How can such a law be enforced outside of the state of Utah? If a user in Utah dials an ISP in another state, how will the Utah enforcers ever check this and if they do find the ISP is in another state, how will they haul that ISP into their courts? If the ISP ignores the Utah authoirities, can the Utah cops come into another state to arrest the ISP?
...Of course, the police, FBI, courts... can get your ID by just asking your ISP...
That assumes a crook doesn't use one of the millions of unsecured public and private access points with a laptop. Even with this new technique, the law enforcers would only know that a given laptop was used from a given place at a certain time. If this identification could be made very fast in real time, they might be able to nab the laptop operator before he/she goes elsewhere.
...The purpose of the armed populace is as a deterrent...
All this discussion on guns is off topic as far as I am concerned. However, gun ownership can be a deterrent to tyranny. If only one out of ten Jews in Nazi Germany and the occupied countries would have had a guns and managed to kill one or more Gestapo agents who came to arrest them in the middle of the night, the Nazis would have had 600,000 or more dead Gestapo goons. I suspect that places like Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz would have had few, if any Jewish prisoners. If a tyrant knows that statistically one of ten of the "enforcers" will die trying to arrest some members of a group of "undesireables", any tyranny government will find it difficult to find enough enforcers if the group of "undesireables" numbers in the millions. Many guns in the hands of many people DOES place severe, if not insurmountable retraints on potential tyrants. If enough people are unwilling to give up their guns, even if any government could or would declare them "illegal", there is no way to enforce such a "law", because a such government could not get enough enforcers willing to risk their necks. Only if that government can persuade a large percentage of the general population of the "undesireability" of a given group is there a possibility of eliminating that group. However if that group and their symphathizers numbers in the millions and most of them are armed, it may result in a civil war in that country.
...neither of which have any redeeming social value...
Businesses will sell anything that someone will buy. The more people are willing to buy a certain product (cigarettes, guns, pornography, drugs etc.) the more businesses there will be trying to sell such items. Even if the Governemt outlaws certain products, (drugs, porn, certain weapons) there will still be some business that will sell these, if people exist who will buy such stuff. All that outlawing an item does in dramatically raise its price making it unaffordable to most. Social value has nothing to do with this unfortunately.
I did not say impossible, but improbable and those two are not the same. It is possible for all the air molecules in your room all congregate in one corner and you die for lack of air, but it is not likely. If you do the math, the probability of a living cell coming into being in any other manner besides the input of energy and INFORMATION, you'd find that the probability of you dying for lack of air is many orders of magnitude greater. If you were to play the multi-state lottery every day of your life and win the jackpot on every ticket, for about 90 years, you begin to approach the odds against the making a single living cell by any known or conceivable method that does NOT require the input of detailed INFORMATION for its construction. I am talking about numbers with three and four digit EXPONENTS of powers of ten. It is estimated that there are about 10^80 atomic particles in the known universe. Your odds of finding ONE particularly identified of these is many orders of magnitude better than the odds of making a single living cell by chance. Still it is not IMPOSSIBLE.
...Science is about the pursuit of understanding and knowledge....
Really!? The understanding of what? Science is really good at answering "how" questions, marginally capable of answering a few "why" questions and totally unable to answer "who" questions. The "who" questions centered on God is the realm of faith and religions as are the most important "why" questions, such as: Why are we here? Science can only reveal some truth in the areas our senses or extensions thereof can perceive. When it comes to questions of origins, there are no experiments we can do to verify or discount any particular theories or conjectures. There are many theories of origins, but all of them rest on untestable assumptions.
The gap between simple organic molecules and a living single cell is huge. DNA molecules are code carriers, analagous to say floppy disk, containing the digital (not binary but 4 level) instructions for building a variety of proteins, including the proteins that make up the DNA. One nagging question: What came first, the DNA that carries the instructions to make proteins or the proteins that make up the DNA carrier of these instructions?
What came first, the computer hardware or the software that gives the instructions on how to build the computer? Probabalistic evolution does not give a satisfying answer to this, but the postulating of a designer does in both the case of the DNA and the computer. Of course even the most careful examination of the design does NOT give us any information of the origin of the designer. That is the realm of faith and religion, NOT science.
...what evolution can do over such vast time spans...
