That's an interesting idea. So to go a little further with it, maybe the radio spectrum is too precious to devote one frequency to broadcasts that cover hundreds of square miles (or kilometers, or space-man area units, whatever). So in the future, maybe we won't divide the spectrum up into these big monolithic channels with big monolithic 500,000W transmitters like we are doing with TV right now; instead, we'll have a bunch of short-range transmitters linked by fiber or something. Once it gets into space, literally billions of low-power broadcasts across a huge range of frequencies would just blend together as just a whole bunch of white noise.
On the other hand, there would probably continue to be regulatory
agencies controlling the spectrum, so the white noise would have notches
in it as an artifact of that. So it would at least look man-made.
On the other hand, if the way some other countries eat up the vapid cultural exports of the USA is any indication, the aliens may be on their way here right now, eagerly anticipating the moment when they get to meet the cast of "Baywatch".
Hopefully, a stream. I have no real idea why it should matter
what it's connecting to. That's a separate issue from what it
does, which is emulate a terminal, and I don't know why it would
make sense for the two things to be intertwined.
That's not to say it doesn't happen in some cases. There
are plenty of apps for Windows and so on that are a combination
of a telnet client and/or ssh client with a terminal emulator.
But there's no reason these components have to be combined into
on piece of software.
Yeah, deleted after a while. Like, scan it, then immediately look
it up in a hash table, and if the plate doesn't match that of a
stolen car, fugitive, or someone with an outstanding warrant, then
delete it right then and there, before it's written to any form
of non-volatile storage.
Just as people drive SUVs in order to feel safer sharing the road with other drivers in SUVs people gain weight in order to feel safer alongside other people who are big and fat and might otherwise crush them.
I'm not worried, because I have a plan. When the fat people
come and try to crush me, I'm heading to the nearest stairwell.
I'll go up one, maybe two, or even three floors. 30 minutes later,
when the fat people have made it to the top of the stairs and
caught their breath again, I'll have had time to set a buffet table
to draw them off my trail. Finally, I'll go wait out the attack in
the perfect hiding place, somewhere it'd never occur to them to go
in a million years: the gym.
The whole thing will probably unfold much like a zombie film,
only in slow motion and with more labored breathing but approximately
the same amount of grunting and moaning.
It is still somewhat of a stretch to say that Commodore buying Amiga led to its demise, since while the Amiga Corporation developed the Amiga, they never brought it to market.
Yeah, but after that, they dropped the ball spectacularly on one occasion after another over a period of 5+ years. When C= bought the platform, the competition had basically 320x200 graphics, 8 or 16 colors, no sampled sound at all, and 640K limit on RAM. The Amiga had 640x400 graphics, 4096 colors (in certain modes), built-in stereo 8-bit sampled sound, and a 9 MB limit on RAM. 8 or 10 years later, the competition had 800x600 graphics with 16 million colors, stereo 16-bit sampled sound, and supposed 64MB of memory. By that time, the Amiga still had 640x400 graphics, 4096 colors, 8-bit sound, and a 16MB limit on RAM.
SUSAN: Seven Costanza? You're serious?
GEORGE: Yeah. It's a beautiful name for a boy or a girl...
First of all, that's exactly what I thought of when I heard
that Vista++ == 7. First Microsoft copies Apple (well, Xerox), and
now they're copying Seinfeld. Pretty hilarious.
But, the thing is, Charles Schultz had
the idea
way before Seinfeld did. (And Schultz may not have been the
first.)
Say that again? C and C++ are standards-based languages with no official working implementation. That's definitely not "corporate-made", in the sense of Java (or C# for that matter).
Sure C and C++ are corporate-made. They were both created by
AT&T / Bell Labs. They have gone on to later be turned into
standardized languages, but Java has open standard as well.
Also, does Java have an official implementation? As far as I know,
it has the JLS and a number of JCP standards. And Sun does offer a
compiler and a JVM, but I am aware of nothing that makes that the
official implementation.
Just because you can put OpenGL bindings in a corporate fabricated language doesn't mean you should.
I agree. Whether a corporation invented the language should be the
deciding factor in whether it's used for OpenGL. That's why I would
never use C or C++ for calling OpenGL, but Perl would be a
perfectly good choice.
