....I can pretty much guarantee that astrologers would have no idea what you're talking about....
Current scientists have no better idea and don't truly know what makes the earths magnetic field. My assertion that God just created it that way, so that we could live upon the earth and worship him is just as valid. Scientists think they know how our world works, but the more answers they get, the more questions they get as well and so they are not much further ahead than our ancestors. Despite all of our technology, we still have not learned to live in peace with one another but have made Weapons of Mass Destruction which to possibly annihilate the entire human race.
The facts are that all disks are doomed because everything in the future will be legally available via download because of steadily improving Internet connection speeds. Even at the present time it is very cheap to store video content on magnetic discs and eventually storage will become so cheap that what happened to music will also happen to video.
I think the Internet is more like a public square. Do you really think that giving away copies of someone else's work in the public square is something you would like if it were done to your work? Giving away some copyrighted work to your loved ones may be morally defensible, but handing someone's work out in public is illegal and immoral.
.....Rights are only meaningful when they are granted by a party that could protect them....
You are advocating the law of the jungle, the law tooth and claw, whoever has the bigger gun. For example the basic right to life. You cannot create life or preserve from death, so what makes you think that you or the government or anybody has the right to take it away. Corporations do not create anything, but it is the individual people applying their God-given creativity that do the creating. If people lived by the golden rule, then there would be no need for copyright or most other laws. If you write a song or perform an act which is then recorded, it is yours or whoever you give it to. If someone takes a recording thereof and distributes it, that person is not living by golden rule. People who do not wish to obey the simple golden rule will not obey 1 billion laws or more.
All rights come from the giver of life, God himself, whether you or anybody else agrees with that or not. All human rights to derive from the basic right to life itself, which only God can give. Anyone who cannot give life must not take it away.
...Heck, if I had the wherewithal, am I not within my rights to make a duplicate of it for my own use...
Therein is the major difference between real property and intellectual property. Real property contains intellectual property, but it is not easily copied. The key is when somebody is making a profit from someone else's work. It comes down to the golden rule, if you create something then you don't want someone else to profit from your creativity.
The whole idea of copyright is to give the creator the exclusive right to distribute copies of his or her work. When a private individual makes a copy for their iPod or other device, they are not in distributing nor profiting by doing this. However, if he or she were giving the CD music to all her friends who were putting it on the Internet, that is wrong because it means they are actually distributing someone else's work.
...Some rights are instantaneously granted by the State....
The state as represented by my next-door neighbor never has and never can give me any rights. It can only take them away. All rights are given by God as it clearly states in our Declaration of Independence. No government anywhere has ever given rights to anybody but only taken them away.
For thousands of years people have lived without copyrights and still created art because it is within the human being to want to create as our Creator did. It is only now that human creativity has become a commercial activity, is it necessary to prevent others from profiting by someone else's creativity. The key ought to be "profiting", not the mere use of content.
...Hey, I mean we haven't discovered any working grand unified theory yet, but at least we're TRYING!...
Well at least the scientists have not yet discovered such a theory, but the theologians have. It is called the "God Theory". That theory says that God made and runs the universe whether you believe that or not. This theory is not very palatable to us philosophically, because if there REALLY is such a God, we instinctively feel responsible to him and that is discomforting because most of us want to be independent and responsible to no one except ourselves.
Much of of cosmology is interpretation of what we actually see and receive. For example, we have never seen a black hole, never observed so called dark matter, never actually seen a neutron star and on the list goes. We see the galaxies move in a certain way and their motion does not fit their theories at this time. So, to to make the data fit they give explanations and invent these never directly seen constructs. It appears that the more scientists probe the mysteries of the cosmos, the harder it is to really figure out what is going on. Every time the data do not fit to their theory, they invent a new construct to try to explain what is really happening. Maybe it is time to go back to the drawing board with an entirely new set of theories by which the universe operates. At this time, the God theory, that God runs it all, can be and maybe just as valid as any of the so-called "scientific" theories which on purely philosophical grounds leave God out of the picture.
