Technically, it's the novaterm application (distributed w/ the SDK) that allows root access to the Pre. But the Pre needs to be in dev mode (w/ the konami code or the newer code) in order for the novaterm application to work.
Apple doesn't care what you do with the iPhone, but they do have to close the holes that enable jailbreaking because they're security holes through which Something Bad could go to Do Something Bad.
Apple absolutely does care what you do with the iPhone. That's why they've updated the ROM in newer 3Gs models to prevent jailbreaking.
If Apple was okay with jailbreaking, and just interested in closing security holes, they would work on those holes, rather than on preventing jailbreaking altogether. (In fact, that's exactly what Palm does do. One of the first methods to install apps on a Pre was to e-mail yourself a link to an application. Palm (rightfully) closed that hole, but left intact the ability to root a Pre.
And I agree with stillpixel. I wouldn't be shocked if Apple themselves had a hand in this.
Thinking that Apple someone had a hand in creating this "worm" for jailbroken iPhones is not only considerably misguided (and unfounded), it's utterly moronic.
I didn't say I believe that Apple had a hand in it. I said I wouldn't be shocked if they did. They've got a vested interest in keeping people from jailbreaking, and this kind of thing (especially because it's relatively innocuous) fits the bill.
In the case of WebOS, you have to be careful with the term "jailbreak". The process for WebOS is nothing remotely similar to what you have to do with an iPhone. In WebOS, it's a simple matter of entering one of two codes.
The other difference, of course, is that Palm wants people to hack on the Pre (and soon, the Pixi) as much as possible. They encourage the homebrew community, and don't even clamp down on apps that Sprint would prefer to not have on their phones like MyTether. (Sure, they don't have MyTether in the App Catalog, but they could easily prevent it from being installed altogether, if they had a mind to.)
As far as the original article, the really unfortunate thing is that Apple's likely reaction to this will be, "So? We told you not to jailbreak your iPhone!" It will lend some (false) legitimacy to the idea that jailbreaking an iphone is wrong, which will only help Apple lock down iPhones further in the future.
And I agree with stillpixel. I wouldn't be shocked if Apple themselves had a hand in this.
I actually did pay for a Gmail invite, in the brief period of time when the only reliable way you could get one was to win it on Ebay. My Gmail service is far more reliable than say, my Internet or cell services. While Gmail has had high-profile outages, I don't think the reliability has been anything near as bad as you've seen with some other online services.
Having said that, unlike the litl, at least Gmail lets you download your content.
I'm just not seeing a market for this thing. While a netbook does rely more heavily on online services than a traditional notebook, at least with a netbook there's a tacit acknowledgement that people have to do a few more things than browse the Web. The litl doesn't even let you create on the device, and then transfer to a service.
Epic fail.
we have no idea whether it is even possible to test the theory of "God exists."
Actually we do; it's explicitly impossible to test the theory of 'God exists'. Or rather, it's impossible to falsify it which is what any meaningful test should do.
It's not entirely impossible to falsify the theory of "God exists". But first, you have to have a concrete definition of what "God" is.
If you define "God" as an omnipotent, omniscient, loving being, you can make predictions about what a universe run by an omnipotent, omniscient, loving being should look like. If it doesn't look like that, then you've falsified that definition of "God".
Most people are unwilling to submit the idea of God to that kind of a test, though, because they're simply not interested in falsifying the idea in the first place.
In the end, the earth belongs to those who have the most babies, and, all those things you advocate, undermine your own culture as much as they undermine your genes.
Survival of the fittest is about adaptation, not about who can have the most babies. When resources start to run out it is the species that is ready to change and adapt that wins out. I don't think anyone will disagree with me when I say religions aren't exactly proponents of change.
You're correct that evolution is about adaptation, but birth rates are closely linked to that. Traits only get passed on if they survive, and the more offspring you have with a given trait, the more likely it is that that trait will survive. In addition, the more offspring you have, the more likely one of them will have a significant mutation (just because of probabilities), and it's these genetic mutations that fuel evolution.
I never understood the "pro-life" (actually more like anti-health) movement. A fetus is nothing special. Because a human is nothing special. It is very arrogant to think that we're oh-so-special. We're not. Life in itself is nothing special. It's just a state of the machine of the class "lifeform". You can make a new fetus in what? Weeks? And this time a healthy one. One that is more likely to create healthy offspring. Or even offspring at all.
The numbers of people who have a very hard time making children grows like crazy. With the current trend, in 3 generations, there will be no human left in the western world, who can reproduce without advanced medical help. A few generations later we're done. At least if we continue to go that way.
There are at least two problems with this line of thinking:
1) It reduces human beings to the level of disposable widgets. While it's true that there's nothing special about the human species on a biological level, actually behaving that way leads to some very dark places.
2) I can't speak for everyone, but I consider my life pretty damn special, and I would take particular, violent exception to anyone who intended to treat it as trivially expendable.
If you want to talk about it on an evolutionary level, the way you get biological diversity is to not kill off your offspring. Sure, badly deformed offspring probably wouldn't live to reproduce anyway, but the current abortion climate goes well beyond that, into eliminating healthy offspring. (Last time I checked, being poor or underprivileged was not a congenital birth defect. And I should know, since I have such a birth defect.)
If the issue is really babies being born to drug-addicted mothers, or being born into abusive homes, how about treating drug addiction and improving child welfare services? Wouldn't that work out just a tad better than allowing the hellish conditions to persist and just endeavoring to make sure that children were never born into them? After all, you can't force an unfit mother to have an abortion any more than you can force someone to be a good parent.
As to the article itself: I think the technology will be used for both treatment and abortions. Some couples will go in one direction, some will go in the other. It's the same with most pre-natal screening. The technology, broadly speaking, allows the couple to make an informed decision about what they want to do. Their actual decision could go either way.
Limbo isn't a place of suffering in Catholic dogma. In fact, it's a place of peace and contentment. It's just not as good as being in Heaven with God. It's Purgatory that's "Hell Lite" (for lack of a better term). In Purgatory, you work off your sin through suffering, in order to get to Heaven. The concept of Purgatory lead to the concept of indulgences, which lead to Martin Luther's 95 Theses, and thus to the Protestant Reformation. So all in all, Purgatory solved a problem for the Church (insofar as it allowed soldiers to engage in brutal combat but still get a shot at salvation if they died), but caused a much larger problem in that it was ripe for abuse.
I think a few of your points are misunderstandings on your part. At the very least, there's another way to look at them.
