> Thus the war was illegal but declaring or not declaring it has nothing to do with that.
A close reading of the US Constitution suggests that it's illegal because only the Congress has the power to declare war. Of course, we ignore it out of convenience, by definining various types of military intervention that aren't "war", and by fighting wars without any declaration at all. But substituting a congressional resolution for an up-and-down congressional vote on a declaration of war was a gross violation of the procedures laid out by the US Constitution.
It is, of course, somewhat naive to suppose that countries will actually declare wars before invading, in a world filled with ICBMs and other nasty stuff. But even that pragmatic concern was not an issue here, since everyone knew damn well that there was going to be an invasion weeks before it happened. IMO the members of the US Congress should be censured for delegating their constitutional perogatives to the President.
> Now, on to Kuwait. In 1990, Hussein in person flew to the White House, and asked G. H. W. Bush's permission to invade. And George said to go for it, it was none of his business what Iraq did to protect itself from oil thieves.
Please get your facts straight. The conversation was held in the region, between an Iraqi official and a US ambassador. The ambassador gave a non-commital response that was interpreted as a go-ahead by someone in Iraq (probably, IMO, by Saddam hearing what he wanted to hear).
> So, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why would he throw out weapons inspectors and risk being thrown out of power?
Saddam didn't throw out the inspectors. The UN withdrew them a few years back when the USA and friends unilaterally decided that a bit of bombing would help things along, and after getting them back in, withdrew them again this year when the USA and friends unilaterally decided to remove the regime by force.
I find it very troubling that supporters of the war are still so poorly informed of what was going on with that, even at this late date.
As for cheerful cooperation, imagine what your country would do if a coalition of foreigners imposed inspections on you, demanded instant access to any site in the country without qualification, and backed up the intrusion with the threat of bombings. Especially after public revelation that earlier inspections had included a spy for your enimies among the inspectors.
Despite this, the Iraqis were cooperating, surly though they were about it. Surely you saw their missiles being crushed by the inspectors' bulldozers mere days before the invasion?
What we're seeing here is a manufactured excuse for a war, by a regime that's too stupid to stage an old-fashioned 'incident' to justify it.
> I am sorry that American soldiers are dying in Iraq but guess what, it is there job to follow the commands of the commander in chief. If he says go and fight, then go.
Even if it's a gratuitous war being fought on false pretexts?
I am sorry that we didn't have any generals with enough backbone to resign over it.
> I am not some self-righteous person that beleives I can make better decisions that the person that was elected to do so.
What makes you suppose that the puppet of a coalition of special interest groups can make better decisions than you can?
> I hope that USA have learned not to support tyrants and terrorists as they did in Chile, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and SaudiArabia.
Surely you jest? Look at the crop of kings and dictators we're supporting now because they're helping us in the war on terrorism (with us talking all the while of bringing democracy to the whole region), and shudder at the thought of what kind of person we're using for common operatives.
> Now, let's celebrate that Saddam was arrested.
I have mixed feelings on it. He appears to be personally responsible for about 1,500,000 deaths, so on that count anything that happens to him is better than what he deserves. But more pragmatically, his capture is likely to lead to more bad PR for the USA around the world. There's not a chance in Hell that the Bush Administration will turn him over to the UN or give him a trial in Iraq or the USA that will be perceived as being fair in the Arab world.
And the net outcome of his removal is merely that the #2 surviving leader of the Ba'ath party is not the #1 surviving leader. I doubt that the capture will have any effect at all, other than a short-lived PR victory and long-term PR loss by the Bush Administration. I was already wondering, for the past month or so, whether it was about time for the Iraqi resistance to decide he was now more of a liability than an asset, and off him themselves.
And of course, the most likely outcome is that the USA will lose him in a prison somewhere but keep him alive, an ace up the sleeve in case we don't like the way Iraq's new government turns out, and we decide we need a "friend" to turn loose in the country to make trouble for them.
> A lot of people simply hate Bush because of what happened in the 2000 elections. There was never a decisive victory (Bush had more electoral votes, Gore had the popular vote). And that simply was horrible to swallow... for myself included. There was absolutely no closure.
The popular vote isn't relevant, nor is this the first time such has happened.
What irks people is the mechanism whereby Bush was awarded the majority of electoral votes, and the perceived political bias of the process.
> As long as Bush is in power, there will be a huge rift between people in the United States.
This has actually been going on since c. 1980, when the Republican Party switched from being a support network for a Good Ole Boys Club to being a support network for religious and political fundamentalism, reactionary to the social progress we had gained so painfully over the previous few decades.
