissions.
.....However, if God can go through such a radical personality change once.....
The root of our disagreement has to do with your view of God. Since nobody can do an experiment to either prove or disprove His existence, we have to rely on faith. Other than His existence, we also have to make some basic assumptions (again faith) about God. Two of these are: That He is good and that He is perfect. Just as darkness may be thought of the absence of light, so evil may be defined as the absence of good. In this sense, God defines goodness. God is flawless and perfect and when everything is said and done, desires for every human being to attain this perfection also.
At the very time, when God laid down the law in the old testament, he told Moses a little about Himself in Exodus 34:6-7 In other passages God says similar things and adds: "And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments." (Exodus 20:6)
Indeed you are right, that if God truly were a deranged despot, living under His thumb would be awful. However, because He is good and loving, living in harmony with His design cannot be anything but wonderful.
In the beginning of the Bible we are told that God made man in His image. Many today will turn that around and say that man makes God is his image. IF you believe in God, you will concede that he was around before mankind. It is because ALL humans, no matter how awful they act at times, STILL bear His image, that it is wrong to murder. Good laws are for our protection, just like a good father makes rules for his family. God put within you, and every human a thing called conscience which innately tells you right from wrong. You can however, by deliberately choosing to override this repeatedly, eventually still its quiet voice. This is how some people become capable of the most despicable acts. Fortunately, most people do not go to the effort required to beat their conscience into silence and so behave decently.
(.....if you discover that you are homosexual....)
God loves, and tells Christians to love everyone, including homosexuals. It is the homosexual behavior, stealing, lying, rage and other bad activities that God has issued His cease and desist orders against. Anyone who insists on continuing with these and others will not want to nor allowed to be in his presence.
(.....When you describe your heaven, what you're describing is Star Trek The Next Generation. It's a dull place......)
I certainly would not describe the present world we live in as boring. Why should a world without evil be boring then? Would this world be boring if everybody obeyed the "Golden Rule"? That's what God's intentions are; a world much like ours except without evil and death. A world where the laws of entropy will no longer exist.
.......There's nothing a new computer can't do that the old computer can do......
It is hard to disagree with you, yet none of us can really predict the future. You could be right. However, if the DRM restrictions are too draconian the old computers will at least be kept for certain purposes. Apple uses DRM, but it doesn't really prevent most users from doing what they wish, such as playing the music on multiple iPods or computers. Users may burn custom CDs for special uses etc. Movie DVDs play on most computers without trouble. If the new computers don't allow for convenient backups of data and software because of these new "Trust" chips, corporate as well as home users will complain to the hardware/software makers and not buy these things. If millions of iPod owners learn that their Government prevents them from listening to any of the new music they bought because of the DMCA law that prevents any copy protection that has been broken from being made available to them, that law will be dumped.
The nirvana dream of the content creators in cahoots with the electronics makers forcing everybody to repurchase their entire library of content and software will end. Once I own say "The Sound of Music" on one format, why should I have to buy it again and again each time a new format comes out? In analog days it was technically more difficult to copy from say vinyl disks to cassettes. It had to be done one at a time and in real time. Also, the quality drops for each copy.
When the information is coded into a collection of bits, the copying can be made easy and almost automatic and there is no copy loss. Digital technology has destroyed the dream of the content makers of getting money over and over again out of the stuff they have stored in their vaults. The CDs can be ripped to play on anything and so can the present DVDs. The content makers are trying to thwart this natural easy copy-ability with artificial technological and legal shackles.
Eventually the content makers may develop new business models that are cognizant of the fact that the days of them getting paid over and over again are permanently ended by the very nature of digital technology and no artificial technical nor legal obstacles will work in the long run. Trusted computing will work for security, but not DRM. The experiment with DRM will end in failure.
......we'll just make our own rules based on the equitable treatment of our fellow humans.....
That's very fine and dandy, except that "in that other place" everybody makes their own rules. So then what happens when your rules collide with somebody else's? Hitler, Stalin, Nero, Idi Amin, Saddam and countless others thought their rules were great and imposed them on others. They thought that their way of doing things makes the world a better place. Hitler and those around him thought that a better world would be one without Jews. Others disagreed with him and it took WW2 and millions of deaths to make that point.
You glibly talk of good triumphing over evil, but who defines what is good or evil. What makes you think that somebody else will let you define your rules as good while you define theirs as bad? Mankind has failed to live in peace and will continue to have strife and warfare until someone is willing and able to forcefully impose order. Parents do this with their squabbling offspring all the time.
Sci-Fi books and films have countless scenarios where a vastly superior race tries to impose their "order" on a violently opposed, suddenly united humanity. Then, after the external danger is passed, mankind goes right back to business as usual - strife and warfare.
Just because a righteous and good, God the father, at last imposes His will on His squabbling human family, doesn't mean that life will not have challenges and be boring. Those who choose to live under His rule will be educated be able to truly explore this universe and "boldly go where no one has gone before". Not only this time-space universe we know about now, but other dimensions and realities of which we have not the faintest notion right now.
He give us a little hint of this: But as it is written, Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him. ( 1Corinthians 2:9)
God, like any good father, lets His kids do the things He knows they are capable of and educates them to do more and more as they grow up. He also know that certain things they are not capable of yet and expects the kids to trust their daddy until they learn that in due course.
The mixture of good and evil, we presently experience, will not always be. There will come a time, when all that God deems good, just and honorable will be collected together in one place, as will everything evil, vile and treacherous in another place. Every human being is given the choice which of these two places to inhabit forever. Theologians argue about whether this choice is only available in this life or not. In any case, this choice is available to you right now, every single day of your life.
....I sincerely hope that ancient prophesy isn't the best hope we have for the future of humanity......
Tolkien and CS Lewis were friends and followers of Jesus Christ. Both wrote fanciful, fictional stories patterned after the fall and redemption themes in the Bible.
The fulfillment of the ancient biblical prophecies IS the very best hope there is for humanity. It will be a time when there is peace and God's laws of morality and love will be obeyed, just as the laws of physics are today.
Many people today treat the ten commandments as suggestions, but then these commandments WILL be obeyed by all. Today, if you fall or jump from a ten story building, the law of gravity makes you immediately reap the results of your action. When that time finally arrives, liars and thieves and all others that break these rules will immediately experience the built-in consequences of these laws.