- Battery - Common complaint, my books don't run out of battery
While e-books obviously do have battery limitations, they're not as much of an issue as one might think. My Kindle easily lasts a week at a time with moderate (e.g., a few hours a day reading a book) use. Obviously, YMMV, and things go downhill once you start doing a lot of Web surfing on the devices, but it's not at all like a PMP or an iPhone in terms of battery usage.
- Space - I can fit a paperback in my pocket.
You can fit dozens or hundreds of paperbacks on a Kindle. Okay, so it won't fit in your pocket, but it'll fit in a book bag, briefcase, or suitcase easily.
- Obsolesence - in 15, or 50 years I can give my books to my daughter or grandkids, and they'll be able to read them all or sell them to someone else to read [hopefully not:) ]. There's a good chance that the ebook I buy today won't be readable in 5 years let alone 50.
I think this one depends a lot on the user. Generally, anything not DRM'd can be converted to another format, so if you really want to stave off obsolescence, you can convert to TXT format (albeit with the loss of graphics that implies). And once you've got your e-book in an open format, it's much easier to secure from damage than a paper book. With a few clicks, you can have multiple copies across several server, so that even the complete destruction of one copy doesn't leave you without the content.
DRM is a problem, and, although I'm not one of them, I acknowledge that there are some people who are in love with the physicality of books. (I do think, however, that the physicality issue is just a matter of technological shift. There were people, in ye olden days (say, 20 years ago) who loved to write letters and notes to their friends. Now they text and write e-mails. People are much more adaptive than we give them credit for sometimes.)
Problem with EInk displays (at least current generation ones) is that contrast is very bad.
Even though the purely reflective screen is a good step, the fact that you are reading grey text on light-grey background is a killer for the eyes
The contrast on the Kindle (I haven't tried any other e-paper device) isn't perfect, by any means, but it's still a substantially better experience than reading on a back-lit device, by a wide margin. I've read on Palm handhelds from the Palm Pilot II to as recently as the Centro (a total of 5 or so models I've owned, over the years) and the experience on a back-lit screen (particularly color) is nicer, aesthetically, for short reading, and certainly for maps (since epaper devices don't currently do color), but for longer reading, it's not all that pleasant, comparatively. It's much easier (at least, for me) to live with lower contrast than to stare into a bright light to read.
i'm 31 and i think of the shoplifting and bird shooting episode as later episodes. The first "premiere" of a simpsons ep i watched was cape feare.
Actually, you're right, in terms of the bird shooting episode. That was season 10. The shoplifting episode was season 7. I still consider first half "early", in a sense, but I can see what you're saying.
Let's just say that the first ten years were different in character, I think, than the later ten.
As far as one-dimensionality goes, I don't think the Simpsons were ever that complex. Bart shows a little bit of complexity in that he's not always the bratty little bastard he usually is. I think they did a great disservice to the Homer character by turning him into a dolt, but I think he's actually the most complex character on the show. Most of the time he's an older, dumber version of Bart, but there's almost always a real undertone of caring about the family (even though he's selfish and fails quite a bit). Lisa is a liberal intellectual parody, and Marge is just an overprotective mother stereotype.
I don't think The Simpsons really ever tried to emulate Family Guy or South Park. Family Guy is almost 99% shock value and political commentary, and The Simpsons almost never goes in that direction. And I think the only nexus between The Simpsons and South Park is that without The Simpsons coming first, South Park could never have existed. "Eat my shorts!", in its own, small way, paved the way for Cartman's "I made you eat your parents!". But South Park has always leaned towards the absurd gross-out, where The Simpsons plays it straight. Compare, for example, "24 Minutes" from The Simpsons, and "The Snuke", from South Park. Both are parodies of 24, but their take on the show demonstrates their respective philosophical aims. Whereas "24 Minutes" takes 24 and puts it in the Simpsons universe, to reinforce traits of the various characters, "The Snuke" puts South Park into the 24 framework, to make an overtly political point.
True, but while I was around 10 I had a book revolving around the original Christmas episode and through reruns had experienced many of the original prime time episodes. The social themes in those were not hard to grasp.
I think the first few seasons of the show were much more about family morality issue than the episodes that followed. The early episodes dealt with things like Bart's "bad" character (thinking specifically about the episode where he's caught shoplifting, and the one where he shoots a bird, and of course, the decapitation of the Jeremiah Springfield statue), whereas the later episodes had more general themes.
I think you're right about those earlier ones, but the later ones are a little more subtle, generally. (There was that one episode where they ripped on Fox, of course, but other than that...:))
Marge, a character from their children's TV shows,
Only if they're the same quality of parents who let their kids watch South Park, Family Guy, Drawn Together, or Adult Swim.
I'll grant you that some of the Simpsons humor might not be accessible to a "tween" or younger, but I don't think you can lump The Simpsons in with Drawn Together or South Park. I've only watched Drawn Together a couple of times, but, from what I've seen, it's got more in common with Fritz the Cat than with The Simpsons.
South Park, which I'm much more familiar with, is about 1000 times more scatological than anything that's ever been done on The Simpsons. (That's not a knock, by the way. I actually like South Park, for what it is, but the show delights in offending people and then tapping on a "lesson" at the end of the episode, as if that was the whole point of the episode. It only works sometimes.)
I don't think the Simpsons is totally irrelevant now. I think they've still done some good social commentary stuff lately. Granted, they haven't done anything mind-bending, but that's not the show's style, anyway. Anyone who's watched the show consistently knows what the show's politics are. For the most part, Lisa's the social conscience of the show.
To me, the this has interesting implications for the show.
1) Will Fox choose to have the Playboy spread written into the show somehow (e.g., mention it during one of the opening sequences -- possibly as a chalkboard gag)?
2) Since posing naked for a magazine os so out of character for Marge (c.f., "Take My Wife, Sleaze"), how will the back story be written up in Playboy and/or the show?
Yes saw that the leaching goes on. Another showing that the engineering at Palm are so bankrupt that instead of actually licensing the code to do what they want they are willing to steal IP and hack their way into iTunes. No need for FUD Palm are spreading enough themselves with this kind of crap.
Palm isn't "stealing" any IP. iTunes looks for a specific VID when a USB device is connected. All the Pre does (in Media Sync mode) is supply that VID. The VID itself is open to anyone who plugs in an iPhone or iPod. All they have to do is plug it into a Linux box and type "lsusb -v".
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Everybody in the world with a smart phone has licensed the code from Apple to allow syncing with iTunes or they wrote their own sync tool, Palm just hacks their way into someone else property. Palm should actually compete instead of whining about Apple cutting them out of a tool for which Apple paid all the engineering costs.
