One scenario: China attacks Taiwan to reclaim it as theirs, once and for all. What does the United States do? It could be pretty hairy for the U.S., as only airpower will be a real option for a while. China likely has enough manpower to destroy any force the U.S. tries to use to reinforce Taiwan. Better bet that China has something fierce targeting Japan, just in case they wanna get a piece of the action.
Russia's not exactly on the side of the States or China, but certainly with the economic trouble, it may decide to sell off some of its tech to China. You know, like in Afghanistan, when the Taliban supporters shot down an F-117 using Russian tech. Certainly Iraq proves that Russia won't always help out the U.S., and with the elections in those former Soviet bloc countries going as they are, there is an increasing number of anti-Western nations.
Also, I'd imagine that the EU is getting a little tired of relying on the U.S. for protection from difficult countries like Iran and some of the former Soviet bloc (which certainly pissed off Italy and could pose a thread to Turkey, and hence the EU if it becomes a member state). The EU rightly has stuff to worry about aside from terrorism.
Because bounces are not variable in time. It's based off a little formula that runs against the (temporal) clock, so it's a valid measurement, even if the units are a bit odd.
They were certainly provoked, but the cartoons were published in September 2005 Link. Why the delayed reaction? Why do they get to print cartoons making fun of the Holocaust, of Christians and of Jews? Where are the protests then? Make no mistake: this is not a simple reaction. It has been provoked by both the newspaper and radical Muslims. It's not freedom of speech; it's a flame war.
It ain't that hard to jam satellite signals. They're just EM waves, after all. It's a function of money, since a pretty nice method to block lots of different different communication (especially over the horizon stuff) is to fire a friggin huge laser into the sky. And yes, it really does ionize the atmosphere, providing lovely amounts of noise to screw up signals. For a somewhat better idea of some real anti-jamming technology, look to "smart" antennas (null-scanning antennas). They're expensive at the moment, but there are some nicer ways to implement them (which should be orders of magnitude cheaper).
Frequency hopping is lovely except that spread-spectrum technology still relies upon sensitive receivers to pick up the signal just above the noise floor. Not an easy task and definitely much harder if the enemy employs somewhat broadband noise weapons.
That's actually what I am implying by this statement. Suffering can always be given to God because it is a force for good. But to those who say that it is always evil and should therefore always be minimized (or eliminated), I gave an example showing how the suffering of many Americans during WW2 was used for good.
When the United States sent over all of those troops (i.e. fathers and sons) to Europe and the Pacific to combat an enemy threatening all of humanity, was there a lot of suffering at home? Yes. Did many of those boys die pointless deaths in Normandy and beyond? Yes. Was the suffering bad? Yes. Was the suffering senseless? NO.
Do not presume that if humans do not know the reason behind the suffering that there is no reason. That suffering is somehow always evil and to be avoided.
Attach the butterfly effect to something as "senseless" as a parasite slowly consuming its host and its following generations and you end up with a very complex picture. Perhaps, just maybe, all those environmentalists chanting that everything is connected are right.
I think that it's appropriate to term it a disaster, even if it isn't on the same raw scale as natural disasters. It ended decades of American invulnerability in space. It gutted the space program and left memories for Congress to pour over when considering the budget after the Cold War ended. It ended a great deal of innovation that could have saved millions of lives. 7 deaths is disastrous when they are important to the people of the world. If you play the numbers game here, I'm sure that you'll find it difficult to justify your line between disaster and tragedy. Do 3000 bodies count as a tragedy or a disaster? Do millions of Native Americans slain in Canada, the United States and the rest of the Americas count? Does John F. Kenney's assassination count?
Perhaps it would be instructive to point out that most universities and educational systems in the West are based around the monastery model. I happen to love it, but most folks don't. Why? Because the model was developed for folks like monks... terribly dedicated and hard-working. In other words, they loved this form of exploration. Most people don't derive such pleasure. Why is it so surprising that most people scream for examples of how the stuff they learn applies to "the real world"? It's clearly because they don't love the learning in-and-of-itself. Universities exist because a bunch of people who loved the act of learning got together to spread the word, but most still think that the learning process is an end in itself, not a means to an end (like most of the commenters seem to believe). Do only what you love and you'll only love what you do.
