It isn't up to science to disprove the existence of god or whatever you want to call it. As Sagan so eloquently put it "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and religion doesn't like to produce evidence.
I would actually ask the same question. I would start by saying, yes, I am a Christian, and I have many reasons for that; but one in particular is the very existance of "stuff". The christian belief on "why there is stuff" has perhaps been well explained-- there is an eternal unchanging God who always was and always will be who willed everything into existance (I have no particular belief concerning the "how"-- a big bang works well enough, though).
The naturalist belief however seems more interesting. There is demonstrably no way to gather evidence from before the big bang: the big bang is, so the theory goes, what created our universe, and thus all measurements are confined to times following the big bang; anything we can interact with is both after and caused by said event. There are a number of theories for "why" the big bang happened, as I understand it; perhaps our universe was spawned from a multiverse, or another universe and so on all the way down. But the core problem seems to be the very thing Sagan (and Russel as quoted earlier) get at: just as christians such as myself are mocked for not having any evidence for our belief in a creator, I might wonder what exactly could justify a belief in an uncaused ball of inexplicable matter to inexplicably explode into the universe-- and what sort of nerve could then admit "and we can never actually prove it".
In the christian's defense, I would say that one cannot rationally explain that ball of matter without a "root cause" or an infinite regress; while neither is perhaps provable, the infinite regress seems to make no logical sense to me ("turtles all the way down").
the odds that the one particular god currently favoured is the right one is pretty darn small so as far as disproving i
This is begging the question: It only holds water so long as you assume from the outset that there is no God. If there is, it would stand to reason that there might be immitator religions which are false, and a true main religion.
Or to flip it around, there are countless beliefs concerning the supernatural; that being the case, why should ANY of them (including the belief that there is none) be correct? Except of course that leaves you with "nothing whatsoever is true". You cant disprove a particular idea simply by pointing out that there are a great many alternatives, and that therefore each is statistically unlikely, any more than you can prove that noone receives money from the lottery simply because it is statistically unlikely for any particular one of them to do so.
Whats messed up is people demanding that we throw out all of the lessons from history and try to do things our own way. Progress doesnt kill opportunity, and "social welfare" is great until you try to base your society on it, and then everything fails.
Literally your exact concern (minus the word robotics) has been voiced so many times in the past, and turned out to be a complete non-issue, that the whole conversation is wearying.
It actually feels like its sapping my will to discuss the issue to hear techies wondering what will happen when menial / low-skilled jobs disappear. Where exactly do you think the tech sector came from? Where exactly do you think the industrial revolution came from? Why exactly did people form cities?
What happens when we roboticize the other 70-80%'s jobs?
I dont know, we could probably ask our history books that same question: what happened when we replaced the need for 95% of the population to grow its own food, gather its own water, knit its own clothing? What about when we no longer needed whole cities to power textile mills in the 19th century?
Why, people came up with a million new industries and created a million new jobs; we innovated, we improved the quality of life; we got educated.
Seriously, this is so much the opposite of "a problem" that its actually crazy that people are getting hysterics about it.
A matter of opinion, and a bad one at that - what, so if a guy works in a factory he's automatically less intelligent, and worth less than the "educated" manager, who got an MBA but never learned what the word "work" actually means? Pardon me if I take offense to that concept.
This should have been stricken:
we kind of jumped the shark in terms of employment when we came up with robotics.
Has there ever been a time in history where the majority of the workforce could be replaced quickly and cheaply by a single technology?
No, and there still isnt. There have been times where some sector (textile workers, or longshoremen, or assembly plants) were replaced by a new techology (power looms, shipping crates, robotics), and of course the result was an INCREASE in economy and wealth for society at large (cheap clothing, vastly cheaper shipping / global trade, cheaper assembled products) and new sectors where education is required.
we kind of jumped the shark in terms of employment when we came up with robotics.
A matter of opinion, and a bad one at that - what, so if a guy works in a factory he's automatically less intelligent, and worth less than the "educated" manager, who got an MBA but never learned what the word "work" actually means? Pardon me if I take offense to that concept.
