When the government takes a dollar in taxes from someone and spends that in a distant war, that money is no longer available for job creating investments. It is not the big mega-corporations that are the life-blood of the economy and the creators of American jobs, but the small to medium size businesses. These do not tend to ship their employees jobs to far away corners of the world and therefore should be treated better by the government and not taxed excessively. Instead of taxing the income of wage earners, the government should tax the cheap, slave labor produced imports, so these would cost the same as domestically made similar items. That way there would not be as much incentive for the Walmarts of this world to buy almost everything overseas.
The number one business of any government is to protect its citizens from each other, regardless whether these are gun wielding thugs, such as we have seen in the Katrina aftermath, or large corporate citizens (such as the Enrons and big oil) whose loyalties are only to the bottom line, at the expense of real living American people.
Big companies, such as the entertainment megaliths for example, have discovered that they can purchase all the politicians they need to get the laws passed in their favor. We the voters need to learn who these polititans are and let them know that it is not the big companies that put them into office and then throw them all out at the next election. In the end, we the voters have to care and vote for some candidates of integrity who are not for sale at any price.
All ideas of the artificial redistribution of wealth are basically flawed in that they take away or drastically reduce the individual incentive to be more productive or innovative than the the next person. It takes better than $20,000 of investment to create even a job for one worker. Where is that to come from if society (other people through government) take that away from someone who would otherwise expand their business enough to be able to hire someone? if someone has a good idea and a marketing plan to match, such as Microsoft or others why should they not reap the benfits. In the end, society benefits by the number of tax paying workers they employ. Society should only step in to ensure that everybody must operate by the same rules of fairness. Do you really think that government, really the bureaucrats that run it, knows better how to spend my money than I do?
Even the most severely hadicapped person is not useless. It requires love and patience to determine how they may be useful, in addition to financial help. There are plenty of rich people in the socialist countries you mention.
I also agree that the children of poor people should be given a boost, but the government is not always the best way to do this. We have currently a boy living with us whose mother is partially blind and disabled. He has been in our house for 5 years now. We have not gotten one red cent from any government agency other than having gotten him on the Oregon Health Plan, since we cannot put him on our own medical insurance.
Forcing people to be responsible is generally a futile endeavor.
....one would distribute excess wealth to where it is needed......
Now WHO would decide what is excess and where it is needed? How poor would you make say Bill Gates by taking away his wealth? Who would decide where his wealth should go? Who is the "one" who would do that and what or who gives any human the right to take away what belongs to another person, assuming the belongings were not stolen? Wealth is not the only thing that is very unevenly distributed in this world we live in. How about health? Would you also take away the health of those who have it (if that could be done) and give it those who are sick? What about intelligence? Should the smart people be downgraded to the level of the dumber ones? Athletic or artistic ability? There are great differences in humans and also in the willingness to work is greater in some than in others. Should all these differences be ironed out? There are those who are poor through no fault of their own, and they should be helped, not by handouts, but by giving them a chance to help themselves. Then there are those who are lazy and poor by choice and they should remain poor. A friend once offered a "homeless" person begging at a Walmart store parking lot a minimum wage job. The beggar turned it down, saying he made more money begging and it was tax free.
The communist experiment was a failure. Even so, there are still so many like you who advocate such or a similar system.
.....You can't blame an individual for doing what the crowd is doing....
Boy what a rotten idea that is! So it is OK to steal, rob, rape or murder as long as a person has lots of others doing it at the same time! So then anything anyone does as part of a crowd is excused? What is a crowd anyway? Is it not simply a number of individuals? How many of these does it take to constitute a "crowd"? Some say three is a crowd. I'd say that anyone who takes advantage of an emergency situation for their own gain ought to be severely dealt with on the spot, if nothing else than to discourage others from following their bad example.
....Both Katrina and it's results were predictable.....
The prediction has been that the levees could be swamped by large storm caused waves, but nobody predicted that a levee would fail. Holland is a country where large sections are below sea level and the water there too is kept out by a system of man made barriers which also have been damaged by unusually fierce storms. Having an entire city depending on the effectiveness of anything man made to hold up against the unbridled forces of nature is a sign of human arrogance and pride. This is NOT our world since we did not make it and we don't have control over it to anywhere near the extent we think we do. It is always better to live with nature than to try to protect ourselves against it.
Next thing people like you will blame Bush for hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and other disasters like some are blaming him for 911. Fascetious statement: Of course all hurricanes are Bush's fault since he is opposed to the global warming treaty. If he had signed that worthless piece of paper it would have averted Katrina, since she strengthened from a Cat. 1 to a Cat 5 storm over the WARM water of the gulf.
Disasters have happened in the past and will in the future. Some aspects of them can be eliminated by not building in areas that are difficult to defend, such as locating a major city near a seacoast and below sea level. No amount of money or preparedness can avert some effects from such monster storms. Some had predicted that in a large storm the levees would be overtopped by the storm caused waves, but nobody thought that a levee would be breached. When the "big one" happens in CA, there too will be surprises that nobody thought of. When the forces of nature are unleashed in various forms, we humans, despite all technology are still quite helpless.
People never have and cannot accurately predict the future. How many times have you thought of doing something different if you had known the future effect of your action or inaction. Why did YOU not invest in Microsoft years ago or buy real estate in certain locations? Hindsight for Bush and everybody else is 20-20 vision. Blaming Bush or Clinton or anyone else for not seeing accurately into the future is about the stupidest thing anybody, right wing or left wing can do.
It is obvious that you hate Mr. Bush, but then you must of neccessity also hate the majority of your fellow citizens who elected him and most of the members of both houses of Congress to office.
If it can be watched/listened to, it will ALWAYS be crackable at least until they put DRM chips in the speakers and displays. At some point the content has to be available to the human senses and therefore accessible to be copied. Maybe the copies won't be perfect, but they should be good enough to tell if the content is worth paying for in a higher quality. Watch and listen to the stuff and if it is garbage (mostly true) erase it again. If it great stuff, worth keeping, then it may be worthwile to pay for it.
...But I see no reason why the copyright on American Pie or Mickey Mouse should not be eternal.....
Copyrights are to be for a limitied time according to the constitution. The big rich content companies have purchased enough of our legislators to extend that time to almost eternal. The purpose of copyrights and patents was not primarily to make creators of content wealthy, but to help the entire country by it. The artists usually get the smallest part of the money that the consumers pay for the material, just as the farmer gets the least fraction of what you pay at the grocery store say for a loaf of bread.
....Random things include the precise coding after DNA replicates...
