Courses that univerisities offer are online. So I suppose it wouldn't be difficult for you to provide a link to a single 'wiccan' class.
No, how about native american religion classes? You might actually find one of those...right inside a 'native american studies' degree. Not for anyone else. I doubt you'll find a whole class dedicated to it, but you might.
OTOH, you'd find exactly the same class talking about the Christian religion if you studied medieval European history. Because you cannot talk about certain cultures without talking about their religions.
And greek philosophy isn't religion, and isn't anything like religion. At most, various philosophers have said 'There is a God, this proves it', or 'There is no need for a God, this proves it'. But and schools don't 'teach' greek philoposhy. They teach about it, as the Plato/Aristotle divide continues down to this day in western thought, but they don't teach it. (You can't teach 'it' anyway, as there is not one set of beliefs.)
The only class that normal students take that touch on random religions is humanities, and, indeed, this includes Christianity and Judaism.
ID is attacking evoluion, not the other way around. It's a bunch of lies and distortions intended to get 'pretend-science' into science classrooms.
Scientists are defending, not attacking. Scientists don't run around attacking myths. Did you see historians come out and complain about Xena screwing with the timeline of the world, or physicists complain dragons? They might quietly disprove such things, but they really don't care.
If anything, aliens are more plausible. You could have them evolve with none of the 'irreducible complexity' that ID proponant assert exists here. And then they came here and meddled with our evolution so we wouldn't turn out as goofy as them. (Or, as goofy as they were before they invented genetic engineering.)
I mean, logically, that works. It violates Occam's, but ID pretty much has to. But there's no logical reason life couldn't have evolved twice (In fact, there are good arguments it couldn't have evolved just once.), and even without FTL, there are billions of years worth of travel time they had to get here.
Or you could take a more new age look and claim that 'life' itself is intelligent. You'd need to figure out some way for it to communicate with itself, but once it's thinking, which can be asserted as 'as soon as it contains as much brains as a human', it could guide its evolution quite simply. (Note this doesn't require sentience, either, and can have throught processes on the scale of a generation.)
Whereas, with a traditional 'God', he's way more irreducibly complex than anything on earth, and , apparently, he didn't 'evolve' this way (I'm not sure why not), he just always existed.
Both the other ID theories make more sense. That the intelligence designed is God makes no sense at all, it is the least likely possibility.
Either God's actions must have a discernable effect on this universe, and thus these effects or lack thereof must be noticable, or God does not effect the universe.
Admittedly, the latter type of God is impossible to disprove, but no one needs to, as no one is asserting a God that does not impact the universe in some way.
And, philosophically, something that cannot in any way effect us doesn't exist in the first place.
A lot of people here don't appear to know what philosophy is.
Philosophy is basically 'Science starting without facts', or, at least, with unprovable subjective facts. Like 'I think' or 'This result is "better" than this other result'. (All science started out as philosophy, and then they started making measurements.)
But while the premises are just 'how we feel', the results are tested via logic to be valid. It's not some mystical 'the universe is one' mumbo-jumbo.
If you want to assert the universe is 'one' in philosophy, you damn well have a chain of logic reaching it from commonly accepted premises, or have some really shiny new premises.
As for where God fits in? Well, various philosophers have argued that, like everything else, the universe must have a cause. However, at that point, everything tends to fall apart, because they can't figure out what the cause of the cause would be.
And ID doesn't fit in philosophy at all, unless you can philosophically come up with the idea that everything has a meaning. (Which has been done.) But that doesn't really prove meddling in evolution.
All observed universes have exactly the correct values required to maintain life, by definition. So to find yourself in such a universe demonstrates nothing at all.
Basically, logically, what you claim means that any location you're in must be designed for humans, because if it had been, for example, fifty feet up in midair, you would be unable to stand there. Or fifty feet underground.
Well, no. You can't be up there in the first place, and thus failing to find yourself there is not surprising. Likewise, it is not surprising to find yourself in a universe that can support life.
What I don't grasp is Intelligent Design. Where is God interfering?
Is he making 'the best' genes? (This kid is going ot have two eyes.) Or is he making sure that the 'best' animal doesn't fall victim to some completely random disaster. (Like getting hit by lightning.) I.e., is he interfering on the mutation side, or the natural selection side? Or both?