THats not what I said at all. In the past 150 years, the percentage of people with post-secondary employment has drastically risen, as has quality of life and median salary. This doesnt happen by magic; it happens when unskilled jobs are no longer in vogue, people have to get educated to make a living, and all of a sudden everyone is educated and can get higher skilled jobs. Theres other factors (like the fact that goods are cheaper BECAUSE of these "job-killing" advances), of course, but the point is that it IS better from a quality-of-life standpoint when fewer people work in assembly lines, yes.
Heres the real issue with any sort of logic like you're employing: It could easily without too much of a stretch be applied in construction, to say that we should dig canals with spoons; after all, powered heavy machinery replaces entire classes of workers, and who am I to say that their job isnt worth having? Of course its then that you remember that slashdot is peopled by a huge number of tech people whose jobs wouldnt even exist if it hadnt been for "job-killing" advances.
How is an ostensibly tech-oriented site such a hotbed of Luddism?
Has noone considered how the quality of life goes UP as the number of people required for menial labor goes down? Has noone even looked in a history book, to see if concerns about vanishing workforces have EVER come true? Have all of these so-called geeks never considered how its BETTER to have a more educated workforce than to have one comprised primarily of factory workers?
Or on the flipside, perhaps one of you can explain why it is preferable that we (as a society / economy) spend money paying people to do non-creative work that can easily be done by an automaton, rather than spending it on art / design / innovation / work that cannot easily be done by a robot?
I am not a Luddite, but we need to think about how tech affect society
Youre not destroying looms, but youre voicing the same concern, and it simply hasnt panned out. Yes, those skilled textile workers lost their jobs, and the number of people needing jobs grew exponentially; yet we have lower unemployment, higher wages, and more wide-spread post secondary education since the luddite days, primarily BECAUSE of advances that reduced the need for manual labor.
Every time an advance comes along that promises to reduce menial work and improve life, people wonder whether it will mean the end of work for some, and the answer has always been "yes: but there will be new jobs and more opportunities". Consider the quality of life in the US, where automation has caught on heavily, and then consider the quality of life in any country where labor is outsourced because of its low cost; and then consider what objecting to technological progress is actually objecting to.
Im not really clear thats a bad thing. Or do you protest as well at the use of heavy machinery (as opposed to very large workforces) in construction jobs?
Donahue underlined eBay Now, a service available in Chicago, Dallas and the Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens areas of New York, and the San Francisco Peninsula area. EBay Now offers delivery of goods in an hour, purchased from local stores and personally delivered by an eBay shopper.
PDF, flash, and java are all cross-platform runtimes. When a bug is patched in one, its patched in all of them-- check the java update history, and see how every windows update has a corresponding linux update. Then check and see just how much of each update is "critical security fixes". IIRC, its "most of them".
If firefox or safari have exploitable bugs (they do), those bugs tend to exist on multiple platforms. Blaming the OS for a framework that interprets code off of the internet-- and is exploited doing so-- is just silly.
Why are there no botnets of Mac or Linux machines?
Because Linux and OSX comprise like 5% of the market, collectively. If youre writing an exploit-kit, would you target windows (~95%), or OSX (5%)? Kind of proved that point with Pwn2Own, where OSX was fully compromised by simply sending a user to a link, before the windows computer, every year for 5 years, simply because of the financial incentive (free MacBook).
Also, your info is wrong. Linux boxes get exploited / broken into all the time; its just that (again) the desktop market for Linux is absolutely miniscule. OSX exploits have actually been on the rise over the last few years as its market share picks up.
As for Pwn2Own, the results really are meaningless - if you break OS X, you win a MacBook. If you break Windows, you get a Sony laptop. If you break Linux, you get a Dell. And they aren't necessarily the nicest machines on the lineup, either.
Theyre not meaningless. They prove exactly what people have been saying for years: that if theres a financial incentive, a platform will be exploited. When the incentive is a macbook, oh look OSX gets exploited in less than a day.
Not sure if you guys are trolling or just misinformed. Windows bugs have long since ceased to be the exploit mechanism for viruses; last time I saw a breakdown on it (a year or so ago) it was something like 35% java holes, 25% adobe acrobat holes, 20% adobe flash holes, 10% browser holes, and a small percentage of OS vulnearabilities.