So why bother with the whole death thing? I understand the added baggage of the blood sacrifice, but the entire exercise seems futile if it's done for no reason at all. Wouldn't it have spared people a lot of grief to just ascend to heaven without the whole death thing.
That is a good question. If the sacrifice on the cross doesn't buy
anything (in the literal sense of the word), why do it? Well, personally,
after I had rejected penal substitutionary atonement, I thought about
that and decided it must be symbolic. There are many things in the
world that are purely symbolic but also highly important.
Symbolism is a way to communicate something.
For example, consider a wedding ring. It doesn't actually do
anything. The act of putting the ring on the finger isn't what makes
two people married. But it is a powerful symbol anyway, and I think
worthwhile for that reason.
So I think it's a pretty decent explanation
that Jesus went to the cross because it fit in with the Jewish tradition
and he wanted to say, "This is what I'm willing to do for you."
The Jewish tradition I'm talking about, of course, is animal sacrifice.
As I understand it, many (most? all?) of the animals sacrificed were used
for food by the priests (or their class) and would have been used for
food had they not been sacrificed. So, as I understand it, animal
sacrifice is not really about killing the animal (because that variable
factors out of the equation) but is instead about devoting yourself
to God's work and giving resources to that end, and giving your best
(IIRC, the law commanded
people to sacrifice their best animals). So when Jesus went to the cross,
it could be interpreted as a reference to this tradition: he chooses to
give something to show his devotion to his creation, and because he wants
to make it abundantly clear where he stands, he gives the best that he
can give as an incarnated human being, which is his life.
Maybe "self-propagating code" is a muddled way of saying code that doesn't
require a hardware hack to install it onto the iPhone. That is, maybe
it means code that can get into the iPhone without having to do complex
steps. This would certainly be high on the list of things to accomplish.
Oh yeah, I know everyone will want to de-solder their batteries from their $600 phone with some kit they bought on e-bay.
Just because they are soldered now does not mean a replacement kit
would require soldering (or desoldering). There are wires coming off
the board and running to the battery. A replacement kit could instruct
you to cut the wires at the battery end, thus leaving you with (from
the photos) about an inch of wire still connected to the iPhone's
board. The kit could then include something like wire nuts or some
other type of splicing thing to connect that to the replacement
battery.
Or to put it another way, solder is how the connection is made right
now, but it is not the only possible way to connect bare wires.
There are already consumer-oriented products on the market that
make connections to bare wire. For example, you can go to a hardware
store and buy switches or replacement plugs that can simply be
clamped onto a lamp cord.
One of the biggest factors in cracking the Enigma code was the fact that the German high command insisted that the settings for every wheel had to change every day. This dramatically reduced the search space. [... ] I always remember this whenever I get a password rejected by a system because it must contain at least one uppercase letter and one number...
I agree. I had a chuckle recently when we had a security training course
at work, and they went through a lot of explaining of what the rules are
for creating a "good password". There was a whole lot of this "must have
a number", and so on. But not only that, they gave you a sort of recipe
for doing it, with suggestions like "turn letter 'E' into a '3' or
letter 'O' into a '0'". These rules are great if you want to remove
entropy, because that's what rules do. But why do you want to
remove entropy from your "randomly"-chosen secret?
(I suppose it's not such a bad thing, though, if in actuality you're
substituting one so-so set of rules for a much worse set of rules,
like "always pick your girlfriend's first name".)
On a side note, I sometimes test people's knowledge of what randomness
means by saying "giving the same number many times in a row would be
a valid behavior for a truly random random number generator" and seeing
if they protest. If they do, I know that either they didn't listen to
the question closely or they don't understand what a random number is:
if it's disallowed for the current number to match the previous one,
then it's not random, because you have a requirement that there be a
negative correlation, whereas random means no correlation.
Which law of physics is it again which allows unknown entities the ability to fiddle with all aspects of life?
This question assumes things about metaphysics. Laws of physics most
certainly do not allow or disallow anything. Instead, they describe
patterns. "When I let go of this apple, it moves towards the earth."
