Indeed that is true and therefore, since evolution cannot be "proven" by any kind of experiment it is misnamed and should be called a conjecture or hypothethis.
Nobody has ever made even a single living cell from non-living matter, yet evolution preaches that this is what happened.
No fossils are being made anywhere today, because when something that was once alive dies, it decays, yet the evolutionary conjecture says that fossils were made over vast periods of time by processes that cannot be duplicated in the lab.
Evolution, as it being preached today requires uniformitarian thinking, yet there is plenty of evidence for some rather large discontinuities and catastrophies that account for such finds as quick frozen mammoths in the ground of Siberia.
Nobody has ever evolved a reptile into a bird or has experimantally demonstrated any of the other nonsense evolutionists preach.
Electromagentic theory, relativity, gravity and many other real theories can be and have been experimentally verified, but evolution has NEVER been duplicated in any lab.
Evolutionists will postulate immense time periods to get around these problems, but the laws of entropy make time work against anything simple becoming more complex.
...rigorously tested and has been found to withstand critical inquiry...
There are a number of sciences that have found the "theory of evolution" flatly contradicting the evidence of observations and practice. For example, the evolutionary theory has no plausible explanation for the origin of information. Since here at/. everybody knows a lot about computers and their design I use that example.
If all the detailed design information to design a disk drive can only be found on a disk drive, how does the first drive get built? What comes first, the information to build the drive or the drive to store the information on? A designer has to have the information on how to build the drive, make one and store the information thereon so more drives can be built by using this detailed design data.
This is the situation with the DNA. The DNA stores a digital ( not binary but 4 level) code of how to make proteins. However, DNA itself is made from proteins. So what came first, the DNA to store the codes defining proteins or the proteins of the DNA so the codes can be stored to make more DNA. Chicken and egg?
Matter plus energy cannot make life. There must be added immense amounts of INFORMATION. This can only come from a source of intelligence. A computer without the information input from an intelligent programmer is only an expensive doorstop. It is the programs therein that determine its function and gives it "life", not the hardware itself. The existence of software emulators shows that the hardware is secondary to the software.
Individually, the atoms in your body and mine are indistinguishable. It is only their arrangement, governed by the information stored in the DNA molecular software storage system than makes us different. This information originally came from a MIND just as the information in a computer. Software has no mass and therefore is not subject to the laws of physics. An erased randomized disk will be exactly the same weight as one with gigabytes of information. So it is with you, the real you runs in a piece of corruptible hardware that will eventually cease to operate, but the information that represents you can be transmitted and preserved forever. The capabilites of the hardware limit the performance of the software, but if you get a better hardware, then the software will perform better and can be upgraded to new, even now unimagined functions. The Bible speaks of resurrection, of a new and better hardware (body) where the upgraded software (you) can someday operate.
You can believe in impersonal random evolution or that you were made by a highly intelligent designer who has great plans for you here in time and beyond the limits of time and space. I choose to believe the latter.
There happen to many observations that contradict evolution. In order to have a place where live could "evolve" as is commonly believed a number of conditions must be met. In the mathematics of statistics it is generally agreed that if the probability of a series of events is less than 10x-50th it is deemed to be impossible. There are only about 10x80th atoms estimated to be in the entire known universe.
So what are some of the conditions needed to have life?
Some have postulated that the chemistry of life could be based on elements other than carbon and thus allow for a greater latitude of temperature. However, the extremely complex structures needed for storing the information codes in living cells cannot be built in any other way than with the element the Creator made for just this purpose.
The electromagnetic force holds the electrons to the nucleus and the atoms to each other. If this were a little smaller, the atoms could not combine to form molecules since the latter would fall apart too readily. A larger force would prevent atoms from "sharing" their electrons in order to form molecules. Either way, there could be no life.
The strong nuclear force holds the inner parts of all atoms together. If this nuclear force were slightly less, then the larger atoms would not hold together to make heavy elements. A stronger force would make hydrogen (and thus water) rare.
The mass (weight) relationship between protons and electrons (parts of the atom) is exactly 1836 times. If protons were either heavier or lighter than this precise ratio, no molecules, and hence no life could exist.
