Some degree of privacy is a prerequisite for some liberties.
No doubt. All the same it is important that we remember that privacy is just a means to securing certain liberties, and maybe not the only means. I fear that a steady erosion of privacy is inevitable, and not just because of government activity, but also because of advancing technology in private hands. As privacy becomes less effective as a means of securing liberty, I think it is important that we find other ways of securing it, so that we don't see a steady erosion of liberty as well.
Privacy is not liberty, nor is it a "civil liberty", although it might be a "civil right". A liberty is a right to carry out some type of action without being obstructed by anyone else. Privacy rights restrict the actions of others (to obtain or publish information about you) which makes them claim-rights. So the US complaint about Canadian privacy laws has nothing at all to do with liberty.
This gives a pretty good introduction to the theoretical classification of rights.
The stuff about legalizing dope is of course another matter entirely. I have no idea why American politicians gets so wound up about dope, when most Americans have used it without comming to much harm.
There is an old joke about economists that goes like this:
Economist A: "Look there's $50 on the ground." Economist B: "Don't bother to pick it up, it's not worth the effort." Economist A: "How can you be so sure?" Economist B: "If it was worth the effort then someone would have done it already."
The opportunity, and probably the motive, required for the September 11 attacks has been available for decades, but it took a while for the right people to get the idea and put it into action. The possibility of building cruise missiles has only been around for a few years (cheap ones anyway). The fact that it hasn't been done yet proves very little.
I never could figure out why IP laws regarding time were extended...
The vast majority of publications have always had a short (or even non-existant) profitable life-span. Most either turn a profit in the first year, or never. However, there are certain copyrighted works that have either held their value, or steadily increased in value, over the years. A number of Disney properties spring to mind as examples. The owners of those properties obviously have a strong economic interest in extending the duration of their copyrights.
And no, I don't think there would have been more hijackings if Grandma hadn't been searched.
Nevermind about searching Grandma. If you don't like searches you have to argue against the best case for having them, not the weakest. You have to argue for a situation where a group of men can walk straight on to a comercial airliner wearing body armor, with automatic weapons, explosives, and any other weapons they might find useful - because there are no searches at all.
If you are not willing to defend a situation like that then all that is left to do is to quibble over what sort of searches to have, and who to search.
There were none in the US before 9/11 for a very long time -- even without the level of security we are suffering under now.
Routine searches of all passengers were introduced in 1973, in response to a rash of hijackings. Unsurprisngly they were very effective in reducing the number of hijackings.
I'll assume you don't rob banks, but if you do, think of someone who doesn't. Now pretend that you lock that person up in a maximum security prison. Gee, locking him up prevented him from robbing a bank, didn't it? No, he wasn't going to do it anyway. Locking him up didn't prevent anything, it just took his freedom away unnecessarily.
Privacy is not liberty. See if you can come up with a persuasive example that actually relates to privacy.
but if I manage to bribe the caterers they can get weapons on board using the food carts
Which is so much easier than just walking on board with weapons - right? Don't you think there would be more hijackings if we did not have these security measures - or have there been none in the US since 9/11 because we ran out of bad guys?
Next you will be telling us that the slaves were really happier before the Civil War. Hell maybe we should have let the French sort out their own problems with Hitler. If it comes to that, was the revolutionary war really worth the effort. Guess not. It's not like anyone would really want to risk their lives for freedom - right?
It's less trading liberty for security and more trading liberty for speed.
It's not trading liberty at all because the searches by themselves do not introduce any new legal prohibitions on the actions that you are allowed to perform. It is a matter of trading privacy.
For some people who travel it is partly a matter of trading privacy for speed, but obviously not for those who must either travel by air or not at all. For people on the ground it is strictly a matter of trading the privacy of others for their own security.
In the US it is now illegal to sell magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds. I think the mag they are using is one of 10 round mags made for the US market, so it looks nothing like the classic AK-47 magazines.
There is a somewhat old, but still very good article about this kind of problem on salon. Worth a read I think.
