Anyone can CLAIM anything at all. According to Jesus (not me), a Christian is someone re-born by the power of the Holy Spirit. Just as in the physical a person cannot be "un-born", so not in the Spirit. When God gives His gift of His Spirit to dwell inside, it is forever. God doesn't take His gift back. It is unconditional and forever. It is a gift not something earned. No one goes to heaving by good behavior and no one goes to hell by bad behavior.
Rom. 11:29 For the free gifts and calling of God are without repentance.
Jesus also said: Matt 12:33 Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or else make the tree corrupt and its fruit corrupt; for the tree is known by its fruit.
Anyone who has the Spirit will bear fruit, as described in: Galatians 5:22-23 But the fruit of the Spirit is: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
If someone claims to be a Christian and at least some of the above characteristics show in that person's life, that gives good evidence that their claim is valid. Notice that fruit is in the singular, a single fruit of the invisible Spirit of God manifested in these visible ways.
Yes, it was a sudden catastrophe that buried the life forms under deep, hot layers of ash. All fossils are made not by some slow process over eons of time, but but sudden burial and heat and/or immense pressure to prevent the decay that would otherwise happen. By today, I mean at least since Darwin lived and proposed his preposterous ideas. Nobody has made a fossil since then or even demonstrated how such a fossil could occur. We know that fossils occur in sedimentary layers. That implies the existence of water.
(..I've never met an evolutionist...)
Someone who believes in the theory of evolution is an evolutionists in the same way that someone who believes in communism is a communist. Is that so hard to grasp?
(..But those of us who accept evolution..)
Yes you have to accept, that is believe evolution occurred in the past. You cannot show that it occurs today. Any time someone tells you about something that happened in the past, you have to either BELIEVE that or not. Evolutionists believe what they believe, but cannot prove it any more than the ID folks can demonstrate their beliefs. The laws of physics presumably were the same millions of years ago.
We cannot prove this however. All we can show is what the laws of physics are today and the assume (believe) that they never changed. All evidence from the past, whether physical or historical has to be BELIEVED, it cannot be demonstrated. Therefore ID and evolution are both beliefs. You pick your belief and I'll pick mine.
My body has grown larger, but not more complex. All information needed for human development is right there in the genetic codes, as stored in the DNA after conception. All reduction of entropy occurs by the application of energy and INFORMATION. Energy by itself is not enough. When you clean up your room or build a house or something, you expend energy and your MIND directs that energy toward the outcome your WILL has determined. Energy applied without the direction of a mind and will NEVER increases order, but only decreases it.
That can be demonstrated in the lab and you experience it every single day of your life. If the car you are driving is not directed by your attentive mind, its energy of motion becomes very destructive to you, itself and any object it crashes into because you did not control it with your mind, giving the car the information it needs to stay on the road.
.... theory of evolution doesn't claim alligators learned to fly.....
No, it claims much more than that. Darwin's "Tree of Life" as still printed in textbooks depicts all life originating in a common ancestor. The very title of his book: "Origin of the Species" proclaims this. Evolutionists claim that all life began with "simple" one celled life forms and became more and more complex over time. There is no evidence whatsoever for this scenario. On the contrary, even evolutionists speak of stuff like "The Cambrian Explosion" as evidenced in the fossil record. An explosion is a sudden event, not something slowly happening over immense periods of time. The fundamental tenet of evolution is shown to be false in the laboratory and in every day life. Simple things NEVER, EVER become more complex without the activity of mind, involving thoughtful planning as well as energy. Nobody has ever demonstrated otherwise today. Undirected energy is almost always destructive. Evolution is a belief of the majority, just as "The Earth is flat" resting on elephants or turtles was a belief of the majority at one time.
....Anything not proven wrong is assumed to be true...
That is an apt description of Darwinism. Just because living things adapt to their surroundings doesn't mean alligators learned to fly and became birds. That is an assertion, for which there is not, as for much of evolution, an iota of "proof".
