Hmm, seems to me that an oppressive government would probably start by legalising drugs. How better to control the population than by limiting their desire and ability to rise up in revolt? The best sort of slavery is voluntary. Why imprison the people, when you can get them to imprison themselves?
As an evil dictator, your first move should be to legalise as many drugs as you can get away with. This will win you a lot of popular support in the short term, and in the long term, the people who might have become well-educated and clever opposition leaders might instead end up as poorly-educated drug users with severe mental health problems. You may commence your evil laughter now.
Well, I thought I was a Peter Jackson fan, but I guess I'm not, since real fans don't criticise.
I don't recall getting bored during the book at all. But I was bored during the film. It really dragged on. It's not so much the plot development and the story - those are fine. It's the action sequences. They are repetitive and interminable. Some of them could be cut out completely, while others could be significantly shortened, and the film would be better for it. There is a tradition of "fan edits" that make bad films better, c.f. "The Phantom Menace", and "The Hobbit" is in dire need of that treatment.
"The Hobbit" needs a fan edit to bring it below the two hour mark. This should be easy for part 1, though the real editing challenge would be to do it for the entire trilogy. Tricky, but possible, because it's not a long book.
I much preferred the LotR approach of releasing shorter versions to theaters and then releasing long versions on DVD for dedicated fans.
No, that's not quite right. Let me refer you here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Establishment
The BBC certainly is part of the Establishment. But it is not part of the government.
I mention this because it's an essential part of understanding how our power structure works. Authority and privilege does not flow downwards from government. There is something above government, something more powerful than it, something which ultimately gives the government the authority to government. This we call the Establishment. It's the word you were looking for. But I don't know if this helps the argument you were making.
The Establishment includes both Houses of Parliament, the Cabinet and the Civil Service - collectively, these are the government.
But it also includes the monarchy, and all the major national institutions - hospitals, courts, police forces, national broadcasters, unions, national newspapers, universities... All of these hold some authority and influence over the nation, though this power may be informal and wielded indirectly. For instance, the BBC's main power is its ability to command public opinion.
Mr. Dawkins doesn't go around beheading people for having different beliefs.
No, instead he merely calls them "uneducated, ignorant, probably stupid, too". And: "You've only got to talk to people who call themselves creationists to realize they haven't the faintest idea what the evidence is, or indeed, what evolution is."
Now, I am personally aware of a number of highly educated and intelligent people who also happen to be creationists. Each one of them can explain exactly what evolution is, and what the evidence is for it. They're not convinced. They have good reasons... reasons which I personally have trouble with, but which I can nevertheless respect.
But Dawkins has no respect for their dissent. He will call them stupid simply because their interpretation of the world is different to his own - as if he is omniscient, and in possession of all the facts. Is this not the height of arrogance? Is it not, in fact, intellectual bigotry?
Windows 7 included backup is quite capable. It can make full system images (bare metal) as well as pretty much any other type of backup you desire, either on demand or on a schedule. Recovery can be done from within windows, or by booting from the windows install disk, choosing repair, and selecting the option to restore from backup. If you only do a full system backup, remember to make a new one every once in a while, as it can be tedious to have to apply a long series of updates to an out-of-date backup.
That is useful to know. My concern about the WIndows Backup software was that it would only backup documents and settings, not the system and applications, but maybe I just did not look hard enough at the features in the Windows 7 version.
Indeed, this should work, but I prefer to use commercial tools for this purpose because I am still wary of open-source tools for reading/writing NTFS, being a veteran from the time where the kernel warned you not to use the "write" feature on the NTFS driver or bad things would happen.
For backup software I would rather pay for a licence, since it is so important that the job is done right, and the FS is restored without any corruption. Furthermore, the commercial tools don't require a reboot for backing up. In fact they can back up a mounted filesystem through VSS while it's in use (thanks, Microsoft).
I maintain a machine much like the one to be used by your son. You are right to give up on trying to get these games working in Wine. Even if you succeed, the next patch might break it. It creates an unreasonable amount of recurring effort, which you can avoid entirely for the cost of an OEM Windows licence, which is really, really cheap in comparison. Sure, this is not what Stallman would say, but then he does not support PCs for a family.
Here are some suggestions:
1. Windows 7 on a new laptop.
2. Install Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free (beer). Don't bother with Norton.
3. Create a regular user account for your son. Ensure the account is not able to modify system files without asking for the admin password. This prevents most of the nasty things malware tries to do. WIndows security is actually really good these days.