Precise coding and random are opposites. Try some random alphabet soup as a computer program some time and see what happens when you try to execute your code. Natural selection as well as everything else operates by certain rules or information, if you will. 1000 monkeys typing for the 100th power of ten number of years STILL would not produce the writings of say Shakespeare of the US constitution. Nobody has yet satisfactorily explained the origin of information from anything other than MIND.
Software as information is not physical, has no mass and can be preserved on any number of carriers simultaneously and transmitted at the speed of light. The real you is software, right now carried in a physical body part called brain. That software can be transmitted and stored in many places. How that may be done we still don't know.
Examining the circuits and chips in a computer tells you NOTHING about its operation. I run Virtual PC in a Mac. If you were to examine that Mac you could not discover that ability unless the Mac were "alive", that is powered up and have its software loaded and have a functioning I/O system. If my Mac dies for some reason, I have a backup. I can reload that software into an better, faster Mac and all the "personality" of my old dead Mac will be available, only faster and better.
In the same way, the real you is SOFTWARE, information, immaterial and as such can just like computer software be loaded into new hardware after your present hardware ceases operation. That is exactly what God tells us will happen after death, at the resurrection. He has a backup of all that you are, your personality and the sum total of all your thoughts.
Jesus said: "And I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." (Matt 12:36)
No man at present knows HOW that will be done, but I believe that the MIND of the One who is the origin of the laws and rules by which all nature operate has that know how. If mere man can make a backups of all their computer data, why is it so unresonable to think that the Creator of everything can't figure out how to make a backup of you and all the data you have ever generated?
.....The important point in all this religion is self control, inner peace, and awareness......
Your whole post concerning religion is a good and thought out one. There are many religions and your summary of them is good and succinct.
The God of the Bible is however not interested in religion, but relationship. The message of the Gospels is exactly the opposite of all religion. Religion is the striving of man to somehow reach the divine. The avenues through which man attempts this are numerous and varied. You gave a good outline of some of them. In the Gospels, the good news, we are told that God, took on human form and dwellt among us. He did this not to give us a set of religious rules, by the keeping of which we could reach God, but to show us the path to a relationship with Himself based on mercy and forgiveness.
In Joh 14:6 it states: Jesus saith unto him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by me."
That statement is either arrogant, delusional, falsity on the part of the writer or it is true. If not true, then Jesus is certainly not worth listening to in whatever else He may have said or what is attributed to Him. It is a VERY narrow minded statement that excludes all other religions.
We observe that the rules and relationships in nature are often very narrow and specific and if they were not, there could be no life anywhere. Water, unlike most substances, expands when it solidifies. If that were not so, there could be no life. The mass of the proton is exactly 1836 times that of an electron. If that were slightly different, atoms could not combine to form living things. Since the rules of the physical realm are quite narrow at times, it doesn't at all surprise me that when the Creator of these rules expresses an extremely narrow path to Himself.
You, as well as every human on this planet, may freely choose to come to the divine by whatever religious effort you can muster, or you can respond to God's invitation of mercy as offered in Jesus Christ. I have chosen the mercy approach, because no human effort is sufficient to stand before the perfect Creator God of the Universe.
This means, now, that I have been accepted mercy and forgiveness, I have with that mercy been given the grace and power to have "...self control, inner peace, and awareness......" and the privilege to now call God "My Father".
.....Creation as evidence - wondered when that would come up.....
There is much evidence that any kind of scenario for expaining what exits, especially life, cannot come from anything random.
Every day in life we observe a part of the second law of thermodynamics called entropy, which ONLY ALWAYS increases. The ONLY exception to this is when ENERGY and THOUGHT are acting together against it. A mess in you house doesn't clean itself up and a wrecked car doesn't repair itself. All random evolution is a theory in the minds of those who do not wish to acknowledge the fact that one day they will have to give an account of their lives to the God who is. Nowhere has random evolution ever been OBSERVED to happen, nor has anyone EVER done an experimental demonstration of such evolution. Nobody has ever made a fossil to demonstrate how that is done. And if they did, it would show that it requires energy and thought to at least create the conditions for making one. Yet everyone observes the effect of entropy every day and much thought and effort goes into minimizing or reversing its effects. You are getting older, your body is wearing out and one day it will no longer be inhabitable by you and you will have to leave and stand before God.
The Bible says in Heb 9:27
"And inasmuch as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment;"
Just as the first part of this verse is indisputable, so is the second part about judgment. Death will happen to you and you know it, and I am telling you that the second part will also.
Even in nature there is NO extinction, only a changing of form. Burning something doesn't destroy it. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed and neither can the real you, that now lives in that body subject to the law of entropy. Whether you dismiss what God says in the Bible as made up tales or not, will not change the fact that one day you will face that God, whose very existence you now deny. You can accept His mercy and forgiveness in Jesus Christ now or face Him as your judge after you draw your last breath.
Indeed, for a first run movie, a movie show owner makes little or no profit from ticket sales. In some cases it is a loss. Most, if not all profit comes from food and ads on the screen. So if it were not for those, the tickets would cost more.
There is no way to prove or disprove that. I can just as confidently say" Yes there is a God and you are going to face Him some day. There is plenty of evidence that God exists, but nothing can ever be proved by any amount of evidence for or against anything. In the end everybody, including you, has to decide, just like a juror in a court case, which evidence to BELIEVE.
(....if you have ever broken a natural law....)
Yes, only two examples, the laws of inertia and the those governing friction ->penalty = car crash. Insufficient antifreeze resulting in broken radiator.
The disregarding of God's natural laws have built in consequences that are usually although not always immediate. Jumping of a cliff or living on only on pizza are two examples. Ignoring God's behavioral laws SEEMS to not have consequences and it APPEARS that we can get away unscathed. You can have unprotected sex with an unknown woman and not die of AIDS the next day. The consequences of ignoring natural laws only apply as long as we are still subject to them while dwelling in these present time-space dimensions. Because the real you is an eternal person, temporarily dwelling in a material body, you will ALWAYS be subject to the behavior laws and the results of your present violations of them is also eternal.
When all is said and done, everything come down to FAITH. When you get into an airplane or car, you do so by faith. You have no GUARANTEE that you will arrive at your destination. However from the available evidence you have concerning cars and airplanes you BELIEVE that you'll most likely get where you are going.
From the available evidence, I have chosen to BELIEVE what Jesus said, according to the written record that has been preserved throughout all the intervening centuries since. He, the God of the Universe clothed Himself in a human body and dwellt on this third rock from the sun for a short time. You not believing the evidence for, have chosen your path, also by faith. For both of us, the results are forever.
Every second order control system has at at least two inputs and one output. One of the inputs is a constant value or calibration. The other input is a desired set point and the output drives the system so the difference between the set point and the reference tend toward zero.