The Culture Wars aren't going to end after the next election. Indeed, my selfish hope is that our next civil war doesn't break out until after I've died. It's going to be a nasty one.
Phillip (sp?) Johnson, a retired lawyer often considered one of the "big three" of the ID movement. He never even pretends to make a scientific argument, AFAIK.
> That excerpt from the memo says no such thing. What it says is Dell are for some reason now very aware that they're at risk of getting sued if they advise people to do thinks that violate somebody's EULA.
Of course, the correct solution for Dell would be to tell vendors that they will not ship computers with software that has EULAs that enforce such a blatant screwing of Dell's customers.
There's something very wrong with the PC economy if a company the size of Dell has to go along with what their suppliers want instead of what their customers want. Especially when what the customers want is so damnably reasonable.
Serendipitously, tonight's Simpson's re-run was the one where Marge jerked the carpet out from under Burns by serving him the three-eyed fish in the media spotlight.
> That of course was a different company. The name is the same, but it is otherwise not the same corporate entity.
Yeah, one of the more curious side effects of our IP and corporate laws is that you can buy dead or dying companies and then sue someone as if the damage had been done to you. You can essentially buy the damage; I'm surprised damage isn't being traded in the futures markets.[*]
And it's too bad I can't go down to the retirement home, buy up a bunch of people dying from lung cancer, and then sue the tobacco companies. I need some cash for a new 64-bit computer.
[*] Of course, IMO it's equally odd that you can buy or sell liabilities just as you can damages. When you step back and look at things as they are, it sometimes seems that we live in Bizarro World.
> > > If the universe really does have the fine tuning properties that it appears to have based on our current understanding, then inferring from that some kind of Creator makes sense as a metaphysical construct.
> > No, not at all. It may be that there is some underlying reason for the universe to have the properties that it does. It may be that there are or have been many universes, and for obvious reasons we can only notice the one we arose in. It may even be a simple matter of luck.
> That makes my point. Both of your alternatives, many universes, or luck, are just as much metaphysical constructs as is the idea of a creator.
The question isn't what qualifies as metaphysics according to your definition; the question is whether the quote at top is correct about a motivation for infering the existence of a Creator. You can believe in a Creator if you wish, and you can call that belief metaphysics if you wish, but you can't claim that an a posteriori perception of fine tuning is a reason to infer a Creator.
At least, that's what I thought this conversation was about.
> "IPU" theory is a straw man argument embodying a number of fallacies. Flesh out the arguments and I will show you the errors.
The whole point is that there isn't any argument for IPU theory. That's what the "theory" was invented to illustrate. It covers its own ass by offering a big lie and then carefully avoiding any further statements that are subject to actual investigation.
> I am glad you agree with me that science cannot be used to prove that theistic belief is irrational or that it can disprove ID.
Right. My grudge with ID isn't a dogmatic belief that no designers exist; my grudge is that ID is being passed off as science when it transparently isn't, and that it is being pushed as a fix for a social agenda rather than as a serious attempt to understand why the universe is the way it is.
> No need to get hostile. I really don't have strong feelings about it one way or the other. The other responder posted a link where I can read more about Evolutionary Theorists' responses to Intelligent Design, and I am going to do so.
Good. Also, no need to interpret my bluntness as hostility. I simply see no reason to call bullshit by any other name.
> Let me just make two quick points, and again, these are not offered in a hostile spirit. First, the irrreducible complexity problem is obviously not "utter bullshit." Whether one believes in ID or not, IC is a serious critique of evol. theory, serious enough to send evol. theorists scrambling to find evolutinary precursors and the like. The IC hypothesis may be *wrong*, but that doesn't mean it's "utter bullshit" in the sense of being foolish or insincere.
Sorry, but it is utter bullshit, and the only threat it offers to real science is the one proffered by Johnson, "when we control the legislatures we'll cut off the funding of anyone who doesn't get in line".
The definition of IC is "if you remove any component, it breaks". That's fine as far as it goes, but it does not in itself pose any problem to the theory of evolution. What aggravates scientists about ID is the way its proponents spin really lame arguments to try to make it look like the definition of the concept somehow poses a problem for regular science. Behe, who should know better, spins his argument against a strawman version of the theory of evolution, and then bypasses peer review and peddles his claims straight to a nation full of creationists desperately looking for a scientific validation of their beliefs. That's either foolish or insincere. He would never have gotten the idea published if he hadn't bypassed the peer review process.
