Of course. But the direction we are heading is along the lines of "your ziplock bag must remain open and in view on the passenger seat at all times". In effect, bypassing the need for a warrant by eliminating privacy.
What you describe is a possible security measure, it has nothing to do with Digital Rights Management.
Surely it would be quite easy to patch the Linux kernel loader so that it only ran binaries that were on a list of md5 sums known to the kernel. I imagine it would be easy to do this for Windoze too. If you want to register every piece of software on your hard drive and only run 'trusted' programs, you could do that today.
There is nothing I have seen in any DRM proposal that gives any extra features for the user that this simple patch could not do.
Unfortunately, nobody is interested in this. In every DRM proposal I've seen, the ultimate holder of the list of allowed md5 sums is not the user, but rather the author of the application or (more likely) operating system or even the hardware manufacturer. So in fact they potentially take away a vast number of features that the open solution provides. Indeed, the whole point of DRM is that the "content" provider (or their agent), rather than the user, holds the keys.
Unfortunately, even the "promise of DRM" that you speak of is unlikely to happen. Will you trust the 'trusted' version of Outlook 2008 Palladium Special Edition any more than you trust the current version of Outlook? Is it any less likely to be riddled with buffer overflows? (well, maybe, if they have improved their coding standards by then, but that is unrelated to DRM itself)
The only thing that DRM (in the versions being pushed today) will mean is that the virus that sends all your personal documents to everyone in your address book won't be able to decrypt the copy of "The Little Mermaid" that is stored on your hard drive.
What is the difference, ultimately, between "online" freedom and real freedom?
Would you be happy for somebody to be listening in to you dinner table conversation, just to make sure that you are not planning a terrorist attack? (If you are thinking "no way, virtual privacy is a different issue to 'real' privacy", suppose that a couple of your friends couldn't make it to the dinner party and you are having a conversation on mIRC instead)
What if the topic of that dinner conversation was a (hypothetical) "accidental" police beating of an innocent suspect? Would you feel uncomfortable having that conversation, knowing that those same people could be listening to you?
What if your dinner table conversation was about planning some kind of protest, say to confront the local mayor about some abuse of government power? Would you still have that conversation if you knew there was a liklihood that the mayor could end up with tapes of your conversation? And what if your protest was going to be mildy illegal (say, a congregation in a public place for which police permission had been denied)? You might be prepared to take the consequences, indeed the media coverage would just serve to highlight the protest, but what if your conversation could be used to prevent the protest from taking place at all? (say, by arresting you prior to the protest?) Sure, there is no one getting dragged off to the gulag here, but isn't the freedom of the public to act against injustice ultimately one of the cornerstones of Democracy? What happens when you eliminate this cornerstone?
Moving onto terrorism itself, is there any evidence that existing "online privacy" was an important factor that has enabled acts of terrorism to be successful in the past?
Is there any evidence that eliminating such privacy would stop acts of terror in the future?
Even if there is no privacy for ordinary citizens, the anti-terror squads obviously need privacy themselves. It is obviously silly to have every action of the secret police being broadcast over the intenet, indeed they will be much more effective if they have total privacy. So, there needs to be at least two classes of citizens, ordinary joes, who have no privacy, and the secret police who have total privacy. How does such a two-class system fit in with the ideal, of representative Democracy? How do you keep checks on a system that is so one-sided? Who is watching the watcher?
Even if privacy is eliminated, doesn't that at best only make it harder to plan and carry out terrorism? In what sense would it reduce/eliminate the causes of terrorism?
Indeed, what impact do you think the loss of privacy would have on people who already hate the government enough to consider terrorism? Wouldn't it just make the situation worse?
Ultimately, do you think people can/should should be trusted to hold private conversations?
Incidentally, do you really believe he was sick? Not showing his face and wrapping him in a blanket sounds awfully suspicous to me.
Sure, maybe their story is true, but would you be surprised if the Pakistani agents got a bit heavy handed and out of control during (or after) the arrest? And if so, what do you think they would do to hide what they had done?
Of course, now that he is in the hands of "Freedom Itself" in the form of the good 'ol USA, you would expect the truth to come out..... maybe......
