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Happy Thanksgiving!
After eating WAY too much turkey and watching Season 1 of Pete and Pete, it's now time to figure out what to get tomorrow when everything is incredibly cheap. I'm looking for an external hard drive since my 60 GB laptop drive is almost completely full, and there's always CD's and DVD's to get.
Intelligent Design is back in the spotlight once again, and yet again I can't believe there is debate about this. "Intelligent Design" is NOT science. Therefore it does not belong in science class. It's just that simple. Making stuff up because it's "too hard" is not science. That's why we have theology classes, where ID belongs. Yes, there are holes in the theory of evolution, but every respectable scientist agrees it is the best theory that we have based on the evidence that we have. And it's not to say we even have all the evidence yet, there's still a lot of Earth to dig up. If the intelligent design propents had their way, we still wouldn't know how the Sun worked, how to defeat bacteria, or pretty much anything else because it would be "too complicated" and obviously the work of some higher power, and thus not worth trying to explore further. If intelligent design can get taught in schools, then why not also that invisible little green elves pull objects toward each other, and gravity is just a myth? Gravity is just a theory too. Or heck, that this "intelligent designer" was actually me. You can't prove I wasn't, and I very well could have been, so therefore I demand that I be put into high school textbooks too!
Scientists are not against new theories (as ID proponents try to claim), they just accept the theories that follow from what they observe. Thus, my little green man theory (as with intelligent design) would not be very accepted among scientific circles because it's ridiculous. If a better or more plausible theory comes along, let it fight it out the way scientific theories and scientific progress have been fought out for centuries, using peer review and scientific journals. As someone wrote in an editorial I read about this subject, Einstein didn't have to lobby and make laws to get relativity put into science classes. Mendel didn't have to appeal to congressmen to get his ideas accepted. The scientific strength of those ideas put them in textbooks. Something ID is sorely lacking. Thank goodness Rutherford didn't think "Geez, this atom thing is way too complex to explain, I give up". Instead he discovered the nuculeus and worked with Bohr to discover the electron orbitals.
The fact that it's being integrated into high school science classes is even worse, in that the purpose of science at the secondary school level is not so much to teach facts and laws (though it is part of being a well rounded individual to know what the parts of an atom is and how light works) but more just to teach critical thinking. To make students not just blindly accept things, but use reason to see why things are the way they are. Teaching intelligent design to students tells them that it's OK to unquestionably accept something someone says without even thinking if it makes ANY logical sense at all. We need more critical thinking, not less!
In other crazy news, October 31st was a very bad day for Sony music. A researcher discovered that certain Sony CD's contain Digital Rights Management (DRM, used for copyright protection) software that is automatically installed on your computer when the CD is put into the CDRom drive. This software then hides that it was ever installed or that it is even running, which is commonly known as a "root-kit". This itself is somewhat worrying, not only because it's the equivilent of a multinational company putting spyware like software on your computer and completely undermining any security that a person has set up on their computer, but also because people could then use this cloaking ability Sony installed on your computer to hide their own viruses. Which is exactly what happened.. Not that the Sony CEO really cared, "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?". Apparently what the customer doesn't know won't hurt them. To Sony's credit, after massive bad publicity they did stop producing CD's with the DRM installed and issued a patch to supposedly remove the DRM software causing all this trouble. But Sony's troubles were no where near over. The initial version of that software only removed the cloaking ability, it didn't remove the actual software. But even worse, it also opened a gaping security hole in it's place, allowing any website you visited to download, install, and run any program it wanted to on your computer. Which affects who knows how many computers since many people might have installed the Sony patch 'just to be on the safe side', without even ever having the DRM software installed on their computer. With all this happening, Microsoft issued an update to remove Sony's software because simply playing a copyright protected Sony CD was seen as a security risk. Sony is now also facing class action lawsuits about their DRM CD's.
But the bad news isn't over yet. By playing a Sony music CD on your computer, you also implicitly agree to an amazingly bad license. Which includes such gems as having to delete all your music on your computer if all you're CD's get stolen or destroyed somehow. Or having to delete all your music if you move out of the country. And much more.
And for the biggest ironic twist of all, part of the code that was used to create Sony's DRM software was stolen from an open source program. So essentially Sony created a rootkit software program to protect copyright by violating copyright in creating it. Hmmmm
The one piece of good news? The whole thing can be bypassed by mearly putting some tape on the outer edge of Sony's CD's. All that work and headaches to be foiled by a simple piece of tape. Not that the software ever really prevented someone from copying or ripping the disc to begin with, which is why the whole idea of putting DRM software on CD's is so stupid. It just takes a little more know how (or just doing it on Linux or any other non-Windows machine). Sigh, will they ever learn?
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