Palm actually has several sync options, any one of which would work with non-DRM'd iTunes music. Palm didn't do it because they don't have their own syncing option. They did it because some people simply want to continue to use iTunes.
my HOPE is that someday we won't have to wait on patent regulations for ideas to become publicly accessible and usable so that innovation can continue unhindered.
If you really want to see innovation unhindered, patents should be protected, to the fullest extent of the law. Very few innovations come about because (or at least mainly because) the innovator wants to make the world a better place for future generations. Most innovations come about because someone (either an individual, a government, or a corporation) sees a need in society and identifies a way to "monetize" that need, as the jargon goes. Of course, the way governments normally profit from such innovations is by getting the people in charge of different departments re-elected, but the principle is the same: It's not normally an altruistic exercise.
Removal of patents would be a serious disincentive to make these kinds of breakthroughs -- and especially these kinds of breakthroughs. Large organizations aren't going to waste their time on research that can be stolen right from under their noses, and this isn't the kind of thing someone is going to jerry-rig in his/her basement for $100.
Where the real problem is with patents is what people/institutions are allowed to patent. IMHO, it's insane to allow a naturally-occurring gene to be patented, but it's apparently happened before. That's the kind of nonsense that needs to stop, rather than the legitimate, novel innovations that inventors come up with.
The key phrase I used was Earth-like.
No, I think the key phrase is:... and, of course, enough time to do it in,...
If you want to argue that all (or most) Earth-like planets will produce intelligent life at some point, that's a perfectly good hypothesis. But even if that's true there still will be many Earth-like planets out there that's haven't reached that point yet (and might not last long enough to do so). My point was just that, if you take your post at face value, you find it "almost impossible to believe" an X could exist without Y, when you're standing on an X that didn't have Y for the vast majority of it's existence - and that sounds kind of silly.
How are you defining "Earth-like"? Are you defining it as a planet that will one day have Earth's conditions, or one that already has Earth's conditions? If we find a planet that has the same conditions we have now, it's likely they'll have intelligent life. The Earth is something like 4 or 5 billion years old. For most of that time, it didn't have the conditions it has now. Anatomically modern humans have been around for about 195,000 years. For most of that time, the Earth would've been recognizable to people today (albeit with different flora and fauna). So if we find a planet that looks the way that ours does now (in terms of atmosphere, etc.) I can't see any reason to think it wouldn't be at the same developmental stage that ours is at. And if a planet doesn't have those conditions, then how "Earth-like" is it?
Now, we will probably find a very different kind of species from us, and they would be at a significantly different technological level (since technology moves at a different rate than biology), but if you assume that intelligence will always emerge eventually, then if we find a planet that looks like ours, it will probably be at roughly the same stage of development as ours (except, as I said, for the technological development).
The idea of the food chain is that the animals above eat the animals below. Cow eats grass. Human eats cow. That kind of thing. It's a predator-prey relationship. When I say humans are at the top of the food chain (in the literal sense) I mean that man has no natural predators. Nothing naturally hunts us for food. At most, humans get killed when they antagonize an animal (getting between a female lion and her cubs, for example).
So what you meant above was: "if another race of intelligent beings was found somewhere else in the universe, it would topple the idea of humans having no natural predators"?
I think you might want to revise that argument.
This is why I specified "in a literal sense". If we found another race of beings somewhere in the universe, and they were "superior" to us, in intellect, technology, or just brute power, we might become their prey. Maybe not in the gastronomical sense, but at the very least, in the competition for resources. To put it in a really basic way, for probably the first time in our species' existence since we developed agriculture, we'd have real competition for resources from other animals (in this case, the aliens).
Your alternate theory concerns what, in particular, in man is made in God's image. That's not what I'm addressing here. What I'm addressing is what it means symbolically to be made in God's image. The symbolic significance would seem to be that humans are closer to God (i.e., his chosen people) than any other creature. If we were confronted with a species that was as well or better off than us in significant ways, that would pose a problem for that vview.
It would only pose a problem for the view that we're the only favoured ones. But the notion of each planet having its own favoured species wouldn't pose any fundamental theological problems.
Are you sure about that? It seems to me that if humans suddenly saw themselves as only one of potentially billions of "favored" species, a lot of people wouldn't exactly enthusiastically embrace that idea. There are people who reject evolution for essentially the same reason: They want man to be set apart and special, not just one of billions of things God has created.
The idea of other humans having no soul or a lesser soul is a rather backward view that I doubt anyone still subscribes to nowadays.
Although I'm sure some people will want to convert the aliens.
Having no soul or a lesser soul isn't really that foreign to Christianity. Sure, that's not a common view about humans (although one could argue that certain sects of Christianity believe that they are the "elect" or "chosen", which I think at least implies that anyone outside the group is "lesser"). It's a very common view about animals, though. And I think what you'll find in a lot of literalist circles is that they won't rush to embrace the idea that there were all of these additional beings that God made deals with and acts of creation that were never spoken about in the bible. You're talking about a theology that doesn't have man at the center of the universe, and that's going to be very hard for a lot of people to accept.
I think you're painting Christianity to be far more open-minded than it actually is.
And I am certain that you're painting Christianity as far more backwards than it really is. I'm not going to argue that all Christians are this open minded, but many are.
I can't argue that there aren't any Christians who would be open to the idea. But I think a very significant proportion of them wouldn't be, simply because it causes them the same problem as evolution does: It makes humans less special. It even makes creation less special. One of the favorite arguments of people who a
2) Indeed, the idea of the soul being "God's image" is old, but that's not the point, really. The point is that if another race of intelligent beings was found somewhere else in the universe, it would topple the idea of humans being the top of the food chain.
Wasn't the point of a food chain that it's a circular thing? We're being eaten by bugs and worms (and the occasional shark) and all that? But even if we are at the top of the food chain on our planet, how would life on a different planet change that? They're bound to be in exactly the same dominant position on their planet as we are on ours.
The food chain isn't circular. If it was circular, it would be called a cycle (or, if you like the circular chain idea, maybe a bracelet).
The idea of the food chain is that the animals above eat the animals below. Cow eats grass. Human eats cow. That kind of thing. It's a predator-prey relationship. When I say humans are at the top of the food chain (in the literal sense) I mean that man has no natural predators. Nothing naturally hunts us for food. At most, humans get killed when they antagonize an animal (getting between a female lion and her cubs, for example).
Believers would have to find some other way to explain how we were still God's favored ones (which is almost certainly what "in God's image" was meant to imply).
That's not at all certain. I just gave you an excellent alternative theory (that fits the bill much better, IMO).
