Terrorists would probably do both if possible. An initial 'map' recon via the net, followed up by going there in person, probably multiple times. So, censoring Google images could sometimes make sense. For example, let's postulate a particularly sensitive target in the middle of a larger, secured complex. If the terrorists (or whomever) can't figure out where it is, what roads lead to it, what other buildings might provide good working sites, etc. from Google, their job becomes exaustively probing the entire complex until they know, instead of physically probing only selected parts, which could be much easier or less likely to result in them being caught during the recon phase.
Of course, some of these images being censored don't make much sense in that light. Uncleared random civilians pass within good observational range of the naval observatory grounds every day, so what would be the point of obscuring some features of number 0, Observatory drive, if those are still physically visible from the roads and public buildings?
Tom? Tom Clancy, you've made that point enough already, now stop teasing them.
(Seriously, the use of ground to air defenses around the white house is predicated on attacks by relatively small aircraft. High vulnerability scenarios include organized coup attacks on Marine 1 during take off or landing, probably by attack helicopter, as well as the more prosaic 'some psycho flying a small plane at the oval office and just hoping his target is in the right part of the building at the time' attack. Lone psycho attacks are the ones that get discussed publicly, but some precautions make good sense to prevent an organized takeover, and that's probably why those precautions have been adopted - that's just not made explicit to the general public.)
I'm going to try and present a few opposite arguments, recognizing that if yours are flamebait, so are mine, perhaps more so.
Do we want a world where all crimes are punished so drastically that any potential criminal would have to be insane to risk even a very slight chance of getting caught? While it might sound like a solid conservative's law and order ideal, it's closer to totalitarianism than anything else. Do you want a world where deterrence is so all important that voluntary compliance with the law can never be enough?
It's a fact that most laws work as well as they do, because many people, usually a substantial majority, agree with them. Where a law is widely considered unfair, it seems to either be changed, or to spawn new laws that exist only to prop up the old ones, so that achieving compliance soon takes whole new volumes of laws. (Witness all the additional drug related laws, setting mandatory minimums, disallowing plea bargaining, making related activities count as conspiracies or criminalizing paraphenalia and not just the drugs themselves. What do all these additional laws exist for, except the majority doesn't really agree with the basic drug laws in the first place, or at the least, is lukewarm in its agreement and a substantial minority disagrees quite strongly.)
I guess I am ambitious because on my last case, I replaced the green LEDs with ultra-bright blue ones. In my defense, I also replaced the springs under the power and reset switches with some screen door closer parts, so the average 5 year old lacks the strength to push the buttons that are now so attractive since I put in those bright blue LEDs.
It's funny that Slashdot runs articles about building a working Babbage style difference engine or reconstructing the Antikythera mechanism, and nobody complains that they're not news for nerds. Maybe the connection between this grashopper escapement and solving a big problem in oceangoing navigation is historically a little more esoteric.
I just love speaking a language where it's possible to say things such as "You can always sue the demonic grasshopper...", and not necessarily be a schizophrenic. We English speakers should probably be more appreciative of a language where nobody inventing the tongue could possibly have anticipated needing to say something like that, but when the need pops up, 'Bob's yer uncle' and English stretches to fit.
My argument is that many teachers are still teaching the part that's discredited. You keep putting words in my mouth, then attacking the multiple straw men you create, and lecturing me over things I already know in a way that is downright insulting, acting as though there is some epistemological reason I simply must be the ignorant one everywhere we disagree, and assuming things (as you yourself put it) which are not in evidence and are not appropriate to assume.
You've somehow taken my last post completely out of context, so that you think I'm arguing some point over the history of science. I bothered to spell things out ("This distinction" and not just "it" or something ambiguous) so what I meant should be clear. The distinction (For the third time) is between teaching Evolution as producing a local optimum state for a given species and teaching Evolution as producing an abstractly perfect creature or even perfecting the entire physical world.
My conclusion is you do believe the Theory of Evolution is supernatural, and has the occult power to make everyone who teaches it understand and teach it flawlessly. That would explain your behavior. You're right of course, I'm a heretic who has challenged the infallibility of the priests of the one true faith. Oh, you didn't mean that? Then why are you taking such pains to 'correct my misconceptions', when the fundamental claim I have advanced all along is simply that it is possible to incorrectly teach Evolution as having religious implications, and some people do it. If you're claiming the opposite, you're the one who has an incredibly heavy burden of proof, not I.