4. Order a Blizzard authenticator to go with WoW. This excludes more nasty things that malware might do... just in case!
5. Back up the machine after you install the games but before you hand it over to your son. Use backup software that will generate a disk image like Macrium Reflect Free Edition. Restore this disk image from a live CD (Reflect can create one for you) if your son has any problems. You have to use a full disk image for Windows because restoring an install is not just a matter of copying the files and rerunning update-grub.
6. When working with Windows, use the same patience you have to use when working with an unfamiliar Linux distribution. Don't expect everything to be straightforward or logical, and be pleasantly surprised when it is. The only extra thing you need to beware of, but Linux users do not, is that there are scam sites which offer to "help" you with common problems, e.g. device driver issues, and serve up malware instead of help. Good practice is to research Windows problems on a Linux machine.
Though don't tell LibreOffice you want "PDF A/1-a" format (i.e. embedded fonts) because if you do, it will generate a broken PDF that Acrobat Reader(!!) will not be able to open.
"There was an error processing a page. Invalid colorspace."
Maybe having fewer options makes it easier to test for this sort of thing. I bet Word's PDF exporter has been tested with Acrobat Reader...
It's depressing that people can be told, in the article, "I'm sorry 'The Cloud' is not an acceptable nor practical solution", and then reply "Hey, why not store your data in the cloud?" And so many replies along those lines, too! At one time this site was full of smart people who had passed their exams. Now it's full of people who don't even read the question. Like I said, depressing.
The rest of what you say, I don't even know why you are arguing with me. Obviously if you have only a small amount of data, the cloud is a good solution. $20/year is no big deal. The problem comes in when you have a lot of data and it would cost, say, $2400/year to store it on S3. You see the problem? How many fire safes and external drives can you buy for $2400? How many do you actually need in order to have a reasonable chance of keeping your data?
But I entirely agree that ludicrous RAID5 servers and piles of disks are a silly idea. I know so many stories about people keeping all their data on RAID5 and assuming it is safe. RAID-anything seems to increase the risk of catastrophe, probably because everything is in one basket. And that is the core of the solution: spread the risk. Different disks, made by different companies, stored in different locations. Bit like the cloud, really, except entirely under your control, and without a recurring cost.
I could agree with all of that, and indeed I think multiple external/removable HDDs are the most practical backup solution for ordinary people.
But I think it is better to do the backups from within the OS since the backup software can avoid copying unused parts of the filesystem, and is able to create differential/incremental backups, which is very fast and space-efficient. Disk cloning has the advantage that you can get up and running very quickly - but it is slow, it copies everything, and you can only store a single version of the filesystem.
Right. Other than buying new disks, there is no good solution.
The asker seems to be looking for some kind of "join all my small disks together" solution. And yes, he can do this. RAID-0 or LVM. But... don't do it! If even one of those disks fails all the data is effectively gone. The solution is cheap to implement but totally worthless. Sorry, your 250Gb SATA disk now belongs in a museum.
RAID-5/6 is, IMO, also a bad idea; there are too many instances where the controller has failed or multiple disks have failed.
The asker explicitly excludes cloud solutions. It's depressing that people have recommended various cloud solutions nonetheless. Apart from not being answers to the question, these solutions are totally awful for large quantities of data. Amazon S3 may be nearly free if you want to store a few gigabytes, but if you want to store a few terabytes you are going to pay through the nose, and all the other service providers are the same. 2Tb would cost $234 per month just for storage, transfer cost not included. For the price of two weeks of S3 storage you can buy a 2Tb external disk. For the price of upload, download and a month's storage, you can buy four or five such disks and have as much redundancy as any normal person could ever need.
It's a work machine so I'm stuck... it is Gnome 3, KDE 4, or Unity. The KDE 3.5 option disappeared years ago, and the most recent upgrade got rid of Gnome 2. Ah, progress.
However, the lack of an obvious way to change workspace is really the only problem I've hit with Gnome 3 in the last few months. That's not bad at all by Linux standards. It actually seems mature and well-built!
Thanks. But how do you change desktops? How do you move applications to a new desktop?
On Gnome 2 the bottom right corner of the screen lets me change to another desktop ("workspace", in Gnome-speak). And I can move an application to a different workspace by right-clicking on the title bar. But Gnome 3 doesn't seem to have these features. No doubt there is an easy answer...?
Multiple desktops are sometimes useful, but what I would really like on Windows is the ability to pin applications so they are "always on top". If anyone has any suggestions for that, I'd be very pleased to know about them.