Your alternate theory concerns what, in particular, in man is made in God's image. That's not what I'm addressing here. What I'm addressing is what it means symbolically to be made in God's image. The symbolic significance would seem to be that humans are closer to God (i.e., his chosen people) than any other creature. If we were confronted with a species that was as well or better off than us in significant ways, that would pose a problem for that vview.
And they'd do it by saying something like our soul is more advanced than the soul of the beings that we encounter.
A "more advanced soul"? What does that even mean?
Europeans used the same kinds of arguments against indigenous people all the time. Even the most advanced race can be thought of as "poor, ignorant savages" if your definition of knowledge includes knowing God. Even people in the same culture can have those kinds of thoughts about each other, if one groups religious practices are outside the norm for that community.
I think the discussion (in Christian circles at least) is much more likely to be about whether they have their own original sin (or maybe ours applies to them too?), whether they're in need of salvation too, whether Jesus' death on the cross applies to them too (or maybe they've had their own messiah?), etc. There's no need to make up (new) weird nonsense to keep believing in anything, it just raised new theological questions.
If they have an advanced civilisation and dominate their planet in the same way we do, it's a good bet that they have a similar favoured position in God's eyes as we do. The big question is: did they fall like we did (having stuff like sin, crime and politics) or did they not fall, which means they'd be some sort of perfect beings without crime and suffering. (Yeah, I'm betting on the first one here.)
Of course having established that they're just as sinful as we are, some people will want to push their religion on the aliens, causing all sorts of new suffering.
I think you're painting Christianity to be far more open-minded than it actually is. In Christianity, there is no "other" Jesus to turn to. There's also the Adam & Eve problem. If you try to keep creationism in the mix, you've got to explain a) multiple creation events, and b) why God said that we
1) Human beings are animals. Nothing distinguishes us from them, per se.
Nothing? Seriously? Are you saying other animals are just as capable of developing our level of culture and art? Of abstract discussion? Of undersatanding science? Of controlling fire, inventing cars and computers?
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying that human beings aren't different from other animals. I'm saying that human beings are animals. We're not a separate category just because we can speak to each other and write (which is where all those other things you mention come from).
We're (most of the time) thinking animals, but that's it.
That's a pretty big "it" if you ask me.
Maybe yes, maybe no. We don't really have a good way of finding out what, if anything, other species are thinking right now. In certain animals, we understand what different behaviors mean generally, but we don't have any way of discerning any more specifically what and how animals are thinking, beyond simple tests to see if they have, for example, the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror and such.
Understanding what other species are actually thinking will only come when animals have a sufficient grasp of our communication to try and match us on our terms. I certainly don't expect a Shakespearian sonnet from a chimp any time soon, but they seem capable of at least a limited form of ASL at this point, and that could be built upon. That's not a bad first step. The thing that has to be remembered is that thinking and expressing those thoughts are two different things. I think it's anthropocentric to believe that just because animals don't chat with us, they can't have thoughts worth expressing.
And it's not even clear that we're the only thinking animals, depending on how you deinfe "rational thought". Other animals use tools, make decisions, etc.
And you really don't see a difference between their tools and decisions and ours?
We generally use better, more sophisticated tools and materials. But a lot of that could be anatomical, rather than because we're more intelligent. What's a dolphin or a great whale going to build? I've never actually tried it, but I don't think you'd be too successful trying to do smelting underwater (especially in salt water). And that's if you can somehow get around the serious impediment of not having hands (let alone opposable thumbs). Higher primates would obviously have an easier time building such structures, physically, but I don't recall ever hearing of a chimp that did problem solving tasks above the level of a first grader. And you generally don't see first graders in construction or engineering positions. But no one would argue that first graders can't think. They certainly lack some perceptual skills and the ability to think very abstract thoughts, but that doesn't mean they're not thinking.
What actually seems to distinguish us the most from other animals is written communication. If chimps, whales, or dolphins ever start writing things down, though, we might be in deep shit.:)
And your claim is that that is not related to rational thought?
Really, the difference we're talking about here is not one of gradual steps, it's one of many orders of magnitude.
No. My claim is that speech and writing are not the sin qua non of rational thought. Sophisticated prolbem-solving can take place without them.
Sorry. I forgot I had another point.:)
2) Indeed, the idea of the soul being "God's image" is old, but that's not the point, really. The point is that if another race of intelligent beings was found somewhere else in the universe, it would topple the idea of humans being the top of the food chain. Believers would have to find some other way to explain how we were still God's favored ones (which is almost certainly what "in God's image" was meant to imply). And they'd do it by saying something like our soul is more advanced than the soul of the beings that we encounter. That would be enough for them to keep believing. Like I said, people make up all kinds of nonsense to keep believing that which they can't afford to give up on.
No sooner will the discovery be made than you'll have theologians "discovering" that the thing "made in God's image" is the soul, not the body
The idea that "God's image" is not about the body is hardly a new one. 3 dimensional bodies are part of this universe. God, as creator of this universe, by necessity isn't. My guess is that "God's image" is about rational though, as that's what distinguishes us from animals.
Two points here:
1) Human beings are animals. Nothing distinguishes us from them, per se. We're (most of the time) thinking animals, but that's it. And it's not even clear that we're the only thinking animals, depending on how you deinfe "rational thought". Other animals use tools, make decisions, etc. What actually seems to distinguish us the most from other animals is written communication. If chimps, whales, or dolphins ever start writing things down, though, we might be in deep shit.:)
I don't think we'd find "little green men"-type life on a planet close enough to us for us to observe (at this stage in our technology, at least). Assuming that stars form at the same rate at the same distance from the center of the Big Bang (which may or may not be true, but which I think makes some sense), I don't think there would be enough time for it. But in a region of the universe with a Sun-type star that formed, say, a billion years before ours, it's hard to say what life would be like. Humans have only had written communication for something like 6,000 years. Life having that much of a head start on us brings up a lot of questions.
There's also, of course, the possibility that an intelligent race of beings would also have our aggression, and would eventually kill themselves off, so maybe it's not even possible for intelligent life to evolve for one billion continuous years...
And if the inhabitants are nothing like humans but have a dominant religion claiming that they were "created in god's image"?
Or does that just mean that their religion is wrong (like all the other ones on Earth)?
I think you underestimate the lengths people will go to in order to insulate their religion from falsification. Sure, it might upset some evangelicals, but that's a small group, compared to either a) the sheep who will believe what their pastors tell them to believe, and b) those who will come up with the latest mental gymnastics to think themselves out of this quandary. No sooner will the discovery be made than you'll have theologians "discovering" that the thing "made in God's image" is the soul, not the body -- a message this other lifeform either hasn't "heard" or "understood".