Actually, drugs *can* work the same way. Talk to anyone who survives an OD or is a friend of someone who ODed. All that I implied by that little modification is that physically arresting the spammers is rather difficult and arresting those who buy from spammers is nearly impossible, as demonstrated numerous times in the "war on drugs." Maybe you haven't had as much experience with it, but living in a border town can quickly change your confidence. Spam and drugs have the same problem: people do it because other people want it to happen. Legislating against it will only move the spammers offshore (gee, isn't that what's happened?). Arresting big spammers only means that spammers will be attached to bigger underground organizations. Spam works on the same principle as advertisements in other mediums, except that there is no pathloss to the internet... an email can be replicated without cost and distributed across the net. People are hopeful and ads take advantage of it. How can you change that?
What I mean is that causal relationships are a nice way of creating equations and understanding them, but it is impossible to prove or observe causality. Think of it: you have an apple that you drop from a height of 1m. A few seconds later, the apple is on the ground. These (including its acceleration, velocity, position, temperature, etc) are irrefutable facts. They are observables. But to imply that causality is observable in any way is false. We all observe a statistical relationship between a set of events, but it's quite another statement to say that gravity *caused* the apple to fall. That's epistemologically unsound.
Furthermore, the scientific method is implicitly dependent upon the proper operation of human observers. A gecko may come to very different conclusions about the world, given its rather limited perspective (biologically speaking). And yet, if it could use mathematics, it may come up with a set of self-consistent equations to describe the world. Maybe or maybe not. My point is that it must be assumed that the scientific method produces objective, and not relative, truth because humans are the observers. I fully agree with the practical view that it is silly to worry about such things, as we cannot step outside our own limitations. It does not change the fact that we have no idea if we are interpreting the universe incorrectly. This is *untestable* because it is unknowable.
The trouble with deities is that they are defined metaphysically, which automatically puts them outside the realm of science (by definition, as metaphysics = after physics). My entire point is that while science engages the world through pure reason, it is predicated upon a few unknowables (and necessarily so). Those unknowables are in the same class as a deity. Science (and mathematics, although that's a somewhat different argument) may give us satisfying answers, but it all ultimately relies upon unprovable, unobservable axioms; in other words, it all comes down to faith. The difference between science and religion is that faith is implicit in the former and explicit in the latter.
Just an observation: science usually relies upon some sense of causality in order to establish relationships between events. Causality is a belief and cannot be proven to exist.
Indeed, I have visited the city and found it to be fantastic. I felt safe in most areas and the police even seem to be very friendly (a dramatic difference with the West Coast cities). That said, there are numerous standing advisories to replace those darn white earbuds. It is still not recommended to walk alone in Central Park at night. Pretty easy stuff to abide by. The fact that none of your iPod owning associates have been accosted is great. Still, those people may not engage in notably risky behavior (at least noted by crime stats). Even if they participate in late night solo jogs with the nearly luminescent earbuds, they will likely not be mugged. But of those mugged (and it happens in every major city, including the largest city), people can do something to reduce their visibility to reduce their chances of being mugged.
Think of it this way (hypothetical situation, numbers made up): 1,000 people are mugged annually in Gotham City, out of a possible million people. Not too shabby by my account: that's a 0.1% mugging rate. Perhaps further studies were conducted on that subset of 1000 and found that 20% (200) were mugged because the assailant specifically wanted his/her iPod, easily noticing the white earbuds. It would be logical to conclude that in order to reduce that segment of the muggings, the visibility of that iPod should be reduced. Easiest and most cost-effective way would be to replace those earbuds.
None of these numbers are meant to say that New York City is unsafe. It is simply about making it a bit safer (since 0% crime is the (unattainable) goal in any city). I'm sorry if I offended you -- you've got a fantastic city.