...I'm surprised they don't bring back Ronald Reagan's Welfare Queen [huppi.com] to beat up in public square...
They are doing much better today with Obama's corporate welfare for megabanks and other mismanaged giant corporations. These are swallowing up billions of borrowed money which the next generation will have to pay. The amount of money that the so-called welfare queens swallow up is chicken feed in comparison.
I do not think that the USA system fine, but I do think that it is a heckuva lot better than any other system on this world today. I do not know what country you live in, but if you find a better country or know where there is such one, you might want to move there if you do not live there already.
...It is a common resource, and the US insisting on keeping control of it is an afront to the rest of the world...
The difference is that the air was not invented by the United States, but the Internet was and it was paid for by the American taxpayers. Just because we let the whole world use it does not mean we no longer own it. The same can be said for the GPS system. It is used by and has become a common resource to the whole world and there have been some who have advocated to turn it over to some international control as well. Google Earth and other Google services are used all over the planet. I would not be surprised to see the same crowd that wants to wrest Internet control from the US also advocate this divestiture to international control for Google and possibly other US originated services from which the whole world benefits.
What is so bad about that? There are quite a few other countries in this world who are run by bullets and bloodshed. Perhaps you would like that better? There are also some countries that are run by the military. Would that be more to your liking? As long as human nature is the way it is, flawed, any human government will also be flawed. If you could find a perfect country to move to, don't go there, because as soon as you did, it would no longer be perfect, because you are now there, being imperfect yourself.
Supposed to be is the operative word, but in practice they're anything except impartial. This severely biased behavior can be most clearly seen by their stance against the tiny nation of Israel. More often than not the United States is the ONLY nation in the entire world to stand with Israel on their side, rather than with all the others against Israel. If it were up to the UN, Israel would have disappeared long ago. If the UN were controlling the Internet today, they would call for the immediate disconnection of the state of Israel. Giving up her authority over the Internet would be one of the worst decisions the United States could make.
Long ago, God, the ruler of the entire universe, chose one person by the name of Abraham and made this promise to him: Genesis 12:3 -- "And I will bless those that bless you and curse the one who curses you. And in you shall all families of the earth be blessed."
The above promise is a major reason, if not the biggest reason, why the United States of America continues to prosper in spite of numerous reasons why this should not be the case. On the other hand, the curse of God has been historically demonstrated in nations such as Germany and Russia as well as others who have persecuted the Jews.
Some of our work around here involves the processing of videos. As a rough guide, an 8 core 2.8 GHz Mac Pro with 6 GB of RAM takes 16 1/2 minutes to process a one-hour DVD video into an H264.mp4 file of an equal number of pixels as the original. An old G5 tower with dual 2GHz processors with 2GB RAM and no other jobs active used to take about 3 1/2 hours for that kind of job, back when that was our fastest machine. The activity Monitor shows all 8 cores pretty much at maximum all the time while processing such a file. Anyone who does video transcoding can use all the computing horsepower available.
...The tower is in its last days as a mass market product...
I suppose that depends on what you mean by mass-market. Apple has always had a core of loyal content creators who are willing to pay for the best possible hardware available for the purpose. Even for those running Windows, the Mac Pro is one of the most powerful computers available, bar none. Apple has always catered to these people for whom price is secondary, but performance and reliability are paramount. IMHO, as long as Steve is at the helm of the Apple, they will not abandon this relatively small, but highly profitable segment of their business.
Yes, you and a few dozen slashdot nerds and nobody else. People who need a big professional machine are willing to pay for it and buy a Mac Pro with 2-4 core processors and up to 32 GB of RAM. These people are usually creators of content who wish to use a computer professionally rather than futz with it for its own sake.
Other than nerdy geeky things, an iMac will do everything 99% of normal users might wish to do. Nowadays, most ordinary users are buying laptops anyway. The main reason why Apple has not sicced its lawyers on the Hackintosh community is that the number of such computers and their users is down in the noise and would not be worth the cost. However, as soon as someone tries to build their business on Apple's hard work, they do take note of this and bring out their attack lawyers.