Either way, I don't really understand the logic. If God has a better idea, he could just write the genes of the entire next generation, couldn't he?
Or, to paraphrase: What does God need with Natural Selection? Couldn't he just, well, make the animals?
All this is presupposing philosophy/humanities classes that grade schools do not have in the US. They should have a humanities class, right after the world history class. Explain who everyone was, and then immediately go through history again, exlaining what they contributed to world thought.
But assuming this hypothetical class exists, ID, if it goes anywhere, goes right next to Plato's cave, when you're talking about the nature of reality. Namely, maybe, while it looks like completely 'natural' causes made this world, maybe someone out there made it this way, and is delibrately trying to confuse us. Aka, maybe someone chained us to the cave and is making shadow pictures on the wall. Or just rigging the roll of the dice.
Sadly, I suspect the ID proponants would have a heart attack if they 'won' and this happened. (Isn't God-the-liar-that's-blinding-us-to-the-truth one of the premises of a brand of Satanism?)
A lot of people think philosophy and religion are the same thing, but, like you said, they aren't.
You can discuss the philosophical implications of the premises of religion very easily, just ask the Jesuits.
But a religion is a system of beliefs, whereas philosophy is where you start with subjective believes about the universe like 'It is good to be alive' and 'Being hurt is bad', neither of which are technically 'facts', but most people will agree with, and build a 'science' on them.
A religion could operate that way, starting with premises and working from there. But in reality religions are almost entirely a bunch of disconnected premises, and if there's a 'philosophy' behind it it's often been reverse engineered.
That said, the 'saner' a religion looks to outsiders is how much it's (reverse-engineered or not) philosophy looks like theirs. For example, if Christians solely followed the two most important premises 'You should love the Lord with all your heart' and 'You should love your neighbor as yourself', and make a philosophy from there, everyone would be fine with Christian behavior. Sure, the first premise is goofy if you don't believe in God, but the second seems sound.
But instead of the 'philosophy', they follow the premises, that, for an example, it is an abomination to shave your sideburns. Or for men to sleep with other men, whatever they're currently complaining about, I've forgotten.
Any damage to the government will get undone. Probably because this administrator is finally getting looked at critically by the media, and is starting to get in quite a lot of trouble. They are not going to occupy a very good place in the history books.
The question is, can the damage to the preception of Christianity be undone?
And, before conservatives leap on this, it's possible a crime what not commmited.
But that's completely unimportant. The Grand Jury thinks this is serious enough to investigate, and the parent poster is right...this isn't about protecting whistleblowers, this is someone being a witness to a crime and refusing to testify.
It reminds me of an absurd Diagnosis Murder I saw once, where a priest witnessed a crime, the criminal saw him, so ran over and confessed to him, thus making him 'unable' to testify, or at least unable to be compelled to testify.
This case has about as much logic as that concept.
I just extended the concept 'Instead of asking an electronic device if we can speak to it, as is the norm, we must now locate the owner and ask him' to other computers.
And, actually, there's no reason we should limit the concept to computers. Sure, that business has an open sign, but maybe they just forgot to take it down last night. Better ask someone before you go in.
I'm sorry, no.
And the danger isn't that people will stop using the internet, even though legally everything they do is illegal.
The danger is that people will be able to have other people arrested for, for example, going to a certain 'non-public' URLs. Or logging into a 'non-public' FTP site with 'anonymous'.
Once we've decided that it is possible to have non-obvious non-public places, we're in a lot of trouble, because there are plenty of companies out there willing to sue google, and anyone follow google's links, because they were stupid enough to put salaries.doc on their web site, but cleverly avoided any links to it. So anyone going there is commiting 'unauthorized access'.
You're completely ignoring the fact that a lot of machines on the internet are not at hosting facilities, but on ISPs, and almost none of them have any sort of wording that lets anyone access your machine. (No, domain names don't help. Anyone can set up a domain name pointed at any IP.)
So while you're might have permission to access any specific computer, you're committing an action that might randomly be illegal each time you go to a web page. Random illegality is lots of fun!