Yeah, I was using the word Socialist this time the way much of the U.S. Right wing does, and I don't really agree with it either. But on Slashdot, a lot of the readers are Libertarians and the comments leading up to yours and mine were probably by some of those Slashdotters, who again, seemed to be using the word Socialism for any government policy that put a damper on any operations of a theoretical perfect free market. Essentially, I was letting a definition stand, and then showing how, even if I accepted that definition for the sake of argument, the implications weren't what the parent poster said, while you were challenging his definition itself.
Many years ago, Joh W. Campbell wrote an essay in Astounding SF where he avoided using terms such as Socialism and Capitalism. If I recall, he substituted terms such as "Gwollic", as in 'Let's define a Gwollic economy as one where the immediate supervisors of a project have lots of discression in how the project works, and minimal oversight or legal control from higher levels, but are held fully responsible if it fails.' (my paraphrase from memory). Using such definitions he showed that the various properties we lump together when speaking of Communism, Socialism, Fascism, and Capitalism were actually separable, and that some of those properties were more a part of opposed economic schools in actual practice than of the schools that theory said applied in a particular country. I.e. The U.S.S.R had a largely 'Gwollic' economy even though the property sounds like one the U.S. economy should have in abundance.
Re:Engineers can rise to the top if...
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I certainly agree about the People Skills. I was 13 years military and made it from PFC to the commissioned officer level, and from my own experience, a NCO is basically front-line management and a 1LT or Captain (or usually even a Major), middle management. The military is the classic example of an area where many people are promoted based on technical merit, and then need to learn people skills, often desperately.
Where I think we disagree, I've since that time been involved in both writing financial planning software and providing businesses with tax and financial planning based, in part, on it. From what I've seen, the types of finance a sales manager learns, mostly about time payments, credit ratings and loans, don't really help much at the upper levels, and may actually give him or her bad habits to overcome. There's a gap to be crossed, and it's (IMHO) a lot bigger than most people think. Especially in the US today. Again, I recommend anyone interested read Demming on management to see what a real, solidly proven expert thinks about that gap.
As I said, "not one professional biologist in a thousand believes this today." Does that really read like I might be surprised to know there have been some changes since Darwin? Or do you feel that statement is inaccurate?
Thank you for assuming that anyone who dares say Evolution can be mistaught or even just that it is not always taught correctly is an unsophisticated yahoo who needs to be brought back into line with the True Doctrine. That certainly deals a blow to my contention.
Thanks for both insulting me, and putting words in my mouth. You have certainly proved that evolution cannot be a religion and I am obviously a heretic who should be burned at the oh-so-non-religious stake for ever thinking otherwise.
For the thinking impaired: What I said was, if a class on evolution taught that there was a big, overall trend for evolution, that the 'goal' was some sort of abstract perfection, if it frequently threw around terms such as 'progress', or if it implied that the world was getting better and better because of Evolution, then that was Evolution being taught as a religion.
I thought he had a real problem by the time he wrote the introduction to Hawking's "A Brief History of Time". It was a two page intro, and he brought up the issue of religion specifically as opposed to science several times, none of which were particularly relevant to the book. He managed to commit a logical fallacy of exclusion at least three times in a single sentence, which is so impressive it ought to be a text-book example. I'm somewhere in the borderline Zen-Gnostic heretic-Sufist range, and I'd never claim Atheism has to be a religion, but for Dr. Sagan, it definitely was.
Changes in gene distribution can be stochastic, that is they can vary for other reasons than selection pressure. When a given population becomes extinct, there was no successful long term selection pressure, as all alternatives lost equally in the end (Extinction being defined as the ultimate negative outcome).
As an example of stochastic genetic distribution, many scientists studying HIV are now suggesting it is a stochastic mutator, with at least four major variants on the protein coat, which are equally likely to mutate back to the baseline or into alternate variants. At least until some medical treatments began targeting a particular protein coat, there was no real selection pressure between types. (Which does not mean HIV doesn't also occasionally have other, no-stochastic mutations, of course it can.).