People have an unfortunately large capacity to take perfectly good facts, and assimilate them into their own bullshit ideas.:)
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Technically, it's the novaterm application (distributed w/ the SDK) that allows root access to the Pre. But the Pre needs to be in dev mode (w/ the konami code or the newer code) in order for the novaterm application to work.
Apple doesn't care what you do with the iPhone, but they do have to close the holes that enable jailbreaking because they're security holes through which Something Bad could go to Do Something Bad.
Apple absolutely does care what you do with the iPhone. That's why they've updated the ROM in newer 3Gs models to prevent jailbreaking.
If Apple was okay with jailbreaking, and just interested in closing security holes, they would work on those holes, rather than on preventing jailbreaking altogether. (In fact, that's exactly what Palm does do. One of the first methods to install apps on a Pre was to e-mail yourself a link to an application. Palm (rightfully) closed that hole, but left intact the ability to root a Pre.
And I agree with stillpixel. I wouldn't be shocked if Apple themselves had a hand in this.
Thinking that Apple someone had a hand in creating this "worm" for jailbroken iPhones is not only considerably misguided (and unfounded), it's utterly moronic.
I didn't say I believe that Apple had a hand in it. I said I wouldn't be shocked if they did. They've got a vested interest in keeping people from jailbreaking, and this kind of thing (especially because it's relatively innocuous) fits the bill.
In the case of WebOS, you have to be careful with the term "jailbreak". The process for WebOS is nothing remotely similar to what you have to do with an iPhone. In WebOS, it's a simple matter of entering one of two codes.
The other difference, of course, is that Palm wants people to hack on the Pre (and soon, the Pixi) as much as possible. They encourage the homebrew community, and don't even clamp down on apps that Sprint would prefer to not have on their phones like MyTether. (Sure, they don't have MyTether in the App Catalog, but they could easily prevent it from being installed altogether, if they had a mind to.)
As far as the original article, the really unfortunate thing is that Apple's likely reaction to this will be, "So? We told you not to jailbreak your iPhone!" It will lend some (false) legitimacy to the idea that jailbreaking an iphone is wrong, which will only help Apple lock down iPhones further in the future.
And I agree with stillpixel. I wouldn't be shocked if Apple themselves had a hand in this.
I actually did pay for a Gmail invite, in the brief period of time when the only reliable way you could get one was to win it on Ebay. My Gmail service is far more reliable than say, my Internet or cell services. While Gmail has had high-profile outages, I don't think the reliability has been anything near as bad as you've seen with some other online services.
Having said that, unlike the litl, at least Gmail lets you download your content.
I'm just not seeing a market for this thing. While a netbook does rely more heavily on online services than a traditional notebook, at least with a netbook there's a tacit acknowledgement that people have to do a few more things than browse the Web. The litl doesn't even let you create on the device, and then transfer to a service. Epic fail.
we have no idea whether it is even possible to test the theory of "God exists."
Actually we do; it's explicitly impossible to test the theory of 'God exists'. Or rather, it's impossible to falsify it which is what any meaningful test should do.
It's not entirely impossible to falsify the theory of "God exists". But first, you have to have a concrete definition of what "God" is. If you define "God" as an omnipotent, omniscient, loving being, you can make predictions about what a universe run by an omnipotent, omniscient, loving being should look like. If it doesn't look like that, then you've falsified that definition of "God". Most people are unwilling to submit the idea of God to that kind of a test, though, because they're simply not interested in falsifying the idea in the first place.
In the end, the earth belongs to those who have the most babies, and, all those things you advocate, undermine your own culture as much as they undermine your genes.
Survival of the fittest is about adaptation, not about who can have the most babies. When resources start to run out it is the species that is ready to change and adapt that wins out. I don't think anyone will disagree with me when I say religions aren't exactly proponents of change.
You're correct that evolution is about adaptation, but birth rates are closely linked to that. Traits only get passed on if they survive, and the more offspring you have with a given trait, the more likely it is that that trait will survive. In addition, the more offspring you have, the more likely one of them will have a significant mutation (just because of probabilities), and it's these genetic mutations that fuel evolution.
I never understood the "pro-life" (actually more like anti-health) movement. A fetus is nothing special. Because a human is nothing special. It is very arrogant to think that we're oh-so-special. We're not. Life in itself is nothing special. It's just a state of the machine of the class "lifeform". You can make a new fetus in what? Weeks? And this time a healthy one. One that is more likely to create healthy offspring. Or even offspring at all.
The numbers of people who have a very hard time making children grows like crazy. With the current trend, in 3 generations, there will be no human left in the western world, who can reproduce without advanced medical help. A few generations later we're done. At least if we continue to go that way.
There are at least two problems with this line of thinking:
1) It reduces human beings to the level of disposable widgets. While it's true that there's nothing special about the human species on a biological level, actually behaving that way leads to some very dark places.
2) I can't speak for everyone, but I consider my life pretty damn special, and I would take particular, violent exception to anyone who intended to treat it as trivially expendable.
If you want to talk about it on an evolutionary level, the way you get biological diversity is to not kill off your offspring. Sure, badly deformed offspring probably wouldn't live to reproduce anyway, but the current abortion climate goes well beyond that, into eliminating healthy offspring. (Last time I checked, being poor or underprivileged was not a congenital birth defect. And I should know, since I have such a birth defect.)
If the issue is really babies being born to drug-addicted mothers, or being born into abusive homes, how about treating drug addiction and improving child welfare services? Wouldn't that work out just a tad better than allowing the hellish conditions to persist and just endeavoring to make sure that children were never born into them? After all, you can't force an unfit mother to have an abortion any more than you can force someone to be a good parent.
As to the article itself: I think the technology will be used for both treatment and abortions. Some couples will go in one direction, some will go in the other. It's the same with most pre-natal screening. The technology, broadly speaking, allows the couple to make an informed decision about what they want to do. Their actual decision could go either way.
Limbo isn't a place of suffering in Catholic dogma. In fact, it's a place of peace and contentment. It's just not as good as being in Heaven with God. It's Purgatory that's "Hell Lite" (for lack of a better term). In Purgatory, you work off your sin through suffering, in order to get to Heaven. The concept of Purgatory lead to the concept of indulgences, which lead to Martin Luther's 95 Theses, and thus to the Protestant Reformation. So all in all, Purgatory solved a problem for the Church (insofar as it allowed soldiers to engage in brutal combat but still get a shot at salvation if they died), but caused a much larger problem in that it was ripe for abuse.