Additionally, since Vista, Windows' "security" has generally been as good or better than its competitors; it had strong ASLR before OSX / Linux, for starters. The issue is that none of that stuff protects against A) buggy plugins, or B) user-executed viruses (aka trojans). The other big issue is that theres been a ton of misinformation on the issue, particularly by Apple's marketing; Im really not clear why anyone would take advertising at face value, or assume that it is technically accurate. Didnt Apple fall FIRST in the first 5-6 Pwn2Own competitions?
How a datacenter encrypts its data is never going to be something the average user can vet, ever. No user should even have access to that data, which is why it wasnt encrypted to begin with: You need to have some pretty solid connections to manage getting access to that stuff.
Theres also no way to vet whether the keys are being provided to a third party, whether or not the backend software is FOSS or not. If Red Hat made the same announcement, there would be no reason the same "objection" couldnt apply.
Must be in a jail when I use firefox, too, since i have no way to inspect that source code and have an understanding of it either (Im not a trained software dev qualified to analyze several million lines of code).
Yes, all non-programmers are in a jail, at all times.
Because the constitution doesnt prevent Ohio from regulating parts of interstate commerce; Texas can demand that its residents pay tax on things bought from a California company, for example, or prohibit its residents from buying certain goods from said company.
Incorrect, it is NOT exclusive. The fed has supremacy when it passes a law, but states CAN reach inter-state agreements about many things: liquor laws, metro finance agreements, etc.
Virginia has reached agreements with Maryland and DC regarding who pays for Metro costs, how the metro runs, who regulates it, etc-- thats not an exclusively federal issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunning-Kruger strikes again!
No, youre right dude. Everyone who disagrees with you is an unthinking knucklehead.
It isn't up to science to disprove the existence of god or whatever you want to call it. As Sagan so eloquently put it "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and religion doesn't like to produce evidence.
I would actually ask the same question. I would start by saying, yes, I am a Christian, and I have many reasons for that; but one in particular is the very existance of "stuff". The christian belief on "why there is stuff" has perhaps been well explained-- there is an eternal unchanging God who always was and always will be who willed everything into existance (I have no particular belief concerning the "how"-- a big bang works well enough, though).
The naturalist belief however seems more interesting. There is demonstrably no way to gather evidence from before the big bang: the big bang is, so the theory goes, what created our universe, and thus all measurements are confined to times following the big bang; anything we can interact with is both after and caused by said event. There are a number of theories for "why" the big bang happened, as I understand it; perhaps our universe was spawned from a multiverse, or another universe and so on all the way down. But the core problem seems to be the very thing Sagan (and Russel as quoted earlier) get at: just as christians such as myself are mocked for not having any evidence for our belief in a creator, I might wonder what exactly could justify a belief in an uncaused ball of inexplicable matter to inexplicably explode into the universe-- and what sort of nerve could then admit "and we can never actually prove it".
In the christian's defense, I would say that one cannot rationally explain that ball of matter without a "root cause" or an infinite regress; while neither is perhaps provable, the infinite regress seems to make no logical sense to me ("turtles all the way down").
the odds that the one particular god currently favoured is the right one is pretty darn small so as far as disproving i
This is begging the question: It only holds water so long as you assume from the outset that there is no God. If there is, it would stand to reason that there might be immitator religions which are false, and a true main religion.
Or to flip it around, there are countless beliefs concerning the supernatural; that being the case, why should ANY of them (including the belief that there is none) be correct? Except of course that leaves you with "nothing whatsoever is true". You cant disprove a particular idea simply by pointing out that there are a great many alternatives, and that therefore each is statistically unlikely, any more than you can prove that noone receives money from the lottery simply because it is statistically unlikely for any particular one of them to do so.
Hoping for actual insightful responses.
Whats messed up is people demanding that we throw out all of the lessons from history and try to do things our own way. Progress doesnt kill opportunity, and "social welfare" is great until you try to base your society on it, and then everything fails.
Literally your exact concern (minus the word robotics) has been voiced so many times in the past, and turned out to be a complete non-issue, that the whole conversation is wearying.
