Sarah Palin’s performance in the Vice Presidential debate was perhaps even worse than her performance with her latest interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson. She was off-topic on nearly all questions, perplexingly incoherent, and shockingly nervous at the beginning of the debate, and at one point even took the time to give “shout outs” as if the debate was some sort of hip-hop rap video.

The interview starts off with the first question going to Joe Biden. When Sarah Palin responds, you can practically see the sweat dripping off her face as it trembles in nervousness while trying to articulate something that can span an entire 120 seconds. You can defiantly see that she was trying very hard in this debate due to her nervousness. I don’t mean to be unfair to Sarah Palin, it’s quite possible that somewhere in her head, when she’s outside of the public eye, are actually well-though-out coherent ideas and plans about issues that actually exist. However, she fails to articulate those ideas, even if they do exist by some improbable miracle. On the first question, Sarah Palin (after winking her eye in some sort of attempt to get into the psyche of her fellow hockey moms) starts talking about we need to be energy independent. However, she hung on to this point of the need for energy independence throughout the entire debate, using it when she had nothing relevant to say. Almost every single question she was asked in the debate, she went off topic and then started talking about energy independence again, and how her and John McCain are “mavericks.”

Early on in the debate Joe Biden talked about how John McCain was clearly for deregulation of the economy. But due to the economic crisis, he’s clearly changed his position in order to adapt to the status quo. Sarah Palin was asked by the moderator to respond, and did so with a whirlwind of nonsense about Obama wanting to “raise taxes” which had absolutely nothing to do with Biden’s original argument. When the stage was flipped back to Biden, he called her out on not answering the question, to which she responded with a heroic speech about how she doesn’t have to answer questions and how she “talks straight to the American people.” What did she mean by this? Also, concerning the economic crisis, Sarah Palin said that the crisis on main street is effecting wall street. Isn’t it thought to be the other way around?

Then Palin goes on with the typical Republican argument against economic fairness by calling it “redistribution of wealth,” and how Obama’s plan wants to have “health care taken over by the feds,” to which Biden responded with a well worded explanation of social and economic fairness.

By this point, Palin starts to get more conformable and doesn’t appear to be shaking in fear (maybe she was having flashbacks of the interview with Charles Gibson?). However, I continued to get lost in a hailstorm of nonsense as she failed to answer the rest of the questions in the debate by changing the subject to our need for energy independence and other well known facts. Joe biden coherently worded his arguments using facts, and also delivered his and Obama’s solution to problems on most questions.

Now it’s time to get to the most fun part of the debate. Sarah Palin was asked what the cause of global warming was. As she asserted in her interview with Katie Couric, she basically “can’t know” and may or may not attribute some of it to nature or some of it to man. However, she knows that something has to be done about it. Uhm, excuse me overworking my brain here, but doesn’t whether or not global warming is caused by humans have a huge effect on whether or not we can, or should, do anything about it? If global warming is caused by natural processes or cycles, what can we do about it? Reduce greenhouse gas emissions that aren’t causing it in the first place? Sarah Palin makes absolutely no sense. Joe Biden responded directly with an affirmative “yes” to the fact that mankind is responsible for the warming of our planet.

Then Sarah Palin and Joe Biden were asked if they would support civil rights for same-sex partners. Joe Biden of course said yes, but once again I got lost in a bizarre sandstorm of incredibly indecisive nonsense from Sarah Palin. First she said that she’s going to be “up front” with the American people about how she does not want to support anything that may eventually lead to marriage being re-defined. But then she also goes on to claim that a “McCain Palin” administration will not do anything to prevent same-sex couples from visiting each other in hospitals or making legal agreements. So, is she, or is she not, going to support legislation that give same-sex benefits? Her answers are as clear as a thick fog of smoke, blinding me with nonsense.