> Second, I would just note that stone masonry arches are indeed irreducibly complex, and we do indeed build them one stone at a time. On the other hand, "we" are intelligent designers.
You missed my point, which was that the way we do it is by erecting a scaffold, building the arch, and then removing the scaffold. The stones do not have to play their final role during this process. Behe's mistake is assuming that evolution cannot use scaffolding (figuratively speaking) and cannot produce any structure that is not rewarded for its ultimate role immediately upon introduction. But that's a strawman version of the theory of evolution. What biologists not blinded by religion actually believe about evolution is that it "tinkers" with existing stuff to form new stuff, very often changing the function of that stuff in the process. The bones in your middle ear didn't poof into existence to serve their current function; they are derived from bones that served a function in the jaws of your ancestors. Nor did the jawbones of those ancestors poof into existence to serve their jawish functions; they were derived from bones that served a function in the gills of their own ancestors. Anyone with so much as a semester of college-level biology should understand that Behe's strawman is a strawman. The only possible conclusion is that Behe himself is either mendacious or incompetent.
And when you start noticing how strongly that syndrome correlates with an evangelical agenda, you start feeling a temptation to conclude the former.
> I have no idea. One thing I do know is that the Bible-thumping fundamentalists (particularly Answers in Genesis, and Institute for Creation Research) don't like the Intellegent Design movement.
I don't know about AiG and ICR, but every bible-thumping yahoo on the planet seems to want to rush over to talk.origins and proclaim that ID has killed evolution. You should skim the posts there sometime.
> They're pissed because the ID adherents refuse to name the Designer as the God of the Bible.
The aforementione BTY's don't seem to have any problem filling in the name on their own.
But you're right, there's absolutely no reason that bible thumpers should be happy with ID. It's hard to find edification in a claim interpreted to mean that God gave the little microbes flagellae while leaving humans prone to bad backs, bad knees, and all the other troubles that come flocking to many of us shortly after childhood.
> However, the nature and identity of any particular intellegent designer is not the goal of the Intellegent Design movement. Rather, ID is a scientific approach that is concerned with detecting intellegent design in the impirical evidence at hand
That's what they say, though they do a piss-poor job of actually doing it.
And the disclaimer of any interest in the nature or identity of the Designer is disingeneous. What astronomer has ever failed to be interested in the nature or identity of the force or process that causes gravity, stellar radiation, etc.? ID's disavowals are just a big condom provided to protect their claims from closer scrutiny.
> bringing to light any deficiencies in the purely naturalistic framework of Neo-Darnwinism, information theory, and the philosophies involved in all of this.
Which again tips their hand, since if it is possible to detect "rarified design" empirically you don't have to drag the purported deficiencies of the theory of evolution into it. ID is just pseudo-science designed to be marketed to evolution deniers.
> It is not scripture based, and has no interest in proving anyone's pet dogmas.
Funny then how it is precisely those with a religious agenda who adopt it.
The denial of religiosity in ID is just a fig leaf to sneak it past the courts.
> I suggest anyone interested in the subject read No Free Lunch, by William Dembski.
I suggest they read any of the many reviews written by real scientists first, unless they think reading trash from primary sources is a good investment of their time.
> It is not dissimilar to the SETI program, which seeks to define what intellegent sources from the cosmos would look like, and attempt to detect them.
Contrary to that oft-repeated claim, ID and SETI have nothing in common. I don't have time to go into this (again) tonight, but interested parties can read the recent threads on that topic at talk.origins. Or post there to get a new thread started.
As best I can tell, there's a direct trade-off between security and ease-of-use. So set the level of security you need, no more and no less.
And if your stuff needs high security, hire people that will understand that and not write down their passwords. Sorry; there aren't any magic-bullet solutions that will allow an end run around that requirement. If you need stuff that requires special handling (computer security or otherwise), and you don't think it's worth paying experts to handle it, you need to rethink your business model.
Slashdot Mirror
> Thus the war was illegal but declaring or not declaring it has nothing to do with that.
A close reading of the US Constitution suggests that it's illegal because only the Congress has the power to declare war. Of course, we ignore it out of convenience, by definining various types of military intervention that aren't "war", and by fighting wars without any declaration at all. But substituting a congressional resolution for an up-and-down congressional vote on a declaration of war was a gross violation of the procedures laid out by the US Constitution.
It is, of course, somewhat naive to suppose that countries will actually declare wars before invading, in a world filled with ICBMs and other nasty stuff. But even that pragmatic concern was not an issue here, since everyone knew damn well that there was going to be an invasion weeks before it happened. IMO the members of the US Congress should be censured for delegating their constitutional perogatives to the President.
