http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Time-Warner-Backs-Off-Metered-Billing-101948

Time Warner Backs Off Metered Billing
Consumers: 1 Time Warner Cable: 0
03:53PM Thursday Apr 16 2009 by Karl Bode
tags: business · bandwidth · cable · caps · Time Warner Cable

Back in January 08, TWC decided to preform trials on bandwidth caps in a small town in Texas. Largely under the radar at the time, the test consisted of caps ranging from 5GB to 40GB, monthly.

Tricky! As long as you are not a new TWC customer and don't sign a new contract with them, you can keep your existing, uncapped TWC product.

I have a couple issues with this rollout of bandwidth caps:

1. Metered Billing is unnecessary
2. Metered Billing is hard to track
3. Over consumption is superfluous if TWC provides the bandwidth the user is paying for
4. TWC isn't increasing bandwidth capacity in the near future to provide relief on the problem of capacity they claim to be having
5. $1 per gigabyte of overage charges is obscene compared to current webhosting charges
6. Metered Billing is Evil and possibly Illegal.
   

Metered Billing is unnecessary

I'm not a sexist, I'm a realist.

Rationalization is the denaturalization (read: castration) of society. Humanity was giving the gift of sentience yet we are the most destructive force on the planet, unable to live at one with nature. This is the embodiment of the constant struggle of our minds versus nature. I'm going to attempt to explain how this dichotomy affects Gender Roles in our modern society. To understand the nature of genders, let's look at the basic biological factors that comprise the base of our raison d'etre.

Men have unlimited quantities of sperm, their survival is inherently dependent on spreading the seed as far and as wide as possible to ensure the permanence of their genetic material. This is maximized by increasing the frequency of copulation and the number of unique sexual partners. Standards of beauty are nature's indication of health. Long hair, clear skin, well proportioned face, and hourglass hips are all ways of ensuring that your mate is healthy and will produce healthy offspring. Women have a limited amount of eggs (genetic material) released in a ~30 year window that are fertile in very small windows. Their survival is dependent on maximizing the survival of each of her eggs by providing not only a healthy injection of genetic material from a mate but by ensuring that the child can survive to reach sexual maturity for further reproduction. This is maximized by nesting, or creating a stable environment. It is here that nature gives us needs of protection, provision and nurturing.

So man want to have multiple partners and women want to maximize their offspring's survival by choosing the best mate and keeping him. How does this compromise work without denying our nature? Man has chosen to stabilize their monogamous relationships in rudimentary society by capitalizing on the fact that monogamous relationships are the most efficient way to raise a child and the most focused way to provide protection, provision and nurturing for his offspring because of the likelihood that their are indeed his genetic material.  All the while, maintaining their basic needs for confidence and decisiveness by seeing and directing the use of their resources.

Neither form of community is wrong. The first is allows a whole community to provide and care for everyone in it because you don't know who could be your child so you are forced to pool your resources together, useful in a communal society system. The second is a nuclear family which has a higher stability and more focused resource that excels in our capitalist society.

Yet somewhere along the way, we have lost touch with nature and have used rationality to fight against it instead of coexisting with it. By nature, men are stable providers, confident hunters, decision-makers, etc. In contrast, women are nurturing, relational, optimizers, etc. It's not about who is better or more well treated than the other, it's about compromise and working together without denying our basic instincts. Compromise isn't about dominance it's about making decisions that are mutually beneficial to the parties involved. Relationships that are one-sided tend to yield instability between the Giver and the Taker. In less psychological terms, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Men need to ensure that their needs are met just as well as women. A Man is not a Man without being a provider because his resources are not being utilized, and a Women is insecure and afraid when she doesn't have stability. Confidence and high self-esteem become the rules of the relationship road and not sensitivity and self-denial. In the end, relationships are about meeting the most basic needs, society has just decided to make it seem more complicated by adding criteria.

Men should never deny their manhood of what makes them who they are, confident and stable. Women should embrace stability as a basic tenet of their survival instincts and should receive provision and protection from their male counterparts in turn by offering their strengths: beauty, relationship, comfort, sexual fulfillment, etc. You may ask why this post is primarily directed towards men, it may well be that I feel much pity for my fellow man, but it's also physiological. Men and women both produce testosterone in their bodies, but only women produce estrogen. It has been shown that men act more manly with more testosterone and the same with women, whereas women can naturally express their estrogen but men can only repress testosterone levels not produce estrogen. The call is for men to embrace their testosterone and learn to utilize the benefits and for women to embrace their feminine side. Women have had to express their testosterone levels because men have repressed theirs; all a result of the miseducation of society's overemphasis on liberation and individuality.

This miseducation about individualism, selfishness and liberation of conservative ideals has served to unbalance the equation so that compromise is a fortuitous occurrence and not the rule. Eventually we will need to reach a point where unity and individuality can coexist in a post modern society where men can be men and women can be women.

Eric Zuniga

This one is easier to follow than my paper and it's in YouTube format :D

Enjoy

I had some stimulating conversations recently about the nature of souls. Both religious and Intellectual interpretations lead to very interesting conclusions.