Now attention is shifted to their war plans. Palin, once again, hurls a bunch of nonsense that does not directly answer the question, asserting out-of-context half truths such as “Barack Obama didn’t vote to fund the troops.” Wasn’t that cleared up in the last debate, where Obama made clear that he didn’t vote for a troop-funding bill that had no timetable for withdraw, while John McCain also did not vote for a bill to fund the troops that did include a timetable for withdraw. The stage shifts to Joe Biden, where he actually answers the question, explaining Obama’s plan for withdraw. Sarah Palin is asked to respond, but gets stumped for about 5 seconds before crying the “white flag of surrender” argument.

Then on the question of what they think the Bush Administration has done good or bad concerning the Middle East. Sarah Palin just talked about how she will support Israel; Joe Biden actually answered the question and said that the Bush Administration made a mistake by legitimizing the elections which lead to Hezbolla being elected. Thankfully when it came to the question of interventionism, both Biden and Palin said they support intervention in Darfur.

Towards the end of the debate, it once again became clear that Sarah Palin lacked the ability to answer questions directly. The last question was about Palin’s and Biden’s Achilles’ heel that they have. Sarah Palin apparently thought that the question was “what are your best strengths?” Then Palin, for the umpteenth time, flip-flops the question in order to waste her remaining response time by saying things like: “And we need to get energy independent! John McCain and I are mavericks! We have a choice on November 4th.” Yea, that’s what those hockey moms want to hear, not the intellectual minority that actually wants to hear an answer!

I’d say the two biggest slip-ups in the debate is when Joe Biden couldn’t say “G” for about 3 seconds, and Sarah Palin paused for about the same amount of time when asked to respond to something, showing her inability to think quickly.

At the end of the day, I hope all those soccer moms and hockey moms realize that Sarah Palin is not executive material. She could no more lead a country in case John McCain dies as a ten year old can make wise stock market trade decisions. Biden has defiantly strengthened the Obama ticket, while Palin just stupefies the McCain ticket.

Step one: Stop Thinking Critically

You must start realizing that truth only comes about through holy books and that science is not a search for the truth. So, fully acknowledging that science is a lie and needs to be discredited as our preconceived notion, we can start making up evidences to support our religious views.

Step two: Find something to work with

You need something to work with in order to turn it into an intelligent design argument. One of the best strategies is to create your own definition of evolution and then try to disprove it. For instance, so called “Evolution” claims that all living organisms share a common ancestor. Your best strategy here is to assert “So you think we came from Monkeys?!?!” This will get those darn evolution liars to realize that their theory is nonsense. Or, you can ask them, “So, you believe you’re a Monkey??”

Proving the Earth is 6,000 Years Old

Okay, so the religion of evolution says that the Earth is millions of billions of years or hundreds of trillions of years old. Who cares about the exact number, all that we need to know is that it’s wrong. So, what is the best way to disprove this? It’s easy!

The evidence of numbers

Pick a number, any number! Find some sort of rate of something occurring over time and mathematically reverse it. Unfortunately many of these have already been taken by other Intelligent Design scientists in the Race for Disproving Evolution, such as the rate which dust collects the moon, or the rate that the moon is moving away from the Earth, or the population growth of humans. So we need to be creative, there’s many un-used numbers out there waiting to be converted into real evidence! For instance, if the current crime rate is 1,000 murders each year the United States right now, and it is decreasing by 1 per year due to crime prevention, you can argue that utterly factual piece of evidence that if humans have really been around for 3 million years (as the religion of evolution teaches), than the homicide rate back then would have been over 3 million per year! Humans would have gone extinct before they could have evolved. This evidence clearly shows that the Earth must be 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs lived with humans.

