Kansas brings America to new low

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From MSNBC.com

TOPEKA, Kan. – Risking the kind of nationwide ridicule it faced six years ago, the Kansas Board of Education approved new public-school science standards Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The 6-4 vote was a victory for “intelligent design” advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.
…
John Calvert, a retired attorney who helped found the Intelligent Design Network, said “These changes are not targeted at changing the hearts and minds of the Darwin fundamentalists.”

It takes a fundamentalist to spot another, I suppose.

All of this supposes that the higher power in question, however, was this much of a stickler for details. Think about it – what do most people want the most of in their lives? Simplicity. Not some hugely involved millions-of-layers-deep master plan, they strive to remove the complications from their lives. Now, if said higher power created Man in His / Her image, why aren’t we looking for more complex solutions rather than slimming down?

Seems to me that any being with that much power wouldn’t want to spend several BILLION years in the largest QA session ever. There wouldn’t be thousands of species of insects to carry out the job of plant pollenation, there would be one. There wouldn’t be thousands of breeds of animals constructed for the purpose of keeping those insect populations in check; the insects would simply only breed as necessary.

And what about all the nuisance insects and animals? You want to tell me the mosquito has a divine purpose? The flea? That God really sat down one day and said, “You know, what we really need now are some blood-sucking, disease-mongering petilences. It should be damned annoying when they bite, too.”

Is this the kind of God you want?

Other creatures are fairly easy to explain under ID: the Creator got stoned. Look at the sloth, for instance. A creature that is so sedentary moss grows on it. Then there’s the platypus – obviously, God had some spare parts lying around and just kind of jumbled them up. “Hey, let’s really screw with their minds! I’ll make it a mammal, but it lays eggs! *snorffle* Hey, don’t bogart the bong, man!”

Was God high, or was it Evolution? My bet is for Darwin. You don’t agree, that’s fine – just keep your arguments out of my children’s schools and in the Church where it belongs. When you can come up with an idea that actually satisfies the definition of theory, then you can talk to me.

News

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So, what’s new in the world?

French youths are rioting on a racial discrimination platform, to the tune of more than 2000 cars being torched in the past two days all over the country. The French government at this point appears powerless to stop it. From what I can gather, the police have no idea how to handle a situation like this. They are making arrests (more than 600 so far) but it does not appear to be stemming the tide.

At the Vatican, officials have lately stated that Darwin was not a complete idiot or a heretic, and further that the Fundamentalist Christians really need to go back and have another read through Genesis. They agree that Evolution is a proven theory, and that the Intelligent Design pundits have taken things too literally.

Boiling it down, the Vatican is saying “God created the Universe, but after that, Evolution took over. God did not sit down and design every little thing one by one.” So, God may have written the original software, but left it up to the adaptive code to see what would happen later. Sit back, pour yourself a mimosa and watch the fun, eh?

Now if we could only get the Vatican to put the stomp down on the fundies.

Whoops

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When do you leave good enough alone? Apparently, just before you try to add slick new themes to KDE.

I added Baghira to get a slick brushed-metal look to the top of all my windows, which somehow managed to disable about half of my widgets. A couple tries at re-installing Qt didn’t work. Then I noticed there was an update available for KDE. “That should fix that Qt problem…”
Not.

Next boot gave me really long KDE start-times followed by a complete lack of fonts.

Hrm.

So, do I try to remove then re-install KDE, or build it from scratch again?

Me? A glutton for punishment? Never!

Failure and mastery

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Failure:
Tried to re-configure Earthlink dial-up on a G4 Mac today, and couldn’t get the damn thing to sync up to the server – it kept timing out before the connection was made, but would then continue connecting. Once connected, it wouldn’t let me try again until I had disconnected.

It’s been a long time since I have been that mad at a computer. I think I hate Macs. Sure they look pretty, but for someone like me who has spent years mastering Windoze, there are simply too many things in the wrong place. Then there is the really stupid shit: the CD eject button is on the keyboard, not the tower. (And of course the client had changed keyboards, and the new one did not have the media keys.)

Mastery:
I have mad KDE skillz. Kubunutu 5.10 had it’s chance, but it just wasn’t up to the task of running Rodimus Prime (my desktop, otherwise known as Hot Rod when it runs Windoze.)

So SuSE 10.0 went back in tonight, and I hamered it into the shape I wanted in short order. Tagline randomizer: check. Emails configured: check. Spam Assassin configured: check. Addressbook imported: check. Firefox extensions, themes and bookmarks: check. Multimedia fix: check. 3D acceleration: check. Audio: check.

At one point I had 7 windows open, with one of those being six tabs of Firefox. And it never slowed down. Yay Linux!

Microsoft now Pro-Privacy?

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Brian Krebs of Security Fix writes to let us know that Microsoft has been prodding lawmakers to enact a Federal-level privacy law to pre-empt all the states who have been doing so locally. Makes plenty of sense to me.

First, M$ is a huge bloody company, selling its products globally. I’d bet that a sizable portion of their expenses can be found under the heading “legal fees”. If every state enacts it’s own privacy laws, then M$ has to pay a lawyer to decipher each one, and then make sure they are abiding by all of them. It gets expensive. A little money now spent urging Congress to act unilaterally will pay for itself later on down the road. Smart move.

Secondly, it’s good PR. M$ has been taking it without lube or a kiss lately over the general insecurity of their products, and this might help swing public opinion a little. Also a good move.