...whatever vendor break the licensing open in court,...
Even if a court decision were made that forced Apple to allow the installation of OSX boxed software on any hardware, such a court decision would be moot if Apple no longer sold OSX as a boxed unit, but only allowed delivery over the Internet to registered at Macintosh owners. It is likely that Apple does not make a fortune from the $129 OS upgrades they have been selling, so they might even give away OSX for free to all their registered computer customers. Many owners of Apple computers could go into an Apple store, present a valid registered serial number and get a free upgrade for their computer. This would cost Apple some money, but IMHO it would more than make up for it in positive customer relations.
You wonder why it is that people always complain that Apple wants to run OSX only on their hardware for which they specifically produced this operating system. Apple does not make operating systems for sale, but they build complete computers which nobody else in the industry does. They sell their operating system for the benefit of customers who have already bought an Apple computer and wish to enhance it.
I wonder why nobody complains that Honda who makes excellent engines does not allow their engines to be installed EASILY in Fords. I suppose a good mechanic can install such an engine in a Ford and Honda probably wouldn't care. However as soon as someone would start a company that would make some off brand of cars and then advertise that they install Honda engines, Honda would rightly object and take them to court.
I suppose that Dell, Hewlett-Packard and all the other Apple competitors who would love to install the best operating system available in their own computers as well. It will be a cold day in hell before Apple turns into another Microsoft.
...And cloud computing could make that happen because it should make the client OS irrelevant....
This might be true for those who have a VERY fast Internet connection. If everybody's Internet connection were as fast as the average hard disk access and at least as reliable, universal network computing, as you describe it will still not kill Microsoft. Even if I had such a connection, I would not trust some outside company to house all my data, ready to give it at the drop of a hat to every Tom Dick and Harry government agency or other legal demand without me even ever knowing about it. At the least, as long as the data is under my control, anybody who wants it has to come to me (possibly with a court order) in order to obtain it. Most large companies may feel they have some responsibility to their stockholders, but not necessarily to their customers. I do not think that anyone at Microsoft is having nightmares about cloud computing happening in the near future.
....which will undoubtedly inconvenience a number of users....
I can just see commercials from Apple:
I'm a PC notebook which is only allowed to run three programs at a time. I'm and Mac which can run as many programs as you wish. I'm a PC whose artificially hobbled performance will slow you down. I'm a Mac which we let you go at the speed you wish to go.
You are a/. reader who should be able to come up with other PC-Mac comparisons.
....crystals and lightening and erosion and rivers and other natural phenomina which occur simply because of the dynamics of movement and energy changes etc....
The reason these natural things occur is because of the laws of physics. In human affairs, laws are passed by intelligent? politicians, although it seems that sometimes random probability could do almost as well. Nevertheless, all human laws originate in human minds, even warped minds.
The question really is: are the laws of physics and the property of matter and energy independent variables? If they are not, are the properties of matter and energy the result of the laws of physics or is it the other way around? Evolutionists believe that the intrinsic properties of water are why there are exquisite snow crystals. I believe it is the intelligently given laws of physics which determine the unique properties of water, which then give rise to the beauty of snowflakes.
(...life itself is just an extension of those processes...)
It is quite evident from research, that life is governed by rather complex laws and processes. Again, the question is: "Are these laws and processes intrinsic to life or is life determined independently by these laws and processes? It is another one of these chicken and egg problems. What came first the rules and laws by which life operates or did life arise spontaneously and then make up its rules as it went along? In human affairs at least, the intelligent plans come first and then the product is produced according to those plans.
(...when we are all alone...)
The idea of being alone in this immense universe we live in is a very discomforting thought to many. That is why people working on projects like SETI spend millions to try to answer the question: Are we the only intelligent beings in the cosmos? So far from science at least, the answer appears to be affirmative.