Another scientific way to disprove evolution

Most scientists are under the delusion that their theory is supported by things like fossils or DNA, when most of them don’t even realize their evidences don’t cover every simple possible question. For instance, they say that the geologic column shows that life forms have went from simple to complex. But how do they know that there’s not a dinosaur fossil in the lower rock layers? Have the dug up every single fossil that exists all throughout the Earth? They claim that there’s a transitional fossil from the dinosaur to the bird called “Archaeopteryx”, but all that does is double the amount of holes in the theory of evolution. Now they have to find more transitional fossils to show that Archaeopteryx came from a dinosaur, or that it ever turned more bird-like. In fact, the more fossils they religion of evolution claims to have, the more holes exist in the theory!

Disproving Carbon Dating

Evolutionists like to claim that they know how old fossils are. But how do they know? Fossils don’t come with name tags. I mean, carbon dating obviously only works for the Dead Sea Scrolls. I mean, if you ignore the fact that there’s over 40 other elements used for dating besides carbon 14, and if you date something by taking the technique out of context (such as dating a living organism), it’s clearly inaccurate and is scientifically disprove. The religion of evolution does not have auto-date generating machine, does it? This is how you scientifically disprove that carbon 14 dating is useless!

The past is not observable

Another way to scientifically disprove the theory of evolution is by telling people that it can’t be observed. A scientific theory must be testable and observable, just like Intelligent Design is. I mean, we can never test or observe evolution can we? Just like a grand jury can’t test or prove a murder. After-the-fact evidence doesn’t prove anything (like a murder weapon, or a fossil!). Of course, the truth of Intelligent Design is excused from this, because we can observe the creation.

Preach on the Roof Tops!

Publish your scientific findings. This is the most critical step, but you have to be careful how you do it. You can send your findings to a creationist website, and they will know that your theory is true right away, and will gladly publish it (unlike those religious scientists who have a thing called “peer review”). Also, you may want to make a youtube video proclaiming your new evidence. Make sure to give it a title that will really attract those viewers into watching, such as “Why Evolution is a LIE” or “Why evolution is IMPOSIBLE.” Using capital letters of /b/ whenever posible is a definate plus! Even if your evidence is about the age of the Earth or the Big Bang, it still falls into the category of scientific religion.

Warding of the demons of critical thinking

Now some of those crazy evolutionists will probably try to think critically about what you’ve just proposed and claim that they have some sort of “logic” of “reason” that tries to disprove what you already know to be your absolute truth. Luckily you have the freedom to delete these comments or video responses. Exercise them!

Well I hope that I have helped lead some Intelligent Designers on the right track to proving that the hypothesis of evolution is WRONG and therefore spontaneous design is the correct fact. God bless, and remember to burn your textbooks children!

What was Ahmadinejad’s purpose and intent? What are his views? Why the hostility? Why does he insist on holding forums with Americans?

I just got done watching Larry King’s interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on CNN. The first thing when I saw Larry King and Ahmadinejad together is: is Larry King going to be “bashed” for talking to this man, as was done by some people when he spoke at the University of Columbia in New York? I personally think it’s tolerable — after all, all Larry King does are interviews, and we are a free country! Some thoughts I have about what he says are as follows:

Firstly, why does Ahmadinejad want to hold discussions with Americans despite the shunning hostility to them on behalf of our government? On the outside, it seems that he genuinely wants to bind our otherwise hostile relationship. But I encourage people to look through his public mask and know what he actually believes:

1. The holocaust never happened
2. Homosexuals don’t exist within his country
3. He thinks the world should progress forward using the sciences and Islam
4. He thinks that the War on Terrorism has actually created more terrorism (which some Americans believe as well, including Michael Moore)
5. He thinks his country should be allowed to pursue nuclear technology
6. He thinks Iran is “vast” (superiorly large in geographic size). I calculated that the U.S. is 596% larger than Iran
7. He thinks the Palestinians deserve the land that is currently the State of Israel, and that the Jews should establish their state in Europe.
8. He views himself as the vassal of Mahdi, working for him and being accountable to him.
9. An interesting fact on his strong Islamic religiosity is that — when he was a former mayor of Tehran — he developed elaborate detailed plans preparing the city for the arrival of the Mahdi.

