It's a dumb reason to complain anyway...I've got my own office. It's pretty nice. But I'm in a busy department, and there are offices all around mine, and unless I shut the door (which isn't done around here, unless you're gone, or having some scary meeting), I can hear stuff going on in 6 or seven other offices. Adding to that, I'm one of a few programmers in an environment filled with DBAs, Netadmins, and tech support guys, so there are always people moving around working on system problems, chatting, etc.
In short, office != quiet.
My advice is to get an iPod and a pair of noise cancellation headphones. Make sure you turn your desk, or put up a mirror or something if you're easily startled...Every place I've ever worked, someone has thought it would be funny to try and "scare" me while I was doing this, and while this has never happened more than once, the reputation that goes with being a tightly-wound stress hound whose "fight" reflex beats the crap out of his "flight" reflex is no fun to live with, and hard to live down.
Yea, only link I ever fell for was off the main page. Still haunts me, sometimes.
I can't imagine a professional webhost doing it, or even allowing it done, but I can definitely see a private individual looking at an exponentiating bandwidth bill and wanting some revenge.
That being said, it's a real jackass manuver. Why blame the readers? And if you've got a problem with it in advance, just block referers.
I took argmentation and debate in college, and was widely known for resorting to bullying and fallacies when I had to defend a position I didn't believe could be rationally defended. It worked more than half of the time; people get flustered and off-balance...Their rational rhetoric seems less certain because they have to try and be accurate, while the person who doesn't care for accuracy is free to beat them with fake or misleading stats, and strawman arguments.
When you throw out a truly outrageous statement, you can watch the other guy recoil, like you slapped them. They know better, of course, but there is still that moment of shock, and an experienced debater can take advantage of that, put them on the run. If you can defeat the person, you can defeat their argument. You see that all the time these days. Debaters taking on people with the facts on their side...And they win. A lot.
Whenever I hear a truly impassioned defense of something, I always suspect shenanigans. Either the person really is emotionally invested, in which case they are no longer in a position to argue it objectively, or they're just throwing up a front to shield the weakness of their argument.
They're implying a causal connection on laughably weak data. That's the fallacy of "Joint effect" because they're saying p2p leads to shoplifting, when in reality p2p and shoplifting stem from a third cause (lack of money), which stems from many causes. It's also "Complex Cause" because they're pointing at one thing, when there is no data that that one thing is even significant, when an idiot could tell that there are other factors involved.
Statistically speaking, it's also not impossible that any apparent correlation is a statisitical accident (like air breathing is 100% correlated to violent crime), and drawing general conclusions from such an accident is yet another fallacy (Accident).
Even if there is correlation, they're most likely applying the fallacy of Insignificance, which is to say that even if p2p does lead to shoplifting, many other things are far more likely to lead to shoplifting, so much so that attributing a causal connection in the general case is fallacious.
And finally, it's also the fallacies of "Appeal to Consequences" (Don't fileshare or you'll end up a shoplifting crack whore), "Predjudicial Language" (Filesharers are shoplifters), "Sipperly Slope" (Filesharing leads to crack whoredom), and of course, "Ad Hominem" (filesharers are shoplifting crack whores).
The pathetic thing is, there are people out there who will believe them.
Have to agree completely. I still play a lot of AC...what a great game. I loved the technology/unit structure (design your own units...mmmmmmmmmmmm), I thought the scripting, cut scenes, and voice acting were amazing. I liked the psycho mindworm boils as "pollution" in the late game...
Basically I just liked everything about it. I would definitely like to see another one some day.
I agree about cavalry, but if you end up with iron and your neighbor doesn't that means you'll have free reign with the Samurai's for a while, and you can pretty much crush anything they put up against you. Almost silly not to attack then, even though it's a pain in the butt without railroads (or even regular roads somtimes).
I'm a big democracy buff in the late game, so long term wars don't always fly with me. In the early game though, if you can cripple a neighbor, it puts you in a much better situation for winning the game in the end.
I agree with you on the naval issue as well. I usually put together a few decent ships if I've got someone pulling a sea invasion...Much better to catch them on the water, but otherwise, it's only useful for moving settlers around.
