The reason is evolution is a deal breaker due to the structure of the Christian religion.

Actually, the head of every major branch of Christianity accepts natural selection. (Evolution just means state-driven progress. Movies and chess games evolve.)

John Paul II was the first pope to accept natural selection as "the mechanism by which God did his work."

Bartholomew I (the Patriarch of Constantinople, sort-of-Orthodox-pope) has stated that natural selection is not incompatible with his reading of the Bible, and that whether it is correct is a scientific matter, in the way that gravity is, which largely does not interest Christianity, whose purposes are matters of the soul and community; this seems to me to be the best possible reaction.

It should not be surprising that the Anglicans accepted natural selection more than 100 years ago; after all, Charles Darwin, who figured out natural selection, and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who figured out the real meat of the theory - everything but breeding and survival being the diversity driver - were both Anglican ministers.

The Ecumenical Church directly funds DNA/RNA scientific research, and has since the 1980s. They accepted natural selection before most Slashdotters were born, back in one of the forms it had prior to its current form; they've been on the ball so long that they've had to accept several revisions to the theory. They have a number of fascinating things that the Slashdotter might crassly read as "science-religion fan fiction": the ecumenical church is quite happy to attempt to understand God's wisdom in terms of biodiverse resiliency and other such "what do you mean a priest said that" kind of topics. They also have the fascinating position "God continues to create." http://episcopalscience.org/projects-2/current-projects/biodiversity/

Aboon Paulose II accepted natural selection before his death in 1996, bringing with him the Cyriac Eastern Orthodoxy and the Assyrian Church. Helpfully, if you want to ask them, they're now headquartered in Chicago, and they have a 1-800 number for questions from random people.

The Malankara and Jacobites accept it. The Tewahedo Church (Ethiopian Orthodox) accepts it. The Jesuits accepted it in the 1930s.

The Protestant denominations (baptists, anabaptists, lutherans, calvinists, etc) don't have a head-of-church, and so it comes down to each local priest or minister. Predictably, this leads to a wide range of beliefs. However, many sub-branches have official or unofficial near-universal positions. For example, the Shakers, Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites have always observed science to be distinct from religion, and never held Christianity to be in contrast with natural selection; their position, like that of the Catholic Church, is that the story of the Garden of Eden is explanatory metaphor.

As far as I know, the only by-the-numbers major branch of Christianity to have actually rejected natural selection is the Methodists (and their Pentecostal derivatives.)

Seriously, the leadership of 90+% of Christianity has accepted natural selection.

How much of this anti-evolution backlash could be directly attributed to this false meme that Christianity rejects evolution?

Maybe if we opened up to that those religions might not be idiots, we might not push its adherents so squarely into the idiot box.

Not quite... part of the UEFI spec says that hardware should carry the UEFI driver on-board and be able to spit it out for the firmware to use prior to OS boot. (The UEFI environment is basically just a stripped-down OS of its own). This gets around having the BIOS require foreknowledge of your peripheral/standard... it knows what a disk controller is, so your add-in card can just provide a disk controller UEFI driver that understands the card's command set, etc.

Unfortunately that spec says the drivers only have a slot for one signature so by default almost every hardware manufacturer is going to use the MS provided signing key to sign their driver, meaning removing the MS root key from your system will likely lead to all your UEFI-capable hardware to suddenly stop working because the system can't verify that it hasn't been tampered with. This is a useful capability since hardware is often full of holes and I can totally see malware flashing itself onto add-in cards to make it unremovable/undetectable.

This part is only really relevant for the paranoid who want to ditch Microsoft's key - unless you have some mechanism to verify and whitelist the drivers you will be stuck with an extremely limited set of compatible hardware.

None of this fixes the chain of trust issues that affect certificates in general (eg SSL CAs being compromised).

Actually this kind of scheme is already an automatic fail. Remember that users routinely answered *yes* to install malicious ActiveX controls from insecure websites. Do you really think they will have any clue in your scenario? (Hint: I just want to see my video/punch the monkey/see that bikini photo, YES you dumb computer! Stop asking so many questions!)

Heck, on Android people routinely answer YES to the security dialogs when some random game or utility asks for every possible permission... that's how all those SMS malware apps and the like end up being installed by thousands of people.