No system has ever been OBSERVED to have become more orderly over time. Time is the enemy of evolution by probabalistic processes. To create order it takes at least two things: Energy and Information. If evolution as commonly postulated were true, why have the best efforts of intelligent scientists failed so far to make *any* kind of self-replicating device of even a millionth of the number of functioning parts that a living single cell contains. This would not have to replicate a cell, but be *any* kind of device that can perform the equivalent functions of a "simple" one celled living organism. Why does something that escapes the best efforts of science get attributed to a probabalistic mechanism? The gap between living and non-living matter is astronomical.
...If the complexity of a single cell was Intelligently Designed by some kind of God, then who designed God?...
That is not a question science is equipped to nor needs to answer, but is a question reserved for faith and religion. I do not need to know the designer of say an automobile in order to explore its function and use it to get me around. If it is a well designed car, I can gain a measure of respect and admiration for the genius of its designer, but whether I appreciate the designer or not does not prevent the vehicle from being useful. Its design might even generate the desire in me to want to get to know the designer.
All "laws" in the human realm are made by lawgivers, legislators. Why is it so incongruous to conceive of a lawgiver who authored the laws of physics. If the laws and parameters of physics were not exactly as they are, you and I would not be here to discuss them. Thus the laws of physics are the product of a mind also. We can study and apply these laws of physics, appreciate their wisdom and completeness and stand in awe and admiration of their author. Whether we decide to appreciate the author does not prevent these laws from governing us and our world and for us to make them work in our favor by seeking to understand them.
To do true science, it is totally unneccessary to answer that question. That is the realm of religion and faith. Science tries to figure out how this world works, not who originated it. Science cannot answer that question. We would very much like to know how this world originated, but that is a question that science cannot probe. Science can tell us that there was a beginning, but nothing about what there was before that "beginning". That is in the realm of faith and religion. There are many religious theories, but science cannot prove or disprove those.
The mathematical definition of "random" does not exist in the physical world; neither do the mathematical constructs of nothing (zero) and infinity. Even so called empty space is not a nothing but has definite electrical and magentic properties.
The problem is that the Universe is finite and infinity is only a mathematical concept that does not exist in the Universe that science can understand. The length of time the Universe is BELIEVED to have existed is FAR too short for even the simplest life forms to have come into being without some sort of intelligent input.
Actually, the sun is and remains a highly ordered, very carefully balanced thermonuclear fusion device, the power output of which is far more constant, over vast spans of time, than what comes out of the sockets in your walls. There is nothing "random" about the structure of the sun. The universe is a closed system and there is no known transport mechanism other than intelligence that can reduce entropy in one part of it at the expense of increasing in another part.
The creation event, or "big bang" created the raw material from which the things that science can deal with are constructed. Like the raw materials we dig out of the Earth, it requires information to order these into the advanced functionality we endow our human creations. Likewise the raw materials created in the "Big Bang" have been ordered very carefully into all the things studied by science through an input of immese amounts of information. Religion is the postulating of the source of this information. Only faith can, but science cannot determine the source, but only explore its effects and by understanding and exploring these effects accrue benefits to us all.
...but I think they're totally extracurricular to science...
Indeed they are, not contradictory, but complementary. The God who is invites His creatures to carefully study what He has created as an additional avenue to get to know Him. He tells us this in a book called the Bible, but He leaves the choice of whether you want to accept this up to you. Contrary to what so many have done and still do in His name, given the chance, He does NOT cram Himself down your throat, but invites you gently to get to know Him. As you do get to know Him personally, you will appreciate and stand in awe of the superlative design of this world all the more and if you are a scientist, wish to explore it with renewed energy.
...what evolution can do over such vast time spans...
I never mention time at all in my orginal post. Evolution may be able to explain some things, but there are some others that do not fit the evolutionary model, no matter how much time, short of infinity, you postulate. When the theory of evolution was first put forth, scientists of that day believed that the Universe has always existed. Einstein and other modern physicists have laid that notion to rest. We now know that space-time and matter-energy did not always exist, but had a definite beginning. No matter how far in time you place this beginning, it limits how many times the evolutionary dice can be rolled. Evolution without the input of some direction from a source of information does not allow enough time for the incredible complexity of living things. Men have always had various notions of what or who that source of intelligence may be like and that is of course the realm of faith, not science. However I do not think that science and faith need to be in an exclusive OR relationship, but can exist peaceably side by side and even be complementary. Early scientists, such as Newton, Pascal, Faraday and many others were also men of faith. Of course there have been and are some, both in the camp of faith and in the camp of science who have preached that the two are contradictory and cannot both be true. I don't see why not.