It's not "it MUST move towards the earth". It's "it DOES move towards
the earth". Laws of physics are therefore not fundamentally
inconsistent with some outside force intervening. By its very
definition, the supernatural is "super" relative to the natural.
I can make a CPU that operates in a perfectly orderly way for
billions of clock cycles consecutively, but if I should decide to
take out the BIOS and reflash it, the order will be temporarily
suspended when intervene and will resume again when I stop
intervening.
Which permits the spontaneous creation of organisms in extremely complex forms which resemble closely what organisms should look like after a billion years of evolution or the like?
This doesn't need to be accounted for because a belief in evolution
has been a mainstream belief within (at least) Christianity for quite
some time. If you don't believe me, ask Pope Pius XII, who in 1950
officially declared evolution and Catholicism to be compatible. Or
ask Cardinal John Henry Newman, who said essentially the same thing
in 1868, only 9 years after The Origin of Species was published.
How is it that an all-good all-knowing god exists while suffering, pain, rape, genocide, natural disasters and all manner of things which are well enough to spring even the most feeble among us to action, aren't deemed worthy by the infinitely strong and infinitely good of some alleviation?
That's a tougher question, but there are reasonable answers to it. One
is that a policy of non-intervention has some purpose, such as allowing
those who do evil things (which would include everyone) to understand
the true consequences of their actions so that they, too, can learn to
hate doing evil. Some suffering isn't a result of evil choices and
seems to be simply a part of living. That's a tougher nut to crack,
but one answer is that even with God, there is no such thing as a
perfect world. Instead, there is merely the best of all
possible worlds, and as long as God has given us that, he has
given us the best that ever could be. Then, morally, for God it
comes down to a choice of whether creating an imperfect -- but
valuable -- world is better than creating nothing at all. And as
Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
Hopefully it's clear here that the point is not to convince you,
but merely to show that there are some good pro-God arguments
that counter the good anti-God arguments, which is why I don't
see the whole thing as super clear cut.
That said, I reject Christianity because it is based on the idea of blood sacrifice. That in order to clear the original sin of all people who originally didn't sin themselves (but get credit by way of parents), God needed to sacrifice Himself to Himself, to wash away this baggage of a crime against Him that the people themselves never did.
Ah! Perfect example! The concept you're talking about is called
"penal substitutionary atonement". When I was a Christian, the idea
never sat well with me, even though it was what my particular church
taught the whole time I was growing up. Fast forward to several
years ago, when I was dating an utterly charming girl who was a
student at the local Presbyterian seminary. Somehow we got on
this subject, and I said something like, "Some people will think
I'm a little odd for this, but penal substitutionary atonement
doesn't make sense to me, and I don't think it's true." Her
response? "I think if you asked around, you'd find most of the
people around here would agree with you on that." Translation:
We don't want to toot our own horns, but we specialize in thinking
about topics exactly like this, so we are relatively confident
in our views, and most of us agree with you. So don't feel like
your opinion is far out.
The point is this: penal substitutionary atonement is by no
means an essential aspect of Christianity. Some people who
don't know much about Christian theology might say it is, but then
I had a bad algebra teacher in high school and I didn't believe
everything she said about algebra, and I don't think her teaching
style is a reflection on math.:-)
Earth itself, in a move indicating some kind of self-awareness, will fight back by redirecting its own geomagnetic field against the meteor, destroying it. The collateral effect of this, however, will be a magnetic induced disease over humanity, who will slowly start to die.
Though entertaining, your story is impossible. Everybody knows
that magnetism
heals people.
There's some really strong evidence that God isn't real.
I've been thinking intently about that subject for about 20-25 years now.
I've even changed "sides" once (and haven't changed back).
I daresay I've thought about it more than many or even most people.
I only feel like I can maybe claim that
because of how startlingly ignorant many people on either side of the
issue seem to be of the other side. The theists I've known have typically
had their minds completely closed to the other point of view, sometimes
unwilling to think about themselves, and in a few cases ready to attack
and/or ostracize someone who thinks too far outside the box.
And the atheists I've
known, for their part, have often rejected Christianity (which
religion I mention
because I live in the US, where it's the dominant religion) without
having a good
understanding of it, often naming some element of Christian
theology as the reason they can't accept it when it turns out
that element is something most mainstream Christian theologians
wouldn't say is a legitimate part of Christianity.