The major thing is the fact that he is a holocaust denier. I will not even attempt to defend the holocaust, as I’m sure nobody who is reading this denies this atrocity. But moving on, let’s ask: Why does Ahmadinejad want to have talks with Americans so much? Is he trying to gain the support of the people through open discussion? There is no question that he is a very smart individual, with carefully chosen words and intellectually tempting speeches. But didn’t Adolf Hitler also provide moving speeches which lead to his overwhelming support? When you remove the mask he puts on while talking to the media, it’s clear that Ahmadinejad does not care about human rights and peace (although I credit him for not launching any nuclear missiles anywhere, even though he’s threatened to do so to Israel in the past). He is a fundamentalist in most respects. Under Iran’s law, based on Islamic Shari’a law, gays as young as 15 years old can receive the death penalty (this might be the explanation as to why they “don’t exist” in Iran, as Ahmadinejad has asserted). Also, he seems to assert this illusion that the occurrence of the holocaust is subject to debate, and that weather or not 6 million Jews were mass-exterminated is ‘just one account, among others’.

Towards the end of his interview, he was keen on throwing in a few last words on a particular topic when Larry King tried to move on: he said that the War in Iraq needs to come to an end, and there needs to be a “timetable.” American needs to keep our influence to our own region; all of the money that we’re spending on foreign affairs should be put into American: to help Americans with their housing and their lives (note the reference to housing).

When he said this, I couldn’t help but realize his obvious strategy here. Ahmadinejad knows that the American people want. This is the movement of the Democratic Party right now; it’s nothing new. He’s merely saying it so that Americans will say “Thats what I believe too!” In turn, this gets into the psyche of the American people who agree with this view into accepting the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad himself.

On a sidenote, the Secrete Service protects Ahmadinejad while he’s in the U.S. (it is the law for us to protect heads of state, regardless of our relationship). However, he cannot leave within 25 miles of New York City, interestingly. He says he’d like to see different parts of America.

Interview of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by Larry King on CNN

Surprisingly enough, starting off as a new website developer, I have never come across a clear-cut explanation on how to write a website template using raw PHP.  Of course, being the quick-thinking programmer that I am, I invented a system that has always worked without a hitch, and I wish to share it with the rest of the website development world!

Often times, I find myself working on a website (or viewing someone else’s work), and they actually use .html (or .php) files for each and every page. This means that if they want to make even the slightest change to the overall template, they will have to go through the tediously redundant task of opening, editing, saving and uploading every .html file separately. If you’re a lazy web designer like me, you’ll definatly need a better alternative. Of course, modern templates (such as wordpress, the template system that is used for this web blog), have files that are called on every page that contain a major portion of the site, such as header.php and footer.php. But even this can end up causing difficulties. What I am about to show you is what I believe is the absolute simplest, most effective and flexible technique for creating a PHP template. Here is a stripped-down version (for readability and simplicity) of my website design company’s website, BlueLineWebDesign.net

The GET field ‘q’ represents what page has been requested (?q=services, etc). We check all the possible valid requests for pages, and appropriately set the variables $ToInclude, which is the main content file, $Title, which is the string to be echoed later on for the title, $Description, $Keywords, and optionally, $HeadToEcho for any page-specific content (such as javascript files, etc). This keeps everything clean, organized, easy to maintain and non-redundant. Sometimes, you even need a page to contain a function to be called when the document loads (<body onLoad=”function()”>). For instance, google maps require an initiation function to load the Google Maps API onLoad. So for this, as I have done below, we can simply declare a variable to fill it in for page-specific needs. For security purposes, you should never directly include a $_GET[] variable, otherwise a hacker can potentially manipulate this field to gain access to any file on your server (file inclusion exploit).

