Intelligent design is what happens when Creationism evolves to deal with an environment that's placing stresses on it and new predators that want to eat it.
That was one of the ancient Greek arguments about whether the gods were really omnipotent or not, but if that's all that you did with it, your professor did you a disservice by leading you up to a beach, mentioning that there's sand on it, and then leading you off somewhere else without suggesting that you could jump in the ocean a few feet away or that there were lots of giants whose shoulders you could stand on while looking at it.
The standard response is that evil is the result of human free will, and that free will is enough more important than even the obvious evils in the world that there's still justice. But that's just one place to jump into the ocean; if you'd like to jump in the same ocean twice, another is to look at questions of what you mean by "evil" and "justice" and "omniscience" and "omnipotence" and talk about whether they're simple enough concepts for syllogisms to apply to, because obviously they're not.
The appropriate Null Hypothesis is that "everything has always been like it is now", and Darwinian Evolution and Intelligent Design and Pastafarianism and various creation myths and the Big Bang and Continuous Creation are all attempts at looking at the world to explain why that might or might not be true. "Why are we here?" is a Philosophy question; "Why is everything really complex? That seems surprising" is more of a science question. Religious hypotheses are more appropriate in a philosophy class, where the problem is not just about the physical world, but about the mystery of consciousness. In a science class, they provide you a hypothesis that says "Evolution happened, all in one week in 4004BC, and it was able to work that fast because there was an Intelligent Designer pulling the strings", which is somewhat testable.
And I suspect that the legislature really, really does not want to go there.
You're wrong about CCC, at least compared to my experience with them in the late 70s. Bill Bright wasn't super-charismatic, and his charisma was "let's go change the world together", not "look at me, I'm cool" - the organization wasn't particularly about him. There was no pressure to drop non-CCC friends (dating unbelievers was discouraged, but having unbeliever friends was not only expected, but how were you going to share the Gospel with unbelievers if you didn't know unbelievers.) You didn't have to go to meetings, but the meetings and small-group Bible studies were what CCC did. There wasn't any "confession" business, though there was a lot of encouragement about introspection.
While personally I'm a Christian, I have to admire the intelligence of the design of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He's just the right size for His Noodley Appendages to get into all the nook and crannies of the Evolution In Schools debate, and cross over into the rest of Deliberately Bad Science (e.g.. the global warming "controversy", which is why the Republicans' Corporate Sponsors are supporting the "evolution controversy".) And the FSM is starting to acquire some antiquity - the Pirate meme is kind of fading, but still useful.
And of course "intelligent design" is entirely the wrong Null Hypothesis. The correct one is "Everything has always been exactly the same as it is today", and Evolution and the Big Bang and Continuous Creation and religious origin myths are attempts at explaining how and why that might or might not be true.
Yup. There's been somebody trying to push this to the state governments for a few years. I don't know if they're trying to sell a product to get states to mandate it (or now, Feds), or if they're Federal or state cops trying to get a privacy-invasion technology deployed under the guise of tax revenue enhancement. The proposals that the states have gotten have been for devices that are continuously tracking your location (because after all, if you drive across state borders, your state should only tax you for the miles driven inside your state), and just because that argument doesn't really apply for a Federal tax, it's still part of the sales pitch. They're less susceptible to mission creep than you'd expect because they already started as a way-overblown program, so the mission is pre-creeped on arrival.
At a state level, almost all states require annual car registration and usually inspection, so they could just check the odometer then.
I've never bothered tracking down the people who are pushing this, but the idea's been floating around the states for a few years - somebody was trying to push it in Oregon, maybe five years ago, and also trying to get California interested. The real question is why, and who's backing them.
It could be just some guy who's obsessed about a "good idea".
It could be some small company that's developed technology that would be useful and is trying to sell it.
It could be the FBI/DEA/etc. fronting it as a tax alternative. (No, I don't have tinfoil stuck in my hair, why do you ask?)
If you look at the proposals, they require putting location-tracking equipment into everybody's cars. Cars already have mileage-tracking equipment, called "odometers", and states that require annual car registration (like all of them) could get odometer readings when they do that, and there are already regulations about tamper-proofing odometers. When this was a state-level proposal, the argument that you need location-tracking is so that your state can tax miles driven in-state but not tax you for miles driven outside the state - that need goes away if it's a Federal program. Gas tax is a straightfoward low-bureaucracy tracking mechanism; these things would add a lot more bureaucracy that would typically soak up any excess revenue the program generates.
