You vote without proof that your vote is counted or protected from misuse. You do it because the government promised you that. You declare for your faith without proof that it is the one way. You do it because your religious text or authority promised you that. Now compare the track record of promises kept by your religious faith against those kept by your government. BTW, if the government comes out ahead, then the government IS your religion.

People use a dictionary word to help them remember the sequence of characters they need to type. Why not just pick a sequence of characters that is easy to remember, given the position of the characters on a keyboard? Try typing "mnbvcxz" and you'll see what I mean. For paranoid password programs you can include numbers and special characters without much difficulty. For learning purposes, you can write the first letter on a sticky and then draw the shape with a line and arrow thus: <---m

Badly. The WWW, IM, music, photos, telephony, and now sadly, ringtones exist just about everywhere I visit. The convenience of modern telephony ensures that people will call without thinking through their questions first. What's left is small talk and not urgent. The ability to leave messages for oneself seems intriguing, but the technology is surpassed by that of an 8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper-- it stands up to abuse better, is more user-friendly, and requires no monetary contractual obligation.

When I don't want to be bothered, I turn the telephone ringer off. When I pick up the phone to make a call, the handset alerts me to any voicemail messages. I then skim my voicemail, which sometimes eliminates the need to call. After I call I'll turn the ringer on, if I feel like it. I do not own exclusive rights to the 10-digit number sequence that is my telephone number. But the handset is mine, and I will choose whether to answer it or not. I set my boundaries-- I choose when I will talk and when I will listen. It is not selfish, it is my responsibility. No one else is responsible for my behaviour, so with my own property I will act as I see fit. To not understand this is to ultimately require counseling.

Imagine your manager switching to Linux. Imagine him asking you lots of questions at inopportune times. Imagine spending a lot of time at his computer, educating him over and over about the dangers of running as root. Imagine upper management putting together policies to govern the frightening liability risk caused by this do-anything system. Imagine IT co-opting the Linux rollout in order to provide "better service". Imagine Red Hat 5.1, because IT has the manual for that distro. Imagine typing "grep" and seeing "grep: not found". Imagine booting Linux and watching crappy desktop apps you never use automatically open on startup, thanks to IT rollout policy. Now imagine they find out about LiveCDs. Remember those 3 1/2 inch drives with the boot floppy locked in so you couldn't eject or use the drive any other way? What's to stop them from doing the same thing to a CD drive with a LiveCD inside? Believe it.

This comment represents the point of view of many I have talked with. I decided to set down my thoughts about it here.

I have found that those who advocate a point of view seek to present one side of a story and place a low priority on learning the other side. But those who care more about the truth than about being viewed as right never stop reading both sides of the story. If you can find one of these people, you can learn some good stuff. But it is hard to trust the rest, because both sides behave as if they have personally vested interests.

For example, the commenter claims that religious adherents bear the mark of "cult-like programming". As a religious adherent, I have to admit there is a kernel of truth in that statement. Most people join both churches and cults out of needs for physical aid, companionship, or imposed order, unless they are coerced into joining. If you adopt the belief system of the people you most deeply respect, you can bond with them and receive their respect. To some extent you will benefit from their virtues and adopt their vices. But if you discard that belief system, that bond is tested. They can no longer understand your decisions, and the quality of your relationship is threatened. This is undeniably evident in the lives of my agnostic friends, no matter how they seek to deny it. They all nurture relationships with people they deeply respect who share their agnostic beliefs. We all seek relationships with those we respect and desire to protect our most valued relationships. It seems that this is the perspective from which all men approach both religion and unreligion: steeped in a personal bias stemming from our instinctual desires connected to our relationships.

It enrages me to realize this. I don't want to approach any search for truth with any bias no matter what it buys me. How much less would I relish the thought of a hopelessly biased perspective in The Search for Ultimate Truth(tm)? I hate having to accept this, and it seems like many refuse to admit such a bias outright. Although the notion that all religious persons are brainwashed is popular among the unreligious, the possibility that they themselves might exhibit any bias is laughed at. But they cannot relinquish their bias any more than they can shed their instincts.

The only way I can think that this could be done would be to cut off contact with all humanity. As it turns out, my father did this very thing. He spent time exploring remote areas of the Minnesota backwoods alone for several months. As it turns out, it was there that he decided that both the unbelief of the people he encountered at university and the church-faith of the farm town he grew up in were wrong.

The person who would show me genuine respect and love, seeking to understand me in spite of our conflict in beliefs-- that is a person I would trust. My desire to nullify my selfish bias is so strong that I would desire to be like this person enough to adopt his beliefs. But it must be genuine love, or I'd chuck his beliefs as soon as I found it was fake (that's my bias at work again). I would need a person committed both to loving me as I am and to his beliefs. If he was noncommittal in his beliefs, how could I trust him to continue to care about me? In a world full of fakers, he'd have to prove both love and commitment to beliefs by facing anything for me, even torture and death. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to truly throw myself into the relationship (including understanding and adopting his beliefs) until I was sure. And I couldn't be sure until he was dead. And once he was dead, my bias would make it all moot. Regardless of where my instincts came from, I have them, they demand to be satisfied, and none of them can be lastingly satisfied by a dead person. Other persons of respect would show up with their beliefs, I'd seek a bond with them, and eventually they would also die. So in the interests of saving time and hurt, if I really wanted to seek the truth, I would have to turn down every man-made belief. Many gods, one god, zero gods, i'm god, joe schmoe is god, god died, if I heard it from someone, I couldn't risk believing it no matter how much I respected him, no matter how much he begged me or cared about me. I'd have to live solely on instinct, and I'd probably be a wretched little bastard for the rest of my short life.