There are some testable predictions of Evolutionary theory. For just one, Darwin pointed out that the mechanisms of heredity could not allow unlimited blending, or his theory wouldn't work. Until Gregor Mendel developed a theory of genetics that didn't allow for blending, (more accurately, until Mendel's writings crept out from their isolated source into the general scientific culture) many people pointed to this as a weakness of the theory.
In point of fact, one of the reasons Crick and Watson got their Nobel is that the discovery of the genetic code supported Darwin and Mendel, that is the model of genes expressed in the four base pairs of the DNA rungs was a code that didn't produce unlimited blending effects.
Back in the 1940's - 50's, when the Steady State theory still looked popular in Cosmology, some very serious scientists (Bertrand Russell and Fred Hoyle, for two), routinely pointed to the SS as a disproof of God. They argued that an infinitely old and infinitely large universe never had a moment of creation, or a point of origin, so the theory proved there could not be a creator God. They didn't say it was an absence of evidence for the proposition, or anything like that, they claimed it was, in Sagan's phrase "evidence of absence", a positive disproof.
Most of these scientists, when the Big Bang theory won out, fought to find ways to use it as a disproof too. They ended up arguing for a version of the Big Bang that had only one point in common with the SS and one prediction in common (The point being they were both scientific theories, and the common prediction being that both of them somehow disproved the existence of God.).
Before that, there were quite a few astronomers who held the theory that planets were produced only when a very rare event occurred - two stars passing closely at the right distance and velocity to raise tides on each other. They frequently pointed out that the extreme rarity of such passes meant the universe was full of lifeless sterile suns, and this waste of space was somehow a proof of God's non-existence. (So presumably, all these extra-solar planets make God more likely - a pity the astronomers of the 1900's - 10's are all dead now.).
Then there's Carl Sagan:
"In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to persue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that god has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?" - Carl Sagan - Cosmos p.257
Before writing this, Dr. Sagan has already outlined the two main recent theories of cosmogenesis in previous chapters - The "Big Bang' theory, and the competing "Steady State" theory were both covered in the third chapter of Cosmos. He has then explained why the best evidence supports the "Big Bang" model. But, if we accept the big bang model, we can't simultaneously conclude that the universe has always existed. Dr. Sagan, by his own writing, does not really think the universe has always existed, and so he has a good reason for not "saving that final step". Why not conclude that the universe has always existed? Because the cosmic microwave background records the flash of its birth, so we are not allowed to take that step. You told us that, Dr. Sagan, so why are you asking this question like it is a rhetorical one? If the Steady State prevailed, we could save your step.
Darwin himself specifically criticized Christianity (as opposed to criticizing religions in general) in his second major book, "The Descent of Man". His argument was that Evolution tended towards a state of perfection, so a religion that specifically believed the world was imperfect, and God would eventually replace it with a flawless version, was superfluous. Now, not one professional biologist in a thousand believes this today. The standard phrase is "Evolution tends only towards a local optimum, never towards any abstract notion of perfection.". Ergo, Darwin's argument on that point was simply wrong.
Have you ever had a class on Evolution? Did the teacher draw this distinction? If they did not, that's teaching Evolution as a secular religion, right there. I know I got it in college biology at the Junior level, but not earlier, and most definitely not in my high school course. A friend who took Biology for pre-med students said he didn't remember it in the popularized course he got in college either.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
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True, but neither is a sales guy. Just because someone handles the cash, at the level of individual sales, is no reason to think they can keep a company in the black. The two skillsets have almost no overlap. For companies that make a real product rather than service industries, coming from manufacturing or distribution ought to have just as good a chance of making good management as coming from sales or finance. For that matter, why worry about initial chances - people since at least Demming have been showing how to select and train good management.
Nazism was state socialism (literally National Socialism), as opposed to the theoretically international socialism of the U.S.S.R. and related. There are some distinctions to be made, of course, but they are a lot more complex than the simple far left/far right dichotomy would lead people to believe. Being founded on an ethnicity or race tends to make State Socialism accept dubious eugenics principles even more, for one example. The modern European governments that are at least semi-socialist have tended to avoid taking most of the bad steps the U.S.S.R. took, but them the Italian Fascists were really reluctant to put a lot of Jews in camps, so not everything we associate with Fascism is a direct consequence everywhere it's been tried. Given what the PRC has said about all persons of Chinese descent still being theoretically subject to its governance, you could easily argue that they are both State Socialists and an intermediate-long term successful Fascist government with eugenics incorporated into their politics.