The temperature control system in your house for heating and cooling has all of these elements. There is a calibrated temperature sensor. The calibration thereof is traceable to an external standard of temperature based on the unchanging melting/freezing characteristics of some substance, such as for example water/ice. No human being has established the temperature at which ice turns to water or lead or whatever melts. These properties were established by the Creator or "nature" if you will. They are not amenable to change by any human power. The second input is the little knob you turn that tells the system how warm/cool you want your house. The system then acts by turning on the heat or cooling until the temperature you set is reached. If the thermometer calibration gets off, your house temperature will also be wrong proportionally.
In the same way, the One who esablished the "laws of nature" also established the "laws of life", as succinctly expressed in the Ten Commandments. Those laws were further condensed by Jesus by the law of love. Simply put it is: Treat others as you wish to be treated and don't do anything to someone else that you would not want done to you.
If you have ever broken a law, you know that there is a penalty associated with it. If you, like I, have ever broken any of these ten or the summary thereof as given by Jesus, you will have to face the penalty, with God as your Judge. You may not believe this now, but whether you do or not doesn't matter any more than if you believe or don't believe the earth is flat or spherical. Our beliefs don't change what is.
So now you have the choice. You can face God as your judge someday or you can take the offer of His mercy in Jesus Christ. I know I can never stand before a perfect God as Judge and not expect the penalty due. Not getting caught and plea bargains are not an option with God. I have however come to and accepted the kind offer of the God of mercy and forgiveness and will not have to pay that penalty I deserve, because Jesus suffered that penalty in my place. Until you breathe your last, that offer of mercy is open to you also. I suggest you personally ask God about this before then.
....he's a Christian and makes no bones about it.....
You are obviously biased against anything Christian. In a way I don't blame you, because many nasty things were and are done in the name of all religion, including Christianity. I know that it is very difficult to set aside any bias, but perhaps you can try. Much effort is expended by courts to get an unbiased jury.
Dr. Greenleaf is saying is that the eyewitnesses of the gospels are credible and truthful by the tests that are applied in human tribunals. The court procedures and methods of trying to ascertain truth, such as trying to ferret out false witnesses, have not changed since those days. In fact, modern technology has improved so as to allow evidence, such as DNA to corroborate the testimony of witnesses. Modern archeological techniques and finds have also been in harmony with the historical accounts of the Bible. The Bible is a collection of 66 books with 40 writers over thousands of years. Nevertheless it has a single authorship which becomes very evident to those who carefully study these writings. It tells us about an eternally, self existent Creator God, dwelling outside our time-space domain, whose existence can neither "proven" nor disproven. Nowhere in the Bible is an attempt made to "prove" that God is there. Just as a juror can believe or disbelieve the evidence presented in court, so you too can believe or not the evidence that God gives of Himself in this book and in the creation. Nothing is ever "proved" in a court of law. The judge or jury weighs the evidence and then according to their BELIEF renders a verdict.
If determining the truth for youself is not worth taking your own time, rather than the boss' then perhaps truth doesn't really matter to you. You can only be conviced of a matter if you are open minded and willing to be persuaded by the available evidence. A man convinced against his will remains unconvinced still.
.....The fact that you cannot see or acknowledge the logical flaws on which your religion is based.....
So what about the flaws in YOUR religion? Just because you may define yours by what you DON'T believe, doesn't mean you have no religion. Human beings have demonstrated that we are all incureably religious. Some use their religion to justify things like fly airplanes into buildings and some use their religion as a driving force to build schools and hospitals.
A man named Dr. Simon Greeleaf, one of the founders of the Harvard Law School, wrote a huge legal text still used in Law Schools today. It details the rules and logic to sift evidence and test the veracity of witnesses and try to determine the truth of a matter. This logic and methodology is still used in all courts of law here in the US. If you are accused of a crime, the prosecutor will use these methods to try to convince 12 people that you are guilty. In our system you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Also, witnesses are presumed to be telling the truth unless the opposing party can show otherwise and convince the jurors thereof.
Dr. Greenleaf also wrote a treatise wherein he examines the writings of the 4 Gospels of the Bible by the rules and logic applied in courts of law to try to determine if these testimonies would stand up in a court of law. You can read about this in a little $10 paperback available at Amazon.com, ISBN #= 0-8254-2747-9.
What people have done with the message of the Bible throughout the ages may be, and indeed often is illogical and terrible, but the writings themselves are truthful and worthy of your consideration. The Bible is the first book ever printed and is still today the most widely circulated book there is in the whole world. It is also the only book that accurately predicts events yet future to when that was written, but also events that are yet future to us. Don't dismiss it so quickly as illogical and unauthoritative, especially if you have never studied it. Atheists cannot "prove" that there is no God anymore than Christians can "prove" there is one. In either case, it is a matter of belief based on available evidence each person may have admitted into the court of their mind. One of the contentions of many court cases is to determine what evidence is admissable and what is not.
I suspect for the vast majority of people and for most video material available now or in the forseeable future, DVD quality or even VHS is good enough. How does HD TV improve the quality of the programs as well as the picture itself? I certainly will never pay for expensive DRM hobbled HD equipment. At least not for as long as that is so terribly expensive and purchaseable or rentable content is available in its present formats. Microsoft Windows is inferior in many ways to OSX or Linux, but it is good enough for most people, especially for those who have never used anything else. Regular TV as we now have it is that way also.
(....jury trials rely on appealing to emotion rather than fact....)
No system devised by man is perfect. If you ARE accused of a crime, you, as an accused have the option to have a Judge decide the outcome. If you feel that he/she is less emotional and therefore better equipped to render a just verdict, presumably in your favor if you are truly innocent.
(.....I fail to see why I should: I have the source material available....)
Do read Dr. Greenleaf's treatise, or at least skim through it to review the rules of evidence used in courts. These are the rules that are used to sufficiently learn the truth upon which you may be acquitted or convicted. If these rules concerning witnesses may be used to possibly determine the life or death of an accused, it seems they ought to be good enough to determine if the witness of the 4 Gospels could be admitted and stand up in your life, with you acting as an impartial juror. Jurors are always instructed to ONLY pay attention to and base their decision on what is presented in the court room. So you too, if you do not have an aready closed mind, may approach the witness of the gospel by these rules and then base your decison concerning the truth or falsity thereof ONLY on what YOU actually read, not on what you may have heard from any other source at any time before in your life. Have you actually EVER read the 4 gospels? Whether you have or have not, you ought to read them with the rules of evidence in mind to see whether they are true for you. Read them with the rules of cold logic used in courts, rather that relying your emotions or feelings.
