There are times when things can be accidentally coincidental. But when the probability mathematical odds get really high, then the question should always be: was it deliberate? If it was terrorists there is a high likely hood that there would be a: "look what we did" news cast. But if it were the covert actions of a semi legitimate government, then it would be made to look accidental. OK, computer geek, model the ocean currents, the depths of the waters, the weights of boats and anchors, and, showing your work, explain the "high likely hood" that these coincidences are not the direct result of the weather. No? Then, just reply "Idle speculation is more fun for me than being right."
You can't prove a negative. If you postulate it is not a coincidence it is upon YOU to show evidence of wrong doing. Imagine a police officers came up to you and said "Prove you didn't commit a crime?" That makes "coincidence" a suspiciously strong alternative hypothesis.
PING irna.ir (209.1.163.102) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=297 ms
irna.ir is "The Islamic Republic News Agency". It's up and running fine. Iran is not cut off from the internet. Egypt is not cut off from the internet, and it would be stupid... no, moronic, for US or any European/North American state to arrange this, since Egypt is one of the few states in the Middle East where some resemblance of reason is preserved. Confirmed.
$ ping irna.ir
PING irna.ir (209.1.163.102) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=38.1 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=37.3 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=37.4 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=4 ttl=48 time=38.9 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=5 ttl=48 time=36.9 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=6 ttl=48 time=37.4 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=7 ttl=48 time=37.8 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=8 ttl=48 time=37.2 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=9 ttl=48 time=42.4 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=10 ttl=48 time=38.6 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=11 ttl=48 time=47.3 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=12 ttl=48 time=35.6 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=13 ttl=48 time=49.0 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=14 ttl=48 time=39.1 ms
--- irna.ir ping statistics ---
14 packets transmitted, 14 received, 0% packet loss, time 196372ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 35.669/39.553/49.063/3.852 ms
Totally, confirmed: 00:45 PDT, 2008-02-02. And, judging by the times, at least one of the three cut wires is repaired. Maybe it was just the weather.
...and it would be stupid... no, moronic, for US or any European/North American state to arrange this, since Egypt is one of the few states in the Middle East where some resemblance of reason is preserved. Frankly, my dear, I just don't give a damn about your strategic plausibility arguments. Just show me that the IntarTubes are still On, mmm-kay?
True, but can't we wait until that actually happens before talking about how suspicious it would be? Doesn't the government actually do enough under-handed things that we can display our cynicism talking about those realities, rather than speculating about what kind of plot we'd dream up if we were the ones being under-handed?
It might be just the weather.
Oman's largest telecom, Omantel, said a tropical storm caused the damage while du (DU.AI:[web widget]:
DU.AI, , ) , the United Arab Emirates' second largest telecom, said the cables were cut due to ships dragging their anchors.
Good call, mea37. There is enough duplicity in politics to keep 200% of voting taxpayers busy for 9 lifetimes, without making shit up. As you were, Slashdotters.
Sorry, after seeing what the US military is capable of in Iraq and Afghanistan, I don't see them as the best there is. Don't be sorry. After personally meeting the best that the Navy has to offer, I concur.
I feel your pain, but considering the plethora of password management tools at sourceforge, I don't excuse ISP's, even though some of their users do complain inordinately. There are good workarounds to offer them, and the few users that still complain about managing a few passwords, with one master password to rule them all, are probably spammers.
Seems illegitimate for Cox to scan e-mails for that, considering how easy it is to instead enforce their 'no servers' rules by only allowing connections that are initiated by a Cox customer's IP. If Cox's sysadmins don't know how to do that, I'll write the iptables script for them myself. For a hefty fee, of course.
I haven't checked the Cox TOS lately, but don't they prohibit running a home web server like all the other residential internet providers? Yes. They may not actively police it, of course, but there it is. So they can disallow a remote client connection to a server run by a Cox customer, but I don't see what that has to do with this story about blocking an e-mail from a Cox customer. That looks like legitimate, allowed, client-type use to me.