Anyway, the number of deaths that can be attributed to software failure is quite small, and just as importantly no one has a clue as to how many lives have been saved by software reliability. For the most part software is used to replace human activity, and humans are notoriously unreliable. We really need to know what the trade-off looks like because if we delay the use of software with regulation, and are forced to live with even more unreliable humans in the meantime, then more people will wind up dead rather than fewer.
I would also note that there is no need to have a uniform policy on software reliability. Consumers may prefer flashy over reliable, but unless they are performing heart surgery with their mp3 players, who cares?
Especially the rationalization that its ok to trade privacy for so-called security.
If you think it is OK for airlines personel (or security personel) to search passengers and luggage for weapons and explosives, then you have already accepted that it is sometimes worthwhile to trade privacy for security.
Here are a couple of ideas you might want to think about for a while.
(1) Sometimes we have no reason to want or expect privacy, like when we hold a conversation with someone in a crowded elevator. Other times we do want and expect privacy. Before going off about intrusions on privacy, it would probably be a good idea to think about those times and places where privacy really matters. If we can trade the kind of privacy that does not matter for greater security then why not do so?
(2) Privacy is not liberty. Sometimes it is a useful means to preserving liberty. The government can't stop you from doing something if they do not know you are doing it. But it is not the same thing as liberty. So while I would accept the claim that any trade of liberty for security is a sham, I would not accept the claim that any trade of privacy for security is a mistake.
(3) Sometimes it is more a matter of trading privacy for liberty rather than trading privacy for security. There are, for example two ways to eliminate the threat of hijacked aircraft, and thus achieve security. You can limit privacy by searching passengers, or you can limit liberty by making comercial aviation illegal. Under the current system we gave up some privacy so that we could achieve a measure of security while also keeping our liberty (to travel etc). In cases like that I will take more liberty over more privacy every time.
Check the news. I think they are running short, because there aren't nearly as many of them as there were six months ago.
There are not as many as six months ago because the Israeli's are all over them with tanks. Like us the Israeli's found that the only way to stop terrorists from comming to you, is to take the war to them.
It takes a mature team of highly trained and motivated adults to take over a plane and then fly it into some building,
Motivated perhaps, but not highly trained. Take a look at the guys who actually carried out the attack. They were surprisingly average. Not especially smart, and not much experience. Guys like that are not at all hard to find in countries like Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
I hope I'm right.
Some of us would prefer a better strategy than "hoping for the best".
more the half of the Bill of Rights has been eroded
Sure. Read some law. You will notice that the courts have changed their minds quite often about the extent and nature of the rights protected by the Bill of Rights. Now if you want to claim that our rights have been eroded in some abstract or moral sense then that is another topic, but if you think that we have fewer rights now, as recognised by the courts, than we did say 40 years ago, then you will have to do a little better.
Do you think there are endless teams of suicide hijackers...
Yeah. Close to endless. Have you seen any signs of the Palestinians running short of suicide bombers? The only real personel limit involved in this kind of tactic is the need for people who can fly a plane in level flight - which is not a particularly difficult skill to master.
Add nuclear or biological weapons to the mix, and you do not even have that limit.
I think that is right. For years - a decade or more - there were a bunch of anti-terrorism types (like these ones) warning about the possibility of terrorist attacks on a huge scale. No one really took the threat seriously - and that was understandable - because such attacks had never actually happened. Now they have happened.
For years the same guys have been warning about the possbility of nuclear terrorism. We know for a fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and they are one small revolution away from being run by terrorists. We know that North Korea has nuclear weapons, and they are already run by terrorists. And those are just the cases where we have no doubt. There are a number of other countries where nuclear weapons programs probably exist. Even worse we can predict with near certainty, thanks to the march of scientific progress, that nuclear weapons will continue to become cheaper and easier to acquire.
So do you think that we should all wait until after a few million people are killed before acting this time?
I disagree.. communism would be an execellent system, if it wasn't for one thing, human nature.
This nicely sums up exactly why communists turned out to be such evil sob's. Political systems are supposed to be fit for humans, not the other way around.