I like science as well, but you've got to balance it. If you drop science to 40% and have enough luxuries to avoid putting anythign into entertainment, it's easier to buy tech than it is to research it. Gives you more of a long term lead, and you can put research into things like "Free Artistry" (which the computer never researches) and get nice Culture and Happy Population wonders without having to compete overmuch with other countries.
People keep treating this like 60% science is my idea of a winning strategy. I agree with you...you're describing how I like to play, with the exception of:
1) If there is a civ that starts near you, killing them is a nice source of cheap cities.
2) If you have iron and your neighbor doesn't, crush them. There may be oil on their land in the late game. The same goes for saltpeter, but less so.
and 3) If someone does declare war with you, bribe everyone else to attack them, put a little effort into defense, and go on with your expansion.
My whole point is that any technology focused strategy is inherently weak, and that they did it that way on purpose, and that it sucks. I like being technologically superior, I like having tech that not everyone has, I like having subs when other races are still using galleons...But in Civ III, that's not really possible. A strong tech lead is having one or two things that not everyone has...Pretty lame. I understand that the Civ AI has always been weak in terms of tech, but gimping the player is not the way to solve that.
You're quite right, and I generally do a good bit of what you're suggesting simply because dedicating 60% of your gdp to science to stay very slightly ahead of your competitors is a quick way to lose the game.
My point is simply that it's not realistic. The computers share tech that no sane human would ever share; eg patriotism, mech infantry, etc. Too often I'm forced to hold on to tradeable tech in order to get a solid head start on a wonder, so by the time its safe to trade it, everyone has already got it...and I do do your "Trade to the whole world" strategy, because you're right. Give it to one of them, and they've all got it next turn.
That's part of my point--the computer players don't play against each other in the tech game. They only play against you, and since the system is set up so that one crappy research race researches at about half the speed of an excellent research race, and all the crappy research races are (coincidentally) researching different techs, and all willing to share those techs with each other, it is impossible to get a solid tech advantage.
You can (easily) have a more modern army, but that is completely different as nearly everyone who responded to my post doesn't seem to realize. The computer almost never builds smart.
The thing that annoyed me most in CivIII was that it was almost impossible to get a solid technological lead.
You could have a commerce/science race, with all the science buildings built in all your cities, with at least as many cities as the next two largest races combined, and a population that was more than the top FOUR other races combined, with 60% of your GDP going into science, and all the science wonders in one coastal city producing nothing but science, with more science specialists than citizens, and you'd STILL have trouble keeping ahead of other races.
Who knows? I'm not a math genius, but I did fairly well in that course. I can only assume that people who were better than me at math did better, and people who were worse did worse. It seemed that way, from what I knew of other peoples grades. There was a big guy with a purple mohawk who turned out to have the second highest average in the class, which was a surprise, but only because I was way off base in my prejudgement.
Rutgers was hell on grade inflation (in science courses). If a prof gave too many good grades, they'd put him up on review and make him prove he wasn't weighting it in the wrong direction.
From my experience with windows, my mind boggles at the idea of trying to do something similar on that platform. Seems like every time I run windows update, some critical DLL ends up changed, and applications add their own specialized librarys with registry keys overriding the defaults.
Hell, half the time windows itself doesn't know what its installed. Every time I have to rollback a box from some semi-major patch, I cringe. I know something is going to break. If it's internal system doesn't keep basic track of what's installed and running (how many broken uninstall apps have you seen, which end up with you crawling through the registry trying to disable the damn software?), how the hell can you even know what to scan for?
I don't have the faintest idea of how to go about checking for a windows rootkit. What could you do? Take a drive image to compare against? That would never fly. Windows hides so many damn system jobs anyway, how the hell would you be able to spot one more?
The bulk of my windows security comes from running Snort upstream on the traffic that comes from the damn box, looking for traffic that ought not be there, and denying outbound from every port except ones I allow explicitly.
I remember walking into a physics practicum late, and having the TA hand me my grade. He'd already passed the point where he'd said the curve, so I looked at my little piece of paper and said, "Is 68 good or bad?"...and got a lot of pencils thrown at me for setting the curve.