I have a hard time thinking there is "really strong" evidence that
God isn't real. "Really strong", to me, sounds too close to
"compelling". I'm not saying there aren't some very good arguments
in favor of the idea that God isn't real. But all the ones I've
seen are based on some metaphysical assumptions (usually hidden
assumptions) that someone is taking as self-evident even though
there are logically defensible alternate views.
In case anyone thinks I'm saying the above because I support
the other side, I should mention I don't think there is any
"really strong" evidence for the existence of God either, which
is part of why I'm an atheist.
I know, I know, people forget their passwords or choose the word "password" all the time. It still seems a little depressing that we have to use all this extra trickery to compensate for people being morons.
We don't. Just let them be morons and suffer the consequences of being morons. If
it gets to be that they don't like it, maybe they'll change. If they don't,
it's not anybody else's responsibility to fix their problems for them.
For the next year, I got periodic mailing and occasional phone calls from AT&T saying they missed me, and wouldn't I switch back.
I had basically the exact same experience, except it was local phone service
from AT&T (before they merged with SBC, so I believe it was the same company
as that which offered long distance). They screwed up something simple.
I wanted to add Caller-ID to my existing service, and after a ridiculous
obstructionist manipulative experience with customer service where they
simply REFUSED to tell me the cheapest way to do it and instead went into
a script about my "calling patterns", they finally added the service, then
proceeded to over-bill me by $50 or $100 the next month. After getting it
initially wrong, they screwed up the follow-up by changing me to different
pricing packages and misrepresenting the price of the packages each time,
and getting the billing wrong as well; I had to spend hours and hours on
the phone with them to finally get everything right.
Eventually I switched, and for a long time afterwards, they sent me these
mailings saying, basically, "PLEASE come back!" God, it was pathetic.
It was like a guy who stands up his girlfriend on several dates, forgets
her birthday even though she reminds him of it 10 times, acts like an
ass when he meets her parents, and then when she finally dumps him he says,
"But honey, I love you! Why are you leaving me?!"
I won't deal with AT&T anymore because it's ugly. It's ugly to watch
a company be that incompetent and complacent. I don't like to see the inane
side of humanity that clearly.
Bollocks. Just like other copyrighted code, Parallels shouldn't release derived binaries until they're compliant.
Absolutely true, but pretty much totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter
whether they should do that, because that has already happened, and you
can't change the past. What matters is whether it was an oversight or
whether it was intentional and whether they intend to do anything about it.
It could be that they were simply careless or ignorant and they're willing
to fix things now that they realize there's a problem but that it will
take time because their legal department is slow. Or it could be that
they knew all along what they were doing, never had any intention of
doing otherwise, still don't have any intention to, and are just
stalling.
Well, I can see why that would upset Parallels fans - but please explain wtf wine should care.
The Wine project should care if Parallels completely removes Wine code from
their product for the same reason open-source projects
in general can often benefit from
having commercial users: the commercial users may find bugs or areas for improvement
and pay professionals to make those changes, then make the changes available
to everyone. This happens quite often with the Linux kernel. A significant
portion of the work on the Linux kernel is done by people working at for-profit
companies that make a Linux-based product. Because of this, the Wine project
stands to gain if they maintain a good relationship companies like Parallels.
And giving them a chance to comply without immediately beating them up is
part of that. Just because they don't get it right off the bat doesn't mean
they will never get it. It's possible they will never get it, but we don't
know right now.
Sounds like you want a FIC NEO1973. According to Sean Moss-Pultz in his most recent announcement, the consumer model due in Q4 this year will include wifi.
"NEO1973"? What is that, a character from crossover fan fiction between "The Matrix" and "THX 1138" or something?
I'm assuming you don't set this up 'in a parking lot' but under some sort of cover/tarp/tent, even painting it white, putting it outside in the northern california sun, can't be very efficient as far as cooling is concerned.