I think you have an overly pessimistic view of governements. Sure, for a dictatorship pretty much anything could happen. but the idea behind democracy in particular, is that the government is representative of the people.
All of this spying shit is undemocratic (even ant-democratic) if only because it is kept secret from the people. How many elections have there been in the USA where the platform that the president was elected on was in direct contradiction to the policy that is or was implemented? I must admit I am not familiar enough with US history to give any definite examples, but I am specifically thinking of...
Tibet - public policy: The USA will not interfere with the 'domestic' politics of China. actual policy: smuggle as many guns as possible into Tibet and train the locals as rebel gurillas, indicentally misleading the locals into thinking that the USA would actually intervene on their behalf at the UN.
Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion: very similar story, but even more so, since it left a lot of Afghans feeling actively betrayed.
There must be a heap of examples that don't involve a war, Martin Luther King vs the FBI for example.
The Iran-Contra scandal is yet another example, but less so because it was the work of a small group within the government, rather than a disparity between policy publicly announced and policy that is actually implemented.
I am not saying that in every case the implemented policy was necessarily bad (well, actually I would say that, but that argument belongs to a different thread), I am just pointing out that it is fundamentally anti-democratic, because the people were supporting the government (and possibly even elected people to office) based on a policy platform that was completely fictitous and didn't represent the policy that was actually implemented.
But, is it really plausible that SCO has any patents on the basic UNIX architecture? Surely not, all this stuff was developed before software patents existed.
In fact, I should not have used the word "patent" at all in my post, I have since read SCO's complaint and it makes no mention of patents at all, only propretary trade secrets. A patent search also reveals nothing of relevance. So the conclusion still stands, albeit for a different reason;)
No. One of the more important safety-nets in the GPL is that you cannot bypass it by claiming patent rights. You must license the patent freely to everybody, or to nobody (including yourself).
See section 7 of the GPL. If you cannot simultaneously satisfy the GLP and the patent license, then you have no right to distribute the program at all.
Yeaeh I agree, this is hilarious. The whole thing smacks of corporate heavyweights posturing for the crowds without realizing that the emperor has no clothes.
No. The GPL explicitly requires that if you own any patent rights on the code, then you must allow everyone all the usual GPL rights on modifications and distribution.
That is, either everybody can share the code with no restrictions (other than the usual GPL), or nobody can - not even SCO themselves.
But the whole thing is silly anyway, it can only possibly affect more recent parts of Linux, the core parts (e2fs filesystem etc) are pretty obviously developed independently of SCO, and owes nothing to them. Indeed, the main response from everyone is that the whole complaint from the beginning is a load of hot air. Especially since they havn't actually given any details on exactly what parts of the kernel are supposed to be infringing their patents.
It doesn't work because Americans simply don't trust each other as much as they used to. The very act of flagging someone down on the highway for help is viewed as suspicous, - perhaps you are a car-jacker, or an escaped felon, or even a terrorist!
Unfortunately I can't see any way for this to be reversed, at least not in the short to medium term. The current government is in fact encouraging the attitude of "keep a lookout on your neighbor, regard everything as suspicous".
It is really a shame, I can only hope that other countries don't end up falling down the same path.
Nice looking animations, but it is a shame that he used a custom renderer. It would be interesting to see this as a plugin to some serious viewer tool, complete with hyperlinks to display source files or a code browser at particular points in the graph.
LOL,
Yes, I was born there. It is very nice, politically and culturally it is rather provincial (as are all semi-isolated areas i think, even in the internet age). A pretty substantial fraction is world heritage area, superb country for bush walking.
The argument is that CFC's lead to an overall reduction in ozone: the fact that it maifests itself as a hole is a secondary effect, which is influenced by several factors (the most significant being governed by the seasons). So, the fact that the hole size fluctuates wildly could (and, if you believe the article you link to, IS) essentially unrelated to the bulk ozone depletion. A long term average is required to know for sure.