<?php
//Connect to database for easy future access
include("MySQLConnect.php");
//Universal keywords and description meta tags
$Keywords = "website design, web design, coding, cheap, chicago";
$Description = "We design and code websites for small business, organizations and individuals.";
//Link page requests with their respective content file, title, header tags, etc
if ($_GET['q'] == '') {
 $TheContent = 'main.php';
$Title = 'Home';
$RightSidebar = 'right_content.php';
}
if ($_GET['q'] == 'services') {
 $TheContent = 'services.php';
$Title = 'Our Services';
//For this page, maybe we want the right sidebar to be an ad
 $RightSidebar = 'advertisment.php';
}
if ($_GET['q'] == 'pricing') {
$TheContent = 'pricing.php';
 $Title = 'Our Prices';
$OnLoadFunctions = "initiateTips(); ";
$HeadToEcho = '<SCRIPT language="JavaScript1.2" src="main.js"type="text/javascript"></SCRIPT>';
$RightSidebar = 'extra_pricing_links.php';
}
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<?php echo $HeadToEcho; ?>
 <title>BlueLine Web Design - <?php echo $Title; ?></title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
 <meta name="description" content="<?php echo $Description; ?>">
<meta name="keywords" content="<?php echo $Keywords; ?>">
</head>
 <body onLoad="<?php echo $OnLoadFunctions; ?>">
<div class="header_logo"></div>
<!-- this line shows the menu-->
<div class="header_menu">Home | Services | Pricing</div>
<div class="main">
  <?php include($TheContent); ?>
</div>
<div class="right_sidebar">
 <?php include($RightSidebar); ?>
</div>
<!-- this displays the universal footer-->
<div class="footer">&copy; 2008 BlueLineWebDesign.net - All Rights Reserved</div>
</body>
</html>
<?php include("MySQLClose.php"); ?>

So for just about every page being called on the website, you need to add a declaration in the beginning PHP loop to specify what the main content file is, the title, any meta tags, and so forth. For instance, if you had a login page, you would want to create a link in your menu to index.php?q=login, and then create a file named login.php that contains the login form and code. This simplifies your entire website into a few basic components that reduces the amount of coding, and makes your code easily editable and understandable.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions, or if you’ve found this useful, login and leave a comment!

Following the stories, speeches and debates this week concerning the Wall Street crisis (excluding political campaign rhetoric), I cannot help but wonder where $700 Billion is going to come from (I mean physically — mass-printing of inflation dollars or China?) The budget deficit for the fiscal year of 2009 is set to 10.6 Trillion; this new addition will raise that ceiling to this new number:

$10,600,000,000,000
$   700,000,000,000
$11,300,000,000,000

Will this be the first time our debt to foreign countries will reach a whopping fifteen digits? I am in no way disagreeing with the action taken by the Bush administration, I am merely pointing out that this could perhaps, in the long run, be working towards an even greater crisis. I hope that whoever wins this election — McCain or Obama — that they surround themselves with people like Alan Greenspan and Meg Whitman in order to defuse this deficit somehow.

If you want to read more, read CNN’s coverage here.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — President Bush asked Congress on Saturday for the authority to spend as much as $700 billion to purchase troubled mortgage assets and contain the financial crisis.

The legislative proposal - the centerpiece of what would be the most sweeping economic intervention by the government since the Great Depression - was sent by the White House overnight to lawmakers. (Read the text here.)

The plan matches the scope of the problem, Bush said.

“It is a big package because it’s a big problem,” Bush told reporters at a news conference. “The risk of doing nothing far outweighs the risk of the package.”

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, lawmakers and their aides are expected to work through the weekend in an effort to craft a bill swiftly. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill said they expect the bill to go before a vote within days.

What exactly is “the moral zeitgeist?” There is a movie called Zeitgeist that’s notoriously known among 9/11 conspiracies and atheists that attempts to “debunk” Christianity and prove that 9/11 was an inside job. This is not what I’m addressing here. Zeitgeist is a German term meaning “spirit of the time.” It refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era.