As a result you won't need locks or other security. You can always expect that everyone will always at all times tell you the truth. All need, want and poverty will vanish like smoke, because prisons and armies and everything else engendered by human selfishness, distrust and greed will be gone. Most people will be healthy and live to the pre-programmed age of about 120 years. Hospitals and doctors will be few because our creator Himself will reveal the still hidden factors that make for perfect health.
The people of Earth will realize that this planet and everything thereon is God's property and will therefore be the good ecologically minded caretakers God wanted mankind to be from the beginning.
You or anyone else who doesn't wish to submit to the rule of God, will not have to. There is a place reserved for those, where everyone there will be allowed to do whatever they please. There will be NO law or restriction placed upon them. Maybe that is your hope for your future.
.....People will get these new computers because every new computer will be sold with this hardware standard by the end of the year, and they'll buy it because the free promotional McHappymeal CDs *only* work on the new computers......
So you really think that millions of people will throw their otherwise perfectly good computers in the trash, just because their whiney kids want to play the "free CD? I guess they'll have to throw all their CD players and iPods into the trash also, because they will not play the new Britney noises either.
How many people are still using Win98 or even Win95 even today? Go to the store and see how many NEW programs you can buy that will still play on 10 year old hardware? Sure, the latest games won't -- so what! As long as a significant number of old dog computers exist, programmers will write software for them and most websites will work just fine. Neither HD TV nor the new TPM computers offer any compelling advantages over current technology. When Joe user learns that he/she can no longer do with the new computers what they were used to doing for years with the old, they'll take the new computer back to the store. Do you really think that users will be pleased when they learn that they can no longer play the new music they bought on one or more iPods or burn a CD of favorites for their car? iTunes has DRM, but it allows users to do these things. If the new DRM no longer allows this, the shit will hit the RIAA and the stink will be horrendous.
How happy will someone be when they learn that the movie they just bought will not play on the same old PC or DVD player that all their older movies in their collection work with? They'll likely take that shiny piece of DRM crap plastic back to the store and demand their money back. After millions of current PC owners do this, new movies will still be released that work on the old machines. As long as there is money to be made from people running the old computers and DVD players, there will be people who will supply that market. Neither the new computers nor the new HD TVs and disks give anywhere near the advantage jump that the current DVDs offered over VHS tapes or CDs did over vinyl.
Perhaps when at least 50% of all households can have an affordable 100Mbyte/sec or better fiber connection, HD TV and the new computers will provide a video on demand killer app, that there will be a huge incentive for the masses to adopt them. How many users, even today are still happy with dial-up internet connections?
Yes, He was submissive to the will of God. The one true God who made everything, including time itself, is the only one who knows when this prophecy will come true.
Jesus came at the right time the first time he lived on Earth:
"but when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son" (Galatians 4:4)
He will come at the right time once more. The first time He came as a little baby, the second time He will come as the King of Kings to rule over mankind rescued from the brink of extinction.
Right now, anyone can choose by faith to follow and submit to Him, but when that day comes, everyone MUST submit.
"Wherefore also God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)"
The word EVERY means me, you, all Muslims, Atheists and all adherents of other religions. You can read the text surrounding the above quoted passage to get the context of the whole message.
....And eventually it will all be exterminated- because human beings are not capable of self-government....
That is what Jesus Christ foretold would eventually happen if God, the creator and owner of this planet, doesn't personally intervene and put a stop to human madness. Whether you choose to believe in the existence of God will not matter on that day. After that, "The Government shall be on His shoulders". All human evil, like cancer cells, will be eliminated and only the good clean corporate humanity will remain. Jesus said that it is the meek and humble ones that will inherit Earth, not the Moslems, Christians, Hindus or any other religion.
.....grandpa are using cheap 2GHz P4 machines to surf the web and email baby pictures, when they could get along just spiffy with a 800MHz PIII. But you can't buy a new cheap 800MHz PIII anymore.....
I agree with you on the computers, because the pentium 2GHz boxes cost no more than the 800 Mhz ones did. Up until now, DRM has not really affected the masses of consumers. iTunes DRM is benign in that it still allows users to do what the want -- namely play the music on several computers and make custom favorite CDs to play in their standard players, wherever and whenever they want. If the future DVD-TV DRM doesn't allow the same sort of things that most consumers can do today, (time and place shifting) the DRM'ed junk will fly back to the stores faster than it can be sold. When millions of Joe consumers find out that it is their own government (DMCA anyone) that prevents them from suddenly doing with their purchased content what they have been doing for years, that will quickly change. In the end, consumers are not stupid and know what they are accustomed to and will let neither government nor Hollywood take that away.
The outcry will either force the content makers to abandon oppressive DRM or the government will be forced by the voters to scrap laws like the DMCA. Then enterprising hackers will quickly sell solutions to do away with all DRM for all consumers. EVERY copy protection, in any shape or form has ALWAYS been defeated. That is why the content providers have purchased the DMCA law that prevents professionals from destroying all protections and selling the means to do so to everybody.
By definition, if it can be watched or listened to, it can be copied with ALL DRM stripped out. If you expect me to read a super-secret message to me, you also have to give me the key. If the key exists, it can be used to decipher the message and then I can do anything with the clear message after that. Even if there are a hundred keys in a hundred super special chips, at some point the message must appear readable and therefore copyable.
......It is the person with the old non-Trusted computer that gets increasingly locked out......
That was my main point, the millions of users of older equipment will represent a sizable market that WILL be filled. This will be especially the case as more and more users find out that they are able to do a lot of things with their old machines that their friends with the newfangled machines can no longer do. There will be software written that will continue to install and work on the old and new systems and their makers will make a lot of noise that their software has NO DRM restrictions. Once users learn that older is better, then old systems will become valuable and there will arise mod kits that will allow the old computers to work with all the new software and destroy the functionality of the TPM chips with modifications. Once Joe user finds out that the new computer they just bought from Dell or whoever no longer lets them copy their CDs to their iPod or watch their DVDs on their laptops, there will be 42 million or more users that will make enough noise to have the DMCA repealed. Politicians still ARE sensitive to the screams of voters if enough of them do. MS and all the content makers will then have gone too far and the backlash will crush even them and all their bought and paid for legislators. Up until now, DRM really has not affected the huge masses of consumers out there, but once they realize what is happening and that their government is the reason they can no longer listen to content they legally bought, wherever, whenever they want to, that will change in such a big hurry that all the lawyers all put together in the whole USA won't be able to stop.