These are only a few of the very basic relationships in the atomic realm that need to be exactly right. Then there are the characteristics of the soalr system and our planet:
Only one parent star ( our sun) per planetary system please. More than one would result in irregular planetary orbits, less than one makes it way too cold for life. Another sun sized star closer than about 3.8 light years would mess up the earth's orbit and make the long term climate of Earth inhospitable to life. Only about half of all the stars in the universe qualify on this distance specification. The Creator gave us only one sun and made sure that the nearest other star is over 4 light years distant.
The mass of the sun has to be just so. Too large a sun would cause the energy output of the sun to vary more than living things could stand. A too tiny sun would force the Earth to be too close to the sun to get enough heat for life. This would mess up the rotation time of the earth tending to make a day and a year the same length, such as the planet Mercury. Also excessive tidal forces that would eradicate all life.
The color (surface temperature) of the sun has to be just so. Too much red light (cool) or too blue, (hot) and the plants would not be able to use sunlight to make food. (photosynthesis needs just the right light) If the light were not as it is, then nothing green would grow on Earth.
The gravity at the surface of the planet must be just so. Too strong gravity causes the atmosphere to contain too much methane and ammonia, both very poisonous to life. Jupiter for example has too much gravity and its atmosphere is mostly ammonia and methane. Too little gravity will produce a planet like Mars with too little water.
Above are only a small sampling of the many parameters I could list that must be exactly right in order to just have the conditions where life could exist. If you figure out the probabilities of all of these being as they are without some intelligent thought, it is many orders of magnitude smaller than all the atoms in the known universe.
...Give me a single statement from the Bible that "science did not discover until about 3-4 hundred years ago"...
None the myths about what supports the Earth that abounded in the ancient world are found in the Word of God. Man has always had very imaginative ideas about the foundation of the Earth. Some believed that it rested on elephants or on the backs of turtles. The Greeks believed that Atlas was the one who carried the Earth on his shoulders. In the book of Job, the oldest book of the Bible we are told: Job 26:7 He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing. (NIV translation)
God tells us in Isaiah 40:22 (above) that the earth is not flat like the scientists of Isaiah's day thought, but is circular. Indeed the Hebrew word chwug (pronounced --> khoog) literally means spherical, like an orange or apple. It was 1700 years later that a Greek mathematician named Erathenes proved that the earth must be spherical.
Before the invention of the telescope and its use by Galileo in 1610 to study the stars, astronomers counted the stars they could see with the unaided eye and made star charts with about 6000 stars. These charts existed in Jeremiah's day already. Yet Jeremiah, speaking truth from God contradicts all scientists of his time in: Jeremiah 33:22 I will make the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars of the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore. Jeremiah 33:22 As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured: so will I multiply the seed of David my servant, and the Levites that minister unto me. Today's modern telescopes reveal hundreds of billions of galaxies each one of which has hundreds of billions of stars. Even with modern technology it is a fact that the stars cannot be numbered. Also consider that numbered is not the same as counted and knowing the total. Numbering implies that each item (stars here) is individually identified. Jesus also said that the hairs on your head are numbered, not just counted.
I could give you more examples, but these should suffice for now
What you are talking about is adaptation. That is well esablished. There are genetic boundaries that have never been observed to be crossed. There are many kinds of dogs, but none has ever become a cat. The Biblical "kinds" is note neccessarily what we commonly call "species". Living things are amazingly adaptable, but that adpatation is not evolution as commonly taught in our schools.
...christians believe that evolution contradicts the bible?....
You forget that evolution is a THEORY. There is not a single scientific FACT that contradicts the Bible. There are numerous statements in the Bible about things science did not discover until about 3 or fourhundred years ago.
...That's why I use Password Safe [sourceforge.net]....
Macs under OSX have a thing called keychain which is an encrypted repository for passwords. Normally it uses the account log-in password to unlock, but it can be secured with a seperate password. For many sites, the user gets prompted whether he/she wants to save the password they just created on some site to the keychain. After that, if the keychain is unlocked, the password is supplied automatically if the site is visited again.
Way back then I had a (and may still have somewhere) Mac program called copy2mac which successfully copied every disk, whether copy protected or not successfully. If the original disk was copy protected, then the copy would be also. It allowed much faster sector copies which worked for many but not all of the copy protected disks and a quite slow bit copy which never failed to properly copy any disk. The program would read all the bits into memory (in small chunks) and then copy them exactly onto a blank floppy. There was no need to format the floppy first for either sector or bit copy. All bits, including the formatting of the original disk were transferred.