I can surely acknowledge that the situation is much more complicated than I previously thought, but I still havn't seen any evidence that actually supports (rather than being neutral, at best) your argument that it can be explained by natural causes. Longer term averages should be able to give this information, but in the meantime, it is the scientists' job to be cautious.
Ok, I found some data, from NASA . As far as I can tell, it is completely consistent with the idea that the reduction in ozone is dominated by increased CFC's.
If you can refute that, I would be interested in hearing about it.
I meant that it takes quite a while to degrade in the sense that a single CFC molecule is typically involved in a large number of reactions before it degrades, I never said anything about a time scale. I have no idea on this, whether it is minutes or centuries.
I was looking for some measurements on recent CFC levels in the upper atmosphere, but I could not find any. Do you have any data? If you can point to some evidence that CFC levels in the upper atmosphere are increasing, so while the amount of ozone has basically stabilized then you might have a point.
Where on earth did you get the idea that the size of the ozone hole has shrunk "down to the size it was then they first started measuring it"? As far as I know, it is roughly the same size now as the LARGEST it has ever been. 10 years after the Montreal Protocol was introduced, it was in fact still increasing in size.
a few seconds of googling later....
Have a look at this graph , which shows the area of the ozone hole. True, there is a big drop at the very last data point, but look at the size of the error bar, that could mean anything, and certainly doesn't indicate that it has 'stabilized'.
I don't think the action of CFC's as a catalyst to break up ozone in the presence of UV radiation is under dispute here, it is not a controversial experiment.
Nor is the fact that CFC's take quite a while to degrade. CFC acts as a catalyst, meaning it participates in the reaction, but is not comsumed. Typical figures are one CFC molecule will survive for long enough to destroy 100,000 ozone molecules. All of this is pretty basic stuff which you could easily find out with 5 minutes of googling.
The upshot of this is that a small amount of CFC's reaching the upper atmosphere produces a tremendous amount of damage. Ozone is naturally created, but if the rate of destruction is too high, then clearly the ozone levels will fall.
In my last post I put some URL's of some tables and graphs. I suggest you study them closely, and decide for yourself if it is natural or not.
Since you seem too lazy to do your own research, or even lookup posted URL's, I post here a table of world CFC production from 1940 to 1990 (from http://arch.rivm.nl/env/int/hyde/eisp_cfc.html
I can't be bothered re-typing the data for CFC-12, it is similar (but higher), look it up yourself (you do know how to click on a URL, don't you???)
Remembering that each CFC molecule will destroy 100,000 or so O3 molecules once it reaches the upper atmosphere, and the units here are millions of killograms, I leave it for you to calculate the potential damage. Exactly how much ozone do you think there is?
Please go and do some research and some thinking, and by all means post again if you can come up with some actual refutations of what I've been saying. So far you have shown absolutely nothing except whining, in response to hard evidence and figures.
Before I get flamed too hard, I should qualify that I meant the amount of ozone over Antarctica when I said that there would be practically no ozone left today.
For starters, the amount of CFC's escaping into the atmosphere did decrease dramatically due to various international agreements, essentially the 1987 Montreal Protocol. I think you are belittling the efforts that went into this. The countries that you implied were not part of the agreement (China, India etc) most definitely were part of the agreement, albeit with concessions due to their status as developing states. This doesn't change things as much as you might think, since for most of these countries much of the CFC producing/containing devices were imports, so when the country of manufacture stops producing CFC's, they also stop exporting it.
You are correct in that the hole in the ozone layer has stabilized much faster than atmospheric scientists were expecting. But it is a logical fallacy to go from "with CFC reductions the hole shrinks faster than expected" to "therefore with more CFC's the hole will grower slower than expected". Indeed, this is directly contradicted by the evidence, where until 1987 the hole was growing very fast indeed. Have a look at this table if you want some real data. Especially, look at the change from 1985 (when the international effort to ban CFC's started to get underway), through 1997 (Montreal Protocol) to the turning point in the early 1990's. Especially have a look at the corresponding graph. If it had continued depleting at the same rate there would be practically no ozone left by today! Without a doubt, a major disaster was averted. Even today, the ozone levels are hovering around the all-time minimum.
