however, that they aren't particularly interested in enforcing religious laws (some of which are actually rather ambiguous as to whom they actually apply to) so much as they are seeking someone to force their own particular brand or morality on.

You hit the nail on the head. What people seem to not understand is that judging people goes directly contrary to Christ's teachings, as is hating anyone for what they are or what they do - hatred itself is forbidden in Christianity.

Try telling some Christians that, though. But nobody's perfect.

Whether or not you were indoctrinated in religion when you were young and impressionable, if you haven't experienced God the only rational choice is that the question doesn't matter.

As to indoctrination, I think you're putting way too much weight on that. One fellow I drink with sometimes was brought up in a strict Baptist family in Kentucky, yet he is absolutely convinced that God can't possibly exist. Another guy I knew was brought up by atheists, and had a religious experience when he was strung out and homeless.

As to "why Jesus" it's because of what he taught (The Buddha was certainly full of wisdom, I learned a lot about Buddhists when stationed in Thailand). Basically, love everybody. Treat folks like you want to be treated. Don't judge.

I don't think Jesus and Buddha would have had much to argue about except that reincarnation thing, and maybe karma.

You can't reason your way into religion, it has to touch you personally. Someone in 1700 Europe would not be able to reason his way into belief that such things as elephants existed. He's have had to visit Asia or Africa to believe.

God is only invisible to those who choose to ignore him.

I believe you're confusing Vogons with wizards. Too much pipeweed, Gandalf?

Or to put it another way, if someone feels the need to say "XYZ is settled science" that's a clue that it might not be.

Can "science" ever be settled?

No, almost certainly not, since that implies perfect knowledge of all existence--all that is, was, or ever could be.

Can science settle particular questions? Yes.

All a smith needs is coal, steel or iron, wind, and water. The only tool he would have a hard time building himself would be the anvil, those are usually cast. The forge isn't all that hard to construct (maybe the fan or bellows) and all the other tools are trivial to make.

The only real cost is steel and fuel unless you have your own mine.

I took a blacksmithing workshop in college and one of the things the 74 year old instructor stressed most was that a blacksmith who doesn't make his own tools isn't much of a blacksmith. He taught us how to make all sorts of tools.

Who makes hammers and tongs? The blacksmith. Who writes compilers? Programmers. Maybe I'm getting old but a programmer who can't write a compiler or interpreter isn't much of a programmer (I wrote an interpreter once, years ago).

We teach preschoolers some specific examples of abstract algebra:

Today is Friday. Friday is the 6th day of the week. What day will it be 3 days from now? *hold up a calendar*

It is 11 o'clock. What time will it be two hours from now? *hold up an analog clock and point to the hour hand*

You get the idea.

Perhaps its time for a centralized theft registry.

Yes, this will reduce the pseudo-anonymity but it can be done.

Here's one possible way for bitcoin-wallet services to handle things, but it's off-the-cuff so it's probably buggy:

Executive summary:

Through the use of multiple wallets and a central registry of "stolen bitcoins," a wallet service's customers can put money they don't need immediately in "vaults." Unauthorized "withdrawals" from the vault will be refused by the software and will never make it into the block-chain, thereby providing some protection to the funds and deterring wholesale theft from bitcoin-wallet services.

Details:

Give account-holders two "wallets" - a "pocket money wallet" and a "vault wallet" - and create a third wallet - a "holding wallet" - that is controlled only by the wallet service.

Wallet #1 is the "pocket money" wallet. It has no additional protections. It's used for "petty cash" and for money that will be needed in the next day or two.

Wallet #2 is the customer's "vault wallet." For certain customers with few incoming transactions, this "vault wallet" will be stored "offline" and only moved online temporarily when the customer tells the wallet service there will be an incoming transaction soon.

Wallet #3 is the "holding wallet" for Wallet #2. There may be more than one such "holding wallet."

The "vault wallets" are registered in bulk by the bitcoin-wallet services with a central authority. Only certain transactions are allowed "out" of these vault wallets. All other transactions will be refused by the software - they will never make it into the block-chain.

