The end of your post is exactly what I was thinking. LoJack is an established security company, so its evidence tends to stand up in courts and holds weight with police officers (in the "LoJack says it's stolen? That's good enough for me." sense). The evidence of a private company's little phone-home script probably isn't enough to get a warrant, and even if it was enough to get said warrant initially, it would be called into question in the trial and would likely be thrown out.
Actually, the companies are apparently sending pills to some regions at cost -- "57 cents a pill for tenofovir and 87 cents for Truvada, the combination drug." That makes a day's supply $1.44, so a month's supply would be about $43.20. Not nearly so horrible, though it's still more than most people in these countries can afford.
To make this really work, you would also have to add a system of auditing the siren and light bar activations. Ideally, duration of activation as well as position should be recorded. If, as another poster said, the officer turns it on just long enough to get through a light, he should be punished in some way. If the activation is one of those short blips just to let other drivers know he's watching them, then the activation should show up as being less than a second long. Any longer and something should be recorded (radio chatter, perhaps) to explain the event.
The reason I suggest recording the radio instead of having the officer file a written report is that the radio should explain what's going on while the siren or light bar are active. Use a small digital recorder that buffers about a minute of audio, then when the light bar or siren is turned on, dump the buffer to mass storage (perhaps a PROM of some kind?) and record directly to storage from that point. That way, there is little to no additional work for the officer when the system is in place.
I would gladly take that professor over my CS professor who goes on for hours about how a Saudi prince accused his wife of having an affair with my professor's warrant officer while the warrant officer was in another country at the time. Or how the Saudi prince then had his wife stoned to death just outside the U.S. compound. Or how that prince then went on to marry a twelve-year-old girl. Sometimes, he spends the entire class period doing nothing but verbally bashing Arabs. What does this have to do with CS?
He goes on about how some event that kills a large number of people in the northeast (a boating accident was one of the more prominent ones) is a good thing because it means fewer Democrats to kill. And he's not joking.
Or how "I've only known one gay guy. He fell out of our helicopter from a couple thousand feet up. A bullet hit him through his harness and broke it. At least, that's what the accident report said."
The sad part is that I'm being dead serious. I have a professor that actually does this. What's worse is that he's the only guy who teaches the higher level courses, so I've had to take some 25 semester-hours from him so far.
I don't care which party a professor supports as long as he doesn't talk about killing members of the other party on class time.
Exactly. The biggest flaw I see in the analogy is that a sports car is less useful for actual work and is only really good for show. Meanwhile, Mac OS is rather well-suited to various kinds of work. Windows is good at other things.
<try type="stupid joke">Like crashing!</try>
So a more valid comparison might be the change between an SUV and a more utilitarian truck. Both can do largely the same work, but they're each better than the other for some real-world tasks.
Even better, you could say that I have this great Ferrari, but I can replace the body and interior with that of a Ford Taurus! A Ferrari drive train will operate in much the same way, regardless of whether you have a Ford body around it or the original Ferrari body.
In the case of running Windows on an Intel Mac, you would be changing the user interface, mostly. The APIs could conceivably be emulated either way.
The roads are more of an example of what the processor supports. Change the processor and you change where you can drive and how much power you have. Change the OS and you change how you can drive, but not what the hardware is capable of doing.
In the U.S., we have a provision called Fair Use in our copyright laws that allows for... well... fair use. Specifically, it allows people to make backup copies of works. Fair Use also applies to parody and citing within other works.
Unfortunately, we now have the nastiness that is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows content providers to use digital means to prevent the creation of any copies, essentially letting them do an end-run around Fair Use. Breaking these digital protections, telling others how to break them, and distributing devices designed to break them are all crimes under this act. Thus, in order to exercise my Fair Use rights guaranteed me under copyright law, I now must become a criminal.
This is why technically, removing that Sony rootkit is illegal in the United States. Hopefully that fiasco will help show lawmakers just how ill-willed all of this digital "protection" nonsense really is. I doubt it will, but I can still hope.