....How long do you think it will be until DVDs are dead?......
What advantage other than higher resolution does the new HD have over regular DVD? DVD has random access, (no rewind) non-wear out and more compact storage as compelling reasons over VHS and thus its rapid adoption. CDs have some of the same advantages over the vinyl and tapes they replaced. The newer fancy SAC and other superfidelity DVD audio never brought anything to the table over regular CDs and virtually nobody paid for any upgrade. I suspect that the HD disks and TVs will not have a sufficiently great advantage to get the kind of broad market penetration of normal DVDs and TVs . There are many who live in apartments, where it is difficult to accommodate the truly large screens that make HD enjoyable. A $200 Walmart 27" TV is big enough and much more affordable for most such people. Discerning the poor shave job or sloppy makeup of the evening news anchor is a compelling reason to spend thousands of $$$$ on? Give me a break!
When terabyte or higher atomic storage systems now in the labs become commercially viable, these may engender the wholesale switch to new media storage devices. HD and blueray are temporary solutions that have no great advantages over what is in the mass market today.
....It may be true that, if we chose to dedicate a significant portion of our lives to memorizing words, we could achieve the level of competency....
Language in general, including spelling is learned early in life. When I came to the USA as an 11 year old, I did not know much English. However I had a good incentive to learn it and in 6 months I was better at reading and writing than my native classmates. Many schools today, do not give children much incentive to learn the language properly and TV as well as computers don't help either. At last when these kids reach young adulthood they discover their severe lack in this area and it becomes a formidable impediment to their future in college or business. Kids are wired to learn language much more readily than adults.
Any of you with kids out there should insist that they learn to use the language without the modern tools first and then learn to use them as a convenience and productivity enhancement later. Learn first how to add up a column of numbers without a calculator and how to cut off a 2x4 without a power saw.
.....and it's the 20 year olds who are the future. Always....
Yes, but in only half a century these 20 year olds will be 70, if they are lucky enough to live that long. They'll then be the "old thinkers" stuck in a new world. Always!
The reason man learns nothing from history is because the young fail to listen what the older ones try to tell them and the older ones too often tell the younger ones to do one thing, but themselves do the opposite.
.....the current implementation of encryption software isn't yet usable for the average user....
Many people leave their car unlocked because there is nothing worth stealing therein. Likewise, most people don't care if anybody reads their e-mail that they had a great time with the kids at the beach last weekend. Security by the obscurity of being part of millions of e-mails works for most people. Having three locks on the front door and three sets of keys is a lot of trouble each time you want to go in or out. Perhaps the new, extra cost security module will be a little USB plug-in device for those who do have deep, dark secrets the wish to protect, but why make everybody pay for a Vault combination lock on their house door?
.....If you have a normal old obsolete computer, none of the new stuff works for you at all. If you have an obsolete old computer you get locked out of all of the new stuff.....
Since there are millions of "old, obsolete" computers around, someone will see the opportunity to write the same kinds of software functions that the new DRMed software provides. There will be a functional equivalence of office and photoshop and many other programs that will run on ALL computers, old and new and the documents produced will be readable on all of them also.
Then the purveyors of the "new" software will be locked out of all the old computers or will have to come out with a new and an old version. They will also have to ensure that all the millions of old computer users can still read the data created by the new DRM enabled software. The scenario you are writing about would only happen if everybody switched to a new TPM system overnight. How many people are still happily using Win98 or even Win95 today? Getting everybody to use a unified computing model like this has about as much chance as all of us learning Chinese or they all learning English. Pretty soon the hardware makers will see that the extra cost of the TPM gets them no return and may even cost them sales. At this point they'll just leave them out to save a few dollars or yen.
Where is there a capitalistic advantage for a computer maker to go to extra expense? There will always be some that will advertise that they sell a system that does not force users to use any particular software and will allow their computer to read the data that is generated by their friends, regardless of whether these friends have an 2015 super duper system or an ancient 2006 Winxp or Mac OSX system. I have recovered files from a 1988 Mac and edited them on a 2005 Windows computer.
This TPM idea is a flash in the pan that will die on the vine as soon as the content makers figure out how to make all the new technologies work for them so they can make lots of money. It may take them a few more years, but they'll figure it out.
The only way this will work is for a WORLD wide government mandate that no more general purpose computers may be sold unless they have these "security" chips.
....it is the creator of the document (fx CFO) that decides who should have access to it, it is not up not anyone who receives it...
However the creator also has to decide whether that PERSON, not the person's computer is trustworthy to receive the information. No matter how trustworthy a computer is, if the person is not trustworthy, then that untrustworthy person will figure out a way to get that information to places the creator would not want it to be. It only takes one untrustworthy person to copy the decrypted bits, no matter what these bits represent, and those bits can be sent around the world to millions of places in seconds. All watermarking and other identifying techniques will fail, since there is no way to tell one bit from another. No trustworthy computer will ever make its users equally trustworthy.
....Clearly there are legitimate reasons for content owners to want to secure their documents.....
The problem is that if you send me that secret document, you also have to give me the key. This means you have to send the key securely so nobody else can intercept it along the way, but you also have to ensure that I and not somebody else is at the receiving end. Further, if you don't want me to pass the secret on to someone else, you'll need to figure out a way to prevent me from giving the key, and the encrypted file or the decrypted file to someone else. Since digital data is easily copied by nature, you have a job that is ultimately impossible. If I want to give the secret data to someone else, you really have no way of preventing me from doing that.
All information ultimately has to be made available to the human senses, mostly visual and audible. In that case, a camera and a microphone can always capture the deepest and darkest secret and broadcast it to the world. The only secrets that truly are secret, as least so far, are those between you and God alone.
Therefore, all the so called "secure" TPM or whatever will not keep any secrets safe. It may make it less convenient, mostly for all users, but no secret worth knowing can be kept so for long. All anti-copying measures have failed until now and will continue to do so.
.....Just because you can run XP on a minimum of 256MB of RAM doesn't mean you should.....
XP run just fine on 256M and likely so will Vista. Just don't try to run any of the Applications you bought the computer for in the first place.