That may be true, but we aren't talking about the distant past. I consider the Bronze Age "the distant past." What happened 10 years ago, I can recall quite clearly, at least the interesting events. It's not lost in the mists of time. Besides, Billions of dollars worth of damages don't have a statute of limitations in the public's perceptions. Maybe a half-life; maybe not. There's no dodging the fact that a great many people paid our own money for a "good" and received a "bad." I don't think I'm alone in considering that fraud.
Windows may still have security issues but that doesn't mean that a person can make it reasonably secure: keeping up to date with patches, using anti-virus, avoiding insecure software such as Internet Explorer, etc. Plenty of people use Windows without it getting infected. Plenty of people do hookers and shoot up with shared needles without getting infected, too. It doesn't make either commodity "safe" or worthy of "trust," which seems to be more the IT marketing keyword of the week. Some people even survive Russian Roullette. The fact that some installations are not infected does not imply that it is as useful as advertised, or that it was ever fit for use. Sorry, I can tell from your sig this will be like fingernails on a blackboard, but at least I modified the car analogy slightly. Would you be defending a building contractor who required their customers to purchase doors separately from a third party? "Plenty of people's homes aren't vandalized before the owners move in and install doors" just doesn't sound reasonable, does it? We're accustomed to higher standards, because there's competition in that market.
And my point still stands. The fact that he allowed his brother to connect an infected machine to his network isn't the fault of the OS. No, and maybe I'm just older than you, but the term "infected machine" just seems to me like a cop-out. The armpit stains are not the fault of Steve Ballmer's shirt, either. But that isn't the point. The point is just that that's ugly. Developer Dance
The problem with an ISP using SMTP-auth for connections outside their network is that SMTP-auth is only as secure as the least secure password used in your customer base. You're right about the least secure password in the user base defining the easiest route for a spambot, but then I think you went too easy on the ISPs, or admins at ISPs.
Given that people are generally lazy and prioritize convenience over security, that means odds are that any decent sized ISP *will* have at least one (and probably very many more) weak passwords, and *that* means that the ISP's mail server *will* be an open relay as soon as the spammers figure it out. OK, accepting, for sake of discussion, that "people are generally lazy and prioritize convenience over security," how do you blame the customer instead of the network administrator, whose job it is to ensure the operation -- which by definition includes the security -- of that network? I consider the necessity of "strong" passwords obvious, and common knowledge among anybody who has any business at all in a server room, and never the responsibility of Joe Sixpack. It's not "lazy" to come home after work, and do something other than the job of my ISP's network administrator. Tools for generating strong passwords are easy to find and not particularly hard to write, either, if the CEO doesn't like the color scheme or something. It's also easy, on the server, to check that customers are creating passwords equal to or greater than a certain length, containing alphanumeric, both upper- & lower-case letters, and more, with simple regular expressions. There's no excuse for being in charge of an ISP's network and not knowing everything in this paragraph, or being sure you have somebody on staff who does.
If "killing" a single-celled organism is wrong, what about fruit flies? They have far more brain cells than a blastocyst. Wouldn't their suffering exceed that of an aborted fetus?
Then, when the Pope dodges all questions related to pursuit of happiness, and relief of real suffering, with his "human soul" escape clause, ask him about the cruelty of cramming a complete human soul into a structure with less consciousness than a fruit fly. Either first trimester abortions and stem cell research are just fine, or God is an abuser. There is no 'out' left to the Catholic Church on these questions. It is either for human life, liberty, and happiness and scientific research in pursuit of all three, or against all forms of human freedom. Unless, they're all just too damned stupid to take seriously, ever, on anything.
That was a joy to read. I agree with #1, but not with #2.
#1 implies, if I understand it, that Bob cannot pollute water that will naturally, downstream, become Alice's. That's good, and feasible.
#2, as I understand it, violates the right of people to voluntarily enter into wage employment contracts. Why any employer would prefer such a thing is a genuine mystery to me, but they all seem to want to save me the trouble of paying separate bills to health insurance companies. In a lot of situations, having # workers available in case there is a paying customer is a genuine necessity. Would you deprive all owners of such businesses of their right to continue to do business?