I have been directly affected by this. I used to live in Tasmania, which was (and is still) affected greatly. Even on a cloudy day in Tasmania it is easy to get sunburn. I really noticed the difference when I moved to Europe, that I do not need to be nearly as careful about sunburn (some of this, but not all, is due to pollutants in the air in the Northern hemisphere - mostly sulphur dioxide, that block UV).
I am a professional scientist, although this is not my field (I am a condensed-matter physicist). So I think I do know what I am talking about - or rather, I think I can differentiate between what I have seen evidence for versus what I have a hunch about. So please do not accuse me of "Chicken Little" science, whatever that is supposed to mean!
What is also conveniently forgotten by creationists is that geological time scales and the age of the earth (at least to the extent that it was known to be of the order of "millions" or "billions" of years rather than "thousands") was well known in Darwin's time, and accepted by the vast majority of theologians. (Cranks that calculate the age of the earth by the generations of people listed in the old testament were, always have been, and always will be, excluded from sensible theological debate.)
It is only since Darwin that biblical literalists have tried to revise history and state that the geological time scale depends in a fundamental way on evolution being correct.
Heh, I read the first couple of paragraphs and was about to write a ranting reply, then I read the rest and I agree completely.
It is important to distinguish between the process of science and the results of science.
The big breakthrough that enabled the continuous stream of advancement since the ~16th century was the invention of the Scientific Method: essentially an elaboration of "if it works, keep it. If it doesn't work, throw it away". It seems so obvious now that it is easy to forget that it took thousands of years to figure this out.
So, the Scientific Method resulted in the reliable observations that objects fall towards the centre of the earth, an object placed on a table will not move unless you apply a force, a ball rolling along a flat surface stays at a constant velocity, the planets move in orbits given by Kepler's laws, etc etc. All of these were used by Newton when he came up with his theory of universal gravitation. Although he made use of scientific observations, the discovery of universal gravition itself was most definitely not done using the Scientific Method. In fact, the story goes that he was dreamily sitting under an apple tree staring at the moon when an apple fell on his head, which gave him the thought that maybe the force that pulls the apple towards the centre of the earth is also responsible for holding the moon in its orbit. It is equally likely that the story about Newton and universal gravitiation is a crock and he was actually high on some kind of hallucinogenic drug:-)
If this thought process had anything to do with science, we could repeat the "experiment" with 10,000 monkeys in an apple orchard and discover everything up to the meaning of life.
The process of finding laws of nature that for the observations is much more like creating art: usually creative, sometimes random, sometimes drug-induced (well, here in the Netherlands there is lots of folklore about drugs and science - I think at least some of it must be true!). The science gives the raw materials and the verification but will never give the step in the middle, of finding the explanation.
The theory of the strong nuclear force is well established, there nature of the force is known, there are equations that govern the behaviour etc etc. Can you show me the equation for god? Can you predict what the force will be if you put two god's next to each other (or even one god would suffice:-)?
Personally, I find the theory of strong nuclear forces to be far more specific than any theory of god I've ever encountered.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. But the direction we are heading is along the lines of "your ziplock bag must remain open and in view on the passenger seat at all times". In effect, bypassing the need for a warrant by eliminating privacy.
Surely it would be quite easy to patch the Linux kernel loader so that it only ran binaries that were on a list of md5 sums known to the kernel. I imagine it would be easy to do this for Windoze too. If you want to register every piece of software on your hard drive and only run 'trusted' programs, you could do that today.
There is nothing I have seen in any DRM proposal that gives any extra features for the user that this simple patch could not do.
Unfortunately, nobody is interested in this. In every DRM proposal I've seen, the ultimate holder of the list of allowed md5 sums is not the user, but rather the author of the application or (more likely) operating system or even the hardware manufacturer. So in fact they potentially take away a vast number of features that the open solution provides. Indeed, the whole point of DRM is that the "content" provider (or their agent), rather than the user, holds the keys.
