I understand what you are saying, but I have no idea how you came to these conclusions, since they are completely wrong. AJAX would NOT require more database queries. In fact, a well-designed AJAX app would require LESS database access.
Let me give you an example.
I go to slashdot.org. First I receive the HTML layout and Javascript code bundle, which itself is obviously static content. The script then requests the front page article list. For most users, this list is identical, and therefore the Slashdot server can return a cached response. No database query is required.
In fact, it can go further. Maybe I have my options set to filter out all posts by Zonk. Under the current system, the Slashdot server must apply this filtering dynamically, which probably means it can't serve cached responses for users like me. However, under AJAX, this filtering could be done client-side, so the server can respond the same as it would to anyone else.
Same goes for comments. I click on an article. The AJAX app sends a request to the server for "All posts for article X with score 3 or more". This is a common request, so the server has a cached response ready to go. No database query required.
But, say I have an option enabled to promote funny posts by 2 points. Now, under the static HTML scheme, this means that Slashdot can't serve that cached response anymore. It is forced to do a separate database query and rebuild the complete page. But, under AJAX, the client code could intelligently divide the request into two parts. First it would do the common request above, then it would additionally request "All posts modded funny with score 1 or 2". Although the latter request probably will require a database query, it is much smaller in scope, and should run faster. Again, the AJAX version is far more efficient.
You seem to be dwelling on this idea of AJAX clients requesting custom updates to the data they already have. So let's try that. Now I want to know if any new comments have been modded up to score 3 or more since my original request. My client could issue a request like "All posts which were promoted to score 3 or more since time X", and another request like "All score changes made since time X for posts having score 3 or more". These requests would require the least bandwidth, but, as you have pointed out, they might be expensive for the server to process, depending on how the database is designed.
So, OK, let's say it is discovered that these requests are way too expensive (or the programmers are too lazy to implement them). Instead, the AJAX client can be programmed to simply redo the original "All posts with score 3 or more" request. The server can then respond from its cache, avoiding the database. The client can do the work of reconciling this list with what it already has, or it can just throw out what it has and start over. In any case, this strategy would be at least as good as what Slashdot currently does, since under static HTML it would have to serve a new copy of the whole page.
Or, you could have the best of both worlds: The AJAX client could send both of the above requests, and say "respond to whichever one you prefer". The server could then decide what to do based on its current load. If it has time to spare, it will go ahead and do the more expensive request to save bandwidth.
Of course, all along, the responses to AJAX requests would be much, much smaller than equivalent HTML responses, since the AJAX responses only need to contain raw data, leading it to the AJAX client to add the formatting and layout client-side. So, lots of bandwidth would be saved.
So, as you can see, an AJAX Slashdot would not only use far less bandwidth, but would actually reduce load on the server if written correctly. The point is, you can program an AJAX client to work however you want, and if server load is a big problem for you, then you can write your client to make requests in a way that reduces this load. You do not have this freedom with plain old HTML requests.
Err... AJAX clients communicate with the server using plain old HTTP. You can cache the responses for common requests just as easily with AJAX clients as with regular static HTML clients. In fact, because these responses would be much smaller than full HTML pages, you could cache far more of them, further reducing load.
Do you even know what AJAX is? It sounds like you're ranting about Java or Flash. AJAX doesn't even have anything to do with graphics.
AJAX is just Javascript that communicates with the server in the background. Obviously not every web site needs it, but stuff like Google Maps is clearly far superior to anything you could create with static pages. Google Maps is much faster and less bandwidth-hungry than the mapping sites that existed before it.
If Slashdot used AJAX, you'd be able to read it a lot faster on your dial-up line since you wouldn't have to re-download all of the page formatting for every comment you read.
Google's motto was never "do no evil". It's "don't be evil". Sometimes, you have to do a small amount of evil (censoring results) to acheive greater good (bringing information to the Chinese people).
Again, the original poster already addressed that. Did you have a counter-argument?
Furthermore, Google's presence in China will -- in my personal opinion -- only speed the downfall of the Chinese government, even if censored. Information is the enemy of any opressive regime, and Google's presence only provides more information to the Chinese people. China knows this, and they have tried to compensate with their filters, but these filters are limited. Like porn filters, they have no hope of blocking everything.