If it’s one thing we can almost defiantly infer from history is that the moral zeitgeist is constantly changing for the better. Things that are evidently inhumane these days were the social norms centuries ago. Polygamy has slowly been decreasing, and eventually becoming illegal in most industrialized countries by the 1800s; slavery (which was not unique only to America) has also declined throughout history; but it was not illegalized in modern society until the 1800s (1808 in the UK, 1862 in America); In 1870, African-American men gained voting rights; women gained equal voting rights in 1918. Now in 2008, we have a respectable, fully educated African-American man – Barrack Obama — nominated to run for president of a major party, and a white women (Hilary Clinton) who all but swiped the nomination from him (and don’t forget Sarah Palin)! This is, of course, no big deal to us. I personally haven’t even considered race as an issue in this election; it’s just an interesting observation. Racists and sexist individuals are increasingly becoming a minority. Humanitarian aid to those in need is increasing as awareness of their suffering is raised. Countries and individuals now donate hard-earned money, out of the goodness of the heart, to help victims of natural disasters and suffering in Africa.

What I’ve stated above is the obvious. What I’m wondering is: what is the future moral zeitgeist going to be? Right now, in America, gay rights seems to be one of them. The awareness of animal cruelty (and subsequent organizations to protect animals) has emerged. Women are ever so-so-slowly gaining civil liberties in middle-eastern countries that suffer from Islamic fundamentalism. Also, the moral zeitgeist of war is increasing. So far, the American military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan have only reached 1% of American military casualties suffered from WWII, and we consider – notwithstanding - those 4,000 deaths outrageously high. There have been 100,000 Iraqi civilian casualties as well, but that – also – is only a mere 0.0025% of the total casualties of WWII. The horrors of Darfur – I can predictably say – would have been overlooked in distant centuries as another nation’s problems; however, it has sounded a trumpet for the need for moral justice around the world (though Congress has turned a blind eye).

I challenge any of my readers to attempt to make some sort of prediction about what the future moral zeitgeist or “standards” will be. Consider that the morals of society (by looking at history) are always changing and evolving, usually for the better. These are a few hypotheses I have as to what the future of moral-norms will be:

• Hunting for sport might be outlawed; the method of killing animals for food will become painless.
• Possibly, animals gain basic rights to life (this means vegetarianism, or the development of a pseudo-meat?).
• Civil liberties will be granted to couples of any sex, then eventually full-blown marriage.
• Society might lighten up on its ban on alternative marriages that involve more than 2 people (as long as it’s consensual). However, I have great speculation as to weather or not this is likely to happen, seeing that the “moral natural selection” (sort of speak) has already eliminated polygamy as immoral.
• Health care will be seen as a privilege not to be excluded from any class of citizens (e.g., those who don’t have health insurance).
• Schools in low-income urban areas will be of the same quality as schools in higher-income areas, providing equal opportunity to different classes of citizens.
• The UN might strengthen, reducing the number and severity of wars; non-cooperative countries (Iran, North Korea, and maybe Russia to name a few) will be converted.
• Stronger international laws against war, and the conduct that takes place within war, might strengthen in effectiveness and morality (e.g., the way in which wars are conducted now might be looked down on as wreakless to life).
• 3rd world countries and African tribes will become civilized and conform to the morals and democratic ways of the rest of the world.
• Religious fundamentalism will cease to exist, being replaced with tolerance and secular morals. All religious views will be tolerated as one’s personal choice (this means radical Islam will cease).
• All people will have an equal chance of getting elected into public based on their

qualifications and ideas, without being prejudged based upon their race, sex or faith.

And finally, there is an ultimatum: either the international community will come to a consensus to destroy all nuclear weapons harbored by various nations, or WWIII will break out and propel our society into a sort of “moral dark age’ of anarchy. Hopefully the former, inevitably the latter.

This is an interesting topic. Comments and additions would be appreciated!