Even being off by a factor of 4 still means that the amount of energy the sun sends our way each day far exceeds all our energy needs. Even a relatively small desert slice of the total land area receives far more energy than is presently produced by all sources we now use. Therefore the gist of my previous post is still valid.
...When HiDef dvd's become standardized and popular, I'll purchase movies again...
When the next SUPERDEF on molecular cube storage (no moving parts) comes out 5 years after that, you'll have to buy your collection again. Another 5 years later, they'll have MEGADEF on atomic quantum storage devices (100 Terabytes on a chip) and you'll have to buy your collection again. Another 5 years later.....
Don't you see the game yet? Hollywood and the electronics manufacturers want to stay in business. They will be doing this at your expense again and again and again.
Actually, the professional pirates would not have to decrypt anything. All they would need is a hacked player/recorder that copies the digital data bits exactly, bit for bit onto another disk. There would be NO way to tell the copy from the original, because a bit is a bit is a bit. If such bitwise players/recorders become commonly available, NO encryption scheme would ever work again. A bit for bit image could be distributed on the Internet and burned onto a disk which the player would decrypt just like an original disk. Making an EXACT copy, encryption and all should not violate the DMCA, since no copy protection is actually circumvented. All that is happening is that a string of ones and zeroes are transmitted from point A to point B. Back in the 80s, there were floppy drives that did bitwise copying, making exact copies, which included the weird formatting and other tricks that the then current copy protection schemes used.
...just not enough energy density in sunlight hitting the Earth's surface...
I don't know where you get that idea, but the sun deposits about 4kw of raw energy on each square meter of most of this planet. The deserts of the western US receive enough energy each day to supply all energy needs of the whole world, not just this country. The solar energy falling on the Sahara EACH DAY would suffice for multiple times the energy needs of mankind for a year or more. You have NO idea how much energy the sun sends to our planet each day and it all free and environmentally safe.
The problem is in capturing this energy efficiently. Right now there are thousands of homes that are not connected to the electrical grid, yet are able to use all the modern electrical gadgets that the grid supplied houses are. Capturing and using solar energy for all of mankind's needs is not a matter of new technology -- it is here now-- but the fact is that fossil fuels are still cheaper. Once these fuels become scarce and expensive enough, solar energy will be used on a massive scale and thus become much less expensive that it is today.
There is a problem with nukes, and it is mostly political. There is this thing of NIMBY (not in my back yard) attitude for almost any energy facility including finding a place acceptable to store the waste products. Yukka mountain in Nevada is about as middle of nowhere as you can get, but there a plenty of voices, both local and national, opposed to depositing the nation's nuclear garbage there.
With present knowledge, solar energy is really the only alternative to fossil fuel, which in itself is really stored solar energy from ages past.
There are really only two practical such sources right now: 1) nuclear fission and 2) solar (indirectly through wind or hydro)
If nuclear energy is used to make electricity, we might as well just build ordinary fission power plants, because we'd still have all the problems such as radioactive waste.
Solar energy can be used to make electric power with solar cells and large mirror arrays could heat water through which the the electric current from the solar cells would pass to make hydrogen. This technology exists now, but it is not likely to be cost effective as long as fossil fuel is still as cheap as it is now.
The hydrogen would be in effect a way to store and transport the solar energy to where it is needed.
You missed the key phrase of my post: "With presently known methods"
I fully agree that future discoveries may allow small fusion reactors. Maybe someone will invent a gravity or anti-gravity generator or an anti-matter catalyst to enable easy generation of matter-antimatter reactions. Perhaps we'll discover how to tap the zero-point energy of space itself -- who knows, but for the forseeable future, I believe that efficient utilization of solar energy is the best possibility.
Re:Government like government
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...government will think that government is a good solution...
It is unfortunate that too often the people with this kind of paternalistic "we must protect the unwashed masses from themselves" attitude find their way into government. Government is after all run by people.
...It doesn't produce useful electricity, and requires more work to be economical...
In order to produce useable amounts of energy, both types of fusion, inertial and magnetic confinement reactors have to be built on a huge expensive scale. With presently known methods, a fusion reactor could be built, but it would have to be big enough to supply almost half of all electricity used in the US.