While e-books obviously do have battery limitations, they're not as much of an issue as one might think. My Kindle easily lasts a week at a time with moderate (e.g., a few hours a day reading a book) use. Obviously, YMMV, and things go downhill once you start doing a lot of Web surfing on the devices, but it's not at all like a PMP or an iPhone in terms of battery usage.
You can fit dozens or hundreds of paperbacks on a Kindle. Okay, so it won't fit in your pocket, but it'll fit in a book bag, briefcase, or suitcase easily.
I think this one depends a lot on the user. Generally, anything not DRM'd can be converted to another format, so if you really want to stave off obsolescence, you can convert to TXT format (albeit with the loss of graphics that implies). And once you've got your e-book in an open format, it's much easier to secure from damage than a paper book. With a few clicks, you can have multiple copies across several server, so that even the complete destruction of one copy doesn't leave you without the content.
DRM is a problem, and, although I'm not one of them, I acknowledge that there are some people who are in love with the physicality of books. (I do think, however, that the physicality issue is just a matter of technological shift. There were people, in ye olden days (say, 20 years ago) who loved to write letters and notes to their friends. Now they text and write e-mails. People are much more adaptive than we give them credit for sometimes.)
Problem with EInk displays (at least current generation ones) is that contrast is very bad.
Even though the purely reflective screen is a good step, the fact that you are reading grey text on light-grey background is a killer for the eyes
The contrast on the Kindle (I haven't tried any other e-paper device) isn't perfect, by any means, but it's still a substantially better experience than reading on a back-lit device, by a wide margin. I've read on Palm handhelds from the Palm Pilot II to as recently as the Centro (a total of 5 or so models I've owned, over the years) and the experience on a back-lit screen (particularly color) is nicer, aesthetically, for short reading, and certainly for maps (since epaper devices don't currently do color), but for longer reading, it's not all that pleasant, comparatively. It's much easier (at least, for me) to live with lower contrast than to stare into a bright light to read.
i'm 31 and i think of the shoplifting and bird shooting episode as later episodes. The first "premiere" of a simpsons ep i watched was cape feare.
Actually, you're right, in terms of the bird shooting episode. That was season 10. The shoplifting episode was season 7. I still consider first half "early", in a sense, but I can see what you're saying.
Let's just say that the first ten years were different in character, I think, than the later ten.
As far as one-dimensionality goes, I don't think the Simpsons were ever that complex. Bart shows a little bit of complexity in that he's not always the bratty little bastard he usually is. I think they did a great disservice to the Homer character by turning him into a dolt, but I think he's actually the most complex character on the show. Most of the time he's an older, dumber version of Bart, but there's almost always a real undertone of caring about the family (even though he's selfish and fails quite a bit). Lisa is a liberal intellectual parody, and Marge is just an overprotective mother stereotype.
I don't think The Simpsons really ever tried to emulate Family Guy or South Park. Family Guy is almost 99% shock value and political commentary, and The Simpsons almost never goes in that direction. And I think the only nexus between The Simpsons and South Park is that without The Simpsons coming first, South Park could never have existed. "Eat my shorts!", in its own, small way, paved the way for Cartman's "I made you eat your parents!". But South Park has always leaned towards the absurd gross-out, where The Simpsons plays it straight. Compare, for example, "24 Minutes" from The Simpsons, and "The Snuke", from South Park. Both are parodies of 24, but their take on the show demonstrates their respective philosophical aims. Whereas "24 Minutes" takes 24 and puts it in the Simpsons universe, to reinforce traits of the various characters, "The Snuke" puts South Park into the 24 framework, to make an overtly political point.
True, but while I was around 10 I had a book revolving around the original Christmas episode and through reruns had experienced many of the original prime time episodes. The social themes in those were not hard to grasp.
I think the first few seasons of the show were much more about family morality issue than the episodes that followed. The early episodes dealt with things like Bart's "bad" character (thinking specifically about the episode where he's caught shoplifting, and the one where he shoots a bird, and of course, the decapitation of the Jeremiah Springfield statue), whereas the later episodes had more general themes. I think you're right about those earlier ones, but the later ones are a little more subtle, generally. (There was that one episode where they ripped on Fox, of course, but other than that... :))
Marge, a character from their children's TV shows,
Only if they're the same quality of parents who let their kids watch South Park, Family Guy, Drawn Together, or Adult Swim.
I'll grant you that some of the Simpsons humor might not be accessible to a "tween" or younger, but I don't think you can lump The Simpsons in with Drawn Together or South Park. I've only watched Drawn Together a couple of times, but, from what I've seen, it's got more in common with Fritz the Cat than with The Simpsons. South Park, which I'm much more familiar with, is about 1000 times more scatological than anything that's ever been done on The Simpsons. (That's not a knock, by the way. I actually like South Park, for what it is, but the show delights in offending people and then tapping on a "lesson" at the end of the episode, as if that was the whole point of the episode. It only works sometimes.)
The only cartoon that beats your head with it more is Southpark.
Nah. My vote's for "American Dad" or "Family Guy" (which are pretty much interchangeable).
I don't think the Simpsons is totally irrelevant now. I think they've still done some good social commentary stuff lately. Granted, they haven't done anything mind-bending, but that's not the show's style, anyway. Anyone who's watched the show consistently knows what the show's politics are. For the most part, Lisa's the social conscience of the show. To me, the this has interesting implications for the show. 1) Will Fox choose to have the Playboy spread written into the show somehow (e.g., mention it during one of the opening sequences -- possibly as a chalkboard gag)? 2) Since posing naked for a magazine os so out of character for Marge (c.f., "Take My Wife, Sleaze"), how will the back story be written up in Playboy and/or the show?
Yes saw that the leaching goes on. Another showing that the engineering at Palm are so bankrupt that instead of actually licensing the code to do what they want they are willing to steal IP and hack their way into iTunes. No need for FUD Palm are spreading enough themselves with this kind of crap.
Palm isn't "stealing" any IP. iTunes looks for a specific VID when a USB device is connected. All the Pre does (in Media Sync mode) is supply that VID. The VID itself is open to anyone who plugs in an iPhone or iPod. All they have to do is plug it into a Linux box and type "lsusb -v".
quote> Everybody in the world with a smart phone has licensed the code from Apple to allow syncing with iTunes or they wrote their own sync tool, Palm just hacks their way into someone else property. Palm should actually compete instead of whining about Apple cutting them out of a tool for which Apple paid all the engineering costs.
Palm actually has several sync options, any one of which would work with non-DRM'd iTunes music. Palm didn't do it because they don't have their own syncing option. They did it because some people simply want to continue to use iTunes.