As

I’m sure many already know, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s personal email was hacked last night by the “anonymous” internet group. Here are some facts about the event:

• The account gov.sarah@yahoo.com was established before she became McCain’s running mate, so this is most likely not a hoax.
• Copies of some of her emails were leaked on Photobucket, which I have posted below.
• gov.sarah@yahoo.com and gov.palin@yahoo.com were auto-locked by Yahoo after the password had been leaked, and has since been completly deleted (for good reason, I would have too!).
• The secrete service is investigating this incident

But the question remains..

• Why was Gov. Sarah Palin using Yahoo Email (a privately-owned, non-government service) for government-related business, instead of using her email on the, state-provided encrypted email servers?

To be honest, I don’t see the point in that last question (which many people are asking!) Unless passwords and things of the like were being sent through this account, what harm is done if official government emails are leaked? Isn’t that called transparency? But that’s not the issue: some believe Gov. Sarah Palin used this email (instead of a government email) in order to subvert public records laws. If so, the evidence has already been destroyed because these accounts have been deleted. In any event, it does seem unwise of her to couple her personal email account and government business account as such. In any event, I have to hand it over to the anonymous group who did this. For those of you who remember, former presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton’s website was hacked to link to Barrack Obama’s website. There’s no need for the townspeople to get out their pitchforks and hunt down the evil hackers now.

So how did they hack Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account, anyway? Yahoo has implemented some very strict security measures to prevent the account hacking. A former (and these days, a quite archaic) technique for hacking an email is a method called “brute force,” in which a program runs through a list of possible password “guesses” (usually from a dictionary of words) until one of them works. However, Yahoo’s servers will block your login requests after 5 tries. Either Sarah Palin’s password was aardvark, or they used a simpler technique!

The “I forgot my password” feature of most websites (Yahoo not excluded!) is probably the most laughably insecure password-retrieval method I’ve ever seen. It generally consists of a few simple questions, such as:

What is your mother’s maiden name?
What was the name of your first teacher?

A bit of background research into one’s life could quite possibly render these answers. Presto: Password! This is why I never use these features. The key is to not forget your password so that the password-recovery options cannot be a vulnerability to the future integrity of your accounts. Of course, I am by no means suggesting this was indeed the method used.. I am merely stating that it seems to be the most probable one.

I would hope that politicians (and perhaps the general population) will take the security of their email accounts and websites more seriously. After about a 10 minute mental debate, I’ve decided to not post any of the images from her email account, as I do not Condon the hacking of people’s personal emails. but I can tell you that there’s nothing interesting at all. I did make one observation, however. Sarah Palin only has one single folder for email organization and 84 unread messages. Also, she received one email that was trying to encourage her against the media’s negativity. Here’s a look at her inbox:

This post is to specifically address the primary “pillar” of the Intelligent Design movement, which is the concept of Irreducible Complexity, developed by Michael Behe in the mid 90s and has since been religiously adopted by anti-evolutionists.

At first when I heard about this concept, I did believe it.. after all, it does “make sense!” Complex structures need many inter-dependant components in order to function correctly. For instance, if you take out even the smallest bit of what’s inside your computer box (a piece to the hard drive, a diode, a wire, etc), chances are you’ve just broken the entire system, as each part works together in order for the whole to function.

The picture you are seeing to the upper left is of the “Bacterium Flagellum.” Some of the smallest “life forms” are bacteria. It just so happens that they have this incredibly intricate “motor” that can reach up to 17,000 RPM. Incredible! Let’s take the E. coli bacterium for example. This little single-cellular water-swimming majestic piece of biological glory contains 40 proteins with it’s respective DNA instructions to “create” it, and if one of those went missing.. it wound no longer function! Therefore, it must have been designed.

Intelligent Designer: Therefore.. Evolution cannot be true!  Let’s seal the books and start teaching “Creation Science.”

