...I am saying that what is construed as a God might just be a super being race...
Instead of projecting myself into the past, how could I decide, what criteria could I apply to someone who came to me today claiming to be God? Could I ask for a miracle? Is it possible to tell miracles from sufficiently advanced technology? We have reasonably good evidence that the laws of physics are uniform throughout the universe. Therefore, an advanced space alien could conceivably use their better knowledge of these laws to falsely convince me that he is God.
The God of the Bible is portrayed as being transcendent, outside of and independent of the time-space universe we inhabit. He is portrayed as the one creator and originator of everything outside of himself. He is not subject to the laws of physics, including time itself. As such, the one true original independent God should be and would be the only one with perfect knowledge of all time, past present and future.
Here's a test I would propose to give to someone claiming to be God. At least to me, it would provide credible evidence of the truth of that claim.
I would ask him to submit to me in writing a list of the next 10 sets of state lottery numbers drawn. If EVERY ONE of the sets of numbers actually came up the winner in the correct order, I would believe that the one who wrote those numbers on that slip of paper really is God. They would all have to be correct without exception. There could not be even one miss.
That would be polytheistic and disallows monotheism which only allows one boss God who is transcendent and the source of everything. This one chief God could of course outsource various god jobs to lesser gods in various departments.
...Sounds nice, but what about all the humans who are otherwise good and peaceful but don't believe Jesus is the messiah?...
I suppose that depends on whether the human standard of "good enough" applies, or whether God's standard of "perfect" will be used in the final judgment of every human life.
How many lies does a person have to tell before they can be truthfully labeled to be a liar? How many items does a person have to steal, before they can be considered to be a thief? How many times does a person have to commit adultery, before they become an adulterer?
God tells us in his written deposition to mankind, the Bible, that all liars, thieves, adulterers and other breakers of the divine laws will be relegated to eternal separation from the presence of God. Right now we live in a world where good and evil are inextricably intertwined. After the final judgment by God, of all things and all people, there will be two worlds eternally separated. One will be the dwelling place of God and only good and the other will be where only evil will exist.
Every human being will appear in the final judgment before God either on their own merit of having kept ALL the laws and rules or on the merit of Jesus Christ who DID keep all the rules and laws, enabling God now to offer grace to people like me who have not managed to keep the rules perfectly. Those who believe and accept the offer of Jesus Christ the Messiah, will be allowed to enter into and remain in the presence of a God who demands perfection. Every one who does not believe this will be accepted by God only if they have never sinned, even only once.
...that a species comes to dominance over its own planet through competitive behavior,...
Your underlying assumption is that life evolved by Darwinian mechanisms here on earth and elsewhere. If on the other hand you assume there is a creator God, he could have used different mechanisms in different worlds. It is quite certain however that any intelligent sentiment creature of his making would reflect his moral character, no matter where it is located.
You are making the assumption that other intelligent life in other worlds or dimensions are also in sinful rebellion against God. In Genesis, the Bible clearly tells us that man fell from sinless perfection by disbelieving what God had said. People still do this today.
...where all the other people besides Adam and Eve came from....
You mean you deny the fact that the male and female human are able to reproduce more humans and these offspring reproduce in turn?
Jesus, claiming to be God in human form, tells his disciples this:
Joh 14:2 In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. Joh 14:3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, so that where I am, you may be also.
So here Jesus is clearly telling us that God created many places and is still creating or at least preparing a place for those willing to believe Him.
(....making life hundreds of lightyears away...)
Do you really believe that the speed of light, which is glacial on a cosmic scale, is an absolute speed limit in our physical space-time universe or, especially in the eternal dimensions of God's dwelling place? Do the Earth and the Sun communicate their relative positions as they are at the moment or what they were eight minutes ago? Are the sun and the center of our galaxy gravitationally in touch with one another as they are today or as they were 50,000 years ago?
Clearly then, the speed of light could not possibly be an impediment to God or a truly advanced civilization he chose to create in a galaxy far far away and a long time ago.
...The Bible doesn't say anywhere that there is only life on Earth....
In fact, Jesus says exactly the opposite:
Joh 14:2 In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. Joh 14:3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, so that where I am, you may be also.
The word translated from the Greek "mansions" is usually rendered as "habitations" over "abodes" in other English translations.
(...From what I see, religion and science aren't necessarily incompatible...)
Scientific facts and the biblical text are never incompatible, but human interpretations of both often are. The theory of evolution is not an experimental science fact, since nobody was there to see what actually happened, except God. for example, Evolutionists find fossils about which they try to make forensic deductions based on certain assumptions (beliefs). It is these deductions, especially concerning the timeframe involved, that are markedly different from the witness of the written record of the Bible. So, as in any court case, the jury has to decide whom to BELIEVE. Will they believe the interpretations of the forensic "experts", or will they believe the written deposition of God, the only eyewitness who was there at the time? Of necessity, whether investigating history or crime, everything is a matter of belief, not experimental or experiential knowledge.
...Unless you believe God is going to save us from the aliens...
It appears, that it may be the other way around. God has quarantined us here on this third rock from the Sun, in time and space, so we humans will not be able to spread the contagion of warlike and selfish behavior throughout the rest of his creation. History shows that people have never gotten along with one another for long. Even in our Star Wars and Star Trek fictional technologies, we spread war and destruction everywhere we go.