For employees, the right to hold out for a contractor position is already guaranteed by law; the economic conditions that prevent many people from exercising that particular right are a bunch of long, sad, boring stories of course, and some of those have evoked my sympathy. But I see no reason to re-write our rights. And although many employers -- bosses, to be more accurate -- have a dictatorial attitude, being a sh*thead should not be made illegal. Everybody has the right to quit if their boss proves to be too much of a sh*thead to handle.
2) Rights are unwaivable and cannot be signed away in contracts...But wait, there's more - interest is really just rent on money, so interest clauses are gone too. Between that and rent, there go the major ways that the rich can get richer just by being rich. But there's still more - wage labor is really nothing but renting *yourself*, giving another temporary rights to control you in exchange for money. That "control" is not absolute; so long as one retains the right to quit -- and I know of no cases of that being in question, as a matter of law -- one has not waived or "signed away" any rights, in contracts. Corporate work can be so anonymous and thankless it feels de-humanizing, but I think your arguments diminish actual slavery and the real significance of rights. Taking away the right to work for a wage would not be an advance. Taking away the legal preferential treatments that corporations get would achieve all the same benefits for "wage slaves," without curtailing our legal rights.
"Everyone has absolute choice in everything that happens to them, so therefore it's obvious that everyone deserves exactly what they are getting. Except me, because I deserve more." ... is not contrary to or even different from "hypocritical anarchism," which is how it was presented:
> Slashdot Libertarianism is mostly hypocritical anarchism
Naw. It's mostly totally unselfconscious, unexamined selfishness combined with a sort of odd belief in 'freedom' that is so strong that it basically amounts to belief in predestination. ("Everyone has absolute choice in everything that happens to them, so therefore it's obvious that everyone deserves exactly what they are getting. Except me, because I deserve more.") The latter is merely a verbose restatement of the former, at the level I'd probably address to a 3rd grader who asked me "What is 'hypocritical anarchism'"? RTFC
You're right that I haven't read the article, and wasn't meaning to defend it in particular... OK, then I'll just reply to what you said, about the topic you're discussing. Please, do read the article, though. It is a horrid piece of filth, and having suffered the first 13 pages of it already myself, I want everybody else to experience the same appalled reaction I had to the many blatant misinterpretations of facts and willful refusal to recognize their correct contexts in reality.
...just the notion that engineer-types seem prone to fundamentalism (not necessarily of the jihadist type, just generic "One True Way" type things, like Linux distros or grammar sticklers). If you're going by Slashdot, the amount that people resort to speech here should never be taken to imply that the professions or personality types that are "strongly overrepresented" here are more prone to violence than others, or than the population generally. If anything, the opposite implication, that people who verbalize their disagreements carefully and thoroughly are less likely to resort to barbarian tactics, is supported by my observations of this forum, and all reputable research I have read.
On the specific topic of Islamic fundamentalism, I would suspect engineers to be less likely to fall into that group due to being more immune to religion in general, although I could see those engineers who *do* fully accept a religion to be more likely to be of the extremist-type, due to the tendency towards taking things literally, absolutely, and to their logical ends (traits which help engineers in subjects like math and physics, but don't apply to pretty much anything else). Hmm, I'm new here, so I don't know if I should use "there, fixed that for you," but I'd like to re-write that as "Engineers generally exhibit a tendency towards taking things literally, absolutely, at whatever level of detail necessary to truly understand the "big picture" completely, and to their logical ends (traits which help engineers and other professionals who routinely work in subjects like math and physical science, but don't get applied as regularly or as rigorously by pretty much anybody else, to much of anything).
There is exactly 1 truth, which is a partial unknown.
If you doubt this why don't we try this experiment. You close your eyes and you jump of the stairs backwards. You make yourself believe this will have no effect on you (use alcohol if necessary), and we test the result, ok ? We don't consider your perspective reasoned well enough to warrant an experiment, certainly not one at our expense. You "test the result."
