Now another letter written by Einstein on the topic of God is up for auction and it reveals yet again just how disdainful of traditional God belief Einstein really was:

Einstein writes “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

Born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1879, he also adds that “for me, the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”

He also wrote “the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.

“As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

This probably won’t stop the occasional Christian from trying to lay claim to Einstein as one of their own, but at least it provides us with another point of reference to refute that argument when it rears its ugly head. The letter itself is expected to go for between $12,000 and $16,000 and if I were a rich man I’d consider buying it myself. Einstein is one of my heroes and having something like that in my collection would be very cool indeed.

I had to check the article out because the first question that popped into my head was: What the fuck is a Zuba? As it turns out it’s actually spelled “Zubaz” and according to its Wikipedia entry they are:

Zubaz (pronounced “zoo-baz” or “zoo-buz”, though officially pronounced “zoo-buzz") are a brand of shorts and pants that became popular during the early 1990s. They were created by two bodybuilders, Dan Stock and Bob Truax, as a comfortable, functional short for weightlifting.

They hoped to make a short that would stretch and expand with the body during a workout. In a short time, the shorts became wildly popular in the United States. The Zubaz company sold $100 million worth of products in 1991 alone.

Although Zubaz began as a line of shorts, they were later developed into long pants, caps, shirts, and even diapers. The pants are tapered at the ankle, with the outer part of the leg being longer than the inner part. They have an elastic waistband to allow for greater flexibility and movement. The pants were originally created in a zebra print, but later began to be sold in almost any design imaginable.

I lived through the early 1990s, Courtney was born in 1990, and for the life of me I couldn’t recall ever hearing about Zubaz before. Though after seeing some of the pants I can certainly recall some folks wearing them and laughing my ass off as a result. Those things are hideous. It seems as though they were a huge fad for awhile, but have since diminished in popularity and are listed on Bad Fads.com. That hasn’t stopped the company from trying to stage a comeback beginning back sometime last year. Usually I’m up on the latest fads because of my interest in trivial things, but fashion is something I’ve never been particularly interested in or adept at (as most of you can probably tell from any of my photographs) so I managed to completely miss the whole Zubaz trend.

Now that I know what they are I can see the humor in the Republicans deciding to go with an 18 year-old outmoded fashion choice for their official convention attire. It certainly does nothing to improve their out-of-touch with the mainstream image. I suppose it could be worse. They could have chosen to go with leisure suits.

The second suggestion was that I check to see if the company, Avant Imaging, that did the CAT scan would be willing to offer a discount seeing as I was paying for it out of pocket. The nice lady at the billing company said she would put another month hold on the bill and send in a request on my behalf and that we should eventually see a new bill with any discount applied to it. Well that bill finally arrived and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s still for $3500 and some change. It appears Avant Imaging won’t cut us any slack and we’ve run out of any further options.

The good news is that the donations you folks sent in back when I first talked about this crisis will cover around a third of the bill. Allow me to again take a moment and express my gratitude for your generosity on our behalf. After that initial payment I’ll have to work out some sort of payment plan with the billing company and pay the rest off over time. The other good news is that we just signed up for health insurance through my new job and it should kick in on May 26th. It’s no where near as great as what I had in the past—in fact it probably wouldn’t cover the majority of the cost if Courtney had to have CAT scans today—but it beats the hell out of no insurance at all. The cost for the insurance will knock my pay down to just a little more than what I was earning at the last job, but at least we’re covered. The only really frustrating part about all of this was that we spent a lot of time sitting around waiting for decisions to be made on if we were going to catch a break or not before finally finding out that we’re going to have to pay the full bill anyway.

My daughter deserved to die for falling in love’ - The Observer

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

[...] It was her first youthful infatuation and it would be her last. She died on 16 March after her father discovered she had been seen in public talking to Paul, considered to be the enemy, the invader and a Christian. Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand’s two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust.

‘Death was the least she deserved,’ said Abdel-Qader. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,’ he said.

Sitting on a chair by his front door and surrounded by the gerberas and white daisies he had planted in the family garden, Abel-Qader attempted to justify his actions.

‘I don’t have a daughter now, and I prefer to say that I never had one. That girl humiliated me in front of my family and friends. Speaking with a foreign solider, she lost what is the most precious thing for any woman. ‘People from western countries might be shocked, but our girls are not like their daughters that can sleep with any man they want and sometimes even get pregnant without marrying. Our girls should respect their religion, their family and their bodies.

‘I have only two boys from now on. That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,’ he said, his voice swelling with pride. ‘My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.’

Not that Christianity doesn’t have its share of passages in its holy book with similar punishments for perceived crimes, but it sometimes seems as though a majority of Muslims still cling to such barbaric teachings. I suppose they deserve credit for sticking to what their religion teaches, but somehow I’d prefer they’d take the more hypocritical approach of the majority of Christians and just cherry pick the good parts of their religion.