I suspect this is a lot like worrying about aerodynamic drag on a 100 ton
locomotive. Yes, it exists, but it's negligible compared to the other
load you have to deal with. I bet if you compared the amount of heat
that the container would gain from sunlight, it's probably a small
percentage of what the equipment inside generates.
If it's RAINING, how do you keep from increasing the humidity inside the box.
Presumably the climate controls take care of that. Most data centers have
climate controls that regulate humidity anyway, don't they? At least, I
assume they do because while high humidity is bad, low humidity is bad
as well (think static electricity), and with air conditioners' tendency
to remove moisture as they chill the air, and considering the amount of
heat you are constantly drawing out of a data center, it seems like
data centers would have problems with the A/C causing the humidity to
drop too low if it weren't otherwise regulated.
Let's say that MythTV implemented your paid service plan and began charging the princely sum of $2 per month for the data. I would give it all of 7 days before that paid for data became available for free. Someone, somewhere, would buy the data for $2 per month and load it up for others to have free of charge.
If you can answer the question of how to prevent the above scenario from happening I can put you in touch with some content providers who will pay REAL money for your idea.
It's pretty easy to solve this problem, actually: each individual consumer
only needs access to a limited subset of the data. For the hypothetical
$2/month, you'd get access to data for one lineup (or maybe 2 or 3).
That is, since I live in Austin, TX and have Time Warner Cable, I'd buy
access to listings only for what Time Warner Cable offers in my area.
Now that person that wants to upload all the data has to have a separate
$2/month subscription for each cable operator in the country. They're
not going to bother.
And to make it just a little tougher, they can easily toss some kind of
digital watermark into the data. This is similar to what map makers do:
they throw in a street or two that doesn't exist. If a commercial TV
listings service did this, they'd have some chance of tracing the data
back to the original account who bought it. Now they have somebody to
sue.
And yes, both of these methods can be defeated. They are imperfect.
But combined together, they should make it pretty impractical to
give away the data.
Now, who are these people that are going to pay me real money for my
idea? My idea only works for TV listings, but you didn't say it had
to be a general solution.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an interesting idea. So to go a little further with it, maybe the radio spectrum is too precious to devote one frequency to broadcasts that cover hundreds of square miles (or kilometers, or space-man area units, whatever). So in the future, maybe we won't divide the spectrum up into these big monolithic channels with big monolithic 500,000W transmitters like we are doing with TV right now; instead, we'll have a bunch of short-range transmitters linked by fiber or something. Once it gets into space, literally billions of low-power broadcasts across a huge range of frequencies would just blend together as just a whole bunch of white noise.
On the other hand, there would probably continue to be regulatory agencies controlling the spectrum, so the white noise would have notches in it as an artifact of that. So it would at least look man-made.
On the other hand, if the way some other countries eat up the vapid cultural exports of the USA is any indication, the aliens may be on their way here right now, eagerly anticipating the moment when they get to meet the cast of "Baywatch".
Hopefully, a stream. I have no real idea why it should matter what it's connecting to. That's a separate issue from what it does, which is emulate a terminal, and I don't know why it would make sense for the two things to be intertwined.
That's not to say it doesn't happen in some cases. There are plenty of apps for Windows and so on that are a combination of a telnet client and/or ssh client with a terminal emulator. But there's no reason these components have to be combined into on piece of software.
Yeah, deleted after a while. Like, scan it, then immediately look it up in a hash table, and if the plate doesn't match that of a stolen car, fugitive, or someone with an outstanding warrant, then delete it right then and there, before it's written to any form of non-volatile storage.
I'm not worried, because I have a plan. When the fat people come and try to crush me, I'm heading to the nearest stairwell. I'll go up one, maybe two, or even three floors. 30 minutes later, when the fat people have made it to the top of the stairs and caught their breath again, I'll have had time to set a buffet table to draw them off my trail. Finally, I'll go wait out the attack in the perfect hiding place, somewhere it'd never occur to them to go in a million years: the gym.
The whole thing will probably unfold much like a zombie film, only in slow motion and with more labored breathing but approximately the same amount of grunting and moaning.
