This really is security 101. Actually it's not even security 101, it's programming 101. You always assume the information fed to you is potentially invalid and qualify it.

How in their right mind could anyone at Verizon not check to see if the account id was legit? This is not a simple oversight. This is gross incompetence, or else it was intentionally left this way.

Don't these companies do security audits?

It's spelled G-O-T-T-L-I-E-B.

(until the 1980s)

The form we know as "pinball" is uniquely American. Bagatelle games are different. Bagatelle is more like gambling and based on chance.

In 1947, when Gottlieb, a Chicago-based company, introduced the first pinball machine with flippers, Humpty Dumpty. Things changed. Thereafter all games soon became flipper-pinball-machines.

>I'm glad you think you're informed, but you're wrong in this case.

Reality shows otherwise. If pinballs were popular they'd still be in every bar. There'd still be arcades all over the place. There isn't.

Yea, there are a few retro-arcades and "bar-cades" popping up now, but they're just pandering to a retro audience at a moment when they have disposable income. The same still holds true for the new manufacturers. They're not really breaking into new markets except tapping into an existing market. It may be appearing to grow, but that's because it really doesn't have anywhere else to go. Pinball all but disappeared 10 years ago.

The exception does not prove the rule. If pinball were still very profitable, they'd be all over the place.

Games now cost in excess of $6500. It's no longer profitable to operate them. They are much higher maintenance than video games and neither bring in the coin-op money they used to. It is unfortunate since pinball really is a uniquely American form, a great combination of technology + mechanical design + art + culture.

"This car is absolutely horrible.... yet somehow it's brilliant!"

Ron Paul is against government regulation. His policies would only make corporate overlords more powerful and have less authority to answer to.

I think ground zero in the security war always begins and ends with the spam industry, which seems to be at the forefront of exploitation.

You are confusing history with religion.

The bible also describes pi as being 3.0 - does that make it a math book? It also gives instruction on how to beat slaves. Does that mean it's a medical text? It provides details on what the fine one must pay if they kick a pregnant woman and cause her to lose her fetus. Does that make it helpful to economics?

God = Psychology
Religion = Economics

Your argument is analogous to suggesting people call themselves a vegetarian and still eat meat. Most religions are mutually-exclusive of each other. Why attach a label to yourself that for thousands of years has been used as the impetus to oppress others?

The reason science cannot disprove religion such as Christianity is because most believers only selfishly care about what God gives to their life, instead of whether the environment/universe is created by God.

You just employed a Begging the Question fallacy. Science can and does routinely disprove religion, from the origins of life in the Book of Genesis to the ancestry of Native Americans in the Book of Mormon. Almost every religion has some material claim that can be tested and thus far, there's been no non-circumstantial, material evidence to indicate any supernatural claims are true. The onus is on those who believe to prove their claims are legitimate. Not the other way around. We don't have to "disprove religion", you have to prove, for example, that prayer makes a difference, and numerous scientific studies have shown that claim to be false. So science can and does disprove numerous religious claims. Can science prove god doesn't exist? No, and it's not our responsibility to do so, and regardless of whether or not we prove you wrong, that still doesn't mean your beliefs or supernatural claims about the origin of the universe are correct. That's a burden you must back up instead of trying to shift it upon the skeptics.

the word 'faith' and correct me if I am wrong, but if something has no ontological status, you cannot argue for or against it.

Correct... until someone's faith-based beliefs intersect with the material world in the form of specific claims. Then their beliefs can be tested and proven or disproven, including:

* The power of prayer - Disproven by the Harvard Prayer Experiment.

* The creation myth of Genesis, disproven by numerous areas of science

* The origin of native Americans as dictated in the Book of Mormon, disproven by genetic science

* The claims of scientology, disproven by analysis of their e-meters other science fields

Religion has never been content with merely residing in a metaphysical realm, and that's when problems arise.