It never can be! A pair of clipleads will break any audio DRM, now or in the future. Just clip the wires to the speakers and plug the other end into a recording device. I suspect that someone will come up with the video equivalent of a pair of clipleads, the other end of which goes to a video recording device. At some point the clean, decrypted video signal has to go to the actual display panels to be rendered visible. Someone will figure out how to intercept that signal at that pIace and send it to a recording device. If nothing else, a video recording device pointed at the screen can capture the picure.
Whether those "clipleads" are declared illegal or not doesn't really prevent the content from escaping the DRM control of the content providers. Once that is done by only one person, who then puts that particularly desireable content on the Internet file sharing networks, all the fancy, expensive, cumbersome DRM is for naught. Laws have never prevented anyone from getting what they really want. Prohibition should have taught that as should the failed 'war on drugs'.
The problem is that it is not hardware that makes a computer, but software. Without software, that box is just an expensive doorstop. With something like Virtual PC I can run Windows or other x86 software systems on a PPC from Apple. Even today, hardware has enough power to make the emulation useful for may uses. Remember, software is the dog and hardware is the tail. As the tail grows, the dog gets even bigger faster.
....one of the experiences which has turned me off to the Apostolic Christian tradition.....
Oh how I so fervently wish that you were the only one turned off to Christianity by the hypocritical and otherwise ungodly behavior of those who take the name of Christ. You are not alone. I too was turned off when I was a teenager. I was brought up in the church, but having an inquisitive mind and an intense interest in science, I became convinced that church and everything associated with it was for old women and little children with no bearing on the real world. The teachings of evolution became quite plausible to me as an explanation of how we and everything else came to be.
The more I studied science and engineering (I am an engineer, that's why I frequent/.) the more I saw some gaping holes in the evolutionary theory, especially concerning the origin of information and the origin of the 'natural laws' by which everything appears to operate. I began to believe again in a God, but He was deemed by me as one who kind of wound up the Universe like a clock and then left it, unconcerned about the mess and sorrow therein.
Out of deference to and love for my mother, I came to a series of special meetings of our little German speaking church ( I am of German descent ) assembled at that time in a San Francisco storefront. A guest speaker from Germany, who also stayed as a guest at our house, gave a series of 'evangelistic' sermons. That kind of stuff normally went in one ear and out the other of this teenage boy. However, he began detailing a number of shortcomings, 'sins' if you will, that I was known for in my family, especially by my mother. I was rather upset and let my Mom know it in no uncertain terms later that night. She swore that she had not said anything to the guy whatsoever about me.
The last and final evening was a repeat performance, except that this time the man mentioned a number of things about me that no other human besides myself knew. The funny thing was is that my younger sister felt the same thing about her.
The man gave an 'altar call' which both my sister and I ignored. The man had said that we could ask God ourselves about the truth we heard about Jesus that night. However, on the way home I stopped the car in the Golden Gate Park, a few blocks from home and said to my sister with me; "Let's take the man up on his challenge and talk to God right now and ask Him what the man said we should ask. After all, it can't hurt." So we both did.
What happened next defies naturalistic explanations. It seemed to both of us as if something in our life had changed. That uneasy sense of guilt was gone and where before I had been afraid of death, that fear was suddenly totally gone. After this experience, I began to read my Bible again, even though I had been exposed to it from childhood on. It began to make sense and come alive for the first time in a way it never had before. And so, both my sister and I became lifelong followers of Jesus. We ignore most of the trappings that have come to be associated with 'religious' Christianity, holding fast to the Biblical teachings we have come to understand. We are told in 1 Cor13 that we now see as in a glass darkly, but someday will see God and know all that God knows. That is why I avoid theological and religious controversies, but try to present the essence of God's love as expressed in Jesus to those around me without coercion.
I don't know how long it has been, if ever, that you personally talked to God. Do the experiment. Tell God from your heart: "If you are relly there and care about me, I too will become a follower of Jesus. Reveal yourself to me in an unmistakeable way, special only to me and make me the kind of person you made me to be". If nothing happens, what have you lost?
.....then they will continue to watch their downsampled movie.....
Exactly! What improvement will HD TV bring to the quality of the actual movies and shows? See the protruding whiskers of the poorly shaven news anchor in great detail? HD displays usually show their superior qualities only in HUGE sizes, certainly much larger than what most people now have or are ever likely to connect to their computers. After all who cares to do their e-mail on a 4 foot screen?
Many people don't even have room for such monsters in their small apartments even if they can hang them on a wall. If all the new DRM makes it harder to watch the new videos than what is available today, then in addtion to the higher costs, few, if any real benefits, the new HD TV thing will take a long time to catch on at all until the costs come down to what present equipment costs. What compelling reason is there for the average consumer to buy a new TV, display or video playback device if all the content he/she might want to watch is available on the devices already in the house?
It is not likely that content providers will release their stuff exclusively on HD until most people have converted. As long as the new content is available on the present equipment, there is no reason to replace it. That in turn will keep prices higher and therefore discourage consumers from buying new equipment unless the old devices die. With entertainment devices it is not quite like with computers, where the old dogs will no longer efficiently run modern software. Even most of the very earliest DVD players will still happily play the latest movies rented from Blockbuster. VHS is also still a ways from being dead yet. The main reason that DVD was adopted by the consumer relatively quickly is that it is very convenient and price effective in that it still works just fine with current TVs. With HD, not only the player, but the entire playback chain has to be replaced at considerable expense. Don't expect the transition rate of HD to be anywhere near that of the VHS to DVD conversion.
.....If you want to convert me, you will be wasting your time. I won't go too much into my delvings in Christian theology, but I have done some study......
There is no way I or anyone else can convert somebody. That is the job of God's Holy Spirit. Only He can convince you or anybody that the statements of Jesus are true. In John 14:6 is written: Jesus saith unto him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by me." There are plenty of religions, but there is only one way to God and that is through Jesus.
I hope that in your spiritual journey, some day, you come to the realization that what Jesus said there applies to you. Jesus is polite and gentle and tell us in Rev 3:20- "Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." Jesus will not break down the door to your heart, but I hope and pray that sometime, before you draw your last breath, you will open that door by faith and let Him in. It is relationship, not religion that God wants with man.
Slashdot Mirror
.....Cooperative investment, aka stock market......
When the government takes a dollar in taxes from someone and spends that in a distant war, that money is no longer available for job creating investments. It is not the big mega-corporations that are the life-blood of the economy and the creators of American jobs, but the small to medium size businesses. These do not tend to ship their employees jobs to far away corners of the world and therefore should be treated better by the government and not taxed excessively. Instead of taxing the income of wage earners, the government should tax the cheap, slave labor produced imports, so these would cost the same as domestically made similar items. That way there would not be as much incentive for the Walmarts of this world to buy almost everything overseas.