The recent Fannie/Freddy bailout is an example, or the 2008 tax rebate*. The government structures such things so that the largest benefits go to big corporations with political connections, but those benefits count as socialist, in that they are taken from the pool of tax moneys and given to keep some people from getting smacked as hard for their mistakes as a free market would smack them. If a law that keeps a debtor from losing his only house or at least one car is socialism, or if social security is socialist for not having invested individual's money and paying back out according to individual input, then a law that keeps a corporation from having to file bankrupcy after making severe mistakes is similarly socialist - if nothing else, just because you are keeping a competitor from driving the screw up out of business and taking over its share of the market, which is theoretically what happens in a free market society.
*The tax rebate law also let businesses (under some circumstances) take the entire cost of new equipment off their taxes in the same year purchased, where normally they would have to amortize that type of equipment over multiple years and keep it in service long enough to do it. Various limits still made this much more beneficial to certain classes of business than others, and particularly, already larger businesses in a given field could shift purchasing to take advantage and small independents usually couldn't. The part of the bill's cost that the individual tax-payers saw was much smaller than the part that went to business.
Plus there's the non-privacy related 'problems we have to contend with'. Like the Denver area government officials who apparently took huge bribes from some of the big oil companies. Some of the bribes allegedly included drugs provided by hookers, but the DEA isn't involved in the investigation, (at least yet). Anyone willing to bet that the officials who were getting away with this for years would have drawn the line at any other abuse because it was privacy related? Anyone willing to bet that, if they get a slap on the wrist, there won't be other government employees emboldened to create more privacy problems?
Why do you even ask the question? The RIAA, etc, aren't Capitalists - they are using the law to create and extend an artificial monopoly, not relying upon the free market. The poster you are attacking is pointing out that they are not Capitalists, that they will try to spin this as just being how good little Capitalists act, but it will be a lie, and so your post shows you generally fall for the lie and start a squabble with people who actually understand the situation. The RIAA wins because that squabbling undermines the people who would organize against the recording industry's version of State Socialism.
There's no law (at least in the U.S.) that says 'only one backup' or anything similar. There are some examples involving the government's recognizing the need to make at least one backup for data, codified as an example of fair use. For example the Berne treaty has a section about fair use that lists on site and off site backups, which would seemingly imply that at least two backups are an example of fair use if they are kept in separate locations. Software, music, video, and other categories all have differing parts of fair use codified, i.e. there's no legal opinion on time shifting as it might or might not apply to software. AFAIK, there's no list of fair use examples that sets a lower limit of acceptable backups the industry must allow for music or movie files.
Some people are confusing the actual laws referring to backups with those fairly common EULA clauses that give specific permission to make no more than X number of backups, but those are only meant as the manufacturer purports in the rest of the EULA. That is, usually they give a specific permission to do action X, but they don't say whether or not the user may already have that right or some larger right as part of fair use laws. Actual statutory references are mostly in regards to just that one legal area - 'fair use', and fair use doctrine is not all spelled out, far from it.
The login prompt tells them some device exists, but supposedly they can't find it physically or by the network? Why start by looking for it physically? The article doesn't say if it's a wired or wireless device, but an even partially wireless system could be very hard to find physically. All it takes is tucking it away in an older building with lots of odd niches and cubbys - something I'm fairly confident San Fran's government has plenty of.
The prompt claims that the device is the administrator's. Why not look at the financial records first, and see if the city bought this device or the administrator presumably did?
Why not study the prompt to see how much info about the device it gives? Knowing that the prompt shows it to be some sort of router isn't much. Most devices, and certainly Cisco's, have changes in the prompt appearance with different models. The city should be able to figure out what make and model they are looking for, and related factors, such as wireless range or number of connections.
For wireless, figure out what devices are talking to it, and which ones are out of range to connect directly. If they know where the rest of the systems are, something like old fashioned triangulation should do wonders.