Many people also BELIEVE in evolution. Truth is not subject to a vote. Since neither evolution not ID can be shown to be either true or false in a science lab, they are BOTH beliefs. God as such is not necessary to either belief. It's just that those who believe in God have jumped onto the ID bandwagon. There are those in the ID camp who do not necessarily believe in God or the record of the Bible. Their position is mainly that evolution, as presently mainstream, is insufficient to account for much of what we see in nature or in the lab. The driving force of natural selection cannot account for all of what we observe.
....That many people believe in creationism and ID is a FACT...
As many evolutionists BELIEVE that Darwinism is a fact. Both are hypotheses about how things came to be. No present day lab experiments or observations can prove one or the other. Fossil evidence shows that some life forms appeared out of seemingly nowhere, rather suddenly. For example, even evolutionists talk of the "Cambrian Explosion", as evidenced by the fossil record. Nobody has ever made a fossil, so we don't really know what processes made fossils. We know for sure, that no fossils are being made today. Today, anything that has ever been alive simply decays, long before it could form a fossil.
...scientific theories that can be tested in the lab...
So tell me, has any lab ever bee able to show how an amoeba, or some other collection of one celled organisms becomes an organism even as lowly as a worm?
Has there ever been an experiment to show how that life can come from non-liveing chemicals? Has any lab ever determined where the immense amount of information originated that is inherent in any living cell?
Evolution is a faith based conjecture of how life came into being, without reference to a Creator God. ID is a conjecture about the same thing, except it hypothesizes some intelligent creator. Both are based on belief. Neither has any present day lab experiments to show its own correctness nor the other's falsity.
In that case, a major tenet of evolution is falsified by the second law of thermodynamics. Nowhere do we OBSERVE today the natural unaided progression from the simple to the complex, which evolution requires. We only observe the breakdown of complex natural and manmade systems into simpler, usually nonfunctional components. The evolutionary assertion that the complexity we see all around us started out as "simple" forms has NEVER be observed today. It is pure faith that the mechanisms that drive micro-evolution also work on the grand scale needed to turn a one celled amoeba into an elephant or a monkey into a man.
....The thing that drives me absolutely apeshit about ID is that one of the greatest gifts humanity has is our capacity for rational thought....
So now what is so irrational about the idea that the human brain is the product of a mind? If it takes human brains to come up with an aircraft carrier or any other complex human creation, might such brains not also exist because an intelligent mind made them?
...In the case of climate change its basically 90% to 10% in scientists...
Since when is scientific knowledge or for that matter, truth itself, dependent on the numbers of adherents? Fundamental scientific progress has NEVER, even once, been the product of a committee or majority consensus. Historically, it has usually been the lone dissenter who eventually proved to be right and brought about a fundamental forward progress of science. For example, it took 50 whole long years for the majority of "scientists" of that time to drop their idea of infinite light speed after the Danish astronomer Roemer measured it to be finite.
....that it's media manipulation which generates the uproar....
Indeed, its all a media frenzy and has nothing whatsoever to do with science. The climate cycles and it has nothing to do with human activity other than media hype.
Take a look at the relatively recent history of the "science" of climate change and the media hype surrounding it:
In the Feb. 24, 1895 issue of the NY times the headline was: "GEOLOGISTS THINK THAT THE WORLD MAY BE FROZEN UP AGAIN". The same paper on May 15, 1932 headlined: "EARTH IS STEADILY GROWING WARMER". Again on May 21, 1975, in the Times, "MAJOR COOLING IS WIDELY CONSIDERED INEVITABLE" and also on the cover of TIME magazine of Dec 3, 1973, "THE BIG FREEZE". Finally recently, again on the front of TIME, April 3, 2006, "SPECIAL REPORT ON GLOBAL WARMING".
Is climate change based on science, that is KNOWLEDGE or is it based of assumptions (beliefs), guesswork and political control agendas? It is an inconvenient truth: Climate has for eons and is still cycling up and down and we humans can't do a damn thing about it.
....I can only hope that the Designer knows what He's doing.....