Do you have any actual examples to back your arguments, or just silly cliches and theories? (Other than China, which I think the original poster argued well enough.)
Larry and Sergey still run Google. Their principles haven't changed.
Even if Google released their source code, they could easily release a version which is slightly different from what they use in production. Releasing the code proves nothing.
In any case, if you don't like the service, don't use it; it's not like you paid for it.
Oh, wait, Google only uses F/OSS -- they don't contribute back.
With most current versions of Linux, the default security configuration means that it is very difficult to infect a machine (not impossible) and very easy to remove the infection.
What bullshit. How, exactly, do you define "infection"?
Imagine a virus that does the following: - Infects the user's system via a remote code execution flaw in Firefox (they exist). - Runs a web server on a high-numbered port. - E-mails out links to said server, harvesting the addresses from Linux-oriented web sites and mailing lists. - Infects others when they view the link. - After some time, runs "rm -rf $HOME".
What is Linux going to do to stop this? In what way is Linux "effectively" immune to this? None of the above requires root privileges. I'm sorry to break it to you, but Linux would happily allow the above code to run.
The only reason why this is unlikely to happen to a Linux user is because Linux doesn't have the market share to sustain a virus.
In most cases, if an e-mail you sent ends up returning to you, it will be ignored as a dupe and not placed in your inbox.
The one exception is when the address you send the e-mail to exactly matches your username. This is a hack which was put in to allow you to e-mail yourself, since people seem to do this a lot.
Note that if you insert a dot into the target address, even though the target is still you, it is not an exact match, and so it will never hit your inbox. Try it: If your address is yourself@gmail.com, try sending an e-mail to your.self@gmail.com. If you send it from the same account, it will never hit your inbox. If you send it from some other e-mail address, it will.
I rather like this graph from the article. Notice how power consumption goes up and down for most of the graph, but skyrockets in the last two bars. Wow! Why are TVs suddenly getting so much more power-hungry?
Wait. The last two bars are for 2010 and 2020. Last I checked it is currently 2006.
So, basically, they're predicting that in the future, the trends in TV power consumption will have absolutely nothing to do with the past, but will instead simply go way the hell up. And they're confident that this trend will carry through to 2020.
Yeah... um... bullshit.
Also, we have another case of a totally meaningless comparison:
To put it another way, the entire population of Glasgow could fly to New York and back again and the resulting emissions would still be less than that from devices left in sleep mode.
Over what period of time!? You're comparing a one-time quantity (emissions from a bunch of plane flights) to a quantity-over-time (emissions from sleeping devices). It makes no sense. How does crap like this even get printed? Doesn't the reporter realize that the sentence is totally meaningless? Or is the average person really so easily impressed by things that sound big?
I'll tell you what: My car is so fast. So incredibly fast. The entire population of New York could walk to LA and back and they still wouldn't be as fast as my car. Isn't that fast!?
For those of you who are trying to "test" this by e-mailing yourself: That may not work.
GMail attempts to remove duplicate e-mails in your mail box. This is very useful, for instance, with mailing lists: You don't want to receive a copy of the e-mail you sent, since GMail is already smart enough to aggregate the sent copy with the rest of the "conversation". Also, when people use "reply-all" to reply to both you and to the mailing list, you probably would rather not receive two copies of the reply, so again, GMail removes the duplicate.
As a result of all this, if you e-mail yourself, GMail will treat it as a duplicate and toss it, so you'll only see the e-mail in your sent mail. I think they made a specific hack that tries to check for mail sent to yourself to put it in your inbox too, but there are lots of ways to make it not work. Long story.
Also, if you address an e-mail to both ab@gmail.com and a.b@gmail.com, ab will only get one copy of the e-mail since the second will be removed as a dupe.
First of all, no one and no law is ever going to force you to pay royalties for mentioning Barry Bond's 72HR season or the outcome of yesterday's game. Even if the MLB can enforce copyright on the stats as a whole, these things would clearly fall under fair use. That's why we have fair use.
Now, consider this: Fantasy baseball leagues make money. However, in order to do so, they must consume something which the MLB creates. If the MLB were to stop running baseball games, fantasy baseball would be dead in the water. Therefore, under capitalist principles, the MLB deserves a cut of that money.