What will Vista bring to the art of computing, that OSX has not had for about a year now already? OSX 10.4 runs faster on our old G4 laptop than the OS 10.2 it came with. With MS, the new OS software generally runs slower on the same hardware or misses out on most of the improvements. One big pain with Windows has always been the difficulty of upgrading from an old to a new computer. When I bought a new G5 iMac for my wife for Christmas, getting all her stuff and settings from the old G4 to the new one was almost automatic. Boot the old one in disk mode, connect them with a cable (firewire) and click the mouse to automatically transfer all data, internet settings, account passwords, preferences and applications and all their settings and more to the new G5. I wonder if Vista will make it easy to upgrade from an older machine to that shiny new one.
If Vista users are no longer running as administrators (a good thing) how many of their current apps will cease functioning? If users have to re-purchase or upgrade much of, or most of their software, that will be a big disincentive to upgrade to a new computer or upgrade to the new OS on the old one.
Indeed, if anyone has deep dark secrets he/she wishes to share with someone, just encrypt with something like PGP. Your secret will be safe unless someone wants it bad enough to torture either you or the recipients for the password. If someone wants to force a secret out of you, they'll get it, unless you, like many young muslims are willing to die for it.
.....rather than just asserting it as being impossible?.....
I never did assert it is IMPOSSIBLE, just highly improbable. Complexity arising spontaneously out of simpler components is not impossible, just as the gas in a container example, but the probability of either happening are vanishingly small.
DNA holds the information needed to carry on all structure and operation of a living creature. It is like the Software in a computer which carries out all the designs of the programmer(s). If you come across a functioning computer, you can study how it works, but no matter what you can do, there is no way you can determine how the software got into that computer by examining the computer as a closed system. You don't have the original CDs and it doesn't have a connection to the outside world. It's just running a very complex software program, of which you have no idea where that program came from.
Just as the computer, we find finished, very complex functioning living systems, but have no way to determine where the complex software that runs them came from. Once the DNA software is running, it governs the reproduction of the hardware it runs on, as well as its own code. We can study and experiment with this and be astonished at the extreme complexity, but no experiment will find the originator of the software.
Like all information, DNA is a product of mind, a mind greater than any human mind. This cannot be proven by any experiment and neither can evolution be proved by an experiment. Evolutionists find the computer with its software and then deny the existence of a programmer. ID and creationism theorize there is a designer and evolutionists deny there is, but neither can do an experiment to either prove or disprove their dogmas. One or the other is believed as a philosophy or religion.
......You'd think that with literally thousands of biologists around the world, someone somewhere would recognize this apparently obvious principle......
Just because a majority holds to a particular view, doesn't mean that is how things really are. How many theories held by every "reputable" scientist at the time, are now in the dustbin of false ideas.
Evolution tries to apply to living systems what applies nowhere else -- namely that systems left to themselves become more complex, rather than breaking down into simpler components.
Evolution teaches that over large spans of time, simple cells evolved into complex animals -- even eventually humans. No experiment has ever been done to prove even the smallest link in such an amazing chain of events. No assembly of individual parts, whether living or not, has ever been made into a complex functioning system without the instructions needed to do so.
Even you, as an intelligent being will have problems putting together a working airplane, even if you were given each of the major subassemblies pre-tested, and all other parts and tools needed. You would also need detailed instructions, especially if you know little about airplanes.
Yet evolutionists try to convince us and themselves, that complex living structures, such as brains, eyes, ears, circulatory systems and on an on all came into being without detailed instructions and knowledge of how put them all together. Hemoglobin molecules are very complex structures that have a very precise arrangements of atoms.
The principle of entropy has far wider applicability than only thermodynamics.
A quote from the WIKI article: "Unlike most other laws of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is statistical in nature, and its reliability arises from the huge number of particles present in macroscopic systems. It is not impossible, in principle, for all 1023 atoms in a gas to spontaneously migrate to one half of container; it is only fantastically unlikely -- so unlikely that no macroscopic violation of the Second Law has ever been observed."
Evolution of simple life forms into complex ones has also never been observed, and although not impossible, it is just as unlikely as the atoms all migrating to only one part of a container. If you have two such containers connected with a pipe, the pressure in both of them will be equal. If you replace the pipe with an intelligently designed power-driven pump, you can get all or most of the atoms into one container only. If you supply energy only, such as heating the pipe, there will be be an equal increase of pressure in both containers. Only the designed pump, supplying energy does the job.
If time suddenly reversed for say an hour, how would you know? What experiment could you do that showed that time was going backwards? Hint: The "arrow of time" is in fact picked by entropy, not as the article states.
Entropy and evolution as currently preached are fundamentally at odds with one another.
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......Apple's already got that covered. The basic Mac mini is $499....
MacMall sells this for $474, but gives an extra $20 rebate, a free printer and a 4x5 graphics tablet.
Instead of a crappy MS XP home you get a real OS, better than XP-professional and you also get the iLife programs.
Add the same keyboard, monitor, speakers and mouse as listed and you get a media capable computer that'll also work great for browsing the web and simple office jobs. The mini is silent, but how much noise does that 300 watt power supply make? The mini is run by a small 85 watt power supply.
Sometime this year the new Intel powered mini will make this so called "Ultimate Budget Box" totally obsolete and expensive.
.....the collected knowledge of the world is at our fingertips.....
The problem is that knowledge and wisdom are not synonymous. If they were, war and strife would end and the great economic disparity among the people of this planet would not be nearly as huge. The reason history repeats is that man learns nothing from history. I doubt that Google and the Internet will change that sad fact.
....Are you saying that there are enough people who would buy it if it wasn't DRM'ed,.....
I think the iTunes music store shows that people ARE willing to pay a reasonable price for the content they want. The iTunes DRM is relatively benign and conveniently allows what most users want to do with the content. Do you really think that Apple would sell significantly fewer songs and videos if there were no DRM at all? I think it might be just the opposite. There are many for whom DRM is a slap in the face, impugning their basic honesty and integrity and they therefore avoid it like the plague. Just as there are some who help themselves to store merchandise and walk out without paying, there will always be some who will get content without paying for it. Even so, most stores make money from the vast majority of honest folk who stop at the cash register.
In the same way, I think the content makers would not lose if they eliminated DRM with its attendant extra costs and the negative effects (Sony rootkit?) of painting their customers as dishonest thieves. I suspect that Sony lost more money and customer goodwill from that episode than they ever might have saved through their DRM efforts.
DRM has never stopped and never will stop the criminal copyright infringers who copy things wholesale and then try to sell it on the streets. These guys should be sought out, thrown in jail and sued into financial oblivion.
