Try finding out what Einstein meant by God. Hint: it's utterly alien to your apparent conception or that of anyone who cleaves to ID or indeed to any of today's major religions.
In 1929, Einstein was asked in a telegram by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein whether he believed in God. Einstein responded by telegram: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
You'll find that quote and references to it in lots of places, including Wikipedia's articles on Baruch Spinoza, on pantheism, and on Albert Einstein, among others. In fact, it's hard to see how you avoided the linked article on Einstein's religious views where he described himself as being agnostic since the age of twelve, and also stated the year before his death:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.
Or maybe it's not so hard, as even the most superficial inquiry would have devastated your position.
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does.
It provides an unjustifiable, partisan[*], and almost certainly wrong answer to the "why" question. It would be more accurate to simply admit that we don't know and that we are very far from having enough data to claim any such knowledge.
[*] The Catholics and most other branches of Christianity reject ID (the Catholics learned their science lessons the hard way, and avoid any contradiction of evolutionary theory). So do most branches of Islam and other major religions. So ID is an intrinsically partisan minority viewpoint.
It's entirely possible to believe both at the same time, in fact.
It's possible to believe any pair of contradictory hypotheses, if your ignorance encompasses both of them. And ignorance of both evolution and so-called intelligent design would be needed to believe in both of them simultaneously.
Indeed. And everything created in/tmp also has drwx------ permissions (by default on all of my systems). So even with several users simultaneously logged-in, the files of one user in/tmp are not accessible to other logged-in users except those with root privileges, and they can access almost anything anyway, if they want to.
Which is not to say it couldn't be done better, so that it would not be available to others - not even root, and not even if the disk were stolen. Suggestions for this include having/tmp encrypted with unique-per-login key, or using a RAM-only/tmpfs instead. Many additional precautions would be needed to bring security of other user data to comparable levels.
At relatively close prices I'd prefer a physical book (where at least I won't be restricted by the publisher's "loan" policy!).
Exactly. I don't buy ebooks. Actually, I bought two about 7 years ago, and was rapidly disgusted at both the price and the insane restrictions (especially the "no copy & paste" lunacy, but also the "can't copy to another device" and "can't print more than X pages per month" stupidity).
Amazon gets a lot of business from us, and so do several local bookstores, but only for real books - ink on paper. Real books can be shared with other family members (occurs very often - we have shared interests), loaned to friends (uncommon, but it happens occasionally), and sold on at second-hand stores (also uncommon, but does happen when kids' books are outgrown). We're all bookworms, and none of us really enjoys reading on a screen.
That would be in your.bash_history file (or whatever you name it locally).
Really, this is way overblown by calling it a "data breach": it's not as if your data is compromised to a remote attacker. It requires that somebody else has your disk. As we all know, if your hardware is stolen/confiscated/impounded/seized/whatever, only encryption can keep your data safe. Apparently, even that can be circumvented by legal compulsion.
Wow! Hijacking a well known metric for a completely unrelated application just to draw a weak metaphor between the original phenomena being measured and this other unrelated event.
Not to worry, they'll probably combine it with other bastardized metrics and consign the lot to oblivion. How about a Beaufort scale for phishing and 419 scams, or a Fujita scale for antisocial behaviors (on the internet, of course).
Perhaps what's really needed is a Kelvin scale for relevance. The suggested "Privacy Richter" scale is pretty cold.
On a related note, we had an employee with a last name Lovelace. An older client, always prim and proper, left a message once to see when "Mr. Deepthroat would be stopping by to finish the job".
Got to watch out for those "prim and proper" ones. She probably exhausted Mr. Lovelace by the time he "finished the job" on each visit.
On the BBC website (the link posted in the summary), and it was quite a prominent story - however, I went back to find it this morning and it's nowhere to be found, you have to use a direct link to get to it. Interesting...
It's there, but not in a very prominent place. Go to the England part of the UK section, select Yorkshire & Lincolnshire as your local area, then click on the Humberside section. It's there, for their community to see, but not really presented to the rest of the nation.