The real question is whether or not they are being fair in deciding not to renew this deal. I sense anti-competitive behavior here, since I believe the MLB runs its own fantasy league.
In Larry Page's keynote at CES he talked about how Google forced all the third parties to remove evil parts of their software. It looks like a lot of the tricks Real tries to do during installation (like trying to subscribe you to all sorts of mailing lists and such) have been stripped, leaving just the technology behind. Personally I've always hated Real but always installed it anyway since sometimes there's just no way around it... it will be nice to be able to install it with this and avoid having to do all the extra work to contain it.
I don't know, I don't know why other intelligent people do somethings - doesn't make them not exist. I can't fathom the mind of a rapist or murderer in my wildest imagination, yet they are still out there.
The question was rhetorical. You had said that you thought that "random chance" would be more likely than intelligent design to put dangerous (to humans) viruses on a comet. Now you say you have no idea what a creator might do. Maybe the creator would put dangerous viruses on a comet. Since "random chance" almost certainly wouldn't, that seems to make it more likely.
The Discovery Institute doesn't speak for everyone, should I go find some nutty biologist that says idiotic things to prove that evolution is wrong? Of course not - it's an attempt to stack the argument in your favor by picking nuts to quote, not the normal thinking people. You know this very well and do it intentionally. Why not argue with the ones that are sane, the scientist, instead of setting up straw men to knock down?
The Discovery Institute essentially runs the Intelligent design movement. They more or less started it, and they are the ones constantly championing it in the media and to school boards.
What you seem to be arguing is entirely different. Perhaps you should not call it "Intelligent Design", since most people (like myself) associate that term with the specific theory and movement championed by the Discovery Institute. Contrary to your accusation, I did not choose their version because it was easy to argue. I chose their version because it is the de facto standard definition of the term. (Note in particular that "Intelligent Design" is much more specific than "Creationism".)
Now that you've explained your definition, my argument is entirely different. In fact, I don't even have one. I concede that there is obviously no way to know if God is tilting the odds of mutation in our favor. And, indeed, your version of ID is quite compatible with evolution.
Why? You presuppose that the intelligence wants this to happen, I submit it to be less likely as the likelyhood of an intelligent being wanting to destroy sentient creatures it has made is very unlikely.
Then why did God create viruses on Earth?
There are "real" biologist who disagree wether you like it or not.
They are a very small minority. It is hard to understand how these people could be effective, given that evolution serves as a bedrock principle for much of biology.
Random chance can take care of anything - infinite monkeys givin infinite time banging on infinite typewriters will eventuall create the complete works of shakespear. That is totally possible, it still doesn't invalidate that Shakespear used "intelligent design" instead of random chance to write.
What does this have to do with anything? Evolution is not random chance. Mutations are random, but natural selection chooses the most beneficial mutation for the given environment. This is in no way analogous to the monkeys-and-typewriters cliche.
However, that point is immaterial as Intelligenent design focuses on why it happened, not how.
The theory of Intelligent Design, with a capital I and D, as championed by the Discovery Institute, explicitly contradicts natural selection. The whole point of the theory is to contend that some biological systems could not possibly have come about via natural selection. It very much intends to explain "how" life came about: it explaints that life was designed by an intelligent creator. It does not attempt to explain why this creator did this.
If you want to argue that the creator may have had some higher reason for using poor designs, then ID returns to the realm of the untestable, which in turn makes it worthless.
How is AOL evil? I always thought they were just kind of dumb/annoying, but not really evil. They aren't Microsoft. And even if they are evil, don't you think Google can use its position to force them to do better?
Intelligent Design would be far more likely to produce bacteria/viruses harmful to us originating from a comet. An intelligent designer can design such things however they like, and could thus think "I'm going do design a life form which could live on a comet but which could also be dangerous to humans!".
You don't know anything about intelligent design beyond reading those that hate/strongly dislike it.
I have read arguments for it as presented by the Discovery Institute and others. Invariably, their supposed examples of biological systems which are too complex and "irreducible" are really not. They use obscure cases which the average person knows nothing about (microbiology and such) so that the average person is unable to understand the details of their argument. Real biologists routinely counter their examples by demonstrating how these systems might be evolved.