....they could lock up a user's entire library before they knew it was possible. Sure it will be hackable but not legally and not easy enough for the majority of users.....
If suddenly millions of such HD DVD owners discovered that none of the content they purchased works any longer, they would start looking for ways to get around that artificial DRM restriction. Just like anyone who wants to today, can get tools to decrypt existing movies and songs, this will also be true of the new DRM schemes. When these millions of voters learn that it actually their government that is the real reason why their movies suddenly don't play any longer because of the laws (DMCA and mandated equipment designs) that these companies have bought from corrupt politicians, these laws will be repealed or ignored.
Since the content must eventually reach the eyes and ears of the consumers, it can also be copied. The content creators know this and are using the laws and courts to support their old, outdated business models. The horse industry tried this for a short time when the horseless carriage came. All bits are copyable and there can NEVER be an artificial restriction that will change this. Existing businesses that will not adapt to changing technology and markets have always tried to use governmental force to protect their business models.
If the government had not protected these old business models, they probably would have changed by now and the content creators would have figured out by now how to make money from the new technology. In the past, the government largely refused to protect content makers from the new emerging technologies such as audio and video recording for consumers. As a result, the content distributers have profited immensely from the new business models they came up with, whereas the actual creators have gotten an increasingly smaller portion of the revenue.
Once these artificial government business model supports are eliminated, DRM will permanently disappear. The real "pirates" are not stopped by any DRM in any case.
.....And this is exactally why I do not subscribe to the VOIP bandwagon yet......
Was the original Internet design not meant for transferring computer files from one system to another? In that application it doesn't really matter if a few packets arrive late, out of order or not al all. The computers sort all that out between themselves until the data has been correctly transferred and recorded. In real time data, such as audio for phones this packet loss or mixup cannot be tolerated. Does this mean that the fundamental design of the Internet has to be changed to truly accommodate real time transmission of phone conversations? For streaming audio or video, the computer can arrange the data into a sufficiently large buffer to make up for packet loss and mixups. It seems that the present Internet is inherently ill suited for time critical data transmissions.
.....However, if God can go through such a radical personality change once.....
The root of our disagreement has to do with your view of God. Since nobody can do an experiment to either prove or disprove His existence, we have to rely on faith. Other than His existence, we also have to make some basic assumptions (again faith) about God. Two of these are: That He is good and that He is perfect. Just as darkness may be thought of the absence of light, so evil may be defined as the absence of good. In this sense, God defines goodness. God is flawless and perfect and when everything is said and done, desires for every human being to attain this perfection also.
At the very time, when God laid down the law in the old testament, he told Moses a little about Himself in Exodus 34:6-7
In other passages God says similar things and adds: "And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments." (Exodus 20:6)
Indeed you are right, that if God truly were a deranged despot, living under His thumb would be awful. However, because He is good and loving, living in harmony with His design cannot be anything but wonderful.
In the beginning of the Bible we are told that God made man in His image. Many today will turn that around and say that man makes God is his image. IF you believe in God, you will concede that he was around before mankind. It is because ALL humans, no matter how awful they act at times, STILL bear His image, that it is wrong to murder. Good laws are for our protection, just like a good father makes rules for his family. God put within you, and every human a thing called conscience which innately tells you right from wrong. You can however, by deliberately choosing to override this repeatedly, eventually still its quiet voice. This is how some people become capable of the most despicable acts. Fortunately, most people do not go to the effort required to beat their conscience into silence and so behave decently.
(.....if you discover that you are homosexual....)
God loves, and tells Christians to love everyone, including homosexuals. It is the homosexual behavior, stealing, lying, rage and other bad activities that God has issued His cease and desist orders against. Anyone who insists on continuing with these and others will not want to nor allowed to be in his presence.
(.....When you describe your heaven, what you're describing is Star Trek The Next Generation. It's a dull place......)
I certainly would not describe the present world we live in as boring. Why should a world without evil be boring then? Would this world be boring if everybody obeyed the "Golden Rule"? That's what God's intentions are; a world much like ours except without evil and death. A world where the laws of entropy will no longer exist.
.......There's nothing a new computer can't do that the old computer can do......
It is hard to disagree with you, yet none of us can really predict the future. You could be right. However, if the DRM restrictions are too draconian the old computers will at least be kept for certain purposes. Apple uses DRM, but it doesn't really prevent most users from doing what they wish, such as playing the music on multiple iPods or computers. Users may burn custom CDs for special uses etc. Movie DVDs play on most computers without trouble. If the new computers don't allow for convenient backups of data and software because of these new "Trust" chips, corporate as well as home users will complain to the hardware/software makers and not buy these things. If millions of iPod owners learn that their Government prevents them from listening to any of the new music they bought because of the DMCA law that prevents any copy protection that has been broken from being made available to them, that law will be dumped.
The nirvana dream of the content creators in cahoots with the electronics makers forcing everybody to repurchase their entire library of content and software will end. Once I own say "The Sound of Music" on one format, why should I have to buy it again and again each time a new format comes out? In analog days it was technically more difficult to copy from say vinyl disks to cassettes. It had to be done one at a time and in real time. Also, the quality drops for each copy.
When the information is coded into a collection of bits, the copying can be made easy and almost automatic and there is no copy loss. Digital technology has destroyed the dream of the content makers of getting money over and over again out of the stuff they have stored in their vaults. The CDs can be ripped to play on anything and so can the present DVDs. The content makers are trying to thwart this natural easy copy-ability with artificial technological and legal shackles.
Eventually the content makers may develop new business models that are cognizant of the fact that the days of them getting paid over and over again are permanently ended by the very nature of digital technology and no artificial technical nor legal obstacles will work in the long run. Trusted computing will work for security, but not DRM. The experiment with DRM will end in failure.
......we'll just make our own rules based on the equitable treatment of our fellow humans.....
That's very fine and dandy, except that "in that other place" everybody makes their own rules. So then what happens when your rules collide with somebody else's? Hitler, Stalin, Nero, Idi Amin, Saddam and countless others thought their rules were great and imposed them on others. They thought that their way of doing things makes the world a better place. Hitler and those around him thought that a better world would be one without Jews. Others disagreed with him and it took WW2 and millions of deaths to make that point.
You glibly talk of good triumphing over evil, but who defines what is good or evil. What makes you think that somebody else will let you define your rules as good while you define theirs as bad? Mankind has failed to live in peace and will continue to have strife and warfare until someone is willing and able to forcefully impose order. Parents do this with their squabbling offspring all the time.
