Slashdot Mirror

Isaac Asimov

The problem:
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. - George Bernard Shaw

Leading to this accepting attitude adjustment:
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. - GBS

yay Preview and Submit buttons switching places.

I've already got VisiCalc, why would I need Excel 2007?

Sure VC is simple, no frills, but it gets the job done, and you can't reinvent anything better than the first time. I don't know how all you programmers keep your jobs, all the good software is already written.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
    ~~ Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899 (attributed)
[Disclaimer: this quote may have been invented.]

The opium that is creationism is some damned powerful stuff.

I would hate to think "Linux has won" in the sense that it has become the only (Hobson's) choice of OS. If that were the case then anti-trust 2.0 should be against the evil penguin. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Linux become a universally accepted alternative to Windoze but I don't think it is healthy for ANY OS to become "all powerful", after all:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/27321.html

An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought. -- U.S. Senator Simon Cameron (1862)

Ice Weasel? Come on, is that really a respectful name for the browser?

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
-- Matt Groening, in his "Love is Hell" book: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/26730.html

It's a reference to a line from one of Matt Groening's Life is Hell cartoons:

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Matt_Groening

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

The exact quote is Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write. Except that I'm fairly certain he'd have written it in French. Anyway, the gist that he would give his life to preserve the other author's freedom of speech.

Sadly, it seems that we're running out of people who believe this, whether through simple attrition or execution.

>I've wondered, in fact, if this might become a new business model in the new internet economy. A "hit of the moment with planned obsolescence". It seems to me that everything cool dies off, and internet fads spike quickly and then degrade.

In about 1890, Oscar Wilde said:
"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

How do you tell a politician is lying? Easy, his lips are moving

The more interesting question is how to tell when a search engine is lying.

There seems to be an assumption that an algorithm is immune to "lying" because code is somehow objective. I think that's a naive position and an outright fallacy. A lie? Well, that would be a subjective judgment, wouldn't it.

For one thing, the mere notion that you can reduce "accuracy" to a single number is questionable.

How many people are happy in the US? Well, that depends on happiness, polling techniques, etc.

How many people are unemployed? Well, that depends on the definition of unemployment. Does working at McD's count as employed if you were formerly a rocket scientist? Does not being on unemployment rolls count?

Do we have a sound economy? How is Google going to rate that when experts presently disagree? Probabilities? Probabilities of what? A crash? Rich people losing money? Poor people? The strongest evidence you have that the answer Google says it will offer is likely to be inaccurate is the dimensionality of the response... if it returns a single response when there are many subjective answers, then that itself is evidence of bias.

I seem to recall someone saying that the only real probability is 1 or 0, and everything else is a fiction we construct based on our belief that we have set up the problem with the correct analysis and independent variables. Google does not have independent variables at its disposal. Google has the world's largest set of interconnected variables, feeding back on each other. It's more likely that we will define what Google says to be true than find that Google is right, since Google's opinion will become accepted as truth and will then itself influence outcomes. Accuracy loses meaning in the presence of such a feedback loop.

I could go on, and might do so in another forum, but forunately some others (here and here and surely others) have done so. For now I'll just point to the old quote variously attributed to Twain or Disraeli: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics..

People's willingness to blindly turn to Google for the answer of all borders creepingly (if not creepily) on religion, and Google is so enthralled with the fun it is having that it's seeming to always be pushing the line on what is ethically reasonable.

The assessment of truth is one topic that we, as humans, should not outsource to machines. As soon as we believe machines can do that, we might as well all just execute a "shutdown" and wait until we're needed again.

p.s. If you're wondering about my subject line, it's the title of a Star Trek episode in which a character asks "Is truth not truth for all?" As a child, I had learned from this episode that there was just one truth, not to be hidden. But on reflection, now older, I don't know that that's really true. Nor do I want to live in a world where a "child intelligence" (Google) is busy making the globally visible mistakes necessary to learn the next higher order truths about truth.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887

False Choice and Appeal to emotion.

No, neither. The choice is not a false one; it is mutually exclusive to say "there exist behaviors X for which it is ethical to force parents into X" and "there do not exist behaviors X for which it is ethical to force parents into X."

