Zixar

Yep. I'll roll those dice, seeing as how there's little downside to it. If the Hindus are right, and I spend the next hundred thousand years working my way back up the reincarnation ladder from a gopher or somesuch, it won't really matter to me, will it? I mean, I've never heard of a gopher having any sort of existential identity crisis...And if you're right, and there's no God at all, I've still lost nothing. I'm wormfood either way, right? Sure, it's Pascal's Wager all over again, but the payoff for Christianity holds higher appeal for me than reaching nirvana. Your mileage may vary.

> 3.

It's a simple, straightforward question, yet it always draws a bunch of armchair lawyering, for some reason. Always with the qualifications and rationalizations...but at least Bramble was honest about it. Thanks. How about if I alter it to be a hypothetical? Suppose that due to an accident, you were exposed to a lethal dose of radiation and despite the doctors' best efforts, you have less than 24 hours to live. (like George Mason in the second season of "24".) Would you turn back to Christ on your deathbed in case you might have been wrong in your earlier rejection? If not, what would you really have to lose under the circumstances? If so, what's the point of being a half-hearted atheist? Few people get the chance to know when they're going to die, so you might not get a forewarning to recant.

I once asked if the ex-Way atheists on GSC would publicly renounce Jesus Christ, seeing as how they didn't believe in him anymore. Only two did, but even one of those argued about it for a while. Will any more of the former Christians here do the same? I mean, if you're absolutely certain that Jesus was just some myth, fable, or even an exaggeration of a possibly-real person, there's no point in leaving yourself an "out" just in case you're wrong, is there?

No, the Tivo drive is Linux formatted. Some folks wrote a set of Linux tools to clone the original drive onto a duplicate, then "bless" the new drive so that the firmware recognizes it. It takes a long time if you have any shows you want to keep on the original drive. If you don't mind starting with an empty list, the process takes less than an hour.

I installed a 120GB HD into my DirecTiVo, so the Dish PVR should be similar, if you can find the right software tools to do it.

Herbie: I haven't filmed an educational film before, but I have done presentations and other video work--more of a "competent amateur" than a professional. I do know a professional voice actress if you're looking for a female narrator.