Never bothered me getting a low number grade. I only had one (science) class where the number grade was anything like the letter grade...That prof was so good at judging the class, every test he curved ten points. After the second test we complained, and he graphed it on the board. Perfect bell, nice tails on both ends. Damn that was a good class (Accelerated Calc II).
You went to Cornell, and then to Rutgers? No wonder you think it sucks...Hey, it ain't Ivy League. There are some damn old buildings on Busch.
But Rutgers is a school with a hell of a lot of opportunities. They don't spoon feed them to you, they don't go out of their way to show you where they are, but they exist for those people who want to find them. I was doing graduate research as a freaking sophomore, and getting paid for it. Their library and computer facilities are stellar, and if you talk to the right people, you can get access to pretty much anything you'll ever need.
Yea, some professors suck...I've never been to a school where this wasn't the case. I took classes where I only went to the tests, and being able to land an "A" without ever going to a regular class definitely says something about the professor. But there's hardly ever a class that's only taught by one guy, and you need to go out for yourself and figure out who the good prof is.
In the end you get out of it what you put into it. I transferred to Rutgers from a small school with a new campus and professors who were there because of what they could teach, not what they had published. New campus, qualified teachers...but a tiny fraction of the opportunities I had at Rutgers. Whether you want to take advantage of those opportunities is up to you.
Re:Just use your Social Security number.
on
Too Many Passwords
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Don't even need to break the scheme really. Ever notice that some sites, when you forget your password, will email it to you? Email you YOUR password, plain text, through email. Which means they're storing it in a format that is readable to them, AND they think email is an acceptable medium for transporting passwords. Oy vey.
That kind of stuff makes me crazy. Any system I design has completely obfuscated passwords, the sort that can't be retrieved but have to be reset. To authenticate I mangle the password that they submit, and see if it matches the mangled one on file. Sure it's possible to de-mangle them, but it's a hell of a lot harder than cracking a piece of 2-way encryption, and you don't have to worry about people who are merely curious or unskilled.
I can't think of a situation where I would want someone to be able to find out my password. I don't want them to be able to email it to me. If I forget, just reset it and send me a temporary password. Anything else is begging to be broken.
I tend to use some kind of hash on a phrase...For example, the previous sentence would leave me with: It2usko#oap, and then just use a word or two from the phrase as a mnemonic.
Leaves room for long passwords, and keeps them from making you insane.
So, you're saying China going to war with all of southeast Asia wouldn't qualify as an interesting time in China?
The difference between me and you is that I am not so arrogant as to believe I know which way things are going to swing when it hits the fan in and around China.
Not going to work. Too much of their system is based on control of information. they have to try and hold on to that control, because if they lose it, they'll end up with another Tiananmen Square...and another and another...
Here, people are passive. Things are too good, no one cares enough to put themselves out. Everyone has too much to lose. The population is also on the old side, which tends to curb activism.
There? The more they communicate, the more they realize that they're paid nothing, they're treated like crap, they're not allowed to have dissenting opinions without being thrown in jail. The more they'll realise that they don't really have that much to lose...Not everyone, of course, but what percentage would it take to be too much to suppress? There are a hell of a lot of people in China...And thanks to their female infantacide issue, they've got a large number of unattached young men, the most volatile population group.
Earthcentric Solar system, vs Heliocentric Solar system
Newtonian Physics, vs Ether and Phlostigion.
Chemistry, vs Alchemy
We could go on like this forever. I don't give a damn if you want to homeschool your kids, teach them whatever the hell you want, but I am sure as hell not paying for some whack job to teach defiled science to kids. It's so bad it's like teaching pottery in a damn math class...Why not do it? Because it's not math.
Why not teach ID in a science class? Because it's not science.
The problem is, ID is not a competing theory. It's not even a scientific theory at all. Read some of their literature and it is ever so clear that all they're interested in is teaching a thinly veiled version of Creationism...I've seen some of these jokers on TV disputing the age of the earth, and claiming dinosaurs were hanging around the garden of eden.