I was using "Christians" in the group sense, like most people use "liberals". You're correct, that's the wrong way to do it. How about this:
More people in power are "Christian" now than when the nation was founded. There are more "Christian" interest groups than I can count, and they have an enormous amount of lobbying power. Here are a few examples.
Kansas just changed the definition of "science" to fit the theocratic pseudoscience that they're wanting to push at their children.
My own state just proved that they're more willing to vote alongside the KKK than they are to let gays have civil rights.
The president of my country actually used the "God told me to" excuse to justify his invasion of Iraq.
Let's not forget the classic example of Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of a foreign head of state. Why is he not being tried right now?
And here's a fun quote: "Interesting observation of the Radical Right, Judge Roy Moore commits peaceful civil disobedience by refusing to remove the Ten Commandments Monument from the Court. He is considered a Hero. Mayor Gavin Newsom commits peaceful civil disobedience by issuing same-sex marriage licenses. He is considered an Anarchist."
Those are just the ones I can list off the top of my head in a minute.
Further, some Christians do indeed have more power now than they did when the nation was founded. Try blacks and women. Originally, they could do none of the things you described, and the justification for this inequity was based on interpretations of the Bible. They were considered property, for crying out loud.
Technically, at least one of the current tests for self-awareness is indeed a test for recognizing an image of yourself.
Experimental psychologists have measured self-awareness by observing an animal's reaction to its mirror image: if it uses the mirror for self-examination, it implies a mental concept of self. This cognitive ability is only seen in the most advanced minds. Self-awareness has been demonstrated in the apes and man by anesthetizing the subject, marking his forehead, and watching his reaction when he wakes up: when he sees the mark in a mirror, does he investigate it by touching himself or the mirror? By these measures, a primate touching itself indicates self-awareness, whereas touching the mirror, a social response, suggests the subject is investigating what it perceives as another individual.
This is quoted from Project Delphis, though I would encourage you to look it up independently.
Gee. If we're counting that way, then very few of the evangelicals are Christians, as they're the ones screaming bloody murder at an order to remove a sculpture of the ten commandments from a courthouse. I seem to remember somebody mentioning something about "the other cheek" and how we should "turn" it. Who was that, again?
Technically, George Washington seems to have been a Deist, not necessarily a Christian. Really, the first six presidents were Deist, as were four later ones. Most of the "founding fathers" were also Deists. Thomas Paine, the man who advocated independence from Britain in his tract Common Sense, also wrote something a good deal longer. The Age Of Reason. In it, he seems to support Deism rather strongly, stating
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
What does this mean?
It means that Christians now have more power in this nation than they had when it was founded, and yet all of these nimrods are complaining about being overly persecuted. It'd be nice if all of these people screaming that they're being censored would pick up a history book once in a while, but "Why take time to do the research when saying it is so much faster?"
Thing is, even if they're all stopped, that gives you ten minutes or so in which the police are busy doing various other things. Let's say you steal the plates from one of the cars rather than simply replacing them and put the stolen plates on your car. This could cause a huge number of duplicates while leaving your perfectly roadworthy car with a set of perfectly valid plates, and it would bypass the nuisance of police on the road while you attempt to get somewhere.
Misdirection and diversion are powerful weapons when used properly.
Either way, it's almost trivial for less-than-ethical people to bypass such a system, or even to use it to their advantage.
Only works when you have unique icons for the different data types, though yes, icons would work better than colors. Thumbnails might not be a good idea, since GUI scripting should be more generalized, thus there wouldn't be specific documents to thumbnail.
So long as useful, meaningful icons could be created for the various data types that could be passed, yes, they would work beautifully.
Frankly, that sounds like a more powerful version of Automater. No color-coding, but it allows components to connect to one another pretty well. The only thing I really miss is conditionals. Parameters can be entered via interactive text boxes. Finished structures can be saved as applications. Simple interface including automatic sorting of possible actions based on the output of the last action.
As for the color-coding, there are way too many potential data types for that to work too well unless you arbitrarily restrict the data types in particular ways. It could work if you used something like resistor color codes, for example. Make it kind of like Apple's UTIs. "Image -> JPEG" being represented as "red blue" or something like that. Even then, the users and script item coders are restricted to the arbitrary data types defined in the scripting application.