Anything that relies on the user to make a security decision has failed before it leaves the drawing board. That's what makes this so damn complicated and annoying. We already have problems with chain of trust now that there are hundreds of CSAs, some of whom routinely get compromised (sometimes for years) and are used to issue bogus certificates.

RedHat/Fedora is completely correct - if you want to be secure you need to deal with the certificate chain of trust (which they are punting on by using Microsoft to handle it) and you must sign the boot loader, kernel, and all modules/drivers. That's the only way to be at least somewhat certain that no one has injected malware along the way.

I tried to start an indie label, partnering with a band that was well-liked locally and had some regional fame. We recorded at home with a TT-24 for digital I/O and monitoring and Logic 7 & Profire Lightbridge for getting it onto disk. Were able to do 24-bit 96khz and plenty of plugins. I had more multi-track channels and more processing power/virtual gear than any studio in the early 1990s. Grabbed a set of self-powered studio monitors for under $1000 (which blow away anything that was available for purchase in 1990).

We did the Tunecore digital distribution method, got into the local record shops, and generally tried to take advantage of any avenue we could.

Ultimately we lost money, here are the mistakes we made:

1. We pressed Vinyl. Granted, we got a good deal and it was a quality product (including MP3 download card using software I wrote myself) but the economics make it such that you need to sell at least a couple hundred to break even and there wasn't enough of a market for it. We sold over 100 in the first year, just from a few local shows and two local record stores. Come to find out this was more than almost everyone else - the local record store sold out (and paid us out) several times - the store manager was shocked to actually be paying money out as most of the indie albums don't sell enough to reach the threshold. Lesson: Don't press vinyl. Unless you can sell out a 5,000 seat venue in at least 10 cities you will lose money.

2. We thought CDs were on their way out so we didn't make that many of them. It turns out we should have - we sold through the CD run quickly and it was our biggest money maker, even at $5 each. This was in 2009 but still - people are more likely to buy CDs when out and about because they are small and easy to carry. Vinyl means a trip back to the car or having to lug it around town for the rest of the night.

3. Digital only works if you have access to some channel to get noticed - a friend with a very popular blog, a host of a very popular podcast who likes you, etc. There is too much music in the online catalogs - often good music. It is extremely difficult to stand out in the crowd, no matter how good you are. You should plan on about 1% conversion rate of people at the show to merch sales, so if 1000 people show up 10-20 will buy something.

4. Publicists and marketing don't work unless you can put a huge budget behind them. Thankfully we didn't spend a ton on this but others we know spent their life savings or thousands. Yes, they got local college radio interviews and blog mentions but none of it translated into increased sales of albums. It did bring a few people to shows but not enough to make up for the outlay in merch sales. This seemed to apply regardless of the genera.

5. We spent money on the launch show - it was a huge loser. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have bothered. It just takes too much money to put on a good light show so unless you have access to moving lights or projectors that you can borrow for free, or can play to a venue that already has the gear, don't bother. This leads into the next item...

6. Unless you are a well-known act, you will get screwed by the venues (who are often trying to squeak by themselves). Always charge a cover and make sure your deal is for the cover if you can (and have *your* helper work the door!). Local promotion is difficult - people are bombarded with Facebook notices, emails, etc about a ton of shows all the time so most people tune out. If possible, find out where the crowds already show up locally and make a deal to play there. It is much easier to make a new fan by going to where the people already are than trying to convince a bunch of strangers to come see an unknown band.

7. You must take credit cards. Period. Get an iPhone and Square and make sure you have signal. Make each band member get on a different network (VZW, ATT, Sprint) so you can be certain you will have coverage at the venue. Taking cards will often more than double your take vs not taking cards. I've seen merch tables have to turn away 2/3 of their customers before because people just don't carry cash.

8. People want T-Shirts. Even if you have other albums and merch, people like to have the shirts because they are easy to carry, have a bit of hipster/I know this cool new band feel, and they are useful as clothing if nothing else. You will probably sell more T-shirts than albums if you have a good design. We screwed up and didn't have them - we would probably have been in the black at this point if we had shirts back then.

Bottom line: Don't expect to make enough money to live, don't spend on anything that isn't absolutely necessary, and set a goal of having the first album/tour finance the next album and tour. It will take a long time to build up an audience so don't give up.