OK, here's a link which tells you how to get it, at the risk it gets slashdotted: Dune, Spicediver fanedit v2. There is much else to like at the fanedit site.
hmmm, was this topic started by Amazon? They can only do well from this in any event. Who else has already added items to their cart based on recommendations here? I am up to six so far.
I'm up to four (a pox on this thread!).
The low number is largely because I've already got so many of the books being suggested.
I always felt the David Lynch version had the right look and feel, it was just too trimmed down. I'd have loved to see a 4 hour version of it.
Lynch's version was about 2:15 or so. However, there were different cuts made for TV (shorter) and so forth, and these often used footage which was left out of the theatrical release. The various DVD releases also contained extras, including some scenes which were cut from all releases. Do yourself a favor, and search for the "Spicediver fanedit" of Dune. It's over 3 hours, and has merged almost all of the available footage, including resequencing many of the scenes so they are not necessarily in the order you've become used to. Apparently, it got a nod of approval from Lynch, who considered the theatrical and TV time constraints to be inadequate.
Innovation requires more effort than genius. There are few "Ah-ha!" developments that come to people in the middle of the night in a dream. Patents are intended to create a profit incentive for people to put in the requisite effort, thereby encouraging innovation for the public good.
At the moment, I have 30 issued US patents (sole inventor in some, joint inventor with my wife and/or other collaborators in others), and a few applications pending. They all involve physical apparatus, rather than pure method/process stuff. My own experience bears out your first point: that invention requires effort rather than genius. However, I'm not at all sure of your second point, below.
As soon as my years of hard work pay off and I put my product on the market, countless other companies would be able to offer the same thing for only the cost of reverse engineering my product.
The cost of reverse engineering a product is often just as high as the cost of inventing in the first place. Moreover, it costs the copier time to reverse engineer and set up production of the copy, and denies the copier the critical insights of why a product was made in a particular way. The knock-off is generally shoddy in comparison to the original, for this and other reasons. Also, since you'll presumably have a first-mover advantage, you'll get a good payoff from the high margin early-adopting customers, when there will be essentially no competition on price or quality.
Usually, the situation is that I have some problem to solve, and in forming the solution some novel method or device is created, or perhaps a few alternative solutions of varying merit are created. Clearly, these creations are useful, and we check carefully that they are novel. Their nonobviousness often relies on not knowing which problem is being addressed. Given a particular problem statement, many other engineers might have reached a similar solution. Often, it is recognizing the problem itself which leads to the invention. Lacking that critical step in the process, is it almost guaranteed that most copycats will be full of glitches and will not compete on performance, and those that perform adequately will be further delayed and will not compete on price.
We usually apply for patents on some of the alternative solutions we don't implement as well as those which we use, and on solutions to problems for which no product is planned. This creates uncertainty for competitors as they are not sure what exactly we're going to do (patent applications must be filed well before products are released). Do we patent every invention we implement in a product? No, of course not: we keep some as secrets, if it is judged very likely that the actual invention would not be reverse engineered, or that it would be too difficult to ascertain whether a competitor's product was infringing.
Well, today it's only 15ms to google.com by ping, while slashdot is still 147ms and 8.8.8.8 is still 46ms. I suppose the route to Google's local search node is less congested.
Incidentally, google.com resolves to several IPs in the 173.194.32.0/24 subnet which all belong to Google's alter ego 1e100.net, while Google's nameservers (including 8.8.8.8) all resolve to addresses in google.com.
150ms to Slashdot? Dear god, open a service ticket!:)
Well, since I'm in Finland the 150ms to Slashdot does not bother me. It's about the same to Distrowatch or Freshmeat, and about 170ms to Wikipedia. I'm more impressed by the 40-48ms to 8.8.8.8 or 25ms to www.google.com, which is even faster than the 52ms to bbc.co.uk, although not nearly as good as the 8ms to funet.fi, tkk.fi, tty.fi (all a few hundred km away) or other well-provisioned sites in Finland.