Despite the fact that you were modded a troll, I don't think you really meant to be labeled as such -- you're just providing an honest opinion on this device. The iPod (all of them) is not a remarkable piece of hardware in any way. There are superior players out there (hardware-wise). Similarly, iTunes is not the absolute easiest thing out there to use (despite the fact that by default, iTunes will automatically load the songs onto the iPod without any problems... I suspect that you are using the Windows version, which you only just installed), but I would say it is up there. Still, the combination of those two things (plus the large, nearly *worldwide* iTunes catalog and minimal DRM) has granted it top-dog status.
The cities that you list as being supposedly "cool" cities are also heavily populated. I know that New York advises everyone who owns an iPod to get a different (preferably black) pair of earbuds to avoid mugging, which seems to be rather consistent from my view of people in New York. Tokyo and London probably have similar advisories. Just because you can't casually see it doesn't mean that they don't have it. Or better yet, maybe you're not seeing them at the right time. I have noticed that the U.S. west coast has much more of the devices than the east coast (or at least the users don't change out the white earbuds).
The comment about the metal back to the iPod is completely correct: they are designed to scratch, making them unique. It's a design statement by one of the world's most acclaimed industrial designers.
The comment about Jobs not inventing the device is quite true, but this philosophy can be extended indefinitely. At some point, you have to draw the line as saying that this person is responsible (not unlike a person in your position) for creating the iPod. He played a heavy hand in making it easy to use, as well as providing the necessary engineering and financial support to bring it up off the ground. I don't know of a single person who actually invented the PC, the GUI, or the iPod from scratch.
The comment about visiting fancy displays seems ill-mannered: why wouldn't you want to show off your product in the best way possible? So much about products (and people, places) come from the first impression. Those stores have some of the highest revenue densities in the world, and yet, they are designed to be spacious and unintrusive. I happen to find good design (not just technical design, despite my engineering background) rare and therefore, valuable. If anything, the feeling of being a complete tool comes from the fact that you bought what you felt was an inferior product because someone else asked you to do it.
Perhaps reminiscent of Quicktime + iTunes, but with one important difference: iTunes is built on Quicktime. It would be like complaining about dependencies on kdelib with any piece of KDE software out there. Or a dependency on Qt, etc. A small, but rather important difference. I like the idea that they are providing each user with software that will perform reasonably well for a common set of tasks encountered through normal web use.
I completely agree with your statements (theoretically extends to some fields of engineering), but I would like to point out one minor historical curiosity: doctors used to be lumped into the same category as lawyers throughout Europe (pre-States). It's no wonder, naturally, that their reputation improved because the methods improved. Today, I would say that their reputation is stellar, except when they find themselves with a lawyer (then the citizens sing of corruption and malpractice).
False dichotomy. It is possible to have evil arise out of morally ambiguous (not amoral) activity of a group. Or even morally good activity, given the appropriate moral system. Consider the Nazi's final solution. There were many Germans who were also executed alongside the Jewish population due to lack of loyalty (or questionable loyalty). Many of the soldiers who participated in that extermination had later said that they were merely following orders; understandable, since disobeying them or registering any noticeable disagreement would mean death to that soldier and his family. In many ways, they were coerced to create evil, despite their individual disagreement with the state policy. To make a concise point, each individual soldier was not notably responsible for the Holocaust, but rather, the group was responsible. Without the other soldiers, the individual soldier probably wouldn't have participated. Evil was created by the group, not by the superposition of individuals.
If you have a digital modulation scheme worked out to function on the existing analog spectrum, it might simply not be possible. Several articles have pointed to the fact that we will reclaim more spectrum after the digital switchover, implying that the channel spacing and bandwidth is tighter -- analog would screw up the system (or digital would screw up the analog signals, as potentially multiple digital channels would fit into a single analog channel).
Remember that wireless equipment utilizes a fixed physical medium, one that everyone shares for better or worse.
The concept of a powerful demon is not unique nor invented by Christianity; you simply happen to live in a society largely constructed by the faithful (at least nominally) followers of one of the 3 great middle-eastern religions. Even if you do not personally anthropomorphize evil (or its source), I hope that you believe it does exist. The greatest problem with pre-1960's relativism is that it denied the existence of evil (where evil = absolute moral wrong). If you still abide by this broken system, at least move on to modern relativism, where there are 3 absolute moral statements.