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Terrorists would probably do both if possible. An initial 'map' recon via the net, followed up by going there in person, probably multiple times. So, censoring Google images could sometimes make sense. For example, let's postulate a particularly sensitive target in the middle of a larger, secured complex. If the terrorists (or whomever) can't figure out where it is, what roads lead to it, what other buildings might provide good working sites, etc. from Google, their job becomes exaustively probing the entire complex until they know, instead of physically probing only selected parts, which could be much easier or less likely to result in them being caught during the recon phase.
Of course, some of these images being censored don't make much sense in that light. Uncleared random civilians pass within good observational range of the naval observatory grounds every day, so what would be the point of obscuring some features of number 0, Observatory drive, if those are still physically visible from the roads and public buildings?
Tom? Tom Clancy, you've made that point enough already, now stop teasing them.
(Seriously, the use of ground to air defenses around the white house is predicated on attacks by relatively small aircraft. High vulnerability scenarios include organized coup attacks on Marine 1 during take off or landing, probably by attack helicopter, as well as the more prosaic 'some psycho flying a small plane at the oval office and just hoping his target is in the right part of the building at the time' attack. Lone psycho attacks are the ones that get discussed publicly, but some precautions make good sense to prevent an organized takeover, and that's probably why those precautions have been adopted - that's just not made explicit to the general public.)
I'm going to try and present a few opposite arguments, recognizing that if yours are flamebait, so are mine, perhaps more so.
Do we want a world where all crimes are punished so drastically that any potential criminal would have to be insane to risk even a very slight chance of getting caught? While it might sound like a solid conservative's law and order ideal, it's closer to totalitarianism than anything else. Do you want a world where deterrence is so all important that voluntary compliance with the law can never be enough?
It's a fact that most laws work as well as they do, because many people, usually a substantial majority, agree with them. Where a law is widely considered unfair, it seems to either be changed, or to spawn new laws that exist only to prop up the old ones, so that achieving compliance soon takes whole new volumes of laws. (Witness all the additional drug related laws, setting mandatory minimums, disallowing plea bargaining, making related activities count as conspiracies or criminalizing paraphenalia and not just the drugs themselves. What do all these additional laws exist for, except the majority doesn't really agree with the basic drug laws in the first place, or at the least, is lukewarm in its agreement and a substantial minority disagrees quite strongly.)
Stef at Columbia Internet, is that you?
I guess I am ambitious because on my last case, I replaced the green LEDs with ultra-bright blue ones. In my defense, I also replaced the springs under the power and reset switches with some screen door closer parts, so the average 5 year old lacks the strength to push the buttons that are now so attractive since I put in those bright blue LEDs.
It's funny that Slashdot runs articles about building a working Babbage style difference engine or reconstructing the Antikythera mechanism, and nobody complains that they're not news for nerds. Maybe the connection between this grashopper escapement and solving a big problem in oceangoing navigation is historically a little more esoteric.
I just love speaking a language where it's possible to say things such as "You can always sue the demonic grasshopper...", and not necessarily be a schizophrenic. We English speakers should probably be more appreciative of a language where nobody inventing the tongue could possibly have anticipated needing to say something like that, but when the need pops up, 'Bob's yer uncle' and English stretches to fit.
My argument is that many teachers are still teaching the part that's discredited. You keep putting words in my mouth, then attacking the multiple straw men you create, and lecturing me over things I already know in a way that is downright insulting, acting as though there is some epistemological reason I simply must be the ignorant one everywhere we disagree, and assuming things (as you yourself put it) which are not in evidence and are not appropriate to assume.
You've somehow taken my last post completely out of context, so that you think I'm arguing some point over the history of science. I bothered to spell things out ("This distinction" and not just "it" or something ambiguous) so what I meant should be clear. The distinction (For the third time) is between teaching Evolution as producing a local optimum state for a given species and teaching Evolution as producing an abstractly perfect creature or even perfecting the entire physical world.
My conclusion is you do believe the Theory of Evolution is supernatural, and has the occult power to make everyone who teaches it understand and teach it flawlessly. That would explain your behavior. You're right of course, I'm a heretic who has challenged the infallibility of the priests of the one true faith. Oh, you didn't mean that? Then why are you taking such pains to 'correct my misconceptions', when the fundamental claim I have advanced all along is simply that it is possible to incorrectly teach Evolution as having religious implications, and some people do it. If you're claiming the opposite, you're the one who has an incredibly heavy burden of proof, not I.