What's the average range of these jammers? Could someone on the bus jamming Mr. Loud Talker also jam a 911 call from an apartment building the bus is driving by? Could someone stopping a movie theater talker be hampering a call outside of the theater?
Wikipedia is sometimes your friend. Quoting the most relevant bits:
"Smaller handheld models block all bands from 800MHz to 1900MHz within a 30-foot range (9 meters)."
"The radius of cell phone jammers can range from a dozen feet for pocket models to kilometers for more dedicated units."
The larger models which interfere with a tower or cover several tens or hundreds of meters are unlikely to be hand-held due to their power consumption. So pocket-sized models are effective over about 4-9 meters, which would extend outside a bus, but not very far outside. The risk of interfering with a 911 call or other emergency situation is very low, but if there are enough jammers in use around the world then it is bound to happen. Interference with 911 calls would be much more likely with the large jamming units employed by police and other government agencies, or by simply switching off cellphone towers (to prevent any call being made).
I used to work for AT&T Uverse and over 200ms was enough to get a tech onsite to look at the problem.
Most likely, you mean latency to a local test unit (perhaps where the uplink switches are).
FYI, my latency is below 4ms to my ISP's speed test machine, about 46ms to 8.8.8.8 (google's public DNS), but around 150ms to slashdot. It depends a lot on the routers and the termination hardware as well as the number of hops.
I have this bookmark that I keep in my browser just for circumstances like this. This is it. The disappointing thing is, I don't even listen to Pink Floyd.
Youtube says "This video contains content from EMI, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." Sod them.
But your personal laptop does provide additional functionality namely not having to screw around with your works equipment to try to do something with it you shouldn't be in the first place. I can almost guarantee you that your corporate IT policy doesn't allow personal use of their equipment. So keeping your job is a nice additional function IMHO.
Actually, you're wrong here. We are allowed to use our work laptops for personal browsing etc. by corporate policy We are not allowed to circumvent any of the protections which defend the integrity of the information on the hard disk. By not booting from that disk, and not even mounting any of its partitions, I am in compliance with this policy. This has been verified with the IT department.
Another option... might be... talk to your work. Tell them hey I'm traveling and have nothing to entertain myself with when I'm not working. Can I use the laptop for this? If not can I install whatever it is I need for work on my personal laptop and use it instead?
You're joking, aren't you? Work is done exclusively on things which are property of the company; laptops are leased. The amount of lock-down needed would mean they'd reformat my Linux laptop and install Windows and a heap of corporate spyware, anti-virus, policy enforcement, and so forth before it could access the VPN. Oh, and I'd have to donate it to the company. Even smartphones are only allowed to connect to the VPN if they are locked-down company smartphones.
I've gotten burned before when using a work computer for my personal use. I didn't have a working computer at home and had a corporate laptop so I was using for all my personal use. Well it got corrupted and IT spent a good day or so browsing through it looking for viruses. Which meant that they were looking at all my internet caches, downloaded files etc. So they came down on me pretty hard and pretty much blamed me for it crashing (maybe maybe not) but regardless resulted in a awkward conversation with my manager as I was 25 at the time and lets just say some things that a 25 year old might use the internet for to entertain themselves is not something you want all your coworkers to know about.
You've been burned, and you burned your employer. Both occurred through your own negligence. My solution avoids any possibility of such ever happening. Oh, I'm not 25, and I'm not at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? How do you square that with:
Try finding out what Einstein meant by God. Hint: it's utterly alien to your apparent conception or that of anyone who cleaves to ID or indeed to any of today's major religions.
In 1929, Einstein was asked in a telegram by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein whether he believed in God. Einstein responded by telegram: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
You'll find that quote and references to it in lots of places, including Wikipedia's articles on Baruch Spinoza, on pantheism, and on Albert Einstein, among others. In fact, it's hard to see how you avoided the linked article on Einstein's religious views where he described himself as being agnostic since the age of twelve, and also stated the year before his death:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.