It actually feels like its sapping my will to discuss the issue to hear techies wondering what will happen when menial / low-skilled jobs disappear. Where exactly do you think the tech sector came from? Where exactly do you think the industrial revolution came from? Why exactly did people form cities?
But what about the sheep-herding jobs!
What happens when we roboticize the other 70-80%'s jobs?
I dont know, we could probably ask our history books that same question: what happened when we replaced the need for 95% of the population to grow its own food, gather its own water, knit its own clothing? What about when we no longer needed whole cities to power textile mills in the 19th century?
Why, people came up with a million new industries and created a million new jobs; we innovated, we improved the quality of life; we got educated.
Seriously, this is so much the opposite of "a problem" that its actually crazy that people are getting hysterics about it.
screwed up the quotes :( '
this should be quoted:
A matter of opinion, and a bad one at that - what, so if a guy works in a factory he's automatically less intelligent, and worth less than the "educated" manager, who got an MBA but never learned what the word "work" actually means? Pardon me if I take offense to that concept.
This should have been stricken:
we kind of jumped the shark in terms of employment when we came up with robotics.
Has there ever been a time in history where the majority of the workforce could be replaced quickly and cheaply by a single technology?
No, and there still isnt. There have been times where some sector (textile workers, or longshoremen, or assembly plants) were replaced by a new techology (power looms, shipping crates, robotics), and of course the result was an INCREASE in economy and wealth for society at large (cheap clothing, vastly cheaper shipping / global trade, cheaper assembled products) and new sectors where education is required.
we kind of jumped the shark in terms of employment when we came up with robotics.
A matter of opinion, and a bad one at that - what, so if a guy works in a factory he's automatically less intelligent, and worth less than the "educated" manager, who got an MBA but never learned what the word "work" actually means? Pardon me if I take offense to that concept.
THats not what I said at all. In the past 150 years, the percentage of people with post-secondary employment has drastically risen, as has quality of life and median salary. This doesnt happen by magic; it happens when unskilled jobs are no longer in vogue, people have to get educated to make a living, and all of a sudden everyone is educated and can get higher skilled jobs. Theres other factors (like the fact that goods are cheaper BECAUSE of these "job-killing" advances), of course, but the point is that it IS better from a quality-of-life standpoint when fewer people work in assembly lines, yes.
Heres the real issue with any sort of logic like you're employing: It could easily without too much of a stretch be applied in construction, to say that we should dig canals with spoons; after all, powered heavy machinery replaces entire classes of workers, and who am I to say that their job isnt worth having? Of course its then that you remember that slashdot is peopled by a huge number of tech people whose jobs wouldnt even exist if it hadnt been for "job-killing" advances.
How is an ostensibly tech-oriented site such a hotbed of Luddism?
Has noone considered how the quality of life goes UP as the number of people required for menial labor goes down? Has noone even looked in a history book, to see if concerns about vanishing workforces have EVER come true? Have all of these so-called geeks never considered how its BETTER to have a more educated workforce than to have one comprised primarily of factory workers?
Or on the flipside, perhaps one of you can explain why it is preferable that we (as a society / economy) spend money paying people to do non-creative work that can easily be done by an automaton, rather than spending it on art / design / innovation / work that cannot easily be done by a robot?
I am not a Luddite, but we need to think about how tech affect society
Youre not destroying looms, but youre voicing the same concern, and it simply hasnt panned out. Yes, those skilled textile workers lost their jobs, and the number of people needing jobs grew exponentially; yet we have lower unemployment, higher wages, and more wide-spread post secondary education since the luddite days, primarily BECAUSE of advances that reduced the need for manual labor.
Every time an advance comes along that promises to reduce menial work and improve life, people wonder whether it will mean the end of work for some, and the answer has always been "yes: but there will be new jobs and more opportunities". Consider the quality of life in the US, where automation has caught on heavily, and then consider the quality of life in any country where labor is outsourced because of its low cost; and then consider what objecting to technological progress is actually objecting to.
Im not really clear thats a bad thing. Or do you protest as well at the use of heavy machinery (as opposed to very large workforces) in construction jobs?