Sci-Fi books and films have countless scenarios where a vastly superior race tries to impose their "order" on a violently opposed, suddenly united humanity. Then, after the external danger is passed, mankind goes right back to business as usual - strife and warfare.
Just because a righteous and good, God the father, at last imposes His will on His squabbling human family, doesn't mean that life will not have challenges and be boring. Those who choose to live under His rule will be educated be able to truly explore this universe and "boldly go where no one has gone before". Not only this time-space universe we know about now, but other dimensions and realities of which we have not the faintest notion right now.
He give us a little hint of this:
But as it is written, Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him. ( 1Corinthians 2:9)
God, like any good father, lets His kids do the things He knows they are capable of and educates them to do more and more as they grow up. He also know that certain things they are not capable of yet and expects the kids to trust their daddy until they learn that in due course.
The mixture of good and evil, we presently experience, will not always be. There will come a time, when all that God deems good, just and honorable will be collected together in one place, as will everything evil, vile and treacherous in another place. Every human being is given the choice which of these two places to inhabit forever. Theologians argue about whether this choice is only available in this life or not. In any case, this choice is available to you right now, every single day of your life.
....I sincerely hope that ancient prophesy isn't the best hope we have for the future of humanity......
Tolkien and CS Lewis were friends and followers of Jesus Christ. Both wrote fanciful, fictional stories patterned after the fall and redemption themes in the Bible.
The fulfillment of the ancient biblical prophecies IS the very best hope there is for humanity. It will be a time when there is peace and God's laws of morality and love will be obeyed, just as the laws of physics are today.
Many people today treat the ten commandments as suggestions, but then these commandments WILL be obeyed by all. Today, if you fall or jump from a ten story building, the law of gravity makes you immediately reap the results of your action. When that time finally arrives, liars and thieves and all others that break these rules will immediately experience the built-in consequences of these laws.
As a result you won't need locks or other security. You can always expect that everyone will always at all times tell you the truth. All need, want and poverty will vanish like smoke, because prisons and armies and everything else engendered by human selfishness, distrust and greed will be gone. Most people will be healthy and live to the pre-programmed age of about 120 years. Hospitals and doctors will be few because our creator Himself will reveal the still hidden factors that make for perfect health.
The people of Earth will realize that this planet and everything thereon is God's property and will therefore be the good ecologically minded caretakers God wanted mankind to be from the beginning.
You or anyone else who doesn't wish to submit to the rule of God, will not have to. There is a place reserved for those, where everyone there will be allowed to do whatever they please. There will be NO law or restriction placed upon them. Maybe that is your hope for your future.
.....People will get these new computers because every new computer will be sold with this hardware standard by the end of the year, and they'll buy it because the free promotional McHappymeal CDs *only* work on the new computers......
So you really think that millions of people will throw their otherwise perfectly good computers in the trash, just because their whiney kids want to play the "free CD? I guess they'll have to throw all their CD players and iPods into the trash also, because they will not play the new Britney noises either.
How many people are still using Win98 or even Win95 even today? Go to the store and see how many NEW programs you can buy that will still play on 10 year old hardware? Sure, the latest games won't -- so what! As long as a significant number of old dog computers exist, programmers will write software for them and most websites will work just fine. Neither HD TV nor the new TPM computers offer any compelling advantages over current technology. When Joe user learns that he/she can no longer do with the new computers what they were used to doing for years with the old, they'll take the new computer back to the store. Do you really think that users will be pleased when they learn that they can no longer play the new music they bought on one or more iPods or burn a CD of favorites for their car? iTunes has DRM, but it allows users to do these things. If the new DRM no longer allows this, the shit will hit the RIAA and the stink will be horrendous.
How happy will someone be when they learn that the movie they just bought will not play on the same old PC or DVD player that all their older movies in their collection work with? They'll likely take that shiny piece of DRM crap plastic back to the store and demand their money back. After millions of current PC owners do this, new movies will still be released that work on the old machines. As long as there is money to be made from people running the old computers and DVD players, there will be people who will supply that market. Neither the new computers nor the new HD TVs and disks give anywhere near the advantage jump that the current DVDs offered over VHS tapes or CDs did over vinyl.
Perhaps when at least 50% of all households can have an affordable 100Mbyte/sec or better fiber connection, HD TV and the new computers will provide a video on demand killer app, that there will be a huge incentive for the masses to adopt them. How many users, even today are still happy with dial-up internet connections?
...Was Jesus submissive?...
Yes, He was submissive to the will of God. The one true God who made everything, including time itself, is the only one who knows when this prophecy will come true.
Jesus came at the right time the first time he lived on Earth:
"but when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son" (Galatians 4:4)
He will come at the right time once more. The first time He came as a little baby, the second time He will come as the King of Kings to rule over mankind rescued from the brink of extinction.
Right now, anyone can choose by faith to follow and submit to Him, but when that day comes, everyone MUST submit.
"Wherefore also God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)"
The word EVERY means me, you, all Muslims, Atheists and all adherents of other religions. You can read the text surrounding the above quoted passage to get the context of the whole message.
....And eventually it will all be exterminated- because human beings are not capable of self-government....
That is what Jesus Christ foretold would eventually happen if God, the creator and owner of this planet, doesn't personally intervene and put a stop to human madness. Whether you choose to believe in the existence of God will not matter on that day. After that, "The Government shall be on His shoulders". All human evil, like cancer cells, will be eliminated and only the good clean corporate humanity will remain. Jesus said that it is the meek and humble ones that will inherit Earth, not the Moslems, Christians, Hindus or any other religion.
.....grandpa are using cheap 2GHz P4 machines to surf the web and email baby pictures, when they could get along just spiffy with a 800MHz PIII. But you can't buy a new cheap 800MHz PIII anymore.....
I agree with you on the computers, because the pentium 2GHz boxes cost no more than the 800 Mhz ones did. Up until now, DRM has not really affected the masses of consumers. iTunes DRM is benign in that it still allows users to do what the want -- namely play the music on several computers and make custom favorite CDs to play in their standard players, wherever and whenever they want. If the future DVD-TV DRM doesn't allow the same sort of things that most consumers can do today, (time and place shifting) the DRM'ed junk will fly back to the stores faster than it can be sold. When millions of Joe consumers find out that it is their own government (DMCA anyone) that prevents them from suddenly doing with their purchased content what they have been doing for years, that will quickly change. In the end, consumers are not stupid and know what they are accustomed to and will let neither government nor Hollywood take that away.
