Ask not what has been stuffed within it.

Well, it seems there is a problem with our Dish Network antenna (the LNA) or the feedline coming into the house.

Lost all signal from the satellite(s) sometime during the night.

Now here's the thing:
The service droids won't be here until Tuesday morning (2 Sep 2014) which means "four days without" the Dish Overpriced Crapola.

Will I miss it?
If not, why keep it??

Well, there are some really good items on HBO, Showtime, Cinemax and Starz.

And FX. And a precious few other of the "channels' they carry.
The overwhelming majority of the rest of it is horseshit.

Cable TV is not an option here - no cable on the mountain. It's a shame, actually, because I would switch in a heartbeat just for the 50 meg internet connection (I would be eligible for Business Class internet with all the commercial stuff that happens here - NetK2NE just for starters). Cable Internet at business class is a different animal. The bandwidth is not provided/provisioned as "up to X meg". It is provided at stated bandwidth with a service level agreement and guarantee (SLA). Just like a *real* commercial broadband provision would have been deployed back in the "good old days" of the 1990s.

*That* is why Cable Internet is no longer the "Big Bad Devil" in the Vince Book of All Things Internet. The business class product also includes fixed IPs and absolutely no caps. And it (if memory serves) is 50 meg from the net and 10 meg to the net. Which means that all my web sites hosted here would appear as if they were on a bonded set of just over 6 T-1 connections. And the speed from the net here in the office (50 meg) would be roughly the equivalent of a DS-3. A bit more, actually.

THAT is why I want the cable company to "appear"
up here on The Mountain.

I can appreciate why, however, it won't happen. There are only, at best, about 1,500 houses up here and probably only 1/3 of those would "spring" for it since they are on either Dish or DirecTV already and don't have a strong "attachment" to "things internet." And for only (roughly) 500 customers, it simply is not worth the cost of a 20 mile "cable pull" just to get service up here.

And, no. There is ****not**** going to be a new startup cable company -- no VinceTV in anyone's future. Period.

It's rather amazing that The Hour of Slack is still being prodced and syndicated. It's kind of cliche to say I enjoy the older ones, which were more Church doctrine focued, more - but after this many years how much more fake religion can you rant on week after week. Well, I guess if you compare it to how much "real" religion is ranted on day after day on religious radio late at night...

In that they're all fake?

There is no such thing as a fake religion.

Technically they're all fake except for one.

However, when people speak of "fake religion" what they usually seem to mean is "parody religion."

There are some religions which were established by those who were either truly enlightened or at least had a sincere belief that they were truly enlightened (Hindu, Buddhism, and the Judeo-Christian tradition, to name a few).

There are some which were manufactured with a specific intent to place into effect someone's agenda by making people think they were following a genuine religion (such as Islam, Scientology, and militant atheism).

Finally, there are some which were truly manufactured as a joke -- these are the ones I believe people are referring to when the term "fake religion" is being used. Examples are Subgenius and Discordianism. For the time being I'm going to leave out things like Pastafarianism and Invisible Pink Unicorn, because those were created with a specific agenda to make a mockery of other religions.


The only thing of which we can be certain is that Richard Dawkins does not exist.

It was said by Blaise Pascal that the only logical choice is to believe in the existence of God.

1. if you believe in God, then you die and find out that there is no God, you lost nothing (except for the 'minor inconveniences' imposed on your life by your particular religious belief system).
2. on the other hand, if you do NOT believe in God and die to find out that God does exist, you lost everything.

Therefore, belief in God is a no-loss choice. You give up 'minor inconveniences' during life for possible eternal happiness.

In Philosophy (and some areas of Mathematics, which some consider so akin to Philosophy as to border on Magick), this is known as Pascal's Wager.

So endeth the Lesson.

So endeth the Lesson.

So long as the God that exists is compatible with the one you believe in.

So long as the God that exists is compatible with the one you believe

in.

To quote Connor McLeod, "There can be only One!"

Discordianism. For the time being I'm going to leave out things like

Pastafarianism and Invisible Pink Unicorn, because those were created

with a specific agenda to make a mockery of other religions.

Hm... yes and no.

There's a bit of mockery, to be sure, but that wasn't the specific agenda for Pastafarianism. Pastafarianism, from what I've read, seeks to show logical fallacies inherent in certain beliefs by presenting equivalent notions that are obviously absurd. That is, in Pastafarianism, what they purport to believe is logically equivalent to what certain other religions believe, but with different words to help expose the logical fallacies.

That said, most people don't like having that kind of thing directed towards something in which they hold strong beliefs.

And just think. For all these years I thought *astafarianism was nothing more than a (not so) thinly disguised excuse to smoke weed....

I don't accept Pascal's wager because I'm a C programmer.

I believe in God because it's pretty darn obvious that He exists.