Yeah, I was using the word Socialist this time the way much of the U.S. Right wing does, and I don't really agree with it either. But on Slashdot, a lot of the readers are Libertarians and the comments leading up to yours and mine were probably by some of those Slashdotters, who again, seemed to be using the word Socialism for any government policy that put a damper on any operations of a theoretical perfect free market. Essentially, I was letting a definition stand, and then showing how, even if I accepted that definition for the sake of argument, the implications weren't what the parent poster said, while you were challenging his definition itself.
Many years ago, Joh W. Campbell wrote an essay in Astounding SF where he avoided using terms such as Socialism and Capitalism. If I recall, he substituted terms such as "Gwollic", as in 'Let's define a Gwollic economy as one where the immediate supervisors of a project have lots of discression in how the project works, and minimal oversight or legal control from higher levels, but are held fully responsible if it fails.' (my paraphrase from memory). Using such definitions he showed that the various properties we lump together when speaking of Communism, Socialism, Fascism, and Capitalism were actually separable, and that some of those properties were more a part of opposed economic schools in actual practice than of the schools that theory said applied in a particular country. I.e. The U.S.S.R had a largely 'Gwollic' economy even though the property sounds like one the U.S. economy should have in abundance.
I certainly agree about the People Skills. I was 13 years military and made it from PFC to the commissioned officer level, and from my own experience, a NCO is basically front-line management and a 1LT or Captain (or usually even a Major), middle management. The military is the classic example of an area where many people are promoted based on technical merit, and then need to learn people skills, often desperately.
Where I think we disagree, I've since that time been involved in both writing financial planning software and providing businesses with tax and financial planning based, in part, on it. From what I've seen, the types of finance a sales manager learns, mostly about time payments, credit ratings and loans, don't really help much at the upper levels, and may actually give him or her bad habits to overcome. There's a gap to be crossed, and it's (IMHO) a lot bigger than most people think. Especially in the US today. Again, I recommend anyone interested read Demming on management to see what a real, solidly proven expert thinks about that gap.
You had a better HS Biology teacher than many.
As I said, "not one professional biologist in a thousand believes this today." Does that really read like I might be surprised to know there have been some changes since Darwin? Or do you feel that statement is inaccurate?
Thank you for assuming that anyone who dares say Evolution can be mistaught or even just that it is not always taught correctly is an unsophisticated yahoo who needs to be brought back into line with the True Doctrine. That certainly deals a blow to my contention.
Thanks for both insulting me, and putting words in my mouth. You have certainly proved that evolution cannot be a religion and I am obviously a heretic who should be burned at the oh-so-non-religious stake for ever thinking otherwise.
For the thinking impaired: What I said was, if a class on evolution taught that there was a big, overall trend for evolution, that the 'goal' was some sort of abstract perfection, if it frequently threw around terms such as 'progress', or if it implied that the world was getting better and better because of Evolution, then that was Evolution being taught as a religion.
I thought he had a real problem by the time he wrote the introduction to Hawking's "A Brief History of Time". It was a two page intro, and he brought up the issue of religion specifically as opposed to science several times, none of which were particularly relevant to the book. He managed to commit a logical fallacy of exclusion at least three times in a single sentence, which is so impressive it ought to be a text-book example. I'm somewhere in the borderline Zen-Gnostic heretic-Sufist range, and I'd never claim Atheism has to be a religion, but for Dr. Sagan, it definitely was.
Changes in gene distribution can be stochastic, that is they can vary for other reasons than selection pressure. When a given population becomes extinct, there was no successful long term selection pressure, as all alternatives lost equally in the end (Extinction being defined as the ultimate negative outcome).
As an example of stochastic genetic distribution, many scientists studying HIV are now suggesting it is a stochastic mutator, with at least four major variants on the protein coat, which are equally likely to mutate back to the baseline or into alternate variants. At least until some medical treatments began targeting a particular protein coat, there was no real selection pressure between types. (Which does not mean HIV doesn't also occasionally have other, no-stochastic mutations, of course it can.).