If you found a watch or other technological gadget somewhere, which you had never come across before, and realized it was the product of an intelligence, does it naturally follow that you then stop investigating the object?....a mere 6000 years ago....
I did not make any reference to time at all and the time it takes to create an intelligent complicated device is not relevant. What is relevant however is that the device contains an incredible amount of INFORMATION, which CANNOT, according information theory arise from randomness, but only from another source of information. 10^99 monkeys will NOT ever type the works of Shakespeare in the known or conjectured time the Universe has been in existence. This can be mathematically proven....It's believed that self-replicating molecules...... It's believed that mitochondria....
Yes indeed -- "It is BELIEVED" and yet you tell me that belief has no place in science. I always thought that science is what we KNOW, not what we believe! Why should believing in a Creator stifle science? Early scientists, who discovered many of the principles and physical laws our modern world operates under, such as Newton, Pascal, Faraday and most of their contemporaries believed in a Creator God who created order and symmetry in the cosmos and therefore man could explore this order and derive benefit from knowing some of the details of how the Creator put this world together. I see no contradiction of true science and faith in an intelligent creator God....and I, as a scientist and a Christian, see no contradiction between evolution and my faith...
Neither do I. Evolution can explain certain aspects of our Cosmos reasonably well, but has severe problems with others. The origin of information is one of them. This subject was not given much thought in Darwin's time, but with the advent of advanced information processing devices, much work has been and is still being done on information theory. One of the goals of information science is to come up with a self-programming computer, but sofar no one has even developed a workable theory how that might be accomplished without supplying the needed information externally first.
...but how do games on MacX verify their disks?...
I don't play games much, but most Mac programs have a code that must be typed into the computer the first time a program is run. I now that some games, such as Age of Empires II can run from a mounted disk image rather than having a physical CD in the drive. It is still neccessary to input the installation code the first time these programs run. Installing most Mac software just involves dragging a file from the CD to the Applications folder.
Appeared from where and how? We know that in our experience, something man-made, such as a car does not just appear, but is the product of intelligent design and purposeful construction, all arising out of a thing we call mind. Does information just arise out of nowhere? Nobody will postulate that even a pencil just appeared, yet why is it BELIEVED that even a singe cell 'appeared' out of seemingly nowhere? Microbiology has shown that a "simple" cell is more complicated by far than anything ever designed by humans. The astounding design and information content of even the simplest living things is at attributed to all sorts of mechanisms and causes, except one: That a superior MIND is the originator of us and all life. Indeed, as you say, life could be common in the universe, but why can it not be attributed to a mind that has made it happen in many places.
Why is it so hard to admit that the order and information content of the "natural" world is the product of a mind just as the products of our modern technological world are conceived in the minds of their creators? All of science would still be just as fascinating and useful if that BELIEF were accepted as the cause for the origin of the order, design and laws that scientists seek to explore.
To a degree that may be true, but most Windows programs are still written for the PERSONAL computer paradigm which assumes that the user/owner has complete control over every bit on the computer. The *NIX flavors, including OSX don't make this assumption since the users of a multi-user system don't have unfettered access unless they are root/administrator users. If MS wants to have a more secure OS, they will have to make the new upcoming Windows into a true multi-user system. This will break many, if not most existing programs, especially the games you mention. If installing any software, including spyware, rootkits or other malware, requires an admin password and the user does not have/give it, then the new Windows should be quite secure, but at the expense of breaking most, if not all backwards compatibility.
OSX does not allow any programs to directly access hardware. For this reason, all OS9 programs that attempt this no longer function even under the compatibility mode Apple provides for the old software. All my MIDI, old scanners, printing devices, X-10 controllers and most games no longer worked. Therefore, the transition to OSX was not exactly inexpensive, but it was well worth it to no longer have my computer crash again and again.
My understanding is that remote network access to the Mac under OSX is turned off by default, as are most other remote server-like services, such as FTP and telnet. Even file and printer sharing are off by default. Local to me is when a user can sit down in front of the actual computer and type commands on a keyboard attached to the same..
I get this mental image of millions of Windows users sitting in hell in front of Windows computers running at 1000Ghz, (really hot) moaning and groaning as the demons install a million spyware programs and viruses on each system, making it run slower than an 8080 with 16K of RAM trying to run XP.