Or maybe it's not so hard, as even the most superficial inquiry would have devastated your position.
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does.
It provides an unjustifiable, partisan[*], and almost certainly wrong answer to the "why" question. It would be more accurate to simply admit that we don't know and that we are very far from having enough data to claim any such knowledge.
[*] The Catholics and most other branches of Christianity reject ID (the Catholics learned their science lessons the hard way, and avoid any contradiction of evolutionary theory). So do most branches of Islam and other major religions. So ID is an intrinsically partisan minority viewpoint.
It's entirely possible to believe both at the same time, in fact.
It's possible to believe any pair of contradictory hypotheses, if your ignorance encompasses both of them. And ignorance of both evolution and so-called intelligent design would be needed to believe in both of them simultaneously.
Educating them will just mean smarter criminals. Not everyone can work in banking.
But the banks are hiring again, and we're running out of educated sociopaths, so they'll have to make do with educated convicts.
and get your degree on Uncle Sam...
Mirosoft confessed that Bing is worse than Google. Who'd a thunk it?
Some here might say "Bing is even worse than Google", of course.
Yes, temp data is written to /tmp/
Indeed. And everything created in /tmp also has drwx------ permissions (by default on all of my systems). So even with several users simultaneously logged-in, the files of one user in /tmp are not accessible to other logged-in users except those with root privileges, and they can access almost anything anyway, if they want to.
Which is not to say it couldn't be done better, so that it would not be available to others - not even root, and not even if the disk were stolen. Suggestions for this include having /tmp encrypted with unique-per-login key, or using a RAM-only /tmpfs instead. Many additional precautions would be needed to bring security of other user data to comparable levels.
As a "data breach", this is rather overblown.
At relatively close prices I'd prefer a physical book (where at least I won't be restricted by the publisher's "loan" policy!).
Exactly. I don't buy ebooks. Actually, I bought two about 7 years ago, and was rapidly disgusted at both the price and the insane restrictions (especially the "no copy & paste" lunacy, but also the "can't copy to another device" and "can't print more than X pages per month" stupidity).
Amazon gets a lot of business from us, and so do several local bookstores, but only for real books - ink on paper. Real books can be shared with other family members (occurs very often - we have shared interests), loaned to friends (uncommon, but it happens occasionally), and sold on at second-hand stores (also uncommon, but does happen when kids' books are outgrown). We're all bookworms, and none of us really enjoys reading on a screen.
I think it's time for someone to define Android.
Ask Opper. After all, he was an android 30 years ago (or maybe 24 years in the future)...
That would be in your .bash_history file (or whatever you name it locally).
Really, this is way overblown by calling it a "data breach": it's not as if your data is compromised to a remote attacker. It requires that somebody else has your disk. As we all know, if your hardware is stolen/confiscated/impounded/seized/whatever, only encryption can keep your data safe. Apparently, even that can be circumvented by legal compulsion.
Wow! Hijacking a well known metric for a completely unrelated application just to draw a weak metaphor between the original phenomena being measured and this other unrelated event.
Not to worry, they'll probably combine it with other bastardized metrics and consign the lot to oblivion. How about a Beaufort scale for phishing and 419 scams, or a Fujita scale for antisocial behaviors (on the internet, of course).
Perhaps what's really needed is a Kelvin scale for relevance. The suggested "Privacy Richter" scale is pretty cold.
On a related note, we had an employee with a last name Lovelace. An older client, always prim and proper, left a message once to see when "Mr. Deepthroat would be stopping by to finish the job".
Got to watch out for those "prim and proper" ones. She probably exhausted Mr. Lovelace by the time he "finished the job" on each visit.
Any sucker can tell it was written in Linda.
On the BBC website (the link posted in the summary), and it was quite a prominent story - however, I went back to find it this morning and it's nowhere to be found, you have to use a direct link to get to it. Interesting...
