One provides some sort of explanation and the other just avoids the question.

I agree with this, but not in the way you meant.

Look, I by my existence am not evidence, or at least if I am, you're going to have to tell me why. You suggest that I-as-evidence can be interpreted either way, in which case I deny that it is evidence.

Look, if we were at a crime scene, we could have a strong definition of evidence: (1) something that establishes guilt or innocence, or a weak one (2) anything relevant to the crime scene. The only kind of evidence I'm interested in is (1). If you allow (2) then the entire universe and all existence is evidence, which makes it utterly useless and wholly uninteresting in answering the question at hand.

Complex organization does not imply conscious creation. If you want, I suppose, you could see life itself as a very, very slow-acting "creator" on a colossal time scale, but any speculation what the consciousness of life "wants" and what its motives are is, well, excessively speculative. And it is not this kind of "creation" which is normally meant in these discussions.

Arguments for creation based on "irreducible complexity" or the like are all ultimately misunderstandings, deliberate or otherwise, of Darwinian adaptation and the laws of thermodynamics.

I deny the existence of an intelligent creator because I have no reason to believe one exists, just as I deny the existence of an invisible pink unicorn within the rings of Saturn. I cannot prove or disprove either claim, but I see no reason to engage in a rhetorical dance about a proposed hypothetical for which no conclusive evidence exists.

The primary argument against an intelligent creator is that, so far, it has been shown to be an extra hypothesis which is wholly unnecessary for understanding the material universe. In science we do not add extra hypotheses without good reason.

There is evidence of creation all around us and there is much evidence that can be plausibly linked to an intelligent creator.

I know of no evidence, none at all, that has ever been presented which has been clearly and objectively demonstrated to be evidence of an intelligent creator. If you believe there is, almost certainly you do not understand what you have seen or you have been misled, or both.

I say "almost certainly" because I recognize the unlikely possibility that you have information which most people who have examined this question do not. In the off chance you do, may I ask for examples of your "evidence of creation"?

For that matter, there's already the issue of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. This was added in the 1930's or so. I was Jewish when I was in grade school, but I'd certainly feel very uncomfortable today if I was asked to make that pledge -- I really see no reason it needs to be there.

It was added in 1954 at the behest of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Knights of Columbus so that you Americans could distinguish yourselves from the fearful godless Communists on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

I'm not stupid enough to argue that cynicism towards politicians is unjustified... I would be disproven pretty fast:

• Stephen Harper has flipflopped on any number of things to retain power, like his Quebec policy, taxing income trusts, Senate appointments, etc.
• The Liberals have done the same (GST and NAFTA being only the most prominent examples) when they were in power and out.

• The NDP have never been in power federally, but Layton has found many excuses to change his position. He spent the last year savaging the Liberals for propping up Harper, then at the start of the latest little multi-party showdown said "Canadians don't want an election now" because he's scared of losing too many seats to the resurgent Liberals.

Pure cynicism is great because you will rarely, probably never, be proven wrong. Plus, you get this correctness without having to do anything hard, like do research on party positions.

The problem with cynicism is simply unproductive.

If you're think all politicians are untrustworthy lying scoundrels, you won't actually distinguish the biggest liars from the lesser. To quote Rick Mercer on his response to the cynic's argument against voting:

“And some people say they don't want to vote because they're just choosing between the lesser of two evils. Well if you don't choose the lesser of two evils then the greater of two evils might win. So not voting supports pure evil!”

If you're asking me for which party I support on issues of net neutrality and net wiretapping, I could just fling up my hands and say "well, none of them, because no matter what they say they might change their mind".

That's just the kind of cynicism I'm talking about. Because the NDP, at least, have consistently opposed these sorts of paternalistic controls, and Michael Geist's article indicates that the Liberals might be joining them.

I wouldn't be shocked to see one of these parties roll over—probably the Liberals—but it's not a certainty. And as long as it's not, I'm going to support them on this issue and not the party that is publicly calling for these controls.

Maybe I'm just Lucy calling for Charlie Brown to try kicking the football again... but unlike Lucy, as least as she appears to us, there is at least a chance that politicians will keep their promises. As as long as that chance exists we should measure it, do our research, and go with the politician that is likeliest to do what we want them to. That's hard and painful work, and means reading a lot of newspapers and reading a lot of media, but it's ultimately more profitable than simple cynicism.