So instead of communism we have capitilism, which exploits human nature.
Better to have a system that suits human nature than a system that attempts to crush humanity into its own deformed shape.
But even they don't think of us as criminals without a cause, which is what the US is doing.
Do you think this would still be true if the 9/11 attacks had happened in Tokyo instead of New York and Washington? The US was never as perfect as you remember, nor as admired or respected, and now it is not as bad as you suppose.
People forget that the rest of the world said exactly the same sort of thing about Reagan (and worse) that people are now saying about Bush. They said he was an idiot, and a warmonger, and plenty of other things besides - until after communism was defeated.
People forget that although the constitution is now more than two hundred years old, most of the constitional rights that are now under threat are no more than a few decades old (being the results of relatively recent Supreme Court rulings).
People also forget that the US is in fact facing a deadly threat, and that there is no garantee that it will survive this war against terrorism.
I think that is probably one of the most serious problems with this war. With terrorism there are no massing armies on the border, and no enemies that bang their shoes on podiums in the UN and promise to burry us. It is all too easy to forget that the threat is there. But we have three thousand dead American civillians to remind us - more than in any war since the Civil War - and if terrorism becomes nuclear then those thousands will become millions. The US government has realised that there is no way to defend against nuclear terrorism, except to stamp out terrorism before it gets that far. If they fail in this task then the US will cease to exist along with most of what we now call civilisation.
In the face of such a threat desperate measures are required, and the tuth is that even if Ashcroft got every power he is asking for, US civil rights would still be in better shape than they were in the 1960's or even in the 1970's.
How this administration is judged in the long term will depend entirely on the results they achieve. If they democratize the middle east, as they claim they intend to, then the reputation of the US will not suffer any harm. In the meantime the US should expect no more respect or admiration from the rest of the world than it got during the cold war - i.e. none at all.
But if you want to debate this you first have to accept intelligent design.
Oh I see, so I have to accept the theory before I get to see any of the evidence. This is what logicians called "begging the question". How can you honestly claim that Creationism is even a theory, let alone a scientific theory, when you admit that there is no way to even start answering the most basic questions about what this so-called theory says, or what the evidence for it is, without first accepting that it is true, and without straying from "pure science".
You don't have to accept that the theory of evolution is true, not even for the sake of argument, in order to understand what it says or how it is supposed to work, or what the evidence for it is.
If you want to engage in philosophical (or even theological) debate then that is fine with me. Just don't pretend you are doing science. And seriously, if your theory starts out with a theological claim, and proceeds with a whole lot of theological speculation based on that claim, then you are doing theology, not science.
I don't think video cameras existed about the time of creation.
So there is no creation going on now? Any explanation of why? Or is this one of those mysteries where you need to consult religion for the answers?
He spoke and it happened. Feel free to repliacte that in you lab.
Pretty thin explanation there, and I am not really sure what the evidence for this is supposed to be. What makes you think that speaking was involved? What makes you think it was a "he"?
As far as you other questions, I'd love to hear the evolutionary explaination for those.
You will find all sorts of interesting evolutionary explanations - everything from explanations of vestigial biological structures, to the oddities of human psychology. Is there anything like this published by Creationists? Anything at all that looks remotely like a use of the theory to solve an actual scientific question?
See, as far as I can tell from reading Creationist literature (and I have read quite a bit) it all amounts to little more than the claim that "God did it" plus a laundry list of objections to the theory of evolution. There is no actual creationist theory. Just that one singular claim. No evidence is ever given for Creationism, no explanation is ever given of what the creator was, no explanation is ever given of how the creating was done or even why it was done, no use of the theory is ever made in answering the kinds of questions that scientists want to answer.
I hope someone with mod points notices this post, because it is right on the money. Of course what few people are willing to admit yet is that nuclear power is almost certain to wind up being most (but not all) of the back end in the hydrogen fueled economy.