Now, we may not be able to sit down and evolve something in a lab, but radio-carbon dating is infinitely reproducable, and gives consistent results. And evolution may not be entirely correct, but as it stands it explains a hell of a lot, and it does it objectively and without any glaring inconsistencies. It's a damn fine theory.
The problem, which you seem to miss, is that if we start teaching ID in schools, what we're really undermining is the whole idea of scientific knowledge. You may dismiss GCC as a fairy tale, but it is based on methodical data collection and analytical reasoning. There is plenty of room for mistakes but, lacking a second test earth to use as a control group, they're going about it in the right way. ID, the other hand, is pretty much just a "what if?" with no data, no analytic thought, and no science behind it.
Teaching GCC in a classroom, with the collected data displayed, and the lines of reasoning followed, would be a good exercise. Even if it's not right, the methodology is what's important in science, because if you stick to the method and don't blind yourself with your own prejudgements, eventually you'll get the right answer.
Teaching ID is just a way to tell students that what you believe is just as valid as any meticulously gathered experimental data, and since it's a hell of a lot easier to believe nonsense than it is to seek truth, I think that is an extrememly bad precident.
I haven't had problems with power supply noise for years...It's almost always dwarfed by the sound of the CPU fan. That's where the real bottleneck has been...if you don't want to go liquid or nitrogen, then you're stuck with a perpetual irritating hummmmmmm.
And god help you if you have an intel processor...The fans on those damn things are like jet turbines. I hated installing the Socket A fans, but god, at least they were freakign quiet.
The only power supply I have now that even registers over the cpu fan of the one modern intel box is an old dell with a power supply that really should just go ahead and die, but seems to be hanging on to piss me off...It's been making dying power supply sounds (high pitched whine) for months, but it won't DIE.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a dumb reason to complain anyway...I've got my own office. It's pretty nice. But I'm in a busy department, and there are offices all around mine, and unless I shut the door (which isn't done around here, unless you're gone, or having some scary meeting), I can hear stuff going on in 6 or seven other offices. Adding to that, I'm one of a few programmers in an environment filled with DBAs, Netadmins, and tech support guys, so there are always people moving around working on system problems, chatting, etc.
In short, office != quiet.
My advice is to get an iPod and a pair of noise cancellation headphones. Make sure you turn your desk, or put up a mirror or something if you're easily startled...Every place I've ever worked, someone has thought it would be funny to try and "scare" me while I was doing this, and while this has never happened more than once, the reputation that goes with being a tightly-wound stress hound whose "fight" reflex beats the crap out of his "flight" reflex is no fun to live with, and hard to live down.
Yea, only link I ever fell for was off the main page. Still haunts me, sometimes.
I can't imagine a professional webhost doing it, or even allowing it done, but I can definitely see a private individual looking at an exponentiating bandwidth bill and wanting some revenge.
That being said, it's a real jackass manuver. Why blame the readers? And if you've got a problem with it in advance, just block referers.
Well, we know it doesn't stand for nerds...
(Sorry...Couldn't resist)
It's not a security hole.
/.'ed, so they do a redirect from the article to goatse or tubgirl as a kind of revenge.
Certain people don't LIKE being
I took argmentation and debate in college, and was widely known for resorting to bullying and fallacies when I had to defend a position I didn't believe could be rationally defended. It worked more than half of the time; people get flustered and off-balance...Their rational rhetoric seems less certain because they have to try and be accurate, while the person who doesn't care for accuracy is free to beat them with fake or misleading stats, and strawman arguments.
When you throw out a truly outrageous statement, you can watch the other guy recoil, like you slapped them. They know better, of course, but there is still that moment of shock, and an experienced debater can take advantage of that, put them on the run. If you can defeat the person, you can defeat their argument. You see that all the time these days. Debaters taking on people with the facts on their side...And they win. A lot.
Whenever I hear a truly impassioned defense of something, I always suspect shenanigans. Either the person really is emotionally invested, in which case they are no longer in a position to argue it objectively, or they're just throwing up a front to shield the weakness of their argument.
It's even worse than that, though you're right.