And while you could read most colo contracts as allowing the hosting service to contact port 80, and to route traffic over the network to that machine, that does not lead to the idea that random people on the internet are authorized to access that machine. That doesn't make any sense at all. If I pay a taxi to drive me home, past my locked gates, that doesn't mean that other people can get in the taxi and go through the gates.
Third parties simply do not gain rights to do things via my contracts. They certainly don't gain them via implicit statements that might be in contracts that they can't read.
And trying to imply some sort of implicit contract right to access servers is fairly crazy when your entire argument is that we don't have the right to access computers that are explicitly sitting there saying 'I'm here' and respond to 'can I talk to you?' with 'yes'.
Because it falls apart in the other direction, too. Why should servers get to talk to computers on ISPs, who almost certainly haven't signed any such contracts? Before you mention 'They're just responding...', remember the vast majority of open WAPs are broadcasting their SSID, and thus computers are just 'responding' to that.
If you want to fix this situtation, don't try to change decades of computer use laws. We have perfectly functional computer access rules. You can go anywhere until you are asked to stop, via the correct protocols. Trying to go past that point without authorization is illegal. It's very very simple. It's incredibly easy to understand, and every protocol developed in the past three decades has a very obvious way to say 'access denied'.
What you should be trying to do is require WAPs be sold with encryption as the default. Either via law (Just one state on taht bandwagon would probably have them change it everywhere.) or via lawsuits about selling products that expose people to danger by default.
I'm amazed every time I have to type a WEP key in, get it wrong, and Windows thinks the network is connected and tries to get an IP.
I honestly don't know what the hell is going on there. All I know is that wifi devices talk to a WAP, the WAP says either 'You're good' or 'I have WEP', and if it's the later the encrypts using the key and tries again, and the WAP should respond 'You're good' or 'Huh?'.
What the devices are actually doing is beyond me. It's like we're back to using CB radios or something, sending out signals and not knowing if the other end is there. It's crazy.
But to be on the network required actual authentication. If your computer is just confused and thinks it's on the network when it's not, it would be rather hard to argue there was 'unauthorized access', or even any 'access' at all. There's just you broadcasting random undecodable crap at the same frequency as the WAP, which is perfectly legal.
And the same thing if your WAP thinks there is someone there, but can't decode their packets. That's not 'access', it's just your WAP being an idiot.
And you'd know random server owners had signed that contract how, exactly, without visiting their servers?
Like I said, it kills the internet.
It could, indeed, work on a network where everyone who possessed an IP had explicitly signed a agreement granting random strangers access to their port 80, and all ISPs had signed contracts saying they would require everyone in the future who gets an IP to sign such an agreement.
That network is not, however, the Internet. And cannot be made from the existing Internet in any reasonable amount of time, even assuming you can get around the problem of multiple governments and contract laws.
Your idea might give a semi-working internet-like thing in a few months. Basically, you'd have to immediately dismantle the existing net (As its primary purpose is, apparently, unauthorized access to computers, ISPs would be facing interesting legal problems if they tried to keep operating.), and move everyone to a new one as they signed paperwork.
No, that's what you do after you've gotten on the wireless network.
Wifi has two layers. It has the basic TCP/IP one, and below that it has a 'radio' layer that is basically the 'wires'. You know, when the light on the router turns green because someone's plugged in?
Wifi has that, but it asks permission at that level, also. Basically 'Can I plug into this network'. This is the level that WEP and WPA work at. It also is the level that controls who can talk when. (Just like ethernet, actually.)
Actually, ethernet has this to some extent, where devices figure out if it's 10 or 100 Mb, and full or half duplex.
And if you know how PPP works, it's the same thing. You dial up, give name and password and all sorts of protocol stuff like compression, and then you set up a TCP/IP connection on top of that.
And, just in case everyone's forgotten, TCP/IP isn't the only game in town. You can negotiate a converstation with a WAP and start speaking Novell or Appletalk. In fact, if you do Windows filesharing over wireless, you're probably doing NetBIOS over it.
So you're not wrong, it's just that DHCP is the second negotiation. Your computer already got permission to be on the 'wire'. Then it asks permission to be on the TCP/IP network.
You might just start sending packets, but I assure you, your computer talked to the WAP before hand. It first asked 'Can I join this network?', and after getting permission, asked 'Can I have an IP address?'.