It's quite true that for most believers nearly all their evidence is completely subjective and amounts to little more than anecdotal data. That doesn't necessarily make it false, merely irreproducible. That's the fundamental reason religious skepticism exists, apart from any emotional response on the part of the skeptic. It's the principle of acting on incomplete data that incenses most skeptics, yet science itself is filled with little-understood processes and incomplete models of those processes. That doesn't stop science, it shouldn't stop religion. Case in point: TMOATSN mention Schroedinger's Cat a couple of pages back. The idea is that if there are equal probabilities of a certain thing happening or not, that thing exists in a state wherein the thing has half-happened and half-not-happened until it is observed by an outsider, whereupon it immediately "collapses" into one reality or the other. (called "eigenstates") Ludicrous, right? Well, not really. It turns out that you really can predict the behavior of subatomic particles as if they were the sum of all their fractional eigenvalues, even though you cannot predict which will be in one eigenstate and which will be in another. (Huh?) Let's move aside from Schroedinger's fanciful half-dead half-alive cat and move to an experiment closer to reality. Suppose we have a lump of radioactive material that decays at a steady rate. Every second, exactly 100 particle decays occur, of two possible varieties. 75% of the time, the decay produces a pi-meson and 25% of the time, the decay produces a K-meson. So, we stick the material in a K-meson detector and let it sit for exactly ten seconds. We check the counter and it shows 250 clicks, exactly what we expect. We then stick it in a pi-meson detector for exactly ten seconds, and we get 750 clicks. (Duh.) So far, we've experimentally proved the decay product distribution. What happens if we expose either detector for only 1/100th of a second, though? That's only enough time for a single decay, right? Well, 75% of the time a pion will fly out, and 25% of the time a kaon will fly out, right? Well, no. What the Schroedinger Wave Function shows is that that single particle behaves as though it is 75% in the pion eigenstate and 25% in the kaon eigenstate until something observes it (i.e. it hits the detector.) Wait a second--that's impossible. The decay product is either a pion or a kaon, it's not a little bit of both. If we have another element that emits only pions 100% of the time and a third that only emits kaons and place them in the detector, we get 1000 clicks on one detector and zero on the other, just like we're supposed to. There are no pions that are a little bit kaon, and no kaons that are mostly pion. It's either one or the other. Not so, says Schroedinger. The single particle will behave as if it were 75% pion and 25% kaon superimposed on each other until something definite happens to force it to reveal itself as 100% one or the other. We perform the experiment, and sure enough, we get the same statistical results as if we had done it with a million particles at once. No one's quite sure what's really going on, or why, and we cannot predict at all which particle will fly out at any given decay, only that 75% of them will be pions and 25% will be kaons. It's completely random. Scientists really don't like random stuff. They like to have a cause for every effect, but the quest to eliminate apparent randomness keeps most of them in business, after all. So, even though they know what's supposed to happen in the long run, they don't know at any given instance what's going to happen next. Heisenberg proved that was impossible anyway. (cf. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) In that sense science and religion do have similarities. Believers don't exactly know how God works or why, but they see enough subjective results to keep believing in spite of the gap in their knowledge. Scientists don't know exactly how the Schroedinger Wave Function predicts the behavior of systems even though it's seemingly impossible in some cases, but the math works, so they keep trusting in it until something can come along and explain it better. In that sense, it's very much a belief based on incomplete knowledge. And that's okay. It keeps the searcher moving forward, gives them something to work with, as they try to figure out how it actually works. The difference is that scientists can do the same experiment and get the same results, so they're more secure in their belief. They still don't really understand it, and can't explain it, but as long as everyone's getting the same answers, that's good enough. Religion, however, deals with something infinitely more complex than the behavior of tiny subatomic particles. We don't know the whole scope of the factors involved, so we don't even know the extent of our ignorance. But there's an awful lot of people getting what they believe are positive results, even if one person doesn't exactly get what another one does. Since the religious model predicts a much greater benefit for belief than skepticism (Pascal's Wager) there's enough reason for some to continue working with an incomplete and irreproducible model. The question then becomes, which model do we go with? They're all mutually-incompatible as written, which leads to my old Incomplete Theorem of the Supernature--in any given supernature, there is at most one religious system that is true, all others can only approach the truth as a limit. The problem is, it doesn't say anything about WHICH one is true, it only says that if there is one, there is only one. Which brings us back to the "Christianity works for me" position. As long as we believe we are observing the predicted results, we have no reason to switch belief systems, especially if we understand that we do not know everything that's going on behind the scenes. Those who cannot accept this fact usually do switch. And that's just fine--until they start attacking those who didn't. If you don't know, then you don't know--one way OR the other. It's the assumption that giving up the search is somehow superior to continued experimentation that's just plain arrogant. There are examples in science where long-dismissed theories get resurrected and modified to explain an observed phenomenon better than a more modern one. But this post is too long already... :)-->

John: It's on sale this week at Best Buy for just $49 after rebates. That's a steal for Studio 9. If you render your slideshow into a video file, then all they'll need is Windows Media Player. (Just don't render to MPEG-2 unless they have a software DVD player--although Studio 9 will let you author a DVD directly, so they could play it in an ordinary DVD player.)

Pinnacle Studio 9. Or many newer DVD players will automatically slideshow a disc full of JPEGs.

Eh. I can't say too much about it without spoiling the plot. The original Dark Horse comic book series was far superior. If you're a diehard fan of both series, you might actually be more disappointed in AvP than the average moviegoer. They could have done so much more with AvP than they did. If I had to rank all of the movies from the two series in one list, it would be: 1) Aliens 2) Alien 3) Predator 4) Alien Resurrection 5) Alien vs. Predator 6) Predator 2 7) Alien 3 (Might go either way on 4&5.)