If an exchange is compromised, all of its "vault wallets" are considered compromised until the exchange indicates they are not. Transactions indicating withdrawals from these "vault wallets" during the time of the compromised are refused by the software - they will never make it into the block-chain.

The registration is nothing more than
* some identifier belonging to the wallet service, to ensure that the registration information isn't tampered with later
* the identifier of the "vault wallet"
* the identifier of one or more "holding wallets."
* for each "holding wallet," a minimum time between each transaction. This will usually be at least a day.
* each "holding wallet" will typically be automatically dumped into the customer's "pocket money wallet" when the time expires.
* at the wallet-service's option, additional obfuscation may happen after the money leaves the holding wallet and enters the customer's "pocket money wallet." For example, the money leaving the customer's "holding wallet" may be dumped into "bank's temporary wallet #1" and an equal amount transferred from "bank's temporary wallet #2" into the customer's "pocket money wallet" shortly thereafter.
* at the wallet-service's option, the "holding wallets" may be part of an obfuscation scheme. For example, they may be randomly re-used across customers, or they may be designed as one-time-use wallets.
* a time-delay for any registration information changes other than marking wallets as compromised.

The idea is that the "pocket money" wallet is just as vulnerable as ever, but it will rarely have most of a customer's coins in it.

The "holding wallet" has some vulnerabilities but it will be empty most of the time and thanks to the "time lock" it's unlikely that all or even most "holding wallets" at a given will be able to be stolen at the same time.

The "vault wallets" are protected enough to make the immediate reward of "raiding" an exchange much lower than it is today. There will still be theft, but the number of people interested in stealing from exchanges will go down and the risk of loss from a given theft will go down.

Trade-offs:

* This is not a complete solution.
* There are probably anonymity issues I haven't considered.
* There are new denial-of-service issues introduced by this system. I can see the possibility of a DOS attack against a particular "vault," against a particular "wallet service," or even against the "central registration authority" itself.

These issues will need to be looked at and either fixed or deemed "acceptable" before this or any similar system will be accepted by end users.

If you control for # of hours worked, that's fine and dandy as long as this factor is something NOT based on gender discrimination.

If men get offered longer-hours, and therefore more-annual-pay, jobs or assignments, because they are men or because of some underlying factor where men have an advantage because they are men, then you SHOULD NOT be factoring this out.

If everyone gets offered such assignments without any gender discrimination and men choose to work longer hours, or if the reasons for any differences between what men are offered and what women are offered are all based on things that happened earlier in life that were based on free choices rather than gender discrimination, then you SHOULD factor these out.

Example:

If promotions are offered to those who have current skills for the new job, and those current skills are usually developed by taking extra training classes on the employee's own time, this may seem like a gender-neutral reason for selecting who gets promoted, even if its effect is to have many more of one gender promoted than another. In some environments, it may actually BE a gender-neutral way of selecting who gets promoted.

However, if the company's employee pool has a large number of women who simply do not have the time to take such classes (say, due to being single parents - single moms significantly outnumber single dads in the USA) and the employer either knows this or would have to be willfully blind to not know it, then using "who has current skills for the new job" for internal promotions without finding some way of ensuring everyone has a REAL opportunity to get skills training is, at best, indirect gender discrimination. If it's a deliberate "bwuhahahaha let's see if we can fool everyone into thinking we can play fair while ensuring most promotions go to men bwuhahahaha" deliberate technique, then the company better hope there is no smoking gun or they will lose any related employment lawsuit and probably alienate their customers as well.

Why in the world would anybody need POTS in the first place? And why would anybody pay $40 per month for it?

Also, the title is misleading -- TFA says he didn't have cable, only phone and internet. No cable, no cable bill, he had a phone/internet bill.

I don't have cable, an antenna is good enough since TV went digital. I'm paying $40 for unlimited everything on my Android, $46 for DSL (unfortunately that's the cheapest internet available here, cable internet is almost twice DSL and since I live alone, DSL suffices nicely).

Your being an asshole doesn't excuse my being an asshole.