Practice Safe Sex!

By now you may have heard about the late Rev. Gary Aldridge, friend of Jerry Falwell, who was dead in his home, with… well, why don’t you just read the autopsy:

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Lack of Evidence for God Is Evidence of God, Says Pope

Quoth the NY Daily News:

“All believers know about the silence of God,” he said in unprepared remarks in Italy. “Even Mother Teresa, with all her charity and force of faith, suffered from the silence of God.”

He said believers sometimes had to withstand the silence of God to understand the situation of people who do not believe.

So God doesn’t actually, like, make himself known to people because he wants believers to sympathize with atheists? And maybe the fact that I can’t fly is a gift from Superman to help me sympathize with the residents of Smallville. I gather that “unprepared remarks” is code for “pulling lame excuses out of his ass.”

(HT Olly’s Onions via Jesus and Mo.)

China Regulates Reincarnation

From Newsweek:

China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”

This may seem silly, but I think a country that executes as many people as China does would want to regulate reincarnation. It’s only a matter of time before Texas does the same.

More EULA Stupidity

Weather Underground has a Dashboard Widget for MacOS (basically, a little desktop display that shows the weather and five-day forecast). The EULA contains a standard no-reverse-engineering clause:

You may not alter, merge, modify, adapt or translate the Software, or decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce the Software to a human-perceivable form.

The problem is that dashboard widgets just use HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. They’re just mini-web page.

Or, to put it in non-techie terms: hey, jackasses! The thing that I’m not allowed to translate into human-readable form is already in human-readable form. Dumbasses.

Criminally Incompetent Teachers

Over at Kent Hovind’s Whinery, I ran across this comment:

I am a high school science teacher. So far I have been able to teach creation science a couple years without being stopped by administration. I spend as much time if not more teaching creation science as I do going thru the textbook they make me use. Of course, I skip all the chapters with evolution. I use Dr. Hovind’s seminar notebook and his book Are You Being Brainwashed. In a couple weeks I will be going at it again. I pray I can continue to do the same as I have been.

Hopefully, this guy is just lying, and has made the whole thing up. Because if not, that means he’s not just failing to teach the kids science, he’s teaching them antiscience, filling their heads with nonsense that has to be unlearned before they can be properly taught. He’s skipping important parts of the curriculum. He’s bringing in “teaching” materials by a wackjob so far out there that even other young-earth creationists have asked him to stop. And if this has really been going on for years, we have to consider the possibility that the school administration knows about his activities, but is turning a blind eye to them.

How would one go about subpoenaing cseblogs.com’s httpd logs to see where this clown posted from, to see whether any of it is true?

GHE EULA: WTF?

Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s is out. One weird thing about it is at the bottom of the copyright notice on the back of the manual:

ACTIVISION EXPRESSLY PROHIBITS THE USE OF THE GAME WITH ANY CONTROLLERS OTHER THAN ACTIVISION AUTHORIZED CONTROLLERS OR THE STANDARD GAME CONTROLLERS.

(This also appears at the bottom of the web site.)

I’ve seen some weird restrictions in EULAs before, but WTF? This is like saying that you can only use Microsoft Office with a Microsoft keyboard. Are they trying to protect the sales of $60 Guitar Hero controllers? Or are they just being dickish control freaks or something?

Thanks to for pointing this out.

The Worst README in the World

While trying to install some drivers on a machine, I ran across for them.

CONTENTS

1.0	About this README file
1.1	  Who should read this README file
1.2	  How to get help
2.0	IBM2105.RTE Change History
3.0	Procedure for upgrading AIX OS, Host attachment, and/or SDD
4.0	User license agreement for IBM device drivers
4.1	  Background / Purpose
4.2	  Definitions
4.3	  License grant
4.4	  Responsibilities
4.5	  Confidential information
4.6	  Limitation of liability
4.7	  Termination
4.8	  Representations and warranties
4.9	  General provisions
5.0	Appendix A
6.0	Notices
7.0	Trademarks and service marks

How anal is it to include a table of contents in a README? I just hope that the section numbers are updated automatically. It would really suck to be the guy in charge of manually renumbering the table of contents when someone edits the file.

At any rate, note that the only interesting part is section 3.0, the actual installation instructions. That section reads, in full:

3.0  Procedure for upgrading AIX OS, Host attachment, and/or SDD

     Please refer to the latest SDD readme file for the detailed procedure.

Wow. Three lines. Out of a 522-line file. And all to say “this is not the file you’re looking for.”

I think the stick up IBM’s ass has officially taken over the entire company.

Another Sign that the Apocalypse Is Nigh

Gil Dodgen: Uncommonly Dense

Gil Dodgen posted the following over at Uncommon Descent:

All computational evolutionary algorithms artificially isolate the effects of random mutation on the underlying machinery: the CPU instruction set, operating system, and algorithmic processes responsible for the replication process.

If the blind-watchmaker thesis is correct for biological evolution, all of these artificial constraints must be eliminated. Every aspect of the simulation, both hardware and software, must be subject to random errors.

Of course, this would result in immediate disaster and the extinction of the CPU, OS, simulation program, and the programmer, who would never get funding for further realistic simulation experiments.

All I can say is “wow”. Either Dodgen is having us all on (which I doubt, since he’s started a new thread to respond to the charge that he doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about), or he honestly doesn’t understand the difference between the simulated environment and the machine doing the simulating.

Presumably he also believes that when NOAA simulates the effect of a hurricane hitting the Florida coast, they have to pour rain onto their computers. And that every time an orc dies in World of Warcraft, a real orc dies in some distant land.

I know that I’m often too rooted in the concrete and have trouble going from a collection of facts to a general principle, but damn!

Perhaps the Ultimate Pirate Video

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKZec6aDhww]

It’s got everything: crappy music, worse dancing, puppets, pirates, Christian rap. Words cannot describe it.

Update, Sep. 12, 2006: Favorite comment: “Can’t sleep, the puppets will eat me.

Update, Sep. 13, 2006: Another good comment: “Okay America, we gave you religious freedom, and you do THIS with it […] Watching this, some would say the terrorists have already won. But NO ONE WINS with this video.”