Oh shut up already. While the operating can certainly help make your computer more secure (or insecure), even the most secure operating system can be crippled by misconfiguration. To be truly secure the operating must disallow misconfiguration, which is undoable and, in my opinion, undesireable.
Indeed you can. The distribution would be the important part. Emailing the root certificate to you employees would be stupid since email can be intercepted and changed (unless you sign it but you can't if the receiver doesn't have the certificate yet... a 'chicken or the egg' problem), so an attacker could insert his own certificate in the email and play man-in-the-middle between the company and the emloyee(s) in possesion of his certificate (for most businesses this scenario is relatively unlikely). Giving a very cheap memory-stick containing the certificate to every employee would work (if you trust the ones handing out the memory-sticks). In the end, it comes down to how paranoia you are:)
Why don't you add the root certificate to you browser? In Firefox 3: Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Encryption -> View Certificates, then add the root certificate to your list of authorities. If memory serves me well, that should do the trick.
We know that Newton is wrong. We know that Einstein is wrong (but less so than Newton). Any scientist claiming his theory is the absolute truth is probably lying.
Science isn't about what is true, but about what models and predicts the world around us best.
> I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member.
This part is very odd indeed. Suppose one day a scientist finds out a cheap and practical way to create infinite energy out of nothing. By the oath, he must not tell anyone about this discovery, since it would mean that all his colleagues researching alternative enery sources would lose their funding, and maybe even their jobs, so by publishing his discovery he would harm his colleages. Also, it would mean the laws of thermodynamics are incorrect, which might discredit the scientists involved in the formulation of these laws.
A less farfetched example: discovering a way to create a (cheap and small) fusion reactor that produces (much) more energy than is required to keep it running would lead to a decrease in funding for scientists who research ways to deal with the nuclear waste of fission reactors (since these would become obsolete), thus 'harming' them.
Gravity cares only about the center of mass. If the earth was twice as dense but a little smaller (thereby keeping its mass the same as it is now) the moon's orbit should stay the same as it is now. We can replace the sun with a black hole with the same mass and you wouldn't notice until you leave the basement and go outside. Well, except for the temperature, which might drop a little.
One who knows that one cannot, by definition, leave a black hole, except as radiation (which, from the astronaut's point of view, is no better than not leaving at all). Also, we cannot turn an asteroid into a black hole. Finally, a black hole with the same mass of the earth would have a 9 mm diameter. Most asteroids weigh less than the earth, but even if you could fine a super-heavy asteroid, how are we to squeeze an astronaut in a ball that small? Probably the same way we compressed the asteroid, but the astronaut would be dead before we sent him into the black hole.
I suggest you google for black holes a bit, or visit wikipedia, if you're interested in black holes. They are very interesting but it seems to me that you know almost nothing about them (you're missing out!).
> Basing artificial intelligence on our brain requires a shift in how computers and their systems are designed.
We can probably get away with merely simulating the the (relevant parts of the) brain in software, instead of building a special computer to do that. But you are absolutely right about the brain being massively parallel, so specialised hardware would indeed be able to speed up such a simulation. The 'imagine a beowolf cluster of these!' comment might actually be on-topic...
"The new Sony Playstation came out a year ago," says Burrus, "but if it came out five years earlier it would be considered a supercomputer." Burrus likens the growth of processing power on a graph to a hockey stick. "In the 90s, the graph was still low. In 2000, the graph started up a little. In 2008, we're getting on the handle of the hockey stick."
This man makes no sense at all. Suppose Moore's law holds for another 50 years. In that case, in 50 years, a graph of the growth of processing power will look... exactly the same, only with bigger numbers on the x-axis and y-axis. Clearly Burrus does not understand exponential growth.
Actually we wouldn't. The black hole would not be any heavier than the earth (the moon would continue to orbit it as if nothing had happened, and the black hole would happily circle around the sun). Since the earth's mass is not that impressive, the black hole would have to be tiny, so the area around it where the gravity would significantly bend the universe would also be quite small, making our painful (but swift) deaths rather unspectacular.