Yeah, but after that, they dropped the ball spectacularly on one occasion after another over a period of 5+ years. When C= bought the platform, the competition had basically 320x200 graphics, 8 or 16 colors, no sampled sound at all, and 640K limit on RAM. The Amiga had 640x400 graphics, 4096 colors (in certain modes), built-in stereo 8-bit sampled sound, and a 9 MB limit on RAM. 8 or 10 years later, the competition had 800x600 graphics with 16 million colors, stereo 16-bit sampled sound, and supposed 64MB of memory. By that time, the Amiga still had 640x400 graphics, 4096 colors, 8-bit sound, and a 16MB limit on RAM.
Hmm, appropriate, except in this case someone is jamming their transmission.
First of all, that's exactly what I thought of when I heard that Vista++ == 7. First Microsoft copies Apple (well, Xerox), and now they're copying Seinfeld. Pretty hilarious.
But, the thing is, Charles Schultz had the idea way before Seinfeld did. (And Schultz may not have been the first.)
Sure C and C++ are corporate-made. They were both created by AT&T / Bell Labs. They have gone on to later be turned into standardized languages, but Java has open standard as well.
Also, does Java have an official implementation? As far as I know, it has the JLS and a number of JCP standards. And Sun does offer a compiler and a JVM, but I am aware of nothing that makes that the official implementation.
I agree. Whether a corporation invented the language should be the deciding factor in whether it's used for OpenGL. That's why I would never use C or C++ for calling OpenGL, but Perl would be a perfectly good choice.
That is a good question. If the sacrifice on the cross doesn't buy anything (in the literal sense of the word), why do it? Well, personally, after I had rejected penal substitutionary atonement, I thought about that and decided it must be symbolic. There are many things in the world that are purely symbolic but also highly important. Symbolism is a way to communicate something.
For example, consider a wedding ring. It doesn't actually do anything. The act of putting the ring on the finger isn't what makes two people married. But it is a powerful symbol anyway, and I think worthwhile for that reason.
So I think it's a pretty decent explanation that Jesus went to the cross because it fit in with the Jewish tradition and he wanted to say, "This is what I'm willing to do for you." The Jewish tradition I'm talking about, of course, is animal sacrifice. As I understand it, many (most? all?) of the animals sacrificed were used for food by the priests (or their class) and would have been used for food had they not been sacrificed. So, as I understand it, animal sacrifice is not really about killing the animal (because that variable factors out of the equation) but is instead about devoting yourself to God's work and giving resources to that end, and giving your best (IIRC, the law commanded people to sacrifice their best animals). So when Jesus went to the cross, it could be interpreted as a reference to this tradition: he chooses to give something to show his devotion to his creation, and because he wants to make it abundantly clear where he stands, he gives the best that he can give as an incarnated human being, which is his life.
Maybe "self-propagating code" is a muddled way of saying code that doesn't require a hardware hack to install it onto the iPhone. That is, maybe it means code that can get into the iPhone without having to do complex steps. This would certainly be high on the list of things to accomplish.
Just because they are soldered now does not mean a replacement kit would require soldering (or desoldering). There are wires coming off the board and running to the battery. A replacement kit could instruct you to cut the wires at the battery end, thus leaving you with (from the photos) about an inch of wire still connected to the iPhone's board. The kit could then include something like wire nuts or some other type of splicing thing to connect that to the replacement battery.
Or to put it another way, solder is how the connection is made right now, but it is not the only possible way to connect bare wires.
There are already consumer-oriented products on the market that make connections to bare wire. For example, you can go to a hardware store and buy switches or replacement plugs that can simply be clamped onto a lamp cord.
I agree. I had a chuckle recently when we had a security training course at work, and they went through a lot of explaining of what the rules are for creating a "good password". There was a whole lot of this "must have a number", and so on. But not only that, they gave you a sort of recipe for doing it, with suggestions like "turn letter 'E' into a '3' or letter 'O' into a '0'". These rules are great if you want to remove entropy, because that's what rules do. But why do you want to remove entropy from your "randomly"-chosen secret? (I suppose it's not such a bad thing, though, if in actuality you're substituting one so-so set of rules for a much worse set of rules, like "always pick your girlfriend's first name".)