I notice you avoided dealing with the crucial question. Would you stop believing in God (or whatever your favourite creator is) if the evidence went against creationism? Or is your belief that there is a creator based on something other than the evidence?
As for evidence of creationism I would be quite happy if you could say, provide me with a short video of the creator at work, maybe creating a small species of bacteria or something (doesn't have to be anything too complex, I know he is a busy guy). Also you (or he) should provide a short explanation of the creation process and give sufficient details of his (or her I suppose) methodology, so that other scientists could reproduce the results in a lab. It would also be helpful if your explanation of the creation process could be used to answer the sorts of basic questions that evolutionary theory answers, like why men have nipples perhaps (was that a joke, or just something about the way the creation process works?), or why we find animals with spotted bodies and striped tails, but never the other way around (just a fashion preference?).
Science is about going where the evidence leads us, not where we want to go.
Right here we have the real problem with creationism. All creationists believe in God, and not because the evidence led them to believe. If you try asking a few about their belief in God then you can be pretty sure that they will say that they have faith that God exists. This leads to a crucial difference between the way in which real scientists believe in evolution and the way in which pseudo-scientists believe in creationism.
Here's the difference:
If the evidence started going south for Darwinism (lets say Lamarkian evolution started to fit the evidence better) or even for Evolution (lets say we start finding alien artefacts, along with manuals with titles like "How to Design a Species" etc), then scientists would switch to the new theory. By contrast, do you really think that creationists would change their religion, or even become athiests if the evidence started going south for their favourite version of creationism?
Scientists change their beliefs all the time, even with regard to the most fundamental ideas. As you put it, they follow the evidence, even when it leads them in surprising directions. Creationists, like most religious people, do not. They take some beliefs on faith, and stick to them regardless of where the evidence leads.
Slashdot Mirror
Some degree of privacy is a prerequisite for some liberties.
No doubt. All the same it is important that we remember that privacy is just a means to securing certain liberties, and maybe not the only means. I fear that a steady erosion of privacy is inevitable, and not just because of government activity, but also because of advancing technology in private hands. As privacy becomes less effective as a means of securing liberty, I think it is important that we find other ways of securing it, so that we don't see a steady erosion of liberty as well.
Only because the US has so far been sucessful in catching terrorists (like these ones) from crossing into the US.
And the last acts of terrorism in Canada were during the FLQ crisis in the 60's.
You must have forgotten about the bombing of the Air India flight that killed 329 people in 1985.
Privacy is not liberty, nor is it a "civil liberty", although it might be a "civil right". A liberty is a right to carry out some type of action without being obstructed by anyone else. Privacy rights restrict the actions of others (to obtain or publish information about you) which makes them claim-rights. So the US complaint about Canadian privacy laws has nothing at all to do with liberty.
This gives a pretty good introduction to the theoretical classification of rights.
The stuff about legalizing dope is of course another matter entirely. I have no idea why American politicians gets so wound up about dope, when most Americans have used it without comming to much harm.
No, but they have the next best thing.
They could burn the plants using pinpoint fire...
Along with the rest of the field. Isn't it anoying how small fires spread? A more plausible solution would be to use steam.
There is an old joke about economists that goes like this:
Economist A: "Look there's $50 on the ground."
Economist B: "Don't bother to pick it up, it's not worth the effort."
Economist A: "How can you be so sure?"
Economist B: "If it was worth the effort then someone would have done it already."
The opportunity, and probably the motive, required for the September 11 attacks has been available for decades, but it took a while for the right people to get the idea and put it into action. The possibility of building cruise missiles has only been around for a few years (cheap ones anyway). The fact that it hasn't been done yet proves very little.
I never could figure out why IP laws regarding time were extended...
The vast majority of publications have always had a short (or even non-existant) profitable life-span. Most either turn a profit in the first year, or never. However, there are certain copyrighted works that have either held their value, or steadily increased in value, over the years. A number of Disney properties spring to mind as examples. The owners of those properties obviously have a strong economic interest in extending the duration of their copyrights.
And no, I don't think there would have been more hijackings if Grandma hadn't been searched.
