Well, I wouldn't say no problem...

Just like beethoven.

There are 1000's of ISP's in the United States. WISPA alone has a huge number of members, and those are only ISP's offering wireless.

In the specific example I gave, yes, that would require god to take action. HOWEVER, that does not mean that there is no possible way to indipendantly prove the existance of god (assuming god does exist). Maybe we'll invent a time machine and go back and directly observe god creating the universe. Maybe we'll find a cheat-code that lets us see outside the matrix. Maybe god's simulation (if we are in one) will crash and we'll suddenly see nothing but white with a boot screen scrolling past our eyes. These wouldn't require god's help.

Not believing in something without substantial evidence does not imply that the person is completely ruling something out. Just like most people don't rule out the possibility of bigfoot existing, but few people actually believe bigfoot exists because we don't have any evidence of bigfoot, only a long history of consistently debunked reports of bigfoot.

I never said god doesn't exist. My "I wonder why" statement was to show that in the complete lack of evidence for something, that continuing to believe in it is foolish.

There are also people who still believe the earth is flat. So what's your point?

Not if we happened to be made of the lesser-common type and thus matter (what we are made of and what we most likely discovered first) would be in a lower supply than the anti-matter that, while more abundant, would get the label "anti-matter" because it would be discovered later.

My bad, "50% chance of being forced to play rock" is what I should have said. I wrote "being forced to" in the first half, then I must have accidentally skipped it after the comma :(

Really? I can think of dozens of ways god himself could prove he existed, if he did. He could appear as a 100 foot indestructible giant, cure all cancer instantly, give flying superpowers to children, rotate the colour spectrum, abolish fluid dynamics, raise the dead, turn the oceans into maple syrup, cause all competing religious texts to burst into flame, invert the laws of magnetism, etc. Any combination of the above would be pretty damn good evidence that he exists.

The only reason nobody can prove he exists is because none of those things has happened. I wonder why...

Then the summary is wrong. He is not forced to play rock 50% of the time, he has a 50% chance of playing rock each round. It's subtle, but the first guarantees an equal rock-notrock ratio whereas the second only suggests an approximately equal rock-notrock ratio.

The outgoing phone line is to the alarm company, not your cell phone.

Would you rather it
A) always go off and everyone notice the VERY loud noise it's making from the other side of the wall.
B) probably go off and alert you as well.

Most new appartments (that would have something like this in the first place) already have analog (very simple, no internet) interconnected fire alarms that can even phone the fire department automatically.

Were people actually *replacing* their existing fire alarms with this instead of just supplementing them? I would think that "return for a refund" would also mean "and buy some damn tried-and-true smoke detectors".

Almost all the reasonable suggestions I've seen for internet-connected things (coffee in the morning, lights as I come in, etc) have already been solved with timers (coffee, thermostat, etc) or motion sensors (lights). Most people who complain about motion-sensed lights are doing it wrong anyways. CFL's (what most people use now thanks to various laws) burn out really fast if they are turned on for less than 15 minutes (it's the actual time duration, NOT just the number of cycles), so they just need to adjust the timer for longer durations and you can still have an override switch if you want it.

But seriously, we don't need everything connected to the internet. In the case of fire alarms (like in this article), wire them in with battery backups and connect them to the phone line (outgoing only), that's ALL they need.

I thought that was Toyota.