I'm sure that he does. In that new world, time itself will be different and what we call entropy will be no more.
We cannot really imagine what it will be like: (1 Cor 2:9) 9 But as it is written, "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard," nor has it entered into the heart of man, "the things which God has prepared for those who love Him."
... people who tell lies sometimes tell the truth...
So how do you know when a liar is telling the truth and when not? If you had a time-travel device, how would you try to convince people of the first century of your origins here in our time and space and of the technology we take for granted?
If Jesus really is God and came from BEYOND time and space itself, how could he convince mere mortals of His deity and power? Jesus ultimately demonstrated this by conquering our worst enemy -- death.
In either case, then and now, no matter how much evidence you presented, both you and Jesus would have to be BELIEVED by the audience.
For every single piece of evidence evolutionists bring up, a smart creationists can re-interpret that so called evidence to support what the Bible records.
The facts are that the universe we observe, especially life, contains tremendous amounts of information. NOBODY has ever demonstrated that information can come from *any* other source than a mind. In the case of life, it is the mind of God. A 747 airliner or a computer were first thoughts in the minds of humans. The code in DNA, like any computer code originated in a mind by processes of thought.
.....The temple for the Jews was rather similar to the Forum for the Romans...
That is what it degenerated to, but not the design of God and the laws God gave through Moses. The temple was to be meeting place alright, but a meeting place between man an God, not like the Roman Forum. The temple was known to be "The House of God", not a marketplace.
Jesus reminded His generation of that rather forcefully.
That's an oxymoron. There is no such thing. Judas followed Jesus around for about three years and would have, by most appearances and maybe even have considered himself to be a Christian. According to Jesus, the only way a person can become a Christian is through a spiritual re-birth. Just as in the physical, you can't be "unborn", so too nobody can be an "ex-christian". All this means is that they never were.
The Apostle John writes: (John 2:19) They left us, but they were not part of us, for if they had been part of us, they would have stayed with us. They simply made it clear that none of them was really part of us.
If you call yourself an "ex-christian" you could have never been one, at least not by the biblical definition of that word.
I was not the one who made that anonymous post you replied to. The things Jesus supposedly said are either true or preposterously false. If these things He is reported to have said are false, this falsehood certainly has had a huge effect on the life of humanity on this planet.
But what if it is true? What if the Creator God DID come here for a short time as a human, as Jesus claimed? Why are we such an arrogant being that assumes that all reality can be grasped by our senses? What if the reality we can perceive is like the tip of an iceberg? If you had a time-travel device, how would you explain modern technology to a first century person? Our technology is still limited to our present time-space dimensions, but if Jesus really was God, He came from a realm totally different from ours.
If you attempted to describe our modern world to such a first century person, they'd have to BELIEVE you or not, whatever you told them. You could maybe take some small items with you, and/or pictures, but in the end they would still have to BELIEVE whatever evidence you showed them and where you claimed your origin was. They might even deem some of the evidence you show them "supernatural".
In the same way, we either MAY believe or not, whatever the record states about the coming and purpose of Jesus and who He is. He too showed powers and abilities which we call "supernatural". He demonstrated power over nature and even of death itself.
....But the brain _is_ the mind, and vice versa....
That is an assertion that is unprovable or at least has some evidence against it. For one, the so called out-of-body-experience accounts have certain things in common that point to the existence of some kind of consciousness apart from the operation of the physical brain cells. We call the products of thought "Intellectual Property" and have an entirely different set of rules for that than we do for tangible stuff.
Products of thought haver a material manifestation, but are in and of themselves immaterial. Explaining in intimate detail the chemistry of ink on paper does not help a bit in explaining the work of Shakespeare or Beethoven. These immaterial products have their origin in an immaterial mind. The brain is only the hardware (wetware?) interface device, just as the material guts of a PC are the interface device for the immaterial software, which again is the immaterial product of the immaterial mind of the programmer. IP is immaterial and can only come from an immaterial source.