I know that Dawkins sometimes plays the shock jock, but his own response to the question is indeed dangerous. It is a fantastically dangerous concept to believe that we are simply the sum of our parts. If a person does not function correctly (as measured by some powerful external social construct), then that person must be repaired. It strikes at the heart of the Holocaust, in which it was supposedly determined that a whole population was broken (and Dr. Dawkins is not so far off the mark, as he views religion of any sort as a mental virus) and the only practical solution was extermination. Dawkins' response fails to take into consideration any respect for individual human beings, hobbled or otherwise.
Just another bit of proof that scientists generally suck at philosophy.
Just a small comment on the iTunes thing... at least on the Mac, you can open up protected files (audio or video) with Quicktime (as long as the computer is authorized), which allows you to play the stuff fullscreen or on a TV.
Same could be said of going to the moon or of any human exploration of space. Usefulness (though I'm not sure about this project's potential) also needs to take into account the journey of getting that cool thing to work. Who knows what contributions a silly project will make to different fields (like stuff in biology affecting antenna design).
Pop culture in the U.S. has valued diversity (i.e. group of people who fail to conform to societal norms) since the 1970s. "The Godfather" was one of the first major films to underscore a non-American culture living in America. You didn't have to be part of the cookie-cutter, war-supporting American culture to live in America. By many posts on/., this rings true today.
Theoretically, the U.S. government doesn't insist that immigrants conform in any meaningful way (you did know that you can take the citizenship test in multiple languages). Especially notable are the massive numbers of Mexican and other Latino immigrants (many of which are illegal) in California and other southern border states. You might be tempted to say that the LA riots in the 90's were a direct result of too many non-conforming illegal immigrants, but I think that analysis would be wrong.
It's one thing to hate your host country (many, many people in the U.S. fall under this banner), but still quite another to terrorize, burn and loot it. Doesn't come close to justifying those actions, even when used as an excuse. I think it's something else.
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One scenario: China attacks Taiwan to reclaim it as theirs, once and for all. What does the United States do? It could be pretty hairy for the U.S., as only airpower will be a real option for a while. China likely has enough manpower to destroy any force the U.S. tries to use to reinforce Taiwan. Better bet that China has something fierce targeting Japan, just in case they wanna get a piece of the action.
Russia's not exactly on the side of the States or China, but certainly with the economic trouble, it may decide to sell off some of its tech to China. You know, like in Afghanistan, when the Taliban supporters shot down an F-117 using Russian tech. Certainly Iraq proves that Russia won't always help out the U.S., and with the elections in those former Soviet bloc countries going as they are, there is an increasing number of anti-Western nations.
Also, I'd imagine that the EU is getting a little tired of relying on the U.S. for protection from difficult countries like Iran and some of the former Soviet bloc (which certainly pissed off Italy and could pose a thread to Turkey, and hence the EU if it becomes a member state). The EU rightly has stuff to worry about aside from terrorism.
Because bounces are not variable in time. It's based off a little formula that runs against the (temporal) clock, so it's a valid measurement, even if the units are a bit odd.
They were certainly provoked, but the cartoons were published in September 2005 Link. Why the delayed reaction? Why do they get to print cartoons making fun of the Holocaust, of Christians and of Jews? Where are the protests then? Make no mistake: this is not a simple reaction. It has been provoked by both the newspaper and radical Muslims. It's not freedom of speech; it's a flame war.
Not to nitpick, but it's 2006.
It ain't that hard to jam satellite signals. They're just EM waves, after all. It's a function of money, since a pretty nice method to block lots of different different communication (especially over the horizon stuff) is to fire a friggin huge laser into the sky. And yes, it really does ionize the atmosphere, providing lovely amounts of noise to screw up signals. For a somewhat better idea of some real anti-jamming technology, look to "smart" antennas (null-scanning antennas). They're expensive at the moment, but there are some nicer ways to implement them (which should be orders of magnitude cheaper).
Frequency hopping is lovely except that spread-spectrum technology still relies upon sensitive receivers to pick up the signal just above the noise floor. Not an easy task and definitely much harder if the enemy employs somewhat broadband noise weapons.