This is one of the potential shortcomings of Automater. I've not had any problems with it, but that's because it provides extremely broad data types such as "files/folders", "images" and so forth and because I've never needed more specificity.
"Quantum encryption" can indeed be a valid phrase. As it currently stands, the quantum effects involved are used to generate a synchronized one-time pad for both ends of the connection. Since it's generating a key rather than applying it, I suppose you could say that it's not doing the actual encryption, but in normal discussion, that is being deliberately obtuse. However, in that case, "quantum encryption" still means encryption involving quantum effects, so it's still a relevant phrase.
Much of my point involved the fact that there is no assurance against a real MitM attack, which is to say, a person truly inline in the optical line used to transfer the quantum properties, that person can be theoretically undetectable. It takes some sort of higher-level authentication to verify that there is no attacker actually intercepting the quantum key. Thus, some sort of public-key cryptography applied upon the actual key allows you to verify that nobody has altered the key, which verifies that there is no man in the middle.
Moving on.
Security through obscurity? Uh... How else would you propose to securely exchange public PGP keys?
If you're paranoid enough to spend the money on the hardware and infrastructure needed to do quantum encryption, there's no way you're going to use a public keyserver. It would be entirely too easy for someone near either end to subvert a router and substitute his own key. Better to call via a phone (specific voices are still inordinately difficult to fake, let alone in real-time, as would be needed for an attack against a phone conversation) or send a copy of the public key via courier or somesuch. It's not security through obscurity, it is instead making the PGP key exchange less prone to MitM attacks.
It's there. Look for "Day Planner". It was formerly "PIM Overview", but they changed the name and gave it the ability to access Yahoo! Calendar information.
The initial exchange of data is no less secure than PGP, as PGP signatures can be used over a quantum-encrypted connection. Just sign a tiny datagram containing 800 bits or so of the key at a certain time offset (just before the datagram was created, for example) and send it. Then use another independent method of verifying the signing key. Phone, say.
It really is easy to get authentication, it just needs to be at a higher level in the OSI model, as quantum encryption operates more on the data-link level.
Keep in mind that the signature only needs to be secure enough to verify that nobody is in the link to begin with. Once that's been done, it doesn't matter if the key is cracked. Just generate a new one. 2048-bit RSA keys will be secure enough for a long time to come. When a key length is determined to no longer be secure, just make it longer. By the time 2048-bit RSA is crackable in a few seconds (you'd need it to be this fast to make an attack feasible), increasing the length to 32768-bits should be possible for those who want a nice buffer of security.
If you use only encryption, then you deserve to be hit by a stupidly easy MitM attack, and this doesn't just apply to quantum encryption. Any kind of encryption is vulnerable to these attacks unless you use cryptographically secure digital signatures of some kind.
In the early days, Apple used to follow their interface guidelines like they were gospel. Now they ignore them in nearly every app they make. No time to start listing all the violations, but for an example, try the minimize and maximize buttons in iTunes. Or try reading their guidelines on when to use brushed metal, and then try to see when they bother to follow their own nearly unintelligible guidelines.
You're making the mistake that I see made all too often. OS X doesn't have a "maximize" button. The button is a "zoom" button, sometimes called "resize". What it does is change the view size to better fit the view's contents or data. In the case of iTunes, it changing the app into a mini-player is appropriate, as it is a change to a better view of the data for some purposes.
Note that I am not saying that the behaviour is the best behaviour, but it's appropriate and falls within the purpose of the zoom button. It's certainly better than making the window take up the whole screen.
Really, I'd rather see the player change into the mini-player via the show/hide toolbar button (the oval on the far right of some windows). That's a slightly more appropriate button to use, as it is already known to change some applications' interfaces between two modes (namely, the Finder).
This is what BSD's immutable flag is for. You set it on a file, and nobody can change the file. Not even root. You need to go into single-user mode to unset the flag, and to be in single-used mode, you need physical access to the machine. Thus, set the immutable flag on the kernel and the core APIs.
When you need to upgrade something, reboot into single-user mode, apply the patch, set the flag again, reboot into normal mode. It's kind of circuitous, but it works.