Those who are not willing to acknowledge the existence of a realm or dimension that goes beyond the physical are not true scientists. True scientists will attempt to learn ALL truth about ALL of reality. Immaterial objects have a different set of laws than tangible things. True Scientists will endeavor to learn these laws, just as the study the laws of physics.
Anything is perfectly legal if you can get away with it. The FBI and other government agencies are more likely to get away with something than an individual.
The fact that really BIG generators produce AC which can then be stepped up for transmission by transformers is also a huge technological advantage. The AC is rectified to DC which is converted to AC at the load end again by some rather complex and expensive thyristor switches. The expense of this only pays off for really long and very big transmission lines, such as the 846 mile, 3100MW Pacific Intertie from the Columbia River, OR to Sylmar CA.
So can that be used to develop programs for hardware other than what Apple makes? Apple sells hardware. So it stands to reason they will make tools available for others to write software for their hardware. The more software there is available, the more hardware Apple will sell. They give these tools away, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but from the profit motive.
Apple isn't locking out free software. Anyone can write programs for the iPhone and give it way. It's the ones who control the licensing of present so called "free" software that have to change their license to allow their code onto the iPhone.
....If a device cannot legally run GPL software....
Most users outside of/. couldn't care less. They will pay for good software. Therefore I suspect there won't be too much free (as in beer) software available for the iPhone. In making it hard for getting malware onto iPhones, Apple has also made it harder for legitimate developers to get their brainchildren onto Apple's hardware. The last thing iPhone users need is to have happen what is the norm for Windows. There anyone can write and distribute any software including damaging code. If some of these "free" licenses have present requirements that preclude use on iPhones, maybe the controllers of these licenses will have to modify them. It is after all only an artificial legal construct, not some innate technological hurdle.
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....who can claim to be a true Christian?...
Anyone can CLAIM anything at all. According to Jesus (not me), a Christian is someone re-born by the power of the Holy Spirit. Just as in the physical a person cannot be "un-born", so not in the Spirit. When God gives His gift of His Spirit to dwell inside, it is forever. God doesn't take His gift back. It is unconditional and forever. It is a gift not something earned. No one goes to heaving by good behavior and no one goes to hell by bad behavior.
Rom. 11:29 For the free gifts and calling of God are without repentance.
Jesus also said: Matt 12:33 Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or else make the tree corrupt and its fruit corrupt; for the tree is known by its fruit.
Anyone who has the Spirit will bear fruit, as described in: Galatians 5:22-23 But the fruit of the Spirit is: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
If someone claims to be a Christian and at least some of the above characteristics show in that person's life, that gives good evidence that their claim is valid. Notice that fruit is in the singular, a single fruit of the invisible Spirit of God manifested in these visible ways.
....Ever heard of a city called Pompeii?....
Yes, it was a sudden catastrophe that buried the life forms under deep, hot layers of ash. All fossils are made not by some slow process over eons of time, but but sudden burial and heat and/or immense pressure to prevent the decay that would otherwise happen. By today, I mean at least since Darwin lived and proposed his preposterous ideas. Nobody has made a fossil since then or even demonstrated how such a fossil could occur. We know that fossils occur in sedimentary layers. That implies the existence of water.
(..I've never met an evolutionist...)
Someone who believes in the theory of evolution is an evolutionists in the same way that someone who believes in communism is a communist. Is that so hard to grasp?
(..But those of us who accept evolution..)
Yes you have to accept, that is believe evolution occurred in the past. You cannot show that it occurs today. Any time someone tells you about something that happened in the past, you have to either BELIEVE that or not. Evolutionists believe what they believe, but cannot prove it any more than the ID folks can demonstrate their beliefs. The laws of physics presumably were the same millions of years ago.
We cannot prove this however. All we can show is what the laws of physics are today and the assume (believe) that they never changed. All evidence from the past, whether physical or historical has to be BELIEVED, it cannot be demonstrated. Therefore ID and evolution are both beliefs. You pick your belief and I'll pick mine.
....Have you become larger and more complex...
