NASA imagery is normally copyright-free, as government documents produced at government expense.
Some matierials produced by NASA may have copyrights. (For instance: movies with copyrighted music in the background which was licensed for NASA's use and needs an additional license if it gets cloned elsewhere).
So someone can make a book with a world like "Lord of the Rings" (and many have) or a game like Doom or music like (in same genre) Michael Jacksons - they just can't reproduced the original and claim it as theirs.
Funny you should use Lord of the Rings in a copyright example. The first US publication of LotR was in violation of copyright: Somebody ripped off a copy of an early version of the manuscript and took it to a US publisher, purporting to be doing so as an agent of Tolkein.
My bladder capacity is less than the run time of a theatre movie - even without the soft drinks. So I wait for the movie to come out on DVD or the like, when I bother at all.
I also have little time to WATCH the darned things. I've got a stack of purchased movies many of which have been gathering dust for a year or more unviewed.
Further, the movies lately have been composed of situations, behavior, and probabilities so unrealistically warped to support stomach-turning politically-correct propaganda that I can no longer immerse in and enjoy the story - or even enjoy laughing at the idiocy of its rendering. (And this is compounded by a tendency to sanitize the movie further between its theatre and DVD/tape release. Example from a while back: The censorship of Yosemite Sam in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" - doubly ironic since the original book's title was "Who CENSORED Roger Rabbit.") So I rarely bother to buy and stack one any more.
There's no risk of addiction if [morphine or heroin a]re used properly. Another victim of the war on drugs: the uncounted millions who die in unneccessary agony.
Or go to street vendors for relief - and end up hooked because they can't adequately control the dose or its onset (because the cost is so high they must administer it IV).
If I recall correctly, Heroin was originally designed the same way, or at least to help people get off of a morphine addiction.
you might be thinking of methadone to treat a heroin addiction.
No, he WAS thinking of Herion.
The drug chemists were trying minor modifications on the morphine molecule, trying to find something with the pain relief but without the addition. This new one had all the pain killing power, so they tried it on a number of the lab personnel and it didn't give any of them withdrawal symptoms.
So they marketed it as the "Heroine" that would rescue the world from addiction by killing pain without hooking. Only to discover that it hooked at least as well as it cured pain.
Turns out:
a) The body jut converts it back to morphine.
b) There is a small fraction of the population that doesn't get hooked on morphine and its derivatives. And it happened that all the people in the lab they tried it on were members of that subset - a statistically unlikely occurrence.
(There was a theory that such people also gravitate toward research science fields, such as chemistry and medicine, for unknown reasons, though I haven't heard whether this was ever checked out.)
= = = =
One of the most tragic parts of the whole additction / drug war / underprescription of painkillers by doctors for fear of prosecution is that morphine and derivatives, given in appropriate doses for relief from actual severe or chronic pain, apparently DON'T addict. It's a dose spike far above the pain-relief level that sets the hook. (Not that it's easy to tell in chronic pain cases, since the return of the underlying pain is a fine substitute for withdrawal symptoms. But for acute pain tapering the dose - even (especially) by self-administration, also tends to avoid the hook.
But DEA scrutinizes doctor dosing habits and sporadicly prosecutes doctors who prescribe "too much" narcotics. And they don't adequately take into account whether the doctor is a specialist in pain treatment or treatment of illnesses with a lot of associated pain, and thus have an atypical patient mix biased toward need for pain medication and high doses.
So doctors underprescribe. And that leaves many chronic pain sufferers with no alternatives but ongoing excruciating pain, suicide, or recourse to illegal drugs (with their uncertain strengths, and high cost requiring IV administration with its sudden onset, leading to dose spikes and addiction).
If course, they could also kill two birds with one stone and put cable television on a faster internet.
They are. In buzzword land it's called "triple play". (Data, VoIP, and IPTV.) "Quadruple play" if you add wireless linkage. The overall phenomenon is "The Convergence" - of all forms of communication into a single packet-switched network.
And the wireline services will eat cable's lunch if they don't upgrade. The minimum Cable needs to do is fiber-to-the-curb, after which they can use the coax for the last few feet. Meanwhile the copper pair people are doing the same thing (when they don't run a fiber all the way to the house.) With a shorter run (blocks rather than miles) they can push tens of megabits or better down the copper.
The key is getting enough PRIVATE bandwidth to each house for several video feeds. Then you can switch what gets fed to the house at the curbside router or switch, the central office, or the head end. At that point the settop box or media-center computer becomes a remote control for the distant switching and cable's large-but-shared bandwidth advantage vanishes.