I'm curious if price discovery is accurate right now since NASDAQ isn't delivering execution notices for FB orders. I know eTrade was down earlier (even the public website) and Fidelity has a notice that FB trades are stuck and have been since it started trading.

All that makes me curious how many orders are stuck out there in limbo land? Will people find out tomorrow that the order they thought was cancelled got filled?

Seems like a big screw up that NASDAQ doesn't want anyone to know about. I don't think you could have mishandled an IPO any further.

But the fact that the system contains a human who designs it makes the fact that it is self organising not interesting. Self organisation amongst humans has been observed frequently in the last few millennia and should not be surprising.

I believe in science when it gives me cell phones and computer processors. When it discovers superconductivity. When it saves my life from cancer. When Hubble delivers pictures of the universe.

But climate change? No sir bob. That's just a bridge too far. You may be able to walk on the moon, splice genes to create whole new organisms, perform surgery with micro-robots over the world-wide communication network that uses LASERs to transmit over tiny glass fibers miles long - all while being told exactly where on the surface of the earth you are by a vast array of satellites in orbit, keeping time by measuring the vibrations of atoms - but frankly I just need to see more evidence for climate change.

(and for the record I'm in favor of an environmental and working conditions tax on imports from countries that do not have similar systems to the first world. If china wants to let people dump toxins and work people to death, they should have to pay an import tax to account for that).

All the major BitTorrent clients already do this, at least with the data chunks. If a certain peer fails more than a few hash checks it is permanently banned.

A lot of peers also support dynamic block lists that use known lists of media companies and groups like the one mentioned in the story. The client will periodically download the list and block any traffic from those IPs.

I couldn't find any technical detail but I assume they are injecting fake data in the initial hash exchange. With the magnet link system all you have is an initial hash and you use peer discovery to find someone in the network who knows what files (and associated hashes) that magnet link hash is associated with (the bit torrent info header from a .torrent file). As far as I know it is using SHA1, although older systems used MD5 in which case you could fake an info reply with crap data that passes the hash, tricking the client into claiming it is an invalid download. But with SHA1 it doesn't appear to be feasible to do on demand, but I wonder if they are using some sort of massive lookup table to do the same sort of poisoning attack? Seems unlikely. It also seems you could use the same logic from file chunks - send the magnet link hash to several peers and if some peers consistently give a failure block them.

Another potential weak point is peer exchange... If you pretend to be a valid peer but inject just enough of your own corrupted peers in the list (and/or just flood the list with slow responders, etc) you may be able to significantly delay the download or even stop it. For example, have your poison peers hand out correct file chunks at high speed (to get preferred) but make sure that none of them hand out certain crucial chunks or all respond extremely slowly for them. Your client could end up with a peer list mostly of the poison peers and find that it just never seems to finish the download, though it gets to 97% OK.

As much as it sucks to have a vendor pushing patches without explicit dialogs/permission, I would argue that the global damage from lack of patches far outweighs the downsides at this point.

This is one area Chrome gets right. Java (along with Firefox, Windows, et al) should automatically download and apply all security patches without prompting or notifying the user in any way unless you go in and manually disable it.

I've seen people see the Windows Update dialog and immediately click cancel. They just see it as another annoying useless dialog box and dismiss it.

Except Verizon has run fiber to a millions of existing homes. I can get 150Mbit service here and the equipment is capable of more. Each fiber serves up to 32 homes via a passive optical splitter with time-division multiplexing. There are four separate wavelengths, one for outbound data at 622Mbit total for the older B-pon and 2.4Gbit for the new G-pon stuff, one wavelength for upload (155Mbit on B, 1.2Gbit on G), another for POTS, and the last for passive cable TV. It wasn't even that expensive - IIRC about 4 billion a year.

There is absolutely no reason that any of the ILECs or cable companies couldn't do the same thing and roll out fiber to every home in the USA. We have simply chosen to let the companies milk their existing infrastructure (and thus we the people).

Any of the states could pass legislation requiring it, or just run it themselves. Or the federal government could force them to do it. For example: 100% tax on profits if at least 10% of the customers are not using 100Mbit fiber Internet connections at the end of this year, the percentage increasing by 10% every year until it reaches some reasonable number like 90%. All sales/transfers will still apply the cap (so no selling off COs to meet the target).

This is not technology or capital problem, its just a lack of will. As long as Cox/AT&T can boost the share price by diverging capex to profits they will do so.