Why would you be worried about that? What are the odds of getting hit by a golfball (or a billion) compared to the size of the universe? As far as I know the earth is still here so they can't be that dangerous. Or one of them might hit us tomorrow and we'd all be dead. Nothing we can do about it, no need to worry.
Keep in mind that to create a golf-ball sized black hole you need to compress a LOT of matter. According to wikipedia, the article about black holes, a black hole with the mass of the moon would have a 0.1 mm diameter. Thus it is safe to assume these black holes, if they exist, were not, in fact, created by cosmic rays hitting something (the wikipedia article suggests that tiny black holes might have been created during the big-bang).
Black holes are unsafe for anything. A little black hole can eat a star (when it's done eating it won't be quite as little) If a black hole is large enough to eat the earth, it's large enough to eat a star.
> In other words, if its not dangerous enough to wipe out a noticeable percentage of stars (the strong ones) then its not dangerous enough to mess up earth?
With this particular instance of 'it': Indeed. And what do you mean with 'the strong ones'?
> Because I can think of plenty of things that exist naturally in space that, while not dangerous enough to destroy a star, would certainly give our fragile climate and tidal system a bad day if it actually landed.
> And these women are NOT VICTIMS. The proper term is TARGET.
I don't get it. When someone shoots at me, I'm a target. When one of those bullets hits me, I have become a victim. If none of these 'raped and abused' women are victims, that would mean that there are no 'raped and abused' women? What a great world you must live in.
Which is quite a retarded pusishment. How are you going to work and make money with only 1 hand? Guess what, you'll end up stealing again (this time because the alternative is starving) and lose you other hand (or your head, if you're lucky).
Anyway if the Medieval you can't work on your farm, your kids are going to be hungry, so getting your hand chopped of == punishing your family.
Java comes with a huge library of classes. It seems that is was the article about. I'm sure you can write a working java interpreter in less than 6.3 million lines.
I quit the witcher half-way through. I didn't like the controls, and the loading times combined with the dumb quests (Speak with person A. Go to Person B 2 loads away. Speak with person B. Go back to speak with A. Go back to speak with B. Go back to speak with A. Go back to sleep with B. Go back to speak with A. Go back to B and kill or sleep with the vampires. Fight some guys. Talk with B. Congrats you finished a quest! Only 3000 more to go) made playing the game feel like work.
Overlord was pretty awesome, and I don't remember the camera angles in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (I didn't play any of the other Splinter Cells) being bad at all.
I expect most windows-running people on slashdot to be able to keep their windows relatively clean, but we are not a good representation of the average user. The average user will happily run every executable they find on their msn/email/intertubes/blogs/blags/bligs/blugs/blegs, and then click away every warning message. Win32Trojan.exe? Clickclick!
After a few weeks of this torture the system will crawl into a corner and start crying and cutting itself. Time for a reinstall! The user accepts this cycle as 'normal'.
Call me a cynic but I believe 2 out of 3 people would sign their own death warrant because they can't be arsed to read what it says.
> Objective? Why must God be an objective entity in order to discuss It/Her/Him?
Where I come from we have a saying: 'Over smaak valt niet te twisten'. It roughly means 'you cannot argue about individual preferences'. I like cookies. Maybe you don't. We could argue about that all day (although I'm sure one of us would get bored/annoyed and leave before the day had passed) but the thing is, wether or not we think the cookie is delicious is not a quality of the cookie. It is a person that tastes a cookie, and it is up to that person to decide wether he likes it or not. Liking something is a quality of a person, not the thing that is being liked. The same can be said of art. We can argue about wheter blowing paint out of your rear is art or not, but there is no right answer since we are only describing ourselves, not the creative goatse guy. Same thing about beaty. Love is slightly trickier, because when two people talk about love they are not even describing the same thing - they are both describing their own emotions. Even so we can talk about love with most people and assume they'll know what we are talking about, probably because humans aren't so different from one another, so how I experience love won't be all that different from how you experience love. This is, off course, an assumption, because it is impossible for me to be someone else, so I will never know how others experience certain emotions. What I am trying to say is that we cannot discuss love, beaty, and art, because they are not objective entities. Well, we could discuss them, but only if we both agree on a definition (thus making the object of the discussion objective for all people involved). Or we could argue about the definition. But we cannot discuss the things themselves as long as they are undefined. This is why we need to define what god is. If you say 'god is different for everyone', then he cannot be the subject of discussion, since that would require the participants of the discussion to agree on a definition.