Do you have any idea how many hojillions of stars there probably are? Look into astronomy some time. Assuming galaxies are about the size of our own and that galactic clusters are about the size of ours...
My point is that in this inordinately huge number of stars, surely at least one of them would happen to form in a way that would happen to lead to life.
As for why "Intelligent Design" should not be taught in schools, I don't have a problem with that so much as with the fact that it's being taught in a science class. That is absolutely the wrong place to teach anything resembling religion.
And finally, I'm guessing you didn't read my last statement properly. "Intelligent Design" is limiting God by saying that He had to nudge evolution along. That He couldn't create completely natural ways for all of this to happen.
So it's kind of taking the worst from both science and religion and mixing them into one big pseudoreligious whole. In essence, "God couldn't make a universe that could do this on its own, and science can't explain why!". Then, its proponents try to equate it with science when it doesn't stand up to even the lowest scientific standards.
There are so many better arguments that could be used than the ones which are. If you don't believe me, go read the FAQ at the talk.origins archive. There are some interesting points from all "sides" there.
"Of the world spinning just right and being the exact distance from the sun that we need...that things just worked out that way...it is all very illogical...and just plain crazy..."
Think about that for a second. You're asking what the odds are that we, life, would form on a planet capable of supporting life rather than on some barren rock. Well... if the Earth was a barren rock, then life wouldn't have formed here. That's not exactly the kind of "point" you want to be using to demonstrate that the world must have been designed. It's almost as bad as asking why one plus one equals two. Such a magical coincidence! Surely God must have designed "one" so that if you take it and add it with another "one", you get "two"!
Here's a hint. The only thing special about this particular rock is that it happens to have the right circumstances for life to form. Thus, life formed.
I don't care one way or the other whether a God created the universe, but it seems profoundly stupid to say that that God couldn't create entirely natural laws under which life could come to be, and instead that He had to resort to post-creation tinkering. That's exactly what "Intelligent Design" claims.
Re:Good thing I'm holding onto my reciept
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
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· Score: 1
With the AVC (also known as H.264) codec in QuickTime, I've been able to encode video at 704*400 retaining watchable quality and high quality audio for a total of 600 kbit/s. That's 75 kB/s which means about 2.5 hours of video in 700 MB.
Once, I dropped the video bitrate to 258 kbit and it started looking like DivX does at 600 kbit. Drop the resolution to 350*200 and use 96 kbit audio and you'll have a good, watchable video at 44.5 kB/s which means nearly 4.5 hours of video on a CD.
It's a really nice codec. A bit heavy on the hardware, though. When some company makes a hardware decoder for it, I can see AVC being used all over instead of DivX, since it provides such high quality at low bitrates.
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The end of your post is exactly what I was thinking. LoJack is an established security company, so its evidence tends to stand up in courts and holds weight with police officers (in the "LoJack says it's stolen? That's good enough for me." sense). The evidence of a private company's little phone-home script probably isn't enough to get a warrant, and even if it was enough to get said warrant initially, it would be called into question in the trial and would likely be thrown out.
Actually, the companies are apparently sending pills to some regions at cost -- "57 cents a pill for tenofovir and 87 cents for Truvada, the combination drug." That makes a day's supply $1.44, so a month's supply would be about $43.20. Not nearly so horrible, though it's still more than most people in these countries can afford.
Come to think of it, you're right and I'm an idiot. The only reason not to use cameras would be expense.
Bravo. Well done.
Would you mind terribly if I quoted that post of yours elsewhere?
To make this really work, you would also have to add a system of auditing the siren and light bar activations. Ideally, duration of activation as well as position should be recorded. If, as another poster said, the officer turns it on just long enough to get through a light, he should be punished in some way. If the activation is one of those short blips just to let other drivers know he's watching them, then the activation should show up as being less than a second long. Any longer and something should be recorded (radio chatter, perhaps) to explain the event.
The reason I suggest recording the radio instead of having the officer file a written report is that the radio should explain what's going on while the siren or light bar are active. Use a small digital recorder that buffers about a minute of audio, then when the light bar or siren is turned on, dump the buffer to mass storage (perhaps a PROM of some kind?) and record directly to storage from that point. That way, there is little to no additional work for the officer when the system is in place.