There are some testable predictions of Evolutionary theory. For just one, Darwin pointed out that the mechanisms of heredity could not allow unlimited blending, or his theory wouldn't work. Until Gregor Mendel developed a theory of genetics that didn't allow for blending, (more accurately, until Mendel's writings crept out from their isolated source into the general scientific culture) many people pointed to this as a weakness of the theory.
In point of fact, one of the reasons Crick and Watson got their Nobel is that the discovery of the genetic code supported Darwin and Mendel, that is the model of genes expressed in the four base pairs of the DNA rungs was a code that didn't produce unlimited blending effects.
Back in the 1940's - 50's, when the Steady State theory still looked popular in Cosmology, some very serious scientists (Bertrand Russell and Fred Hoyle, for two), routinely pointed to the SS as a disproof of God. They argued that an infinitely old and infinitely large universe never had a moment of creation, or a point of origin, so the theory proved there could not be a creator God. They didn't say it was an absence of evidence for the proposition, or anything like that, they claimed it was, in Sagan's phrase "evidence of absence", a positive disproof.
Most of these scientists, when the Big Bang theory won out, fought to find ways to use it as a disproof too. They ended up arguing for a version of the Big Bang that had only one point in common with the SS and one prediction in common (The point being they were both scientific theories, and the common prediction being that both of them somehow disproved the existence of God.).
Before that, there were quite a few astronomers who held the theory that planets were produced only when a very rare event occurred - two stars passing closely at the right distance and velocity to raise tides on each other. They frequently pointed out that the extreme rarity of such passes meant the universe was full of lifeless sterile suns, and this waste of space was somehow a proof of God's non-existence. (So presumably, all these extra-solar planets make God more likely - a pity the astronomers of the 1900's - 10's are all dead now.).
Then there's Carl Sagan:
"In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to persue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that god has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?" - Carl Sagan - Cosmos p.257
Before writing this, Dr. Sagan has already outlined the two main recent theories of cosmogenesis in previous chapters - The "Big Bang' theory, and the competing "Steady State" theory were both covered in the third chapter of Cosmos. He has then explained why the best evidence supports the "Big Bang" model. But, if we accept the big bang model, we can't simultaneously conclude that the universe has always existed. Dr. Sagan, by his own writing, does not really think the universe has always existed, and so he has a good reason for not "saving that final step". Why not conclude that the universe has always existed? Because the cosmic microwave background records the flash of its birth, so we are not allowed to take that step. You told us that, Dr. Sagan, so why are you asking this question like it is a rhetorical one? If the Steady State prevailed, we could save your step.
Darwin himself specifically criticized Christianity (as opposed to criticizing religions in general) in his second major book, "The Descent of Man". His argument was that Evolution tended towards a state of perfection, so a religion that specifically believed the world was imperfect, and God would eventually replace it with a flawless version, was superfluous. Now, not one professional biologist in a thousand believes this today. The standard phrase is "Evolution tends only towards a local optimum, never towards any abstract notion of perfection.". Ergo, Darwin's argument on that point was simply wrong.
Have you ever had a class on Evolution? Did the teacher draw this distinction? If they did not, that's teaching Evolution as a secular religion, right there. I know I got it in college biology at the Junior level, but not earlier, and most definitely not in my high school course. A friend who took Biology for pre-med students said he didn't remember it in the popularized course he got in college either.
True, but neither is a sales guy. Just because someone handles the cash, at the level of individual sales, is no reason to think they can keep a company in the black. The two skillsets have almost no overlap. For companies that make a real product rather than service industries, coming from manufacturing or distribution ought to have just as good a chance of making good management as coming from sales or finance. For that matter, why worry about initial chances - people since at least Demming have been showing how to select and train good management.
Nazism was state socialism (literally National Socialism), as opposed to the theoretically international socialism of the U.S.S.R. and related. There are some distinctions to be made, of course, but they are a lot more complex than the simple far left/far right dichotomy would lead people to believe. Being founded on an ethnicity or race tends to make State Socialism accept dubious eugenics principles even more, for one example. The modern European governments that are at least semi-socialist have tended to avoid taking most of the bad steps the U.S.S.R. took, but them the Italian Fascists were really reluctant to put a lot of Jews in camps, so not everything we associate with Fascism is a direct consequence everywhere it's been tried. Given what the PRC has said about all persons of Chinese descent still being theoretically subject to its governance, you could easily argue that they are both State Socialists and an intermediate-long term successful Fascist government with eugenics incorporated into their politics.