But let’s look a little deeper. There are many other types of bacteria, and many of them have some of the same proteins used for the flagella, but they serve a totally different purpose in the cell! Moreover, there are many different types of bacterium, each of which has a different set of proteins in order to make their molecular motor. Either the “Designer” really went to the extreme with redundancy, or evolution is building, modifying, changing and re-using!

This concept is well-proven. In the Dover trial, the Intelligent Design proponents were left speechless as their theory was disproved. However, they maintain their grounds to this day.

If you talk to a science-oriented Creationist (and I say “science-oriented,” because there’s the ones that use ignorance to prove their point, and others who use pseudo-science), I guarantee that they’ll quote Michael Behe’s Irreducible Complexity. But the reality is that this point cannot hold any water. Just because something is irreducibly complex doesn’t mean it cannot serve a different purpose.You may be wondering, exactly how do complex systems evolve? The answer is simple: complex systems evolve by duplicating and re-using simpler systems that already exist! For example, before the eye fully evolved, there was probably a much simpler, reducibly complex eye that served a much simpler purpose (for instance, detecting darkness and brightness) which gave it a survival advantage. You can imagine how this simple system could have increased in complexity by minor changes and improvements, eventually creating what appears to be an irreducibly complex system. To the contrary! I will further illustrate this reality that a system’s complexity is highly reducible:

I intend to do a more in-depth post debunking common anti-evolution / creationist myths. Until then, if you want to learn more about irreducible complexity, feel free to watch this. The video is by Ken Miller, someone who I highly respect as a biologist and as a theistic evolutionist. He’s probably the least boring of all biologists!

Thanks for reading, don’t forget to comment when something strikes your interest, and subscribe if you want to be informed of my future posts!

Most computer users these days are completly blind to advertisments. You can spot a google-ads box without even focusing on it. No need to, really. So, I was on facebook for the first time today and saw an advertisment to take an IQ test. Well, I took my last online one about 3 years ago and scored a 130.. so I figured, hey, why not freshup up a bit! Here’s the rest..

* Took the test - 4 pages.

* We’ll send the results to your email!

* Erm.. Whatever. /inputs email

* Your almost there! Enter your name, street address and phone number!

* OMG WTF, /puts in false info

* /Puts in false info again.. I have to re-try different false fields about 5 times to get them to “go through”

* Almost there.. enter your phone number! *Advertisments about the New Hottest Ringtones*

So, just to warn everyone… Never trust social networking based advertisments for any amount of legitimacy. Always, always use google if you want to find a legit site for something.

So everyone knows about AT&T’s participation in George Bush’s warentless wiretaps. The company handed over American’s personal phone calls + internet data to the U.S. government for monitoring. Oh, my gosh.. in the name of homeland security, of course!

So today, AT&T came over to my house to see what’s up with our ADSL after a recent move. Just as they say in the comcast comercials, “the further away you are from the hub or central office, the slower your connection.” Try 300kbsp, and on top of that our new home’s phone cord is so old that it doesn’t even allow DLS data to go through (90% packet loss). So we got to talking with the AT&T worker, he was a kewl guy.. most of them look like old-school computer hackers (if you’ve seen one I’m sure you will agree). He said to check out http://dslreports.com/ for interesting topics from various individuals who work for phone companies. So I checked it out, and happend to stumble across this article:

From: dslreports.com

Congress yesterday voted to approve the latest FISA bill, complete with immunity for AT&T, Verizon and Sprint for their participation in the Bush administration’s controversial warrantless wiretapping program….. A complete breakdown of who voted for the bill can be found here. As expected, Presidential hopeful Barack Obama voted for the bill in his quest to appeal to centrists.

Hilary voted against it, Mccain (not suprisingly) didn’t vote.

It’s dissapointing to think that we don’t have much of a choise anymore when voting. Since when did presidents / bills breaking the constitutional right to privacy become something that does not enrage every single American? If I had to guess.. I would say: when TV was invented.

My mission in writing this blog is to inform any  readers of Obama’s actions, as you probably won’t hear about it on the liberal media.