They're implying a causal connection on laughably weak data. That's the fallacy of "Joint effect" because they're saying p2p leads to shoplifting, when in reality p2p and shoplifting stem from a third cause (lack of money), which stems from many causes. It's also "Complex Cause" because they're pointing at one thing, when there is no data that that one thing is even significant, when an idiot could tell that there are other factors involved.
Statistically speaking, it's also not impossible that any apparent correlation is a statisitical accident (like air breathing is 100% correlated to violent crime), and drawing general conclusions from such an accident is yet another fallacy (Accident).
Even if there is correlation, they're most likely applying the fallacy of Insignificance, which is to say that even if p2p does lead to shoplifting, many other things are far more likely to lead to shoplifting, so much so that attributing a causal connection in the general case is fallacious.
And finally, it's also the fallacies of "Appeal to Consequences" (Don't fileshare or you'll end up a shoplifting crack whore), "Predjudicial Language" (Filesharers are shoplifters), "Sipperly Slope" (Filesharing leads to crack whoredom), and of course, "Ad Hominem" (filesharers are shoplifting crack whores).
The pathetic thing is, there are people out there who will believe them.
Have to agree completely. I still play a lot of AC...what a great game. I loved the technology/unit structure (design your own units...mmmmmmmmmmmm), I thought the scripting, cut scenes, and voice acting were amazing. I liked the psycho mindworm boils as "pollution" in the late game...
Basically I just liked everything about it. I would definitely like to see another one some day.
I agree about cavalry, but if you end up with iron and your neighbor doesn't that means you'll have free reign with the Samurai's for a while, and you can pretty much crush anything they put up against you. Almost silly not to attack then, even though it's a pain in the butt without railroads (or even regular roads somtimes).
I'm a big democracy buff in the late game, so long term wars don't always fly with me. In the early game though, if you can cripple a neighbor, it puts you in a much better situation for winning the game in the end.
I agree with you on the naval issue as well. I usually put together a few decent ships if I've got someone pulling a sea invasion...Much better to catch them on the water, but otherwise, it's only useful for moving settlers around.
I like science as well, but you've got to balance it. If you drop science to 40% and have enough luxuries to avoid putting anythign into entertainment, it's easier to buy tech than it is to research it. Gives you more of a long term lead, and you can put research into things like "Free Artistry" (which the computer never researches) and get nice Culture and Happy Population wonders without having to compete overmuch with other countries.
People keep treating this like 60% science is my idea of a winning strategy. I agree with you...you're describing how I like to play, with the exception of:
1) If there is a civ that starts near you, killing them is a nice source of cheap cities.
2) If you have iron and your neighbor doesn't, crush them. There may be oil on their land in the late game. The same goes for saltpeter, but less so.
and 3) If someone does declare war with you, bribe everyone else to attack them, put a little effort into defense, and go on with your expansion.
My whole point is that any technology focused strategy is inherently weak, and that they did it that way on purpose, and that it sucks. I like being technologically superior, I like having tech that not everyone has, I like having subs when other races are still using galleons...But in Civ III, that's not really possible. A strong tech lead is having one or two things that not everyone has...Pretty lame. I understand that the Civ AI has always been weak in terms of tech, but gimping the player is not the way to solve that.
The fact that you ever managed to find Moo3 entertaining shoots your credibility full of holes.
That game was flat awful, and the automation certainly didn't help.
You're quite right, and I generally do a good bit of what you're suggesting simply because dedicating 60% of your gdp to science to stay very slightly ahead of your competitors is a quick way to lose the game.
My point is simply that it's not realistic. The computers share tech that no sane human would ever share; eg patriotism, mech infantry, etc. Too often I'm forced to hold on to tradeable tech in order to get a solid head start on a wonder, so by the time its safe to trade it, everyone has already got it...and I do do your "Trade to the whole world" strategy, because you're right. Give it to one of them, and they've all got it next turn.
That's part of my point--the computer players don't play against each other in the tech game. They only play against you, and since the system is set up so that one crappy research race researches at about half the speed of an excellent research race, and all the crappy research races are (coincidentally) researching different techs, and all willing to share those techs with each other, it is impossible to get a solid tech advantage.