The number one business of any government is to protect its citizens from each other, regardless whether these are gun wielding thugs, such as we have seen in the Katrina aftermath, or large corporate citizens (such as the Enrons and big oil) whose loyalties are only to the bottom line, at the expense of real living American people.
Big companies, such as the entertainment megaliths for example, have discovered that they can purchase all the politicians they need to get the laws passed in their favor. We the voters need to learn who these polititans are and let them know that it is not the big companies that put them into office and then throw them all out at the next election. In the end, we the voters have to care and vote for some candidates of integrity who are not for sale at any price.
....Communism implies....
All ideas of the artificial redistribution of wealth are basically flawed in that they take away or drastically reduce the individual incentive to be more productive or innovative than the the next person. It takes better than $20,000 of investment to create even a job for one worker. Where is that to come from if society (other people through government) take that away from someone who would otherwise expand their business enough to be able to hire someone? if someone has a good idea and a marketing plan to match, such as Microsoft or others why should they not reap the benfits. In the end, society benefits by the number of tax paying workers they employ. Society should only step in to ensure that everybody must operate by the same rules of fairness. Do you really think that government, really the bureaucrats that run it, knows better how to spend my money than I do?
Even the most severely hadicapped person is not useless. It requires love and patience to determine how they may be useful, in addition to financial help. There are plenty of rich people in the socialist countries you mention.
I also agree that the children of poor people should be given a boost, but the government is not always the best way to do this. We have currently a boy living with us whose mother is partially blind and disabled. He has been in our house for 5 years now. We have not gotten one red cent from any government agency other than having gotten him on the Oregon Health Plan, since we cannot put him on our own medical insurance.
Forcing people to be responsible is generally a futile endeavor.
....one would distribute excess wealth to where it is needed......
Now WHO would decide what is excess and where it is needed? How poor would you make say Bill Gates by taking away his wealth? Who would decide where his wealth should go? Who is the "one" who would do that and what or who gives any human the right to take away what belongs to another person, assuming the belongings were not stolen? Wealth is not the only thing that is very unevenly distributed in this world we live in. How about health? Would you also take away the health of those who have it (if that could be done) and give it those who are sick? What about intelligence? Should the smart people be downgraded to the level of the dumber ones? Athletic or artistic ability? There are great differences in humans and also in the willingness to work is greater in some than in others. Should all these differences be ironed out? There are those who are poor through no fault of their own, and they should be helped, not by handouts, but by giving them a chance to help themselves. Then there are those who are lazy and poor by choice and they should remain poor. A friend once offered a "homeless" person begging at a Walmart store parking lot a minimum wage job. The beggar turned it down, saying he made more money begging and it was tax free.
The communist experiment was a failure. Even so, there are still so many like you who advocate such or a similar system.
.....You can't blame an individual for doing what the crowd is doing....
Boy what a rotten idea that is! So it is OK to steal, rob, rape or murder as long as a person has lots of others doing it at the same time! So then anything anyone does as part of a crowd is excused? What is a crowd anyway? Is it not simply a number of individuals? How many of these does it take to constitute a "crowd"? Some say three is a crowd. I'd say that anyone who takes advantage of an emergency situation for their own gain ought to be severely dealt with on the spot, if nothing else than to discourage others from following their bad example.
....Both Katrina and it's results were predictable.....
The prediction has been that the levees could be swamped by large storm caused waves, but nobody predicted that a levee would fail. Holland is a country where large sections are below sea level and the water there too is kept out by a system of man made barriers which also have been damaged by unusually fierce storms. Having an entire city depending on the effectiveness of anything man made to hold up against the unbridled forces of nature is a sign of human arrogance and pride. This is NOT our world since we did not make it and we don't have control over it to anywhere near the extent we think we do. It is always better to live with nature than to try to protect ourselves against it.
....That he's created catastrophe everywhere....
Next thing people like you will blame Bush for hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and other disasters like some are blaming him for 911. Fascetious statement: Of course all hurricanes are Bush's fault since he is opposed to the global warming treaty. If he had signed that worthless piece of paper it would have averted Katrina, since she strengthened from a Cat. 1 to a Cat 5 storm over the WARM water of the gulf.
Disasters have happened in the past and will in the future. Some aspects of them can be eliminated by not building in areas that are difficult to defend, such as locating a major city near a seacoast and below sea level. No amount of money or preparedness can avert some effects from such monster storms. Some had predicted that in a large storm the levees would be overtopped by the storm caused waves, but nobody thought that a levee would be breached. When the "big one" happens in CA, there too will be surprises that nobody thought of. When the forces of nature are unleashed in various forms, we humans, despite all technology are still quite helpless.
People never have and cannot accurately predict the future. How many times have you thought of doing something different if you had known the future effect of your action or inaction. Why did YOU not invest in Microsoft years ago or buy real estate in certain locations? Hindsight for Bush and everybody else is 20-20 vision. Blaming Bush or Clinton or anyone else for not seeing accurately into the future is about the stupidest thing anybody, right wing or left wing can do.
It is obvious that you hate Mr. Bush, but then you must of neccessity also hate the majority of your fellow citizens who elected him and most of the members of both houses of Congress to office.
.....and get uncrackable....
If it can be watched/listened to, it will ALWAYS be crackable at least until they put DRM chips in the speakers and displays. At some point the content has to be available to the human senses and therefore accessible to be copied. Maybe the copies won't be perfect, but they should be good enough to tell if the content is worth paying for in a higher quality. Watch and listen to the stuff and if it is garbage (mostly true) erase it again. If it great stuff, worth keeping, then it may be worthwile to pay for it.
...But I see no reason why the copyright on American Pie or Mickey Mouse should not be eternal.....
Copyrights are to be for a limitied time according to the constitution. The big rich content companies have purchased enough of our legislators to extend that time to almost eternal. The purpose of copyrights and patents was not primarily to make creators of content wealthy, but to help the entire country by it. The artists usually get the smallest part of the money that the consumers pay for the material, just as the farmer gets the least fraction of what you pay at the grocery store say for a loaf of bread.
....Random things include the precise coding after DNA replicates...
Precise coding and random are opposites. Try some random alphabet soup as a computer program some time and see what happens when you try to execute your code. Natural selection as well as everything else operates by certain rules or information, if you will. 1000 monkeys typing for the 100th power of ten number of years STILL would not produce the writings of say Shakespeare of the US constitution. Nobody has yet satisfactorily explained the origin of information from anything other than MIND.
Software as information is not physical, has no mass and can be preserved on any number of carriers simultaneously and transmitted at the speed of light. The real you is software, right now carried in a physical body part called brain. That software can be transmitted and stored in many places. How that may be done we still don't know.