About 2000 years ago, God limited himself by leaving his dwelling place in eternity and entering our time-space dimension in the human form of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The sermon on the Mount by this extraterrestrial sentient being expresses the epitome of morality.
Selfish, sinful representatives of the human race murdered Jesus in a most cruel manner, demonstrating to all the other inhabitants of his creation why the quarantine of the human race is necessary.
Jesus of course, being God, did not stay dead, but arose triumphantly, returning into the eternal dimensions, where he is today. His early followers, being eyewitnesses of this fact, were tortured to death for proclaiming this truth. Jesus promises each human individual willing to believe and completely trust him, release from the quarantined prison colony earth and live with him in the eternal dimensions He called Heaven.
He has also promised to return to this planet, not as a helpless human, but in all his divine power and splendor. He will not come alone, but in the company of millions of resurrected human "aliens" to cleanse the earth of evil and enforce a peaceful golden age for all mankind.
...Why are we soooo certain that we *want* to be found?...
Anybody intelligent enough to be able to travel throughout this galaxy or beyond, or even just communicate, would certainly study us for awhile. They would have learned by now that we humans are a warlike race that cannot get along with one another even on our own world. Even in our fictionalized scenarios, with imagined technology, such as Star Trek or Star Wars, there is nothing but war and death, such as the destruction of entire planets by some of our imagined technology. Human history provides an absolute guarantee, that if we would meet such an advanced civilization, we would use their technology against them and one another.
There must be something wrong with your VM or maybe your XP installation. I am running XP-SP3 on the Parallels 4 VM and it opens shared folder almost instantly, certainly less than one second. This is also true when I run VISTA in a VM. Copying a large file from a shared Mac folder to/from XP or VISTA is not much different either.
One underlying assumption is that there is no God that ultimately owns, and controls this universe and everything in it, including a physics experiment by His creatures. That is ultimately the question, not whether some theorized black hole will bring the "end of the world". The underlying assumption of all the speculation here is that man is the master of his fate, the captain of spaceship Earth.
If the underlying assumption (belief) is that there is indeed a God who in control, then there is nothing to worry about. When He decides to pull that switch, there is nothing anybody can do. I seriously doubt that the LHC is the switch and that man can or will pull the switch that ushers in the end of this planet and everything on it.
...you give your employer permission to exercise all the holder-only rights,.....
That would be fine, except that it would be for a fixed unalterable legally defined time only. For music, that might be three years initially and renewable at the option of the copyright owner for a fixed term of two years at a time. After the initial agreement expires, all subsequent two-year agreements could be made by the copyright owner with anyone they chose.
By that I did not mean their non-existence, they obviously do. However they are not persons, but are an invention of the modern state. They have been given certain rights, privileges and immunities. Individual living persons can and do make binding agreements with corporations. Because corporations have an enormous advantage if there is a dispute concerning some agreement, most agreements between corporations and real living persons are rather one sided.
In the IP arena that could be remedied by the state which is the foundation of a corporation leveling the playing field by not allowing corporate entities to OWN IP at all. All IP arises in the mind of a living person and should be protected. All agreements concerning the USE of IP should have strict renewable time limits fixed by law. A person working for a someone may make whatever agreements mutually acceptable, but in the case of IP have legally defined time limits that cannot be altered. Also, all LP reverts to the public domain after the flesh and blood owner dies. Mickey Mouse would be in the public domain.Because IP is not a physical good, it should not be possible to buy and sell it like some commodity.
Since there are various kinds of IP, various time limits could be set by law. Agreement by a living person with a company making drugs would be longer. For example. The initial agreement for music might be three years and renewable at the option of the IP owner for two years each time. After a given agreement expires, the IP owner would also have the freedom to make a deal with someone else or nobody at all.
A simple and straightforward reform would be to allow only real living flesh and blood persons to have copyrights and patents. No faceless corporation has ever written a song or come up with a new idea. It is only creative people within these corporations that do this and they should be rewarded, not the corporation. The title to and disposition of the so-called intellectual property could never be bought or sold or transferred in any way and would die with its creator. At that time the work or patent enters the public domain for all of society. The concept of the work for hire should be abolished. A creative person could make any agreement with any corporation they wanted to, as long as no title to a work gets transferred. All such agreements must have maximum time limit included. No corporation or other fictitious business entity should ever become the OWNERS of products of a mind.
....I think patents should only protect companies with a small market cap...
How about only allowing real flesh and blood people, rather than fictitious constructs of the state to own copyrights and patents. These individual owners could rent out their intellectual property to others, including corporations, but it could never be bought or sold or inherited by someone else. Anyone who worked for one of these faceless corporations could get a patent, but the real live human owner of the patent would always have the final say about who gets to use it and under what conditions. No contract of any shape or form or agreement could be made with the owner of such a patent by anyone that would restrict the rights of such a person in regards to their patent.
A corporation would have to choose a real live human being to be the unrestricted owner of the intellectual property. This would allow individuals who come up with new ideas to be rewarded, but would prevent other entities, such as corporate patent trolls buying up large portfolios of patents and then suing somebody who made use of the principles embodied in these patents.
No corporation has ever invented or copyrighted anything. Only real living people are creative should primarily benefit from their creativity. Whether a person works for a big corporation or not is only incidental.
... when the mortgage payment was adjusting from $1600/mo to $4700/mo....