Unfortunately, even the "promise of DRM" that you speak of is unlikely to happen. Will you trust the 'trusted' version of Outlook 2008 Palladium Special Edition any more than you trust the current version of Outlook? Is it any less likely to be riddled with buffer overflows? (well, maybe, if they have improved their coding standards by then, but that is unrelated to DRM itself)
The only thing that DRM (in the versions being pushed today) will mean is that the virus that sends all your personal documents to everyone in your address book won't be able to decrypt the copy of "The Little Mermaid" that is stored on your hard drive.
Would you be happy for somebody to be listening in to you dinner table conversation, just to make sure that you are not planning a terrorist attack? (If you are thinking "no way, virtual privacy is a different issue to 'real' privacy", suppose that a couple of your friends couldn't make it to the dinner party and you are having a conversation on mIRC instead)
What if the topic of that dinner conversation was a (hypothetical) "accidental" police beating of an innocent suspect? Would you feel uncomfortable having that conversation, knowing that those same people could be listening to you?
What if your dinner table conversation was about planning some kind of protest, say to confront the local mayor about some abuse of government power? Would you still have that conversation if you knew there was a liklihood that the mayor could end up with tapes of your conversation? And what if your protest was going to be mildy illegal (say, a congregation in a public place for which police permission had been denied)? You might be prepared to take the consequences, indeed the media coverage would just serve to highlight the protest, but what if your conversation could be used to prevent the protest from taking place at all? (say, by arresting you prior to the protest?) Sure, there is no one getting dragged off to the gulag here, but isn't the freedom of the public to act against injustice ultimately one of the cornerstones of Democracy? What happens when you eliminate this cornerstone?
Moving onto terrorism itself, is there any evidence that existing "online privacy" was an important factor that has enabled acts of terrorism to be successful in the past?
Is there any evidence that eliminating such privacy would stop acts of terror in the future?
Even if there is no privacy for ordinary citizens, the anti-terror squads obviously need privacy themselves. It is obviously silly to have every action of the secret police being broadcast over the intenet, indeed they will be much more effective if they have total privacy. So, there needs to be at least two classes of citizens, ordinary joes, who have no privacy, and the secret police who have total privacy. How does such a two-class system fit in with the ideal, of representative Democracy? How do you keep checks on a system that is so one-sided? Who is watching the watcher?
Even if privacy is eliminated, doesn't that at best only make it harder to plan and carry out terrorism? In what sense would it reduce/eliminate the causes of terrorism?
Indeed, what impact do you think the loss of privacy would have on people who already hate the government enough to consider terrorism? Wouldn't it just make the situation worse?
Ultimately, do you think people can/should should be trusted to hold private conversations?
Sure, maybe their story is true, but would you be surprised if the Pakistani agents got a bit heavy handed and out of control during (or after) the arrest? And if so, what do you think they would do to hide what they had done?
Of course, now that he is in the hands of "Freedom Itself" in the form of the good 'ol USA, you would expect the truth to come out..... maybe......
All of this spying shit is undemocratic (even ant-democratic) if only because it is kept secret from the people. How many elections have there been in the USA where the platform that the president was elected on was in direct contradiction to the policy that is or was implemented? I must admit I am not familiar enough with US history to give any definite examples, but I am specifically thinking of...
Tibet - public policy: The USA will not interfere with the 'domestic' politics of China. actual policy: smuggle as many guns as possible into Tibet and train the locals as rebel gurillas, indicentally misleading the locals into thinking that the USA would actually intervene on their behalf at the UN.
Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion: very similar story, but even more so, since it left a lot of Afghans feeling actively betrayed.
There must be a heap of examples that don't involve a war, Martin Luther King vs the FBI for example.
The Iran-Contra scandal is yet another example, but less so because it was the work of a small group within the government, rather than a disparity between policy publicly announced and policy that is actually implemented.
I am not saying that in every case the implemented policy was necessarily bad (well, actually I would say that, but that argument belongs to a different thread), I am just pointing out that it is fundamentally anti-democratic, because the people were supporting the government (and possibly even elected people to office) based on a policy platform that was completely fictitous and didn't represent the policy that was actually implemented.
Indeed some people, even among the 'allies', would argue that the USA is already an enemy of freedom.