It's there, but not in a very prominent place. Go to the England part of the UK section, select Yorkshire & Lincolnshire as your local area, then click on the Humberside section. It's there, for their community to see, but not really presented to the rest of the nation.
OK, here's a link which tells you how to get it, at the risk it gets slashdotted: Dune, Spicediver fanedit v2. There is much else to like at the fanedit site.
hmmm, was this topic started by Amazon? They can only do well from this in any event. Who else has already added items to their cart based on recommendations here? I am up to six so far.
I'm up to four (a pox on this thread!).
The low number is largely because I've already got so many of the books being suggested.
I always felt the David Lynch version had the right look and feel, it was just too trimmed down. I'd have loved to see a 4 hour version of it.
Lynch's version was about 2:15 or so. However, there were different cuts made for TV (shorter) and so forth, and these often used footage which was left out of the theatrical release. The various DVD releases also contained extras, including some scenes which were cut from all releases. Do yourself a favor, and search for the "Spicediver fanedit" of Dune. It's over 3 hours, and has merged almost all of the available footage, including resequencing many of the scenes so they are not necessarily in the order you've become used to. Apparently, it got a nod of approval from Lynch, who considered the theatrical and TV time constraints to be inadequate.
As long as you're willing to say the right prayer and wear the right clothes.
Say none. Wear none.
Hmmm, better live somewhere a bit warmer than this...
Innovation requires more effort than genius. There are few "Ah-ha!" developments that come to people in the middle of the night in a dream. Patents are intended to create a profit incentive for people to put in the requisite effort, thereby encouraging innovation for the public good.
At the moment, I have 30 issued US patents (sole inventor in some, joint inventor with my wife and/or other collaborators in others), and a few applications pending. They all involve physical apparatus, rather than pure method/process stuff. My own experience bears out your first point: that invention requires effort rather than genius. However, I'm not at all sure of your second point, below.
As soon as my years of hard work pay off and I put my product on the market, countless other companies would be able to offer the same thing for only the cost of reverse engineering my product.
The cost of reverse engineering a product is often just as high as the cost of inventing in the first place. Moreover, it costs the copier time to reverse engineer and set up production of the copy, and denies the copier the critical insights of why a product was made in a particular way. The knock-off is generally shoddy in comparison to the original, for this and other reasons. Also, since you'll presumably have a first-mover advantage, you'll get a good payoff from the high margin early-adopting customers, when there will be essentially no competition on price or quality.
Usually, the situation is that I have some problem to solve, and in forming the solution some novel method or device is created, or perhaps a few alternative solutions of varying merit are created. Clearly, these creations are useful, and we check carefully that they are novel. Their nonobviousness often relies on not knowing which problem is being addressed. Given a particular problem statement, many other engineers might have reached a similar solution. Often, it is recognizing the problem itself which leads to the invention. Lacking that critical step in the process, is it almost guaranteed that most copycats will be full of glitches and will not compete on performance, and those that perform adequately will be further delayed and will not compete on price.
We usually apply for patents on some of the alternative solutions we don't implement as well as those which we use, and on solutions to problems for which no product is planned. This creates uncertainty for competitors as they are not sure what exactly we're going to do (patent applications must be filed well before products are released). Do we patent every invention we implement in a product? No, of course not: we keep some as secrets, if it is judged very likely that the actual invention would not be reverse engineered, or that it would be too difficult to ascertain whether a competitor's product was infringing.
Well, today it's only 15ms to google.com by ping, while slashdot is still 147ms and 8.8.8.8 is still 46ms. I suppose the route to Google's local search node is less congested.
Incidentally, google.com resolves to several IPs in the 173.194.32.0/24 subnet which all belong to Google's alter ego 1e100.net, while Google's nameservers (including 8.8.8.8) all resolve to addresses in google.com.