The scientific is indeed based on certain beliefs (I guess you could call these beliefs 'assumptions' instead), such as the belief that the universe behaves according to a certain set of (unchanging) rules, and that we can find better approximations of these rules by collecting data.
Should it turn out that the assumptions science makes do not always hold... well, that would suck.:( Having said that, the scientific method has been extremely succesful in explaining the world around us, and using this knowledge to accomplish great things (such as the intertubes and blags). The scientific method works when the assumptions it makes hold, and there is every reason to assume they do [hold]. I'd argue the scientific method is the most succesful belief system invented.
I think you have: free will. Of course there is a small chance you do not believe in free will. In which case your logical conclusion should be that criminals may not be put into prisons are they clearly are not responsible for their actions.
I hear that quite often. It is ridiculous.
Suppose I write a program. I think we can all agree computers behave in a deterministic way. If I run the same piece of softare twice under the exact same conditions, the outputs will be the same. So the software does not have free will (for some (most?) definitions of 'free').
Suppose my (hypothetical) program makes decisions. The input is the description of a certain action, with a list of all known possible outcomes of the action, and how good/bad those outcomes are. The task of the program is to tell me wether I should perform the action. It does so by weighing the pros and cons of the action, and selecting the best option (to perform or not to perform). I have defined a certain value of acceptable risk in case of uncertainty.
I think it is safe to say that most of us would agree that stealing is bad. Suppose we have no punishment for theft. This is what I tell my program:
Action: Steal
Concequences:
Good: Free stuff
Program says: go and steal stuff.
Now with a law that punishes people who steal:
Action: Steal
Concequences:
Good: Free stuff
Very Bad: Go to jail
Program says: don't steal stuff.
Obviously, the law improves the situation by making sure I don't steal. The program was not free to make a decision, but by making it responsible for its actions anyway it did make an other (better) choice.
Things don't need mass to exist. I think you belief the browser you used to make that post exists, but it has no mass, does it? The vacuum of space has no weight, but is very much there, and it can kill you.
I believe my conciousness is just the result of the neurons is my skull, and that the behavior of those neurons is deterministic. As such I don't believe my will is truly 'free' (for certain values of free). I'll replace 'free will' with 'conciousness' and answer your question:
Where does it come from (1), what is the mass (2) and where does it go to when you die (3)?
1) My conciousness is the result of my neurons. 2) My conciousness has no mass, as it is a concept, not an object. 3) It doesn't go anywhere when I die, it just ends.
It depends what you mean by Jesus. If you mean 'Jesus the son of god who did a number of cool things such as walking on water, come back to life after being dead for a couple of days, change water into wine, etc' then I think this person did not exist. If by Jesus you mean 'a man who lived about 2000 years ago and was relatively well-known' then I think it is safe to say this person might have existed. The problem is that many christians will see evidence of a historical 'mundane' Jesus as evidence of a divine Jesus.
> What's important is the hospitality to life and the flexibility of life. We know that life is ridiculously flexible
Life needs time to adapt. You can't just throw bacteria from environment A into a very different environment B and expect them to survive. It doesn't work like that.
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Oh shut up already. While the operating can certainly help make your computer more secure (or insecure), even the most secure operating system can be crippled by misconfiguration. To be truly secure the operating must disallow misconfiguration, which is undoable and, in my opinion, undesireable.