First, a couple of points to form the basis of my arguments:

 - The brain is impossible to completely comprehend through biological means and there exist portions of our human personalities that are a product of more than just neurological impulses.
 - Personality is the intersection of the soul and the brain. We only actively use 10% of our brains and the rest remains a mystery.
 - Souls are 5th dimensional entities that connect to physical bodies at birth and disconnect at death. Spirit is the glue that marries the soul to the physical body.

On a purely intellectual level, we can imagine souls as 5th dimensional objects floating around in 5-space that intersect and interact with objects (bodies) in our 4th dimension. I.e. planets in a solar system exerting gravitational attractions at all levels. As a fetus develops, it begins to grow a brain as early as week 4 and the soul that is most vibrationally attuned/attracted to the physical body of the fetus, begins to interact and bond with the body through to adulthood. Morality and personality traits develop through childhood and adolescence and at full maturity, the soul and body are as united as possible. At death, the body can no longer support the soul and it leaves. Since souls are 5th dimensional beings, they have vibrations that are constructive/destructive, in/out of phase with each other. This introduces psychological principles of attraction, hatred, friendship, etc. See the article on love for further analysis of these ideas. The only way to disprove the existence of souls is to completely describe the nuances of personality and character and everything we define as human sentient characteristics as a chemical function of the brain.

Again, as with God, it's impossible to disprove the existence of the supernatural because by definition you have to use unnatural scientific methods, which is by nature supernatural and not a naturalistic approach. The supernatural will always find refuge in the infinitesimal quantum probabilities to the infiniteness of the universe and it's birth, because natural discrete methods cannot explain the infinite with something finite.

---

The bible is concerned about the soul for the purposes of understanding salvation. To investigate, let's turn our bibles to Genesis. Got it? Good. Here's a synopsis for the Easter Sunday Christians. Genesis 2:9,16,17 God tells Adam and Eve in the Garden that they may eat of all trees in the garden including the Tree of Life but if they eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they will die. Genesis 2:7 shows God breathing life into Adam's nostrils. God is life, represented by the Tree of Life. By allowing them to eat from the Tree of Life, he was inviting them to partake of him and live eternally. The choices they had represents the free will given to them by their Creator. They could either chose eternal life or eternal death. Now, when Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they don't die right away. But as a consequence, they are banished from the garden and barred from eating the Tree of Life. Obviously, if they can no longer eat from the Tree of Life, they are screwed and doomed to die. Not only that, since God represents the Tree of Life, they are barred from communicating with him because of their choice to disobey. Thus the sacrifices for atonement of sin, something has to die to keep us close to God. The death of the soul represents sin. The sin of disobedience when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, pulled their souls away from God. Their souls died a literal death because instead of Him walking and talking with his creation as was normal, he said in Genesis 3:9, "Where are you?", because their souls were hidden away, far away from God because of their sin, because of man's decision to chose himself over God.

The soul of man desires to be close to God. The desires of the flesh only want that which benefits the body not the soul. Free will and the knowledge of Good and Evil represents man's constant struggle to please the soul and body, God or his opposite. Our souls eternal resting place is determined by the decisions we make in life that either bring us closer or further from God. Unrepentant sin is the unwillingness to place God's connection with us on the highest priority. When you no longer care if you and God are close, that's when you are sinning. Without repentance, there can be no atonement through Jesus.  Dante's Inferno describes levels of Hell for all souls and at the very bottom is eternal Cold, not fire, as is usually depicted. Cold represents eternal and complete separation from God. The worst Hell imaginable for the soul is to be so disconnected from God that you don't feel his vibration (read: heat). Connection or disconnection is the ultimate result of the decisions we make from day to day to either find God and cling to him, or to hide away from him, ashamed.

Religion is Man's structure to lead our lives with that Godly connection as the end result. At the end of our lives, we don't judge who goes and who stays, because it is our decisions that leave our souls out in the cold dark or basking in the warming light. God's simply going to point out the obvious conclusion to your life.

I'm a Soul Man,

Bynop

Here's an old article I wrote a while back that I love to go over... I'll follow up with a more current explanation of what a soul is.

Does God exist?
Does science provide us the necessary framework to explain his existence? Can God and science coexist? Here's my take on it. 