There in a nutshell you have the biggest reason for the trouble the financial industry is now in. It is just plain and simple greed. There is no other reason why that person's mortgage payments should rise by almost a factor of three. Now the the government is bailing out these greedy bastards with printed money. Anyone who has the ability to print money and not go to jail can never go bankrupt. Most likely, the economy will recover, as it would have anyway, but all that Fiat money will cause monstrous inflation afterwards.
Everyone who manages to hang on to this financial roller coaster of debt, will be able to pay off that debt with cheap plentiful money.
(...Do we pretend America needs to be saved from a depression at any cost?...)
There is no pretend here, but it is actually happening, at the expense of the value of the dollar. And foreigners, like China and others ask for the money they have loaned to the United States, the government has two choices. One is to simply stiff them and the other is to print even more money and pay them. It is the second option that was usually adopted by governments in the past. That will fuel the inflation spiral a few more turns. The situation may become like it was in Germany before Hitler came to power. My grandmother told me what happened there in her hometown.
A man had a wheelbarrow full of paper money that he wanted to use to buy a few loaves of bread. He parked the wheelbarrow in front of the bake shop and went inside to request the baker to open the side door in order to bring the wheelbarrow full of money into the shop. While he was in the shop, someone came and dumped the money on the sidewalk and made off with the wheelbarrow!
(...We're being patient with him, though he is coming up on 3 months rent due again...)
You are lucky to have some real estate, especially if it has not a big debt on it. It is good that you are being patient with that tenant, if you can afford that. Maybe you will need to help him out even more by reducing the rent. That will give him hope to eventually get out of debt to you, especially if he is otherwise a decent person. If he is forced to move out because he can no longer afford to rent your unit you will have lost money. Most rental properties can always use maintenance, repair and upgrading. If this person is skilled in construction, you might check if he is willing and able to do some work for part of the rent.
(...Like basic research into petroleum replacements, energy sources...)
The problem here is that researchers, being highly skilled, are generally economically better off and there are not that many of them. People like your tenant should be put to work in useful public works programs similar to what FDR did in the 1930s.
It is definitely true what you wrote. We are tapped out and are reaping what we sowed.
Really? How do they enforce that? Sell someone into slavery, like they did in Rome or other ancient cultures? Make sex slaves out of debtors? Throw such one and/or their relatives into debtors prison?
Even the IRS cannot always get the money some tax payers owe. Of course it there is fraud involved, threat of prison will get many to eventually pay up.
That's easy to fix. Just give the bailout money now going to rich bankers, stock gamblers (analysts & brokers), mega corporation's overpaid senior executives and other rich moneybags to the grandma's on the converter coupon waiting list. There is enough money going to these leeches to buy a new HD TV set for all those poor grandmas.
Except that everything in that article is based on computer models and NOT actual observation. The computer model makes assumptions about the existence and properties of a black hole and based on these assumptions, shows how such a black hole "might" be detected. The problem is that all this is an elaborate mathematical exercise, but not an actual observation of physical reality.
Mass is a PROPERTY of matter and in essence mass and matter are not one and the same. Nobody really knows the mechanisms by which matter exhibits inertial and gravitational properties.
The speed of light is not the fastest thing in the universe. The earth and the sun "feel" each other gravitationally, not how the were eight minutes ago, but as the are now, in real time, instantaneously. The sun and all the planets orbit the center of our galaxy. Both the center of the galaxy and the sun with its planets appear to "communicate" with each other essentially instantaneously. On galactic scales, the speed of light is positively glacial. I think there were a few things that Einstein's mathematics missed and is still being missed by cosmologists. Postulating a warping of space-time doesn't solve the communication problem. Experiments with quantum entanglements also seem to indicate that all parts of the universe may be in constant touch with one another in zero time.
...that the equations show a very high density mass that you know you wouldn't be able to see if it did exist...
Just because it is impossible to see the "missing star" or whatever massive object the gravitational equations indicate might be there, does not mean automatically that it has to be a black hole. If in addition to gravity, electrical forces are at work, the so-called massive object may not be all massive after all. Additionally, the so-called massive object might be obscured by intervening matter.
Other "weird" objects observed in a number of places in the universe is something that has been labeled a pulsar. These objects appear to be rapidly pulsating sources of electromagnetic energy. The conventional, gravitationally, mechanical explanation of these is a rapidly rotating "almost formed" black hole called a neutron dwarf star. However, the rate pulsation of some of these pulsars is so high, that no physical object could hold together at the rates of rotation required by this theory. Here on Earth, all electromagnetic pulses are produced by electricity, both natural lightening and man-made. It is therefore quite reasonable to postulate that some natural electrical mechanism is responsible for these fast, extremely energetic pulses.
that is a proprietary program and not open source. Once the Windows users have suitably debugged it, the Mac folks will get a clean non-beta version to enjoy. It is debatable at this point whether chrome is greatly superior to Safari. If not, most Mac users won't bother with Chrome. Of course almost anything is better than any version of Swiss Cheese IE from MS.
...You also forget that black holes were first postulated in the 18th century by Laplace relying only on Newton's laws long before general relativity was even conceived....
Laplace was a mathematician who invented a mathematical theory way back then already. Ever since then the black hole hypothesis has been looking for a physical reality to back up the theory. That is exactly BACKWARDS to the scientific method. In REAL science someone makes a puzzling observation or an experiment has an entirely unexpected outcome. It is only after that theories are put forth to try to explain and figure out what is going on.
(....I'd also like to point out that you are the one relying on the mathematics to support a postulate for which there is no experimental motivation...)