Evolution is extremely testable and has been tested in many different ways. This article presents 29+ extremely strong tests which evolution passes. I find prediction 1.3 to be particularly amazing.
IMO, Intelligent Design is also testable. If we were intelligently designed, we would expect not to see aspects of our design which are utterly bad or easily fixed. In reality, our bodies are full of horrible design. For instance, our pelvises are slanted forward, and the base of our spines must slant back to compensate. This leads to all manner of back pain as we get older. This design flaw makes a lot of sense in evolutionary terms -- we evolved from knuckle-dragging apes -- but no self-respecting engineer would come up with such a design.
Speaking of our spine: it is composed of a whole bunch of vertebrae, which would be great if we were walking around on four legs and didn't need to support our full weight on it vertically. The flexibility would be perfect for galloping like a horse. But, again, it mostly causes problems for us.
Oh, and we have too many teeth to fit in our mouth. What's up with that?
These are just a few small examples. Honestly, I would give God more credit than to think that he designed such poorly-engineered creatures as us.
You're absolutely right. Your suggestion is silly.
A life form which evolved to survive on the surface of a comet has zero chance of being successful inside the human body. In order for a life form to evolve to be effective in an environment, it must have exposure to that environment. The viruses which already plague us here on Earth have spent billions of years evolving specifically to attack the other life forms already present on Earth.
Of course, this argument is strongly rooted in evolution. As some other posters have pointed out, if you believe in intelligent design, you might disagree. But then, real-life observations and evidence are overwhelmingly consistent with evolution, not intelligent design, so I think we're safe.
BioDiesel is great. My understanding is that it takes a lot of time and effort to collect and refine, since you can't just get it from a gas station, but if you're willing to do all that, more power to you.
In general, not perceived as an insufferable prick
Actually, I think you've thoroughly demonstrated the opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand what you are saying, but I have no idea how you came to these conclusions, since they are completely wrong. AJAX would NOT require more database queries. In fact, a well-designed AJAX app would require LESS database access.
Let me give you an example.
I go to slashdot.org. First I receive the HTML layout and Javascript code bundle, which itself is obviously static content. The script then requests the front page article list. For most users, this list is identical, and therefore the Slashdot server can return a cached response. No database query is required.
In fact, it can go further. Maybe I have my options set to filter out all posts by Zonk. Under the current system, the Slashdot server must apply this filtering dynamically, which probably means it can't serve cached responses for users like me. However, under AJAX, this filtering could be done client-side, so the server can respond the same as it would to anyone else.
Same goes for comments. I click on an article. The AJAX app sends a request to the server for "All posts for article X with score 3 or more". This is a common request, so the server has a cached response ready to go. No database query required.
But, say I have an option enabled to promote funny posts by 2 points. Now, under the static HTML scheme, this means that Slashdot can't serve that cached response anymore. It is forced to do a separate database query and rebuild the complete page. But, under AJAX, the client code could intelligently divide the request into two parts. First it would do the common request above, then it would additionally request "All posts modded funny with score 1 or 2". Although the latter request probably will require a database query, it is much smaller in scope, and should run faster. Again, the AJAX version is far more efficient.
You seem to be dwelling on this idea of AJAX clients requesting custom updates to the data they already have. So let's try that. Now I want to know if any new comments have been modded up to score 3 or more since my original request. My client could issue a request like "All posts which were promoted to score 3 or more since time X", and another request like "All score changes made since time X for posts having score 3 or more". These requests would require the least bandwidth, but, as you have pointed out, they might be expensive for the server to process, depending on how the database is designed.
So, OK, let's say it is discovered that these requests are way too expensive (or the programmers are too lazy to implement them). Instead, the AJAX client can be programmed to simply redo the original "All posts with score 3 or more" request. The server can then respond from its cache, avoiding the database. The client can do the work of reconciling this list with what it already has, or it can just throw out what it has and start over. In any case, this strategy would be at least as good as what Slashdot currently does, since under static HTML it would have to serve a new copy of the whole page.
Or, you could have the best of both worlds: The AJAX client could send both of the above requests, and say "respond to whichever one you prefer". The server could then decide what to do based on its current load. If it has time to spare, it will go ahead and do the more expensive request to save bandwidth.