So they're proposing a radical attack on privacy which is an obvious opportunity for scope creep by subpoenas and warrants, and significant increase in costs. Either of the explanations about people who want to get the Feds to mandate people to buy their product or about Feds wanting extra surveillance capabilities could explain it. If it's the latter, I'd really rather they just mandate that everybody carry an emergency smartphone in their car (:-).
Windows does this, but only within the same/64 subnet - the network bits (typically/56 or/48) and the subnet bits (any more bits to get to/64) stay the same. IPv6 address privacy hides which computer on the subnet you're using (and because it's hiding the MAC address, also hides what manufacturer of Ethernet chip you have), but it's still giving away a lot of information, especially if you've got different subnets for wired and wireless networks (typical.) You could get fancy and modify DD-WRT to switch off the subnets you're using a bit, but they'll still be on your house's IPv6 network number.
The big win that you get from IPv6 address privacy is with laptops that you use at different locations - otherwise you'd be trackable as you move from home to Starbucks to work to the pub to that dodgy nightclub to your friend's party. (Of course, if you keep checking in with Foursquare and tweeting geotagged pictures, there's nothing IPv6 can do to help you, but it's not their problem.)
In the beginning, there was nothing, which then exploded.
The article is a newspaper report about some physics papers. Half of it's just fine (slight-post-Big-Bang black holes still being around is a perfectly reasonable concept.)
The other half apparently has at least some math to it and is trying to see what it implies, and while it's more likely to be wrong than right, unless you've gone and read the physics papers it's a bit excessive to call even that half of the article pseudo-scientific nonsense. I'm skeptical about it (after the previous universe's Big Crunch (speculative but not unpopular) there was nothing left (still ok), occupying no space because space itself no longer existed (still okayish), and that nothing had HOLES IN IT (or next to it or something), which sounds like a major stretch, but all of the scientific theories of the very early origins of the universe are pretty much of a stretch. It's something that's at least as falsifiable as any theory of the early Big Bang period.
Yes, you can use external hard drives for backups, but it's convenient to be able to make them on cheap removable media as well. (Admittedly, with terabyte drives under $100, it's less valuable than it used to be, but 25GB Blue-Ray is a lot more convenient than 4GB DVDs. You can use an external burner, I suppose.
There was a TV in the student union and some dorm lounges, but not many. My fraternity had one down in the basement lounge. On the other hand, I went to school in an area that was hilly enough that you couldn't really get TV without cable or a really big antenna tower. One neighbor in the dorms had a TV one year, but could only sort of get one UHF station, badly.
That was a good thing - it kept us from wasting much time watching TV. We did watch Star Trek reruns, and occasional sports or movies, but not much. If we wanted to do things other than studying, we'd actual do them with other people, or go hang out in the pub.
Osama bin Laden is a sufficiently important target that he rates a personalized attack. They'd might or might not have wanted to capture him alive, but they very certainly would want to be able to say "We got Osama bin Laden himself, here's the evidence" as opposed to "We bombed the house and killed an old guy with a beard, but he's too burned to be sure if it's him", not only because they lose the chance to brag, but because otherwise they've got to keep hunting. It's one thing if you think he's somewhere in the Tora Bora mountainsides, but if you think you know which house it's worth a raid.
W00t! Somebody actually used the term "motherlode" correctly, and didn't spell it "mother load"! You don't see that every day, and loosing correct grammar upon the world isn't an everyday experience! W00t!
(Should I feed the troll? Awww, c'mon, it'll be fun!)
An IPv4 address typically identifies a single household, not a single individual.
And while sometimes the activity that leads to a search warrant based on an IP address rates the term "pieces of human waste", it's usually not child pornography, it's usually just music or movie downloading, and maybe the person trying to have sex with the "13-year-old girl" in the chat room is actually the 13-year-old teenage boy in the household, not the 40-year-old adult who's paying for the IP address.