You can (easily) have a more modern army, but that is completely different as nearly everyone who responded to my post doesn't seem to realize. The computer almost never builds smart.
The thing that annoyed me most in CivIII was that it was almost impossible to get a solid technological lead.
You could have a commerce/science race, with all the science buildings built in all your cities, with at least as many cities as the next two largest races combined, and a population that was more than the top FOUR other races combined, with 60% of your GDP going into science, and all the science wonders in one coastal city producing nothing but science, with more science specialists than citizens, and you'd STILL have trouble keeping ahead of other races.
Now, that's just not realistic.
Who knows? I'm not a math genius, but I did fairly well in that course. I can only assume that people who were better than me at math did better, and people who were worse did worse. It seemed that way, from what I knew of other peoples grades. There was a big guy with a purple mohawk who turned out to have the second highest average in the class, which was a surprise, but only because I was way off base in my prejudgement.
Rutgers was hell on grade inflation (in science courses). If a prof gave too many good grades, they'd put him up on review and make him prove he wasn't weighting it in the wrong direction.
From my experience with windows, my mind boggles at the idea of trying to do something similar on that platform. Seems like every time I run windows update, some critical DLL ends up changed, and applications add their own specialized librarys with registry keys overriding the defaults.
Hell, half the time windows itself doesn't know what its installed. Every time I have to rollback a box from some semi-major patch, I cringe. I know something is going to break. If it's internal system doesn't keep basic track of what's installed and running (how many broken uninstall apps have you seen, which end up with you crawling through the registry trying to disable the damn software?), how the hell can you even know what to scan for?
I don't have the faintest idea of how to go about checking for a windows rootkit. What could you do? Take a drive image to compare against? That would never fly. Windows hides so many damn system jobs anyway, how the hell would you be able to spot one more?
The bulk of my windows security comes from running Snort upstream on the traffic that comes from the damn box, looking for traffic that ought not be there, and denying outbound from every port except ones I allow explicitly.
I remember walking into a physics practicum late, and having the TA hand me my grade. He'd already passed the point where he'd said the curve, so I looked at my little piece of paper and said, "Is 68 good or bad?"...and got a lot of pencils thrown at me for setting the curve.
Never bothered me getting a low number grade. I only had one (science) class where the number grade was anything like the letter grade...That prof was so good at judging the class, every test he curved ten points. After the second test we complained, and he graphed it on the board. Perfect bell, nice tails on both ends. Damn that was a good class (Accelerated Calc II).
You went to Cornell, and then to Rutgers? No wonder you think it sucks...Hey, it ain't Ivy League. There are some damn old buildings on Busch.
But Rutgers is a school with a hell of a lot of opportunities. They don't spoon feed them to you, they don't go out of their way to show you where they are, but they exist for those people who want to find them. I was doing graduate research as a freaking sophomore, and getting paid for it. Their library and computer facilities are stellar, and if you talk to the right people, you can get access to pretty much anything you'll ever need.
Yea, some professors suck...I've never been to a school where this wasn't the case. I took classes where I only went to the tests, and being able to land an "A" without ever going to a regular class definitely says something about the professor. But there's hardly ever a class that's only taught by one guy, and you need to go out for yourself and figure out who the good prof is.
In the end you get out of it what you put into it. I transferred to Rutgers from a small school with a new campus and professors who were there because of what they could teach, not what they had published. New campus, qualified teachers...but a tiny fraction of the opportunities I had at Rutgers. Whether you want to take advantage of those opportunities is up to you.
Don't even need to break the scheme really. Ever notice that some sites, when you forget your password, will email it to you? Email you YOUR password, plain text, through email. Which means they're storing it in a format that is readable to them, AND they think email is an acceptable medium for transporting passwords. Oy vey.
That kind of stuff makes me crazy. Any system I design has completely obfuscated passwords, the sort that can't be retrieved but have to be reset. To authenticate I mangle the password that they submit, and see if it matches the mangled one on file. Sure it's possible to de-mangle them, but it's a hell of a lot harder than cracking a piece of 2-way encryption, and you don't have to worry about people who are merely curious or unskilled.