Unless, of course, you mean literally the first thing it does. Which, yes, is sending packets, before it even knows if there's a network there.
And if that's illegal, it's illegal to use any wireless network, anywhere, even if you have permission, because your packets might hit another network, which will quite correctly ignore them.
And if the router is broadcasting the SSID, it probably sent the first packet, anyway, which means it illegally accessed his computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Courses that univerisities offer are online. So I suppose it wouldn't be difficult for you to provide a link to a single 'wiccan' class.
No, how about native american religion classes? You might actually find one of those...right inside a 'native american studies' degree. Not for anyone else. I doubt you'll find a whole class dedicated to it, but you might.
OTOH, you'd find exactly the same class talking about the Christian religion if you studied medieval European history. Because you cannot talk about certain cultures without talking about their religions.
And greek philosophy isn't religion, and isn't anything like religion. At most, various philosophers have said 'There is a God, this proves it', or 'There is no need for a God, this proves it'. But and schools don't 'teach' greek philoposhy. They teach about it, as the Plato/Aristotle divide continues down to this day in western thought, but they don't teach it. (You can't teach 'it' anyway, as there is not one set of beliefs.)
The only class that normal students take that touch on random religions is humanities, and, indeed, this includes Christianity and Judaism.
ID is attacking evoluion, not the other way around. It's a bunch of lies and distortions intended to get 'pretend-science' into science classrooms.
Scientists are defending, not attacking. Scientists don't run around attacking myths. Did you see historians come out and complain about Xena screwing with the timeline of the world, or physicists complain dragons? They might quietly disprove such things, but they really don't care.
Many people have the belief in one, but belief is not a theory.
I mean, logically, that works. It violates Occam's, but ID pretty much has to. But there's no logical reason life couldn't have evolved twice (In fact, there are good arguments it couldn't have evolved just once.), and even without FTL, there are billions of years worth of travel time they had to get here.
Or you could take a more new age look and claim that 'life' itself is intelligent. You'd need to figure out some way for it to communicate with itself, but once it's thinking, which can be asserted as 'as soon as it contains as much brains as a human', it could guide its evolution quite simply. (Note this doesn't require sentience, either, and can have throught processes on the scale of a generation.)
Whereas, with a traditional 'God', he's way more irreducibly complex than anything on earth, and , apparently, he didn't 'evolve' this way (I'm not sure why not), he just always existed.
Both the other ID theories make more sense. That the intelligence designed is God makes no sense at all, it is the least likely possibility.
It's a scientific premise.
Admittedly, the latter type of God is impossible to disprove, but no one needs to, as no one is asserting a God that does not impact the universe in some way.
And, philosophically, something that cannot in any way effect us doesn't exist in the first place.
Philosophy is basically 'Science starting without facts', or, at least, with unprovable subjective facts. Like 'I think' or 'This result is "better" than this other result'. (All science started out as philosophy, and then they started making measurements.)
But while the premises are just 'how we feel', the results are tested via logic to be valid. It's not some mystical 'the universe is one' mumbo-jumbo.
If you want to assert the universe is 'one' in philosophy, you damn well have a chain of logic reaching it from commonly accepted premises, or have some really shiny new premises.
As for where God fits in? Well, various philosophers have argued that, like everything else, the universe must have a cause. However, at that point, everything tends to fall apart, because they can't figure out what the cause of the cause would be.
And ID doesn't fit in philosophy at all, unless you can philosophically come up with the idea that everything has a meaning. (Which has been done.) But that doesn't really prove meddling in evolution.
All observed universes have exactly the correct values required to maintain life, by definition. So to find yourself in such a universe demonstrates nothing at all.
Basically, logically, what you claim means that any location you're in must be designed for humans, because if it had been, for example, fifty feet up in midair, you would be unable to stand there. Or fifty feet underground.
Well, no. You can't be up there in the first place, and thus failing to find yourself there is not surprising. Likewise, it is not surprising to find yourself in a universe that can support life.
Is he making 'the best' genes? (This kid is going ot have two eyes.) Or is he making sure that the 'best' animal doesn't fall victim to some completely random disaster. (Like getting hit by lightning.) I.e., is he interfering on the mutation side, or the natural selection side? Or both?