150ms to Slashdot? Dear god, open a service ticket! :)
Well, since I'm in Finland the 150ms to Slashdot does not bother me. It's about the same to Distrowatch or Freshmeat, and about 170ms to Wikipedia. I'm more impressed by the 40-48ms to 8.8.8.8 or 25ms to www.google.com, which is even faster than the 52ms to bbc.co.uk, although not nearly as good as the 8ms to funet.fi, tkk.fi, tty.fi (all a few hundred km away) or other well-provisioned sites in Finland.
What's the average range of these jammers? Could someone on the bus jamming Mr. Loud Talker also jam a 911 call from an apartment building the bus is driving by? Could someone stopping a movie theater talker be hampering a call outside of the theater?
Wikipedia is sometimes your friend. Quoting the most relevant bits:
"Smaller handheld models block all bands from 800MHz to 1900MHz within a 30-foot range (9 meters)."
"The radius of cell phone jammers can range from a dozen feet for pocket models to kilometers for more dedicated units."
The larger models which interfere with a tower or cover several tens or hundreds of meters are unlikely to be hand-held due to their power consumption. So pocket-sized models are effective over about 4-9 meters, which would extend outside a bus, but not very far outside. The risk of interfering with a 911 call or other emergency situation is very low, but if there are enough jammers in use around the world then it is bound to happen. Interference with 911 calls would be much more likely with the large jamming units employed by police and other government agencies, or by simply switching off cellphone towers (to prevent any call being made).
I used to work for AT&T Uverse and over 200ms was enough to get a tech onsite to look at the problem.
Most likely, you mean latency to a local test unit (perhaps where the uplink switches are).
FYI, my latency is below 4ms to my ISP's speed test machine, about 46ms to 8.8.8.8 (google's public DNS), but around 150ms to slashdot. It depends a lot on the routers and the termination hardware as well as the number of hops.
I have this bookmark that I keep in my browser just for circumstances like this. This is it. The disappointing thing is, I don't even listen to Pink Floyd.
Youtube says "This video contains content from EMI, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." Sod them.
I think people that use homeopathic medicine should be allowed to marry.
Maybe just if they promise to use homeopathic fertility enhancements only. The average intelligence of the human race would not be diminished thereby.
But your personal laptop does provide additional functionality namely not having to screw around with your works equipment to try to do something with it you shouldn't be in the first place. I can almost guarantee you that your corporate IT policy doesn't allow personal use of their equipment. So keeping your job is a nice additional function IMHO.
Actually, you're wrong here. We are allowed to use our work laptops for personal browsing etc. by corporate policy We are not allowed to circumvent any of the protections which defend the integrity of the information on the hard disk. By not booting from that disk, and not even mounting any of its partitions, I am in compliance with this policy. This has been verified with the IT department.
Another option ... might be ... talk to your work. Tell them hey I'm traveling and have nothing to entertain myself with when I'm not working. Can I use the laptop for this? If not can I install whatever it is I need for work on my personal laptop and use it instead?
You're joking, aren't you? Work is done exclusively on things which are property of the company; laptops are leased. The amount of lock-down needed would mean they'd reformat my Linux laptop and install Windows and a heap of corporate spyware, anti-virus, policy enforcement, and so forth before it could access the VPN. Oh, and I'd have to donate it to the company. Even smartphones are only allowed to connect to the VPN if they are locked-down company smartphones.
I've gotten burned before when using a work computer for my personal use. I didn't have a working computer at home and had a corporate laptop so I was using for all my personal use. Well it got corrupted and IT spent a good day or so browsing through it looking for viruses. Which meant that they were looking at all my internet caches, downloaded files etc. So they came down on me pretty hard and pretty much blamed me for it crashing (maybe maybe not) but regardless resulted in a awkward conversation with my manager as I was 25 at the time and lets just say some things that a 25 year old might use the internet for to entertain themselves is not something you want all your coworkers to know about.
You've been burned, and you burned your employer. Both occurred through your own negligence. My solution avoids any possibility of such ever happening. Oh, I'm not 25, and I'm not at the bottom of the hierarchy.