... they just can't offer me the wide assortment of programs..
You must be doing some extraordinary things with your computer. Exactly what JOBS (not programs) are you doing with your Wintel box that a Mac cannot? Games is about the only common applications category that Wintel is better than a Mac. However, I consider spending a whole pile of $$$ for a PC to play games on a huge waste. A dedicated game console is a much better choice than a general pupose computer, Wintel or Mac. Of course you also get a wide assortment of spyware and other malware for your Wintel machine that won't run on a Mac.
If the next iteration of Windows is going to be truly secure (don't hold your breath) then you'll be likely buying all new software anyway. If most of your software still has to run under the new Windows, then the new version cannot be significantly more secure that the present systems. The recent XP upgrade broke quite a few programs. So if you are planning to upgrade to the new Windows when it finally appears, you'll end up buying your software again anyway. For $500. you now can try the Mac Mini and find out how well it does or does not meet your needs.
That means physical accress to the machine, does it not? In that case, such as on a public Mac, there is no need to be a skilled hacker, all that is needed is an OSX install disk. NO machine can be secured against anyone who has physical access to it. Local exploits are essentially meaningless because if the bad guy has physical access to your computer, your have bigger problems.
Indeed true! What I can't understand is that the **AA folks must surely know this and yet they spend millions on useless DRM schemes. This DRM stuff may thwart the normal end users, but then they are not the ones that cause huge losses to the content creators. It is the professional "pirates" that make and sell thousands of bogus copies the **AA people should be concentrating their legal guns on, rather than some grandma or 12 year old kid. If they would reduce their prices, they would get to the point where they would still make enough money and illegal copying would diminish to the point they could live with, because most people would rather own a genuine copy than a pirate version if the price difference were not so huge.
Slashdot Mirror
How can such a law be enforced outside of the state of Utah? If a user in Utah dials an ISP in another state, how will the Utah enforcers ever check this and if they do find the ISP is in another state, how will they haul that ISP into their courts? If the ISP ignores the Utah authoirities, can the Utah cops come into another state to arrest the ISP?
...Of course, the police, FBI, courts... can get your ID by just asking your ISP...
That assumes a crook doesn't use one of the millions of unsecured public and private access points with a laptop. Even with this new technique, the law enforcers would only know that a given laptop was used from a given place at a certain time. If this identification could be made very fast in real time, they might be able to nab the laptop operator before he/she goes elsewhere.
...The purpose of the armed populace is as a deterrent...
All this discussion on guns is off topic as far as I am concerned. However, gun ownership can be a deterrent to tyranny. If only one out of ten Jews in Nazi Germany and the occupied countries would have had a guns and managed to kill one or more Gestapo agents who came to arrest them in the middle of the night, the Nazis would have had 600,000 or more dead Gestapo goons. I suspect that places like Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz would have had few, if any Jewish prisoners. If a tyrant knows that statistically one of ten of the "enforcers" will die trying to arrest some members of a group of "undesireables", any tyranny government will find it difficult to find enough enforcers if the group of "undesireables" numbers in the millions. Many guns in the hands of many people DOES place severe, if not insurmountable retraints on potential tyrants. If enough people are unwilling to give up their guns, even if any government could or would declare them "illegal", there is no way to enforce such a "law", because a such government could not get enough enforcers willing to risk their necks. Only if that government can persuade a large percentage of the general population of the "undesireability" of a given group is there a possibility of eliminating that group. However if that group and their symphathizers numbers in the millions and most of them are armed, it may result in a civil war in that country.
...neither of which have any redeeming social value...
Businesses will sell anything that someone will buy. The more people are willing to buy a certain product (cigarettes, guns, pornography, drugs etc.) the more businesses there will be trying to sell such items. Even if the Governemt outlaws certain products, (drugs, porn, certain weapons) there will still be some business that will sell these, if people exist who will buy such stuff. All that outlawing an item does in dramatically raise its price making it unaffordable to most. Social value has nothing to do with this unfortunately.
...does not make it impossible...