Not at all. The laws of electrodynamics are never even applied to the cosmos at the large scale, because it is assumed (believed) that they apply only on small scales, such as within and between atoms. That is patently false. Modern space probes show that the electrical action of the solar wind extends to the distant edges of the solar system. It is also interesting that modern space probes show that the average charged particle energy from the sun INCREASES with distance outward. This indicates that there is an accelerating field that overcomes the gravity of the sun.
Many modern observations from space probes leave scientists "surprised" and forces them to come up with esoteric constructs in order to explain the data by means of long-held currently accepted theories. Gravity obviously is involved in the mechanics of the universe, but it alone is insufficient to explain in a simple and systematic way what modern observations show. If you are truly interested you can begin here:
....Astronomers that claim to have observed black holes have also found a match....
Except that Kepler could directly see the sun and the planets and observe their relative locations and paths through space. In the case of alleged black holes, they cannot be seen, only the motion of an object on a path through space, guided by an invisible force. Electrons which "orbit" atomic nuclei are governed by the electric force. If there are two large objects in space, say two stars, and they carry opposite electric charges as a whole, their motions will be determined by BOTH gravity as determined by the laws of gravitation and the laws of electrical laws acting together. This can make the apparent motion of the object(s) behave as if there was a very large mass involved if gravity alone is taken into account.
In real science some observations are made and then scientists attempt to construct a theory to explain these observations. In the case of black holes it is backwards, just the opposite. It is important to note the fact that no observations gave rise to the notion of a black hole, for which a theory needed to be developed. The black hole is a fictional, mathematical creation of a theory. Now observations are misconstrued in order to legitimize a theory. Reports of black holes are just wishful thinking in support of a belief not factual in any way.
A black hole is allegedly predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. The alleged signatures of the black hole are an infinitely dense point-mass singularity and an event horizon. However his theory forbids the existence of anything of infinite density. That alone is sufficient to prove that black holes are not predicted by theory of General Relativity. Infinite density is forbidden because no material body can acquire the speed of light.
It is also interesting that Newton'w theory of gravity does not predict black holes either although it has been claimed that it does.
To me, a theory that requires an infinite of anything is not only suspect but definitely wrong. Infinities may work in theology as an attribute of God, but not in an objective scientific inquiry.
...your definition of "observable" appears to be limited to inferences based on direct observation of the photons radiated or reflected by an object....
How then,is the object the motion of which these scientists attribute to the powerful gravitational field of a black hole observed? Is this not by electromagnetic radiation generated or reflected from the object, the motion of which is ASSUMED to be influenced by gravity? Could it be possible that electrical and magnetic forces instead of or in addition to gravity could explain the observed motion?
The curriculum of study of astrophysicists and astronomers includes nothing or very little material on electrodynamics and electric field theory. Mostly they learn about orbital mechanics based on gravity alone. If the much stronger electric interaction is considered in ADDITION to gravity as an explanation of the observed data, much simpler, more elegant explanations are possible. Such alternate theories do not require elaborate and fictitious, never observed constructs such as black holes, dark energy and matter.
The charged particle beams in the LHC and other particle accelerators are controlled by well understood systems of magnetic and electric fields. Why is it that most cosmologists and astrophysicists do not even attempt to apply the well understood principles by which these machines operate on charged matter to the motion of charged matter in the universe at large? This is most puzzling to me, in light of the fact that most matter in the universe is definitely not electrically neutral and is therefore highly affected by even relatively weak electric and magnetic fields.
Even if there is an unmeasurably small electrical field across the galaxy of only one millivolt per kilometer, what would the energy be achieved by a proton that started its journey on the other side of our galaxy, 70,000 light years distant? What would the energy of such a proton be if it originated 1 billion or more light years from us? Is that why we measure such particles of incredibly high energy coming at us, often from seemingly empty areas of the universe? How are the incredibly intense x-rays generated we observe coming to us from objects that have been named quasars? No scientist has ever demonstrated a method of generating electromagnetic radiation by anything else other than accelerating charges.
(...So everything you and I think we know is all based on inference...)
Here you are getting into philosophy, not objective science. Science only can be based on what information our physical senses transmit into our brains where it is interpreted by our minds. In philosophy, science, mathematics, in fact in all disciplines and human endeavors, there are underlying assumptions. Assumptions should be minimized and carefully scrutinized. In present-day cosmology of astrophysics, an underlying assumption is that gravity alone controls of a large-scale operation of the universe. A steadily increasing mountain of data from modern space probes and telescopes indicates that this assumption is questionable if not flat wrong.
...You still cant violate the protections of the Fourth Amendment...
Anybody that is not part of any governmental body is NOT bound by the fourth or any other amendment. Congress can and has made laws that extend specific portions of the constitution to states and in some cases to private entities. So a private school can make rules that public schools are forbidden to make. Private schools are allowed to and do teach religion as part of their curriculum and may allow their teachers to confiscate student notes. Such policies are generally bad even though legal.
If someone in my house gets loud and boisterous and refuses to shut up, I have the option of picking such a one up by the collar of their shirt and throwing them out of the house just like I might do to my cat when he gets obnoxious. It is probably a good idea to first ask such a person nicely to leave on their own two legs. The cat has learned make a quick exit on his own in the meantime, knowing what may come next.
Slashdot Mirror
...I am saying that what is construed as a God might just be a super being race...