I'm not so sure about this. With ether, it was basically disproved by that experiment: it was falsified. With gods or other higher beings, there's no way we know of to prove or disprove their existence I could append "does not imply the existence of any known gods" to the Conclusions section of all published experiments and it would be perfectly true. It just wouldn't be within the scope of any of those experiments. So, in my book, that puts ether that much ahead of the deity hypothesis; at least a test was devised and performed. All we can say about god is, haven't needed that hypothesis yet, for anything. Why should I ignore Occam's Razor, just this once?
So I don't see how it can even be addressed by science. No, I don't see how the various claims about gods can be addressed experimentally. But, we can analyze the necessity of each one, and say in every single case that god hypotheses add nothing of value to science. At least, that has been my experience, so far; the most plausible hypothesis is "no god exists," because if it did, and considering the magnitude required to be consistent with its asserted previous effects, it ought to be the best available hypothesis, for at least something.
"The Unseen" is not a valid basis for making statements" Sounds like this is your axiom, the statement you based other statements on rather the statement that you derive from something else. Funny! No, it is not an axiom. It derives from the verifiability possible in one, and the lack of verifiability of the other. Take my word for it.
Wrong.
The nonbeliever would say there was a scientific explanation. The skeptic/scientist/thinker would look for the causal mechanism, not attribute observations to any particular cause without reason -- not to god, not to the absence of god. It just turns out that the evidence does not in any way imply the presence of a god, so its non-existence is the more consistent of the hypotheses. That does not imply that anybody is trying to disprove the existence of god or biased toward concluding the non-existence of god contrary to evidence. There simply is no such evidence.
It is dishonest since the nonbeliever will then say there's no evidence for God -- it's circular reasoning: How about you present your extraordinary hypothetical situations, then ask the nonbeliever what I would say to that, rather than put words in my mouth? Or, would you prefer to just talk to yourself?
1) God doesn't exist (he says)
2) Therefore when something weird happens, God cannot be the cause
3) Therefore there is no evidence that God exists
4) Therefore God doesn't exist. Corrections:
1. There is no evidence that god does exist.
2. Unrelated to 1., when something "weird" happens, we [scientists/skeptics/atheists/intellectuals] say "That's weird. I wonder why that happened," and set out to learn why.
3. Therefore, no observations yet have been so resistant to causal explanation to be classified as evidence of god's existence.
4. Therefore, gods' nonexistence is the most rational hypothesis about the topic of gods.
Suppose that all the atoms of air in a room move to one corner of the room and a person suffocates to death. Suppose that I remind you that a thought experiment is valid as illustration of a concept, not proof of its applicability to reality.
(An event which is less likely than the age of the universe.) Measured in what units? Unless I pick a unit much larger than Billions of years, the age of The Universe will be at least of the order of magnitude of 1. If I measure in years, the number would be in the Billions, and if I measure in seconds, a factor of about 3.2e7 more. The point of which is that being less than any of those numbers does not by itself imply an extraordinarily small number, although the probability in question should be described by an extraordinarily small number and your argument depends on a very small, not a very large number. Did you mean the inverse?
A believer would say, "Maybe that was caused by God -- the odds of divine intervention are much higher than the odds of the brownian motion of billions of atoms all synchronizing at once." That would be extraordinary evidence, all right. But it isn't. It is only an example of what is meant by "extraordinary evidence," which would be required to lead logically to your extraordinary claim. The improbability you cited is a good indication of how extraordinary your claim is, which logically indicates that absent such extraordinary evidence, your argument should not be taken seriously.
When people say this, they don't mean it -- they just are restating that circular argument above. That circular argument is yours, a straw man, and in no way attributable to me.
More importantly, most statements of this sort are dishonest -- even if an experiment of some sort showed that God might have intervened, the doubter would doubt it anyway. Let's cross that bridge when we get to it, and stop calling people "dishonest" just because we don't concede to believe your extraordinary claims without equally extraordinary evidence. Until there is proof that God intervened, the pertinent facts are that no such proof exists, and that the point that you just dishonestly called "dishonest" is in fact perfectly valid.