I did not say impossible, but improbable and those two are not the same. It is possible for all the air molecules in your room all congregate in one corner and you die for lack of air, but it is not likely. If you do the math, the probability of a living cell coming into being in any other manner besides the input of energy and INFORMATION, you'd find that the probability of you dying for lack of air is many orders of magnitude greater. If you were to play the multi-state lottery every day of your life and win the jackpot on every ticket, for about 90 years, you begin to approach the odds against the making a single living cell by any known or conceivable method that does NOT require the input of detailed INFORMATION for its construction. I am talking about numbers with three and four digit EXPONENTS of powers of ten. It is estimated that there are about 10^80 atomic particles in the known universe. Your odds of finding ONE particularly identified of these is many orders of magnitude better than the odds of making a single living cell by chance. Still it is not IMPOSSIBLE.
...Science is about the pursuit of understanding and knowledge....
Really!? The understanding of what? Science is really good at answering "how" questions, marginally capable of answering a few "why" questions and totally unable to answer "who" questions. The "who" questions centered on God is the realm of faith and religions as are the most important "why" questions, such as: Why are we here? Science can only reveal some truth in the areas our senses or extensions thereof can perceive. When it comes to questions of origins, there are no experiments we can do to verify or discount any particular theories or conjectures. There are many theories of origins, but all of them rest on untestable assumptions.
...gives rise to simple organic molecules...
The gap between simple organic molecules and a living single cell is huge. DNA molecules are code carriers, analagous to say floppy disk, containing the digital (not binary but 4 level) instructions for building a variety of proteins, including the proteins that make up the DNA. One nagging question: What came first, the DNA that carries the instructions to make proteins or the proteins that make up the DNA carrier of these instructions?
What came first, the computer hardware or the software that gives the instructions on how to build the computer? Probabalistic evolution does not give a satisfying answer to this, but the postulating of a designer does in both the case of the DNA and the computer. Of course even the most careful examination of the design does NOT give us any information of the origin of the designer. That is the realm of faith and religion, NOT science.
...what evolution can do over such vast time spans ...
No system has ever been OBSERVED to have become more orderly over time. Time is the enemy of evolution by probabalistic processes. To create order it takes at least two things: Energy and Information. If evolution as commonly postulated were true, why have the best efforts of intelligent scientists failed so far to make *any* kind of self-replicating device of even a millionth of the number of functioning parts that a living single cell contains. This would not have to replicate a cell, but be *any* kind of device that can perform the equivalent functions of a "simple" one celled living organism. Why does something that escapes the best efforts of science get attributed to a probabalistic mechanism? The gap between living and non-living matter is astronomical.
...If the complexity of a single cell was Intelligently Designed by some kind of God, then who designed God?...
That is not a question science is equipped to nor needs to answer, but is a question reserved for faith and religion. I do not need to know the designer of say an automobile in order to explore its function and use it to get me around. If it is a well designed car, I can gain a measure of respect and admiration for the genius of its designer, but whether I appreciate the designer or not does not prevent the vehicle from being useful. Its design might even generate the desire in me to want to get to know the designer.
All "laws" in the human realm are made by lawgivers, legislators. Why is it so incongruous to conceive of a lawgiver who authored the laws of physics. If the laws and parameters of physics were not exactly as they are, you and I would not be here to discuss them. Thus the laws of physics are the product of a mind also. We can study and apply these laws of physics, appreciate their wisdom and completeness and stand in awe and admiration of their author. Whether we decide to appreciate the author does not prevent these laws from governing us and our world and for us to make them work in our favor by seeking to understand them.
...how did the superior mind originate?...
To do true science, it is totally unneccessary to answer that question. That is the realm of religion and faith. Science tries to figure out how this world works, not who originated it. Science cannot answer that question. We would very much like to know how this world originated, but that is a question that science cannot probe. Science can tell us that there was a beginning, but nothing about what there was before that "beginning". That is in the realm of faith and religion. There are many religious theories, but science cannot prove or disprove those.
The mathematical definition of "random" does not exist in the physical world; neither do the mathematical constructs of nothing (zero) and infinity. Even so called empty space is not a nothing but has definite electrical and magentic properties.
...Like the infinite monkeys theory...
The problem is that the Universe is finite and infinity is only a mathematical concept that does not exist in the Universe that science can understand. The length of time the Universe is BELIEVED to have existed is FAR too short for even the simplest life forms to have come into being without some sort of intelligent input.
...the sun is graduallly messing itself up...