Getting a warrant for a guns-drawn SWAT raid should require an extremely high amount of certainty and a lot of information about the suspect, not just the simple "we've seen him dealing weed and don't want him flushing it" level. Even a warrant for a normal polite knock on the door by an officer with a search warrant or arrest warrant ought to require higher standards than police have been getting away with lately, and if the alleged "crime" is "copyright violation", that's something that ought to be dealt with by a process server, not a cop.
There are several reasons ISPs would rather give you dynamic addresses - DHCP is easier than keeping track of address assignments, and it lets them charge you more if you care about static. (And most ISPs are planning 256 subnets per house, not just 256 host addresses.)
But the commercial interests who do advertising or who do geolocation or other tricks to sell to advertisers would *love* to have user information tracked by static IP addresses and ideally even per-device MAC addresses that can be encoded into IPv6 addrs, because that's better consumer data.
I briefly used Kaspersky anti-virus, and now lots of my files have:KAVICHS: or something like that tacked onto them as alternate data streams. When I copy those files to devices that don't support them (e.g. memory sticks using FATxx), Windows has to pop up dialog boxes to warn me that it'll be unable to copy the extra baggage. [Insert snarky comments here...]
Those crafty French persons not only provide cliche'd phrases that we're expected to adopt as binary blobs, they deliberately obfuscate them by using letters that aren't supported in normal open-source ASCII.
If you're running Linux or BSD, then either you're expected to know what you're doing, or you're running an appliance with a built-in operating system based on one of those and the appliance designers are expected to know what you're doing.
In reality, with Linux, it may be that all you're doing is letting the Update Manager manage updates for you, and using the Upgrade button after a major Ubuntu release has been available for a month, but that's ok - you'll still be running some vaguely current software with most of the recent fixes. With BSD desktops, the reality is that you're really definitely expected to know what you're doing.
Based on the comments from other people here, what you're doing may also include complaining about peripheral makers who don't give out the documentation needed to write decent open-source drivers, but that's a mostly separable problem from making sure you're running an up to date operating system.
7. IRS Audits you - you may need the records from step 1.
Step 6 is 3-7 years depending on whether the IRS is lazy or suspects you of fraud, but Step 2 if however long you hold the asset before you sell it. If it's a more complicated investment, there may be other steps involved - for instance, the company merges with another, or spins off another company, or splits their stock, or does something else weird, so now you the stock you own isn't identical to what you bought.
If you own a house, you need to keep even more records. There's the purchase of the house, and anything related to the purchasing process (real estate commissions, lawyers, everything about the mortgage), any expenses you have that increase the basis of the house (a new garage counts, painting the inside might not), and then when you sell the house, usually you're buying another one and rolling over the capital gain into it (unless it was a loss.) You probably only need to keep documentation on a single house for 7 years after you file your taxes after you sell it (maybe up to 9 if it took you the whole 2 years to buy the next house), since the tax return from rolling over the cost documents your basis.
Usually the rule is to keep purchase records 7 years after you sell something.
IT departments usually don't care about that as long as they don't have to know. I've done it before, and spending $20 to save an hour a day of watching my laptop's disk drive light spin while it was paging Firefox in and out was totally worth it.
It is possible to break a computer that way, even though there should be nothing that goes wrong in simply plugging in a memory card into a laptop, or at least nothing that shouldn't be fixable by removing the not-quite-compatible memory card. It's most likely to happen with older flakier computers, which (surprise!) are the ones you're more likely to be trying to upgrade. I have in fact done it once, and had to give the IT department a puzzled "Hi, IT department, I don't know what's wrong with the laptop, it's just stopped working", and entirely did not feel bad about that happening with an old piece of junk laptop that should have been replaced a year earlier anyway. So do a backup first.
There are several free X servers that can run on WIndows - Xming, Cygwin, etc. Run one of them and log in to a nearby Linux server that has enough RAM to actually run Firefox on. Or boot Linux from a memory stick.
Or if you only have Windows servers, use Windows Remote Desktop to run the browser on one of them, though that's a bit more awkward.
ICANN's always been about Intellectual Property, not the Internet Protocol. So they DO have some idea about what job they're doing and how it works, it's just not what you or I wanted to have them doing. And they spent a long time making sure community involvement in their policy-making didn't happen (such as Karl Auerbach's membership on their board), because internet users were not the community they were working for.