So within the next year or two, as IPTV with video-on-demand deploys among the wireline carriers, cable has to invest in splitting the neighborhoods fine enough to give everybody their own several video streams worth of dedicated bandwidth. Otherwise they can't deliver a version of the video on demand "killer ap" - and it kills them.
(Actually, it was EASIER with fatnet, since the LAN was just a wire and the router or bridge was a separate box in the closet - when it wasn't one of the workstations themselves, in which case you normally knew WHICH one(s) it was.)
It was a little harder back then to peak around behind the machine and see what it was plugged into due to size
Not really. Sun workstations had already graduated from a slightly oversize tower configuration to the pizza box (smaller than a modern desktop PC's tower).
or to know if itwas plugged in due poor wiring schematics.
You don't need a schematic to know if a network cable is plugged in - on the box OR the router/switch.
A government agent, possibly armed, shows up in your office with instructions and hints of the PATRIOT Act and Gitmo. The instructions don't include warrants like you're used to seeing, but a Federally subsidized vacation in Cuba doesn't sound too attractive and, besides, you're rather fond of making your mortgage payment.
I can understand the pressure and sympathize with the person under it.
But similar pressure is imposed by leaders of criminal gangs to "encourage" participation in their activities. Yet being under such pressure is no excuse when an underling is caught and tried for committing a crime.
Why should it be any different for a corporate executive, manager, or worker? Or for the corporate pesudo-person itself?
"An Unconstitutional Act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is, in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed. - U.S. Supreme Court Norton V. Shelby County 118 U.S. 425, 442"
Seems to me this applies to unconstitutional orders from members of the executive branch just as much as to unconstitutional acts of congress. And that the "imposes no duties" and "affords no protection" parts would apply in such a case.
Presuming the court ruled correctly, the executive did not have the power to issue the order. So the order "imposed no duties" on the tellco or its employees, whose choice to follow it was thus personal or corporate. And thus the order also "affords no protection" from the legal consequences of committing the act, such as liability for damages it inflicts.
FTA: "'Those viruses exist right now only on a CD in a sealed container in a locked cabinet in our computer lab,' Beckford said."
Seriously, it's not like these will ever exist outside of a lab, right?
And as I recall that's what Morris claimed about the internet mail worm, too: That he was experimenting with it on a set of local computers and it got out accidentally due to a connection he wasn't aware of or hadn't properly shut off.
(The timing of when it got out (when most of the relevant people for fighting it were in transit to a conference, giving it max time to spread) argues aginst his claim. But the fact that the worm was clearly not debugged yet, containing partially implemented code for features (including some intended to shut it down if it were in the wild) argues for it.)
Ya, go ahead, earthling. Send me one of these (According to TFA) $3,000 toys.
What are your company's technology secrets, customer lists, and/or bid calculations worth to your competitors?
$3,000 hardware cost on an industrial espionage operation that lets your competition marginally underbid you on, say, a $200,000,000 project with 60% margins? Chump change.
On an op that lets them snatch your design secrets and combine them with their own, building a new product that drives your company under? You can play with the "toy" in the unemployment line.
You won't see any WLAN viruses' base on driver level exploits any time soon for one very important reason, proximity.
One of the proposed uses is to turn it on and mail it to the site in question. It can perform "tests" (including man-in-the-middle attacks) "while sitting on the CEO's desk".
Or in the mail rooom. On in the inbox of somebody on vacation.
Of course that means it (or a similar device) could be shipped in the same way. It could run for a couple weeks (or until the battery is exhausted), rooting around the company's wireless LAN and shipping the result out the internet to the attacker's safe drop. Then (or when the package it opened) it could purge its own software and self-destruct or turn itself into something innocent appearing, such as a promotional toy. (Perhaps it could sucker somebody into recharging it.) Or it could be built into some other object and never discovered.
If the IT staff isn't on the edge of their seats about searching for rogue WiFi devices and/or sniffing network traffic it could have weeks to work undetected. Even if they ARE on the ball and have the cutting-edge stuff it can snag a lot of interesting stuff at computer speeds in the time it takes to hunt it down and kill it or succesfully cut it off from all outside contact (including masquerading as a legitimate device).
Unless/until somebody comes up with a suitably compressed notation. B-)
Example: Maxwell's four equations were each about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 pages long in a notebook when first formulated as differential equations. Expessed using the currently familiar "del" operator form they are each much less than a line of type, and have been fit onto T shirts. Sometimes along with additional text, as in:
And God said
(max)
(well's)
(equa)
(tions) and there was light!