My body has grown larger, but not more complex. All information needed for human development is right there in the genetic codes, as stored in the DNA after conception. All reduction of entropy occurs by the application of energy and INFORMATION. Energy by itself is not enough. When you clean up your room or build a house or something, you expend energy and your MIND directs that energy toward the outcome your WILL has determined. Energy applied without the direction of a mind and will NEVER increases order, but only decreases it.
That can be demonstrated in the lab and you experience it every single day of your life. If the car you are driving is not directed by your attentive mind, its energy of motion becomes very destructive to you, itself and any object it crashes into because you did not control it with your mind, giving the car the information it needs to stay on the road.
.... theory of evolution doesn't claim alligators learned to fly.....
No, it claims much more than that. Darwin's "Tree of Life" as still printed in textbooks depicts all life originating in a common ancestor. The very title of his book: "Origin of the Species" proclaims this. Evolutionists claim that all life began with "simple" one celled life forms and became more and more complex over time. There is no evidence whatsoever for this scenario. On the contrary, even evolutionists speak of stuff like "The Cambrian Explosion" as evidenced in the fossil record. An explosion is a sudden event, not something slowly happening over immense periods of time. The fundamental tenet of evolution is shown to be false in the laboratory and in every day life. Simple things NEVER, EVER become more complex without the activity of mind, involving thoughtful planning as well as energy. Nobody has ever demonstrated otherwise today. Undirected energy is almost always destructive. Evolution is a belief of the majority, just as "The Earth is flat" resting on elephants or turtles was a belief of the majority at one time.
....Anything not proven wrong is assumed to be true...
That is an apt description of Darwinism. Just because living things adapt to their surroundings doesn't mean alligators learned to fly and became birds. That is an assertion, for which there is not, as for much of evolution, an iota of "proof".
... that many people believe ID....
Many people also BELIEVE in evolution. Truth is not subject to a vote. Since neither evolution not ID can be shown to be either true or false in a science lab, they are BOTH beliefs. God as such is not necessary to either belief. It's just that those who believe in God have jumped onto the ID bandwagon. There are those in the ID camp who do not necessarily believe in God or the record of the Bible. Their position is mainly that evolution, as presently mainstream, is insufficient to account for much of what we see in nature or in the lab. The driving force of natural selection cannot account for all of what we observe.
....That many people believe in creationism and ID is a FACT...
As many evolutionists BELIEVE that Darwinism is a fact. Both are hypotheses about how things came to be. No present day lab experiments or observations can prove one or the other. Fossil evidence shows that some life forms appeared out of seemingly nowhere, rather suddenly. For example, even evolutionists talk of the "Cambrian Explosion", as evidenced by the fossil record. Nobody has ever made a fossil, so we don't really know what processes made fossils. We know for sure, that no fossils are being made today. Today, anything that has ever been alive simply decays, long before it could form a fossil.
...scientific theories that can be tested in the lab...
So tell me, has any lab ever bee able to show how an amoeba, or some other collection of one celled organisms becomes an organism even as lowly as a worm?
Has there ever been an experiment to show how that life can come from non-liveing chemicals? Has any lab ever determined where the immense amount of information originated that is inherent in any living cell?
Evolution is a faith based conjecture of how life came into being, without reference to a Creator God. ID is a conjecture about the same thing, except it hypothesizes some intelligent creator. Both are based on belief. Neither has any present day lab experiments to show its own correctness nor the other's falsity.
... it must be falsifiable....
In that case, a major tenet of evolution is falsified by the second law of thermodynamics. Nowhere do we OBSERVE today the natural unaided progression from the simple to the complex, which evolution requires. We only observe the breakdown of complex natural and manmade systems into simpler, usually nonfunctional components. The evolutionary assertion that the complexity we see all around us started out as "simple" forms has NEVER be observed today. It is pure faith that the mechanisms that drive micro-evolution also work on the grand scale needed to turn a one celled amoeba into an elephant or a monkey into a man.
...The Ether was discredited around 100 years ago as being unnecessary...