> Now, on to Kuwait. In 1990, Hussein in person flew to the White House, and asked G. H. W. Bush's permission to invade. And George said to go for it, it was none of his business what Iraq did to protect itself from oil thieves.
Please get your facts straight. The conversation was held in the region, between an Iraqi official and a US ambassador. The ambassador gave a non-commital response that was interpreted as a go-ahead by someone in Iraq (probably, IMO, by Saddam hearing what he wanted to hear).
> So, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why would he throw out weapons inspectors and risk being thrown out of power?
Saddam didn't throw out the inspectors. The UN withdrew them a few years back when the USA and friends unilaterally decided that a bit of bombing would help things along, and after getting them back in, withdrew them again this year when the USA and friends unilaterally decided to remove the regime by force.
I find it very troubling that supporters of the war are still so poorly informed of what was going on with that, even at this late date.
As for cheerful cooperation, imagine what your country would do if a coalition of foreigners imposed inspections on you, demanded instant access to any site in the country without qualification, and backed up the intrusion with the threat of bombings. Especially after public revelation that earlier inspections had included a spy for your enimies among the inspectors.
Despite this, the Iraqis were cooperating, surly though they were about it. Surely you saw their missiles being crushed by the inspectors' bulldozers mere days before the invasion?
What we're seeing here is a manufactured excuse for a war, by a regime that's too stupid to stage an old-fashioned 'incident' to justify it.
Or just use '2' everywhere, and don't worry about it.
> I am sorry that American soldiers are dying in Iraq but guess what, it is there job to follow the commands of the commander in chief. If he says go and fight, then go.
Even if it's a gratuitous war being fought on false pretexts?
I am sorry that we didn't have any generals with enough backbone to resign over it.
> I am not some self-righteous person that beleives I can make better decisions that the person that was elected to do so.
What makes you suppose that the puppet of a coalition of special interest groups can make better decisions than you can?
> When they pulled him out of his hole, Clippy was on his laptop screen: "I see you're trying to devise an escape plan..."
No, that's just the politically correct version of the story released for public consumption.
What Clippy really said was "I see that you are shitting in your pants...".
> I hope that USA have learned not to support tyrants and terrorists as they did in Chile, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and SaudiArabia.
Surely you jest? Look at the crop of kings and dictators we're supporting now because they're helping us in the war on terrorism (with us talking all the while of bringing democracy to the whole region), and shudder at the thought of what kind of person we're using for common operatives.
> Now, let's celebrate that Saddam was arrested.
I have mixed feelings on it. He appears to be personally responsible for about 1,500,000 deaths, so on that count anything that happens to him is better than what he deserves. But more pragmatically, his capture is likely to lead to more bad PR for the USA around the world. There's not a chance in Hell that the Bush Administration will turn him over to the UN or give him a trial in Iraq or the USA that will be perceived as being fair in the Arab world.
And the net outcome of his removal is merely that the #2 surviving leader of the Ba'ath party is not the #1 surviving leader. I doubt that the capture will have any effect at all, other than a short-lived PR victory and long-term PR loss by the Bush Administration. I was already wondering, for the past month or so, whether it was about time for the Iraqi resistance to decide he was now more of a liability than an asset, and off him themselves.
And of course, the most likely outcome is that the USA will lose him in a prison somewhere but keep him alive, an ace up the sleeve in case we don't like the way Iraq's new government turns out, and we decide we need a "friend" to turn loose in the country to make trouble for them.
> A lot of people simply hate Bush because of what happened in the 2000 elections. There was never a decisive victory (Bush had more electoral votes, Gore had the popular vote). And that simply was horrible to swallow... for myself included. There was absolutely no closure.
The popular vote isn't relevant, nor is this the first time such has happened.
What irks people is the mechanism whereby Bush was awarded the majority of electoral votes, and the perceived political bias of the process.
> As long as Bush is in power, there will be a huge rift between people in the United States.
This has actually been going on since c. 1980, when the Republican Party switched from being a support network for a Good Ole Boys Club to being a support network for religious and political fundamentalism, reactionary to the social progress we had gained so painfully over the previous few decades.
The Culture Wars aren't going to end after the next election. Indeed, my selfish hope is that our next civil war doesn't break out until after I've died. It's going to be a nasty one.
> Well, ol' man, back when I was your age, we didn't have monochrome monitors. We had punch cards, card readers and a line printer. Yessir.