But then, without the disks, there is very little to say about how these machines were once configured and used within the data centres.
I hope that one day somebody from Blizzard will write a book about the development and deployment of the game, similar to Masters of Doom, in which this sort of information will be revealed. I, for one, would find it very interesting. Sure, as outsiders, we can take educated guesses about how you might build Warcraft, or a clone of it, but how much more interesting to know how it was (is) actually done! One day, perhaps it will not be so important to keep this secret.
You should read their terms again. They dont "need" to be deleted in 21 days. They simply guarantee to retain your file for 21 days without any downloads in the period. Depending on their resource availability they could retain files they believe would bring them revenue, for as long as they like and in any structure they like. And why shouldnt popularity-of-download be a goal?
Right, but this is totally inconsistent with the claim that "legal users of megaupload" have lost data. Because clearly MU was not a safe place to store data, as it might disappear if it wasn't sufficiently popular in the eyes of the MU admins. A totally arbitrary policy. No guarantees. There was no comeback if Kim Dotcom deleted your data - so why should there be any comeback if Carpathia Hosting deletes it? Honestly, you'd have to be very thick to store your only copy of anything on MU.
I also would have liked to read the paper mentioned by the GP. I hope the authors will resubmit it somewhere else. It is certainly topical, although it will probably remain unfashionable for many years to come.
No. See the indictment. Very interesting document. The real evidence against these guys is not on Megaupload at all. It is in the emails they sent to each other and to outsiders.
The Feds' case hangs on the allegation that these guys formed a criminal conspiracy, i.e. that they knew that they were breaking laws and that they conspired to hide this because of the vast profitability of their operation. The evidence is all email records, bank statements, and Kim Dotcom's fleet of luxury cars.
Anyone storing their own private data on Megaupload was quite simply insane. This was not a backup service or a cloud storage service. There was no guarantee to store data indefinitely, or even at all, not even if you had a paid account. Files would be deleted after 21 days unless other people kept downloading them, which is hardly appropriate for private data. It couldn't be any less like a backup service.
I predict that anyone suing the Feds to "get their data back" will be referred to the Megaupload terms and conditions, which make no guarantee about data retrieval. Users who unwisely stored their backups in MU, in defiance of all common sense, have no recourse against either MU or the FBI.
Why wouldn't observations or logical conclusions have no relation with reality?
Well, it's common sense that they would. But the argument is more technical than that. It's about the nature of proof.
What do you think "proof" is? Proof must be contingent on "the current truth" actually being true, right? That is, proof is not a statement "Y = true", but an implication, "X implies Y". The assumptions (X) are contingent on "the current truth" at the time when the proof is produced. If these later turn out to be false, the proof remains true, because "X implies Y" is true if "X = false".
In order for "proof" to make sense as a concept you must accept that "the current truth" and "the truth" are not the same thing at all. They are not even the same sort of thing. One is based on observations, the other is reality. There are many possible "current truths". There is one "truth".
It takes faith to assert that your assumptions are so good that "the current truth" is near enough to "the truth" that the difference is unimportant, because nothing about this metaphysical relationship can be proved. It's beyond the reach of any experiment - it is the domain of philosophy and religion. So you see, you do still need faith, even for the things you think are proved by sufficient evidence, because you need to have faith that the evidence is truly sufficient, and that's not something that can itself be proved.
I did not say that, what I said was that even if you accept the premise that nothing can be proven, the argument for the existence of a god remains extremely weak.
Never said you did. I was merely restating my actual argument, since you seem to have assumed it was actually "the groundwork" for some/r/atheism-style straw man argument for the existence of God. And you have told everyone else here that my logic is somehow flawed ("the kind of logic that an apologist must resort to") though of course you never say how.
I think that I should defend myself against accusations of this sort since I use my real name here. But I'm not going to get into actual arguments about the existence for God, because that would just be a waste of everyone's time.
It looks like perfectly ordinary logic to me. You are the one ascribing theological meaning to it.
Proof always relies on assumptions, and if the assumptions are invalid, so is the proof. Naturalism is an assumption about reality. Don't say "I only believe in things that can be proved" unless you want to see that assumption deconstructed.
If you want to argue with people about theology and the tricks used by those nasty "apologists", then I'm sorry, I can't be bothered to oblige you. Please try over there.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, seems to me that an oppressive government would probably start by legalising drugs. How better to control the population than by limiting their desire and ability to rise up in revolt? The best sort of slavery is voluntary. Why imprison the people, when you can get them to imprison themselves?