Of course, all along, the responses to AJAX requests would be much, much smaller than equivalent HTML responses, since the AJAX responses only need to contain raw data, leading it to the AJAX client to add the formatting and layout client-side. So, lots of bandwidth would be saved.
So, as you can see, an AJAX Slashdot would not only use far less bandwidth, but would actually reduce load on the server if written correctly. The point is, you can program an AJAX client to work however you want, and if server load is a big problem for you, then you can write your client to make requests in a way that reduces this load. You do not have this freedom with plain old HTML requests.
Does this make sense now?
How on Earth is that any harder than what Slashdot is doing already?
Err... AJAX clients communicate with the server using plain old HTTP. You can cache the responses for common requests just as easily with AJAX clients as with regular static HTML clients. In fact, because these responses would be much smaller than full HTML pages, you could cache far more of them, further reducing load.
Do you even know what AJAX is? It sounds like you're ranting about Java or Flash. AJAX doesn't even have anything to do with graphics.
AJAX is just Javascript that communicates with the server in the background. Obviously not every web site needs it, but stuff like Google Maps is clearly far superior to anything you could create with static pages. Google Maps is much faster and less bandwidth-hungry than the mapping sites that existed before it.
If Slashdot used AJAX, you'd be able to read it a lot faster on your dial-up line since you wouldn't have to re-download all of the page formatting for every comment you read.
Your debate style is hilarious. First it was cliches, now it's totally ridiculous false analogies.
Google's motto was never "do no evil". It's "don't be evil". Sometimes, you have to do a small amount of evil (censoring results) to acheive greater good (bringing information to the Chinese people).
Again, the original poster already addressed that. Did you have a counter-argument?
Furthermore, Google's presence in China will -- in my personal opinion -- only speed the downfall of the Chinese government, even if censored. Information is the enemy of any opressive regime, and Google's presence only provides more information to the Chinese people. China knows this, and they have tried to compensate with their filters, but these filters are limited. Like porn filters, they have no hope of blocking everything.
Which is easier to replace? Your boot sector (run LILO) or your home directory (hope you have backups)?
Also note that the virus could happily perform DDoSes from a user account.
Do you have any actual examples to back your arguments, or just silly cliches and theories? (Other than China, which I think the original poster argued well enough.)
Larry and Sergey still run Google. Their principles haven't changed.
Even if Google released their source code, they could easily release a version which is slightly different from what they use in production. Releasing the code proves nothing.
In any case, if you don't like the service, don't use it; it's not like you paid for it.
Oh, wait, Google only uses F/OSS -- they don't contribute back.
http://code.google.com/projects.html
With most current versions of Linux, the default security configuration means that it is very difficult to infect a machine (not impossible) and very easy to remove the infection.
What bullshit. How, exactly, do you define "infection"?
Imagine a virus that does the following:
- Infects the user's system via a remote code execution flaw in Firefox (they exist).
- Runs a web server on a high-numbered port.
- E-mails out links to said server, harvesting the addresses from Linux-oriented web sites and mailing lists.
- Infects others when they view the link.
- After some time, runs "rm -rf $HOME".
What is Linux going to do to stop this? In what way is Linux "effectively" immune to this? None of the above requires root privileges. I'm sorry to break it to you, but Linux would happily allow the above code to run.
The only reason why this is unlikely to happen to a Linux user is because Linux doesn't have the market share to sustain a virus.
*sigh*
In most cases, if an e-mail you sent ends up returning to you, it will be ignored as a dupe and not placed in your inbox.
The one exception is when the address you send the e-mail to exactly matches your username. This is a hack which was put in to allow you to e-mail yourself, since people seem to do this a lot.
Note that if you insert a dot into the target address, even though the target is still you, it is not an exact match, and so it will never hit your inbox. Try it: If your address is yourself@gmail.com, try sending an e-mail to your.self@gmail.com. If you send it from the same account, it will never hit your inbox. If you send it from some other e-mail address, it will.
I rather like this graph from the article. Notice how power consumption goes up and down for most of the graph, but skyrockets in the last two bars. Wow! Why are TVs suddenly getting so much more power-hungry?
Wait. The last two bars are for 2010 and 2020. Last I checked it is currently 2006.
So, basically, they're predicting that in the future, the trends in TV power consumption will have absolutely nothing to do with the past, but will instead simply go way the hell up. And they're confident that this trend will carry through to 2020.