If you're in an area that has what they call IFITL (pronounced eye-fiddle) then you have digital fiber to the curb, and the only copper is between the house and the junction box. IFITL stands for "Integrated Fiber In The Loop". Many phone companies use this type of technology to offer phone, broadband, and cable-tv off of a single digital pipe. In fact, with IFITL telephone lines, you don't really have DSL, you have a direct Ethernet connection to the fiber trunk. For what it's worth, Zix

Jim: Actually, the File Explorer is exactly the same as Win98's, with one minorly annoying difference. Sometimes, XP will try to decide what "type" of folder you're opening and give you a big menu of options on the side according to what the majority of files in it are. If it's full of pictures, it will open a picture menu in the lefthand pane, music files, a playing menu, and so on. To get back to standard Explorer look and feel, you have to hit the "Folders" button in the tool bar. The specialty menu will disappear, and you'll get your standard Windows drive/folder tree in the lefthand pane. I can't remember if it works in 98, but the shortcut to pop up the Explorer in XP is Windows Key+E.

XP is far more stable than 98 ever was--provided your machines have enough horsepower. If the machines have less than 256MB of RAM, you're in for a headache. If they're less than 700MHz, you'll have speed complaints. If you can get 512MB of RAM in each machine, and each machine has a 1GHz or better CPU, you'll be fine. Unless you're using your 2003 box as an Internet gateway, you probably won't have to run DNS on it. Even if you do, it's not that big a deal.

As of 10 minutes ago, 1 3-bedroom cabin has become available. There are still 2 inn rooms available as well.

dmiller: Mr. Razorblade says he remembers you, but that will avail you naught. Mr. Razorblade says "All will taste oblivion..which tastes just like Red Bull...which is DISGUSTING!", but I know he just swiped that from O'Malley the Evil A.I., the big phony. Mr. Razorblade now says he knows where I sleep.... Oh yeah, I'd like to see the little wuss get out of the drawer without my help this time! Now Mr. Razorblade is threatening to "chew up my heart and crap out my soul". Apparently Mr. Razorblade forgets we watched that episode together. Mr. Razorblade would be a lot more menacing if he could come up with original material.

Not so here. FireWire : ~30Mbytes/sec USB2.0: ~11.5Mbytes/sec.

Dot: It took guts to do what you did. 'Twas downright inspiring... ;)--> God bless! Zix

Hurt my feelings? Dude, get over yourself, already. I got the joke, and just gave it back to you. Could you just drop the armchair psychoanalysis for a while? You're worse at it than I am, for Pete's sake... ...although Mr. Razorblade told me to tell you he doesn't like you very much, and he's looking forward to meeting you in person. I'm not exactly sure what that means, though. Mr. Razorblade is often so clever that no one understands what the hell he's talking about. (Before anyone gets all bent out of shape, that's obviously a joke, too. Grow up.)

Nice edit, *******.

This is *strictly* for amusement purposes only! What should Zixar's response to Steve! be? o "Gee, thanks, DAD..." o "Steve! Mind your own bus!ness" o "Steve! Go ! yourself." o "Steve! You're just lucky I happen to like your wife. Otherwise, you would have to have a very short, but also very unpleasant experience with Mr. Razorblade..."

igotout: Nope! Not when you've started a repair install of XP over the old one. It locks you out of Safe Mode until the install can complete. Fortunately, I was able to boot off of a DOS disk and copy the new DLL over the old one. Setup then ran through. I had to install SP1a again, then download 32 different updates and patches, but at least it works now. I've just resigned myself to using the drive in the slow USB2 mode instead of FireWire.

def59: Prove it. ;)-->

When you're watching it, remember that Lansbury is only 3 years older than Laurence Harvey... :)-->

...it contained a message that really wasn't necessary, in hindsight. I can give you a good deal on the space!