In fact, I should not have used the word "patent" at all in my post, I have since read SCO's complaint and it makes no mention of patents at all, only propretary trade secrets. A patent search also reveals nothing of relevance. So the conclusion still stands, albeit for a different reason ;)
See section 7 of the GPL. If you cannot simultaneously satisfy the GLP and the patent license, then you have no right to distribute the program at all.
It is not called free software for nothing.
Yeaeh I agree, this is hilarious. The whole thing smacks of corporate heavyweights posturing for the crowds without realizing that the emperor has no clothes.
That is, either everybody can share the code with no restrictions (other than the usual GPL), or nobody can - not even SCO themselves.
But the whole thing is silly anyway, it can only possibly affect more recent parts of Linux, the core parts (e2fs filesystem etc) are pretty obviously developed independently of SCO, and owes nothing to them. Indeed, the main response from everyone is that the whole complaint from the beginning is a load of hot air. Especially since they havn't actually given any details on exactly what parts of the kernel are supposed to be infringing their patents.
Unfortunately I can't see any way for this to be reversed, at least not in the short to medium term. The current government is in fact encouraging the attitude of "keep a lookout on your neighbor, regard everything as suspicous".
It is really a shame, I can only hope that other countries don't end up falling down the same path.
Nice looking animations, but it is a shame that he used a custom renderer. It would be interesting to see this as a plugin to some serious viewer tool, complete with hyperlinks to display source files or a code browser at particular points in the graph.
Have a look at a photo album of a friend of mine who still lives there . I've been to most of the places listed. From his page there are some links to some tourist/conservation sites too.
The argument is that CFC's lead to an overall reduction in ozone: the fact that it maifests itself as a hole is a secondary effect, which is influenced by several factors (the most significant being governed by the seasons). So, the fact that the hole size fluctuates wildly could (and, if you believe the article you link to, IS) essentially unrelated to the bulk ozone depletion. A long term average is required to know for sure.
I can surely acknowledge that the situation is much more complicated than I previously thought, but I still havn't seen any evidence that actually supports (rather than being neutral, at best) your argument that it can be explained by natural causes. Longer term averages should be able to give this information, but in the meantime, it is the scientists' job to be cautious.
If you can refute that, I would be interested in hearing about it.
I was looking for some measurements on recent CFC levels in the upper atmosphere, but I could not find any. Do you have any data? If you can point to some evidence that CFC levels in the upper atmosphere are increasing, so while the amount of ozone has basically stabilized then you might have a point.
Interesting. Where do you work?
a few seconds of googling later....
Have a look at this graph , which shows the area of the ozone hole. True, there is a big drop at the very last data point, but look at the size of the error bar, that could mean anything, and certainly doesn't indicate that it has 'stabilized'.
Are you aware of atmospheric studies measuring the amount of CFC in the upper atmosphere?
Do you acknowledge that this provides a causal link that at least some of the damage to the ozone layer is caused by CFC's?
I don't think the action of CFC's as a catalyst to break up ozone in the presence of UV radiation is under dispute here, it is not a controversial experiment.
Nor is the fact that CFC's take quite a while to degrade. CFC acts as a catalyst, meaning it participates in the reaction, but is not comsumed. Typical figures are one CFC molecule will survive for long enough to destroy 100,000 ozone molecules. All of this is pretty basic stuff which you could easily find out with 5 minutes of googling.
The upshot of this is that a small amount of CFC's reaching the upper atmosphere produces a tremendous amount of damage. Ozone is naturally created, but if the rate of destruction is too high, then clearly the ozone levels will fall.
In my last post I put some URL's of some tables and graphs. I suggest you study them closely, and decide for yourself if it is natural or not.
Since you seem too lazy to do your own research, or even lookup posted URL's, I post here a table of world CFC production from 1940 to 1990 (from http://arch.rivm.nl/env/int/hyde/eisp_cfc.html
CFC-11 output, millions of killograms
1940: 0.1
1945: 0.3
1950: 5.5
1955: 23
1960: 40.5
1965: 108.3
1970: 206.6
1975: 310.9
1980: 250.8
1985: 280.8
1985: 216.1
I can't be bothered re-typing the data for CFC-12, it is similar (but higher), look it up yourself (you do know how to click on a URL, don't you???)