By announcing that they are investigating a company they destroy invester confidence in the company, whether there is good reason to suspect wrongdoing or not. This can have a DRASTIC effect on the market price.
For instance: Redback Networks had been trading in the 23-24 range, and had been pushed down to the mid 18s by rumors started by a confused analyst. These had been debunked by other analysts and the stock was apparently starting to recover.
Then the regulators announced that they were looking at Redback (among many others) to see if it might have done some backdating. The stock tanked down to the 14-15 level, dipping as low as 12.40.
At the quarterly report phone conference they announced that an internal audit was under way and had found no irregularities so far. (They also "beat the street" on their profit/loss numbers big time, but the stock price slide continued.)
Two days ago they announced that they'd completed the internal audit and found:
- no backdating,
- some cases where the option date was delayed slightly from the date of grant approval to the date where some paperwork was completed,
- this would increase the "cost" that must be accounted by a grand total of $300,000 (which is something like a half cent per share),
- and that this did NOT mean that the government agreed they're off the hook.
In just the two days since that announcement the stock price jumped from 15.13 back to 18.60 (about where it was before the regulators' FUD), a 23% increase. (Some expect it to rise significantly above the previous 23-24 range before it settles down, since there's been a blowout quarter, the rumors were debunked, and no other overhang is out there.)
Now does this look like the regulators had the interests of the stockholders in mind when they made an announcement that destroyed (hopefully only temporarily) somewhere between 25% and 42% of the value of their investment?
Get the question right and you'll get more agreement between the sides.
Of course since the purpose of asking the question in the first place is to bash the other side, it's not in the interest of the bashers to get it right. B-)
This is the question: Were weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq
This is the answer: No
Sorry, but the answer is "Yes".
If the question had been "Was either recent, non-mothballed, large-scale WMD production or a large stockpile of recently-made and operational WMDs found?" then answer might have been "No." (or possibly "If there was, the Bush administration, which has an incentive to publicize it, isn't telling us.")
If the question had been "Were mothballed WMD production facilities, stockpiled raw and/or partially processed materials, hidden plans, etc. (suitable for restarting production and development once the sanctions were lifted) found?" the answer would have been "Yes."
Get the question right and you'll get more agreement between the sides.
Sadam apparently mothballed his production and destroyed the weapons. Then he tried to make it look like he hadn't, perhaps to keep Iran and other neighbors off his back and the Iranian Shiites and Kurds under his thumb, counting on the western intelligence agencies to figure this out and keep the US off his back. Unfortunately for him (though perhaps fortunately for those of his population scheduled for detention, torture, and execution), his posturing convinced the ever-paranoid western intelligence agencies that he still had WMDs.
... if we're going to be a democracy, people need to have a basic understanding that the world is not about pixie dust and fairy tales.
Not at all. And your belief to the contrary shows a profound (though common) misunderstanding of democratic forms of government (such as the constitutional republic).
The purpose of such forms is not to make wise or informed decisions.
The purpose is to make decisions that predict the outcome of a civil war, in a way that is sufficiently believable to the losers that they will not attmpte to reverse the decision by violence.
So it doesn't matter if the voters believe life came about by evolution from accidentally produced self-replicating molecules with mild enzymatic activity, divine creation, engineering by a team of space aliens, or a sprinkling of pixie dust.
What matters is whether there are people who are willing to FIGHT about it, and how many of them are on each side.
If an election counts them correctly, lets the big group get enough of its way to satisfy its members, convinces their active opposion to knuckle under, and thus keeps the groups from actually holding a war that would achieve the same result with more bloodletting, "democracy" did its job.
... it sucks for people who live in an age defined by the scientific enterprise to be lorded over militarily and economically by a scientifically stunted nation.
Actually, I find that encouraging.
It shows that a country can tolerate diversity of religious belief among its citizens, rather than imposing some standard, and still achive success in military, political, economic, and culture-propagating endeavors.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd never even HEARD of the "DJ Ditty" until this morning's radio news mentioned that Dell had dropped it.
With PR like that - versus Apple's dancing silhouettes - it's no surprise it never sold.
NASA imagery is normally copyright-free, as government documents produced at government expense.
Some matierials produced by NASA may have copyrights. (For instance: movies with copyrighted music in the background which was licensed for NASA's use and needs an additional license if it gets cloned elsewhere).
More a NASA web site.