Found via Pharyngula who put things a bit more eloquently than I did.

Found over at Kotaku.com.

The answer is: Yes, yes we would allow them to host the Olympics. In 1936 in fact.

Crack a history book every now and then and perhaps you won’t end up looking like a complete idiot.

Sent in by a number of people.

Hey Spore Fans -

We wanted to let you know that we’ve been hearing your concerns about the online authentication mentioned earlier this week. I didn’t want to head into the weekend without getting back to you with some information about how Spore is planning on using this new system.

A few things we wanted you to know:

• We authenticate your game online when you install and launch it the first time.
• We’ll re-authenticate when a player uses online features, downloads new content or a patch for their game.
• The new system means you don’t have to play with the disc in your computer. And if you are like me, always losing discs, this will be a huge benefit.
• You’ll still be able to install and play on multiple computers.
• You can play offline. 

We do hope that players will play online - sharing creatures, buildings and vehicles with other players is something that is unique to Spore and one of the coolest features of the game. Every day, when I play the Creature Stage, I get to see wacky and awesome new creatures from my Buddies on the team coming over the hill at me and I can’t wait to see what happens when our creative, passionate community starts sharing their creations.

I’d love to write more - but I need to get back to work. We’ve got a game to finish.

-caryl

I’m still not happy about it, but if they limit the authentications to when the player is getting downloadable content/patches and it doesn’t stop legitimate applications (read: Process Explorer) from running then I may be able to live with it. Mass Effect is still out of the question though.

Late Tuesday afternoon I reached J. B. Perrette, the president of digital distribution for NBC Universal, to ask why NBC found Microsoft’s video store more appealing than Apple’s.

He explained that NBC, like most studios, would like the broadest distribution possible for its programming. But it has two disputes with Apple.

First, Apple insists that all TV shows have an identical wholesale price so that it can sell all of them at $1.99. NBC wants to sell its programs for whatever price it chooses.

Second, Apple refused to cooperate with NBC on building filters into its iPod player to remove pirated movies and videos.

Microsoft, by contrast, will accept NBC’s pricing scheme and will work with it to try to develop a copyright “cop” to be installed on its devices.

Oddly enough there appears to be some debate at Microsoft about whether or not this Copyright Cop software will actually ever see the light of day on the Zune:

In the Zune Insider Blog, Cesar Menendez, a member of Microsoft’s Zune team, refers to this post, and the blog discussion it prompted. He writes:

We have no plans or commitments to implement any new type of content filtering in the Zune devices as part of our content distribution deal with NBC.

It’s worth noting that Mr. Perrette told me that Microsoft committed to explore filtering; he didn’t say it committed to implementing those filters.

Here is what Mr. Sohn, the Microsoft spokesman, told me yesterday when I asked him about what Mr. Perrette said: “I don’t think they are wrong, but we are not going to characterize those discussions.” Later he added, “We have agreed to work with NBC across a range of topics, and protection of copyrighted material is certainly one of them.”

Either way it’s certainly a good reason to think twice about whether or not you want to purchase a Zune especially given the fate that befell users of the defunct MSN Music service. 

Now word comes down that the critically acclaimed RPG Mass Effect will also make use of SecuROM with a limit of 3 installs and a requirement that it phone home every 10 days to reactivate itself. Apparently the same will also be true of Spore:

BioWare technical producer Derek French lit up the Mass Effect forums this past week announcing that both their game and (on page 2) fellow Electronic Arts title Spore come with SecuROM, a DRM system that requires activation the first time you play the game and then a re-check every ten days, with the first check on the fifth day.

French explained that there is no external program installed and the check will be run through MassEffect.exe (or Spore.exe, presumably), the data transfered will be the CD key and a “unique machine identifier of some type” and that he has been told, “there will be clear labeling on the package.”

This is very disappointing news as it guarantees that I won’t even consider purchasing Mass Effect now and it makes my purchase of Spore debatable as well. If I do end up being weak willed enough to buy Spore I can guarantee you that I will be hunting down the crack for it. There’s been a fair amount of talk among developers that piracy is killing the market for games on the PC, but these draconian DRM schemes aren’t helping the situation at all as it pretty much ensures that legitimate customers will either end up turning to pirated copies to get away from the restrictive DRM or just refuse to purchase the game. Given the fact that Spore will contacting servers on a regular basis to download user created content there’s even less of a need for SecuROM as opposed to just using the game’s CD Key.

What’s going to end up killing the PC game market in the long run is treating your customers like criminals, but it appears that’s a trend that isn’t going away anytime soon.