It is no accident that the gravity confinement fusion reactor 93 mill. miles from Earth is so big. By substituting the electromagentic or nuclear force for the much weaker gravity it may be possible to make such a reactor much smaller, but still quite large on an earthly scale.
Actually, the sun shines 24 hours a day. If solar energy were developed in the whole world, there would always be a place where the sun shines. An efficient global energy distribution system would likely cost less in the long run than a pipedream of as yet non-existing fusion reactors fueled from the moon.
If solar electricty were developed on the massive scale needed to to provide all power, its cost would be manageable. Even today there are many homes which are not on the electric grid but use solar panels for all power needs. Better energy storage would certainly make solar power competitive much sooner as fossil fuels get depleted.
Indeed you are right! Worrying how to get the fuel is easily solveable. The effort to make a viable fusion power reactor that actually generates real, useable electricity has been going on for decades already.
It seems that the scale needed with presently known magnetic or inertial fusion technology is huge, such that one such reactor would be have to be large enough to generate about one third to one half of all the power required in the US. That would not be so good, since if it stops working for some reason, there would not be enough power available to make up for such a huge generating loss and transmitting that power to the loads would not be easy.
There must be a good reason why the creator chose to make such a big thermonuclear reactor and put the Earth just the right distance away to keep us all cozy.
That cost would be small compared to researching and finally building a working fusion reactor. How is the technology with H3 different and presumeably easier than just the current fusion devices using plain deuterium? We got plenty of that right here on Earth. As far as I know, they have been trying for many years to make a power producing, practical fusion reactor and are still a long ways from achieving this.
There is a very reliable fusion reactor now operating 93 million miles from here. I think we'd all be better off figuring out how to use only a small fraction of the power it delivers to this planet each day. All our fossil fuel energy originated in this reactor a very long time ago. Living organisms captured and stored that energy for us. Maybe we can genetically engineer some efficient living cells that can capture the energy currently being delivered each day and convert it to a useful form, such as electricity.
Re:Who will "fix" the internet and how?
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...How long will it take before the government regulates the net...
Why are there so many otherwise intelligent people that think the government can solve every problem? Most of the time government creates more problems than it solves. Trusting computers is not the problem and there will always be scams, with or without the Internet. The problem is that there are more and more untrustworthy people, not computers. These phishing scams can also done with the phone or by mail. However, the Internet happens to be a much more efficient tool do do this sort of thing.
There was a time when multimillion dollar deals were sealed by a word of truth and a handshake and a man's word was his bond. Now it takes an army of lawyers and a written contract thicker than the Manhattan telephone book. An even with that, some try to weasel out on a technicality.
On the 'net, as in most of our society, unfortunately it is increasingly a "buyer beware" world.
Re:10.2 Billion is a stunning number.
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...poorly regulated capitalism doesn't work...
What a bunch of BS. What ya want -- communism? --- Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head demanding you MUST use one of those ubiqutous pieces of plastic to pay for the stuff you want.
If your wants outstrip your cash supply you might possibly have to discipline yourself to curtail your desires. Why are there so many elitists in this world that insist that they know better and try to protect stupid/greedy/undisiplined people from themselves by getting the government to impose rules on those who do limit their desires within their means? If you don't want to pay the greedy credit card companies profit, don't be greedy yourself and spend money you don't have to buy stuff you don't need to impress people you don't like. I do have a credit card, but I carefully keep track of my expenditures (computers are great for this) and pay it off before the due date and therefore pay NO interest. If you can't impose that sort of dicipline on yourself, cut up your plastic and pay cash.
Re:Combat it or deny responsibility you mean...
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... by obvious scams...
The problem is that some of these scams are not at all obvious. Banks (like mine) need to tell their customers again and again and again VERY emphatically to categorically NEVER respond to a request for information that the customer did not initiate and not to respond to any links in an e-mail. Even better, if unsolicited information is requested, give out some bogus data. If enough people start doing that it'll take a lot of the scammer's time for nothing. Still visiting an unknown website with a vulnerable OS or browser is best avoided.
What can MS Access do that Filemaker 7 can't? Maybe Access interacts better with other MS programs, but then there is nothing magic about a data base. Any computer can do database work, even some old DOS machines are still used with dBase2.
Slashdot Mirror
...a theory is something that can be proven...
Indeed that is true and therefore, since evolution cannot be "proven" by any kind of experiment it is misnamed and should be called a conjecture or hypothethis.