So someone can make a book with a world like "Lord of the Rings" (and many have) or a game like Doom or music like (in same genre) Michael Jacksons - they just can't reproduced the original and claim it as theirs.
Funny you should use Lord of the Rings in a copyright example. The first US publication of LotR was in violation of copyright: Somebody ripped off a copy of an early version of the manuscript and took it to a US publisher, purporting to be doing so as an agent of Tolkein.
Those editions are collector's items now.
(giggle)
Bloggers cannot be trusted?! Unbelievable. This is the story of the century!
Quick! We MUST write blog entries to expose this!
... to go to the bathroom.
My bladder capacity is less than the run time of a theatre movie - even without the soft drinks. So I wait for the movie to come out on DVD or the like, when I bother at all.
I also have little time to WATCH the darned things. I've got a stack of purchased movies many of which have been gathering dust for a year or more unviewed.
Further, the movies lately have been composed of situations, behavior, and probabilities so unrealistically warped to support stomach-turning politically-correct propaganda that I can no longer immerse in and enjoy the story - or even enjoy laughing at the idiocy of its rendering. (And this is compounded by a tendency to sanitize the movie further between its theatre and DVD/tape release. Example from a while back: The censorship of Yosemite Sam in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" - doubly ironic since the original book's title was "Who CENSORED Roger Rabbit.") So I rarely bother to buy and stack one any more.
Sorry, Snowgirl. I didn't look at your handle. Mea Culpa.
There's no risk of addiction if [morphine or heroin a]re used properly. Another victim of the war on drugs: the uncounted millions who die in unneccessary agony.
Or go to street vendors for relief - and end up hooked because they can't adequately control the dose or its onset (because the cost is so high they must administer it IV).
If I recall correctly, Heroin was originally designed the same way, or at least to help people get off of a morphine addiction.
you might be thinking of methadone to treat a heroin addiction.
No, he WAS thinking of Herion.
The drug chemists were trying minor modifications on the morphine molecule, trying to find something with the pain relief but without the addition. This new one had all the pain killing power, so they tried it on a number of the lab personnel and it didn't give any of them withdrawal symptoms.
So they marketed it as the "Heroine" that would rescue the world from addiction by killing pain without hooking. Only to discover that it hooked at least as well as it cured pain.
Turns out:
a) The body jut converts it back to morphine.
b) There is a small fraction of the population that doesn't get hooked on morphine and its derivatives. And it happened that all the people in the lab they tried it on were members of that subset - a statistically unlikely occurrence.
(There was a theory that such people also gravitate toward research science fields, such as chemistry and medicine, for unknown reasons, though I haven't heard whether this was ever checked out.)
= = = =
One of the most tragic parts of the whole additction / drug war / underprescription of painkillers by doctors for fear of prosecution is that morphine and derivatives, given in appropriate doses for relief from actual severe or chronic pain, apparently DON'T addict. It's a dose spike far above the pain-relief level that sets the hook. (Not that it's easy to tell in chronic pain cases, since the return of the underlying pain is a fine substitute for withdrawal symptoms. But for acute pain tapering the dose - even (especially) by self-administration, also tends to avoid the hook.
But DEA scrutinizes doctor dosing habits and sporadicly prosecutes doctors who prescribe "too much" narcotics. And they don't adequately take into account whether the doctor is a specialist in pain treatment or treatment of illnesses with a lot of associated pain, and thus have an atypical patient mix biased toward need for pain medication and high doses.
So doctors underprescribe. And that leaves many chronic pain sufferers with no alternatives but ongoing excruciating pain, suicide, or recourse to illegal drugs (with their uncertain strengths, and high cost requiring IV administration with its sudden onset, leading to dose spikes and addiction).
If course, they could also kill two birds with one stone and put cable television on a faster internet.
They are. In buzzword land it's called "triple play". (Data, VoIP, and IPTV.) "Quadruple play" if you add wireless linkage. The overall phenomenon is "The Convergence" - of all forms of communication into a single packet-switched network.
And the wireline services will eat cable's lunch if they don't upgrade. The minimum Cable needs to do is fiber-to-the-curb, after which they can use the coax for the last few feet. Meanwhile the copper pair people are doing the same thing (when they don't run a fiber all the way to the house.) With a shorter run (blocks rather than miles) they can push tens of megabits or better down the copper.
The key is getting enough PRIVATE bandwidth to each house for several video feeds. Then you can switch what gets fed to the house at the curbside router or switch, the central office, or the head end. At that point the settop box or media-center computer becomes a remote control for the distant switching and cable's large-but-shared bandwidth advantage vanishes.