Actually, the sun is and remains a highly ordered, very carefully balanced thermonuclear fusion device, the power output of which is far more constant, over vast spans of time, than what comes out of the sockets in your walls. There is nothing "random" about the structure of the sun. The universe is a closed system and there is no known transport mechanism other than intelligence that can reduce entropy in one part of it at the expense of increasing in another part.
The creation event, or "big bang" created the raw material from which the things that science can deal with are constructed. Like the raw materials we dig out of the Earth, it requires information to order these into the advanced functionality we endow our human creations. Likewise the raw materials created in the "Big Bang" have been ordered very carefully into all the things studied by science through an input of immese amounts of information. Religion is the postulating of the source of this information. Only faith can, but science cannot determine the source, but only explore its effects and by understanding and exploring these effects accrue benefits to us all.
...but I think they're totally extracurricular to science...
Indeed they are, not contradictory, but complementary. The God who is invites His creatures to carefully study what He has created as an additional avenue to get to know Him. He tells us this in a book called the Bible, but He leaves the choice of whether you want to accept this up to you. Contrary to what so many have done and still do in His name, given the chance, He does NOT cram Himself down your throat, but invites you gently to get to know Him. As you do get to know Him personally, you will appreciate and stand in awe of the superlative design of this world all the more and if you are a scientist, wish to explore it with renewed energy.
...what evolution can do over such vast time spans ...
I never mention time at all in my orginal post. Evolution may be able to explain some things, but there are some others that do not fit the evolutionary model, no matter how much time, short of infinity, you postulate. When the theory of evolution was first put forth, scientists of that day believed that the Universe has always existed. Einstein and other modern physicists have laid that notion to rest. We now know that space-time and matter-energy did not always exist, but had a definite beginning. No matter how far in time you place this beginning, it limits how many times the evolutionary dice can be rolled. Evolution without the input of some direction from a source of information does not allow enough time for the incredible complexity of living things. Men have always had various notions of what or who that source of intelligence may be like and that is of course the realm of faith, not science. However I do not think that science and faith need to be in an exclusive OR relationship, but can exist peaceably side by side and even be complementary. Early scientists, such as Newton, Pascal, Faraday and many others were also men of faith. Of course there have been and are some, both in the camp of faith and in the camp of science who have preached that the two are contradictory and cannot both be true. I don't see why not.
...then stop investigating...
...a mere 6000 years ago....
...It's believed that self-replicating molecules... ... It's believed that mitochondria....
...and I, as a scientist and a Christian, see no contradiction between evolution and my faith...
If you found a watch or other technological gadget somewhere, which you had never come across before, and realized it was the product of an intelligence, does it naturally follow that you then stop investigating the object?.
I did not make any reference to time at all and the time it takes to create an intelligent complicated device is not relevant. What is relevant however is that the device contains an incredible amount of INFORMATION, which CANNOT, according information theory arise from randomness, but only from another source of information. 10^99 monkeys will NOT ever type the works of Shakespeare in the known or conjectured time the Universe has been in existence. This can be mathematically proven.
Yes indeed -- "It is BELIEVED" and yet you tell me that belief has no place in science. I always thought that science is what we KNOW, not what we believe! Why should believing in a Creator stifle science? Early scientists, who discovered many of the principles and physical laws our modern world operates under, such as Newton, Pascal, Faraday and most of their contemporaries believed in a Creator God who created order and symmetry in the cosmos and therefore man could explore this order and derive benefit from knowing some of the details of how the Creator put this world together. I see no contradiction of true science and faith in an intelligent creator God.
Neither do I. Evolution can explain certain aspects of our Cosmos reasonably well, but has severe problems with others. The origin of information is one of them. This subject was not given much thought in Darwin's time, but with the advent of advanced information processing devices, much work has been and is still being done on information theory. One of the goals of information science is to come up with a self-programming computer, but sofar no one has even developed a workable theory how that might be accomplished without supplying the needed information externally first.
...but how do games on MacX verify their disks?...
I don't play games much, but most Mac programs have a code that must be typed into the computer the first time a program is run. I now that some games, such as Age of Empires II can run from a mounted disk image rather than having a physical CD in the drive. It is still neccessary to input the installation code the first time these programs run. Installing most Mac software just involves dragging a file from the CD to the Applications folder.
...Then something appeared...