Nobody has ever made even a single living cell from non-living matter, yet evolution preaches that this is what happened.
No fossils are being made anywhere today, because when something that was once alive dies, it decays, yet the evolutionary conjecture says that fossils were made over vast periods of time by processes that cannot be duplicated in the lab.
Evolution, as it being preached today requires uniformitarian thinking, yet there is plenty of evidence for some rather
large discontinuities and catastrophies that account for such finds as quick frozen mammoths in the ground of Siberia.
Nobody has ever evolved a reptile into a bird or has experimantally demonstrated any of the other nonsense evolutionists preach.
Electromagentic theory, relativity, gravity and many other real theories can be and have been experimentally verified, but evolution has NEVER been duplicated in any lab.
Evolutionists will postulate immense time periods to get around these problems, but the laws of entropy make time work against anything simple becoming more complex.
...rigorously tested and has been found to withstand critical inquiry...
/. everybody knows a lot about computers and their design I use that example.
There are a number of sciences that have found the "theory of evolution" flatly contradicting the evidence of observations and practice. For example, the evolutionary theory has no plausible explanation for the origin of information. Since here at
If all the detailed design information to design a disk drive can only be found on a disk drive, how does the first drive get built? What comes first, the information to build the drive or the drive to store the information on? A designer has to have the information on how to build the drive, make one and store the information thereon so more drives can be built by using this detailed design data.
This is the situation with the DNA. The DNA stores a digital ( not binary but 4 level) code of how to make proteins. However, DNA itself is made from proteins. So what came first, the DNA to store the codes defining proteins or the proteins of the DNA so the codes can be stored to make more DNA. Chicken and egg?
Matter plus energy cannot make life. There must be added immense amounts of INFORMATION. This can only come from a source of intelligence. A computer without the information input from an intelligent programmer is only an expensive doorstop. It is the programs therein that determine its function and gives it "life", not the hardware itself. The existence of software emulators shows that the hardware is secondary to the software.
Individually, the atoms in your body and mine are indistinguishable. It is only their arrangement, governed by the information stored in the DNA molecular software storage system than makes us different. This information originally came from a MIND just as the information in a computer. Software has no mass and therefore is not subject to the laws of physics. An erased randomized disk will be exactly the same weight as one with gigabytes of information. So it is with you, the real you runs in a piece of corruptible hardware that will eventually cease to operate, but the information that represents you can be transmitted and preserved forever. The capabilites of the hardware limit the performance of the software, but if you get a better hardware, then the software will perform better and can be upgraded to new, even now unimagined functions. The Bible speaks of resurrection, of a new and better hardware (body) where the upgraded software (you) can someday operate.
You can believe in impersonal random evolution or that you were made by a highly intelligent designer who has great plans for you here in time and beyond the limits of time and space. I choose to believe the latter.
...has not yet contradicted any observations...
There happen to many observations that contradict evolution. In order to have a place where live could "evolve" as is commonly believed a number of conditions must be met. In the mathematics of statistics it is generally agreed that if the probability of a series of events is less than 10x-50th it is deemed to be impossible. There are only about 10x80th atoms estimated to be in the entire known universe.
So what are some of the conditions needed to have life?
Some have postulated that the chemistry of life could be based on elements other than carbon and thus allow for a greater latitude of temperature. However, the extremely complex structures needed for storing the information codes in living cells cannot be built in any other way than with the element the Creator made for just this purpose.
The electromagnetic force holds the electrons to the nucleus and the atoms to each other. If this were a little smaller, the atoms could not combine to form molecules since the latter would fall apart too readily. A larger force would prevent atoms from "sharing" their electrons in order to form molecules. Either way, there could be no life.
The strong nuclear force holds the inner parts of all atoms together. If this nuclear force were slightly less, then the larger atoms would not hold together to make heavy elements. A stronger force would make hydrogen (and thus water) rare.
The mass (weight) relationship between protons and electrons (parts of the atom) is exactly 1836 times. If protons were either heavier or lighter than this precise ratio, no molecules, and hence no life could exist.
These are only a few of the very basic relationships in the atomic realm that need to be exactly right. Then there are the characteristics of the soalr system and our planet:
Only one parent star ( our sun) per planetary system please. More than one would result in irregular planetary orbits, less than one makes it way too cold for life. Another sun sized star closer than about 3.8 light years would mess up the earth's orbit and make the long term climate of Earth inhospitable to life. Only about half of all the stars in the universe qualify on this distance specification. The Creator gave us only one sun and made sure that the nearest other star is over 4 light years distant.