Not quite, they just renamed it "virtual particles" filling all space, responsible for the zero point energy.
....The thing that drives me absolutely apeshit about ID is that one of the greatest gifts humanity has is our capacity for rational thought....
So now what is so irrational about the idea that the human brain is the product of a mind? If it takes human brains to come up with an aircraft carrier or any other complex human creation, might such brains not also exist because an intelligent mind made them?
...In the case of climate change its basically 90% to 10% in scientists...
Since when is scientific knowledge or for that matter, truth itself, dependent on the numbers of adherents? Fundamental scientific progress has NEVER, even once, been the product of a committee or majority consensus. Historically, it has usually been the lone dissenter who eventually proved to be right and brought about a fundamental forward progress of science. For example, it took 50 whole long years for the majority of "scientists" of that time to drop their idea of infinite light speed after the Danish astronomer Roemer measured it to be finite.
....that it's media manipulation which generates the uproar ....
Indeed, its all a media frenzy and has nothing whatsoever to do with science. The climate cycles and it has nothing to do with human activity other than media hype.
Take a look at the relatively recent history of the "science" of climate change and the media hype surrounding it:
In the Feb. 24, 1895 issue of the NY times the headline was: "GEOLOGISTS THINK THAT THE WORLD MAY BE FROZEN UP AGAIN". The same paper on May 15, 1932 headlined: "EARTH IS STEADILY GROWING WARMER". Again on May 21, 1975, in the Times, "MAJOR COOLING IS WIDELY CONSIDERED INEVITABLE" and also on the cover of TIME magazine of Dec 3, 1973, "THE BIG FREEZE". Finally recently, again on the front of TIME, April 3, 2006, "SPECIAL REPORT ON GLOBAL WARMING".
Is climate change based on science, that is KNOWLEDGE or is it based of assumptions (beliefs), guesswork and political control agendas? It is an inconvenient truth: Climate has for eons and is still cycling up and down and we humans can't do a damn thing about it.
....I can only hope that the Designer knows what He's doing.....
I'm sure that he does. In that new world, time itself will be different and what we call entropy will be no more.
We cannot really imagine what it will be like: (1 Cor 2:9) 9 But as it is written, "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard," nor has it entered into the heart of man, "the things which God has prepared for those who love Him."
... people who tell lies sometimes tell the truth...
So how do you know when a liar is telling the truth and when not? If you had a time-travel device, how would you try to convince people of the first century of your origins here in our time and space and of the technology we take for granted?
If Jesus really is God and came from BEYOND time and space itself, how could he convince mere mortals of His deity and power? Jesus ultimately demonstrated this by conquering our worst enemy -- death.
In either case, then and now, no matter how much evidence you presented, both you and Jesus would have to be BELIEVED by the audience.
....mounds of evidence supporting evolution....
For every single piece of evidence evolutionists bring up, a smart creationists can re-interpret that so called evidence to support what the Bible records.
The facts are that the universe we observe, especially life, contains tremendous amounts of information. NOBODY has ever demonstrated that information can come from *any* other source than a mind. In the case of life, it is the mind of God. A 747 airliner or a computer were first thoughts in the minds of humans. The code in DNA, like any computer code originated in a mind by processes of thought.
.....The temple for the Jews was rather similar to the Forum for the Romans ...
That is what it degenerated to, but not the design of God and the laws God gave through Moses. The temple was to be meeting place alright, but a meeting place between man an God, not like the Roman Forum. The temple was known to be "The House of God", not a marketplace.
Jesus reminded His generation of that rather forcefully.
....an ex-Christian....
That's an oxymoron. There is no such thing. Judas followed Jesus around for about three years and would have, by most appearances and maybe even have considered himself to be a Christian. According to Jesus, the only way a person can become a Christian is through a spiritual re-birth. Just as in the physical, you can't be "unborn", so too nobody can be an "ex-christian". All this means is that they never were.
The Apostle John writes: (John 2:19) They left us, but they were not part of us, for if they had been part of us, they would have stayed with us. They simply made it clear that none of them was really part of us.