As an evil dictator, your first move should be to legalise as many drugs as you can get away with. This will win you a lot of popular support in the short term, and in the long term, the people who might have become well-educated and clever opposition leaders might instead end up as poorly-educated drug users with severe mental health problems. You may commence your evil laughter now.
Well, I thought I was a Peter Jackson fan, but I guess I'm not, since real fans don't criticise.
I don't recall getting bored during the book at all. But I was bored during the film. It really dragged on. It's not so much the plot development and the story - those are fine. It's the action sequences. They are repetitive and interminable. Some of them could be cut out completely, while others could be significantly shortened, and the film would be better for it. There is a tradition of "fan edits" that make bad films better, c.f. "The Phantom Menace", and "The Hobbit" is in dire need of that treatment.
"The Hobbit" needs a fan edit to bring it below the two hour mark. This should be easy for part 1, though the real editing challenge would be to do it for the entire trilogy. Tricky, but possible, because it's not a long book.
I much preferred the LotR approach of releasing shorter versions to theaters and then releasing long versions on DVD for dedicated fans.
No, that's not quite right. Let me refer you here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Establishment
The BBC certainly is part of the Establishment. But it is not part of the government.
I mention this because it's an essential part of understanding how our power structure works. Authority and privilege does not flow downwards from government. There is something above government, something more powerful than it, something which ultimately gives the government the authority to government. This we call the Establishment. It's the word you were looking for. But I don't know if this helps the argument you were making.
The word you are looking for is "Establishment".
The Establishment includes both Houses of Parliament, the Cabinet and the Civil Service - collectively, these are the government.
But it also includes the monarchy, and all the major national institutions - hospitals, courts, police forces, national broadcasters, unions, national newspapers, universities... All of these hold some authority and influence over the nation, though this power may be informal and wielded indirectly. For instance, the BBC's main power is its ability to command public opinion.
Mr. Dawkins doesn't go around beheading people for having different beliefs.
No, instead he merely calls them "uneducated, ignorant, probably stupid, too". And: "You've only got to talk to people who call themselves creationists to realize they haven't the faintest idea what the evidence is, or indeed, what evolution is."
Now, I am personally aware of a number of highly educated and intelligent people who also happen to be creationists. Each one of them can explain exactly what evolution is, and what the evidence is for it. They're not convinced. They have good reasons... reasons which I personally have trouble with, but which I can nevertheless respect.
But Dawkins has no respect for their dissent. He will call them stupid simply because their interpretation of the world is different to his own - as if he is omniscient, and in possession of all the facts. Is this not the height of arrogance? Is it not, in fact, intellectual bigotry?
Windows 7 included backup is quite capable. It can make full system images (bare metal) as well as pretty much any other type of backup you desire, either on demand or on a schedule. Recovery can be done from within windows, or by booting from the windows install disk, choosing repair, and selecting the option to restore from backup. If you only do a full system backup, remember to make a new one every once in a while, as it can be tedious to have to apply a long series of updates to an out-of-date backup.
That is useful to know. My concern about the WIndows Backup software was that it would only backup documents and settings, not the system and applications, but maybe I just did not look hard enough at the features in the Windows 7 version.
Indeed, this should work, but I prefer to use commercial tools for this purpose because I am still wary of open-source tools for reading/writing NTFS, being a veteran from the time where the kernel warned you not to use the "write" feature on the NTFS driver or bad things would happen.
For backup software I would rather pay for a licence, since it is so important that the job is done right, and the FS is restored without any corruption. Furthermore, the commercial tools don't require a reboot for backing up. In fact they can back up a mounted filesystem through VSS while it's in use (thanks, Microsoft).
I maintain a machine much like the one to be used by your son. You are right to give up on trying to get these games working in Wine. Even if you succeed, the next patch might break it. It creates an unreasonable amount of recurring effort, which you can avoid entirely for the cost of an OEM Windows licence, which is really, really cheap in comparison. Sure, this is not what Stallman would say, but then he does not support PCs for a family.
Here are some suggestions:
1. Windows 7 on a new laptop.
2. Install Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free (beer). Don't bother with Norton.
3. Create a regular user account for your son. Ensure the account is not able to modify system files without asking for the admin password. This prevents most of the nasty things malware tries to do. WIndows security is actually really good these days.
