Guilt and regret for not playing with my Pi for a few days. He or She (She is probably more correct) is called Dorothy. The name traces its lineage through an unbroken chain of components, each dorothy having some in common with the last, to my first purpose built Linux computer.

I love my Pi, it's nice and small
And on that little circuit board is all
You need to learn to code as fun
For fun and joy are needed
To get the learning process done.

The bigger picture is that the non-local desktop should not be achieved at the foundational level of the windowing system, but as an application layer. Not all applications are feasible over a network, so network transparency should only be used for those applications that need it and, more importantly, the architecture of the desktop should not be compromised in the name of network-transparency.

It is, however, just a saying. It is nice, succint, but just plain wrong. You cannot be reasonably intelligent, reasonably honest and a creationist: that much I'd agree. To make creationist ideas work properly you need to be seriously intelligent, brutally honest about what we do not actually know but merely believe we do, and take a totally free-minded approach to possibility. Doing this may just drive you crazy, and is pointless for the most part because if you do realise how to reconcile science and creationism, the people who understand you, yourself included, will most likely be countable on the thumbs on your left hand.

If you'd like me to play an educated creationist and see where we go, I'd be more than happy. There is a rational alternative to the theory that our origins are purely evolutionary if you question your assumptions deeply enough. As my other post points out, however, the discussion has no place in science. For reference I'm a WeDontHaveAClueist in the sense that my position is we don't know and can't know and science can't tell us where we really came from. Truth, when you dig in, is one of the biggest cans of worms in creation/uncreation/notcreatedatalleation.

My thoughts: Science classes should teach evolution, not creationism, the latter is not science. If you want to rationally approach the subject of our origins in an open minded way, that is the place of an appropriate branch of philosophy. If you look for a theory that fits the evidence and make reasonable assumptions that batsh** crazy stuff isn't happening behind the scenes, evolution's what you get, thus that's what should be taught in science classes. What direly needs to be taught is that the scientific approach isn't the only way to view the world, and that science divorced of its underlying philosophy becomes like a house with its foundations removed. There is a point to faith, and indeed to myths. The point of myths is that much meaning can be conveyed to a level sufficient for everyday life that would require thousands of journal articles to pin down to scientific standards, if it can be pinned down at all. Sometimes a myth is enough.

In short, teach basic maths, basic science and teach people how to be open-minded, reason carefully and not be dogmatic about what they believe.

Also develop a good notion what faith is, in both a secular and religious context and teach that. Do not teach the agressive secularist idea that faith is old-fashioned, backward, inconsistent with evidence or just plain wrong. That is, alas, the seed of religious dogmatism growing up within the humanist viewpoint, where surely religious dogmatism has no place.

We've got a choice between two bunches and a little extra bunch, all composed of professional politicians. We can't vote the political class out as a bloc and are basically stuffed until we do. Thus: we're stuffed.

When we get to the prequel to the prequel to the prequel to the prequel to the...

When does this stop?

We may as well stop where we are now and answer the question posed without worrying about foundational prequels.

And where does chance get its random numbers from? Why is reality unreasonably well described by mathematical laws.

In summary, 'you just happened by chance, get over it' is no better than 'you exist because God created man in verse X of Genesis 1, and you have sin because of Eve's sin in Genesis 2-3.. get over it.' The point of this is that the 'get over it' attitude is unhelpful to those who are unsatisfied.

Consider:

Eventually if you don't get over it, if you chase back far enough, abstract enough, you will at least find something that you can label as the Divine (to give it a name other than God.) Either the 'this is the case because X, and X is the case because Y' chain goes back indefinitely, in which case you pick a point, any point, say X and say 'from X backwards we'll call everything divine, and label the totality of divine things The Divine, or God, or whatever name you choose' or else this chain terminates, and where it terminates is, again, the Divine.

I don't really see the point of this kind of reasoning anymore, but went along these lines in the past.

If you want to believe in God, there are rational reasons if you look for them, and likewise for if you don't. There is, for sure, never going to be sufficient philosophical foundations to decide. So choose your faith, be it materialistic or theistic or whatever wisely, and accept that you cannot know for sure. This latter point is the one thing where I would play the get over it card: we don't know intellectually, and we can't know intellectually, so get over it.

I thought the seasons were six months out in the southern hemisphere, but September is only five months after April. Or are these Thai guys serious? And does the floating glass palace have a big Apple logo like the famous stores??

X and the current event subsystem designs render all that is built upon them uncompetitive in the current climate. We need a new graphics layer optimised for local graphics, with remote stuff added via a different layer. Much novel stuff can be done with events handling from devices. But so long as we stick doggedly with X, that won't happen. We need to move on, and have needed to do so for a decade or so.

we know the process of evolution exists, observed it (in part), and know how it works.

So we know it has a role to play in some of the small changes in our recent past. Besides that 'can't see anything else' argument, how does one conclude that it is the only mechanism?

One would expect most things to be beyond human understanding, so why not the nature of a creator if one exists?

I raise such questions because I believe that evolution and naive science are the new religious dogmas of the world, and represent a trend in the following of scientific progress that needs opposing. People should take real care with their thinking when it comes to making deductions from the evidence (and you don't need to point out the oxymoronic aspect of that previous statement: I'm well aware of it.)

I've questioned everything to death, come to the conclusion that you can't do better then a good, open minded religious faith (where questioning is welcome). Unquestionable dogma is one of the worst features of much of religion, though the complexity of current science gives it, de facto, a similar level of unquestionability: consider how much training and qualification you need just to get a frontline scientific researcher to consider your views seriously without being dismissed as naive. As such, you have to draw on mainstream belief systems as resources for inspiration, voting with your feet where necessary, and ultimately convince yourself against your scepticism that you have a good belief system for living life by. Science in its present state provides little of this, just as the biblical text provides very little in the way of scientifically accurate models of our reality. What bemuses me is people who expect that one can provide a substitute for the other,

We have maybe a few decades of serious measurements about our universe to work on. Sensible practice means not extrapolating too far into the past and expecting accurate results. Sure running the physics clock back to an apparent origin makes sense from the sense of testing a theory for internal consistency and consistency with other theories (this shows an incompatibility between QM and relativity, hence the need for something such as string theory.) But if you believe you can extrapolate a few million years into the past from data gathered in a few recent decades, you need to check your thinking carefully. There is probably an assumption that basic principles as understood now and which can be verified to work now have always been that way, without variation. There is probably the assumption that a theory about the past that is consistent with the evidence you see in front of you actually happened, as is necessary to make progress in many areas, but which needn't hold true for the distant past. The problem comes when you try to eliminate such assumptions: you bump headlong into circularity.