Indeed you can. The distribution would be the important part. Emailing the root certificate to you employees would be stupid since email can be intercepted and changed (unless you sign it but you can't if the receiver doesn't have the certificate yet... a 'chicken or the egg' problem), so an attacker could insert his own certificate in the email and play man-in-the-middle between the company and the emloyee(s) in possesion of his certificate (for most businesses this scenario is relatively unlikely). Giving a very cheap memory-stick containing the certificate to every employee would work (if you trust the ones handing out the memory-sticks). In the end, it comes down to how paranoia you are :)
Why don't you add the root certificate to you browser? In Firefox 3: Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Encryption -> View Certificates, then add the root certificate to your list of authorities. If memory serves me well, that should do the trick.
We know that Newton is wrong. We know that Einstein is wrong (but less so than Newton). Any scientist claiming his theory is the absolute truth is probably lying.
Science isn't about what is true, but about what models and predicts the world around us best.
> I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member.
This part is very odd indeed. Suppose one day a scientist finds out a cheap and practical way to create infinite energy out of nothing. By the oath, he must not tell anyone about this discovery, since it would mean that all his colleagues researching alternative enery sources would lose their funding, and maybe even their jobs, so by publishing his discovery he would harm his colleages. Also, it would mean the laws of thermodynamics are incorrect, which might discredit the scientists involved in the formulation of these laws.
A less farfetched example: discovering a way to create a (cheap and small) fusion reactor that produces (much) more energy than is required to keep it running would lead to a decrease in funding for scientists who research ways to deal with the nuclear waste of fission reactors (since these would become obsolete), thus 'harming' them.
Gravity cares only about the center of mass. If the earth was twice as dense but a little smaller (thereby keeping its mass the same as it is now) the moon's orbit should stay the same as it is now. We can replace the sun with a black hole with the same mass and you wouldn't notice until you leave the basement and go outside. Well, except for the temperature, which might drop a little.
One who knows that one cannot, by definition, leave a black hole, except as radiation (which, from the astronaut's point of view, is no better than not leaving at all). Also, we cannot turn an asteroid into a black hole. Finally, a black hole with the same mass of the earth would have a 9 mm diameter. Most asteroids weigh less than the earth, but even if you could fine a super-heavy asteroid, how are we to squeeze an astronaut in a ball that small? Probably the same way we compressed the asteroid, but the astronaut would be dead before we sent him into the black hole.
I suggest you google for black holes a bit, or visit wikipedia, if you're interested in black holes. They are very interesting but it seems to me that you know almost nothing about them (you're missing out!).
> Basing artificial intelligence on our brain requires a shift in how computers and their systems are designed.
We can probably get away with merely simulating the the (relevant parts of the) brain in software, instead of building a special computer to do that. But you are absolutely right about the brain being massively parallel, so specialised hardware would indeed be able to speed up such a simulation. The 'imagine a beowolf cluster of these!' comment might actually be on-topic...
"The new Sony Playstation came out a year ago," says Burrus, "but if it came out five years earlier it would be considered a supercomputer." Burrus likens the growth of processing power on a graph to a hockey stick. "In the 90s, the graph was still low. In 2000, the graph started up a little. In 2008, we're getting on the handle of the hockey stick."
This man makes no sense at all. Suppose Moore's law holds for another 50 years. In that case, in 50 years, a graph of the growth of processing power will look... exactly the same, only with bigger numbers on the x-axis and y-axis. Clearly Burrus does not understand exponential growth.
Actually we wouldn't. The black hole would not be any heavier than the earth (the moon would continue to orbit it as if nothing had happened, and the black hole would happily circle around the sun). Since the earth's mass is not that impressive, the black hole would have to be tiny, so the area around it where the gravity would significantly bend the universe would also be quite small, making our painful (but swift) deaths rather unspectacular.
Yeah I know. 'WOOOOSH!'