Most people instinctively do not like the idea of being alone. In contradiction to the findings SETI, I believe that I am never alone, because I BELIEVE what Jesus said in Matthew 28:20 "And, behold, I am with you all the days until the end of the world."
...I would love to see this type of self-arranging -dare I say smart?- nano-tech....
That is like saying you would like to see entropy reversed. AFAIK, only intelligently designed (smart) systems are capable of doing that even only on a local level. Never once, has it ever been shown that the application of energy alone is sufficient to reverse entropy. Pumping water uphill requires energy and reversing entropy requires intelligence.
...but would be much more difficult to get it to layout an x86 schematic...
If that is difficult, how about constructing an amoeba or paramecium or most any other single celled organism? After all, these are much more complicated on the nanoscale level that all integrated circuits in the world put together. According to evolutionists, all living things evolved by the use of matter and energy alone, with no intelligent input of any kind whatsoever. Why is it that these researchers don't just put assorted nanoparticles into your container and shake it around vigorously in the hope that complicated structures will form?
(...self assembly of natural objects is easy, it gets difficult if you want to assemble structures and items not found in nature....)
For natural objects the difficult design steps are already done and so you think it is easy, but of course that is hindsight 2020 vision. Every green living thing has cells in it, which by means of photosynthesis assemble the basic elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and assorted other elements into the starting materials for all other living organisms. This is a very complicated process, which the best efforts of highly intelligent researchers have yet to duplicate or even learn exactly how it operates. To me, this screams deafeningly that great intelligence was needed to design this process in the first place.
....in the printing world that would be postscript....
That is why we decided to get a more expensive network printer with PostScript. Rather than getting one printer for each computer and having to install drivers and maintain multiple printers, one higher quality printer attached to the network allows all operating systems to print properly.
Slashdot Mirror
....I can pretty much guarantee that astrologers would have no idea what you're talking about....
Current scientists have no better idea and don't truly know what makes the earths magnetic field. My assertion that God just created it that way, so that we could live upon the earth and worship him is just as valid. Scientists think they know how our world works, but the more answers they get, the more questions they get as well and so they are not much further ahead than our ancestors. Despite all of our technology, we still have not learned to live in peace with one another but have made Weapons of Mass Destruction which to possibly annihilate the entire human race.
... we'll eventually see Blu-Ray take over ...
The facts are that all disks are doomed because everything in the future will be legally available via download because of steadily improving Internet connection speeds. Even at the present time it is very cheap to store video content on magnetic discs and eventually storage will become so cheap that what happened to music will also happen to video.
... a community of Internet based loved ones ...
I think the Internet is more like a public square. Do you really think that giving away copies of someone else's work in the public square is something you would like if it were done to your work? Giving away some copyrighted work to your loved ones may be morally defensible, but handing someone's work out in public is illegal and immoral.
.....Rights are only meaningful when they are granted by a party that could protect them....
You are advocating the law of the jungle, the law tooth and claw, whoever has the bigger gun. For example the basic right to life. You cannot create life or preserve from death, so what makes you think that you or the government or anybody has the right to take it away. Corporations do not create anything, but it is the individual people applying their God-given creativity that do the creating. If people lived by the golden rule, then there would be no need for copyright or most other laws. If you write a song or perform an act which is then recorded, it is yours or whoever you give it to. If someone takes a recording thereof and distributes it, that person is not living by golden rule. People who do not wish to obey the simple golden rule will not obey 1 billion laws or more.
All rights come from the giver of life, God himself, whether you or anybody else agrees with that or not. All human rights to derive from the basic right to life itself, which only God can give. Anyone who cannot give life must not take it away.
...Heck, if I had the wherewithal, am I not within my rights to make a duplicate of it for my own use...
Therein is the major difference between real property and intellectual property. Real property contains intellectual property, but it is not easily copied. The key is when somebody is making a profit from someone else's work. It comes down to the golden rule, if you create something then you don't want someone else to profit from your creativity.