That's actually what I am implying by this statement. Suffering can always be given to God because it is a force for good. But to those who say that it is always evil and should therefore always be minimized (or eliminated), I gave an example showing how the suffering of many Americans during WW2 was used for good.
When the United States sent over all of those troops (i.e. fathers and sons) to Europe and the Pacific to combat an enemy threatening all of humanity, was there a lot of suffering at home? Yes. Did many of those boys die pointless deaths in Normandy and beyond? Yes. Was the suffering bad? Yes. Was the suffering senseless? NO.
Do not presume that if humans do not know the reason behind the suffering that there is no reason. That suffering is somehow always evil and to be avoided.
Attach the butterfly effect to something as "senseless" as a parasite slowly consuming its host and its following generations and you end up with a very complex picture. Perhaps, just maybe, all those environmentalists chanting that everything is connected are right.
I think that it's appropriate to term it a disaster, even if it isn't on the same raw scale as natural disasters. It ended decades of American invulnerability in space. It gutted the space program and left memories for Congress to pour over when considering the budget after the Cold War ended. It ended a great deal of innovation that could have saved millions of lives. 7 deaths is disastrous when they are important to the people of the world. If you play the numbers game here, I'm sure that you'll find it difficult to justify your line between disaster and tragedy. Do 3000 bodies count as a tragedy or a disaster? Do millions of Native Americans slain in Canada, the United States and the rest of the Americas count? Does John F. Kenney's assassination count?
Perhaps it would be instructive to point out that most universities and educational systems in the West are based around the monastery model. I happen to love it, but most folks don't. Why? Because the model was developed for folks like monks ... terribly dedicated and hard-working. In other words, they loved this form of exploration. Most people don't derive such pleasure. Why is it so surprising that most people scream for examples of how the stuff they learn applies to "the real world"? It's clearly because they don't love the learning in-and-of-itself. Universities exist because a bunch of people who loved the act of learning got together to spread the word, but most still think that the learning process is an end in itself, not a means to an end (like most of the commenters seem to believe). Do only what you love and you'll only love what you do.
Actually, drugs *can* work the same way. Talk to anyone who survives an OD or is a friend of someone who ODed. All that I implied by that little modification is that physically arresting the spammers is rather difficult and arresting those who buy from spammers is nearly impossible, as demonstrated numerous times in the "war on drugs." Maybe you haven't had as much experience with it, but living in a border town can quickly change your confidence. Spam and drugs have the same problem: people do it because other people want it to happen. Legislating against it will only move the spammers offshore (gee, isn't that what's happened?). Arresting big spammers only means that spammers will be attached to bigger underground organizations. Spam works on the same principle as advertisements in other mediums, except that there is no pathloss to the internet ... an email can be replicated without cost and distributed across the net. People are hopeful and ads take advantage of it. How can you change that?
Well, two. Same basic idea, but attacking it from two different sides:
1) Execute all drug dealers.
2) Execute all the imbeciles who buy from them.
Drugs are a human problem, not a technology problem.
I think you'll see that human problems are very difficult to solve. This two-step plan hasn't worked so far.
What I mean is that causal relationships are a nice way of creating equations and understanding them, but it is impossible to prove or observe causality. Think of it: you have an apple that you drop from a height of 1m. A few seconds later, the apple is on the ground. These (including its acceleration, velocity, position, temperature, etc) are irrefutable facts. They are observables. But to imply that causality is observable in any way is false. We all observe a statistical relationship between a set of events, but it's quite another statement to say that gravity *caused* the apple to fall. That's epistemologically unsound.
Furthermore, the scientific method is implicitly dependent upon the proper operation of human observers. A gecko may come to very different conclusions about the world, given its rather limited perspective (biologically speaking). And yet, if it could use mathematics, it may come up with a set of self-consistent equations to describe the world. Maybe or maybe not. My point is that it must be assumed that the scientific method produces objective, and not relative, truth because humans are the observers. I fully agree with the practical view that it is silly to worry about such things, as we cannot step outside our own limitations. It does not change the fact that we have no idea if we are interpreting the universe incorrectly. This is *untestable* because it is unknowable.