I guarantee you the Liberals and NDP will back this up. No political party has a monopoly on the never ending quest for power.

Don't be so sure.

It's easy to say that a country with the longest boarder in the world has a population all within X amount of km's from the boarder. Thunder Bay is quite close to the boarder, but the communities surrounding it are still out in the middle of nowhere. I don't understand how the boarder automatically translates into high population density.

Fair enough... my father grew up quite close to the border in Manitoba but could hardly be said to be close to anything dense (even Winnipeg was far away). But my point was that the total land area of Canada, a huge part of which is the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, is a misleading impression of where the people are.

It is this sort ignorant mentality that makes the rest of Canada feel misrepresented. These communities are not "exceptional cases" but the people who live a modest life, and represent true Canadians. Just because a community doesn't adopt urban sprawl and clear cut everything in site does not justify writing it off in terms of policy. I grew up in Etobicoke and have been living up here for 5 years now.

But they are exceptional cases. Arguing they're "just the same" as Toronto is exactly the kind of mentality that gets them ignored, because the bigwigs in Toronto say "oh well, guess we're all the same" and fail to take into account the special conditions of non-urbanites.

I should make clear there is no stigma that should go with being "exceptional". All it means is what the word itself means: atypical, unusual, etc. which from a population-based perspective is simply true. Take it as a positive or negative if you want: I mean neither. There is nothing more or less "true" about this lifestyle, and I say this as someone with cousins in Brampton and Mississauga as well as Fort St. John, B.C.

Toronto is a polluted orgasm of suburbia and a perfect example of how not to populate an area. All the parks and trails back home I used to enjoy are now row housing.

Agreed! It's a hellscape: my mother lives in suburban Oakville (though I'm not from there originally) and there is literally nothing within a 3-km radius of her house but other completely identical houses. Nothing I said should be taken as some form of endorsement of urban sprawl, which I detest. My only point was that any plan for reaching out to people who don't live in cities must first acknowledge that they are not the usual case, that they require special accommodation. If you fail to do that, city folks won't recognize that they do have different needs.

As for electronic voting, I have objections to that that are basically independent of all this talk about population density. Aside from the obvious potential for voter fraud, I think it doesn't offer proper assurance to voters that their votes has been correctly handled, and there is a huge possibility for corruption on server side.

Remember the Diebold executive in 2004 who promised to "deliver the election for President Bush", and the strange correspondences between machine-voting breakdowns and Democratic-leaning precincts?

I think that the greatest potential for abuse is in those voting districts where most of the people are—in the cities—so I would seek to exclude such places from online voting. If you live close to a voting station, go there and vote. If you don't, only then should we think about loosening the rules a bit and using online voting. Otherwise (in my view) we're asking for trouble.

... my beef, if you bothered to read what I wrote, is that he says that the end user should be allowed to turn off password masking for applications such as banking/ATMs, which is totally stupid.

Dude, I understood what you said and what your beef was.

My point, which you apparently missed, was that you were mischaracterizing him by citing him as having argued for a default unmasked password entry mode. He did argue for an unmasked entry mode, but not as a default.

Because that would be expensive with, "9,984,670 km2 of land"

I have to say I'm rather tired of our total land area being cited as justification for our exceptionalism in everything from energy consumption to transit infrastructure to shipping costs. (And now voting systems.)

"Of course we use more energy... we're so BIG!"
"We can't build high-speed trains... we're so BIG!"
"That package will take two weeks to get here... we're so BIG!"

Most of us live within 150 km of the U.S. border. Most of us also live in the Windsor to Quebec City corridor, which has a population density comparable to Europe. Many of the rest live in the Greater Vancouver Area or the Edmonton-Calgary corridor.

Canada is big, but we are not evenly spread. The overall land area of Canada is an utterly useless figure for estimating the cost of voting. Baffin Island (507,451 km2) is four times the land area of Southern Ontario (139,931 km2), but it does not cost four times as much to count its votes since only 11,000 people live there as opposed to 12,000,000!

I'm not throwing the rest of Canada to the wind: we absolutely must make sure they have electoral services comparable to those living in denser areas. My point is that the far-flung communities are the exceptional case by overall population. If we are to experiment with new voting services to accommodate such people, I would prefer that it be restricted to those who need it.

As one who lives in a city, I'm quite happy with paper ballots and I see no reason to change. I am no Luddite: it is precisely because of my technical background that I oppose online and machine voting of any kind.