If you call yourself an "ex-christian" you could have never been one, at least not by the biblical definition of that word.
...Jesus lived, but was not the god ...
I was not the one who made that anonymous post you replied to. The things Jesus supposedly said are either true or preposterously false. If these things He is reported to have said are false, this falsehood certainly has had a huge effect on the life of humanity on this planet.
But what if it is true? What if the Creator God DID come here for a short time as a human, as Jesus claimed? Why are we such an arrogant being that assumes that all reality can be grasped by our senses? What if the reality we can perceive is like the tip of an iceberg? If you had a time-travel device, how would you explain modern technology to a first century person? Our technology is still limited to our present time-space dimensions, but if Jesus really was God, He came from a realm totally different from ours.
If you attempted to describe our modern world to such a first century person, they'd have to BELIEVE you or not, whatever you told them. You could maybe take some small items with you, and/or pictures, but in the end they would still have to BELIEVE whatever evidence you showed them and where you claimed your origin was. They might even deem some of the evidence you show them "supernatural".
In the same way, we either MAY believe or not, whatever the record states about the coming and purpose of Jesus and who He is. He too showed powers and abilities which we call "supernatural". He demonstrated power over nature and even of death itself.
....But the brain _is_ the mind, and vice versa....
That is an assertion that is unprovable or at least has some evidence against it. For one, the so called out-of-body-experience accounts have certain things in common that point to the existence of some kind of consciousness apart from the operation of the physical brain cells. We call the products of thought "Intellectual Property" and have an entirely different set of rules for that than we do for tangible stuff.
Products of thought haver a material manifestation, but are in and of themselves immaterial. Explaining in intimate detail the chemistry of ink on paper does not help a bit in explaining the work of Shakespeare or Beethoven. These immaterial products have their origin in an immaterial mind. The brain is only the hardware (wetware?) interface device, just as the material guts of a PC are the interface device for the immaterial software, which again is the immaterial product of the immaterial mind of the programmer. IP is immaterial and can only come from an immaterial source.
Those who are not willing to acknowledge the existence of a realm or dimension that goes beyond the physical are not true scientists. True scientists will attempt to learn ALL truth about ALL of reality. Immaterial objects have a different set of laws than tangible things. True Scientists will endeavor to learn these laws, just as the study the laws of physics.
...it's "perfectly" legal....
Anything is perfectly legal if you can get away with it. The FBI and other government agencies are more likely to get away with something than an individual.
...so the actual advantage of AC disappears...
The fact that really BIG generators produce AC which can then be stepped up for transmission by transformers is also a huge technological advantage. The AC is rectified to DC which is converted to AC at the load end again by some rather complex and expensive thyristor switches. The expense of this only pays off for really long and very big transmission lines, such as the 846 mile, 3100MW Pacific Intertie from the Columbia River, OR to Sylmar CA.
...but Apple charges a total of $0 for Xcode....
So can that be used to develop programs for hardware other than what Apple makes? Apple sells hardware. So it stands to reason they will make tools available for others to write software for their hardware. The more software there is available, the more hardware Apple will sell. They give these tools away, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but from the profit motive.
....Locking out free software ...
Apple isn't locking out free software. Anyone can write programs for the iPhone and give it way. It's the ones who control the licensing of present so called "free" software that have to change their license to allow their code onto the iPhone.
....If a device cannot legally run GPL software....
/. couldn't care less. They will pay for good software. Therefore I suspect there won't be too much free (as in beer) software available for the iPhone. In making it hard for getting malware onto iPhones, Apple has also made it harder for legitimate developers to get their brainchildren onto Apple's hardware. The last thing iPhone users need is to have happen what is the norm for Windows. There anyone can write and distribute any software including damaging code. If some of these "free" licenses have present requirements that preclude use on iPhones, maybe the controllers of these licenses will have to modify them. It is after all only an artificial legal construct, not some innate technological hurdle.
Most users outside of