So within the next year or two, as IPTV with video-on-demand deploys among the wireline carriers, cable has to invest in splitting the neighborhoods fine enough to give everybody their own several video streams worth of dedicated bandwidth. Otherwise they can't deliver a version of the video on demand "killer ap" - and it kills them.
(Actually, it was EASIER with fatnet, since the LAN was just a wire and the router or bridge was a separate box in the closet - when it wasn't one of the workstations themselves, in which case you normally knew WHICH one(s) it was.)
It was a little harder back then to peak around behind the machine and see what it was plugged into due to size
Not really. Sun workstations had already graduated from a slightly oversize tower configuration to the pizza box (smaller than a modern desktop PC's tower).
or to know if itwas plugged in due poor wiring schematics.
You don't need a schematic to know if a network cable is plugged in - on the box OR the router/switch.
A government agent, possibly armed, shows up in your office with instructions and hints of the PATRIOT Act and Gitmo. The instructions don't include warrants like you're used to seeing, but a Federally subsidized vacation in Cuba doesn't sound too attractive and, besides, you're rather fond of making your mortgage payment.
I can understand the pressure and sympathize with the person under it.
But similar pressure is imposed by leaders of criminal gangs to "encourage" participation in their activities. Yet being under such pressure is no excuse when an underling is caught and tried for committing a crime.
Why should it be any different for a corporate executive, manager, or worker? Or for the corporate pesudo-person itself?
"An Unconstitutional Act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is, in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed. - U.S. Supreme Court Norton V. Shelby County 118 U.S. 425, 442"
Seems to me this applies to unconstitutional orders from members of the executive branch just as much as to unconstitutional acts of congress. And that the "imposes no duties" and "affords no protection" parts would apply in such a case.
Presuming the court ruled correctly, the executive did not have the power to issue the order. So the order "imposed no duties" on the tellco or its employees, whose choice to follow it was thus personal or corporate. And thus the order also "affords no protection" from the legal consequences of committing the act, such as liability for damages it inflicts.
FTA: "'Those viruses exist right now only on a CD in a sealed container in a locked cabinet in our computer lab,' Beckford said."
Seriously, it's not like these will ever exist outside of a lab, right?
And as I recall that's what Morris claimed about the internet mail worm, too: That he was experimenting with it on a set of local computers and it got out accidentally due to a connection he wasn't aware of or hadn't properly shut off.
(The timing of when it got out (when most of the relevant people for fighting it were in transit to a conference, giving it max time to spread) argues aginst his claim. But the fact that the worm was clearly not debugged yet, containing partially implemented code for features (including some intended to shut it down if it were in the wild) argues for it.)
Ya, go ahead, earthling. Send me one of these (According to TFA) $3,000 toys.
What are your company's technology secrets, customer lists, and/or bid calculations worth to your competitors?
$3,000 hardware cost on an industrial espionage operation that lets your competition marginally underbid you on, say, a $200,000,000 project with 60% margins? Chump change.
On an op that lets them snatch your design secrets and combine them with their own, building a new product that drives your company under? You can play with the "toy" in the unemployment line.
You won't see any WLAN viruses' base on driver level exploits any time soon for one very important reason, proximity.
One of the proposed uses is to turn it on and mail it to the site in question. It can perform "tests" (including man-in-the-middle attacks) "while sitting on the CEO's desk".
Or in the mail rooom. On in the inbox of somebody on vacation.
Of course that means it (or a similar device) could be shipped in the same way. It could run for a couple weeks (or until the battery is exhausted), rooting around the company's wireless LAN and shipping the result out the internet to the attacker's safe drop. Then (or when the package it opened) it could purge its own software and self-destruct or turn itself into something innocent appearing, such as a promotional toy. (Perhaps it could sucker somebody into recharging it.) Or it could be built into some other object and never discovered.
If the IT staff isn't on the edge of their seats about searching for rogue WiFi devices and/or sniffing network traffic it could have weeks to work undetected. Even if they ARE on the ball and have the cutting-edge stuff it can snag a lot of interesting stuff at computer speeds in the time it takes to hunt it down and kill it or succesfully cut it off from all outside contact (including masquerading as a legitimate device).
Unless/until somebody comes up with a suitably compressed notation. B-)
Example: Maxwell's four equations were each about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 pages long in a notebook when first formulated as differential equations. Expessed using the currently familiar "del" operator form they are each much less than a line of type, and have been fit onto T shirts. Sometimes along with additional text, as in:
And God said
(max)
(well's)
(equa)
(tions)
and there was light!