The mass of the sun has to be just so. Too large a sun would cause the energy output of the sun to vary more than living things could stand. A too tiny sun would force the Earth to be too close to the sun to get enough heat for life. This would mess up the rotation time of the earth tending to make a day and a year the same length, such as the planet Mercury. Also excessive tidal forces that would eradicate all life.
The color (surface temperature) of the sun has to be just so. Too much red light (cool) or too blue, (hot) and the plants would not be able to use sunlight to make food. (photosynthesis needs just the right light) If the light were not as it is, then nothing green would grow on Earth.
The gravity at the surface of the planet must be just so. Too strong gravity causes the atmosphere to contain too much methane and ammonia, both very poisonous to life. Jupiter for example has too much gravity and its atmosphere is mostly ammonia and methane. Too little gravity will produce a planet like Mars with too little water.
Above are only a small sampling of the many parameters I could list that must be exactly right in order to just have the conditions where life could exist. If you figure out the probabilities of all of these being as they are without some intelligent thought, it is many orders of magnitude smaller than all the atoms in the known universe.
...Give me a single statement from the Bible that "science did not discover until about 3-4 hundred years ago"...
None the myths about what supports the Earth that abounded in the ancient world are found in the Word of God. Man has always had very imaginative ideas about the foundation of the Earth. Some believed that it rested on elephants or on the backs of turtles.
The Greeks believed that Atlas was the one who carried the Earth on his shoulders. In the book of Job, the oldest book of the Bible we are told:
Job 26:7 He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing. (NIV translation)
God tells us in Isaiah 40:22 (above) that the earth is not flat like the scientists of Isaiah's day thought, but is circular. Indeed the Hebrew word chwug (pronounced --> khoog) literally means spherical, like an orange or apple. It was 1700 years later that a Greek mathematician named Erathenes proved that the earth must be spherical.
Before the invention of the telescope and its use by Galileo in 1610 to study the stars, astronomers counted the stars they could see with the unaided eye and made star charts with about 6000 stars. These charts existed in Jeremiah's day already. Yet Jeremiah, speaking truth from God contradicts all scientists of his time in:
Jeremiah 33:22 I will make the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars of the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore.
Jeremiah 33:22 As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured: so will I multiply the seed of David my servant, and the Levites that minister unto me.
Today's modern telescopes reveal hundreds of billions of galaxies each one of which has hundreds of billions of stars. Even with modern technology it is a fact that the stars cannot be numbered. Also consider that numbered is not the same as counted and knowing the total. Numbering implies that each item (stars here) is individually identified. Jesus also said that the hairs on your head are numbered, not just counted.
I could give you more examples, but these should suffice for now
...see butterflies of england....
What you are talking about is adaptation. That is well esablished. There are genetic boundaries that have never been observed to be crossed. There are many kinds of dogs, but none has ever become a cat. The Biblical "kinds" is note neccessarily what we commonly call "species". Living things are amazingly adaptable, but that adpatation is not evolution as commonly taught in our schools.
...christians believe that evolution contradicts the bible?....
You forget that evolution is a THEORY. There is not a single scientific FACT that contradicts the Bible. There are numerous statements in the Bible about things science did not discover until about 3 or fourhundred years ago.
...That's why I use Password Safe [sourceforge.net]....
Macs under OSX have a thing called keychain which is an encrypted repository for passwords. Normally it uses the account log-in password to unlock, but it can be secured with a seperate password. For many sites, the user gets prompted whether he/she wants to save the password they just created on some site to the keychain. After that, if the keychain is unlocked, the password is supplied automatically if the site is visited again.
...copy bit-by-bit...
Way back then I had a (and may still have somewhere) Mac program called copy2mac which successfully copied every disk, whether copy protected or not successfully. If the original disk was copy protected, then the copy would be also. It allowed much faster sector copies which worked for many but not all of the copy protected disks and a quite slow bit copy which never failed to properly copy any disk. The program would read all the bits into memory (in small chunks) and then copy them exactly onto a blank floppy. There was no need to format the floppy first for either sector or bit copy. All bits, including the formatting of the original disk were transferred.