Do you have a big collection of porn on punchcards?
> It was amazing to me that people could get so worked up about seeing a fat chick's floppy boobies.
Adjust the aspect ratio, silly.
> Who is Johnson?
Phillip (sp?) Johnson, a retired lawyer often considered one of the "big three" of the ID movement. He never even pretends to make a scientific argument, AFAIK.
How can my Warhol virus harvest its entitled 15 minutes of fame, if they pinch it off after 10 minutes?
...if not for Slashdot's 2-minute delay policy.
> That excerpt from the memo says no such thing. What it says is Dell are for some reason now very aware that they're at risk of getting sued if they advise people to do thinks that violate somebody's EULA.
Of course, the correct solution for Dell would be to tell vendors that they will not ship computers with software that has EULAs that enforce such a blatant screwing of Dell's customers.
There's something very wrong with the PC economy if a company the size of Dell has to go along with what their suppliers want instead of what their customers want. Especially when what the customers want is so damnably reasonable.
> Why does this surprise people?
I think it's that quaint old idea that companies should at least pretend to have their customers' best interests in mind.
...gerbils with cameras on their heads.
> If this is true and is proven to be true, heads will roll, namely SCO's.
Maybe Boies can still cover his investment by selling souvenir copies of penny-stock certificates.
> I wonder why Chris Hellwig himself does not reply.
If he's smart he has a lawyer advising him about that kind of thing right now.
> Also, if conspiracy is proven, SCO, and its board, will face criminal, as well as civil penalties.
Yeah, I get tired of fantasizing about Paris Hilton now and then too.
> That of course was a different company. The name is the same, but it is otherwise not the same corporate entity.
Yeah, one of the more curious side effects of our IP and corporate laws is that you can buy dead or dying companies and then sue someone as if the damage had been done to you. You can essentially buy the damage; I'm surprised damage isn't being traded in the futures markets.[*]
And it's too bad I can't go down to the retirement home, buy up a bunch of people dying from lung cancer, and then sue the tobacco companies. I need some cash for a new 64-bit computer.
[*] Of course, IMO it's equally odd that you can buy or sell liabilities just as you can damages. When you step back and look at things as they are, it sometimes seems that we live in Bizarro World.
> > > If the universe really does have the fine tuning properties that it appears to have based on our current understanding, then inferring from that some kind of Creator makes sense as a metaphysical construct.
> > No, not at all. It may be that there is some underlying reason for the universe to have the properties that it does. It may be that there are or have been many universes, and for obvious reasons we can only notice the one we arose in. It may even be a simple matter of luck.
> That makes my point. Both of your alternatives, many universes, or luck, are just as much metaphysical constructs as is the idea of a creator.
The question isn't what qualifies as metaphysics according to your definition; the question is whether the quote at top is correct about a motivation for infering the existence of a Creator. You can believe in a Creator if you wish, and you can call that belief metaphysics if you wish, but you can't claim that an a posteriori perception of fine tuning is a reason to infer a Creator.
At least, that's what I thought this conversation was about.
> "IPU" theory is a straw man argument embodying a number of fallacies. Flesh out the arguments and I will show you the errors.
The whole point is that there isn't any argument for IPU theory. That's what the "theory" was invented to illustrate. It covers its own ass by offering a big lie and then carefully avoiding any further statements that are subject to actual investigation.
> I am glad you agree with me that science cannot be used to prove that theistic belief is irrational or that it can disprove ID.
Right. My grudge with ID isn't a dogmatic belief that no designers exist; my grudge is that ID is being passed off as science when it transparently isn't, and that it is being pushed as a fix for a social agenda rather than as a serious attempt to understand why the universe is the way it is.
> No need to get hostile. I really don't have strong feelings about it one way or the other. The other responder posted a link where I can read more about Evolutionary Theorists' responses to Intelligent Design, and I am going to do so.
Good. Also, no need to interpret my bluntness as hostility. I simply see no reason to call bullshit by any other name.
> Let me just make two quick points, and again, these are not offered in a hostile spirit. First, the irrreducible complexity problem is obviously not "utter bullshit." Whether one believes in ID or not, IC is a serious critique of evol. theory, serious enough to send evol. theorists scrambling to find evolutinary precursors and the like. The IC hypothesis may be *wrong*, but that doesn't mean it's "utter bullshit" in the sense of being foolish or insincere.
Sorry, but it is utter bullshit, and the only threat it offers to real science is the one proffered by Johnson, "when we control the legislatures we'll cut off the funding of anyone who doesn't get in line".