Of course the examples given have emotional impact, but that does not make the argument fallacious. The point is that they are behaviors that almost every sane person finds ethically abhorrent; a set of ethical principles that fails to condemn them is at odds with our intuitive understanding. It is this intuitive understanding, not raw emotion, to which the appeal is made.

Arguments of this sort are common in ethics, the equivalent of a reductio ad absurdum: "by such-and-such argument, murdering innocents is acceptable. But we know murder is not acceptable. Therefore such-and-such argument is flawed."

You may reject such axioms as "murdering innocents is unacceptable" or "beating kids with a two-by-four is wrong and justifies the use of force to stop". They are (at the level at which we're working) axioms, not provable statements. But if that is your position, then we have nothing more to discuss.

If, however, you agree that there exist behaviors X (such as refraining from severe beatings) for which is is ethically right to force parents into X, then we must ask what conditions characterize the set X. There is no answer to this that does not rest on a "value judgment": what things do we value strongly enough to use force?

There is a strong consensus in our society that a basic education for children is something we value that strongly, that compulsory education is ethically justified.

Such an education must be based on what is true according to our consensual best knowledge about the universe; the process of setting school curricula is political so that a consensus of some sort can be reached. Yes, it can be an ugly process, and doesn't work 100% of the time. Consensus and best knowledge are sometimes at odds. People are a problem.

Some of this consensual best knowledge may contradict prejudices and superstitions held by the parents. Saying that "a person's skin color has no bearing on their ability to think or feel", "the Earth goes around the sun", or "species are related through common ancestry, differentiated through natural selection" are examples of such truths.

Comparing the above [child abuse, etc.] to teaching children values *you* might find objectionable is disingenuous, at best.

That's an example of the "fallacy of the Extended Analogy".

Again, let me point out that there are two questions: "are there behaviors X for which is ethically right to force parents into X", and "what is the criteria for membership in X"?

If they want to teach thier kids that the invisible pink unicorns created the world by wishing really really hard, that's thier concern. You can question it, condemn it, and ridicule it all you want, but you have no right to stop them.

Anyone is free to tell anyone that invisible pink unicorns created the world by wishing really really hard; that's free speech.

Parents, however, are obligated to see to it that their children are given a decent education. Such an education includes that the child will encounter and be given the opportunty to fully consider alternate theories, theories which are based upon the consensual best knowledge about the universe.

That may mean that a homeschooling parent has to tell the kid about the Big Bang during a science lesson, and then after the lesson tells the kid that scientists who don't believe in the invisible pink unicorns are liars and are condemned to spend eternity in the region of Thud. Fine. The kid has been exposed to the idea and, in the fullness of maturity, will be able to make an informed choice about which theory has more explanatory power.

Well out of all the places where you can find out who wrote this... Google!!
According to the quotations page it was written by Abraham Lincoln in a book review (I wonder which book that was). They give the precise quote as "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like".

more specifically, Al Gore qualified that later as voting on legislation to create DARPAnet, an ancestor of the Internet, not the Internet itself. DARPAnet evolved into ARPAnet and eventually into the Internet.

Anyhow, nothing he ever said could ever make up for the idiotic things the elder Bush's VP said http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dan_Quayle/ - even in context he sounded like an idiot, although a few of them I think he meant figuratively (like being a part of Europe).

And no, I'm not a Democrat troll, I haven't been happy with any President for either major party(including Reagan, whom I think was a great figurehead, but made some lousy decisions) - most of the candidates for major parties I like are nixed early on because they stray on some issues from party lines.

I was searching for a suitable dubya quote to make a witty reply - in particular I was searching for a quote containing a reference to both the words "freedom" and "truth". Imaginge my surprise to find most pages of dubya quotes I found, such as this one, contain numerous references to "freedom" but few or in this case no references to "truth". Not one. Does this tell us something about the man?

"Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."
Albert Einstein
New York Times, March 13, 1940
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/29604.html

I want my children to be happy, healthy, and safe. So, I don't call Congress and ask them to legislate the fear-mongering-du-jour. What do I do? I love, respect, and educate my kids - including helping them to understand the wonderful and the horrible things about the world (including the internet, and sites like MySpace). My kids have to make decisions for themselves about these things (they MUST think on their own and MUST have their own opinions) - I just provide guidance, respect, love, and lots of support. Loving, realistic parents are kids' greatest allies, not the congress.

I sincerely believe that our (U.S.) representatives are often deeply confused about the massive, swirling, changing world around them. It is almost as though they spend their day wading through the swirl of society, plucking things out of the air (just because something is popular, is in the news, ore is something important to their handlers).

A little plucking of my own, something I read on quotationspage.com, here's something I think is succinct:
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." Thomas Jefferson, to Archibald Stuart, 1791

- http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Thomas_Jeffer son/Thomas Jefferson

Why can't they just make their own choices and be responible for them? We're talking about adults of legal age. I'm sooooooooo sick of the "It's for your protection" BS that it's not even funny. How about accountability?

I wish I had mod points. +5 - my GF asks me why I watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report and get all upset about news like this - when we live in Canada. I tr yto explain to hher that what happensin the US has some impact on us, and that I am very concerned with the slow erosion of privacy and personal rights occuring in the US today. She just won't understand, so I tell her its okay - I worry enough or the both of us. It makes me glad I am not a US citizen - if I was I would be up in arms right about now.

To quote a few old folks:

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
                Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), to Archibald Stuart, 1791

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
        Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790), Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Both taken from: http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/freedom/

The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.
-Larry Hardiman

You worked for Charles De Gaulle?!

Sure, de nada. I'm a bit surprised at the timing of the front page article, too... or maybe not, given that news events from the past, presumably caught in bobbles, do seem to crop up on the front page of Slashdot with some regularity.

Oh well. I guess it just serves to demonstrate Edna St. Vincent Millay's classic observation, "It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over."

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Benjamin Disraeli .

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Benjamin_Disr aeli

"Figures may or may not lie, but liars always figure." me

Matthew

Reminds me of my favorite quote :

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

"The Moon is essentially in the same orbit... The Moon is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."

- Hunter S. Thompson

> > 1. What you know you know.
> > 2. What you know you don't know.
> > 3. What you don't know you know.
> > 4. What you don't know you don't know.
>
> Wow, I didn't know the Secretary of Defense had a Slashdot account!

It seems to me that both the writer of "1., 2., 3., 4." and Rumsfeld are familiar with Rene Descartes, famious mathematician and philosopher:

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." Rene Descartes

Wow, I didn't know the Secretary of Defense had a Slashdot account!

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
- Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002

"Facts are stupid things."

From http://www.quotationspage.com/

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790), Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Some Ben Franklin quotes

George Gallup said "I could prove God statistically". I think that sums up the reasons for belief in superbeings rather nicely.

The fact is that, when unlikely events continue to happen against their probability -- not just once, not twice, but over a person's entire lifetime -- that influences people to believe that some power is working against the natural flow of events.

When those things lead to much better outcomes than one might suppose the alternatives would have been (I might not have met my wife, I might not have ever ______), one begins to believe that the Power is a beneficent one, holding a plan for their lives and wishing the best for them.

What people here tend not to realize is that, when you tell someone that they believe in a work of fiction, you're telling them to ignore a lifetime's accumulated "evidence" to the contrary. I quote "evidence" here not to trivialize it, but to mean that it's not evidence in the experimental sense, but in the anecdotal sense, which is still extremely powerful - even if it doesn't live up to "The Scientific Method".

And perhaps that's where the rub is. There's no control group for an individual's life. What muddies the water even more is that some atheists thrive while some Christians suffer. And, even more, it's difficult to tell what was "best" for each person. For some people, "best" is a little house in suburbia with their wife and kids. For others, extreme wealth, others, a life of slavery or prison. Saint Paul "endured hardships on [his] journeys: he was imprisoned in Philippi, was lashed and stoned several times and almost murdered once", but he believed it all to be in God's plan for his life.