And im sure you could generate that energy through nuclear reactions! Easy!
Wait...
Context, people, context. Hack and exploit mean wildly different things in different contexts.
The article indicates one:
Donahue underlined eBay Now, a service available in Chicago, Dallas and the Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens areas of New York, and the San Francisco Peninsula area. EBay Now offers delivery of goods in an hour, purchased from local stores and personally delivered by an eBay shopper.
Im not sure theres a single person out there who has an understanding of the entire firefox codebase. What you propose is a practical impossibility.
I guess we're going with "misinformed".
PDF, flash, and java are all cross-platform runtimes. When a bug is patched in one, its patched in all of them-- check the java update history, and see how every windows update has a corresponding linux update. Then check and see just how much of each update is "critical security fixes". IIRC, its "most of them".
If firefox or safari have exploitable bugs (they do), those bugs tend to exist on multiple platforms. Blaming the OS for a framework that interprets code off of the internet-- and is exploited doing so-- is just silly.
Why are there no botnets of Mac or Linux machines?
Because Linux and OSX comprise like 5% of the market, collectively. If youre writing an exploit-kit, would you target windows (~95%), or OSX (5%)? Kind of proved that point with Pwn2Own, where OSX was fully compromised by simply sending a user to a link, before the windows computer, every year for 5 years, simply because of the financial incentive (free MacBook).
Also, your info is wrong. Linux boxes get exploited / broken into all the time; its just that (again) the desktop market for Linux is absolutely miniscule. OSX exploits have actually been on the rise over the last few years as its market share picks up.
As for Pwn2Own, the results really are meaningless - if you break OS X, you win a MacBook. If you break Windows, you get a Sony laptop. If you break Linux, you get a Dell. And they aren't necessarily the nicest machines on the lineup, either.
Theyre not meaningless. They prove exactly what people have been saying for years: that if theres a financial incentive, a platform will be exploited. When the incentive is a macbook, oh look OSX gets exploited in less than a day.
Not sure if youre aware, but theres an entire book of the bible dedicated to how sex is a beautiful thing.
Still strawmen are always fun i guess.
Then dont give your research to Elsevier. Im not seeing the dilemma here.
Not sure if you guys are trolling or just misinformed. Windows bugs have long since ceased to be the exploit mechanism for viruses; last time I saw a breakdown on it (a year or so ago) it was something like 35% java holes, 25% adobe acrobat holes, 20% adobe flash holes, 10% browser holes, and a small percentage of OS vulnearabilities.
Additionally, since Vista, Windows' "security" has generally been as good or better than its competitors; it had strong ASLR before OSX / Linux, for starters. The issue is that none of that stuff protects against A) buggy plugins, or B) user-executed viruses (aka trojans). The other big issue is that theres been a ton of misinformation on the issue, particularly by Apple's marketing; Im really not clear why anyone would take advertising at face value, or assume that it is technically accurate. Didnt Apple fall FIRST in the first 5-6 Pwn2Own competitions?
How a datacenter encrypts its data is never going to be something the average user can vet, ever. No user should even have access to that data, which is why it wasnt encrypted to begin with: You need to have some pretty solid connections to manage getting access to that stuff.
Theres also no way to vet whether the keys are being provided to a third party, whether or not the backend software is FOSS or not. If Red Hat made the same announcement, there would be no reason the same "objection" couldnt apply.
Must be in a jail when I use firefox, too, since i have no way to inspect that source code and have an understanding of it either (Im not a trained software dev qualified to analyze several million lines of code).
Yes, all non-programmers are in a jail, at all times.
Because the constitution doesnt prevent Ohio from regulating parts of interstate commerce; Texas can demand that its residents pay tax on things bought from a California company, for example, or prohibit its residents from buying certain goods from said company.
Those nasty fundamentalists and their pesky tenth amendment....
Incorrect, it is NOT exclusive. The fed has supremacy when it passes a law, but states CAN reach inter-state agreements about many things: liquor laws, metro finance agreements, etc.
Virginia has reached agreements with Maryland and DC regarding who pays for Metro costs, how the metro runs, who regulates it, etc-- thats not an exclusively federal issue.