Examining the circuits and chips in a computer tells you NOTHING about its operation. I run Virtual PC in a Mac. If you were to examine that Mac you could not discover that ability unless the Mac were "alive", that is powered up and have its software loaded and have a functioning I/O system. If my Mac dies for some reason, I have a backup. I can reload that software into an better, faster Mac and all the "personality" of my old dead Mac will be available, only faster and better.
In the same way, the real you is SOFTWARE, information, immaterial and as such can just like computer software be loaded into new hardware after your present hardware ceases operation. That is exactly what God tells us will happen after death, at the resurrection. He has a backup of all that you are, your personality and the sum total of all your thoughts.
Jesus said: "And I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." (Matt 12:36)
No man at present knows HOW that will be done, but I believe that the MIND of the One who is the origin of the laws and rules by which all nature operate has that know how. If mere man can make a backups of all their computer data, why is it so unresonable to think that the Creator of everything can't figure out how to make a backup of you and all the data you have ever generated?
.....The important point in all this religion is self control, inner peace, and awareness......
Your whole post concerning religion is a good and thought out one. There are many religions and your summary of them is good and succinct.
The God of the Bible is however not interested in religion, but relationship. The message of the Gospels is exactly the opposite of all religion. Religion is the striving of man to somehow reach the divine. The avenues through which man attempts this are numerous and varied. You gave a good outline of some of them. In the Gospels, the good news, we are told that God, took on human form and dwellt among us. He did this not to give us a set of religious rules, by the keeping of which we could reach God, but to show us the path to a relationship with Himself based on mercy and forgiveness.
In Joh 14:6 it states: Jesus saith unto him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by me."
That statement is either arrogant, delusional, falsity on the part of the writer or it is true. If not true, then Jesus is certainly not worth listening to in whatever else He may have said or what is attributed to Him. It is a VERY narrow minded statement that excludes all other religions.
We observe that the rules and relationships in nature are often very narrow and specific and if they were not, there could be no life anywhere. Water, unlike most substances, expands when it solidifies. If that were not so, there could be no life. The mass of the proton is exactly 1836 times that of an electron. If that were slightly different, atoms could not combine to form living things. Since the rules of the physical realm are quite narrow at times, it doesn't at all surprise me that when the Creator of these rules expresses an extremely narrow path to Himself.
You, as well as every human on this planet, may freely choose to come to the divine by whatever religious effort you can muster, or you can respond to God's invitation of mercy as offered in Jesus Christ. I have chosen the mercy approach, because no human effort is sufficient to stand before the perfect Creator God of the Universe.
This means, now, that I have been accepted mercy and forgiveness, I have with that mercy been given the grace and power to have "...self control, inner peace, and awareness......" and the privilege to now call God "My Father".
.....Creation as evidence - wondered when that would come up.....
There is much evidence that any kind of scenario for expaining what exits, especially life, cannot come from anything random.
Every day in life we observe a part of the second law of thermodynamics called entropy, which ONLY ALWAYS increases. The ONLY exception to this is when ENERGY and THOUGHT are acting together against it. A mess in you house doesn't clean itself up and a wrecked car doesn't repair itself. All random evolution is a theory in the minds of those who do not wish to acknowledge the fact that one day they will have to give an account of their lives to the God who is. Nowhere has random evolution ever been OBSERVED to happen, nor has anyone EVER done an experimental demonstration of such evolution. Nobody has ever made a fossil to demonstrate how that is done. And if they did, it would show that it requires energy and thought to at least create the conditions for making one. Yet everyone observes the effect of entropy every day and much thought and effort goes into minimizing or reversing its effects. You are getting older, your body is wearing out and one day it will no longer be inhabitable by you and you will have to leave and stand before God.
The Bible says in Heb 9:27
"And inasmuch as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment;"
Just as the first part of this verse is indisputable, so is the second part about judgment. Death will happen to you and you know it, and I am telling you that the second part will also.
Even in nature there is NO extinction, only a changing of form. Burning something doesn't destroy it. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed and neither can the real you, that now lives in that body subject to the law of entropy. Whether you dismiss what God says in the Bible as made up tales or not, will not change the fact that one day you will face that God, whose very existence you now deny. You can accept His mercy and forgiveness in Jesus Christ now or face Him as your judge after you draw your last breath.
....Now to find a rusty barbed wire fence.......
We have miles of rusty barbed wire fences here. Send me a self addresses paid for UPS truck and I'll send you all you need for your networking setup.
....ticket prices would then be $15 or so....
Indeed, for a first run movie, a movie show owner makes little or no profit from ticket sales. In some cases it is a loss. Most, if not all profit comes from food and ads on the screen. So if it were not for those, the tickets would cost more.
(....There is no God.....)
There is no way to prove or disprove that. I can just as confidently say" Yes there is a God and you are going to face Him some day. There is plenty of evidence that God exists, but nothing can ever be proved by any amount of evidence for or against anything. In the end everybody, including you, has to decide, just like a juror in a court case, which evidence to BELIEVE.
(....if you have ever broken a natural law....)
Yes, only two examples, the laws of inertia and the those governing friction ->penalty = car crash. Insufficient antifreeze resulting in broken radiator.
The disregarding of God's natural laws have built in consequences that are usually although not always immediate. Jumping of a cliff or living on only on pizza are two examples. Ignoring God's behavioral laws SEEMS to not have consequences and it APPEARS that we can get away unscathed. You can have unprotected sex with an unknown woman and not die of AIDS the next day. The consequences of ignoring natural laws only apply as long as we are still subject to them while dwelling in these present time-space dimensions. Because the real you is an eternal person, temporarily dwelling in a material body, you will ALWAYS be subject to the behavior laws and the results of your present violations of them is also eternal.
When all is said and done, everything come down to FAITH. When you get into an airplane or car, you do so by faith. You have no GUARANTEE that you will arrive at your destination. However from the available evidence you have concerning cars and airplanes you BELIEVE that you'll most likely get where you are going.
From the available evidence, I have chosen to BELIEVE what Jesus said, according to the written record that has been preserved throughout all the intervening centuries since. He, the God of the Universe clothed Himself in a human body and dwellt on this third rock from the sun for a short time. You not believing the evidence for, have chosen your path, also by faith. For both of us, the results are forever.
...external reference...
Every second order control system has at at least two inputs and one output. One of the inputs is a constant value or calibration. The other input is a desired set point and the output drives the system so the difference between the set point and the reference tend toward zero.