On a side note, I sometimes test people's knowledge of what randomness means by saying "giving the same number many times in a row would be a valid behavior for a truly random random number generator" and seeing if they protest. If they do, I know that either they didn't listen to the question closely or they don't understand what a random number is: if it's disallowed for the current number to match the previous one, then it's not random, because you have a requirement that there be a negative correlation, whereas random means no correlation.
This question assumes things about metaphysics. Laws of physics most certainly do not allow or disallow anything. Instead, they describe patterns. "When I let go of this apple, it moves towards the earth." It's not "it MUST move towards the earth". It's "it DOES move towards the earth". Laws of physics are therefore not fundamentally inconsistent with some outside force intervening. By its very definition, the supernatural is "super" relative to the natural. I can make a CPU that operates in a perfectly orderly way for billions of clock cycles consecutively, but if I should decide to take out the BIOS and reflash it, the order will be temporarily suspended when intervene and will resume again when I stop intervening.
This doesn't need to be accounted for because a belief in evolution has been a mainstream belief within (at least) Christianity for quite some time. If you don't believe me, ask Pope Pius XII, who in 1950 officially declared evolution and Catholicism to be compatible. Or ask Cardinal John Henry Newman, who said essentially the same thing in 1868, only 9 years after The Origin of Species was published.
That's a tougher question, but there are reasonable answers to it. One is that a policy of non-intervention has some purpose, such as allowing those who do evil things (which would include everyone) to understand the true consequences of their actions so that they, too, can learn to hate doing evil. Some suffering isn't a result of evil choices and seems to be simply a part of living. That's a tougher nut to crack, but one answer is that even with God, there is no such thing as a perfect world. Instead, there is merely the best of all possible worlds, and as long as God has given us that, he has given us the best that ever could be. Then, morally, for God it comes down to a choice of whether creating an imperfect -- but valuable -- world is better than creating nothing at all. And as Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
Hopefully it's clear here that the point is not to convince you, but merely to show that there are some good pro-God arguments that counter the good anti-God arguments, which is why I don't see the whole thing as super clear cut.
Ah! Perfect example! The concept you're talking about is called "penal substitutionary atonement". When I was a Christian, the idea never sat well with me, even though it was what my particular church taught the whole time I was growing up. Fast forward to several years ago, when I was dating an utterly charming girl who was a student at the local Presbyterian seminary. Somehow we got on this subject, and I said something like, "Some people will think I'm a little odd for this, but penal substitutionary atonement doesn't make sense to me, and I don't think it's true." Her response? "I think if you asked around, you'd find most of the people around here would agree with you on that." Translation: We don't want to toot our own horns, but we specialize in thinking about topics exactly like this, so we are relatively confident in our views, and most of us agree with you. So don't feel like your opinion is far out.
The point is this: penal substitutionary atonement is by no means an essential aspect of Christianity. Some people who don't know much about Christian theology might say it is, but then I had a bad algebra teacher in high school and I didn't believe everything she said about algebra, and I don't think her teaching style is a reflection on math. :-)
Though entertaining, your story is impossible. Everybody knows that magnetism heals people.
Is your machine called "the internet"?
I've been thinking intently about that subject for about 20-25 years now. I've even changed "sides" once (and haven't changed back). I daresay I've thought about it more than many or even most people. I only feel like I can maybe claim that because of how startlingly ignorant many people on either side of the issue seem to be of the other side. The theists I've known have typically had their minds completely closed to the other point of view, sometimes unwilling to think about themselves, and in a few cases ready to attack and/or ostracize someone who thinks too far outside the box. And the atheists I've known, for their part, have often rejected Christianity (which religion I mention because I live in the US, where it's the dominant religion) without having a good understanding of it, often naming some element of Christian theology as the reason they can't accept it when it turns out that element is something most mainstream Christian theologians wouldn't say is a legitimate part of Christianity.
I have a hard time thinking there is "really strong" evidence that God isn't real. "Really strong", to me, sounds too close to "compelling". I'm not saying there aren't some very good arguments in favor of the idea that God isn't real. But all the ones I've seen are based on some metaphysical assumptions (usually hidden assumptions) that someone is taking as self-evident even though there are logically defensible alternate views.