4. Order a Blizzard authenticator to go with WoW. This excludes more nasty things that malware might do... just in case!
5. Back up the machine after you install the games but before you hand it over to your son. Use backup software that will generate a disk image like Macrium Reflect Free Edition. Restore this disk image from a live CD (Reflect can create one for you) if your son has any problems. You have to use a full disk image for Windows because restoring an install is not just a matter of copying the files and rerunning update-grub.
6. When working with Windows, use the same patience you have to use when working with an unfamiliar Linux distribution. Don't expect everything to be straightforward or logical, and be pleasantly surprised when it is. The only extra thing you need to beware of, but Linux users do not, is that there are scam sites which offer to "help" you with common problems, e.g. device driver issues, and serve up malware instead of help. Good practice is to research Windows problems on a Linux machine.
Yes, particularly as this hack circumvents the need to pay for international iPlayer, where you pay a monthly fee for access to iPlayer programmes.
Though don't tell LibreOffice you want "PDF A/1-a" format (i.e. embedded fonts) because if you do, it will generate a broken PDF that Acrobat Reader(!!) will not be able to open.
"There was an error processing a page. Invalid colorspace."
Maybe having fewer options makes it easier to test for this sort of thing. I bet Word's PDF exporter has been tested with Acrobat Reader...
It's depressing that people can be told, in the article, "I'm sorry 'The Cloud' is not an acceptable nor practical solution", and then reply "Hey, why not store your data in the cloud?" And so many replies along those lines, too! At one time this site was full of smart people who had passed their exams. Now it's full of people who don't even read the question. Like I said, depressing.
The rest of what you say, I don't even know why you are arguing with me. Obviously if you have only a small amount of data, the cloud is a good solution. $20/year is no big deal. The problem comes in when you have a lot of data and it would cost, say, $2400/year to store it on S3. You see the problem? How many fire safes and external drives can you buy for $2400? How many do you actually need in order to have a reasonable chance of keeping your data?
But I entirely agree that ludicrous RAID5 servers and piles of disks are a silly idea. I know so many stories about people keeping all their data on RAID5 and assuming it is safe. RAID-anything seems to increase the risk of catastrophe, probably because everything is in one basket. And that is the core of the solution: spread the risk. Different disks, made by different companies, stored in different locations. Bit like the cloud, really, except entirely under your control, and without a recurring cost.
I could agree with all of that, and indeed I think multiple external/removable HDDs are the most practical backup solution for ordinary people.
But I think it is better to do the backups from within the OS since the backup software can avoid copying unused parts of the filesystem, and is able to create differential/incremental backups, which is very fast and space-efficient. Disk cloning has the advantage that you can get up and running very quickly - but it is slow, it copies everything, and you can only store a single version of the filesystem.
Right. Other than buying new disks, there is no good solution.
The asker seems to be looking for some kind of "join all my small disks together" solution. And yes, he can do this. RAID-0 or LVM. But... don't do it! If even one of those disks fails all the data is effectively gone. The solution is cheap to implement but totally worthless. Sorry, your 250Gb SATA disk now belongs in a museum.
RAID-5/6 is, IMO, also a bad idea; there are too many instances where the controller has failed or multiple disks have failed.
The asker explicitly excludes cloud solutions. It's depressing that people have recommended various cloud solutions nonetheless. Apart from not being answers to the question, these solutions are totally awful for large quantities of data. Amazon S3 may be nearly free if you want to store a few gigabytes, but if you want to store a few terabytes you are going to pay through the nose, and all the other service providers are the same. 2Tb would cost $234 per month just for storage, transfer cost not included. For the price of two weeks of S3 storage you can buy a 2Tb external disk. For the price of upload, download and a month's storage, you can buy four or five such disks and have as much redundancy as any normal person could ever need.
It's a work machine so I'm stuck... it is Gnome 3, KDE 4, or Unity. The KDE 3.5 option disappeared years ago, and the most recent upgrade got rid of Gnome 2. Ah, progress.
However, the lack of an obvious way to change workspace is really the only problem I've hit with Gnome 3 in the last few months. That's not bad at all by Linux standards. It actually seems mature and well-built!
Thanks. But how do you change desktops? How do you move applications to a new desktop?
On Gnome 2 the bottom right corner of the screen lets me change to another desktop ("workspace", in Gnome-speak). And I can move an application to a different workspace by right-clicking on the title bar. But Gnome 3 doesn't seem to have these features. No doubt there is an easy answer...?