Either way, I don't really understand the logic. If God has a better idea, he could just write the genes of the entire next generation, couldn't he?
Or, to paraphrase: What does God need with Natural Selection? Couldn't he just, well, make the animals?
But assuming this hypothetical class exists, ID, if it goes anywhere, goes right next to Plato's cave, when you're talking about the nature of reality. Namely, maybe, while it looks like completely 'natural' causes made this world, maybe someone out there made it this way, and is delibrately trying to confuse us. Aka, maybe someone chained us to the cave and is making shadow pictures on the wall. Or just rigging the roll of the dice.
Sadly, I suspect the ID proponants would have a heart attack if they 'won' and this happened. (Isn't God-the-liar-that's-blinding-us-to-the-truth one of the premises of a brand of Satanism?)
You can discuss the philosophical implications of the premises of religion very easily, just ask the Jesuits.
But a religion is a system of beliefs, whereas philosophy is where you start with subjective believes about the universe like 'It is good to be alive' and 'Being hurt is bad', neither of which are technically 'facts', but most people will agree with, and build a 'science' on them.
A religion could operate that way, starting with premises and working from there. But in reality religions are almost entirely a bunch of disconnected premises, and if there's a 'philosophy' behind it it's often been reverse engineered.
That said, the 'saner' a religion looks to outsiders is how much it's (reverse-engineered or not) philosophy looks like theirs. For example, if Christians solely followed the two most important premises 'You should love the Lord with all your heart' and 'You should love your neighbor as yourself', and make a philosophy from there, everyone would be fine with Christian behavior. Sure, the first premise is goofy if you don't believe in God, but the second seems sound.
But instead of the 'philosophy', they follow the premises, that, for an example, it is an abomination to shave your sideburns. Or for men to sleep with other men, whatever they're currently complaining about, I've forgotten.
Are you on drugs or something?
I wouldn't be opposed to a philosophy or humanities class in grade school, bu we do not actually have them.
The question is, can the damage to the preception of Christianity be undone?
But that's completely unimportant. The Grand Jury thinks this is serious enough to investigate, and the parent poster is right...this isn't about protecting whistleblowers, this is someone being a witness to a crime and refusing to testify.
It reminds me of an absurd Diagnosis Murder I saw once, where a priest witnessed a crime, the criminal saw him, so ran over and confessed to him, thus making him 'unable' to testify, or at least unable to be compelled to testify.
This case has about as much logic as that concept.
Remember those kids who got dropped from colleges because they edited their URL on their application page?
Regardless of how you feel about that, how would you like them to be charged with felony computer misuse and sentenced to five years in jail?
Or are people simply not understanding what 'unauthorized computer access' is and how serious it is?
I just extended the concept 'Instead of asking an electronic device if we can speak to it, as is the norm, we must now locate the owner and ask him' to other computers.
And, actually, there's no reason we should limit the concept to computers. Sure, that business has an open sign, but maybe they just forgot to take it down last night. Better ask someone before you go in.
I'm sorry, no.
And the danger isn't that people will stop using the internet, even though legally everything they do is illegal.
The danger is that people will be able to have other people arrested for, for example, going to a certain 'non-public' URLs. Or logging into a 'non-public' FTP site with 'anonymous'.
Once we've decided that it is possible to have non-obvious non-public places, we're in a lot of trouble, because there are plenty of companies out there willing to sue google, and anyone follow google's links, because they were stupid enough to put salaries.doc on their web site, but cleverly avoided any links to it. So anyone going there is commiting 'unauthorized access'.
And we're already had suits over that idea.
Yeah, that's a lot better.
So while you're might have permission to access any specific computer, you're committing an action that might randomly be illegal each time you go to a web page. Random illegality is lots of fun!
And while you could read most colo contracts as allowing the hosting service to contact port 80, and to route traffic over the network to that machine, that does not lead to the idea that random people on the internet are authorized to access that machine. That doesn't make any sense at all. If I pay a taxi to drive me home, past my locked gates, that doesn't mean that other people can get in the taxi and go through the gates.
Third parties simply do not gain rights to do things via my contracts. They certainly don't gain them via implicit statements that might be in contracts that they can't read.