The whole idea of copyright is to give the creator the exclusive right to distribute copies of his or her work. When a private individual makes a copy for their iPod or other device, they are not in distributing nor profiting by doing this. However, if he or she were giving the CD music to all her friends who were putting it on the Internet, that is wrong because it means they are actually distributing someone else's work.
...Some rights are instantaneously granted by the State ....
The state as represented by my next-door neighbor never has and never can give me any rights. It can only take them away. All rights are given by God as it clearly states in our Declaration of Independence. No government anywhere has ever given rights to anybody but only taken them away.
For thousands of years people have lived without copyrights and still created art because it is within the human being to want to create as our Creator did. It is only now that human creativity has become a commercial activity, is it necessary to prevent others from profiting by someone else's creativity. The key ought to be "profiting", not the mere use of content.
...Hey, I mean we haven't discovered any working grand unified theory yet, but at least we're TRYING!...
Well at least the scientists have not yet discovered such a theory, but the theologians have. It is called the "God Theory". That theory says that God made and runs the universe whether you believe that or not. This theory is not very palatable to us philosophically, because if there REALLY is such a God, we instinctively feel responsible to him and that is discomforting because most of us want to be independent and responsible to no one except ourselves.
...and clearly label this as "conjecture"...
Much of of cosmology is interpretation of what we actually see and receive. For example, we have never seen a black hole, never observed so called dark matter, never actually seen a neutron star and on the list goes. We see the galaxies move in a certain way and their motion does not fit their theories at this time. So, to to make the data fit they give explanations and invent these never directly seen constructs. It appears that the more scientists probe the mysteries of the cosmos, the harder it is to really figure out what is going on. Every time the data do not fit to their theory, they invent a new construct to try to explain what is really happening. Maybe it is time to go back to the drawing board with an entirely new set of theories by which the universe operates. At this time, the God theory, that God runs it all, can be and maybe just as valid as any of the so-called "scientific" theories which on purely philosophical grounds leave God out of the picture.
...I'm surprised they don't bring back Ronald Reagan's Welfare Queen [huppi.com] to beat up in public square...
They are doing much better today with Obama's corporate welfare for megabanks and other mismanaged giant corporations. These are swallowing up billions of borrowed money which the next generation will have to pay. The amount of money that the so-called welfare queens swallow up is chicken feed in comparison.
....You obviously think that's fine, ....
I do not think that the USA system fine, but I do think that it is a heckuva lot better than any other system on this world today. I do not know what country you live in, but if you find a better country or know where there is such one, you might want to move there if you do not live there already.
...It is a common resource, and the US insisting on keeping control of it is an afront to the rest of the world...
The difference is that the air was not invented by the United States, but the Internet was and it was paid for by the American taxpayers. Just because we let the whole world use it does not mean we no longer own it. The same can be said for the GPS system. It is used by and has become a common resource to the whole world and there have been some who have advocated to turn it over to some international control as well. Google Earth and other Google services are used all over the planet. I would not be surprised to see the same crowd that wants to wrest Internet control from the US also advocate this divestiture to international control for Google and possibly other US originated services from which the whole world benefits.
...The entire system runs on money ...
What is so bad about that? There are quite a few other countries in this world who are run by bullets and bloodshed. Perhaps you would like that better? There are also some countries that are run by the military. Would that be more to your liking? As long as human nature is the way it is, flawed, any human government will also be flawed. If you could find a perfect country to move to, don't go there, because as soon as you did, it would no longer be perfect, because you are now there, being imperfect yourself.
...is supposed to be impartial...
Supposed to be is the operative word, but in practice they're anything except impartial. This severely biased behavior can be most clearly seen by their stance against the tiny nation of Israel. More often than not the United States is the ONLY nation in the entire world to stand with Israel on their side, rather than with all the others against Israel. If it were up to the UN, Israel would have disappeared long ago. If the UN were controlling the Internet today, they would call for the immediate disconnection of the state of Israel. Giving up her authority over the Internet would be one of the worst decisions the United States could make.