Here’s where we get to the part I don’t like. M$ is big enough to buy some serious sway, and that means they could have a big hand in writing the law. Him that writes the law will often make himself a loophole to get out of it.

Still, the devil will be in the details, (Chris) Hoofnagle cautioned, noting that Microsoft’s statement of principles says the company supports “consumer opt-in” — the consumer’s advance permission would be required — for sharing of sensitive (e.g., financial or medical) data but supports “opt-out” — data can be shared unless the consumer explicitly says “no” — for every other kind of information.

Personally, I am of the firm belief that any company I do business with needs to ask permission in writing before disclosing any of my personal information. This should be a completely seperate form, not wrapped up in another block of legaleze. It should have only the one option, so therefore it would be quite short, so you can use a nice easy-to-read font.

Here’s an example: “I agree to let XYZ Company share my personal information with that company’s business partners for the purpose listed here.” Followed of course, by said purpose. One purpose per page, each page requiring a signature.

SuSE 10.0 and Kubuntu 5.10 Reviews

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Some of you may have heard this particular story before – feel free to skip along as you see fit. For those that haven’t, sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…

Way back in the never-never of 2000, I was living in apartment A of a 4-unit building. B:TNG lived in unit C, with TS and the Physicist living in the stacked apartments between us. We all decided life would be much better if we could network all of our computers together to share out B’s DSL connection and get all of us out of dial-up hell. Me being the cable guy, I spent a few hours crawling around under the building and got the whole thing working without much fuss – with one exception.

Continue Reading →

What’s that buzzing noise?

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Girls: fancy an SMS-fired Bluetooth vibrator? | The Register

Our female readers are invited to imagine the folllowing scenario: It’s Monday, you’re at work, you’re bored, you’re thinking “how could I possibly spice up this trawl of the 2,000 weekend emails in my inbox?” when it occurs to you that if someone were to invent an SMS-triggered Bluetooth vibrator then your partner could bring you to an earth-shattering climax simply by texting a few sweet words of lurv, leaving you totally satisfied as a woman and fit to face the most daunting online task…

The Toy is worn internally, linked to a mobile phone and controlled by sms text messages sent to the phone. Once read, the message is transported automatically to The Toy, which turns it into vibrations – with a huge range of movements, depending on what you have written.

That’s right folks, a vibe triggered by a text message. Puts that ‘unlimited’ messaging plan in a new light, doesn’t it?

Ahh, the holidays

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Carving a Jack-‘o-Lantern with the Pookster:

“No, Daddy, don’t throw away the seeds – I want to make mine throw up!”

An excellent artistic vision she has, wot? Unfortunately, you’ll have to get very close to see it, as the Jack in question is about the size of an apple. Maybe I’ll augment the scene with a larger “Daddy” Jack holding a spoon and a bottle of ippecac.

Best use of “guts” I’ve ever seen though was a pumpkin holding a toy gun to itself, with the opposite side being a massive exit wound.

I turn the key and it goes – or maybe not *updated*

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Do you have any idea how long it takes to drive in a 1.5 inch machine bolt one ratchet-click at a time? Yeah. Bloody forever. On the upside, the preliminary results indicate that replacing the solenoid on the starter seems to have done the trick.

I say “preliminary” because when I took the starter in to Schuck’s today for testing it worked. This means to me that if the solenoid was the actual problem (and all the troubleshooting I could think of plus opinions of a couple other people point to it), it may have been a heat-related issue. Both times it has refused to start were on days where I had put the car through a fair amount of mileage. And let’s face it – even if it wasn’t the whole problem, replacing a 17-year-old part isn’t a bad idea.

So, the WBGF helped me put the whole thing back together (she ended up making the blood sacrifice) and it started a couple times without fuss. The car started again after the round-trip of taking my sweetie home, so I think all is again in order.

Knock on wood…
*UPDATE*
Not hard enough, I guess.

I was proud of myself for getting up on time for once this week and out the door in such a manner as to show up for work a few minutes early, only to find that the Beastie refused to start – it was doing that cyclic thing with the starter again.

Luckily, I remembered that I have a solid-steel steering column before I started bashing my head against it. I ended up hoofing it down to the train to catch my first appointment downtown, then grabbed B:TNG out of his office to jump the car and take it to Schuck’s for another test, hoping it would fail.

Sure as shit, she cranked and started on the first try. And the second and third tries down at Schuck’s, where they pronounced the battery and charging system “good”.
Razzle-frazzen !#@$!!%^@%#!!!

So, back to the house for a quick lunch and back on the road to work…NOT! Refused to start again. Talked one of the guys at the industrial shop across the street into jump-starting it, and, back down to Schuck’s for more testing. Drumroll please….

IT FAILED!! Yay!!!

They okayed the warranty discount, and I managed to get the new battery installed. (This one is slightly larger and requires me to remove a small body brace. I had also forgot my 13mm ratchet for removing the holding block and ended up buying a new one.)

So anyway, I bring to a close the last car-related post for some time with a happily starting car and a much-relieved author.

If it doesn’t start in the morning, I’m pushing it into the river.

Yay for happy parties!

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Tonight was The World’s Best Girlfriend’s birthday, and the party went off very well. She turned the ripe old age of Beautiful, smiled for three solid hours, and the world is a better place for it.

I am incredibly lucky to have her in my life, and a day doesn’t go by when I don’t think it.

I love you, Beautiful.