The outcry will either force the content makers to abandon oppressive DRM or the government will be forced by the voters to scrap laws like the DMCA. Then enterprising hackers will quickly sell solutions to do away with all DRM for all consumers. EVERY copy protection, in any shape or form has ALWAYS been defeated. That is why the content providers have purchased the DMCA law that prevents professionals from destroying all protections and selling the means to do so to everybody.
By definition, if it can be watched or listened to, it can be copied with ALL DRM stripped out. If you expect me to read a super-secret message to me, you also have to give me the key. If the key exists, it can be used to decipher the message and then I can do anything with the clear message after that. Even if there are a hundred keys in a hundred super special chips, at some point the message must appear readable and therefore copyable.
......It is the person with the old non-Trusted computer that gets increasingly locked out......
That was my main point, the millions of users of older equipment will represent a sizable market that WILL be filled. This will be especially the case as more and more users find out that they are able to do a lot of things with their old machines that their friends with the newfangled machines can no longer do. There will be software written that will continue to install and work on the old and new systems and their makers will make a lot of noise that their software has NO DRM restrictions. Once users learn that older is better, then old systems will become valuable and there will arise mod kits that will allow the old computers to work with all the new software and destroy the functionality of the TPM chips with modifications. Once Joe user finds out that the new computer they just bought from Dell or whoever no longer lets them copy their CDs to their iPod or watch their DVDs on their laptops, there will be 42 million or more users that will make enough noise to have the DMCA repealed. Politicians still ARE sensitive to the screams of voters if enough of them do. MS and all the content makers will then have gone too far and the backlash will crush even them and all their bought and paid for legislators. Up until now, DRM really has not affected the huge masses of consumers out there, but once they realize what is happening and that their government is the reason they can no longer listen to content they legally bought, wherever, whenever they want to, that will change in such a big hurry that all the lawyers all put together in the whole USA won't be able to stop.
....How long do you think it will be until DVDs are dead?......
What advantage other than higher resolution does the new HD have over regular DVD? DVD has random access, (no rewind) non-wear out and more compact storage as compelling reasons over VHS and thus its rapid adoption. CDs have some of the same advantages over the vinyl and tapes they replaced. The newer fancy SAC and other superfidelity DVD audio never brought anything to the table over regular CDs and virtually nobody paid for any upgrade. I suspect that the HD disks and TVs will not have a sufficiently great advantage to get the kind of broad market penetration of normal DVDs and TVs . There are many who live in apartments, where it is difficult to accommodate the truly large screens that make HD enjoyable. A $200 Walmart 27" TV is big enough and much more affordable for most such people. Discerning the poor shave job or sloppy makeup of the evening news anchor is a compelling reason to spend thousands of $$$$ on? Give me a break!
When terabyte or higher atomic storage systems now in the labs become commercially viable, these may engender the wholesale switch to new media storage devices. HD and blueray are temporary solutions that have no great advantages over what is in the mass market today.
....It may be true that, if we chose to dedicate a significant portion of our lives to memorizing words, we could achieve the level of competency....
Language in general, including spelling is learned early in life. When I came to the USA as an 11 year old, I did not know much English. However I had a good incentive to learn it and in 6 months I was better at reading and writing than my native classmates. Many schools today, do not give children much incentive to learn the language properly and TV as well as computers don't help either. At last when these kids reach young adulthood they discover their severe lack in this area and it becomes a formidable impediment to their future in college or business. Kids are wired to learn language much more readily than adults.
Any of you with kids out there should insist that they learn to use the language without the modern tools first and then learn to use them as a convenience and productivity enhancement later. Learn first how to add up a column of numbers without a calculator and how to cut off a 2x4 without a power saw.
.....and it's the 20 year olds who are the future. Always....
Yes, but in only half a century these 20 year olds will be 70, if they are lucky enough to live that long. They'll then be the "old thinkers" stuck in a new world. Always!
The reason man learns nothing from history is because the young fail to listen what the older ones try to tell them and the older ones too often tell the younger ones to do one thing, but themselves do the opposite.
.....the current implementation of encryption software isn't yet usable for the average user....
Many people leave their car unlocked because there is nothing worth stealing therein. Likewise, most people don't care if anybody reads their e-mail that they had a great time with the kids at the beach last weekend. Security by the obscurity of being part of millions of e-mails works for most people. Having three locks on the front door and three sets of keys is a lot of trouble each time you want to go in or out. Perhaps the new, extra cost security module will be a little USB plug-in device for those who do have deep, dark secrets the wish to protect, but why make everybody pay for a Vault combination lock on their house door?
.....If you have a normal old obsolete computer, none of the new stuff works for you at all. If you have an obsolete old computer you get locked out of all of the new stuff.....
Since there are millions of "old, obsolete" computers around, someone will see the opportunity to write the same kinds of software functions that the new DRMed software provides. There will be a functional equivalence of office and photoshop and many other programs that will run on ALL computers, old and new and the documents produced will be readable on all of them also.
Then the purveyors of the "new" software will be locked out of all the old computers or will have to come out with a new and an old version. They will also have to ensure that all the millions of old computer users can still read the data created by the new DRM enabled software. The scenario you are writing about would only happen if everybody switched to a new TPM system overnight. How many people are still happily using Win98 or even Win95 today? Getting everybody to use a unified computing model like this has about as much chance as all of us learning Chinese or they all learning English. Pretty soon the hardware makers will see that the extra cost of the TPM gets them no return and may even cost them sales. At this point they'll just leave them out to save a few dollars or yen.
Where is there a capitalistic advantage for a computer maker to go to extra expense? There will always be some that will advertise that they sell a system that does not force users to use any particular software and will allow their computer to read the data that is generated by their friends, regardless of whether these friends have an 2015 super duper system or an ancient 2006 Winxp or Mac OSX system. I have recovered files from a 1988 Mac and edited them on a 2005 Windows computer.
This TPM idea is a flash in the pan that will die on the vine as soon as the content makers figure out how to make all the new technologies work for them so they can make lots of money. It may take them a few more years, but they'll figure it out.
The only way this will work is for a WORLD wide government mandate that no more general purpose computers may be sold unless they have these "security" chips.
....it is the creator of the document (fx CFO) that decides who should have access to it, it is not up not anyone who receives it...