First, i'll start out with a review of basic dimensional analyses.  The 0th dimension has no height or length and has only position. It  is typically represented by a point in a space. No two points can occupy the same space, each position is a unique location that can be pinpointed with infinite accuracy. The 1st dimension is the dimension that includes length. Length, simply defined, is the distance between two points in space. The respective positions of the endpoints and the infinite number of points between them dictate the length of a line. The first dimension is typically represented by a number line from -∞ to +∞, with infinite points in between to describe any position on the line. The 2nd dimension adds another variable dimension to the equation, height. With height we can now describe shapes and area with certainty because lines, by definition, can never meet at a point (unless you are in non-Euclidean geometry) and two lines by definition can only meet in at most one place unless they are parallel or they are the same line, However, in 2-space, we can have three or more lines that are in the space that define a closed set of points. A square is the set of all points between and including two perpendicular sets of parallel lines and a triangle is the set of all points between three non parallel lines. Keep in mind the relationships between the dimensions as it will be important later. 2nd dimensional objects (shapes) are made of 0-dimensional objects (points) in a defined area contained by 1-dimensional boundaries (lines). The 3rd dimension adds a variable of depth to the equation that causes shapes and closed boundaries to have a volume. Shapes can now exist superimposed on each other but at different depths behind or in front. An example of a volume in 3-space is a prism where you have two rectangles at different depths whose vertices are connected by parallel lines. If you take a plane parallel to the rectangles and slice the prism at any depth between the two faces, you will get a rectangle superimposed on the plane of intersection. Now here's where it gets tricky-dicky. The 4th dimension includes the dimension of time measured as duration. This means that at any given time, an object that could be represented as a volume can change position or even shape. The volumes are superimposed on each other but they do not all exist at the same instant of time. A man walking across the street would be perceived as a series of volume shapes of a human with one foot forward, one foot backward, one foot in the middle, and so on. The series of shapes altogether create the image of a man walking 3 meters in 5 seconds. This is the dimension that we can all perceive and live in.

The 5th dimension cannot be comprehended by us as humans. Many believe that the 5th dimension adds an element of vibration or frequency that suggests that for any volume in time, there are infinite ways or positions that the volumes coexist for any instant in time. In other words, if you were to take a freeze frame of the man walking in the 5th dimension, you would see infinite positions of the man at that instant. It's hard for us to perceive what that would be like, my mind hiccups to comprehend that.  So now, how does this have anything to do with the existence of God? Well, I can't prove the existence of God, no one can. If we could, then faith would cease to exist. I only attempt to disprove that he can't exist. I can best illustrate how God can exist through a little illustration. Once upon a time, there lived Mr. Circle in flat world (2D). At first he lived alone and then one day he happened upon Mrs. Circle. He saw her from afar and got excited. Mrs. Circle looked like a line to Mr. Circle. But as he walked around her, he began to realize that Mrs. Circle had much more depth than a simple line. Mr. Circle then deduced that Mrs. Circle was in fact a circle with area just like himself and they got married and had many circlets together. Now, later on as Mr. Circle got older, Mr. Cylinder from 3D-land came and set foot in flat land where Mr. Circle resided. Mr. Circle was again confused but he quickly resolved that from what he saw that Mr. Cylinder was also much like himself because all he could see was the circle which represented an infinitesimal portion of his body interacting with flat land. Because his world was in 2D, Mr. Circle could only see the part of Mr. Cylinder that existed in his dimension at that time. This story shows us how our perception can be limited by our ability to comprehend the world around us. Our eyes see shapes but the images that they send to our minds are 2D. As we get used to living in a world with 3D shapes, we develop the ability to have a good depth perception (the reason why some of us are good at basketball and some suck like me). Now our brain processes and pieces together the 4th dimension by putting all the eye's 2D images representing 3D shapes together, in a series, to create a movie of shapes in much the same way as Mr. Circle walked around Mrs. Circle to find out that she was actually a 2D shape like him.

Here is where God comes into the picture. I propose that God is a 5th dimensional being. He is able to look at two instances in time in the same way i can look at the spatial ends of a hallway and thus He knows what has happened and what will happen (omniscient). He is able to exist in many different forms in different spaces at different times (omnipresent), much like we can manipulate our position and volume (weight-watchers lol). He is able to discern the effects of free will over time by witnessing the alternate outcomes with discrete vibrational frequencies depending on if you decided to eat the hamburger or not. When we think back to the Mr. Circle example, God continues to interact with us at a personal level in our dimension in a way that we can relate, but we often personify God with our own human qualities because that is the only way we can perceive him and make sense of his infinite nature. That's why when Moses asked God to show him his glory, he said he saw the backside of God ("Show  me your booty!" - Third Day) because that was the only way he could perceive of God's interaction with him. Mr. Circle was limited in his understanding of Mr. Cylinder because he could only see the part of him that was interacting in his dimension.

Finally, if we conclude that God is a 5th dimensional entity, then his supernaturality has a place in theoretical science. By definition, the Theory of God will never be proven, but it can be understood in an intellectual framework. Most importantly, because he exists outside our dimension and can only be evidenced by limited interactions, consequently, his existence can never be disproven as long as there are people who see the evidence of his existence in their personal lives. You can't disprove God without living in the 5th dimension to witness his absence or presence and if you live in the 5th dimension like Mr. Mytzlplk, then you have already proven the existence of God by being Him yourself. If you actually read this far without falling over or getting dizzy then you share my interest for intellectual conversation. If you are reading this because you were bored then I hope I didn't bore you more. If you are a skimmer and you only read the first and last paragraph then you suck, but God loves you anyway.

From the Next Dimension, 

Zuni