Retarded doesn't begin to cover this. Offering a default to turn OFF password masking for bank accounts? I'm sure the banks will just LOVE this one. We have enough problems with identity theft already.

Um, in the quote you presented he's arguing that for some applications such as bank passwords, you should have password-masking ON by default.

In other cases, where the password is less critical, you could have the checkbox unchecked by default, i.e. password-masking OFF.

Yes. Khomeini was your puppet, because it was the only one you could find against the Shah and you knew he would make Iran weak again so USA could continue it's exploition. Things go wrong, things don't always go right.

But American oil interests in Iran were nationalized by the state after the revolution! I suppose you think Khomeini (who, by the way, I am not defending!) was secretly shipping oil money out the door to the Americans, even though he spent all his time in public bashing them and fomenting Shia uprisings in Iraq and Lebanon.

I am attempting to say this as respectfully as I can: I believe your view of history to be delusional. However, I don't see why your view of history requires Khomeini to have been an American puppet. If the Americans played some role in stirring up the Revolution -- and this I could believe, since Western-educated Iranians with exposure to democratic traditions were among the first to support it -- then you could just argue it got out of control and Khomeini seized the momentum and turned it to his advantage. This could have happened whether he was a puppet or not, and if Khomeini was a puppet he sure had an odd way of showing it.

The Hostage crises got a lot of enemies killed, beause "USA didn't have enough time to shred information on spies" and it allowed USA to freeze Iranian assets outside of Iran. How did the Islamic revolution save American interests? Let's see: The nation is weak, thus you can continue exploit it. Iran was sent hundreds of years back.

That I don't deny, though as I've said previously I believe the Shah to have been an American client ruler and that the Iranian people did in some way ultimately benefit from being out from under the American thumb, although it came at the (brutal) cost of a theocracy. What I would have preferred to see (as much as my opinion as a non-Iranian Westerner counts for anything) is a republic or a constitutional monarchy emerge from the revolution, with real power vested in the Majlis.

No, the Shah was not a client and I am still not seeing anything that can prove me to me how he was a client of USA.

Well, I'm not going to convince you if you don't want to believe it. He got massive foreign aid and military hardware from the U.S., his army was trained by Americans and even his son Reza Pahlavi was trained as a fighter pilot in the U.S. air force. After leaving Iran during the revolution he lived in Panama and Egypt (both within the American sphere of influence) and the United States. His son Reza (who you perhaps regard as Reza Shah II?) has lived in the U.S. for the last 25 years.

Most significantly, the Iranians themselves believed the Shah to be an American pawn during the Revolution. This idea had to come from somewhere. Now, you could argue that Khomeini the "secret American agent" fed the theory of the "American puppet Shah" with anti-American rhetoric and false accusations, but the idea of the Americans systematically stirring anti-American rhetoric as part of some nefarious plan beggars belief.

Either way, oh.. so you bring SAVAK into this. Right, what about your beautiful CIA who disappear people? Torture people? Kill people? Secret prisons in Europe, or do Americans not count?

First off, they are not "my" CIA: I'm not American. I am a Westerner, so I can't pretend to be entirely distant from that world. But have you been listening to anything I've been saying? I have accused the CIA of being behind the Mossadegh takedown, and they are responsible for far more bloody and terrible things in South America and elsewhere. At no point have I made any attempt to defend the CIA, and I shall not!

The CIA is terrible, SAVAK was terrible, and so are the institutions in today's Iran that disappear and kill people like Zahra Kazemi. All of these agencies show the ugly faces of the governments they work for, and attempts like yours to cleanse the Shah's reputation and make him out to be some sort of tragic hero will never convince me and others like as long as the history of SAVAK is alive.

And guess what, the Shah of Iran said that he is not going to RENEW the British oil contract in 1979 - and see what happened - "revolution" (If you don't get it, British and Americans overthrew him for making Iran independent).

Um, are you saying the British and Americans engineered the Iranian revolution?

So was Khomeini their puppet then? Given that Iran severed all communications with the U.S. and that the hostage crisis played a large role in destroying Carter's presidency, just how did the Islamic Revolution serve American interests? And if, as you acknowledge, the U.S. bankrolled Iraq to fight against Iran in the 1980s, surely the revolution couldn't all have gone according to their plan! So who did the Americans want to win the revolution, then? Not Khomeini, surely. And not the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who would've brought Iran into the Soviet orbit.