However the creator also has to decide whether that PERSON, not the person's computer is trustworthy to receive the information. No matter how trustworthy a computer is, if the person is not trustworthy, then that untrustworthy person will figure out a way to get that information to places the creator would not want it to be. It only takes one untrustworthy person to copy the decrypted bits, no matter what these bits represent, and those bits can be sent around the world to millions of places in seconds. All watermarking and other identifying techniques will fail, since there is no way to tell one bit from another. No trustworthy computer will ever make its users equally trustworthy.
....Clearly there are legitimate reasons for content owners to want to secure their documents.....
The problem is that if you send me that secret document, you also have to give me the key. This means you have to send the key securely so nobody else can intercept it along the way, but you also have to ensure that I and not somebody else is at the receiving end. Further, if you don't want me to pass the secret on to someone else, you'll need to figure out a way to prevent me from giving the key, and the encrypted file or the decrypted file to someone else. Since digital data is easily copied by nature, you have a job that is ultimately impossible. If I want to give the secret data to someone else, you really have no way of preventing me from doing that.
All information ultimately has to be made available to the human senses, mostly visual and audible. In that case, a camera and a microphone can always capture the deepest and darkest secret and broadcast it to the world. The only secrets that truly are secret, as least so far, are those between you and God alone.
Therefore, all the so called "secure" TPM or whatever will not keep any secrets safe. It may make it less convenient, mostly for all users, but no secret worth knowing can be kept so for long. All anti-copying measures have failed until now and will continue to do so.
.....Just because you can run XP on a minimum of 256MB of RAM doesn't mean you should.....
XP run just fine on 256M and likely so will Vista. Just don't try to run any of the Applications you bought the computer for in the first place.
What will Vista bring to the art of computing, that OSX has not had for about a year now already? OSX 10.4 runs faster on our old G4 laptop than the OS 10.2 it came with. With MS, the new OS software generally runs slower on the same hardware or misses out on most of the improvements. One big pain with Windows has always been the difficulty of upgrading from an old to a new computer. When I bought a new G5 iMac for my wife for Christmas, getting all her stuff and settings from the old G4 to the new one was almost automatic. Boot the old one in disk mode, connect them with a cable (firewire) and click the mouse to automatically transfer all data, internet settings, account passwords, preferences and applications and all their settings and more to the new G5. I wonder if Vista will make it easy to upgrade from an older machine to that shiny new one.
If Vista users are no longer running as administrators (a good thing) how many of their current apps will cease functioning? If users have to re-purchase or upgrade much of, or most of their software, that will be a big disincentive to upgrade to a new computer or upgrade to the new OS on the old one.
.....it's not hard to encrypt it....
Indeed, if anyone has deep dark secrets he/she wishes to share with someone, just encrypt with something like PGP. Your secret will be safe unless someone wants it bad enough to torture either you or the recipients for the password. If someone wants to force a secret out of you, they'll get it, unless you, like many young muslims are willing to die for it.
.....rather than just asserting it as being impossible?.....
I never did assert it is IMPOSSIBLE, just highly improbable. Complexity arising spontaneously out of simpler components is not impossible, just as the gas in a container example, but the probability of either happening are vanishingly small.
DNA holds the information needed to carry on all structure and operation of a living creature. It is like the Software in a computer which carries out all the designs of the programmer(s). If you come across a functioning computer, you can study how it works, but no matter what you can do, there is no way you can determine how the software got into that computer by examining the computer as a closed system. You don't have the original CDs and it doesn't have a connection to the outside world. It's just running a very complex software program, of which you have no idea where that program came from.
Just as the computer, we find finished, very complex functioning living systems, but have no way to determine where the complex software that runs them came from. Once the DNA software is running, it governs the reproduction of the hardware it runs on, as well as its own code. We can study and experiment with this and be astonished at the extreme complexity, but no experiment will find the originator of the software.
Like all information, DNA is a product of mind, a mind greater than any human mind. This cannot be proven by any experiment and neither can evolution be proved by an experiment. Evolutionists find the computer with its software and then deny the existence of a programmer. ID and creationism theorize there is a designer and evolutionists deny there is, but neither can do an experiment to either prove or disprove their dogmas. One or the other is believed as a philosophy or religion.
......You'd think that with literally thousands of biologists around the world, someone somewhere would recognize this apparently obvious principle......
Just because a majority holds to a particular view, doesn't mean that is how things really are. How many theories held by every "reputable" scientist at the time, are now in the dustbin of false ideas.
Evolution tries to apply to living systems what applies nowhere else -- namely that systems left to themselves become more complex, rather than breaking down into simpler components.
Evolution teaches that over large spans of time, simple cells evolved into complex animals -- even eventually humans. No experiment has ever been done to prove even the smallest link in such an amazing chain of events. No assembly of individual parts, whether living or not, has ever been made into a complex functioning system without the instructions needed to do so.
Even you, as an intelligent being will have problems putting together a working airplane, even if you were given each of the major subassemblies pre-tested, and all other parts and tools needed. You would also need detailed instructions, especially if you know little about airplanes.
Yet evolutionists try to convince us and themselves, that complex living structures, such as brains, eyes, ears, circulatory systems and on an on all came into being without detailed instructions and knowledge of how put them all together. Hemoglobin molecules are very complex structures that have a very precise arrangements of atoms.
The principle of entropy has far wider applicability than only thermodynamics.
A quote from the WIKI article: "Unlike most other laws of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is statistical in nature, and its reliability arises from the huge number of particles present in macroscopic systems. It is not impossible, in principle, for all 1023 atoms in a gas to spontaneously migrate to one half of container; it is only fantastically unlikely -- so unlikely that no macroscopic violation of the Second Law has ever been observed."
Evolution of simple life forms into complex ones has also never been observed, and although not impossible, it is just as unlikely as the atoms all migrating to only one part of a container. If you have two such containers connected with a pipe, the pressure in both of them will be equal. If you replace the pipe with an intelligently designed power-driven pump, you can get all or most of the atoms into one container only. If you supply energy only, such as heating the pipe, there will be be an equal increase of pressure in both containers. Only the designed pump, supplying energy does the job.
If time suddenly reversed for say an hour, how would you know? What experiment could you do that showed that time was going backwards? Hint: The "arrow of time" is in fact picked by entropy, not as the article states.
Entropy and evolution as currently preached are fundamentally at odds with one another.