Long ago, God, the ruler of the entire universe, chose one person by the name of Abraham and made this promise to him: Genesis 12:3 -- "And I will bless those that bless you and curse the one who curses you. And in you shall all families of the earth be blessed."
The above promise is a major reason, if not the biggest reason, why the United States of America continues to prosper in spite of numerous reasons why this should not be the case. On the other hand, the curse of God has been historically demonstrated in nations such as Germany and Russia as well as others who have persecuted the Jews.
...Here, let me bing that for you...
Here, let me eat those bing cherries for you. Microsoft has a real cherry here!
....Depends on the workload I guess....
Some of our work around here involves the processing of videos. As a rough guide, an 8 core 2.8 GHz Mac Pro with 6 GB of RAM takes 16 1/2 minutes to process a one-hour DVD video into an H264 .mp4 file of an equal number of pixels as the original. An old G5 tower with dual 2GHz processors with 2GB RAM and no other jobs active used to take about 3 1/2 hours for that kind of job, back when that was our fastest machine. The activity Monitor shows all 8 cores pretty much at maximum all the time while processing such a file. Anyone who does video transcoding can use all the computing horsepower available.
...The tower is in its last days as a mass market product...
I suppose that depends on what you mean by mass-market. Apple has always had a core of loyal content creators who are willing to pay for the best possible hardware available for the purpose. Even for those running Windows, the Mac Pro is one of the most powerful computers available, bar none. Apple has always catered to these people for whom price is secondary, but performance and reliability are paramount. IMHO, as long as Steve is at the helm of the Apple, they will not abandon this relatively small, but highly profitable segment of their business.
....that's the Mac I want to buy....
Yes, you and a few dozen slashdot nerds and nobody else. People who need a big professional machine are willing to pay for it and buy a Mac Pro with 2-4 core processors and up to 32 GB of RAM. These people are usually creators of content who wish to use a computer professionally rather than futz with it for its own sake.
Other than nerdy geeky things, an iMac will do everything 99% of normal users might wish to do. Nowadays, most ordinary users are buying laptops anyway. The main reason why Apple has not sicced its lawyers on the Hackintosh community is that the number of such computers and their users is down in the noise and would not be worth the cost. However, as soon as someone tries to build their business on Apple's hard work, they do take note of this and bring out their attack lawyers.
...whatever vendor break the licensing open in court,...
Even if a court decision were made that forced Apple to allow the installation of OSX boxed software on any hardware, such a court decision would be moot if Apple no longer sold OSX as a boxed unit, but only allowed delivery over the Internet to registered at Macintosh owners. It is likely that Apple does not make a fortune from the $129 OS upgrades they have been selling, so they might even give away OSX for free to all their registered computer customers. Many owners of Apple computers could go into an Apple store, present a valid registered serial number and get a free upgrade for their computer. This would cost Apple some money, but IMHO it would more than make up for it in positive customer relations.
....OS X is locked to the hardware....
You wonder why it is that people always complain that Apple wants to run OSX only on their hardware for which they specifically produced this operating system. Apple does not make operating systems for sale, but they build complete computers which nobody else in the industry does. They sell their operating system for the benefit of customers who have already bought an Apple computer and wish to enhance it.
I wonder why nobody complains that Honda who makes excellent engines does not allow their engines to be installed EASILY in Fords. I suppose a good mechanic can install such an engine in a Ford and Honda probably wouldn't care. However as soon as someone would start a company that would make some off brand of cars and then advertise that they install Honda engines, Honda would rightly object and take them to court.
I suppose that Dell, Hewlett-Packard and all the other Apple competitors who would love to install the best operating system available in their own computers as well. It will be a cold day in hell before Apple turns into another Microsoft.
...And cloud computing could make that happen because it should make the client OS irrelevant....