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Intelligent design is what happens when Creationism evolves to deal with an environment that's placing stresses on it and new predators that want to eat it.
That was one of the ancient Greek arguments about whether the gods were really omnipotent or not, but if that's all that you did with it, your professor did you a disservice by leading you up to a beach, mentioning that there's sand on it, and then leading you off somewhere else without suggesting that you could jump in the ocean a few feet away or that there were lots of giants whose shoulders you could stand on while looking at it.
The standard response is that evil is the result of human free will, and that free will is enough more important than even the obvious evils in the world that there's still justice. But that's just one place to jump into the ocean; if you'd like to jump in the same ocean twice, another is to look at questions of what you mean by "evil" and "justice" and "omniscience" and "omnipotence" and talk about whether they're simple enough concepts for syllogisms to apply to, because obviously they're not.
Absolutely - I've only dated carbon-based life forms, and have no intention of changing, thank you!
The appropriate Null Hypothesis is that "everything has always been like it is now", and Darwinian Evolution and Intelligent Design and Pastafarianism and various creation myths and the Big Bang and Continuous Creation are all attempts at looking at the world to explain why that might or might not be true. "Why are we here?" is a Philosophy question; "Why is everything really complex? That seems surprising" is more of a science question. Religious hypotheses are more appropriate in a philosophy class, where the problem is not just about the physical world, but about the mystery of consciousness. In a science class, they provide you a hypothesis that says "Evolution happened, all in one week in 4004BC, and it was able to work that fast because there was an Intelligent Designer pulling the strings", which is somewhat testable.
And I suspect that the legislature really, really does not want to go there.
You're wrong about CCC, at least compared to my experience with them in the late 70s. Bill Bright wasn't super-charismatic, and his charisma was "let's go change the world together", not "look at me, I'm cool" - the organization wasn't particularly about him. There was no pressure to drop non-CCC friends (dating unbelievers was discouraged, but having unbeliever friends was not only expected, but how were you going to share the Gospel with unbelievers if you didn't know unbelievers.) You didn't have to go to meetings, but the meetings and small-group Bible studies were what CCC did. There wasn't any "confession" business, though there was a lot of encouragement about introspection.
While personally I'm a Christian, I have to admire the intelligence of the design of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He's just the right size for His Noodley Appendages to get into all the nook and crannies of the Evolution In Schools debate, and cross over into the rest of Deliberately Bad Science (e.g.. the global warming "controversy", which is why the Republicans' Corporate Sponsors are supporting the "evolution controversy".) And the FSM is starting to acquire some antiquity - the Pirate meme is kind of fading, but still useful.
And of course "intelligent design" is entirely the wrong Null Hypothesis. The correct one is "Everything has always been exactly the same as it is today", and Evolution and the Big Bang and Continuous Creation and religious origin myths are attempts at explaining how and why that might or might not be true.
Yup. There's been somebody trying to push this to the state governments for a few years. I don't know if they're trying to sell a product to get states to mandate it (or now, Feds), or if they're Federal or state cops trying to get a privacy-invasion technology deployed under the guise of tax revenue enhancement. The proposals that the states have gotten have been for devices that are continuously tracking your location (because after all, if you drive across state borders, your state should only tax you for the miles driven inside your state), and just because that argument doesn't really apply for a Federal tax, it's still part of the sales pitch. They're less susceptible to mission creep than you'd expect because they already started as a way-overblown program, so the mission is pre-creeped on arrival.
At a state level, almost all states require annual car registration and usually inspection, so they could just check the odometer then.
I've never bothered tracking down the people who are pushing this, but the idea's been floating around the states for a few years - somebody was trying to push it in Oregon, maybe five years ago, and also trying to get California interested. The real question is why, and who's backing them.
If you look at the proposals, they require putting location-tracking equipment into everybody's cars. Cars already have mileage-tracking equipment, called "odometers", and states that require annual car registration (like all of them) could get odometer readings when they do that, and there are already regulations about tamper-proofing odometers. When this was a state-level proposal, the argument that you need location-tracking is so that your state can tax miles driven in-state but not tax you for miles driven outside the state - that need goes away if it's a Federal program. Gas tax is a straightfoward low-bureaucracy tracking mechanism; these things would add a lot more bureaucracy that would typically soak up any excess revenue the program generates.