Remembering that each CFC molecule will destroy 100,000 or so O3 molecules once it reaches the upper atmosphere, and the units here are millions of killograms, I leave it for you to calculate the potential damage. Exactly how much ozone do you think there is?
Please go and do some research and some thinking, and by all means post again if you can come up with some actual refutations of what I've been saying. So far you have shown absolutely nothing except whining, in response to hard evidence and figures.
Before I get flamed too hard, I should qualify that I meant the amount of ozone over Antarctica when I said that there would be practically no ozone left today.
You are correct in that the hole in the ozone layer has stabilized much faster than atmospheric scientists were expecting. But it is a logical fallacy to go from "with CFC reductions the hole shrinks faster than expected" to "therefore with more CFC's the hole will grower slower than expected". Indeed, this is directly contradicted by the evidence, where until 1987 the hole was growing very fast indeed. Have a look at this table if you want some real data. Especially, look at the change from 1985 (when the international effort to ban CFC's started to get underway), through 1997 (Montreal Protocol) to the turning point in the early 1990's. Especially have a look at the corresponding graph. If it had continued depleting at the same rate there would be practically no ozone left by today! Without a doubt, a major disaster was averted. Even today, the ozone levels are hovering around the all-time minimum.
I have been directly affected by this. I used to live in Tasmania, which was (and is still) affected greatly. Even on a cloudy day in Tasmania it is easy to get sunburn. I really noticed the difference when I moved to Europe, that I do not need to be nearly as careful about sunburn (some of this, but not all, is due to pollutants in the air in the Northern hemisphere - mostly sulphur dioxide, that block UV).
I am a professional scientist, although this is not my field (I am a condensed-matter physicist). So I think I do know what I am talking about - or rather, I think I can differentiate between what I have seen evidence for versus what I have a hunch about. So please do not accuse me of "Chicken Little" science, whatever that is supposed to mean!
What is also conveniently forgotten by creationists is that geological time scales and the age of the earth (at least to the extent that it was known to be of the order of "millions" or "billions" of years rather than "thousands") was well known in Darwin's time, and accepted by the vast majority of theologians. (Cranks that calculate the age of the earth by the generations of people listed in the old testament were, always have been, and always will be, excluded from sensible theological debate.)
It is only since Darwin that biblical literalists have tried to revise history and state that the geological time scale depends in a fundamental way on evolution being correct.
It is important to distinguish between the process of science and the results of science.
The big breakthrough that enabled the continuous stream of advancement since the ~16th century was the invention of the Scientific Method: essentially an elaboration of "if it works, keep it. If it doesn't work, throw it away". It seems so obvious now that it is easy to forget that it took thousands of years to figure this out.
So, the Scientific Method resulted in the reliable observations that objects fall towards the centre of the earth, an object placed on a table will not move unless you apply a force, a ball rolling along a flat surface stays at a constant velocity, the planets move in orbits given by Kepler's laws, etc etc. All of these were used by Newton when he came up with his theory of universal gravitation. Although he made use of scientific observations, the discovery of universal gravition itself was most definitely not done using the Scientific Method. In fact, the story goes that he was dreamily sitting under an apple tree staring at the moon when an apple fell on his head, which gave him the thought that maybe the force that pulls the apple towards the centre of the earth is also responsible for holding the moon in its orbit. It is equally likely that the story about Newton and universal gravitiation is a crock and he was actually high on some kind of hallucinogenic drug :-)
If this thought process had anything to do with science, we could repeat the "experiment" with 10,000 monkeys in an apple orchard and discover everything up to the meaning of life.
The process of finding laws of nature that for the observations is much more like creating art: usually creative, sometimes random, sometimes drug-induced (well, here in the Netherlands there is lots of folklore about drugs and science - I think at least some of it must be true!). The science gives the raw materials and the verification but will never give the step in the middle, of finding the explanation.
Personally, I find the theory of strong nuclear forces to be far more specific than any theory of god I've ever encountered.