The point is that people have their own perceptions of God in their lives, and simply claiming that it's unprovable doesn't make it any less real to them. For them, it's not only NOT 'unprovable', is's already proven through a lifetime of experiences.

If you're not afraid to challenge your "unprovable" assertion, then do an experiement. Ask God to do something completely unpredictable and that wouldn't harm anyone else, and then wait and honestly observe. You just might be surprised.

Churchill once said "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

It's a play on the Tolkien quote, "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger." Presumably from one of the LOTR books or the like (haven't read them myself).

I forgive you. We're not all employed by Bill, after all.

Read some of these. I'm sure there are some that apply.

a dog is a slave to man, while a cat is only slave to himself

Oh, okay. And what makes you think I got it from the web? I really can't believe I'm continuing to dignify this. Your principle really does mean that if ANYONE ELSE has ever quoted the same passage, you have to also quote them. You and I both know that's wrong, so you can spare me the lecture. I bolded the passage, not because someone else happened to do it a few years ago in an obscure little internet article, but because that is the part I wanted to emphasize! And guess what? I sorta kinda mentioned that I added the bold.

You know what my favorite intro to a book is? It's the one in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. It goes "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." (p. 1, bold added) as quoted in

http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/cities.html

http://www.bartleby.com/59/6/itwasthebest.html

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/29595.html

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/charles dic101118.html

http://www.epinions.com/content_3173621892

http://www.courierpostonline.com/columnists/cxan06 1104a.htm

http://www.answers.com/topic/it-was-the-best-of-ti mes-it-was-the-worst-of-times

http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=75 62_0_10_0_C

http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/it_was_the_best _of_times-it_was_the_worst_of/147366.html

According to you and only you, I have to quote all those webpages whenever I want to quote the first like of that book. Otherwise, it's plagiarism. Oh, and I better cross my fingers and hope no one has bolded any part of that sentence.

Well, good work. You got me to dignify another person who really doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

Here is one such site.

Two Factor Authenticationis not the only part of the problem. It does helps a lot for strong authentication of the client. Some other important parts of the problem are:

1. Mutual Authentication. Short term, need to have the FI display something unique which helps the user tell for sure they are connected to who they think they are connected to. Longer term, need changes to Firefox and IE6 (which for me means 95% of my customers) so that the PKI credentials for the FI are displayed.
2. Need to be able to ask the client if I can query their computers status, and make sure that they have a current patch level and decent AV and Spyware protection. So, need to ask Linux and Windows (or other products installed on Windows and Linux) to provide capabilities, because I do not want to download code. After all, not my business. Could request this function with a special HTTP header.
3. Mid term to long term, I love the idea of a second factor (USB attachment) which supports PKCS#11 / PKCS#15. This, along with #1, prevents MITM attack.
4. Everywhere in the world, except maybe theU.S., we are rapidly rolling out EMV and VIS. So, we are going to have Smartcards in everyone's wallet, that will be a key part of the 2FA problem. Just need a small portable USB device to support a USB interface to the card. So far, I am having trouble with this, need something small enough to hang on your keychain. Wait a year or so, someone will build it.

On the server side, need to make some changes as well.

1. Proper support for tiered authentication. So, you can access less dangerous functionality with less authentication
2. Base the entire thing on a decent RBAC approach, so I can administer and keep track of what is going on. Note, DSD gives me a decent way to model tiered authentication.
3. Need to build a proper authorization framework so that the requirements for both a proper authentication tier and even a signature (OTP, Digitial Signature) on specific transactions can be enforced.

The bottom line:

1. The stronger the authentication of the client, the better. As we move towards 2FA, lets be careful to not make any stupid biometric decisions. Biometrics should only be used to gain access to the hardware second factor, for instance via a thumbprint. Then, it the second factor gets stolen, we just revoke the token; we do not need to cut off your thumb!
2. Mutual authentication. Not only does the client need to prove who they are, the FI needs to prove who it is. Some cool stop-gate things with GIFs and stuff are possible, but in the middle and longer term, changes to the browsers (the two that dominate my customer base are Firefox and IE)
3. Assurance the PC is protected. If you will excuse me the vanity, I will riff on "Clarke&'s Third Law", name it "Cameron's Law&", and state that "Any sufficiently infested PC cannot be protected from allowing the customer to be scammed". Frankly, I was really hoping that the Fed would step up to that in its

It is a good thing you have no idea what you are talking about. Science is the study of the things of nature and if "God" created the Cosmos, then you should be able to find a "fingerprint" of a design. As the master himself said "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Einstein http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/24949.html

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

Mahatma Gandhi

They (Saddam's terrorists) already had attacked, and were attacking still. Your claim makes no sense. The "attacks" you mention were retaliation for attacks against Americans which had already occured.