Multiple desktops are sometimes useful, but what I would really like on Windows is the ability to pin applications so they are "always on top". If anyone has any suggestions for that, I'd be very pleased to know about them.
Yeah, disappointing.
But then, without the disks, there is very little to say about how these machines were once configured and used within the data centres.
I hope that one day somebody from Blizzard will write a book about the development and deployment of the game, similar to Masters of Doom, in which this sort of information will be revealed. I, for one, would find it very interesting. Sure, as outsiders, we can take educated guesses about how you might build Warcraft, or a clone of it, but how much more interesting to know how it was (is) actually done! One day, perhaps it will not be so important to keep this secret.
You should read their terms again. They dont "need" to be deleted in 21 days. They simply guarantee to retain your file for 21 days without any downloads in the period. Depending on their resource availability they could retain files they believe would bring them revenue, for as long as they like and in any structure they like. And why shouldnt popularity-of-download be a goal?
Right, but this is totally inconsistent with the claim that "legal users of megaupload" have lost data. Because clearly MU was not a safe place to store data, as it might disappear if it wasn't sufficiently popular in the eyes of the MU admins. A totally arbitrary policy. No guarantees. There was no comeback if Kim Dotcom deleted your data - so why should there be any comeback if Carpathia Hosting deletes it? Honestly, you'd have to be very thick to store your only copy of anything on MU.
I also would have liked to read the paper mentioned by the GP. I hope the authors will resubmit it somewhere else. It is certainly topical, although it will probably remain unfashionable for many years to come.
No. See the indictment. Very interesting document. The real evidence against these guys is not on Megaupload at all. It is in the emails they sent to each other and to outsiders.
The Feds' case hangs on the allegation that these guys formed a criminal conspiracy, i.e. that they knew that they were breaking laws and that they conspired to hide this because of the vast profitability of their operation. The evidence is all email records, bank statements, and Kim Dotcom's fleet of luxury cars.
Anyone storing their own private data on Megaupload was quite simply insane. This was not a backup service or a cloud storage service. There was no guarantee to store data indefinitely, or even at all, not even if you had a paid account. Files would be deleted after 21 days unless other people kept downloading them, which is hardly appropriate for private data. It couldn't be any less like a backup service.
I predict that anyone suing the Feds to "get their data back" will be referred to the Megaupload terms and conditions, which make no guarantee about data retrieval. Users who unwisely stored their backups in MU, in defiance of all common sense, have no recourse against either MU or the FBI.
Well, it's common sense that they would. But the argument is more technical than that. It's about the nature of proof.
What do you think "proof" is? Proof must be contingent on "the current truth" actually being true, right? That is, proof is not a statement "Y = true", but an implication, "X implies Y". The assumptions (X) are contingent on "the current truth" at the time when the proof is produced. If these later turn out to be false, the proof remains true, because "X implies Y" is true if "X = false".
In order for "proof" to make sense as a concept you must accept that "the current truth" and "the truth" are not the same thing at all. They are not even the same sort of thing. One is based on observations, the other is reality. There are many possible "current truths". There is one "truth".
It takes faith to assert that your assumptions are so good that "the current truth" is near enough to "the truth" that the difference is unimportant, because nothing about this metaphysical relationship can be proved. It's beyond the reach of any experiment - it is the domain of philosophy and religion. So you see, you do still need faith, even for the things you think are proved by sufficient evidence, because you need to have faith that the evidence is truly sufficient, and that's not something that can itself be proved.
"merely attack the very foundation of all argument"
Care to clarify where I did this?
I did not say that, what I said was that even if you accept the premise that nothing can be proven, the argument for the existence of a god remains extremely weak.
Never said you did. I was merely restating my actual argument, since you seem to have assumed it was actually "the groundwork" for some /r/atheism-style straw man argument for the existence of God. And you have told everyone else here that my logic is somehow flawed ("the kind of logic that an apologist must resort to") though of course you never say how.
I think that I should defend myself against accusations of this sort since I use my real name here. But I'm not going to get into actual arguments about the existence for God, because that would just be a waste of everyone's time.
It looks like perfectly ordinary logic to me. You are the one ascribing theological meaning to it.
Proof always relies on assumptions, and if the assumptions are invalid, so is the proof. Naturalism is an assumption about reality. Don't say "I only believe in things that can be proved" unless you want to see that assumption deconstructed.
If you want to argue with people about theology and the tricks used by those nasty "apologists", then I'm sorry, I can't be bothered to oblige you. Please try over there.