Instead of projecting myself into the past, how could I decide, what criteria could I apply to someone who came to me today claiming to be God? Could I ask for a miracle? Is it possible to tell miracles from sufficiently advanced technology? We have reasonably good evidence that the laws of physics are uniform throughout the universe. Therefore, an advanced space alien could conceivably use their better knowledge of these laws to falsely convince me that he is God.
The God of the Bible is portrayed as being transcendent, outside of and independent of the time-space universe we inhabit. He is portrayed as the one creator and originator of everything outside of himself. He is not subject to the laws of physics, including time itself. As such, the one true original independent God should be and would be the only one with perfect knowledge of all time, past present and future.
Here's a test I would propose to give to someone claiming to be God. At least to me, it would provide credible evidence of the truth of that claim.
I would ask him to submit to me in writing a list of the next 10 sets of state lottery numbers drawn. If EVERY ONE of the sets of numbers actually came up the winner in the correct order, I would believe that the one who wrote those numbers on that slip of paper really is God. They would all have to be correct without exception. There could not be even one miss.
...maybe there is one god per planet ...
That would be polytheistic and disallows monotheism which only allows one boss God who is transcendent and the source of everything. This one chief God could of course outsource various god jobs to lesser gods in various departments.
...Sounds nice, but what about all the humans who are otherwise good and peaceful but don't believe Jesus is the messiah?...
I suppose that depends on whether the human standard of "good enough" applies, or whether God's standard of "perfect" will be used in the final judgment of every human life.
How many lies does a person have to tell before they can be truthfully labeled to be a liar? How many items does a person have to steal, before they can be considered to be a thief? How many times does a person have to commit adultery, before they become an adulterer?
God tells us in his written deposition to mankind, the Bible, that all liars, thieves, adulterers and other breakers of the divine laws will be relegated to eternal separation from the presence of God. Right now we live in a world where good and evil are inextricably intertwined. After the final judgment by God, of all things and all people, there will be two worlds eternally separated. One will be the dwelling place of God and only good and the other will be where only evil will exist.
Every human being will appear in the final judgment before God either on their own merit of having kept ALL the laws and rules or on the merit of Jesus Christ who DID keep all the rules and laws, enabling God now to offer grace to people like me who have not managed to keep the rules perfectly. Those who believe and accept the offer of Jesus Christ the Messiah, will be allowed to enter into and remain in the presence of a God who demands perfection. Every one who does not believe this will be accepted by God only if they have never sinned, even only once.
...that a species comes to dominance over its own planet through competitive behavior,...
Your underlying assumption is that life evolved by Darwinian mechanisms here on earth and elsewhere. If on the other hand you assume there is a creator God, he could have used different mechanisms in different worlds. It is quite certain however that any intelligent sentiment creature of his making would reflect his moral character, no matter where it is located.
...to take other intelligent life into account..
You are making the assumption that other intelligent life in other worlds or dimensions are also in sinful rebellion against God. In Genesis, the Bible clearly tells us that man fell from sinless perfection by disbelieving what God had said. People still do this today.
...where all the other people besides Adam and Eve came from....
You mean you deny the fact that the male and female human are able to reproduce more humans and these offspring reproduce in turn?
Jesus, claiming to be God in human form, tells his disciples this:
Joh 14:2 In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
Joh 14:3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, so that where I am, you may be also.
So here Jesus is clearly telling us that God created many places and is still creating or at least preparing a place for those willing to believe Him.
(....making life hundreds of lightyears away...)
Do you really believe that the speed of light, which is glacial on a cosmic scale, is an absolute speed limit in our physical space-time universe or, especially in the eternal dimensions of God's dwelling place? Do the Earth and the Sun communicate their relative positions as they are at the moment or what they were eight minutes ago? Are the sun and the center of our galaxy gravitationally in touch with one another as they are today or as they were 50,000 years ago?
Clearly then, the speed of light could not possibly be an impediment to God or a truly advanced civilization he chose to create in a galaxy far far away and a long time ago.
...The Bible doesn't say anywhere that there is only life on Earth....
In fact, Jesus says exactly the opposite:
Joh 14:2 In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
Joh 14:3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, so that where I am, you may be also.
The word translated from the Greek "mansions" is usually rendered as "habitations" over "abodes" in other English translations.
(...From what I see, religion and science aren't necessarily incompatible...)
Scientific facts and the biblical text are never incompatible, but human interpretations of both often are. The theory of evolution is not an experimental science fact, since nobody was there to see what actually happened, except God. for example, Evolutionists find fossils about which they try to make forensic deductions based on certain assumptions (beliefs). It is these deductions, especially concerning the timeframe involved, that are markedly different from the witness of the written record of the Bible. So, as in any court case, the jury has to decide whom to BELIEVE. Will they believe the interpretations of the forensic "experts", or will they believe the written deposition of God, the only eyewitness who was there at the time? Of necessity, whether investigating history or crime, everything is a matter of belief, not experimental or experiential knowledge.
...Unless you believe God is going to save us from the aliens...
It appears, that it may be the other way around. God has quarantined us here on this third rock from the Sun, in time and space, so we humans will not be able to spread the contagion of warlike and selfish behavior throughout the rest of his creation. History shows that people have never gotten along with one another for long. Even in our Star Wars and Star Trek fictional technologies, we spread war and destruction everywhere we go.
About 2000 years ago, God limited himself by leaving his dwelling place in eternity and entering our time-space dimension in the human form of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The sermon on the Mount by this extraterrestrial sentient being expresses the epitome of morality.