This might be true for those who have a VERY fast Internet connection. If everybody's Internet connection were as fast as the average hard disk access and at least as reliable, universal network computing, as you describe it will still not kill Microsoft. Even if I had such a connection, I would not trust some outside company to house all my data, ready to give it at the drop of a hat to every Tom Dick and Harry government agency or other legal demand without me even ever knowing about it. At the least, as long as the data is under my control, anybody who wants it has to come to me (possibly with a court order) in order to obtain it. Most large companies may feel they have some responsibility to their stockholders, but not necessarily to their customers. I do not think that anyone at Microsoft is having nightmares about cloud computing happening in the near future.
....which will undoubtedly inconvenience a number of users....
I can just see commercials from Apple:
I'm a PC notebook which is only allowed to run three programs at a time.
I'm and Mac which can run as many programs as you wish.
I'm a PC whose artificially hobbled performance will slow you down.
I'm a Mac which we let you go at the speed you wish to go.
You are a /. reader who should be able to come up with other PC-Mac comparisons.
....crystals and lightening and erosion and rivers and other natural phenomina which occur simply because of the dynamics of movement and energy changes etc....
The reason these natural things occur is because of the laws of physics. In human affairs, laws are passed by intelligent? politicians, although it seems that sometimes random probability could do almost as well. Nevertheless, all human laws originate in human minds, even warped minds.
The question really is: are the laws of physics and the property of matter and energy independent variables? If they are not, are the properties of matter and energy the result of the laws of physics or is it the other way around? Evolutionists believe that the intrinsic properties of water are why there are exquisite snow crystals. I believe it is the intelligently given laws of physics which determine the unique properties of water, which then give rise to the beauty of snowflakes.
(...life itself is just an extension of those processes...)
It is quite evident from research, that life is governed by rather complex laws and processes. Again, the question is: "Are these laws and processes intrinsic to life or is life determined independently by these laws and processes? It is another one of these chicken and egg problems. What came first the rules and laws by which life operates or did life arise spontaneously and then make up its rules as it went along? In human affairs at least, the intelligent plans come first and then the product is produced according to those plans.
(...when we are all alone...)
The idea of being alone in this immense universe we live in is a very discomforting thought to many. That is why people working on projects like SETI spend millions to try to answer the question: Are we the only intelligent beings in the cosmos? So far from science at least, the answer appears to be affirmative.
Most people instinctively do not like the idea of being alone. In contradiction to the findings SETI, I believe that I am never alone, because I BELIEVE what Jesus said in Matthew 28:20 "And, behold, I am with you all the days until the end of the world."
...I would love to see this type of self-arranging -dare I say smart?- nano-tech....
That is like saying you would like to see entropy reversed. AFAIK, only intelligently designed (smart) systems are capable of doing that even only on a local level. Never once, has it ever been shown that the application of energy alone is sufficient to reverse entropy. Pumping water uphill requires energy and reversing entropy requires intelligence.
...but would be much more difficult to get it to layout an x86 schematic...
If that is difficult, how about constructing an amoeba or paramecium or most any other single celled organism? After all, these are much more complicated on the nanoscale level that all integrated circuits in the world put together. According to evolutionists, all living things evolved by the use of matter and energy alone, with no intelligent input of any kind whatsoever. Why is it that these researchers don't just put assorted nanoparticles into your container and shake it around vigorously in the hope that complicated structures will form?
(...self assembly of natural objects is easy, it gets difficult if you want to assemble structures and items not found in nature....)
For natural objects the difficult design steps are already done and so you think it is easy, but of course that is hindsight 2020 vision. Every green living thing has cells in it, which by means of photosynthesis assemble the basic elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and assorted other elements into the starting materials for all other living organisms. This is a very complicated process, which the best efforts of highly intelligent researchers have yet to duplicate or even learn exactly how it operates. To me, this screams deafeningly that great intelligence was needed to design this process in the first place.
....in the printing world that would be postscript....
That is why we decided to get a more expensive network printer with PostScript. Rather than getting one printer for each computer and having to install drivers and maintain multiple printers, one higher quality printer attached to the network allows all operating systems to print properly.