If you really want to see innovation unhindered, patents should be protected, to the fullest extent of the law. Very few innovations come about because (or at least mainly because) the innovator wants to make the world a better place for future generations. Most innovations come about because someone (either an individual, a government, or a corporation) sees a need in society and identifies a way to "monetize" that need, as the jargon goes. Of course, the way governments normally profit from such innovations is by getting the people in charge of different departments re-elected, but the principle is the same: It's not normally an altruistic exercise.
Removal of patents would be a serious disincentive to make these kinds of breakthroughs -- and especially these kinds of breakthroughs. Large organizations aren't going to waste their time on research that can be stolen right from under their noses, and this isn't the kind of thing someone is going to jerry-rig in his/her basement for $100.
Where the real problem is with patents is what people/institutions are allowed to patent. IMHO, it's insane to allow a naturally-occurring gene to be patented, but it's apparently happened before. That's the kind of nonsense that needs to stop, rather than the legitimate, novel innovations that inventors come up with.
The key phrase I used was Earth-like. No, I think the key phrase is: ... and, of course, enough time to do it in, ...
If you want to argue that all (or most) Earth-like planets will produce intelligent life at some point, that's a perfectly good hypothesis. But even if that's true there still will be many Earth-like planets out there that's haven't reached that point yet (and might not last long enough to do so). My point was just that, if you take your post at face value, you find it "almost impossible to believe" an X could exist without Y, when you're standing on an X that didn't have Y for the vast majority of it's existence - and that sounds kind of silly.
How are you defining "Earth-like"? Are you defining it as a planet that will one day have Earth's conditions, or one that already has Earth's conditions? If we find a planet that has the same conditions we have now, it's likely they'll have intelligent life. The Earth is something like 4 or 5 billion years old. For most of that time, it didn't have the conditions it has now. Anatomically modern humans have been around for about 195,000 years. For most of that time, the Earth would've been recognizable to people today (albeit with different flora and fauna). So if we find a planet that looks the way that ours does now (in terms of atmosphere, etc.) I can't see any reason to think it wouldn't be at the same developmental stage that ours is at. And if a planet doesn't have those conditions, then how "Earth-like" is it?
Now, we will probably find a very different kind of species from us, and they would be at a significantly different technological level (since technology moves at a different rate than biology), but if you assume that intelligence will always emerge eventually, then if we find a planet that looks like ours, it will probably be at roughly the same stage of development as ours (except, as I said, for the technological development).
The idea of the food chain is that the animals above eat the animals below. Cow eats grass. Human eats cow. That kind of thing. It's a predator-prey relationship. When I say humans are at the top of the food chain (in the literal sense) I mean that man has no natural predators. Nothing naturally hunts us for food. At most, humans get killed when they antagonize an animal (getting between a female lion and her cubs, for example).
So what you meant above was: "if another race of intelligent beings was found somewhere else in the universe, it would topple the idea of humans having no natural predators"?
I think you might want to revise that argument.
This is why I specified "in a literal sense". If we found another race of beings somewhere in the universe, and they were "superior" to us, in intellect, technology, or just brute power, we might become their prey. Maybe not in the gastronomical sense, but at the very least, in the competition for resources. To put it in a really basic way, for probably the first time in our species' existence since we developed agriculture, we'd have real competition for resources from other animals (in this case, the aliens).
Your alternate theory concerns what, in particular, in man is made in God's image. That's not what I'm addressing here. What I'm addressing is what it means symbolically to be made in God's image. The symbolic significance would seem to be that humans are closer to God (i.e., his chosen people) than any other creature. If we were confronted with a species that was as well or better off than us in significant ways, that would pose a problem for that vview.
It would only pose a problem for the view that we're the only favoured ones. But the notion of each planet having its own favoured species wouldn't pose any fundamental theological problems.
Are you sure about that? It seems to me that if humans suddenly saw themselves as only one of potentially billions of "favored" species, a lot of people wouldn't exactly enthusiastically embrace that idea. There are people who reject evolution for essentially the same reason: They want man to be set apart and special, not just one of billions of things God has created.
The idea of other humans having no soul or a lesser soul is a rather backward view that I doubt anyone still subscribes to nowadays.
Although I'm sure some people will want to convert the aliens.
Having no soul or a lesser soul isn't really that foreign to Christianity. Sure, that's not a common view about humans (although one could argue that certain sects of Christianity believe that they are the "elect" or "chosen", which I think at least implies that anyone outside the group is "lesser"). It's a very common view about animals, though. And I think what you'll find in a lot of literalist circles is that they won't rush to embrace the idea that there were all of these additional beings that God made deals with and acts of creation that were never spoken about in the bible. You're talking about a theology that doesn't have man at the center of the universe, and that's going to be very hard for a lot of people to accept.
I think you're painting Christianity to be far more open-minded than it actually is.
And I am certain that you're painting Christianity as far more backwards than it really is. I'm not going to argue that all Christians are this open minded, but many are.
I can't argue that there aren't any Christians who would be open to the idea. But I think a very significant proportion of them wouldn't be, simply because it causes them the same problem as evolution does: It makes humans less special. It even makes creation less special. One of the favorite arguments of people who a
2) Indeed, the idea of the soul being "God's image" is old, but that's not the point, really. The point is that if another race of intelligent beings was found somewhere else in the universe, it would topple the idea of humans being the top of the food chain.
Wasn't the point of a food chain that it's a circular thing? We're being eaten by bugs and worms (and the occasional shark) and all that? But even if we are at the top of the food chain on our planet, how would life on a different planet change that? They're bound to be in exactly the same dominant position on their planet as we are on ours.
The food chain isn't circular. If it was circular, it would be called a cycle (or, if you like the circular chain idea, maybe a bracelet).
The idea of the food chain is that the animals above eat the animals below. Cow eats grass. Human eats cow. That kind of thing. It's a predator-prey relationship. When I say humans are at the top of the food chain (in the literal sense) I mean that man has no natural predators. Nothing naturally hunts us for food. At most, humans get killed when they antagonize an animal (getting between a female lion and her cubs, for example).
Believers would have to find some other way to explain how we were still God's favored ones (which is almost certainly what "in God's image" was meant to imply).
That's not at all certain. I just gave you an excellent alternative theory (that fits the bill much better, IMO).
Your alternate theory concerns what, in particular, in man is made in God's image. That's not what I'm addressing here. What I'm addressing is what it means symbolically to be made in God's image. The symbolic significance would seem to be that humans are closer to God (i.e., his chosen people) than any other creature. If we were confronted with a species that was as well or better off than us in significant ways, that would pose a problem for that vview.