Selfish, sinful representatives of the human race murdered Jesus in a most cruel manner, demonstrating to all the other inhabitants of his creation why the quarantine of the human race is necessary.
Jesus of course, being God, did not stay dead, but arose triumphantly, returning into the eternal dimensions, where he is today. His early followers, being eyewitnesses of this fact, were tortured to death for proclaiming this truth. Jesus promises each human individual willing to believe and completely trust him, release from the quarantined prison colony earth and live with him in the eternal dimensions He called Heaven.
He has also promised to return to this planet, not as a helpless human, but in all his divine power and splendor. He will not come alone, but in the company of millions of resurrected human "aliens" to cleanse the earth of evil and enforce a peaceful golden age for all mankind.
...Why are we soooo certain that we *want* to be found?...
Anybody intelligent enough to be able to travel throughout this galaxy or beyond, or even just communicate, would certainly study us for awhile. They would have learned by now that we humans are a warlike race that cannot get along with one another even on our own world. Even in our fictionalized scenarios, with imagined technology, such as Star Trek or Star Wars, there is nothing but war and death, such as the destruction of entire planets by some of our imagined technology. Human history provides an absolute guarantee, that if we would meet such an advanced civilization, we would use their technology against them and one another.
... while XP takes 10 - 15 seconds...
There must be something wrong with your VM or maybe your XP installation. I am running XP-SP3 on the Parallels 4 VM and it opens shared folder almost instantly, certainly less than one second. This is also true when I run VISTA in a VM. Copying a large file from a shared Mac folder to/from XP or VISTA is not much different either.
... based on incorrect assumptions,...
One underlying assumption is that there is no God that ultimately owns, and controls this universe and everything in it, including a physics experiment by His creatures. That is ultimately the question, not whether some theorized black hole will bring the "end of the world". The underlying assumption of all the speculation here is that man is the master of his fate, the captain of spaceship Earth.
If the underlying assumption (belief) is that there is indeed a God who in control, then there is nothing to worry about. When He decides to pull that switch, there is nothing anybody can do. I seriously doubt that the LHC is the switch and that man can or will pull the switch that ushers in the end of this planet and everything on it.
...you give your employer permission to exercise all the holder-only rights,.....
That would be fine, except that it would be for a fixed unalterable legally defined time only. For music, that might be three years initially and renewable at the option of the copyright owner for a fixed term of two years at a time. After the initial agreement expires, all subsequent two-year agreements could be made by the copyright owner with anyone they chose.
..Corporations are not fictitious...
By that I did not mean their non-existence, they obviously do. However they are not persons, but are an invention of the modern state. They have been given certain rights, privileges and immunities. Individual living persons can and do make binding agreements with corporations. Because corporations have an enormous advantage if there is a dispute concerning some agreement, most agreements between corporations and real living persons are rather one sided.
In the IP arena that could be remedied by the state which is the foundation of a corporation leveling the playing field by not allowing corporate entities to OWN IP at all. All IP arises in the mind of a living person and should be protected. All agreements concerning the USE of IP should have strict renewable time limits fixed by law. A person working for a someone may make whatever agreements mutually acceptable, but in the case of IP have legally defined time limits that cannot be altered. Also, all LP reverts to the public domain after the flesh and blood owner dies. Mickey Mouse would be in the public domain.Because IP is not a physical good, it should not be possible to buy and sell it like some commodity.
Since there are various kinds of IP, various time limits could be set by law. Agreement by a living person with a company making drugs would be longer. For example. The initial agreement for music might be three years and renewable at the option of the IP owner for two years each time. After a given agreement expires, the IP owner would also have the freedom to make a deal with someone else or nobody at all.
...What we need is copyright reform....
A simple and straightforward reform would be to allow only real living flesh and blood persons to have copyrights and patents. No faceless corporation has ever written a song or come up with a new idea. It is only creative people within these corporations that do this and they should be rewarded, not the corporation. The title to and disposition of the so-called intellectual property could never be bought or sold or transferred in any way and would die with its creator. At that time the work or patent enters the public domain for all of society. The concept of the work for hire should be abolished. A creative person could make any agreement with any corporation they wanted to, as long as no title to a work gets transferred. All such agreements must have maximum time limit included. No corporation or other fictitious business entity should ever become the OWNERS of products of a mind.
....I think patents should only protect companies with a small market cap...
How about only allowing real flesh and blood people, rather than fictitious constructs of the state to own copyrights and patents. These individual owners could rent out their intellectual property to others, including corporations, but it could never be bought or sold or inherited by someone else. Anyone who worked for one of these faceless corporations could get a patent, but the real live human owner of the patent would always have the final say about who gets to use it and under what conditions. No contract of any shape or form or agreement could be made with the owner of such a patent by anyone that would restrict the rights of such a person in regards to their patent.
A corporation would have to choose a real live human being to be the unrestricted owner of the intellectual property. This would allow individuals who come up with new ideas to be rewarded, but would prevent other entities, such as corporate patent trolls buying up large portfolios of patents and then suing somebody who made use of the principles embodied in these patents.
No corporation has ever invented or copyrighted anything. Only real living people are creative should primarily benefit from their creativity. Whether a person works for a big corporation or not is only incidental.
... when the mortgage payment was adjusting from $1600/mo to $4700/mo....