The definition of IC is "if you remove any component, it breaks". That's fine as far as it goes, but it does not in itself pose any problem to the theory of evolution. What aggravates scientists about ID is the way its proponents spin really lame arguments to try to make it look like the definition of the concept somehow poses a problem for regular science. Behe, who should know better, spins his argument against a strawman version of the theory of evolution, and then bypasses peer review and peddles his claims straight to a nation full of creationists desperately looking for a scientific validation of their beliefs. That's either foolish or insincere. He would never have gotten the idea published if he hadn't bypassed the peer review process.
> Second, I would just note that stone masonry arches are indeed irreducibly complex, and we do indeed build them one stone at a time. On the other hand, "we" are intelligent designers.
You missed my point, which was that the way we do it is by erecting a scaffold, building the arch, and then removing the scaffold. The stones do not have to play their final role during this process. Behe's mistake is assuming that evolution cannot use scaffolding (figuratively speaking) and cannot produce any structure that is not rewarded for its ultimate role immediately upon introduction. But that's a strawman version of the theory of evolution. What biologists not blinded by religion actually believe about evolution is that it "tinkers" with existing stuff to form new stuff, very often changing the function of that stuff in the process. The bones in your middle ear didn't poof into existence to serve their current function; they are derived from bones that served a function in the jaws of your ancestors. Nor did the jawbones of those ancestors poof into existence to serve their jawish functions; they were derived from bones that served a function in the gills of their own ancestors. Anyone with so much as a semester of college-level biology should understand that Behe's strawman is a strawman. The only possible conclusion is that Behe himself is either mendacious or incompetent.
And when you start noticing how strongly that syndrome correlates with an evangelical agenda, you start feeling a temptation to conclude the former.
> I have no idea. One thing I do know is that the Bible-thumping fundamentalists (particularly Answers in Genesis, and Institute for Creation Research) don't like the Intellegent Design movement.
I don't know about AiG and ICR, but every bible-thumping yahoo on the planet seems to want to rush over to talk.origins and proclaim that ID has killed evolution. You should skim the posts there sometime.
> They're pissed because the ID adherents refuse to name the Designer as the God of the Bible.
The aforementione BTY's don't seem to have any problem filling in the name on their own.
But you're right, there's absolutely no reason that bible thumpers should be happy with ID. It's hard to find edification in a claim interpreted to mean that God gave the little microbes flagellae while leaving humans prone to bad backs, bad knees, and all the other troubles that come flocking to many of us shortly after childhood.
> However, the nature and identity of any particular intellegent designer is not the goal of the Intellegent Design movement. Rather, ID is a scientific approach that is concerned with detecting intellegent design in the impirical evidence at hand
That's what they say, though they do a piss-poor job of actually doing it.
And the disclaimer of any interest in the nature or identity of the Designer is disingeneous. What astronomer has ever failed to be interested in the nature or identity of the force or process that causes gravity, stellar radiation, etc.? ID's disavowals are just a big condom provided to protect their claims from closer scrutiny.
> bringing to light any deficiencies in the purely naturalistic framework of Neo-Darnwinism, information theory, and the philosophies involved in all of this.
Which again tips their hand, since if it is possible to detect "rarified design" empirically you don't have to drag the purported deficiencies of the theory of evolution into it. ID is just pseudo-science designed to be marketed to evolution deniers.
> It is not scripture based, and has no interest in proving anyone's pet dogmas.
Funny then how it is precisely those with a religious agenda who adopt it.
The denial of religiosity in ID is just a fig leaf to sneak it past the courts.
> I suggest anyone interested in the subject read No Free Lunch, by William Dembski.
I suggest they read any of the many reviews written by real scientists first, unless they think reading trash from primary sources is a good investment of their time.
> It is not dissimilar to the SETI program, which seeks to define what intellegent sources from the cosmos would look like, and attempt to detect them.
Contrary to that oft-repeated claim, ID and SETI have nothing in common. I don't have time to go into this (again) tonight, but interested parties can read the recent threads on that topic at talk.origins. Or post there to get a new thread started.
As best I can tell, there's a direct trade-off between security and ease-of-use. So set the level of security you need, no more and no less.
And if your stuff needs high security, hire people that will understand that and not write down their passwords. Sorry; there aren't any magic-bullet solutions that will allow an end run around that requirement. If you need stuff that requires special handling (computer security or otherwise), and you don't think it's worth paying experts to handle it, you need to rethink your business model.