I can't think of a situation where I would want someone to be able to find out my password. I don't want them to be able to email it to me. If I forget, just reset it and send me a temporary password. Anything else is begging to be broken.
I tend to use some kind of hash on a phrase...For example, the previous sentence would leave me with: It2usko#oap, and then just use a word or two from the phrase as a mnemonic.
Leaves room for long passwords, and keeps them from making you insane.
So, you're saying China going to war with all of southeast Asia wouldn't qualify as an interesting time in China?
The difference between me and you is that I am not so arrogant as to believe I know which way things are going to swing when it hits the fan in and around China.
Not going to work. Too much of their system is based on control of information. they have to try and hold on to that control, because if they lose it, they'll end up with another Tiananmen Square...and another and another...
Here, people are passive. Things are too good, no one cares enough to put themselves out. Everyone has too much to lose. The population is also on the old side, which tends to curb activism.
There? The more they communicate, the more they realize that they're paid nothing, they're treated like crap, they're not allowed to have dissenting opinions without being thrown in jail. The more they'll realise that they don't really have that much to lose...Not everyone, of course, but what percentage would it take to be too much to suppress? There are a hell of a lot of people in China...And thanks to their female infantacide issue, they've got a large number of unattached young men, the most volatile population group.
China's in for interesting times.
Shrug. Why not do that with all bad theories?
Earth is Round, vs Earth is Flat.
Earthcentric Solar system, vs Heliocentric Solar system
Newtonian Physics, vs Ether and Phlostigion.
Chemistry, vs Alchemy
We could go on like this forever. I don't give a damn if you want to homeschool your kids, teach them whatever the hell you want, but I am sure as hell not paying for some whack job to teach defiled science to kids. It's so bad it's like teaching pottery in a damn math class...Why not do it? Because it's not math.
Why not teach ID in a science class? Because it's not science.
The problem is, ID is not a competing theory. It's not even a scientific theory at all. Read some of their literature and it is ever so clear that all they're interested in is teaching a thinly veiled version of Creationism...I've seen some of these jokers on TV disputing the age of the earth, and claiming dinosaurs were hanging around the garden of eden.
Now, we may not be able to sit down and evolve something in a lab, but radio-carbon dating is infinitely reproducable, and gives consistent results. And evolution may not be entirely correct, but as it stands it explains a hell of a lot, and it does it objectively and without any glaring inconsistencies. It's a damn fine theory.
The problem, which you seem to miss, is that if we start teaching ID in schools, what we're really undermining is the whole idea of scientific knowledge. You may dismiss GCC as a fairy tale, but it is based on methodical data collection and analytical reasoning. There is plenty of room for mistakes but, lacking a second test earth to use as a control group, they're going about it in the right way. ID, the other hand, is pretty much just a "what if?" with no data, no analytic thought, and no science behind it.
Teaching GCC in a classroom, with the collected data displayed, and the lines of reasoning followed, would be a good exercise. Even if it's not right, the methodology is what's important in science, because if you stick to the method and don't blind yourself with your own prejudgements, eventually you'll get the right answer.
Teaching ID is just a way to tell students that what you believe is just as valid as any meticulously gathered experimental data, and since it's a hell of a lot easier to believe nonsense than it is to seek truth, I think that is an extrememly bad precident.
Yes, though I had a dell support tech swear to me that this was not the case once. Proved him wrong at the cost of one slightly singed motherboard.
Ha! I have that exact box, except it only has 4 drives. Just put it together recently as a replacement production box, and it's been running great.
I haven't had problems with power supply noise for years...It's almost always dwarfed by the sound of the CPU fan. That's where the real bottleneck has been...if you don't want to go liquid or nitrogen, then you're stuck with a perpetual irritating hummmmmmm.
And god help you if you have an intel processor...The fans on those damn things are like jet turbines. I hated installing the Socket A fans, but god, at least they were freakign quiet.
The only power supply I have now that even registers over the cpu fan of the one modern intel box is an old dell with a power supply that really should just go ahead and die, but seems to be hanging on to piss me off...It's been making dying power supply sounds (high pitched whine) for months, but it won't DIE.