The trouble with deities is that they are defined metaphysically, which automatically puts them outside the realm of science (by definition, as metaphysics = after physics). My entire point is that while science engages the world through pure reason, it is predicated upon a few unknowables (and necessarily so). Those unknowables are in the same class as a deity. Science (and mathematics, although that's a somewhat different argument) may give us satisfying answers, but it all ultimately relies upon unprovable, unobservable axioms; in other words, it all comes down to faith. The difference between science and religion is that faith is implicit in the former and explicit in the latter.
Just an observation: science usually relies upon some sense of causality in order to establish relationships between events. Causality is a belief and cannot be proven to exist.
Indeed, I have visited the city and found it to be fantastic. I felt safe in most areas and the police even seem to be very friendly (a dramatic difference with the West Coast cities). That said, there are numerous standing advisories to replace those darn white earbuds. It is still not recommended to walk alone in Central Park at night. Pretty easy stuff to abide by. The fact that none of your iPod owning associates have been accosted is great. Still, those people may not engage in notably risky behavior (at least noted by crime stats). Even if they participate in late night solo jogs with the nearly luminescent earbuds, they will likely not be mugged. But of those mugged (and it happens in every major city, including the largest city), people can do something to reduce their visibility to reduce their chances of being mugged. Think of it this way (hypothetical situation, numbers made up): 1,000 people are mugged annually in Gotham City, out of a possible million people. Not too shabby by my account: that's a 0.1% mugging rate. Perhaps further studies were conducted on that subset of 1000 and found that 20% (200) were mugged because the assailant specifically wanted his/her iPod, easily noticing the white earbuds. It would be logical to conclude that in order to reduce that segment of the muggings, the visibility of that iPod should be reduced. Easiest and most cost-effective way would be to replace those earbuds. None of these numbers are meant to say that New York City is unsafe. It is simply about making it a bit safer (since 0% crime is the (unattainable) goal in any city). I'm sorry if I offended you -- you've got a fantastic city.
Despite the fact that you were modded a troll, I don't think you really meant to be labeled as such -- you're just providing an honest opinion on this device. The iPod (all of them) is not a remarkable piece of hardware in any way. There are superior players out there (hardware-wise). Similarly, iTunes is not the absolute easiest thing out there to use (despite the fact that by default, iTunes will automatically load the songs onto the iPod without any problems ... I suspect that you are using the Windows version, which you only just installed), but I would say it is up there. Still, the combination of those two things (plus the large, nearly *worldwide* iTunes catalog and minimal DRM) has granted it top-dog status.
The cities that you list as being supposedly "cool" cities are also heavily populated. I know that New York advises everyone who owns an iPod to get a different (preferably black) pair of earbuds to avoid mugging, which seems to be rather consistent from my view of people in New York. Tokyo and London probably have similar advisories. Just because you can't casually see it doesn't mean that they don't have it. Or better yet, maybe you're not seeing them at the right time. I have noticed that the U.S. west coast has much more of the devices than the east coast (or at least the users don't change out the white earbuds).
The comment about the metal back to the iPod is completely correct: they are designed to scratch, making them unique. It's a design statement by one of the world's most acclaimed industrial designers.
The comment about Jobs not inventing the device is quite true, but this philosophy can be extended indefinitely. At some point, you have to draw the line as saying that this person is responsible (not unlike a person in your position) for creating the iPod. He played a heavy hand in making it easy to use, as well as providing the necessary engineering and financial support to bring it up off the ground. I don't know of a single person who actually invented the PC, the GUI, or the iPod from scratch.
The comment about visiting fancy displays seems ill-mannered: why wouldn't you want to show off your product in the best way possible? So much about products (and people, places) come from the first impression. Those stores have some of the highest revenue densities in the world, and yet, they are designed to be spacious and unintrusive. I happen to find good design (not just technical design, despite my engineering background) rare and therefore, valuable. If anything, the feeling of being a complete tool comes from the fact that you bought what you felt was an inferior product because someone else asked you to do it.