Of course, if that person came back from death after being tortured, I might put my trust in him. If I can't believe in anything else, I might as well believe in something crazy enough to get someone tortured and killed, in view of the alternatives. At least the guy really liked me, and he seemed to have his instincts licked, mine would not willingly submit to torture. But if I couldn't be sure of torture, death, and recovery, I'd think it was a scam. If I could be there and use all my senses then maybe I'd believe it. It still wouldn't be unequivocal proof, but it would be good enough to chance it, given the alternatives of trusting someone out for themselves or going animalistic. If someone else was there and told me about it, it's a bit dicier. I might believe him if he met the following conditions. All his senses would have to agree about the torture, death, and recovery of the dead man. He'd also have to prove his commitment to his beliefs by being tortured and dying for them. But he'd also have to prove his love to me somehow. If his beliefs centered on genuinely loving others, and if he was tortured and died for those beliefs, perhaps I could believe he would have loved me. Perhaps then I could believe that this happened. Having thought about it, the choice is brutal. But at least there is room to choose, I'm not forced to accept this dead man's account. If it had happened in front of me (or to me) I would have had to believe it or stop trusting my senses.

My beliefs have become apparent here, something I didn't expect when I began writing this. But having faced the difficulty of this sort of choice here, I can't call anyone a whack job for their choice. I feel that more than ever I am interested in truth, in all sides of the story, so flame on.

If you want to hear what my father decided and his reasoning as he explained it to me, ask.

First let me address the pro-life readers. Consider who gets a late-term, partial birth abortion. You have the people who couldn't come up with the money right away because of genuine financial hardship (i.e., homeless people). You have the people who could have done it sooner but refused to get their priorities straight until they became inconvenienced by the pregnancy (i.e., crack whores). You have the people who didn't realize they were pregnant for 6 months (i.e., mentally challenged). Note that these are the people the state declares unfit parents-- it routinely removes children from such parents to protect them. These three types certainly aren't going to use contraceptives. If they don't have an abortion, they will become parents. Do we really want that to happen? Ah, you say, that's the beauty of adoption. Well I doubt the typical pro-lifer has given much thought to where an unwanted child goes.

There are more than 150,000 children in the US foster care system waiting for permanent homes (1). Foster care can never be a permanent solution, because without inheritance and the permanancy of true adoption a child knows that every time he oversteps his bounds he might lose his family (2). Neither are orphanages a permanent solution-- imagine being 25th in line for a hug from your father-figure. These children need parents to adopt them. If the (more than 150,000) moral majority (3) lived what they say, this would be a non-issue. They would be holding crack babies in hospital delivery rooms and making cooing noises. They would be waiting at our borders for refugee minors and welcoming them into their homes permanently. Well I have some news for you. First of all, I have it on good authority that people are not, I repeat, not rushing to the adoption center and saying "One homeless retarded crack baby, please." Secondly, the fees are so prohibitive (4) it's cheaper to have your own, even with costly fertility drugs (5). Thirdly, have you seen the adoption paperwork (6)? It's impenetrable! You need a whole team of contract lawyers to figure it out. Good parents don't usually have the kind of money to handle that, but some career criminals do-- perhaps some who specialize in child slave labor exports (7).

Having popped that beautiful dream bubble, I'll address the pro-choice readers. I assume there are some homeless retarded crack whores among your number who protest, aid petition drives, and so on, for whom this cause is near and dear to their hearts. Oh, there aren't? Then they asked you to stand up for them, right? No? So you are all planning to have late-term partial birth abortions and this legislation will ruin your plans, yes? No? Oh, yeah, I remember that speech about "They came and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a crack whore". Yes, I agree that someone should speak up for the rights of crack whores. Taxpayers clearly owe crack whores (the backbone of our civilized society) a debt of gratitude, and I for one think we should pay that debt in the right to an abortion they won't get, along with medical treatment for heroin abscesses and petty theft court costs. Hell, they already cost us millions (8).

See, one thing is clear from this current legal battle. For both sides, it's not about lives or the quality of life anymore. It's just about getting My Own Way, even if it screws over someone else. Such hypocrites can never be part of any solution. If you're pro-life, what have you done to show love to the children you had a hand in bringing to life, despite the fact that they never asked to be born? Yelling doesn't count. Nor does paying someone else to make the problem go away. If you're pro-choice, what have you done to show love to the woman in crisis? If she had the rest of her ducks in a row, she'd be celebrating her pregnancy instead of calling it a crisis. Even Planned Parenthood knows abortion is at best a bandage over a bad situation. Yet 24% of women having an abortion are on their second trip, 7% on their third, 3% on their fourth (9). The underlying problems have been ignored. And as every engineer knows, if you try to create a solution without understanding the underlying problem, you're just asking for trouble.

Until we reach the point where technology allows individuals to control their reproductive capabilities with a toggle switch, how anyone on either side of the issue can think they are making a difference in solving social problems is beyond me.