Can't Nastyware authors detect which ISP you have? Presuming so, it just leads to another Phish attack.
Those phish attacks would work pretty much as well whether the ISPs actually monitor for malware traffic or not, so the ISPs actually monitoring for malware traffic still makes things better.
I'm surprised that the ISPs don't do this already. When one of my family members connected an infected PC to my home network my (UK) ISP promptly contacted me to tell me that the network was a source of malware attacks and to sort it or they would disconnect me. For which I was grateful, and I helped the family member resolve the problem.
Deadly spiders? New Zealand has no snakes and only one species of poisonous spider
That's because the Maori's ate them all. Seriously, the bloody Maori's are the only native race to ever get a treaty from the vicious pommy bastard tribe!
Not wise to eat poisonous spiders. Venomous ones, now that could be another matter...
Well, that's what they are going to try to model it seems. Which misses the point, as an AC below points out. The models are already good enough to account for irrationality, what they missed, and which caused the crash, is that the models can be wrong, and that isn't something that can usefully be modelled, it's an attitude that the execs need to have.
Premise 1: Ian Huntley was a socially awkward person. Premise 2: Ian Huntley was a child-killer Conclusion: Socially awkward people are child-killers.
Logic 101, anybody?
True, they were not random failures so a negative exponential distribution of time between failures isn't an ideal model -- if I recall rightly, design faults being revealed in service tends in practice to be closer to a Rayleigh distribution. I think that makes my estimate somewhat pessimistic, which is usually the preferred direction of error in risk management.
>>>Feynman pointed out that that this was like flying the space shuttle every day for 300 years without an accident.
That's 1 out of 300*365 days. In reality NASA had 2 blowups in 1300 days of flight. So 1 in 650 odds of catastrophic failure.
Worse than that, I think -- doing the Chi-square test (single tail lower bound, time-terminated test) I make it about 1 in 420 days (60% confidence), 1 in 210 days (95% confidence). Dividing time by failures is significantly over-optimistic when the number of failures is low. The usual rule of thumb if you don't have a spreadsheet or Chi-square tables to hand is to divide by the number of failures plus 1, which in this case gives about 1 in 430, somewhere near the 60% confidence point. That avoids claiming infinite reliability if you have zero failures, when all it really means is that the test hasn't run for long enough to give useful results.
Try reading what I wrote -- no lies, just you trying to twist it to your own preconceptions. I've also given you the source of the quote, which is available for free online, so if you cared you could look it up.
So now you claim that "physics depends on psychology" meant that your mind controls (mostly) your body ?
No, you're still not reading what I write. I'm claiming that that's all you're now falsely accusing me of, but that it's still a misrepresentation of what I wrote. Just a different misrepresentation to your previous misrepresentation. Again, your subsequent rant completely misses the mark because it's a response to a fictitious posting that bears no resemblance to anything I have actually said or believe.
That's the absurdity I refer to, which basically means that what you think makes things happen. Funny how you retract the obvious meaning of your words when called out on their meaning.
Funny how you change your accusations. "What you think makes things happen" is nothing like what I wrote means (try reading Morowitz's "Rediscovering the Mind") but at least this time you're accusing me of a far less contentious statement. What we think (probably -- I'm not an occasionalist, epipenomenonalist or material eliminationist) does make things happen -- I think I'll press this key on my keyboard, and (indirectly, through a whole pile of physical process) it makes me press this key. What I think makes (a limited range of) things happen.
I didn't bother reading the rest of your message because it was clearly directed at somebody other than me, because I have never made the claims you attack. (Although I confess I couldn't resist reading far enough to see you giving me a grade-school lecture about stuff I got my degree in and which I in no way dispute -- you only think I do because you can't see past your blinkers to what I'm actually writing)
I can hardly believe my eyes. Someone is arguing that whatever you imagine happens
You are right not to believe your eyes. I'm not arguing any such bullshit, and if you think I am then try reading it again and look at what I've actually written, not what you want me to have written. An observer observes, they don't control the events they observe. The person who opens the box with Schroedinger's cat in it doesn't decide whether the cat is alive or dead, they observe it.
Now, try responding to what I really argued, instead of your straw man.
I should have mentioned that "Student" in the title means university level, not grade school level, and that apparently it's a reduced form of a much larger work which presumably would give you additional depth should you need it.
*sigh* or how about you accept that anything more complex than newtonian physics and chemistry just doesn't matter until at least a few KeV or faster particles are involved (excluding, obviously, photons).
Or until you get down to quantum levels. Quantum Mechanics doesn't behave in a Newtonian manner.
Let me guess, you voted for Obama ? Am I right ? There is NOTHING in quantum mechanics (that's what it's called by the way, you don't sound like the type of person that would know that)
You don't actually have an argument, then? All you can resort to is abuse. For what it's worth I've studied both the physics and the philosophy of this quite extensively (at university, not just reading populist texts), and judging from your lack of argument I suspect I know rather more than you about it.