The temperature control system in your house for heating and cooling has all of these elements. There is a calibrated temperature sensor. The calibration thereof is traceable to an external standard of temperature based on the unchanging melting/freezing characteristics of some substance, such as for example water/ice. No human being has established the temperature at which ice turns to water or lead or whatever melts. These properties were established by the Creator or "nature" if you will. They are not amenable to change by any human power.
The second input is the little knob you turn that tells the system how warm/cool you want your house. The system then acts by turning on the heat or cooling until the temperature you set is reached. If the thermometer calibration gets off, your house temperature will also be wrong proportionally.
In the same way, the One who esablished the "laws of nature" also established the "laws of life", as succinctly expressed in the Ten Commandments. Those laws were further condensed by Jesus by the law of love. Simply put it is: Treat others as you wish to be treated and don't do anything to someone else that you would not want done to you.
If you have ever broken a law, you know that there is a penalty associated with it. If you, like I, have ever broken any of these ten or the summary thereof as given by Jesus, you will have to face the penalty, with God as your Judge. You may not believe this now, but whether you do or not doesn't matter any more than if you believe or don't believe the earth is flat or spherical. Our beliefs don't change what is.
So now you have the choice. You can face God as your judge someday or you can take the offer of His mercy in Jesus Christ. I know I can never stand before a perfect God as Judge and not expect the penalty due. Not getting caught and plea bargains are not an option with God. I have however come to and accepted the kind offer of the God of mercy and forgiveness and will not have to pay that penalty I deserve, because Jesus suffered that penalty in my place. Until you breathe your last, that offer of mercy is open to you also. I suggest you personally ask God about this before then.
....he's a Christian and makes no bones about it.....
You are obviously biased against anything Christian. In a way I don't blame you, because many nasty things were and are done in the name of all religion, including Christianity. I know that it is very difficult to set aside any bias, but perhaps you can try. Much effort is expended by courts to get an unbiased jury.
Dr. Greenleaf is saying is that the eyewitnesses of the gospels are credible and truthful by the tests that are applied in human tribunals. The court procedures and methods of trying to ascertain truth, such as trying to ferret out false witnesses, have not changed since those days. In fact, modern technology has improved so as to allow evidence, such as DNA to corroborate the testimony of witnesses. Modern archeological techniques and finds have also been in harmony with the historical accounts of the Bible. The Bible is a collection of 66 books with 40 writers over thousands of years. Nevertheless it has a single authorship which becomes very evident to those who carefully study these writings. It tells us about an eternally, self existent Creator God, dwelling outside our time-space domain, whose existence can neither "proven" nor disproven. Nowhere in the Bible is an attempt made to "prove" that God is there. Just as a juror can believe or disbelieve the evidence presented in court, so you too can believe or not the evidence that God gives of Himself in this book and in the creation. Nothing is ever "proved" in a court of law. The judge or jury weighs the evidence and then according to their BELIEF renders a verdict.
If determining the truth for youself is not worth taking your own time, rather than the boss' then perhaps truth doesn't really matter to you. You can only be conviced of a matter if you are open minded and willing to be persuaded by the available evidence. A man convinced against his will remains unconvinced still.
(.....Perhaps you could just give a brief outline.....) The Greenleaf treatise I was referring to was written to and dedicated to his fellow members of the legal profession. The URL below points to this introduction and dedication. If you are then so inclined, you may read or download all or parts of the work. Dr. Greenleaf lived from 1783 to 1853. Much of his work was published in collections after his death. http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx ?sid=32a9d7f2f1cd32163b53e7a19c08b133&idno=aga1251 .0001.001&c=moa&cc=moa&q1=our+profession+leads+us& seq=7&size=s&view=text
.....The fact that you cannot see or acknowledge the logical flaws on which your religion is based .....
So what about the flaws in YOUR religion? Just because you may define yours by what you DON'T believe, doesn't mean you have no religion. Human beings have demonstrated that we are all incureably religious. Some use their religion to justify things like fly airplanes into buildings and some use their religion as a driving force to build schools and hospitals.
A man named Dr. Simon Greeleaf, one of the founders of the Harvard Law School, wrote a huge legal text still used in Law Schools today. It details the rules and logic to sift evidence and test the veracity of witnesses and try to determine the truth of a matter. This logic and methodology is still used in all courts of law here in the US. If you are accused of a crime, the prosecutor will use these methods to try to convince 12 people that you are guilty. In our system you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Also, witnesses are presumed to be telling the truth unless the opposing party can show otherwise and convince the jurors thereof.
Dr. Greenleaf also wrote a treatise wherein he examines the writings of the 4 Gospels of the Bible by the rules and logic applied in courts of law to try to determine if these testimonies would stand up in a court of law. You can read about this in a little $10 paperback available at Amazon.com, ISBN #= 0-8254-2747-9.
What people have done with the message of the Bible throughout the ages may be, and indeed often is illogical and terrible, but the writings themselves are truthful and worthy of your consideration. The Bible is the first book ever printed and is still today the most widely circulated book there is in the whole world. It is also the only book that accurately predicts events yet future to when that was written, but also events that are yet future to us. Don't dismiss it so quickly as illogical and unauthoritative, especially if you have never studied it. Atheists cannot "prove" that there is no God anymore than Christians can "prove" there is one. In either case, it is a matter of belief based on available evidence each person may have admitted into the court of their mind. One of the contentions of many court cases is to determine what evidence is admissable and what is not.
(....effectively reduces the quality....)
I suspect for the vast majority of people and for most video material available now or in the forseeable future, DVD quality or even VHS is good enough. How does HD TV improve the quality of the programs as well as the picture itself? I certainly will never pay for expensive DRM hobbled HD equipment. At least not for as long as that is so terribly expensive and purchaseable or rentable content is available in its present formats. Microsoft Windows is inferior in many ways to OSX or Linux, but it is good enough for most people, especially for those who have never used anything else. Regular TV as we now have it is that way also.
(....jury trials rely on appealing to emotion rather than fact....)
No system devised by man is perfect. If you ARE accused of a crime, you, as an accused have the option to have a Judge decide the outcome. If you feel that he/she is less emotional and therefore better equipped to render a just verdict, presumably in your favor if you are truly innocent.
(.....I fail to see why I should: I have the source material available....)
Do read Dr. Greenleaf's treatise, or at least skim through it to review the rules of evidence used in courts. These are the rules that are used to sufficiently learn the truth upon which you may be acquitted or convicted. If these rules concerning witnesses may be used to possibly determine the life or death of an accused, it seems they ought to be good enough to determine if the witness of the 4 Gospels could be admitted and stand up in your life, with you acting as an impartial juror. Jurors are always instructed to ONLY pay attention to and base their decision on what is presented in the court room. So you too, if you do not have an aready closed mind, may approach the witness of the gospel by these rules and then base your decison concerning the truth or falsity thereof ONLY on what YOU actually read, not on what you may have heard from any other source at any time before in your life. Have you actually EVER read the 4 gospels? Whether you have or have not, you ought to read them with the rules of evidence in mind to see whether they are true for you. Read them with the rules of cold logic used in courts, rather that relying your emotions or feelings.