There in a nutshell you have the biggest reason for the trouble the financial industry is now in. It is just plain and simple greed. There is no other reason why that person's mortgage payments should rise by almost a factor of three. Now the the government is bailing out these greedy bastards with printed money. Anyone who has the ability to print money and not go to jail can never go bankrupt. Most likely, the economy will recover, as it would have anyway, but all that Fiat money will cause monstrous inflation afterwards.
Everyone who manages to hang on to this financial roller coaster of debt, will be able to pay off that debt with cheap plentiful money.
(...Do we pretend America needs to be saved from a depression at any cost?...)
There is no pretend here, but it is actually happening, at the expense of the value of the dollar. And foreigners, like China and others ask for the money they have loaned to the United States, the government has two choices. One is to simply stiff them and the other is to print even more money and pay them. It is the second option that was usually adopted by governments in the past. That will fuel the inflation spiral a few more turns. The situation may become like it was in Germany before Hitler came to power. My grandmother told me what happened there in her hometown.
A man had a wheelbarrow full of paper money that he wanted to use to buy a few loaves of bread. He parked the wheelbarrow in front of the bake shop and went inside to request the baker to open the side door in order to bring the wheelbarrow full of money into the shop. While he was in the shop, someone came and dumped the money on the sidewalk and made off with the wheelbarrow!
(...We're being patient with him, though he is coming up on 3 months rent due again...)
You are lucky to have some real estate, especially if it has not a big debt on it. It is good that you are being patient with that tenant, if you can afford that. Maybe you will need to help him out even more by reducing the rent. That will give him hope to eventually get out of debt to you, especially if he is otherwise a decent person. If he is forced to move out because he can no longer afford to rent your unit you will have lost money. Most rental properties can always use maintenance, repair and upgrading. If this person is skilled in construction, you might check if he is willing and able to do some work for part of the rent.
(...Like basic research into petroleum replacements, energy sources...)
The problem here is that researchers, being highly skilled, are generally economically better off and there are not that many of them. People like your tenant should be put to work in useful public works programs similar to what FDR did in the 1930s.
It is definitely true what you wrote. We are tapped out and are reaping what we sowed.
...You still have to pay things back...
Really? How do they enforce that? Sell someone into slavery, like they did in Rome or other ancient cultures? Make sex slaves out of debtors? Throw such one and/or their relatives into debtors prison?
Even the IRS cannot always get the money some tax payers owe. Of course it there is fraud involved, threat of prison will get many to eventually pay up.
...They say that there was not enough funding....
That's easy to fix. Just give the bailout money now going to rich bankers, stock gamblers (analysts & brokers), mega corporation's overpaid senior executives and other rich moneybags to the grandma's on the converter coupon waiting list. There is enough money going to these leeches to buy a new HD TV set for all those poor grandmas.
...Actually a black *can* be observed ...
Except that everything in that article is based on computer models and NOT actual observation. The computer model makes assumptions about the existence and properties of a black hole and based on these assumptions, shows how such a black hole "might" be detected. The problem is that all this is an elaborate mathematical exercise, but not an actual observation of physical reality.
Mass is a PROPERTY of matter and in essence mass and matter are not one and the same. Nobody really knows the mechanisms by which matter exhibits inertial and gravitational properties.
The speed of light is not the fastest thing in the universe. The earth and the sun "feel" each other gravitationally, not how the were eight minutes ago, but as the are now, in real time, instantaneously. The sun and all the planets orbit the center of our galaxy. Both the center of the galaxy and the sun with its planets appear to "communicate" with each other essentially instantaneously. On galactic scales, the speed of light is positively glacial. I think there were a few things that Einstein's mathematics missed and is still being missed by cosmologists. Postulating a warping of space-time doesn't solve the communication problem. Experiments with quantum entanglements also seem to indicate that all parts of the universe may be in constant touch with one another in zero time.
...that the equations show a very high density mass that you know you wouldn't be able to see if it did exist...
Just because it is impossible to see the "missing star" or whatever massive object the gravitational equations indicate might be there, does not mean automatically that it has to be a black hole. If in addition to gravity, electrical forces are at work, the so-called massive object may not be all massive after all. Additionally, the so-called massive object might be obscured by intervening matter.
Other "weird" objects observed in a number of places in the universe is something that has been labeled a pulsar. These objects appear to be rapidly pulsating sources of electromagnetic energy. The conventional, gravitationally, mechanical explanation of these is a rapidly rotating "almost formed" black hole called a neutron dwarf star. However, the rate pulsation of some of these pulsars is so high, that no physical object could hold together at the rates of rotation required by this theory. Here on Earth, all electromagnetic pulses are produced by electricity, both natural lightening and man-made. It is therefore quite reasonable to postulate that some natural electrical mechanism is responsible for these fast, extremely energetic pulses.
that is a proprietary program and not open source. Once the Windows users have suitably debugged it, the Mac folks will get a clean non-beta version to enjoy. It is debatable at this point whether chrome is greatly superior to Safari. If not, most Mac users won't bother with Chrome. Of course almost anything is better than any version of Swiss Cheese IE from MS.
...You also forget that black holes were first postulated in the 18th century by Laplace relying only on Newton's laws long before general relativity was even conceived....
Laplace was a mathematician who invented a mathematical theory way back then already. Ever since then the black hole hypothesis has been looking for a physical reality to back up the theory. That is exactly BACKWARDS to the scientific method. In REAL science someone makes a puzzling observation or an experiment has an entirely unexpected outcome. It is only after that theories are put forth to try to explain and figure out what is going on.