Slashdot Mirror
PING irna.ir (209.1.163.102) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=297 ms
irna.ir is "The Islamic Republic News Agency". It's up and running fine. Iran is not cut off from the internet. Egypt is not cut off from the internet, and it would be stupid
PING irna.ir (209.1.163.102) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=38.1 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=37.3 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=37.4 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=4 ttl=48 time=38.9 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=5 ttl=48 time=36.9 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=6 ttl=48 time=37.4 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=7 ttl=48 time=37.8 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=8 ttl=48 time=37.2 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=9 ttl=48 time=42.4 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=10 ttl=48 time=38.6 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=11 ttl=48 time=47.3 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=12 ttl=48 time=35.6 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=13 ttl=48 time=49.0 ms
64 bytes from 209.1.163.102: icmp_seq=14 ttl=48 time=39.1 ms
--- irna.ir ping statistics --- 14 packets transmitted, 14 received, 0% packet loss, time 196372ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 35.669/39.553/49.063/3.852 ms
Totally, confirmed: 00:45 PDT, 2008-02-02. And, judging by the times, at least one of the three cut wires is repaired. Maybe it was just the weather.
...and it would be stupidIt might be just the weather.
Oman's largest telecom, Omantel, said a tropical storm caused the damage while du (DU.AI:[web widget]: DU.AI, , ) , the United Arab Emirates' second largest telecom, said the cables were cut due to ships dragging their anchors.
Good call, mea37. There is enough duplicity in politics to keep 200% of voting taxpayers busy for 9 lifetimes, without making shit up. As you were, Slashdotters.
I feel your pain, but considering the plethora of password management tools at sourceforge, I don't excuse ISP's, even though some of their users do complain inordinately. There are good workarounds to offer them, and the few users that still complain about managing a few passwords, with one master password to rule them all, are probably spammers.
Seems illegitimate for Cox to scan e-mails for that, considering how easy it is to instead enforce their 'no servers' rules by only allowing connections that are initiated by a Cox customer's IP. If Cox's sysadmins don't know how to do that, I'll write the iptables script for them myself. For a hefty fee, of course.
If "killing" a single-celled organism is wrong, what about fruit flies? They have far more brain cells than a blastocyst. Wouldn't their suffering exceed that of an aborted fetus?
Then, when the Pope dodges all questions related to pursuit of happiness, and relief of real suffering, with his "human soul" escape clause, ask him about the cruelty of cramming a complete human soul into a structure with less consciousness than a fruit fly. Either first trimester abortions and stem cell research are just fine, or God is an abuser. There is no 'out' left to the Catholic Church on these questions. It is either for human life, liberty, and happiness and scientific research in pursuit of all three, or against all forms of human freedom. Unless, they're all just too damned stupid to take seriously, ever, on anything.
#1 implies, if I understand it, that Bob cannot pollute water that will naturally, downstream, become Alice's. That's good, and feasible.
#2, as I understand it, violates the right of people to voluntarily enter into wage employment contracts. Why any employer would prefer such a thing is a genuine mystery to me, but they all seem to want to save me the trouble of paying separate bills to health insurance companies. In a lot of situations, having # workers available in case there is a paying customer is a genuine necessity. Would you deprive all owners of such businesses of their right to continue to do business?
For employees, the right to hold out for a contractor position is already guaranteed by law; the economic conditions that prevent many people from exercising that particular right are a bunch of long, sad, boring stories of course, and some of those have evoked my sympathy. But I see no reason to re-write our rights. And although many employers -- bosses, to be more accurate -- have a dictatorial attitude, being a sh*thead should not be made illegal. Everybody has the right to quit if their boss proves to be too much of a sh*thead to handle. 2) Rights are unwaivable and cannot be signed away in contracts...But wait, there's more - interest is really just rent on money, so interest clauses are gone too. Between that and rent, there go the major ways that the rich can get richer just by being rich. But there's still more - wage labor is really nothing but renting *yourself*, giving another temporary rights to control you in exchange for money. That "control" is not absolute; so long as one retains the right to quit -- and I know of no cases of that being in question, as a matter of law -- one has not waived or "signed away" any rights, in contracts. Corporate work can be so anonymous and thankless it feels de-humanizing, but I think your arguments diminish actual slavery and the real significance of rights. Taking away the right to work for a wage would not be an advance. Taking away the legal preferential treatments that corporations get would achieve all the same benefits for "wage slaves," without curtailing our legal rights.