I stand corrected .. however,
Even being off by a factor of 4 still means that the amount of energy the sun sends our way each day far exceeds all our energy needs. Even a relatively small desert slice of the total land area receives far more energy than is presently produced by all sources we now use. Therefore the gist of my previous post is still valid.
...When HiDef dvd's become standardized and popular, I'll purchase movies again...
When the next SUPERDEF on molecular cube storage (no moving parts) comes out 5 years after that, you'll have to buy your collection again. Another 5 years later, they'll have MEGADEF on atomic quantum storage devices (100 Terabytes on a chip) and you'll have to buy your collection again. Another 5 years later.....
Don't you see the game yet? Hollywood and the electronics manufacturers want to stay in business. They will be doing this at your expense again and again and again.
...that you still have to decrypt the content ...
Actually, the professional pirates would not have to decrypt anything. All they would need is a hacked player/recorder that copies the digital data bits exactly, bit for bit onto another disk. There would be NO way to tell the copy from the original, because a bit is a bit is a bit. If such bitwise players/recorders become commonly available, NO encryption scheme would ever work again. A bit for bit image could be distributed on the Internet and burned onto a disk which the player would decrypt just like an original disk. Making an EXACT copy, encryption and all should not violate the DMCA, since no copy protection is actually circumvented. All that is happening is that a string of ones and zeroes are transmitted from point A to point B. Back in the 80s, there were floppy drives that did bitwise copying, making exact copies, which included the weird formatting and other tricks that the then current copy protection schemes used.
...just not enough energy density in sunlight hitting the Earth's surface...
I don't know where you get that idea, but the sun deposits about 4kw of raw energy on each square meter of most of this planet. The deserts of the western US receive enough energy each day to supply all energy needs of the whole world, not just this country. The solar energy falling on the Sahara EACH DAY would suffice for multiple times the energy needs of mankind for a year or more. You have NO idea how much energy the sun sends to our planet each day and it all free and environmentally safe.
The problem is in capturing this energy efficiently. Right now there are thousands of homes that are not connected to the electrical grid, yet are able to use all the modern electrical gadgets that the grid supplied houses are. Capturing and using solar energy for all of mankind's needs is not a matter of new technology -- it is here now-- but the fact is that fossil fuels are still cheaper. Once these fuels become scarce and expensive enough, solar energy will be used on a massive scale and thus become much less expensive that it is today.
...building a few nukes...
There is a problem with nukes, and it is mostly political. There is this thing of NIMBY (not in my back yard) attitude for almost any energy facility including finding a place acceptable to store the waste products. Yukka mountain in Nevada is about as middle of nowhere as you can get, but there a plenty of voices, both local and national, opposed to depositing the nation's nuclear garbage there.
With present knowledge, solar energy is really the only alternative to fossil fuel, which in itself is really stored solar energy from ages past.
...non-fossil-fuel using energy sources...
There are really only two practical such sources right now: 1) nuclear fission and 2) solar (indirectly through wind or hydro)
If nuclear energy is used to make electricity, we might as well just build ordinary fission power plants, because we'd still have all the problems such as radioactive waste.
Solar energy can be used to make electric power with solar cells and large mirror arrays could heat water through which the the electric current from the solar cells would pass to make hydrogen. This technology exists now, but it is not likely to be cost effective as long as fossil fuel is still as cheap as it is now.
The hydrogen would be in effect a way to store and transport the solar energy to where it is needed.
You missed the key phrase of my post: "With presently known methods"
I fully agree that future discoveries may allow small fusion reactors. Maybe someone will invent a gravity or anti-gravity generator or an anti-matter catalyst to enable easy generation of matter-antimatter reactions. Perhaps we'll discover how to tap the zero-point energy of space itself -- who knows, but for the forseeable future, I believe that efficient utilization of solar energy is the best possibility.
...government will think that government is a good solution...
It is unfortunate that too often the people with this kind of paternalistic "we must protect the unwashed masses from themselves" attitude find their way into government. Government is after all run by people.
...It doesn't produce useful electricity, and requires more work to be economical...
In order to produce useable amounts of energy, both types of fusion, inertial and magnetic confinement reactors have to be built on a huge expensive scale. With presently known methods, a fusion reactor could be built, but it would have to be big enough to supply almost half of all electricity used in the US.