I would gladly take that professor over my CS professor who goes on for hours about how a Saudi prince accused his wife of having an affair with my professor's warrant officer while the warrant officer was in another country at the time. Or how the Saudi prince then had his wife stoned to death just outside the U.S. compound. Or how that prince then went on to marry a twelve-year-old girl. Sometimes, he spends the entire class period doing nothing but verbally bashing Arabs. What does this have to do with CS?
He goes on about how some event that kills a large number of people in the northeast (a boating accident was one of the more prominent ones) is a good thing because it means fewer Democrats to kill. And he's not joking.
Or how "I've only known one gay guy. He fell out of our helicopter from a couple thousand feet up. A bullet hit him through his harness and broke it. At least, that's what the accident report said."
The sad part is that I'm being dead serious. I have a professor that actually does this. What's worse is that he's the only guy who teaches the higher level courses, so I've had to take some 25 semester-hours from him so far.
I don't care which party a professor supports as long as he doesn't talk about killing members of the other party on class time.
Exactly. The biggest flaw I see in the analogy is that a sports car is less useful for actual work and is only really good for show. Meanwhile, Mac OS is rather well-suited to various kinds of work. Windows is good at other things.
<try type="stupid joke">Like crashing!</try>
So a more valid comparison might be the change between an SUV and a more utilitarian truck. Both can do largely the same work, but they're each better than the other for some real-world tasks.
Even better, you could say that I have this great Ferrari, but I can replace the body and interior with that of a Ford Taurus! A Ferrari drive train will operate in much the same way, regardless of whether you have a Ford body around it or the original Ferrari body.
In the case of running Windows on an Intel Mac, you would be changing the user interface, mostly. The APIs could conceivably be emulated either way.
The roads are more of an example of what the processor supports. Change the processor and you change where you can drive and how much power you have. Change the OS and you change how you can drive, but not what the hardware is capable of doing.
It all comes full circle!
I think you meant to say that it all goes in one infinite loop.
In the U.S., we have a provision called Fair Use in our copyright laws that allows for ... well ... fair use. Specifically, it allows people to make backup copies of works. Fair Use also applies to parody and citing within other works.
Unfortunately, we now have the nastiness that is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows content providers to use digital means to prevent the creation of any copies, essentially letting them do an end-run around Fair Use. Breaking these digital protections, telling others how to break them, and distributing devices designed to break them are all crimes under this act. Thus, in order to exercise my Fair Use rights guaranteed me under copyright law, I now must become a criminal.
This is why technically, removing that Sony rootkit is illegal in the United States. Hopefully that fiasco will help show lawmakers just how ill-willed all of this digital "protection" nonsense really is. I doubt it will, but I can still hope.
More people in power are "Christian" now than when the nation was founded. There are more "Christian" interest groups than I can count, and they have an enormous amount of lobbying power. Here are a few examples.
And here's a fun quote: "Interesting observation of the Radical Right, Judge Roy Moore commits peaceful civil disobedience by refusing to remove the Ten Commandments Monument from the Court. He is considered a Hero. Mayor Gavin Newsom commits peaceful civil disobedience by issuing same-sex marriage licenses. He is considered an Anarchist."
Those are just the ones I can list off the top of my head in a minute.
Further, some Christians do indeed have more power now than they did when the nation was founded. Try blacks and women. Originally, they could do none of the things you described, and the justification for this inequity was based on interpretations of the Bible. They were considered property, for crying out loud.
This is quoted from Project Delphis, though I would encourage you to look it up independently.
Gee. If we're counting that way, then very few of the evangelicals are Christians, as they're the ones screaming bloody murder at an order to remove a sculpture of the ten commandments from a courthouse. I seem to remember somebody mentioning something about "the other cheek" and how we should "turn" it. Who was that, again?
What does this mean?
It means that Christians now have more power in this nation than they had when it was founded, and yet all of these nimrods are complaining about being overly persecuted. It'd be nice if all of these people screaming that they're being censored would pick up a history book once in a while, but "Why take time to do the research when saying it is so much faster?"