Prior to the invasion, when did "Saddam's terrorists" attack the US? If you're going to say 9/11, your so dellusional, but it wouldn't be your fault. You would have just been taken by a orchestrated, and immediately discredited, lie.

How many lies must be told to defend Saddam? There is nothing true about this. Iraq refused to document such destruction of the weapons. They were still blocking inspections up until the US large-scale retaliation. If they were eager to end the embargo, they would have welcomed inspections. [...] There would have been no second "war". if he had bothered to comply.

The irony of course is that in the end he did in fact comply.

I attended a forum with UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. He said that Saddam's regime was a bunch of liars, but even a liar can eventually tell the truth. He told of the story about the search for some sort of proscribed ballistic missles, which he said was typical of his dealings with Iraq.

The inspectors would first ask the Iraqis to prove they were in compliance. The Iraqis would say they were, and then drive the inspectors out into the desert to show them the destroyed missles. The inspectors would then take an inventory of all the identifyable parts and take notes of the part and serial numbers. These parts would then me matched to specific shipments.

This investigation would show that these parts came in lots of 100, but there were only enough parts at the site for 10 missles. The Iraqis would then be confronted with this. After some stalling, the Iraqis would eventually state that they "honestly thought" they destroyed all the missles, but were mistaken, but have since destroyed the remaining 90 missles. The inspectors would go out to the desert, examine the remains, and positively 85 missles. There would be a pile of parts that could make 5 missles, but they couldn't be positively identified with any particular missle. He said that if the Iraqis weren't lying so much, the inspectors would have listed these parts as 5 missles, and sign off. But the Iraqis were liars. They lied all the time. Given their track record, they could have been lying then. So the inspectors wouldn't sign off. And so begins one of the many tragedies in the lead up to the invasion. The intellegence services believed that the Iraqis had 5 missles, but they actually didn't, and there was no way the Iraqis to prove otherwise.

While you attempt to sugar-coat it, you do mention Saddam's terrorist actions to try to exterminate the Jews.

First, he didn't "try to exterminate the Jews." He was thug, dictator, and a murder, but didn't do that. There's plenty of attrocities to attribute to him, without make some up.

In keeping with "tell any lie in order to prop up Saddam and make Bush look bad", [...]This is quite typical. None of the arguments used in support of Saddam Hussein and his aggression have any validity.

Listen jackass. No one supports/supported Saddam Hussein. Many, and now a majority, believe it was the wrong war, at the wrong time, against the wrong people, executed without a plan, and on slim-to-no rationale.

Try and wrap your mind around this: Someone can say, "That guy is a son-of-a-bitch, but he's not the son-of-a-bitch we're looking for. Remember what you said before? We want to get him! We are at war, but not with guy! You let the most wanted men in the world escape not just once but

"They that give up liberty for security deserve neither" - Benjamin Franklin

Do you have a social security #?

Quit mangling Franklin's words...

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

a decent programmer can program for all systems?

I didn't say that, or did I?

sure you did. here's your post:

Decent programmers...can easily program for all of those systems.


"non programmers don't program at all, other pretend they do." WTF?

I didn't say that either, you misquoted :)

yeah, you said that too - here it is below (spelling errors included):

"Some non-programemrs don't program at all, others pretend they do."

i just have no idea what your OP is supposed to mean. so i'm not a decent programmer because i don't do windows, *nix and mainframes?

maybe i'm wasting my time

Keep that up every year as mandatory courses along with the other mandatory courses, and there won't be educational problems.

= 9J =