Appeared from where and how? We know that in our experience, something man-made, such as a car does not just appear, but is the product of intelligent design and purposeful construction, all arising out of a thing we call mind. Does information just arise out of nowhere? Nobody will postulate that even a pencil just appeared, yet why is it BELIEVED that even a singe cell 'appeared' out of seemingly nowhere? Microbiology has shown that a "simple" cell is more complicated by far than anything ever designed by humans. The astounding design and information content of even the simplest living things is at attributed to all sorts of mechanisms and causes, except one: That a superior MIND is the originator of us and all life. Indeed, as you say, life could be common in the universe, but why can it not be attributed to a mind that has made it happen in many places.
Why is it so hard to admit that the order and information content of the "natural" world is the product of a mind just as the products of our modern technological world are conceived in the minds of their creators? All of science would still be just as fascinating and useful if that BELIEF were accepted as the cause for the origin of the order, design and laws that scientists seek to explore.
see my reply to previous post, (aardvarkjoe) concerning services turned off on Max OSX
...mostly under the heading of Bad Programming...
To a degree that may be true, but most Windows programs are still written for the PERSONAL computer paradigm which assumes that the user/owner has complete control over every bit on the computer. The *NIX flavors, including OSX don't make this assumption since the users of a multi-user system don't have unfettered access unless they are root/administrator users. If MS wants to have a more secure OS, they will have to make the new upcoming Windows into a true multi-user system. This will break many, if not most existing programs, especially the games you mention. If installing any software, including spyware, rootkits or other malware, requires an admin password and the user does not have/give it, then the new Windows should be quite secure, but at the expense of breaking most, if not all backwards compatibility.
OSX does not allow any programs to directly access hardware. For this reason, all OS9 programs that attempt this no longer function even under the compatibility mode Apple provides for the old software. All my MIDI, old scanners, printing devices, X-10 controllers and most games no longer worked. Therefore, the transition to OSX was not exactly inexpensive, but it was well worth it to no longer have my computer crash again and again.
...I get this mental image of a lone mac user...
My understanding is that remote network access to the Mac under OSX is turned off by default, as are most other remote server-like services, such as FTP and telnet. Even file and printer sharing are off by default. Local to me is when a user can sit down in front of the actual computer and type commands on a keyboard attached to the same..
...I get this mental image of a lone mac user...
I get this mental image of millions of Windows users sitting in hell in front of Windows computers running at 1000Ghz, (really hot) moaning and groaning as the demons install a million spyware programs and viruses on each system, making it run slower than an 8080 with 16K of RAM trying to run XP.
... they just can't offer me the wide assortment of programs..
You must be doing some extraordinary things with your computer. Exactly what JOBS (not programs) are you doing with your Wintel box that a Mac cannot? Games is about the only common applications category that Wintel is better than a Mac. However, I consider spending a whole pile of $$$ for a PC to play games on a huge waste. A dedicated game console is a much better choice than a general pupose computer, Wintel or Mac. Of course you also get a wide assortment of spyware and other malware for your Wintel machine that won't run on a Mac.
If the next iteration of Windows is going to be truly secure (don't hold your breath) then you'll be likely buying all new software anyway. If most of your software still has to run under the new Windows, then the new version cannot be significantly more secure that the present systems. The recent XP upgrade broke quite a few programs. So if you are planning to upgrade to the new Windows when it finally appears, you'll end up buying your software again anyway. For $500. you now can try the Mac Mini and find out how well it does or does not meet your needs.
...his local shell access ..
That means physical accress to the machine, does it not? In that case, such as on a public Mac, there is no need to be a skilled hacker, all that is needed is an OSX install disk. NO machine can be secured against anyone who has physical access to it. Local exploits are essentially meaningless because if the bad guy has physical access to your computer, your have bigger problems.
...run Admin because some games require it...
In Windows, not only games require the user to have admin privs, but other programs also want admin.
... Thus, all DRM is breakable...
Indeed true! What I can't understand is that the **AA folks must surely know this and yet they spend millions on useless DRM schemes. This DRM stuff may thwart the normal end users, but then they are not the ones that cause huge losses to the content creators. It is the professional "pirates" that make and sell thousands of bogus copies the **AA people should be concentrating their legal guns on, rather than some grandma or 12 year old kid. If they would reduce their prices, they would get to the point where they would still make enough money and illegal copying would diminish to the point they could live with, because most people would rather own a genuine copy than a pirate version if the price difference were not so huge.