Yeah... um... bullshit.
Also, we have another case of a totally meaningless comparison:
To put it another way, the entire population of Glasgow could fly to New York and back again and the resulting emissions would still be less than that from devices left in sleep mode.
Over what period of time!? You're comparing a one-time quantity (emissions from a bunch of plane flights) to a quantity-over-time (emissions from sleeping devices). It makes no sense. How does crap like this even get printed? Doesn't the reporter realize that the sentence is totally meaningless? Or is the average person really so easily impressed by things that sound big?
I'll tell you what: My car is so fast. So incredibly fast. The entire population of New York could walk to LA and back and they still wouldn't be as fast as my car. Isn't that fast!?
For those of you who are trying to "test" this by e-mailing yourself: That may not work.
GMail attempts to remove duplicate e-mails in your mail box. This is very useful, for instance, with mailing lists: You don't want to receive a copy of the e-mail you sent, since GMail is already smart enough to aggregate the sent copy with the rest of the "conversation". Also, when people use "reply-all" to reply to both you and to the mailing list, you probably would rather not receive two copies of the reply, so again, GMail removes the duplicate.
As a result of all this, if you e-mail yourself, GMail will treat it as a duplicate and toss it, so you'll only see the e-mail in your sent mail. I think they made a specific hack that tries to check for mail sent to yourself to put it in your inbox too, but there are lots of ways to make it not work. Long story.
Also, if you address an e-mail to both ab@gmail.com and a.b@gmail.com, ab will only get one copy of the e-mail since the second will be removed as a dupe.
First of all, no one and no law is ever going to force you to pay royalties for mentioning Barry Bond's 72HR season or the outcome of yesterday's game. Even if the MLB can enforce copyright on the stats as a whole, these things would clearly fall under fair use. That's why we have fair use.
Now, consider this: Fantasy baseball leagues make money. However, in order to do so, they must consume something which the MLB creates. If the MLB were to stop running baseball games, fantasy baseball would be dead in the water. Therefore, under capitalist principles, the MLB deserves a cut of that money.
The real question is whether or not they are being fair in deciding not to renew this deal. I sense anti-competitive behavior here, since I believe the MLB runs its own fantasy league.
In Larry Page's keynote at CES he talked about how Google forced all the third parties to remove evil parts of their software. It looks like a lot of the tricks Real tries to do during installation (like trying to subscribe you to all sorts of mailing lists and such) have been stripped, leaving just the technology behind. Personally I've always hated Real but always installed it anyway since sometimes there's just no way around it... it will be nice to be able to install it with this and avoid having to do all the extra work to contain it.
Don't play it.
Seriously, what's this guy's problem?
"Wannabe Travoltas?" I play DDR for two reasons: (1) it's fun, and (2) it's excersize. I actually hate real dancing.
So because I have fun doing something that this guy doesn't find fun, I'm lame?
"Then why did God create viruses on Earth?"
I don't know, I don't know why other intelligent people do somethings - doesn't make them not exist. I can't fathom the mind of a rapist or murderer in my wildest imagination, yet they are still out there.
The question was rhetorical. You had said that you thought that "random chance" would be more likely than intelligent design to put dangerous (to humans) viruses on a comet. Now you say you have no idea what a creator might do. Maybe the creator would put dangerous viruses on a comet. Since "random chance" almost certainly wouldn't, that seems to make it more likely.
The Discovery Institute doesn't speak for everyone, should I go find some nutty biologist that says idiotic things to prove that evolution is wrong? Of course not - it's an attempt to stack the argument in your favor by picking nuts to quote, not the normal thinking people. You know this very well and do it intentionally. Why not argue with the ones that are sane, the scientist, instead of setting up straw men to knock down?
The Discovery Institute essentially runs the Intelligent design movement. They more or less started it, and they are the ones constantly championing it in the media and to school boards.
What you seem to be arguing is entirely different. Perhaps you should not call it "Intelligent Design", since most people (like myself) associate that term with the specific theory and movement championed by the Discovery Institute. Contrary to your accusation, I did not choose their version because it was easy to argue. I chose their version because it is the de facto standard definition of the term. (Note in particular that "Intelligent Design" is much more specific than "Creationism".)