In case anyone thinks I'm saying the above because I support the other side, I should mention I don't think there is any "really strong" evidence for the existence of God either, which is part of why I'm an atheist.
We don't. Just let them be morons and suffer the consequences of being morons. If it gets to be that they don't like it, maybe they'll change. If they don't, it's not anybody else's responsibility to fix their problems for them.
I had basically the exact same experience, except it was local phone service from AT&T (before they merged with SBC, so I believe it was the same company as that which offered long distance). They screwed up something simple. I wanted to add Caller-ID to my existing service, and after a ridiculous obstructionist manipulative experience with customer service where they simply REFUSED to tell me the cheapest way to do it and instead went into a script about my "calling patterns", they finally added the service, then proceeded to over-bill me by $50 or $100 the next month. After getting it initially wrong, they screwed up the follow-up by changing me to different pricing packages and misrepresenting the price of the packages each time, and getting the billing wrong as well; I had to spend hours and hours on the phone with them to finally get everything right.
Eventually I switched, and for a long time afterwards, they sent me these mailings saying, basically, "PLEASE come back!" God, it was pathetic. It was like a guy who stands up his girlfriend on several dates, forgets her birthday even though she reminds him of it 10 times, acts like an ass when he meets her parents, and then when she finally dumps him he says, "But honey, I love you! Why are you leaving me?!"
I won't deal with AT&T anymore because it's ugly. It's ugly to watch a company be that incompetent and complacent. I don't like to see the inane side of humanity that clearly.
Absolutely true, but pretty much totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether they should do that, because that has already happened, and you can't change the past. What matters is whether it was an oversight or whether it was intentional and whether they intend to do anything about it. It could be that they were simply careless or ignorant and they're willing to fix things now that they realize there's a problem but that it will take time because their legal department is slow. Or it could be that they knew all along what they were doing, never had any intention of doing otherwise, still don't have any intention to, and are just stalling.
The Wine project should care if Parallels completely removes Wine code from their product for the same reason open-source projects in general can often benefit from having commercial users: the commercial users may find bugs or areas for improvement and pay professionals to make those changes, then make the changes available to everyone. This happens quite often with the Linux kernel. A significant portion of the work on the Linux kernel is done by people working at for-profit companies that make a Linux-based product. Because of this, the Wine project stands to gain if they maintain a good relationship companies like Parallels. And giving them a chance to comply without immediately beating them up is part of that. Just because they don't get it right off the bat doesn't mean they will never get it. It's possible they will never get it, but we don't know right now.
"NEO1973"? What is that, a character from crossover fan fiction between "The Matrix" and "THX 1138" or something?
I suspect this is a lot like worrying about aerodynamic drag on a 100 ton locomotive. Yes, it exists, but it's negligible compared to the other load you have to deal with. I bet if you compared the amount of heat that the container would gain from sunlight, it's probably a small percentage of what the equipment inside generates.
Presumably the climate controls take care of that. Most data centers have climate controls that regulate humidity anyway, don't they? At least, I assume they do because while high humidity is bad, low humidity is bad as well (think static electricity), and with air conditioners' tendency to remove moisture as they chill the air, and considering the amount of heat you are constantly drawing out of a data center, it seems like data centers would have problems with the A/C causing the humidity to drop too low if it weren't otherwise regulated.
It's pretty easy to solve this problem, actually: each individual consumer only needs access to a limited subset of the data. For the hypothetical $2/month, you'd get access to data for one lineup (or maybe 2 or 3). That is, since I live in Austin, TX and have Time Warner Cable, I'd buy access to listings only for what Time Warner Cable offers in my area.
Now that person that wants to upload all the data has to have a separate $2/month subscription for each cable operator in the country. They're not going to bother.
And to make it just a little tougher, they can easily toss some kind of digital watermark into the data. This is similar to what map makers do: they throw in a street or two that doesn't exist. If a commercial TV listings service did this, they'd have some chance of tracing the data back to the original account who bought it. Now they have somebody to sue.
And yes, both of these methods can be defeated. They are imperfect. But combined together, they should make it pretty impractical to give away the data.
Now, who are these people that are going to pay me real money for my idea? My idea only works for TV listings, but you didn't say it had to be a general solution.