Nevermind about searching Grandma. If you don't like searches you have to argue against the best case for having them, not the weakest. You have to argue for a situation where a group of men can walk straight on to a comercial airliner wearing body armor, with automatic weapons, explosives, and any other weapons they might find useful - because there are no searches at all.
If you are not willing to defend a situation like that then all that is left to do is to quibble over what sort of searches to have, and who to search.
There were none in the US before 9/11 for a very long time -- even without the level of security we are suffering under now.
Routine searches of all passengers were introduced in 1973, in response to a rash of hijackings. Unsurprisngly they were very effective in reducing the number of hijackings.
I'll assume you don't rob banks, but if you do, think of someone who doesn't. Now pretend that you lock that person up in a maximum security prison. Gee, locking him up prevented him from robbing a bank, didn't it? No, he wasn't going to do it anyway. Locking him up didn't prevent anything, it just took his freedom away unnecessarily.
Privacy is not liberty. See if you can come up with a persuasive example that actually relates to privacy.
but if I manage to bribe the caterers they can get weapons on board using the food carts
Which is so much easier than just walking on board with weapons - right? Don't you think there would be more hijackings if we did not have these security measures - or have there been none in the US since 9/11 because we ran out of bad guys?
Next you will be telling us that the slaves were really happier before the Civil War. Hell maybe we should have let the French sort out their own problems with Hitler. If it comes to that, was the revolutionary war really worth the effort. Guess not. It's not like anyone would really want to risk their lives for freedom - right?
It's less trading liberty for security and more trading liberty for speed.
It's not trading liberty at all because the searches by themselves do not introduce any new legal prohibitions on the actions that you are allowed to perform. It is a matter of trading privacy.
For some people who travel it is partly a matter of trading privacy for speed, but obviously not for those who must either travel by air or not at all. For people on the ground it is strictly a matter of trading the privacy of others for their own security.
This does not look like AK47 magazine at all!
In the US it is now illegal to sell magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds. I think the mag they are using is one of 10 round mags made for the US market, so it looks nothing like the classic AK-47 magazines.
There is a somewhat old, but still very good article about this kind of problem on salon. Worth a read I think.
Anyway, the number of deaths that can be attributed to software failure is quite small, and just as importantly no one has a clue as to how many lives have been saved by software reliability. For the most part software is used to replace human activity, and humans are notoriously unreliable. We really need to know what the trade-off looks like because if we delay the use of software with regulation, and are forced to live with even more unreliable humans in the meantime, then more people will wind up dead rather than fewer.
I would also note that there is no need to have a uniform policy on software reliability. Consumers may prefer flashy over reliable, but unless they are performing heart surgery with their mp3 players, who cares?
Especially the rationalization that its ok to trade privacy for so-called security.
If you think it is OK for airlines personel (or security personel) to search passengers and luggage for weapons and explosives, then you have already accepted that it is sometimes worthwhile to trade privacy for security.
Here are a couple of ideas you might want to think about for a while.
(1) Sometimes we have no reason to want or expect privacy, like when we hold a conversation with someone in a crowded elevator. Other times we do want and expect privacy. Before going off about intrusions on privacy, it would probably be a good idea to think about those times and places where privacy really matters. If we can trade the kind of privacy that does not matter for greater security then why not do so?
(2) Privacy is not liberty. Sometimes it is a useful means to preserving liberty. The government can't stop you from doing something if they do not know you are doing it. But it is not the same thing as liberty. So while I would accept the claim that any trade of liberty for security is a sham, I would not accept the claim that any trade of privacy for security is a mistake.
(3) Sometimes it is more a matter of trading privacy for liberty rather than trading privacy for security. There are, for example two ways to eliminate the threat of hijacked aircraft, and thus achieve security. You can limit privacy by searching passengers, or you can limit liberty by making comercial aviation illegal. Under the current system we gave up some privacy so that we could achieve a measure of security while also keeping our liberty (to travel etc). In cases like that I will take more liberty over more privacy every time.