I think you're trying very hard to view Iranian history from 1953 to 1979 in such a way as to cast the Shah as a sympathetic figure. He was, to a degree, and he did honestly try to engineer a good path for Iran and a resurgence of Persian culture. But from 1953 onwards, his was a client state of the United States.

That's no great shame: most of the world was divided like that and it was hard not to take sides. But don't pretend he was a wholly independent figure. And don't pretend either that his rule was founded on some sort of universal respect by the people. Leaders who are so blessed do not need a secret police force that disappear people in the night.

Please let me know! The CIA did not help the Shah - in fact the Shah was NEVER restored. He had always been the Shah, this time whoever he went on vacation to avoid a bloodbath, as always because he loved his people.

Yes, he had always been the Shah, since the resignation of his father during WWII. But from his accession until the CIA-backed coup of 1953, he had been politically marginalized and power was in the hands of the Majlis. There are legitimate questions about to what degree Mossadegh really was a democrat -- after all, he was a member of the Qajar family -- but he was clearly far more of a democrat than the Shah!

As for your comments about democracy and lies, I'm not sure what you mean. If you're arguing that democracy doesn't exist, well, no point carrying on this conversation. If you're arguing that the "Mossadegh as democrat" story is all Western propaganda, well just how does an admission that the Western world conspired to screw over Iran serve Western interests? It does nothing but paint us Westerners in a bad light.

If the Shah went on vacation because he "loved his people" and wanted "to avoid a bloodbath", he had an odd way of showing it upon his return. Secret police, random disappearances, detentions in the middle of the night. (But these were all bad people, right?) Thank goodness my own government does not "love" me so much!

JFK's dad was Joe Kennedy. Here is an example of the story you mentioned (which I hadn't heard before):

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/04/15/211503/index.htm

Google fails to automatically translate the page, but not the content. Translation follows:

I don't know any Swedish, but it seems like a pretty good translation. The main thing left untranslated is the word "jävsfrågan" which recurs repeatedly throughout the text.

While I don't know Swedish, I know enough Germanic languages to guess (correctly as it turns out) that "frågan" is 'question'. And "jäv" appears to be 'bias' with 'jävs' the genitive form, thus "jävsfrågan" appears to be 'question of bias'. Similarly, "anklagade" is 'accused', so "jävsanklagade" is 'accused of bias'.

With that in mind the modified translation is:

The Court of Appeal replace the newly appointed judge in Pirate Bay case. The question of the district court was biased now determined by three judges from another department.

The information can be mentioned that none of these are or have been members of any of the compounds are present in the case, write the court of appeal in a press release.

Following reports that the newly appointed Court of Appeal judge in Pirate Baymålet previously been a member of the same compound as the District Court judge accused of copyright bias, asked the Court of Appeal president yesterday to hear unless another law department should determine the question of bias.

Today came the decision: Designated Court of Appeal Council Ulrika Ihrfelt, who works for the department which has a special focus on copyright and intellectual property goals, may not adjudicate the issue of the district court was biased.

Instead, questions of bias will be moved to another court of appeal of the departments and review by the department head, Court of Appeal lagmannen Anders Eka together with the Court of Appeal councils Christina Jacobsson and Ulrika Beer Grehn.

"The reasons for this is for the question of bias to be reviewed by other judges than those which may subsequently come to try the case and that, having regard to the contents of the allegations of bias, deemed appropriate that questions of bias be determined by a department that has not specialized on copyright," writes the court of appeal in the press release.

Questions of bias should be treated with priority. Court of Appeal president Fredrik Wersäll expects that decision may come "in a maximum of a few weeks", states the TT.

The Court of Appeal will not go ahead with the Pirate Bay case until the question of bias is settled. If Norström would be judged as biased, the goal can be sent back to district court and the ruling reopened.

Several of the condemned pirates defense lawyers argue that Norström been biased, particularly because he is a member of several compounds related to copyright. The four sentenced to one year's imprisonment and to pay damages of 30 million.

even a whiff of slightly rancid butter (from which name butyric acid derives)

I thought that it was called butyric acid because it has four carbon atoms, just as butane does, and this was just some random IUPAC convention (like "meth" with 1 carbon and "eth" with two.) So you're saying that butane is called butane because of butyric acid?

I had never heard of any association of the "but-" prefix with butter before. I wonder if it was English or German that contributed it, since "butter" is one of those odd words that's exactly the same in both languages.