Right..... because when Verizon customer's pay for internet connection service, and Verizon customers request pages and media from Wikipedia.... Wikipedia should pay Verizon. That totally makes sense. On crack.

Everything is originating on Verizon's network..... Verizon customer's are the ones wanting to open a connection to Netfix and request the data.

When I make a phonecall to someone, and I spend 99% of the call listening to what that person has to say, NO ONE is going to buy that my local phone company can SEND A BILL TO THE PERSON I CALLED.

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No. Level3 offered to upgrade the connection FOR FREE. Level3 offered to pay 100% of the cost of the extra hardware to upgrade the link and GIFT it to Verizon.

The second part of your comment was correct.... the part about Verizon saying "No". Verizon doesn't want the problem fixed for free - Verizon wants to use their monopoly position to bottleneck their customer's datastreams, to try to extort a slice of the content-revenue-stream pie.

Yep. Verizon themselves put out a graphic showing that there's abundant bandwidth, and that the entire problem is the one chokepoint where they're linked to Level3. Which Level3 offered to foot 100% of the bill of fixing.

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Screw "a small step away".
Verizon should provide free internet services for every service their customers request.

The customer is paying for internet service, and the ISP goddamn well needs to round-trip delivery of the customer's internet data, up to the quantity and speed THAT THE CUSTOMER PAYED FOR.

The truly insane thing here is that Level3 has gone to the absurd length of offering to pay 100% of the cost GIFTING Verizon with the additional network cards and cables to expand the link and fix the problem. Verizon refused. Verizon isn't happy being a network provider - they see the revenue Netflix and others gets being a content providers, and Verizon doesn't want the connection problem fixed for free.... Verizon wants to extort Netflix to give them a permanent revenue stream from the content pie. Verizon is abusing their monopoly power to bottleneck customer's data.... trying to force Netflix to raise prices and pay that extra money as a KICKBACK to Verizon. Verizon is abusing their monopoly position to try to gouge their own customers - and trying to force Verizon's price-gouging to show up on customer's Netflix bills rather than appearing on Verizon's own bills.

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If there are any other government agencies out there looking for a new IT system, I can fail to deliver for $100 million.

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There was a large fleet of German civilian ships in the Atlantic between 1941 and 1945, although they were all submarines.

They did have torpedoes on board, but they were civilian torpedoes. For defense.

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I think it should be MANDATORY to teach the 2nd law of thermodynamics in any physics education. I wish your teachers had been more clear on it. Your notion of the 2nd law is clearly flawed or incomplete, as it would prohibit the natural formation of highly ordered snowflakes from chaotic water vapor, as well as prohibiting countless other common physical processes.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that the total entropy of a closed system tends to increase, with overwhelming probability. It does not apply to any system subject to a flow of energy an outside source. It not prohibit one location or object in a system from increasing in order while other objects/locations in that system have an equal or larger increase in disorder.

The earth is receiving energy from the sun. The enormous entropy increase within the sun easily "pays for" the ongoing creation of order and complexity here on earth. So long as the sun shines, that energy flow can and does fuel natural self-organizing physical processes. You can see this in snowflake formation, the self-organization of hurricanes, the development of an individual organism, as well as the genetic evolution of a population. There is no violation of the 2nd law here. The sun's energy input pays for, fuels, these self-organizing natural processes.

Computer science, with an active interest in physics and science in general. Computer science deals extensively with Information Theory, the ways that information can measured, processed, transformed, and CREATED. Evolution is not merely a "theory", it is an applied science. Evolutionary Algorithms is a field of computer science where complex, ordered, useful, problem-solving information is CREATED by replication with mutation and natural selection of "digital-DNA". I have personally witnessed the fact that evolution can and does create complex useful new information. It is an applied science put to active use in one way or another by a majority Fortune 500 companies. It is quite common for evolution to create designs better than the best "Intelligent Designs" by human engineers. One particular case comes to mind of one team that applied evolution to jet engine design, which evolved an engine more fuel efficient than any human engineer had ever been able to achieve. And there is at least one company solely dedicated to filing patents on valuable innovations generated via evolution.

Here is a grossly oversimplified illustration. Roll one hundred dice. The chances of them all coming up 6 is effectively zero. Now apply evolution. Take that random result and REPLICATE it, and lets apply one MUTATION re-rolling one random die. Now SELECT (keep) the set with the higher total, and kill (discard) the set with the lower or equal total. After approximately 3000 replication-selection steps you will have a perfect set of all 6's.

This process works even when you do not have a pre-determined target. All it requires to work is that you have some means of measuring which set of DNA is "better" or "worse" than another. Evolution will generate whatever information is required to satisfy the selection criteria.