Check the news. I think they are running short, because there aren't nearly as many of them as there were six months ago.
There are not as many as six months ago because the Israeli's are all over them with tanks. Like us the Israeli's found that the only way to stop terrorists from comming to you, is to take the war to them.
It takes a mature team of highly trained and motivated adults to take over a plane and then fly it into some building,
Motivated perhaps, but not highly trained. Take a look at the guys who actually carried out the attack. They were surprisingly average. Not especially smart, and not much experience. Guys like that are not at all hard to find in countries like Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
I hope I'm right.
Some of us would prefer a better strategy than "hoping for the best".
more the half of the Bill of Rights has been eroded
Sure. Read some law. You will notice that the courts have changed their minds quite often about the extent and nature of the rights protected by the Bill of Rights. Now if you want to claim that our rights have been eroded in some abstract or moral sense then that is another topic, but if you think that we have fewer rights now, as recognised by the courts, than we did say 40 years ago, then you will have to do a little better.
Do you think there are endless teams of suicide hijackers...
Yeah. Close to endless. Have you seen any signs of the Palestinians running short of suicide bombers? The only real personel limit involved in this kind of tactic is the need for people who can fly a plane in level flight - which is not a particularly difficult skill to master.
Add nuclear or biological weapons to the mix, and you do not even have that limit.
They don't forget, they just don't believe it.
I think that is right. For years - a decade or more - there were a bunch of anti-terrorism types (like these ones) warning about the possibility of terrorist attacks on a huge scale. No one really took the threat seriously - and that was understandable - because such attacks had never actually happened. Now they have happened.
For years the same guys have been warning about the possbility of nuclear terrorism. We know for a fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and they are one small revolution away from being run by terrorists. We know that North Korea has nuclear weapons, and they are already run by terrorists. And those are just the cases where we have no doubt. There are a number of other countries where nuclear weapons programs probably exist. Even worse we can predict with near certainty, thanks to the march of scientific progress, that nuclear weapons will continue to become cheaper and easier to acquire.
So do you think that we should all wait until after a few million people are killed before acting this time?
I disagree.. communism would be an execellent system, if it wasn't for one thing, human nature.
This nicely sums up exactly why communists turned out to be such evil sob's. Political systems are supposed to be fit for humans, not the other way around.
So instead of communism we have capitilism, which exploits human nature.
Better to have a system that suits human nature than a system that attempts to crush humanity into its own deformed shape.
But even they don't think of us as criminals without a cause, which is what the US is doing.
Do you think this would still be true if the 9/11 attacks had happened in Tokyo instead of New York and Washington? The US was never as perfect as you remember, nor as admired or respected, and now it is not as bad as you suppose.
People forget that the rest of the world said exactly the same sort of thing about Reagan (and worse) that people are now saying about Bush. They said he was an idiot, and a warmonger, and plenty of other things besides - until after communism was defeated.
People forget that although the constitution is now more than two hundred years old, most of the constitional rights that are now under threat are no more than a few decades old (being the results of relatively recent Supreme Court rulings).
People also forget that the US is in fact facing a deadly threat, and that there is no garantee that it will survive this war against terrorism.
I think that is probably one of the most serious problems with this war. With terrorism there are no massing armies on the border, and no enemies that bang their shoes on podiums in the UN and promise to burry us. It is all too easy to forget that the threat is there. But we have three thousand dead American civillians to remind us - more than in any war since the Civil War - and if terrorism becomes nuclear then those thousands will become millions. The US government has realised that there is no way to defend against nuclear terrorism, except to stamp out terrorism before it gets that far. If they fail in this task then the US will cease to exist along with most of what we now call civilisation.
In the face of such a threat desperate measures are required, and the tuth is that even if Ashcroft got every power he is asking for, US civil rights would still be in better shape than they were in the 1960's or even in the 1970's.
How this administration is judged in the long term will depend entirely on the results they achieve. If they democratize the middle east, as they claim they intend to, then the reputation of the US will not suffer any harm. In the meantime the US should expect no more respect or admiration from the rest of the world than it got during the cold war - i.e. none at all.