.....Now, the system WON'T be entirely secure....
It never can be! A pair of clipleads will break any audio DRM, now or in the future. Just clip the wires to the speakers and plug the other end into a recording device. I suspect that someone will come up with the video equivalent of a pair of clipleads, the other end of which goes to a video recording device. At some point the clean, decrypted video signal has to go to the actual display panels to be rendered visible. Someone will figure out how to intercept that signal at that pIace and send it to a recording device. If nothing else, a video recording device pointed at the screen can capture the picure.
Whether those "clipleads" are declared illegal or not doesn't really prevent the content from escaping the DRM control of the content providers. Once that is done by only one person, who then puts that particularly desireable content on the Internet file sharing networks, all the fancy, expensive, cumbersome DRM is for naught. Laws have never prevented anyone from getting what they really want. Prohibition should have taught that as should the failed 'war on drugs'.
... I'd rather see the OS authenticate itself ....
The problem is that it is not hardware that makes a computer, but software. Without software, that box is just an expensive doorstop. With something like Virtual PC I can run Windows or other x86 software systems on a PPC from Apple. Even today, hardware has enough power to make the emulation useful for may uses. Remember, software is the dog and hardware is the tail. As the tail grows, the dog gets even bigger faster.
....one of the experiences which has turned me off to the Apostolic Christian tradition.....
/.) the more I saw some gaping holes in the evolutionary theory, especially concerning the origin of information and the origin of the 'natural laws' by which everything appears to operate. I began to believe again in a God, but He was deemed by me as one who kind of wound up the Universe like a clock and then left it, unconcerned about the mess and sorrow therein.
Oh how I so fervently wish that you were the only one turned off to Christianity by the hypocritical and otherwise ungodly behavior of those who take the name of Christ. You are not alone. I too was turned off when I was a teenager. I was brought up in the church, but having an inquisitive mind and an intense interest in science, I became convinced that church and everything associated with it was for old women and little children with no bearing on the real world. The teachings of evolution became quite plausible to me as an explanation of how we and everything else came to be.
The more I studied science and engineering (I am an engineer, that's why I frequent
Out of deference to and love for my mother, I came to a series of special meetings of our little German speaking church ( I am of German descent ) assembled at that time in a San Francisco storefront. A guest speaker from Germany, who also stayed as a guest at our house, gave a series of 'evangelistic' sermons. That kind of stuff normally went in one ear and out the other of this teenage boy. However, he began detailing a number of shortcomings, 'sins' if you will, that I was known for in my family, especially by my mother. I was rather upset and let my Mom know it in no uncertain terms later that night. She swore that she had not said anything to the guy whatsoever about me.
The last and final evening was a repeat performance, except that this time the man mentioned a number of things about me that no other human besides myself knew. The funny thing was is that my younger sister felt the same thing about her.
The man gave an 'altar call' which both my sister and I ignored. The man had said that we could ask God ourselves about the truth we heard about Jesus that night. However, on the way home I stopped the car in the Golden Gate Park, a few blocks from home and said to my sister with me; "Let's take the man up on his challenge and talk to God right now and ask Him what the man said we should ask. After all, it can't hurt." So we both did.
What happened next defies naturalistic explanations. It seemed to both of us as if something in our life had changed. That uneasy sense of guilt was gone and where before I had been afraid of death, that fear was suddenly totally gone. After this experience, I began to read my Bible again, even though I had been exposed to it from childhood on. It began to make sense and come alive for the first time in a way it never had before. And so, both my sister and I became lifelong followers of Jesus. We ignore most of the trappings that have come to be associated with 'religious' Christianity, holding fast to the Biblical teachings we have come to understand. We are told in 1 Cor13 that we now see as in a glass darkly, but someday will see God and know all that God knows. That is why I avoid theological and religious controversies, but try to present the essence of God's love as expressed in Jesus to those around me without coercion.
I don't know how long it has been, if ever, that you personally talked to God. Do the experiment. Tell God from your heart: "If you are relly there and care about me, I too will become a follower of Jesus. Reveal yourself to me in an unmistakeable way, special only to me and make me the kind of person you made me to be". If nothing happens, what have you lost?
.....then they will continue to watch their downsampled movie.....
Exactly! What improvement will HD TV bring to the quality of the actual movies and shows? See the protruding whiskers of the poorly shaven news anchor in great detail? HD displays usually show their superior qualities only in HUGE sizes, certainly much larger than what most people now have or are ever likely to connect to their computers. After all who cares to do their e-mail on a 4 foot screen?
Many people don't even have room for such monsters in their small apartments even if they can hang them on a wall. If all the new DRM makes it harder to watch the new videos than what is available today, then in addtion to the higher costs, few, if any real benefits, the new HD TV thing will take a long time to catch on at all until the costs come down to what present equipment costs. What compelling reason is there for the average consumer to buy a new TV, display or video playback device if all the content he/she might want to watch is available on the devices already in the house?
It is not likely that content providers will release their stuff exclusively on HD until most people have converted. As long as the new content is available on the present equipment, there is no reason to replace it. That in turn will keep prices higher and therefore discourage consumers from buying new equipment unless the old devices die. With entertainment devices it is not quite like with computers, where the old dogs will no longer efficiently run modern software. Even most of the very earliest DVD players will still happily play the latest movies rented from Blockbuster. VHS is also still a ways from being dead yet. The main reason that DVD was adopted by the consumer relatively quickly is that it is very convenient and price effective in that it still works just fine with current TVs. With HD, not only the player, but the entire playback chain has to be replaced at considerable expense. Don't expect the transition rate of HD to be anywhere near that of the VHS to DVD conversion.
.....If you want to convert me, you will be wasting your time. I won't go too much into my delvings in Christian theology, but I have done some study......
There is no way I or anyone else can convert somebody. That is the job of God's Holy Spirit. Only He can convince you or anybody that the statements of Jesus are true. In John 14:6 is written: Jesus saith unto him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by me." There are plenty of religions, but there is only one way to God and that is through Jesus.
I hope that in your spiritual journey, some day, you come to the realization that what Jesus said there applies to you. Jesus is polite and gentle and tell us in Rev 3:20- "Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." Jesus will not break down the door to your heart, but I hope and pray that sometime, before you draw your last breath, you will open that door by faith and let Him in. It is relationship, not religion that God wants with man.