Now that you've explained your definition, my argument is entirely different. In fact, I don't even have one. I concede that there is obviously no way to know if God is tilting the odds of mutation in our favor. And, indeed, your version of ID is quite compatible with evolution.
Why? You presuppose that the intelligence wants this to happen, I submit it to be less likely as the likelyhood of an intelligent being wanting to destroy sentient creatures it has made is very unlikely.
Then why did God create viruses on Earth?
There are "real" biologist who disagree wether you like it or not.
They are a very small minority. It is hard to understand how these people could be effective, given that evolution serves as a bedrock principle for much of biology.
Random chance can take care of anything - infinite monkeys givin infinite time banging on infinite typewriters will eventuall create the complete works of shakespear. That is totally possible, it still doesn't invalidate that Shakespear used "intelligent design" instead of random chance to write.
What does this have to do with anything? Evolution is not random chance. Mutations are random, but natural selection chooses the most beneficial mutation for the given environment. This is in no way analogous to the monkeys-and-typewriters cliche.
However, that point is immaterial as Intelligenent design focuses on why it happened, not how.
The theory of Intelligent Design, with a capital I and D, as championed by the Discovery Institute, explicitly contradicts natural selection. The whole point of the theory is to contend that some biological systems could not possibly have come about via natural selection. It very much intends to explain "how" life came about: it explaints that life was designed by an intelligent creator. It does not attempt to explain why this creator did this.
If you want to argue that the creator may have had some higher reason for using poor designs, then ID returns to the realm of the untestable, which in turn makes it worthless.
How is AOL evil? I always thought they were just kind of dumb/annoying, but not really evil. They aren't Microsoft. And even if they are evil, don't you think Google can use its position to force them to do better?
Intelligent Design would be far more likely to produce bacteria/viruses harmful to us originating from a comet. An intelligent designer can design such things however they like, and could thus think "I'm going do design a life form which could live on a comet but which could also be dangerous to humans!".
You don't know anything about intelligent design beyond reading those that hate/strongly dislike it.
I have read arguments for it as presented by the Discovery Institute and others. Invariably, their supposed examples of biological systems which are too complex and "irreducible" are really not. They use obscure cases which the average person knows nothing about (microbiology and such) so that the average person is unable to understand the details of their argument. Real biologists routinely counter their examples by demonstrating how these systems might be evolved.
Evolution is extremely testable and has been tested in many different ways. This article presents 29+ extremely strong tests which evolution passes. I find prediction 1.3 to be particularly amazing.
IMO, Intelligent Design is also testable. If we were intelligently designed, we would expect not to see aspects of our design which are utterly bad or easily fixed. In reality, our bodies are full of horrible design. For instance, our pelvises are slanted forward, and the base of our spines must slant back to compensate. This leads to all manner of back pain as we get older. This design flaw makes a lot of sense in evolutionary terms -- we evolved from knuckle-dragging apes -- but no self-respecting engineer would come up with such a design.
Speaking of our spine: it is composed of a whole bunch of vertebrae, which would be great if we were walking around on four legs and didn't need to support our full weight on it vertically. The flexibility would be perfect for galloping like a horse. But, again, it mostly causes problems for us.
Oh, and we have too many teeth to fit in our mouth. What's up with that?
These are just a few small examples. Honestly, I would give God more credit than to think that he designed such poorly-engineered creatures as us.
You're absolutely right. Your suggestion is silly.
A life form which evolved to survive on the surface of a comet has zero chance of being successful inside the human body. In order for a life form to evolve to be effective in an environment, it must have exposure to that environment. The viruses which already plague us here on Earth have spent billions of years evolving specifically to attack the other life forms already present on Earth.
Of course, this argument is strongly rooted in evolution. As some other posters have pointed out, if you believe in intelligent design, you might disagree. But then, real-life observations and evidence are overwhelmingly consistent with evolution, not intelligent design, so I think we're safe.
Making any change to a service as big as Google is hardly an easy fix.
I have never seen a gas station offering it.
BioDiesel is great. My understanding is that it takes a lot of time and effort to collect and refine, since you can't just get it from a gas station, but if you're willing to do all that, more power to you.
In general, not perceived as an insufferable prick
Actually, I think you've thoroughly demonstrated the opposite.