Why would you be worried about that? What are the odds of getting hit by a golfball (or a billion) compared to the size of the universe? As far as I know the earth is still here so they can't be that dangerous. Or one of them might hit us tomorrow and we'd all be dead. Nothing we can do about it, no need to worry.
Keep in mind that to create a golf-ball sized black hole you need to compress a LOT of matter. According to wikipedia, the article about black holes, a black hole with the mass of the moon would have a 0.1 mm diameter. Thus it is safe to assume these black holes, if they exist, were not, in fact, created by cosmic rays hitting something (the wikipedia article suggests that tiny black holes might have been created during the big-bang).
Black holes are unsafe for anything. A little black hole can eat a star (when it's done eating it won't be quite as little) If a black hole is large enough to eat the earth, it's large enough to eat a star.
> In other words, if its not dangerous enough to wipe out a noticeable percentage of stars (the strong ones) then its not dangerous enough to mess up earth?
With this particular instance of 'it': Indeed. And what do you mean with 'the strong ones'?
> Because I can think of plenty of things that exist naturally in space that, while not dangerous enough to destroy a star, would certainly give our fragile climate and tidal system a bad day if it actually landed.
Black holes are not among those things.
> Women LIKE being raped and abused, you say?
No, that's not what he said at all.
> And these women are NOT VICTIMS. The proper term is TARGET.
I don't get it. When someone shoots at me, I'm a target. When one of those bullets hits me, I have become a victim. If none of these 'raped and abused' women are victims, that would mean that there are no 'raped and abused' women? What a great world you must live in.
Not hard at all. Even after a single beer my computer starts acting funny.
Which is quite a retarded pusishment. How are you going to work and make money with only 1 hand? Guess what, you'll end up stealing again (this time because the alternative is starving) and lose you other hand (or your head, if you're lucky).
Anyway if the Medieval you can't work on your farm, your kids are going to be hungry, so getting your hand chopped of == punishing your family.
> You find a Cat-5 cable shoved through your letterbox and decide to plug your laptop into it.
Would that be a 'glory-cat-5-cable'?
Java comes with a huge library of classes. It seems that is was the article about. I'm sure you can write a working java interpreter in less than 6.3 million lines.
I quit the witcher half-way through. I didn't like the controls, and the loading times combined with the dumb quests (Speak with person A. Go to Person B 2 loads away. Speak with person B. Go back to speak with A. Go back to speak with B. Go back to speak with A. Go back to sleep with B. Go back to speak with A. Go back to B and kill or sleep with the vampires. Fight some guys. Talk with B. Congrats you finished a quest! Only 3000 more to go) made playing the game feel like work.
Overlord was pretty awesome, and I don't remember the camera angles in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (I didn't play any of the other Splinter Cells) being bad at all.
I expect most windows-running people on slashdot to be able to keep their windows relatively clean, but we are not a good representation of the average user. The average user will happily run every executable they find on their msn/email/intertubes/blogs/blags/bligs/blugs/blegs, and then click away every warning message. Win32Trojan.exe? Clickclick!
After a few weeks of this torture the system will crawl into a corner and start crying and cutting itself. Time for a reinstall! The user accepts this cycle as 'normal'.
Call me a cynic but I believe 2 out of 3 people would sign their own death warrant because they can't be arsed to read what it says.
> Objective? Why must God be an objective entity in order to discuss It/Her/Him?
Where I come from we have a saying: 'Over smaak valt niet te twisten'. It roughly means 'you cannot argue about individual preferences'. I like cookies. Maybe you don't. We could argue about that all day (although I'm sure one of us would get bored/annoyed and leave before the day had passed) but the thing is, wether or not we think the cookie is delicious is not a quality of the cookie. It is a person that tastes a cookie, and it is up to that person to decide wether he likes it or not. Liking something is a quality of a person, not the thing that is being liked.
The same can be said of art. We can argue about wheter blowing paint out of your rear is art or not, but there is no right answer since we are only describing ourselves, not the creative goatse guy.
