With as fast as Android phones are improving, this doesn't seem like a realistic concern for me. I have one of the original myTouch 3G's, which just recently got the Android 2.2 update. The thing is, the hardware really can't run the OS at a reasonable speed anymore. I'm now looking at getting a new phone simply so I can use the software to its fullest.

I don't think 20 years is that long to wait to write something down. Is it uncommon to wait 20 years before writing one's autobiography? We don't usually think people have forgotten all the details or are fabricating stories of their own life, even if they are telling things that happened 20 years ago.

If you look through 1 Thessalonians (the book the link you cited lists as being the first book in the New Testament), it mentions Christians in a fairly large area. There's already an established community of Christians. This book isn't establishing a new religion, it's encouraging people who are Christians already. Given how important the resurrection is to Christianity, I don't think the Christians of the time would have bought it had Paul suddenly said "Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you these last 20 years, not only did Jesus die for us, He came back to life too!"

Most of the early teaching of Christianity was oral. If you notice, Paul wrote many of his epistles while he was in prison. It may be that they early Christians were too busy travelling around preaching to take the time to write down a complete account. Maybe as they decided to settle down, they also decided to write a more permanent record of the things they had been teaching most of their lives.

The Bible being infallible doesn't mean it is an unabridged compilation of all that is knowable. It simply means it is accurate on the subjects it addresses. The Bible primarily with things such as why are we here and how are we to treat each other. Apparently the existence or non-existence of aliens is not important to those questions. If we ever do discover aliens, it would be reasonable for Christians to conclude that God created them too, but their existence isn't something we need to know about to please God.

True faith is based on evidence, not opposed to evidence. If you look at the teachings of the apostles in Acts, for example, their message rested on the fact that there was a man who everyone had seen or heard of, who had done impressive miracles that many people have seen, was put to death in a very public fashion and then seen by many people alive afterwards. Surely, if these things were true, the faith that results from believing them would be one based on evidence and not warm feelings, right? Today our evidence primarily deals with the question of whether these accounts have been reliably preserved and recorded by credible witnesses. You may not find this evidence compelling, but I hope you can at least admit that there are Christians today who have come to their faith for better reasons than because their preacher said so.

I'm curious what you mean by this. Many of the letters in the New Testament are written to churches, and it seems that these must have been started or instituted in some way. The Bible even talks about some church organization, with bishops/pastors/elders (the terms are used interchangeably in the Bible) overseeing the spiritual needs of each church and deacons acting as servants of the church. Of course, I'd agree that any organization beyond this goes against what's in the Bible. The Bible definitely goes against building elaborate, word-wide hierarchies, adding to or changing (including ignoring) teachings of the Bible, and a lot of practices that are common in so many churches today.

I apologize if you knew all this already, you certainly do seem knowledgeable. I just wanted to clarify what point you were making.

One guy I used to work with that used to work in supercomputing claimed he did one project involving aerodynamic simulations of Pringles chips. Apparently they were originally shaped like wings, and would become airborne when traveling along high speed conveyor belts. They used a simulation to find a shape that wouldn't generate so much lift.

I and most Christians I know do not have a problem with condoms, and we probably wouldn't even recommend prayer as the most effective way to prevent HIV. What we'd probably recommend instead is to only have sex with the person you're married to. Sure, this doesn't work too well against rape and blood transfusions, but then again, condoms don't really work there either.

I'm not sure this is a terribly stable equilibrium though. Consider what's been happening with cell phone companies lately. They were all charging about the same price, but a few months ago tmobile basically cut their prices in half. I just noticed that Verizon recently lowered their prices, and presumably at&t will or has too.

I haven't actually written any Android software (although I have a myTouch now, so I might give it a try one of these days), so I'm not speaking from experience here. One advantage Android has over the iPhone as far as development goes is that it's Java-based. Pretty much every practicing software developer now learned Java at some point in their life, so chances are they could pick up the Android API pretty quickly. Android also has an Eclipse plugin, letting developers use familiar tools that work on Mac, Windows and Linux. It looks like there's also a C-based API for writing native code.

For the iPhone, on the other hand, you have to use Objective-C. While Objective-C seems like a nice language in a lot of ways, pretty much the only people who know it are Mac developers. You've also got to use XCode, which is Mac-only. Clearly this isn't preventing a huge number of apps from being written anyway (probably even more than are written for Mac OS X), but it does seem to me like it's at least somewhat of a disadvantage for the ease of developing apps.

Microsoft actually does have some experience with this. The XBox 360 is PowerPC-based, but it's able to run games from the original XBox, which was x64-based. I'm not sure, but this is quite possibly done using the very software you mentioned from Connectix.

At any rate, if Microsoft were to release an ARM port of Windows, it'd very likely be some kind of Windows Netbook Edition, and application providers would release versions of their apps for the netbook edition. It seems like the trend is largely towards smaller computers, and software companies would be stupid not to make sure they support this space too.

It's probably a lot easier to convince application makers to port their application from Windows (x86) to Windows (ARM) than from Windows (x86) to Linux (x86). There's a pretty good chance that switching architectures for most applications just requires a recompile, like porting from x86 to amd64. It's not always that simple, but in this case you'll still have all your Win32 APIs available, whereas porting to Linux will often times mean rewriting the whole thing in GTK or QT.

ARM processors still aren't being targeted at desktop machines either, but mostly Netbooks. I could see application makers being convinced that writing a netbook edition would be worth porting architectures, but maybe not being worth the full cost of porting to Linux.

It's not really that absurd. It sounds a lot like how the world was around the time I first got online. Back then, everyone had Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, or any other online services that were around. I don't remember there being any interoperability at the time, so in effect they said "Let them build their own free internet if they want to complete." That's exactly what they did, and now these companies are all either out of business or they have morphed into just another ISP.

True, the Internet was developed long before I got online through these non-Internet services, but in the early 90s, I recall a world where the Internet was not something targeted at normal people. Researchers, businesses, the military, etc., all used the Internet. Regular people used closed services. Ultimately, openness won.

You were modded funny, and I'm not sure if you meant it as such, but this is really a pretty good point. People encourage you to come up with a password that's easy to remember. The problem is, these usually make passwords a lot easier to guess. Instead, you should just use a randomly generated string of 8 characters. If you type the password often enough, it'll be stored in muscle memory with about as much effort in my experience as trying to remember an easy to remember password.

One benefit I can see is that it gives you a single place to go get books from. I don't have to remember the web sites for 100 authors, or 50 publishers. Instead, I can just remember a single site which aggregates all the books together. Sure, I'll end up paying a higher monetary cost due to the middleman, but presumably the time cost savings is enough to me that it is worthwhile.

It's sort like having an iPhone App Store instead of hundreds of independent software publishers to download from. Another benefit is that the App Store provides common payment processing infrastructure, which keeps the cost of implementing this from being duplicated for every software publisher.

If the problem is the oxygen, clearly we need to produce a vacuum between the transmitter and the receiver. I propose a long cylinder of some rigid material, with a smaller cylinder bored out through the middle. Once this long pipe, or "tube," if you will, is connected to the transmitter and receiver, you could suck the air out of the inside of the tube and extend the wireless range. Several such transmitting and listening stations could be combined to form a series of tubes.

Maybe my sarcasm detector failed miserably, but isn't the point of a multiprocess Firefox so that you can encapsulate Flash in its own process?