So they're proposing a radical attack on privacy which is an obvious opportunity for scope creep by subpoenas and warrants, and significant increase in costs. Either of the explanations about people who want to get the Feds to mandate people to buy their product or about Feds wanting extra surveillance capabilities could explain it. If it's the latter, I'd really rather they just mandate that everybody carry an emergency smartphone in their car (:-).
My wife once saw a sign that had both "everyday" and "every day" on it, and they were both used correctly - she was highly impressed.
Windows does this, but only within the same /64 subnet - the network bits (typically /56 or /48) and the subnet bits (any more bits to get to /64) stay the same. IPv6 address privacy hides which computer on the subnet you're using (and because it's hiding the MAC address, also hides what manufacturer of Ethernet chip you have), but it's still giving away a lot of information, especially if you've got different subnets for wired and wireless networks (typical.) You could get fancy and modify DD-WRT to switch off the subnets you're using a bit, but they'll still be on your house's IPv6 network number.
The big win that you get from IPv6 address privacy is with laptops that you use at different locations - otherwise you'd be trackable as you move from home to Starbucks to work to the pub to that dodgy nightclub to your friend's party. (Of course, if you keep checking in with Foursquare and tweeting geotagged pictures, there's nothing IPv6 can do to help you, but it's not their problem.)
In the beginning, there was nothing, which then exploded.
The article is a newspaper report about some physics papers. Half of it's just fine (slight-post-Big-Bang black holes still being around is a perfectly reasonable concept.)
The other half apparently has at least some math to it and is trying to see what it implies, and while it's more likely to be wrong than right, unless you've gone and read the physics papers it's a bit excessive to call even that half of the article pseudo-scientific nonsense. I'm skeptical about it (after the previous universe's Big Crunch (speculative but not unpopular) there was nothing left (still ok), occupying no space because space itself no longer existed (still okayish), and that nothing had HOLES IN IT (or next to it or something), which sounds like a major stretch, but all of the scientific theories of the very early origins of the universe are pretty much of a stretch. It's something that's at least as falsifiable as any theory of the early Big Bang period.
Yes, you can use external hard drives for backups, but it's convenient to be able to make them on cheap removable media as well. (Admittedly, with terabyte drives under $100, it's less valuable than it used to be, but 25GB Blue-Ray is a lot more convenient than 4GB DVDs. You can use an external burner, I suppose.
There was a TV in the student union and some dorm lounges, but not many. My fraternity had one down in the basement lounge. On the other hand, I went to school in an area that was hilly enough that you couldn't really get TV without cable or a really big antenna tower. One neighbor in the dorms had a TV one year, but could only sort of get one UHF station, badly.
That was a good thing - it kept us from wasting much time watching TV. We did watch Star Trek reruns, and occasional sports or movies, but not much. If we wanted to do things other than studying, we'd actual do them with other people, or go hang out in the pub.
Osama bin Laden is a sufficiently important target that he rates a personalized attack. They'd might or might not have wanted to capture him alive, but they very certainly would want to be able to say "We got Osama bin Laden himself, here's the evidence" as opposed to "We bombed the house and killed an old guy with a beard, but he's too burned to be sure if it's him", not only because they lose the chance to brag, but because otherwise they've got to keep hunting. It's one thing if you think he's somewhere in the Tora Bora mountainsides, but if you think you know which house it's worth a raid.
W00t! Somebody actually used the term "motherlode" correctly, and didn't spell it "mother load"! You don't see that every day, and loosing correct grammar upon the world isn't an everyday experience! W00t!
(Should I feed the troll? Awww, c'mon, it'll be fun!)
An IPv4 address typically identifies a single household, not a single individual.
And while sometimes the activity that leads to a search warrant based on an IP address rates the term "pieces of human waste", it's usually not child pornography, it's usually just music or movie downloading, and maybe the person trying to have sex with the "13-year-old girl" in the chat room is actually the 13-year-old teenage boy in the household, not the 40-year-old adult who's paying for the IP address.