Naw. It's mostly totally unselfconscious, unexamined selfishness combined with a sort of odd belief in 'freedom' that is so strong that it basically amounts to belief in predestination. ("Everyone has absolute choice in everything that happens to them, so therefore it's obvious that everyone deserves exactly what they are getting. Except me, because I deserve more.") The latter is merely a verbose restatement of the former, at the level I'd probably address to a 3rd grader who asked me "What is 'hypocritical anarchism'"? RTFC
...just the notion that engineer-types seem prone to fundamentalism (not necessarily of the jihadist type, just generic "One True Way" type things, like Linux distros or grammar sticklers). If you're going by Slashdot, the amount that people resort to speech here should never be taken to imply that the professions or personality types that are "strongly overrepresented" here are more prone to violence than others, or than the population generally. If anything, the opposite implication, that people who verbalize their disagreements carefully and thoroughly are less likely to resort to barbarian tactics, is supported by my observations of this forum, and all reputable research I have read. On the specific topic of Islamic fundamentalism, I would suspect engineers to be less likely to fall into that group due to being more immune to religion in general, although I could see those engineers who *do* fully accept a religion to be more likely to be of the extremist-type, due to the tendency towards taking things literally, absolutely, and to their logical ends (traits which help engineers in subjects like math and physics, but don't apply to pretty much anything else). Hmm, I'm new here, so I don't know if I should use "there, fixed that for you," but I'd like to re-write that as "Engineers generally exhibit a tendency towards taking things literally, absolutely, at whatever level of detail necessary to truly understand the "big picture" completely, and to their logical ends (traits which help engineers and other professionals who routinely work in subjects like math and physical science, but don't get applied as regularly or as rigorously by pretty much anybody else, to much of anything).If you doubt this why don't we try this experiment. You close your eyes and you jump of the stairs backwards. You make yourself believe this will have no effect on you (use alcohol if necessary), and we test the result, ok ? We don't consider your perspective reasoned well enough to warrant an experiment, certainly not one at our expense. You "test the result."
http://xkcd.com/373/
That was so much simpler than all those extra words I've been hammering out, one lousy key at a time.
2) Therefore when something weird happens, God cannot be the cause
3) Therefore there is no evidence that God exists
4) Therefore God doesn't exist. Corrections:
1. There is no evidence that god does exist.
2. Unrelated to 1., when something "weird" happens, we [scientists/skeptics/atheists/intellectuals] say "That's weird. I wonder why that happened," and set out to learn why.
3. Therefore, no observations yet have been so resistant to causal explanation to be classified as evidence of god's existence.
4. Therefore, gods' nonexistence is the most rational hypothesis about the topic of gods.
Suppose that all the atoms of air in a room move to one corner of the room and a person suffocates to death. Suppose that I remind you that a thought experiment is valid as illustration of a concept, not proof of its applicability to reality. (An event which is less likely than the age of the universe.) Measured in what units? Unless I pick a unit much larger than Billions of years, the age of The Universe will be at least of the order of magnitude of 1. If I measure in years, the number would be in the Billions, and if I measure in seconds, a factor of about 3.2e7 more. The point of which is that being less than any of those numbers does not by itself imply an extraordinarily small number, although the probability in question should be described by an extraordinarily small number and your argument depends on a very small, not a very large number. Did you mean the inverse? A believer would say, "Maybe that was caused by God -- the odds of divine intervention are much higher than the odds of the brownian motion of billions of atoms all synchronizing at once." That would be extraordinary evidence, all right. But it isn't. It is only an example of what is meant by "extraordinary evidence," which would be required to lead logically to your extraordinary claim. The improbability you cited is a good indication of how extraordinary your claim is, which logically indicates that absent such extraordinary evidence, your argument should not be taken seriously. When people say this, they don't mean it -- they just are restating that circular argument above. That circular argument is yours, a straw man, and in no way attributable to me.