So if you injure yourself changing your motor oil after fertilizing your yard, you're going to have a LOT of trouble at the emergency room.
How about ... Stop invading countries for the wrong reasons!! Maybe then they'll stop thinking about blowing us all up!!
Too late. (Has been at LEAST since the "Monica Missiles".)
By announcing that they are investigating a company they destroy invester confidence in the company, whether there is good reason to suspect wrongdoing or not. This can have a DRASTIC effect on the market price.
For instance: Redback Networks had been trading in the 23-24 range, and had been pushed down to the mid 18s by rumors started by a confused analyst. These had been debunked by other analysts and the stock was apparently starting to recover.
Then the regulators announced that they were looking at Redback (among many others) to see if it might have done some backdating. The stock tanked down to the 14-15 level, dipping as low as 12.40.
At the quarterly report phone conference they announced that an internal audit was under way and had found no irregularities so far. (They also "beat the street" on their profit/loss numbers big time, but the stock price slide continued.)
Two days ago they announced that they'd completed the internal audit and found:
- no backdating,
- some cases where the option date was delayed slightly from the date of grant approval to the date where some paperwork was completed,
- this would increase the "cost" that must be accounted by a grand total of $300,000 (which is something like a half cent per share),
- and that this did NOT mean that the government agreed they're off the hook.
In just the two days since that announcement the stock price jumped from 15.13 back to 18.60 (about where it was before the regulators' FUD), a 23% increase. (Some expect it to rise significantly above the previous 23-24 range before it settles down, since there's been a blowout quarter, the rumors were debunked, and no other overhang is out there.)
Now does this look like the regulators had the interests of the stockholders in mind when they made an announcement that destroyed (hopefully only temporarily) somewhere between 25% and 42% of the value of their investment?
Get the question right and you'll get more agreement between the sides.
Of course since the purpose of asking the question in the first place is to bash the other side, it's not in the interest of the bashers to get it right. B-)
This is the question: Were weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq
This is the answer: No
Sorry, but the answer is "Yes".
If the question had been "Was either recent, non-mothballed, large-scale WMD production or a large stockpile of recently-made and operational WMDs found?" then answer might have been "No." (or possibly "If there was, the Bush administration, which has an incentive to publicize it, isn't telling us.")
If the question had been "Were mothballed WMD production facilities, stockpiled raw and/or partially processed materials, hidden plans, etc. (suitable for restarting production and development once the sanctions were lifted) found?" the answer would have been "Yes."
Get the question right and you'll get more agreement between the sides.
Sadam apparently mothballed his production and destroyed the weapons. Then he tried to make it look like he hadn't, perhaps to keep Iran and other neighbors off his back and the Iranian Shiites and Kurds under his thumb, counting on the western intelligence agencies to figure this out and keep the US off his back. Unfortunately for him (though perhaps fortunately for those of his population scheduled for detention, torture, and execution), his posturing convinced the ever-paranoid western intelligence agencies that he still had WMDs.
... if we're going to be a democracy, people need to have a basic understanding that the world is not about pixie dust and fairy tales.
Not at all. And your belief to the contrary shows a profound (though common) misunderstanding of democratic forms of government (such as the constitutional republic).
The purpose of such forms is not to make wise or informed decisions.
The purpose is to make decisions that predict the outcome of a civil war, in a way that is sufficiently believable to the losers that they will not attmpte to reverse the decision by violence.
So it doesn't matter if the voters believe life came about by evolution from accidentally produced self-replicating molecules with mild enzymatic activity, divine creation, engineering by a team of space aliens, or a sprinkling of pixie dust.
What matters is whether there are people who are willing to FIGHT about it, and how many of them are on each side.
If an election counts them correctly, lets the big group get enough of its way to satisfy its members, convinces their active opposion to knuckle under, and thus keeps the groups from actually holding a war that would achieve the same result with more bloodletting, "democracy" did its job.
... it sucks for people who live in an age defined by the scientific enterprise to be lorded over militarily and economically by a scientifically stunted nation.
Actually, I find that encouraging.
It shows that a country can tolerate diversity of religious belief among its citizens, rather than imposing some standard, and still achive success in military, political, economic, and culture-propagating endeavors.
Evolution makes no claims as to the origin of life. It merly theorises what has happened to that life once it did start.
I recall a collegue once speculating: If life were created, are introns the comments in the code? And if so, do they qualify as "holy writ"?