When I was in public school, I'd have agreed with this. Even separating students into "honors" classes and so forth wasn't generally enough for the high achievers.

Here's the problem, though: intelligence is neither determined nor static. Your brain does not even stop growing until well into college. In the big picture, most of us personally know very high achievers in adulthood who were mediocre achievers in grade school, and most of us also know high achievers in grade school who never got any smarter. Your proposal would reward these folks while kicking the former to the curb.

It's honestly quite sad to see an exceptional 12th grader grow up to become... an exceptional 12th grader.

The best schools understand this. Instead of spuriously selecting the "best" and weeding out the "worst," there are institutions that spend their time carefully improving every student. Done correctly, this produces more high achievers without limiting those who started out ahead. A corroborating observation: some colleges that admit mediocre students nevertheless produce better graduates than prestigious, highly selective colleges (via some objective measure such as admission rates to medical/law schools). So much, then, for social darwinism. Turns out we can do better than that.

It has a 3-way RAID 1 (linux software raid), so it will take 3 disk failures for the storage to die. In fact, one of the disks have failed already, but since it still have 2-way RAID it I see no reason to do anything about it :).

Here are two reasons. If you wait for the next disk to die, then:

1. You have no protection against the final disk failing during the rebuild.
2. You have no protection against bad sectors discovered during the rebuild.

BTW, both of those reasons are why our customers have been demanding RAID6.

Another vote for Anacreon!

More specifically, a vote for the freeware rewrite: Anacreon is no longer a character-mode game. George Moromisato reimplemented the entire thing from scratch and -- crucially -- added netplay.

For those not familiar with Anacreon, it's a 4X turn-based space conquest game that delivers unusual depth despite its relative simplicity; it is complex without being complicated. Its hardware requirements are, accordingly, minimal. Yet IMHO it compares favorably with GalCiv II in several respects, and is significantly better than Master of Orion I/II or Space Empires IV (which is a game that attempts to be richly complex but only succeeds at being drably complicated).

Hi there, sorry for the late reply. When you said you'll "end here," I originally thought that you were ending the dialogue. It randomly occurred to me just now that you probably just meant you were ending your post. =) In case that was your intention, here's my response.

Your claim, in the quote above, did not originally say that. It says "1. It is possible to scientifically detect and study evidence of design." Forensics studies and detects evidence which is #1.

Ah, my apologies. I can see how that could be confusing. I considered the two statements to be deductively equivalent. But just to make things clear, let me just re-state the argument unambiguously:

1. There are scientific disciplines that detect evidence of intelligent activity, including forensics, archaeology, and SETI.
2. There might be detectable intelligent activity within the natural world itself.
3. Therefore, a discipline seeking to detect evidence of intelligent activity in the natural world, or to establish the lack thereof, can be a scientific discipline.

The intent of this argument, as before, is to demonstrate that one cannot logically deny #3 without denying #1 or #2. And really, I think we've already come to an approximate agreement when you say that you "accept it might be possible but have no idea how." That's a perfectly reasonable stance to take! I'm only saying that your stance doesn't disqualify "ID" from being science. It only states that ID is extremely hard -- perhaps insurmountably hard? But science has repeatedly overcome seemingly insurmountable difficulties, if given the chance.

What is this intelligence if not a supreme being? As I see it by using "intelligence" is just an attempt to misdirect.

It's no secret that some "IDers" use "intelligence" to misdirect, but as before, their malfeasance discredits only themselves, and not the concept as a whole. I wish I could apologize for them, but they don't represent me and I don't represent them. And I'll grant that they've made it hard to take the concept seriously, but if one were to take it seriously for a moment, it wouldn't be hard to conclude that "intelligence" is in fact the correct phenomenon to look for. Again, SETI makes a good example.

And what might we find? I'm happy to let the evidence speak for itself. For instance, if we were to discover that the universe was constructed by aliens but left unfinished in some significant manner, we'd conclude that these are very powerful but decidedly non-supreme beings. Incidentally, this would be moderately incompatible with Christianity, so I imagine that some folks would be quite thrilled to see this outcome (and would be scrambling to take back anything they said about its not being science).

Of course, that's a frivolous example. And although I gave some other examples in the last paragraph of my last post, I really don't have any better idea than you do regarding how or where to look. If I did, I wouldn't be sitting here writing, I'd be out in the lab doing it. But there are a lot of people who might have much better ideas than either of us, if only they were allowed to think that this stuff could be science, and given the academic freedom to pursue the evidence where they may find it. I don't care about legitimizing anything the "ID camp" has done thus far, and in fact I'd be the first to reject the majority of it as crap. What has gone before has no bearing on my argument, and it has no bearing on where we might go from here.