Thing is, even if they're all stopped, that gives you ten minutes or so in which the police are busy doing various other things. Let's say you steal the plates from one of the cars rather than simply replacing them and put the stolen plates on your car. This could cause a huge number of duplicates while leaving your perfectly roadworthy car with a set of perfectly valid plates, and it would bypass the nuisance of police on the road while you attempt to get somewhere.
Misdirection and diversion are powerful weapons when used properly.
Either way, it's almost trivial for less-than-ethical people to bypass such a system, or even to use it to their advantage.
Only works when you have unique icons for the different data types, though yes, icons would work better than colors. Thumbnails might not be a good idea, since GUI scripting should be more generalized, thus there wouldn't be specific documents to thumbnail.
So long as useful, meaningful icons could be created for the various data types that could be passed, yes, they would work beautifully.
Frankly, that sounds like a more powerful version of Automater. No color-coding, but it allows components to connect to one another pretty well. The only thing I really miss is conditionals. Parameters can be entered via interactive text boxes. Finished structures can be saved as applications. Simple interface including automatic sorting of possible actions based on the output of the last action.
As for the color-coding, there are way too many potential data types for that to work too well unless you arbitrarily restrict the data types in particular ways. It could work if you used something like resistor color codes, for example. Make it kind of like Apple's UTIs. "Image -> JPEG" being represented as "red blue" or something like that. Even then, the users and script item coders are restricted to the arbitrary data types defined in the scripting application.
This is one of the potential shortcomings of Automater. I've not had any problems with it, but that's because it provides extremely broad data types such as "files/folders", "images" and so forth and because I've never needed more specificity.
"Quantum encryption" can indeed be a valid phrase. As it currently stands, the quantum effects involved are used to generate a synchronized one-time pad for both ends of the connection. Since it's generating a key rather than applying it, I suppose you could say that it's not doing the actual encryption, but in normal discussion, that is being deliberately obtuse. However, in that case, "quantum encryption" still means encryption involving quantum effects, so it's still a relevant phrase.
... How else would you propose to securely exchange public PGP keys?
Much of my point involved the fact that there is no assurance against a real MitM attack, which is to say, a person truly inline in the optical line used to transfer the quantum properties, that person can be theoretically undetectable. It takes some sort of higher-level authentication to verify that there is no attacker actually intercepting the quantum key. Thus, some sort of public-key cryptography applied upon the actual key allows you to verify that nobody has altered the key, which verifies that there is no man in the middle.
Moving on.
Security through obscurity? Uh
If you're paranoid enough to spend the money on the hardware and infrastructure needed to do quantum encryption, there's no way you're going to use a public keyserver. It would be entirely too easy for someone near either end to subvert a router and substitute his own key. Better to call via a phone (specific voices are still inordinately difficult to fake, let alone in real-time, as would be needed for an attack against a phone conversation) or send a copy of the public key via courier or somesuch. It's not security through obscurity, it is instead making the PGP key exchange less prone to MitM attacks.
It's there. Look for "Day Planner". It was formerly "PIM Overview", but they changed the name and gave it the ability to access Yahoo! Calendar information.
The initial exchange of data is no less secure than PGP, as PGP signatures can be used over a quantum-encrypted connection. Just sign a tiny datagram containing 800 bits or so of the key at a certain time offset (just before the datagram was created, for example) and send it. Then use another independent method of verifying the signing key. Phone, say.
It really is easy to get authentication, it just needs to be at a higher level in the OSI model, as quantum encryption operates more on the data-link level.
Keep in mind that the signature only needs to be secure enough to verify that nobody is in the link to begin with. Once that's been done, it doesn't matter if the key is cracked. Just generate a new one. 2048-bit RSA keys will be secure enough for a long time to come. When a key length is determined to no longer be secure, just make it longer. By the time 2048-bit RSA is crackable in a few seconds (you'd need it to be this fast to make an attack feasible), increasing the length to 32768-bits should be possible for those who want a nice buffer of security.