We really should shoot anyone who reads the term "observation" in a quantum mechanics paper and thinks his eyes need to be involved.
Quite right. Oh -- you're not so stupid as to think that's what I meant, are you?
Our brains are NOT magical. They obey the laws of physics
Trivially so, because the "laws of physics" will be adjusted if necessary to fit however the brain turns out to work. That's what the scientific method is.
and perfectly obey all the laws of newtonian physics
Nope -- quantum mechanics is not Newtonian.
and chemistry.
Yep.
This is exactly what I meant, that some people require free will to be something magical, something that is totally unexaplainable and beyond any measurement or control. Sorry, but humans are not some magical light creatures
If you read up a bit on the subject -- even populist stuff would probably help, from where you are at the moment -- you'd find that the problem with free will is even more fundamental than the physics of it. Even if humans were "magical light creatures" (which I don't believe they are), free will would still be problematic just from consideration of caused and uncaused events.
they never ever have any interaction that would require anything more than newtonian physics to explain
What we routinely interact with and what we need to understand in order to work out how we function are not necessarily the same thing -- either you're trying to change the subject or you don't understand what you are writing about.
We "are slaves" to the perfect predictability that any newtonian system has.
No we are not, but if you knew anything about the subject you would realise that the randomness that non-Newtonian physics brings in doesn't affect the free will argument.
Now google "three body problem".
I don't need to Google it, thanks -- I learned about that over 30 years ago, and have carried on learning since then.
Yet academics are supposed to be the ones bringing the truth to other people.
And you know what that truth is, and the academics don't? I've got news for you -- you don't have exclusive access to the truth, and people who disagree with you might just know something you don't.
Some days I fear that priests did a better job. What point is there in fighting creationism if it's replaced by "whatever you want happens"-idiocy ?
And your point is? I think that creationism and "whatever you want happens" are both BS, but that doesn't make your naive views of the mind right.
I hope the 2 parent posters realize that they simply believe in magic, not in science.
There are at least 5 ancestor posters, I have no idea which two you mean by the 2 parent posters -- nobody seems to be proposing the sort of nonsense you are ascribing to them, so it looks as if you simply don't understand what is being discussed.
Or they simply recognise that every model we have at present has got serious flaws, and use the model that best fits the task in hand until a better model is found.
You assume that humans have an actual motivation at all
No I don't -- I specifically point out that it can be useful in modelling behaviour even if it doesn't correspond to anything actually happening in other minds.
Obviously any useful definition of free will would have to fit within a Newtonian model of the mind.
Newtonian? I think you'll find that science has moved on a little from there. As Morowitz pointed out in 1980, 20th century physics, particularly the significance of the observer, rather undermined pure materialism (he explains that psychology is now dependent on biology, biology is dependent on physics and physics is dependent on psychology). Not that any of the other models is any better -- idealism, dualism and so on all have problems that are at least as bad as materialism's. I think it was Russell who used the analogy of two people trying to find their way out of a room. One suggests that the chimney is the way out, but the other says that's silly because it's too narrow, and insists that the window is the way out. The first replies that that's silly because it's too high. I suspect that the argument over different models of the mind is of this type, and nobody (myself included, of course) has noticed the door.
Plus there's the whole issue of "motivation" implying "free will".
Not really, that's a confusion of levels. People who don't believe that humans have free will still refer to motivation when getting their juniors to do something. Whether we have free will or not, it's part of our mental model of how other minds work. The question of free will is one of whether we can change motivation or merely observe it. It has predictive power over what happens in the "black box" of other minds, regardless of whether it's an accurate model of how those minds really work.
In other words, I write in an old-fashioned style (try reading Dickens, Woolf, Peake). I recognise that -- it tends to come with being old (I'm just as likely to complain about the style of younger writers being too fragmented, with too many major stops interrupting the flow). I'm hardly likely to use changes in understanding of grammar as an excuse for writing in an older style, though, am I?
What this doesn't account for is the number of people who have both personal mobiles and mobiles supplied by their employers, eg for on-call purposes
And those who have multiple mobile accounts for other reasons. I have two Orange pay-as-you-go accounts that I use only to get the cheap cinema ticket offers that Orange does. My day-to-day account is Vodafone. Because they give SIMs away, and most of us have old handsets lying around, having multiple accounts like this can't be uncommon.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't Nastyware authors detect which ISP you have? Presuming so, it just leads to another Phish attack.
Those phish attacks would work pretty much as well whether the ISPs actually monitor for malware traffic or not, so the ISPs actually monitoring for malware traffic still makes things better.
"Predate" or "pre-date"? Or both? In this context it's hard to tell.