Getting a warrant for a guns-drawn SWAT raid should require an extremely high amount of certainty and a lot of information about the suspect, not just the simple "we've seen him dealing weed and don't want him flushing it" level. Even a warrant for a normal polite knock on the door by an officer with a search warrant or arrest warrant ought to require higher standards than police have been getting away with lately, and if the alleged "crime" is "copyright violation", that's something that ought to be dealt with by a process server, not a cop.
There are several reasons ISPs would rather give you dynamic addresses - DHCP is easier than keeping track of address assignments, and it lets them charge you more if you care about static. (And most ISPs are planning 256 subnets per house, not just 256 host addresses.)
But the commercial interests who do advertising or who do geolocation or other tricks to sell to advertisers would *love* to have user information tracked by static IP addresses and ideally even per-device MAC addresses that can be encoded into IPv6 addrs, because that's better consumer data.
1000 watts is about what you need for a toaster. And the usual operating system for various toasters was always BSD, so what's not to like there?
I briefly used Kaspersky anti-virus, and now lots of my files have :KAVICHS: or something like that tacked onto them as alternate data streams. When I copy those files to devices that don't support them (e.g. memory sticks using FATxx), Windows has to pop up dialog boxes to warn me that it'll be unable to copy the extra baggage. [Insert snarky comments here...]
Those crafty French persons not only provide cliche'd phrases that we're expected to adopt as binary blobs, they deliberately obfuscate them by using letters that aren't supported in normal open-source ASCII.
If you're running Linux or BSD, then either you're expected to know what you're doing, or you're running an appliance with a built-in operating system based on one of those and the appliance designers are expected to know what you're doing.
In reality, with Linux, it may be that all you're doing is letting the Update Manager manage updates for you, and using the Upgrade button after a major Ubuntu release has been available for a month, but that's ok - you'll still be running some vaguely current software with most of the recent fixes. With BSD desktops, the reality is that you're really definitely expected to know what you're doing.
Based on the comments from other people here, what you're doing may also include complaining about peripheral makers who don't give out the documentation needed to write decent open-source drivers, but that's a mostly separable problem from making sure you're running an up to date operating system.
Step 6 is 3-7 years depending on whether the IRS is lazy or suspects you of fraud, but Step 2 if however long you hold the asset before you sell it. If it's a more complicated investment, there may be other steps involved - for instance, the company merges with another, or spins off another company, or splits their stock, or does something else weird, so now you the stock you own isn't identical to what you bought.
If you own a house, you need to keep even more records. There's the purchase of the house, and anything related to the purchasing process (real estate commissions, lawyers, everything about the mortgage), any expenses you have that increase the basis of the house (a new garage counts, painting the inside might not), and then when you sell the house, usually you're buying another one and rolling over the capital gain into it (unless it was a loss.) You probably only need to keep documentation on a single house for 7 years after you file your taxes after you sell it (maybe up to 9 if it took you the whole 2 years to buy the next house), since the tax return from rolling over the cost documents your basis.
Usually the rule is to keep purchase records 7 years after you sell something.
IT departments usually don't care about that as long as they don't have to know. I've done it before, and spending $20 to save an hour a day of watching my laptop's disk drive light spin while it was paging Firefox in and out was totally worth it.
It is possible to break a computer that way, even though there should be nothing that goes wrong in simply plugging in a memory card into a laptop, or at least nothing that shouldn't be fixable by removing the not-quite-compatible memory card. It's most likely to happen with older flakier computers, which (surprise!) are the ones you're more likely to be trying to upgrade. I have in fact done it once, and had to give the IT department a puzzled "Hi, IT department, I don't know what's wrong with the laptop, it's just stopped working", and entirely did not feel bad about that happening with an old piece of junk laptop that should have been replaced a year earlier anyway. So do a backup first.
There are several free X servers that can run on WIndows - Xming, Cygwin, etc. Run one of them and log in to a nearby Linux server that has enough RAM to actually run Firefox on. Or boot Linux from a memory stick.
Or if you only have Windows servers, use Windows Remote Desktop to run the browser on one of them, though that's a bit more awkward.
ICANN's always been about Intellectual Property, not the Internet Protocol. So they DO have some idea about what job they're doing and how it works, it's just not what you or I wanted to have them doing. And they spent a long time making sure community involvement in their policy-making didn't happen (such as Karl Auerbach's membership on their board), because internet users were not the community they were working for.
And yeah, I'm glad they hired him.