If you use only encryption, then you deserve to be hit by a stupidly easy MitM attack, and this doesn't just apply to quantum encryption. Any kind of encryption is vulnerable to these attacks unless you use cryptographically secure digital signatures of some kind.
In the early days, Apple used to follow their interface guidelines like they were gospel. Now they ignore them in nearly every app they make. No time to start listing all the violations, but for an example, try the minimize and maximize buttons in iTunes. Or try reading their guidelines on when to use brushed metal, and then try to see when they bother to follow their own nearly unintelligible guidelines.
You're making the mistake that I see made all too often. OS X doesn't have a "maximize" button. The button is a "zoom" button, sometimes called "resize". What it does is change the view size to better fit the view's contents or data. In the case of iTunes, it changing the app into a mini-player is appropriate, as it is a change to a better view of the data for some purposes.
Note that I am not saying that the behaviour is the best behaviour, but it's appropriate and falls within the purpose of the zoom button. It's certainly better than making the window take up the whole screen.
Really, I'd rather see the player change into the mini-player via the show/hide toolbar button (the oval on the far right of some windows). That's a slightly more appropriate button to use, as it is already known to change some applications' interfaces between two modes (namely, the Finder).
This is what BSD's immutable flag is for. You set it on a file, and nobody can change the file. Not even root. You need to go into single-user mode to unset the flag, and to be in single-used mode, you need physical access to the machine. Thus, set the immutable flag on the kernel and the core APIs.
When you need to upgrade something, reboot into single-user mode, apply the patch, set the flag again, reboot into normal mode. It's kind of circuitous, but it works.
Do you have any idea how many hojillions of stars there probably are? Look into astronomy some time. Assuming galaxies are about the size of our own and that galactic clusters are about the size of ours ...
My point is that in this inordinately huge number of stars, surely at least one of them would happen to form in a way that would happen to lead to life.
As for why "Intelligent Design" should not be taught in schools, I don't have a problem with that so much as with the fact that it's being taught in a science class. That is absolutely the wrong place to teach anything resembling religion.
And finally, I'm guessing you didn't read my last statement properly. "Intelligent Design" is limiting God by saying that He had to nudge evolution along. That He couldn't create completely natural ways for all of this to happen.
So it's kind of taking the worst from both science and religion and mixing them into one big pseudoreligious whole. In essence, "God couldn't make a universe that could do this on its own, and science can't explain why!". Then, its proponents try to equate it with science when it doesn't stand up to even the lowest scientific standards.
There are so many better arguments that could be used than the ones which are. If you don't believe me, go read the FAQ at the talk.origins archive. There are some interesting points from all "sides" there.
"Of the world spinning just right and being the exact distance from the sun that we need...that things just worked out that way...it is all very illogical...and just plain crazy..."
... if the Earth was a barren rock, then life wouldn't have formed here. That's not exactly the kind of "point" you want to be using to demonstrate that the world must have been designed. It's almost as bad as asking why one plus one equals two. Such a magical coincidence! Surely God must have designed "one" so that if you take it and add it with another "one", you get "two"!
Think about that for a second. You're asking what the odds are that we, life, would form on a planet capable of supporting life rather than on some barren rock. Well
Here's a hint. The only thing special about this particular rock is that it happens to have the right circumstances for life to form. Thus, life formed.
I don't care one way or the other whether a God created the universe, but it seems profoundly stupid to say that that God couldn't create entirely natural laws under which life could come to be, and instead that He had to resort to post-creation tinkering. That's exactly what "Intelligent Design" claims.
With the AVC (also known as H.264) codec in QuickTime, I've been able to encode video at 704*400 retaining watchable quality and high quality audio for a total of 600 kbit/s. That's 75 kB/s which means about 2.5 hours of video in 700 MB.
Once, I dropped the video bitrate to 258 kbit and it started looking like DivX does at 600 kbit. Drop the resolution to 350*200 and use 96 kbit audio and you'll have a good, watchable video at 44.5 kB/s which means nearly 4.5 hours of video on a CD.
It's a really nice codec. A bit heavy on the hardware, though. When some company makes a hardware decoder for it, I can see AVC being used all over instead of DivX, since it provides such high quality at low bitrates.