Perhaps reminiscent of Quicktime + iTunes, but with one important difference: iTunes is built on Quicktime. It would be like complaining about dependencies on kdelib with any piece of KDE software out there. Or a dependency on Qt, etc. A small, but rather important difference. I like the idea that they are providing each user with software that will perform reasonably well for a common set of tasks encountered through normal web use.
I completely agree with your statements (theoretically extends to some fields of engineering), but I would like to point out one minor historical curiosity: doctors used to be lumped into the same category as lawyers throughout Europe (pre-States). It's no wonder, naturally, that their reputation improved because the methods improved. Today, I would say that their reputation is stellar, except when they find themselves with a lawyer (then the citizens sing of corruption and malpractice).
False dichotomy. It is possible to have evil arise out of morally ambiguous (not amoral) activity of a group. Or even morally good activity, given the appropriate moral system. Consider the Nazi's final solution. There were many Germans who were also executed alongside the Jewish population due to lack of loyalty (or questionable loyalty). Many of the soldiers who participated in that extermination had later said that they were merely following orders; understandable, since disobeying them or registering any noticeable disagreement would mean death to that soldier and his family. In many ways, they were coerced to create evil, despite their individual disagreement with the state policy. To make a concise point, each individual soldier was not notably responsible for the Holocaust, but rather, the group was responsible. Without the other soldiers, the individual soldier probably wouldn't have participated. Evil was created by the group, not by the superposition of individuals.
If you have a digital modulation scheme worked out to function on the existing analog spectrum, it might simply not be possible. Several articles have pointed to the fact that we will reclaim more spectrum after the digital switchover, implying that the channel spacing and bandwidth is tighter -- analog would screw up the system (or digital would screw up the analog signals, as potentially multiple digital channels would fit into a single analog channel).
Remember that wireless equipment utilizes a fixed physical medium, one that everyone shares for better or worse.
The concept of a powerful demon is not unique nor invented by Christianity; you simply happen to live in a society largely constructed by the faithful (at least nominally) followers of one of the 3 great middle-eastern religions. Even if you do not personally anthropomorphize evil (or its source), I hope that you believe it does exist. The greatest problem with pre-1960's relativism is that it denied the existence of evil (where evil = absolute moral wrong). If you still abide by this broken system, at least move on to modern relativism, where there are 3 absolute moral statements.
I know that Dawkins sometimes plays the shock jock, but his own response to the question is indeed dangerous. It is a fantastically dangerous concept to believe that we are simply the sum of our parts. If a person does not function correctly (as measured by some powerful external social construct), then that person must be repaired. It strikes at the heart of the Holocaust, in which it was supposedly determined that a whole population was broken (and Dr. Dawkins is not so far off the mark, as he views religion of any sort as a mental virus) and the only practical solution was extermination. Dawkins' response fails to take into consideration any respect for individual human beings, hobbled or otherwise.
Just another bit of proof that scientists generally suck at philosophy.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
Just a small comment on the iTunes thing ... at least on the Mac, you can open up protected files (audio or video) with Quicktime (as long as the computer is authorized), which allows you to play the stuff fullscreen or on a TV.
Same could be said of going to the moon or of any human exploration of space. Usefulness (though I'm not sure about this project's potential) also needs to take into account the journey of getting that cool thing to work. Who knows what contributions a silly project will make to different fields (like stuff in biology affecting antenna design).
Pop culture in the U.S. has valued diversity (i.e. group of people who fail to conform to societal norms) since the 1970s. "The Godfather" was one of the first major films to underscore a non-American culture living in America. You didn't have to be part of the cookie-cutter, war-supporting American culture to live in America. By many posts on /., this rings true today.
Theoretically, the U.S. government doesn't insist that immigrants conform in any meaningful way (you did know that you can take the citizenship test in multiple languages). Especially notable are the massive numbers of Mexican and other Latino immigrants (many of which are illegal) in California and other southern border states. You might be tempted to say that the LA riots in the 90's were a direct result of too many non-conforming illegal immigrants, but I think that analysis would be wrong.
It's one thing to hate your host country (many, many people in the U.S. fall under this banner), but still quite another to terrorize, burn and loot it. Doesn't come close to justifying those actions, even when used as an excuse. I think it's something else.