I'm surprised that the ISPs don't do this already. When one of my family members connected an infected PC to my home network my (UK) ISP promptly contacted me to tell me that the network was a source of malware attacks and to sort it or they would disconnect me. For which I was grateful, and I helped the family member resolve the problem.
Deadly spiders? New Zealand has no snakes and only one species of poisonous spider
That's because the Maori's ate them all. Seriously, the bloody Maori's are the only native race to ever get a treaty from the vicious pommy bastard tribe!
Not wise to eat poisonous spiders. Venomous ones, now that could be another matter...
Like irrationality.
Well, that's what they are going to try to model it seems. Which misses the point, as an AC below points out. The models are already good enough to account for irrationality, what they missed, and which caused the crash, is that the models can be wrong, and that isn't something that can usefully be modelled, it's an attitude that the execs need to have.
Premise 1: Ian Huntley was a socially awkward person.
Premise 2: Ian Huntley was a child-killer
Conclusion: Socially awkward people are child-killers.
Logic 101, anybody?
True, they were not random failures so a negative exponential distribution of time between failures isn't an ideal model -- if I recall rightly, design faults being revealed in service tends in practice to be closer to a Rayleigh distribution. I think that makes my estimate somewhat pessimistic, which is usually the preferred direction of error in risk management.
>>>Feynman pointed out that that this was like flying the space shuttle every day for 300 years without an accident.
That's 1 out of 300*365 days. In reality NASA had 2 blowups in 1300 days of flight. So 1 in 650 odds of catastrophic failure.
Worse than that, I think -- doing the Chi-square test (single tail lower bound, time-terminated test) I make it about 1 in 420 days (60% confidence), 1 in 210 days (95% confidence). Dividing time by failures is significantly over-optimistic when the number of failures is low. The usual rule of thumb if you don't have a spreadsheet or Chi-square tables to hand is to divide by the number of failures plus 1, which in this case gives about 1 in 430, somewhere near the 60% confidence point. That avoids claiming infinite reliability if you have zero failures, when all it really means is that the test hasn't run for long enough to give useful results.
Try reading what I wrote -- no lies, just you trying to twist it to your own preconceptions. I've also given you the source of the quote, which is available for free online, so if you cared you could look it up.
So now you claim that "physics depends on psychology" meant that your mind controls (mostly) your body ?
No, you're still not reading what I write. I'm claiming that that's all you're now falsely accusing me of, but that it's still a misrepresentation of what I wrote. Just a different misrepresentation to your previous misrepresentation. Again, your subsequent rant completely misses the mark because it's a response to a fictitious posting that bears no resemblance to anything I have actually said or believe.
You said "physics depends on psychology".
Actually, I didn't, Doctor Harold J Morowitz, Robinson Professor in Biology and Natural Philosophy, George Mason University said it, although I happen to think he's right.
That's the absurdity I refer to, which basically means that what you think makes things happen. Funny how you retract the obvious meaning of your words when called out on their meaning.
Funny how you change your accusations. "What you think makes things happen" is nothing like what I wrote means (try reading Morowitz's "Rediscovering the Mind") but at least this time you're accusing me of a far less contentious statement. What we think (probably -- I'm not an occasionalist, epipenomenonalist or material eliminationist) does make things happen -- I think I'll press this key on my keyboard, and (indirectly, through a whole pile of physical process) it makes me press this key. What I think makes (a limited range of) things happen.
I didn't bother reading the rest of your message because it was clearly directed at somebody other than me, because I have never made the claims you attack. (Although I confess I couldn't resist reading far enough to see you giving me a grade-school lecture about stuff I got my degree in and which I in no way dispute -- you only think I do because you can't see past your blinkers to what I'm actually writing)
I can hardly believe my eyes. Someone is arguing that whatever you imagine happens
You are right not to believe your eyes. I'm not arguing any such bullshit, and if you think I am then try reading it again and look at what I've actually written, not what you want me to have written. An observer observes, they don't control the events they observe. The person who opens the box with Schroedinger's cat in it doesn't decide whether the cat is alive or dead, they observe it.
Now, try responding to what I really argued, instead of your straw man.
I should have mentioned that "Student" in the title means university level, not grade school level, and that apparently it's a reduced form of a much larger work which presumably would give you additional depth should you need it.
*sigh* or how about you accept that anything more complex than newtonian physics and chemistry just doesn't matter until at least a few KeV or faster particles are involved (excluding, obviously, photons).
Or until you get down to quantum levels. Quantum Mechanics doesn't behave in a Newtonian manner.
Let me guess, you voted for Obama ? Am I right ? There is NOTHING in quantum mechanics (that's what it's called by the way, you don't sound like the type of person that would know that)
You don't actually have an argument, then? All you can resort to is abuse. For what it's worth I've studied both the physics and the philosophy of this quite extensively (at university, not just reading populist texts), and judging from your lack of argument I suspect I know rather more than you about it.