Same thing about beaty.
Love is slightly trickier, because when two people talk about love they are not even describing the same thing - they are both describing their own emotions. Even so we can talk about love with most people and assume they'll know what we are talking about, probably because humans aren't so different from one another, so how I experience love won't be all that different from how you experience love. This is, off course, an assumption, because it is impossible for me to be someone else, so I will never know how others experience certain emotions.
What I am trying to say is that we cannot discuss love, beaty, and art, because they are not objective entities. Well, we could discuss them, but only if we both agree on a definition (thus making the object of the discussion objective for all people involved). Or we could argue about the definition. But we cannot discuss the things themselves as long as they are undefined.
This is why we need to define what god is. If you say 'god is different for everyone', then he cannot be the subject of discussion, since that would require the participants of the discussion to agree on a definition.
The scientific is indeed based on certain beliefs (I guess you could call these beliefs 'assumptions' instead), such as the belief that the universe behaves according to a certain set of (unchanging) rules, and that we can find better approximations of these rules by collecting data.
:(
Should it turn out that the assumptions science makes do not always hold... well, that would suck.
Having said that, the scientific method has been extremely succesful in explaining the world around us, and using this knowledge to accomplish great things (such as the intertubes and blags). The scientific method works when the assumptions it makes hold, and there is every reason to assume they do [hold]. I'd argue the scientific method is the most succesful belief system invented.
I think you have: free will. Of course there is a small chance you do not believe in free will. In which case your logical conclusion should be that criminals may not be put into prisons are they clearly are not responsible for their actions.
I hear that quite often. It is ridiculous.
Suppose I write a program. I think we can all agree computers behave in a deterministic way. If I run the same piece of softare twice under the exact same conditions, the outputs will be the same. So the software does not have free will (for some (most?) definitions of 'free').
Suppose my (hypothetical) program makes decisions. The input is the description of a certain action, with a list of all known possible outcomes of the action, and how good/bad those outcomes are. The task of the program is to tell me wether I should perform the action. It does so by weighing the pros and cons of the action, and selecting the best option (to perform or not to perform). I have defined a certain value of acceptable risk in case of uncertainty.
I think it is safe to say that most of us would agree that stealing is bad. Suppose we have no punishment for theft. This is what I tell my program:
Action: Steal
Concequences:
Good: Free stuff
Program says: go and steal stuff.
Now with a law that punishes people who steal:
Action: Steal
Concequences:
Good: Free stuff
Very Bad: Go to jail
Program says: don't steal stuff.
Obviously, the law improves the situation by making sure I don't steal. The program was not free to make a decision, but by making it responsible for its actions anyway it did make an other (better) choice.
Things don't need mass to exist. I think you belief the browser you used to make that post exists, but it has no mass, does it? The vacuum of space has no weight, but is very much there, and it can kill you.
I believe my conciousness is just the result of the neurons is my skull, and that the behavior of those neurons is deterministic. As such I don't believe my will is truly 'free' (for certain values of free). I'll replace 'free will' with 'conciousness' and answer your question:
Where does it come from (1), what is the mass (2) and where does it go to when you die (3)?
1) My conciousness is the result of my neurons.
2) My conciousness has no mass, as it is a concept, not an object.
3) It doesn't go anywhere when I die, it just ends.
It depends what you mean by Jesus. If you mean 'Jesus the son of god who did a number of cool things such as walking on water, come back to life after being dead for a couple of days, change water into wine, etc' then I think this person did not exist. If by Jesus you mean 'a man who lived about 2000 years ago and was relatively well-known' then I think it is safe to say this person might have existed.
The problem is that many christians will see evidence of a historical 'mundane' Jesus as evidence of a divine Jesus.
> What's important is the hospitality to life and the flexibility of life. We know that life is ridiculously flexible
Life needs time to adapt. You can't just throw bacteria from environment A into a very different environment B and expect them to survive. It doesn't work like that.