And trying to imply some sort of implicit contract right to access servers is fairly crazy when your entire argument is that we don't have the right to access computers that are explicitly sitting there saying 'I'm here' and respond to 'can I talk to you?' with 'yes'.
Because it falls apart in the other direction, too. Why should servers get to talk to computers on ISPs, who almost certainly haven't signed any such contracts? Before you mention 'They're just responding...', remember the vast majority of open WAPs are broadcasting their SSID, and thus computers are just 'responding' to that.
If you want to fix this situtation, don't try to change decades of computer use laws. We have perfectly functional computer access rules. You can go anywhere until you are asked to stop, via the correct protocols. Trying to go past that point without authorization is illegal. It's very very simple. It's incredibly easy to understand, and every protocol developed in the past three decades has a very obvious way to say 'access denied'.
What you should be trying to do is require WAPs be sold with encryption as the default. Either via law (Just one state on taht bandwagon would probably have them change it everywhere.) or via lawsuits about selling products that expose people to danger by default.
I'm amazed every time I have to type a WEP key in, get it wrong, and Windows thinks the network is connected and tries to get an IP.
I honestly don't know what the hell is going on there. All I know is that wifi devices talk to a WAP, the WAP says either 'You're good' or 'I have WEP', and if it's the later the encrypts using the key and tries again, and the WAP should respond 'You're good' or 'Huh?'.
What the devices are actually doing is beyond me. It's like we're back to using CB radios or something, sending out signals and not knowing if the other end is there. It's crazy.
But to be on the network required actual authentication. If your computer is just confused and thinks it's on the network when it's not, it would be rather hard to argue there was 'unauthorized access', or even any 'access' at all. There's just you broadcasting random undecodable crap at the same frequency as the WAP, which is perfectly legal.
And the same thing if your WAP thinks there is someone there, but can't decode their packets. That's not 'access', it's just your WAP being an idiot.
Bad manners != illegal
Like I said, it kills the internet.
It could, indeed, work on a network where everyone who possessed an IP had explicitly signed a agreement granting random strangers access to their port 80, and all ISPs had signed contracts saying they would require everyone in the future who gets an IP to sign such an agreement.
That network is not, however, the Internet. And cannot be made from the existing Internet in any reasonable amount of time, even assuming you can get around the problem of multiple governments and contract laws.
Your idea might give a semi-working internet-like thing in a few months. Basically, you'd have to immediately dismantle the existing net (As its primary purpose is, apparently, unauthorized access to computers, ISPs would be facing interesting legal problems if they tried to keep operating.), and move everyone to a new one as they signed paperwork.
I sysadmin on a colocated webserver.
At no point have has my company ever contractually granted anyone access besides the people running the facility and clients.
Wifi has two layers. It has the basic TCP/IP one, and below that it has a 'radio' layer that is basically the 'wires'. You know, when the light on the router turns green because someone's plugged in?
Wifi has that, but it asks permission at that level, also. Basically 'Can I plug into this network'. This is the level that WEP and WPA work at. It also is the level that controls who can talk when. (Just like ethernet, actually.)
Actually, ethernet has this to some extent, where devices figure out if it's 10 or 100 Mb, and full or half duplex.
And if you know how PPP works, it's the same thing. You dial up, give name and password and all sorts of protocol stuff like compression, and then you set up a TCP/IP connection on top of that.
And, just in case everyone's forgotten, TCP/IP isn't the only game in town. You can negotiate a converstation with a WAP and start speaking Novell or Appletalk. In fact, if you do Windows filesharing over wireless, you're probably doing NetBIOS over it.
So you're not wrong, it's just that DHCP is the second negotiation. Your computer already got permission to be on the 'wire'. Then it asks permission to be on the TCP/IP network.
Unless, of course, you mean literally the first thing it does. Which, yes, is sending packets, before it even knows if there's a network there.
And if that's illegal, it's illegal to use any wireless network, anywhere, even if you have permission, because your packets might hit another network, which will quite correctly ignore them.
And if the router is broadcasting the SSID, it probably sent the first packet, anyway, which means it illegally accessed his computer.
Remember, the FBI are the people to contact if the police refuse to act on reports of their own misbehavior. ;)