This is where the evidence leads me.
Which evidence was that again?
But if you want to debate this you first have to accept intelligent design.
Oh I see, so I have to accept the theory before I get to see any of the evidence. This is what logicians called "begging the question". How can you honestly claim that Creationism is even a theory, let alone a scientific theory, when you admit that there is no way to even start answering the most basic questions about what this so-called theory says, or what the evidence for it is, without first accepting that it is true, and without straying from "pure science".
You don't have to accept that the theory of evolution is true, not even for the sake of argument, in order to understand what it says or how it is supposed to work, or what the evidence for it is.
If you want to engage in philosophical (or even theological) debate then that is fine with me. Just don't pretend you are doing science. And seriously, if your theory starts out with a theological claim, and proceeds with a whole lot of theological speculation based on that claim, then you are doing theology, not science.
I don't think video cameras existed about the time of creation.
So there is no creation going on now? Any explanation of why? Or is this one of those mysteries where you need to consult religion for the answers?
He spoke and it happened. Feel free to repliacte that in you lab.
Pretty thin explanation there, and I am not really sure what the evidence for this is supposed to be. What makes you think that speaking was involved? What makes you think it was a "he"?
As far as you other questions, I'd love to hear the evolutionary explaination for those.
You can start reading here:
You will find all sorts of interesting evolutionary explanations - everything from explanations of vestigial biological structures, to the oddities of human psychology. Is there anything like this published by Creationists? Anything at all that looks remotely like a use of the theory to solve an actual scientific question?
See, as far as I can tell from reading Creationist literature (and I have read quite a bit) it all amounts to little more than the claim that "God did it" plus a laundry list of objections to the theory of evolution. There is no actual creationist theory. Just that one singular claim. No evidence is ever given for Creationism, no explanation is ever given of what the creator was, no explanation is ever given of how the creating was done or even why it was done, no use of the theory is ever made in answering the kinds of questions that scientists want to answer.
I hope someone with mod points notices this post, because it is right on the money. Of course what few people are willing to admit yet is that nuclear power is almost certain to wind up being most (but not all) of the back end in the hydrogen fueled economy.
I notice you avoided dealing with the crucial question. Would you stop believing in God (or whatever your favourite creator is) if the evidence went against creationism? Or is your belief that there is a creator based on something other than the evidence?
As for evidence of creationism I would be quite happy if you could say, provide me with a short video of the creator at work, maybe creating a small species of bacteria or something (doesn't have to be anything too complex, I know he is a busy guy). Also you (or he) should provide a short explanation of the creation process and give sufficient details of his (or her I suppose) methodology, so that other scientists could reproduce the results in a lab. It would also be helpful if your explanation of the creation process could be used to answer the sorts of basic questions that evolutionary theory answers, like why men have nipples perhaps (was that a joke, or just something about the way the creation process works?), or why we find animals with spotted bodies and striped tails, but never the other way around (just a fashion preference?).
Feel free to start where ever you like.
Science is about going where the evidence leads us, not where we want to go.
Right here we have the real problem with creationism. All creationists believe in God, and not because the evidence led them to believe. If you try asking a few about their belief in God then you can be pretty sure that they will say that they have faith that God exists. This leads to a crucial difference between the way in which real scientists believe in evolution and the way in which pseudo-scientists believe in creationism.
Here's the difference:
If the evidence started going south for Darwinism (lets say Lamarkian evolution started to fit the evidence better) or even for Evolution (lets say we start finding alien artefacts, along with manuals with titles like "How to Design a Species" etc), then scientists would switch to the new theory. By contrast, do you really think that creationists would change their religion, or even become athiests if the evidence started going south for their favourite version of creationism?
Scientists change their beliefs all the time, even with regard to the most fundamental ideas. As you put it, they follow the evidence, even when it leads them in surprising directions. Creationists, like most religious people, do not. They take some beliefs on faith, and stick to them regardless of where the evidence leads.