It is no accident that the gravity confinement fusion reactor 93 mill. miles from Earth is so big. By substituting the electromagentic or nuclear force for the much weaker gravity it may be possible to make such a reactor much smaller, but still quite large on an earthly scale.
...Solar only works during the day/expensive...
Actually, the sun shines 24 hours a day. If solar energy were developed in the whole world, there would always be a place where the sun shines. An efficient global energy distribution system would likely cost less in the long run than a pipedream of as yet non-existing fusion reactors fueled from the moon.
If solar electricty were developed on the massive scale needed to to provide all power, its cost would be manageable. Even today there are many homes which are not on the electric grid but use solar panels for all power needs. Better energy storage would certainly make solar power competitive much sooner as fossil fuels get depleted.
...the reactor tech comes first....
Indeed you are right! Worrying how to get the fuel is easily solveable. The effort to make a viable fusion power reactor that actually generates real, useable electricity has been going on for decades already.
It seems that the scale needed with presently known magnetic or inertial fusion technology is huge, such that one such reactor would be have to be large enough to generate about one third to one half of all the power required in the US. That would not be so good, since if it stops working for some reason, there would not be enough power available to make up for such a huge generating loss and transmitting that power to the loads would not be easy.
There must be a good reason why the creator chose to make such a big thermonuclear reactor and put the Earth just the right distance away to keep us all cozy.
...Transportation costs from the moon...
That cost would be small compared to researching and finally building a working fusion reactor. How is the technology with H3 different and presumeably easier than just the current fusion devices using plain deuterium? We got plenty of that right here on Earth. As far as I know, they have been trying for many years to make a power producing, practical fusion reactor and are still a long ways from achieving this.
There is a very reliable fusion reactor now operating 93 million miles from here. I think we'd all be better off figuring out how to use only a small fraction of the power it delivers to this planet each day. All our fossil fuel energy originated in this reactor a very long time ago. Living organisms captured and stored that energy for us. Maybe we can genetically engineer some efficient living cells that can capture the energy currently being delivered each day and convert it to a useful form, such as electricity.
...How long will it take before the government regulates the net...
Why are there so many otherwise intelligent people that think the government can solve every problem? Most of the time government creates more problems than it solves. Trusting computers is not the problem and there will always be scams, with or without the Internet. The problem is that there are more and more untrustworthy people, not computers. These phishing scams can also done with the phone or by mail. However, the Internet happens to be a much more efficient tool do do this sort of thing.
There was a time when multimillion dollar deals were sealed by a word of truth and a handshake and a man's word was his bond. Now it takes an army of lawyers and a written contract thicker than the Manhattan telephone book. An even with that, some try to weasel out on a technicality.
On the 'net, as in most of our society, unfortunately it is increasingly a "buyer beware" world.
...poorly regulated capitalism doesn't work...
What a bunch of BS. What ya want -- communism? --- Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head demanding you MUST use one of those ubiqutous pieces of plastic to pay for the stuff you want.
If your wants outstrip your cash supply you might possibly have to discipline yourself to curtail your desires. Why are there so many elitists in this world that insist that they know better and try to protect stupid/greedy/undisiplined people from themselves by getting the government to impose rules on those who do limit their desires within their means? If you don't want to pay the greedy credit card companies profit, don't be greedy yourself and spend money you don't have to buy stuff you don't need to impress people you don't like. I do have a credit card, but I carefully keep track of my expenditures (computers are great for this) and pay it off before the due date and therefore pay NO interest. If you can't impose that sort of dicipline on yourself, cut up your plastic and pay cash.
... by obvious scams...
The problem is that some of these scams are not at all obvious. Banks (like mine) need to tell their customers again and again and again VERY emphatically to categorically NEVER respond to a request for information that the customer did not initiate and not to respond to any links in an e-mail. Even better, if unsolicited information is requested, give out some bogus data. If enough people start doing that it'll take a lot of the scammer's time for nothing. Still visiting an unknown website with a vulnerable OS or browser is best avoided.
...People who work in microsoft access....
What can MS Access do that Filemaker 7 can't? Maybe Access interacts better with other MS programs, but then there is nothing magic about a data base. Any computer can do database work, even some old DOS machines are still used with dBase2.
...not worth the extra thousand dollars it'll cost them....
What model of Mac is there that costs a thousand dollars more than an equivalent Wintel box?