(....I'd also like to point out that you are the one relying on the mathematics to support a postulate for which there is no experimental motivation...)
Not at all. The laws of electrodynamics are never even applied to the cosmos at the large scale, because it is assumed (believed) that they apply only on small scales, such as within and between atoms. That is patently false. Modern space probes show that the electrical action of the solar wind extends to the distant edges of the solar system. It is also interesting that modern space probes show that the average charged particle energy from the sun INCREASES with distance outward. This indicates that there is an accelerating field that overcomes the gravity of the sun.
Many modern observations from space probes leave scientists "surprised" and forces them to come up with esoteric constructs in order to explain the data by means of long-held currently accepted theories. Gravity obviously is involved in the mechanics of the universe, but it alone is insufficient to explain in a simple and systematic way what modern observations show. If you are truly interested you can begin here:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan1.html
....Astronomers that claim to have observed black holes have also found a match....
Except that Kepler could directly see the sun and the planets and observe their relative locations and paths through space. In the case of alleged black holes, they cannot be seen, only the motion of an object on a path through space, guided by an invisible force. Electrons which "orbit" atomic nuclei are governed by the electric force. If there are two large objects in space, say two stars, and they carry opposite electric charges as a whole, their motions will be determined by BOTH gravity as determined by the laws of gravitation and the laws of electrical laws acting together. This can make the apparent motion of the object(s) behave as if there was a very large mass involved if gravity alone is taken into account.
In real science some observations are made and then scientists attempt to construct a theory to explain these observations. In the case of black holes it is backwards, just the opposite. It is important to note the fact that no observations gave rise to the notion of a black hole, for which a theory needed to be developed. The black hole is a fictional, mathematical creation of a theory. Now observations are misconstrued in order to legitimize a theory. Reports of black holes are just wishful thinking in support of a belief not factual in any way.
A black hole is allegedly predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. The alleged signatures of the black hole are an infinitely dense point-mass singularity and an event horizon. However his theory forbids the existence of anything of infinite density. That alone is sufficient to prove that black holes are not predicted by theory of General Relativity. Infinite density is forbidden because no material body can acquire the speed of light.
It is also interesting that Newton'w theory of gravity does not predict black holes either although it has been claimed that it does.
To me, a theory that requires an infinite of anything is not only suspect but definitely wrong. Infinities may work in theology as an attribute of God, but not in an objective scientific inquiry.
...your definition of "observable" appears to be limited to inferences based on direct observation of the photons radiated or reflected by an object....
How then,is the object the motion of which these scientists attribute to the powerful gravitational field of a black hole observed? Is this not by electromagnetic radiation generated or reflected from the object, the motion of which is ASSUMED to be influenced by gravity? Could it be possible that electrical and magnetic forces instead of or in addition to gravity could explain the observed motion?
The curriculum of study of astrophysicists and astronomers includes nothing or very little material on electrodynamics and electric field theory. Mostly they learn about orbital mechanics based on gravity alone. If the much stronger electric interaction is considered in ADDITION to gravity as an explanation of the observed data, much simpler, more elegant explanations are possible. Such alternate theories do not require elaborate and fictitious, never observed constructs such as black holes, dark energy and matter.
The charged particle beams in the LHC and other particle accelerators are controlled by well understood systems of magnetic and electric fields. Why is it that most cosmologists and astrophysicists do not even attempt to apply the well understood principles by which these machines operate on charged matter to the motion of charged matter in the universe at large? This is most puzzling to me, in light of the fact that most matter in the universe is definitely not electrically neutral and is therefore highly affected by even relatively weak electric and magnetic fields.
Even if there is an unmeasurably small electrical field across the galaxy of only one millivolt per kilometer, what would the energy be achieved by a proton that started its journey on the other side of our galaxy, 70,000 light years distant? What would the energy of such a proton be if it originated 1 billion or more light years from us? Is that why we measure such particles of incredibly high energy coming at us, often from seemingly empty areas of the universe? How are the incredibly intense x-rays generated we observe coming to us from objects that have been named quasars? No scientist has ever demonstrated a method of generating electromagnetic radiation by anything else other than accelerating charges.
(...So everything you and I think we know is all based on inference...)
Here you are getting into philosophy, not objective science. Science only can be based on what information our physical senses transmit into our brains where it is interpreted by our minds. In philosophy, science, mathematics, in fact in all disciplines and human endeavors, there are underlying assumptions. Assumptions should be minimized and carefully scrutinized. In present-day cosmology of astrophysics, an underlying assumption is that gravity alone controls of a large-scale operation of the universe. A steadily increasing mountain of data from modern space probes and telescopes indicates that this assumption is questionable if not flat wrong.
...You still cant violate the protections of the Fourth Amendment ...
Anybody that is not part of any governmental body is NOT bound by the fourth or any other amendment. Congress can and has made laws that extend specific portions of the constitution to states and in some cases to private entities. So a private school can make rules that public schools are forbidden to make. Private schools are allowed to and do teach religion as part of their curriculum and may allow their teachers to confiscate student notes. Such policies are generally bad even though legal.
If someone in my house gets loud and boisterous and refuses to shut up, I have the option of picking such a one up by the collar of their shirt and throwing them out of the house just like I might do to my cat when he gets obnoxious. It is probably a good idea to first ask such a person nicely to leave on their own two legs. The cat has learned make a quick exit on his own in the meantime, knowing what may come next.