But as I said, that was a grossly oversimplified example. Evolution's power to generate information is exponentially increased when there is a population with sexual reproduction (genetic recombination). This has been mathematically proven by the Schemata Theorem (J. Holland 1975). I won't attempt to explain it here, but a Google search on schemata theorem turns up 122,000 results. It is a seminal paper, widely cited by subsequent scientific work in mathematics and computer science and biological evolution. It mathematically proves a major principal whereby population evolution is almost infinitely more powerful than the trivial dice example I gave above.

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Oh joy, an "engineer" who doesn't have the faintest clue what the fuck the 2nd law of thermodynamics says, and doesn't seem to have much grasp of anything else in science either. I sure as hell hope you don't "engineer" anything safety-critical.

Now the 2nd law of thermodynamics says: "All natural systems (e.g. nature) progresses from a state of order (creations) to a state of chaos (puddle of mud)".

Riiiiiight.... that's what it says..... which also means snow is impossible because chaotic water molecules in the air cannot self-organize into beautiful complex highly ordered snowflakes.

Jeremy Connell Ministries: Snow, it doesn't exist.

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Your comment is pointless because everyone already agrees with that.
Unless you are one of those confused people who thinks teaching evolution is atheism, in which case I suggest you ask for a refund on your "actual scientific degree from a respected university".

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I find belief in invisible-magical-people to be rather odd, but what really baffles me is worshiping Loki, god of mischief and deception.

Yep, it's conceivable that Loki exists and created the universe 6 hours ago and all of your memories and all of the apparent age of the earth is a deliberate fraud. It's conceivable that you're a disembodied brain in a jar wired to to some Matrix-style fictional reality. And it's utterly absurd to waste time with such things. If there were some malevolent all-powerful superbeing dead-set on deceiving you, then you will be deceived. If a malevolent entity wants to deceive you into thinking 2+2=3, then the entire world and all of your thoughts and memories can be deceptively manipulated on the fly. You will believe 2+2=3, if a malevolent god wants you to believe it.

If the earth appears to be 4.5 billion years old, then either the earth actually is 4.5 billion years old or Loki crafted a deliberate deception of a 4.5 billion year age. Either acknowledge that you worship Loki, or drop this nonsense a planet-worth of evidence of age might be some elaborate deception.

You cannon profess to believe in a benevolent god while rejecting truths plainly and exhaustively revealed by the scientific study of the world. If the world appears old, then the world is old. If evolution appears true, then evolution is true. If god exists, and evolution is true, then god simply created a universe which included evolution as part of the design.

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I checked your link. Most of the pages in fact explain that there *aren't* any "out of place fossils". The closest was a page so blindly-stupid as to think an overthrust creates out of place fossils, and about two lpages that bafflingly think that a newly found slightly earlier ancestor, or a later descendant, is somehow "out of place". Not one single example of a rabbit in the Precambrian, or any other remotely out of place fossil. An out of place fossil has to be an evolutionary descendant (like rabbits) appearing before an ancestor (like dinosaurs). You didn't present a single one, your link didn't present a single example.

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It's not being treated as a monolith. The government was finally spurred to action on this issue mainly because of Islamist trying push religion in science class. The general rule is that you can't false claims about any flavor of creationism being accepted supported science. You have to teach science in a science class. Kinda like you are supposed to be teaching math in a math class.

No. Old earth creationists are being treated equally. You can't teach old earth creationism in a science class when the only accurate description of the current state of science is that professional scientists consider old-earth creationism unscientific and unsupported scientifically.

It seems you need to flip that around.
Scientific is not the same thing as atheism!
Science does not mention gods because there is zero scientific evidence for or against the existence of any gods. Just because science has nothing to say about gods does not make science atheistic. Just because welding class has nothing to say about gods doesn't make welding atheistic.

Yep. And therefore shouldn't be in a science class.

A theology class, comparing and contrasting the major world religions, would be an entirely appropriate class to teach the Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and other stories of creation.

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What a bizarre argument. You confirm every single point of the case proving AGW, and you counter by citing that atmospheric CO2 only goes up half as fast as we dump CO2 into the atmosphere. This is something that has been long known and factored in by scientists. As long as atmospheric CO2 is going up then you're concurring that the AGW case has been established, and you're merely pointing out that in a fictional world without natural CO2 sinks the CO2 increase would have been twice as fast, a fictional world that would have had faster and more severe warming.

Basically you're saying the effect is real and proven, but it's only half as big as I imagine it could have been, therefore it doesn't exist? Huh?

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It has been known for years, probably decades, that gene frequencies follow this mathematical rule, and that it has been mathematically proven optimal for solving Multi-armed bandit type problems. Each generation genes are tested by natural selection, and increase or decrease in frequency according to multiplicative increase or decrease. This is a mathematically optimal strategy for exploring and optimizing payoff in a complex unknown environment. Mutation creates random stuff to try, and this mathematically selection algorithm optimally crafts it into useful new information.

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