And they'd do it by saying something like our soul is more advanced than the soul of the beings that we encounter.
A "more advanced soul"? What does that even mean?
Europeans used the same kinds of arguments against indigenous people all the time. Even the most advanced race can be thought of as "poor, ignorant savages" if your definition of knowledge includes knowing God. Even people in the same culture can have those kinds of thoughts about each other, if one groups religious practices are outside the norm for that community.
I think the discussion (in Christian circles at least) is much more likely to be about whether they have their own original sin (or maybe ours applies to them too?), whether they're in need of salvation too, whether Jesus' death on the cross applies to them too (or maybe they've had their own messiah?), etc. There's no need to make up (new) weird nonsense to keep believing in anything, it just raised new theological questions.
If they have an advanced civilisation and dominate their planet in the same way we do, it's a good bet that they have a similar favoured position in God's eyes as we do. The big question is: did they fall like we did (having stuff like sin, crime and politics) or did they not fall, which means they'd be some sort of perfect beings without crime and suffering. (Yeah, I'm betting on the first one here.)
Of course having established that they're just as sinful as we are, some people will want to push their religion on the aliens, causing all sorts of new suffering.
I think you're painting Christianity to be far more open-minded than it actually is. In Christianity, there is no "other" Jesus to turn to. There's also the Adam & Eve problem. If you try to keep creationism in the mix, you've got to explain a) multiple creation events, and b) why God said that we
1) Human beings are animals. Nothing distinguishes us from them, per se.
Nothing? Seriously? Are you saying other animals are just as capable of developing our level of culture and art? Of abstract discussion? Of undersatanding science? Of controlling fire, inventing cars and computers?
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying that human beings aren't different from other animals. I'm saying that human beings are animals. We're not a separate category just because we can speak to each other and write (which is where all those other things you mention come from).
We're (most of the time) thinking animals, but that's it.
That's a pretty big "it" if you ask me.
Maybe yes, maybe no. We don't really have a good way of finding out what, if anything, other species are thinking right now. In certain animals, we understand what different behaviors mean generally, but we don't have any way of discerning any more specifically what and how animals are thinking, beyond simple tests to see if they have, for example, the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror and such.
Understanding what other species are actually thinking will only come when animals have a sufficient grasp of our communication to try and match us on our terms. I certainly don't expect a Shakespearian sonnet from a chimp any time soon, but they seem capable of at least a limited form of ASL at this point, and that could be built upon. That's not a bad first step. The thing that has to be remembered is that thinking and expressing those thoughts are two different things. I think it's anthropocentric to believe that just because animals don't chat with us, they can't have thoughts worth expressing.
And it's not even clear that we're the only thinking animals, depending on how you deinfe "rational thought". Other animals use tools, make decisions, etc.
And you really don't see a difference between their tools and decisions and ours?
We generally use better, more sophisticated tools and materials. But a lot of that could be anatomical, rather than because we're more intelligent. What's a dolphin or a great whale going to build? I've never actually tried it, but I don't think you'd be too successful trying to do smelting underwater (especially in salt water). And that's if you can somehow get around the serious impediment of not having hands (let alone opposable thumbs). Higher primates would obviously have an easier time building such structures, physically, but I don't recall ever hearing of a chimp that did problem solving tasks above the level of a first grader. And you generally don't see first graders in construction or engineering positions. But no one would argue that first graders can't think. They certainly lack some perceptual skills and the ability to think very abstract thoughts, but that doesn't mean they're not thinking.
What actually seems to distinguish us the most from other animals is written communication. If chimps, whales, or dolphins ever start writing things down, though, we might be in deep shit. :)
And your claim is that that is not related to rational thought?
Really, the difference we're talking about here is not one of gradual steps, it's one of many orders of magnitude.
No. My claim is that speech and writing are not the sin qua non of rational thought. Sophisticated prolbem-solving can take place without them.
Sorry. I forgot I had another point. :)
2) Indeed, the idea of the soul being "God's image" is old, but that's not the point, really. The point is that if another race of intelligent beings was found somewhere else in the universe, it would topple the idea of humans being the top of the food chain. Believers would have to find some other way to explain how we were still God's favored ones (which is almost certainly what "in God's image" was meant to imply). And they'd do it by saying something like our soul is more advanced than the soul of the beings that we encounter. That would be enough for them to keep believing. Like I said, people make up all kinds of nonsense to keep believing that which they can't afford to give up on.
No sooner will the discovery be made than you'll have theologians "discovering" that the thing "made in God's image" is the soul, not the body
The idea that "God's image" is not about the body is hardly a new one. 3 dimensional bodies are part of this universe. God, as creator of this universe, by necessity isn't. My guess is that "God's image" is about rational though, as that's what distinguishes us from animals.
Two points here:
:)
1) Human beings are animals. Nothing distinguishes us from them, per se. We're (most of the time) thinking animals, but that's it. And it's not even clear that we're the only thinking animals, depending on how you deinfe "rational thought". Other animals use tools, make decisions, etc. What actually seems to distinguish us the most from other animals is written communication. If chimps, whales, or dolphins ever start writing things down, though, we might be in deep shit.
I don't think we'd find "little green men"-type life on a planet close enough to us for us to observe (at this stage in our technology, at least). Assuming that stars form at the same rate at the same distance from the center of the Big Bang (which may or may not be true, but which I think makes some sense), I don't think there would be enough time for it. But in a region of the universe with a Sun-type star that formed, say, a billion years before ours, it's hard to say what life would be like. Humans have only had written communication for something like 6,000 years. Life having that much of a head start on us brings up a lot of questions.
There's also, of course, the possibility that an intelligent race of beings would also have our aggression, and would eventually kill themselves off, so maybe it's not even possible for intelligent life to evolve for one billion continuous years...
And if the inhabitants are nothing like humans but have a dominant religion claiming that they were "created in god's image"? Or does that just mean that their religion is wrong (like all the other ones on Earth)?
I think you underestimate the lengths people will go to in order to insulate their religion from falsification. Sure, it might upset some evangelicals, but that's a small group, compared to either a) the sheep who will believe what their pastors tell them to believe, and b) those who will come up with the latest mental gymnastics to think themselves out of this quandary. No sooner will the discovery be made than you'll have theologians "discovering" that the thing "made in God's image" is the soul, not the body -- a message this other lifeform either hasn't "heard" or "understood". People have an unfortunately large capacity to take perfectly good facts, and assimilate them into their own bullshit ideas. :)