We really should shoot anyone who reads the term "observation" in a quantum mechanics paper and thinks his eyes need to be involved.
Quite right. Oh -- you're not so stupid as to think that's what I meant, are you?
Our brains are NOT magical. They obey the laws of physics
Trivially so, because the "laws of physics" will be adjusted if necessary to fit however the brain turns out to work. That's what the scientific method is.
and perfectly obey all the laws of newtonian physics
Nope -- quantum mechanics is not Newtonian.
and chemistry.
Yep.
This is exactly what I meant, that some people require free will to be something magical, something that is totally unexaplainable and beyond any measurement or control. Sorry, but humans are not some magical light creatures
If you read up a bit on the subject -- even populist stuff would probably help, from where you are at the moment -- you'd find that the problem with free will is even more fundamental than the physics of it. Even if humans were "magical light creatures" (which I don't believe they are), free will would still be problematic just from consideration of caused and uncaused events.
they never ever have any interaction that would require anything more than newtonian physics to explain
What we routinely interact with and what we need to understand in order to work out how we function are not necessarily the same thing -- either you're trying to change the subject or you don't understand what you are writing about.
We "are slaves" to the perfect predictability that any newtonian system has.
No we are not, but if you knew anything about the subject you would realise that the randomness that non-Newtonian physics brings in doesn't affect the free will argument.
Now google "three body problem".
I don't need to Google it, thanks -- I learned about that over 30 years ago, and have carried on learning since then.
Yet academics are supposed to be the ones bringing the truth to other people.
And you know what that truth is, and the academics don't? I've got news for you -- you don't have exclusive access to the truth, and people who disagree with you might just know something you don't.
Some days I fear that priests did a better job. What point is there in fighting creationism if it's replaced by "whatever you want happens"-idiocy ?
And your point is? I think that creationism and "whatever you want happens" are both BS, but that doesn't make your naive views of the mind right.
I hope the 2 parent posters realize that they simply believe in magic, not in science.
There are at least 5 ancestor posters, I have no idea which two you mean by the 2 parent posters -- nobody seems to be proposing the sort of nonsense you are ascribing to them, so it looks as if you simply don't understand what is being discussed.
Or they simply recognise that every model we have at present has got serious flaws, and use the model that best fits the task in hand until a better model is found.
I knew I should have been a programmer. [snip] Time to earn that second degree (and maybe score with the ladies for a change).
Yep, those babes sure do go for the code geeks!
The doctors may also be able to control any complications, but again that only matters in severe cases.
You assume that humans have an actual motivation at all
No I don't -- I specifically point out that it can be useful in modelling behaviour even if it doesn't correspond to anything actually happening in other minds.
Obviously any useful definition of free will would have to fit within a Newtonian model of the mind.
Newtonian? I think you'll find that science has moved on a little from there. As Morowitz pointed out in 1980, 20th century physics, particularly the significance of the observer, rather undermined pure materialism (he explains that psychology is now dependent on biology, biology is dependent on physics and physics is dependent on psychology). Not that any of the other models is any better -- idealism, dualism and so on all have problems that are at least as bad as materialism's. I think it was Russell who used the analogy of two people trying to find their way out of a room. One suggests that the chimney is the way out, but the other says that's silly because it's too narrow, and insists that the window is the way out. The first replies that that's silly because it's too high. I suspect that the argument over different models of the mind is of this type, and nobody (myself included, of course) has noticed the door.
Plus there's the whole issue of "motivation" implying "free will".
Not really, that's a confusion of levels. People who don't believe that humans have free will still refer to motivation when getting their juniors to do something. Whether we have free will or not, it's part of our mental model of how other minds work. The question of free will is one of whether we can change motivation or merely observe it. It has predictive power over what happens in the "black box" of other minds, regardless of whether it's an accurate model of how those minds really work.
In other words, I write in an old-fashioned style (try reading Dickens, Woolf, Peake). I recognise that -- it tends to come with being old (I'm just as likely to complain about the style of younger writers being too fragmented, with too many major stops interrupting the flow). I'm hardly likely to use changes in understanding of grammar as an excuse for writing in an older style, though, am I?
What this doesn't account for is the number of people who have both personal mobiles and mobiles supplied by their employers, eg for on-call purposes
And those who have multiple mobile accounts for other reasons. I have two Orange pay-as-you-go accounts that I use only to get the cheap cinema ticket offers that Orange does. My day-to-day account is Vodafone. Because they give SIMs away, and most of us have old handsets lying around, having multiple accounts like this can't be uncommon.
Just making sure...
Shouldn't that be 911-Eh?
I don't have any references to research to hand, but Chapter 13 of the Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English describes some of the differences and discusses why they might occur.
Are you saying that I write like a retard? If you are, please provide evidence. If not, I'm calling your BS.