The recent Fannie/Freddy bailout is an example, or the 2008 tax rebate*. The government structures such things so that the largest benefits go to big corporations with political connections, but those benefits count as socialist, in that they are taken from the pool of tax moneys and given to keep some people from getting smacked as hard for their mistakes as a free market would smack them. If a law that keeps a debtor from losing his only house or at least one car is socialism, or if social security is socialist for not having invested individual's money and paying back out according to individual input, then a law that keeps a corporation from having to file bankrupcy after making severe mistakes is similarly socialist - if nothing else, just because you are keeping a competitor from driving the screw up out of business and taking over its share of the market, which is theoretically what happens in a free market society.
*The tax rebate law also let businesses (under some circumstances) take the entire cost of new equipment off their taxes in the same year purchased, where normally they would have to amortize that type of equipment over multiple years and keep it in service long enough to do it. Various limits still made this much more beneficial to certain classes of business than others, and particularly, already larger businesses in a given field could shift purchasing to take advantage and small independents usually couldn't. The part of the bill's cost that the individual tax-payers saw was much smaller than the part that went to business.
Plus there's the non-privacy related 'problems we have to contend with'. Like the Denver area government officials who apparently took huge bribes from some of the big oil companies. Some of the bribes allegedly included drugs provided by hookers, but the DEA isn't involved in the investigation, (at least yet). Anyone willing to bet that the officials who were getting away with this for years would have drawn the line at any other abuse because it was privacy related? Anyone willing to bet that, if they get a slap on the wrist, there won't be other government employees emboldened to create more privacy problems?
Why do you even ask the question? The RIAA, etc, aren't Capitalists - they are using the law to create and extend an artificial monopoly, not relying upon the free market. The poster you are attacking is pointing out that they are not Capitalists, that they will try to spin this as just being how good little Capitalists act, but it will be a lie, and so your post shows you generally fall for the lie and start a squabble with people who actually understand the situation. The RIAA wins because that squabbling undermines the people who would organize against the recording industry's version of State Socialism.
There's no law (at least in the U.S.) that says 'only one backup' or anything similar. There are some examples involving the government's recognizing the need to make at least one backup for data, codified as an example of fair use. For example the Berne treaty has a section about fair use that lists on site and off site backups, which would seemingly imply that at least two backups are an example of fair use if they are kept in separate locations. Software, music, video, and other categories all have differing parts of fair use codified, i.e. there's no legal opinion on time shifting as it might or might not apply to software. AFAIK, there's no list of fair use examples that sets a lower limit of acceptable backups the industry must allow for music or movie files.
Some people are confusing the actual laws referring to backups with those fairly common EULA clauses that give specific permission to make no more than X number of backups, but those are only meant as the manufacturer purports in the rest of the EULA. That is, usually they give a specific permission to do action X, but they don't say whether or not the user may already have that right or some larger right as part of fair use laws. Actual statutory references are mostly in regards to just that one legal area - 'fair use', and fair use doctrine is not all spelled out, far from it.
The login prompt tells them some device exists, but supposedly they can't find it physically or by the network?
Why start by looking for it physically? The article doesn't say if it's a wired or wireless device, but an even partially wireless system could be very hard to find physically. All it takes is tucking it away in an older building with lots of odd niches and cubbys - something I'm fairly confident San Fran's government has plenty of.
The prompt claims that the device is the administrator's. Why not look at the financial records first, and see if the city bought this device or the administrator presumably did?
Why not study the prompt to see how much info about the device it gives? Knowing that the prompt shows it to be some sort of router isn't much. Most devices, and certainly Cisco's, have changes in the prompt appearance with different models. The city should be able to figure out what make and model they are looking for, and related factors, such as wireless range or number of connections.
For wireless, figure out what devices are talking to it, and which ones are out of range to connect directly. If they know where the rest of the systems are, something like old fashioned triangulation should do wonders.