Well if you want to be scientific about it you could do a scientific statistical study of which belief system has done (and/or will do) more good for society in the long term. Of course you'd have to come up with your criteria of good. If you define "good = atheist" I doubt it'll make for a very scientific or useful study.
The belief systems are not all the same. An Atheist I know says he makes fun of Christians and not Muslims because the Christians are less likely to kill him;). And from various evidence he's probably right too.
IMO, the Buddhists generally don't do as much evil, but they don't tend to do as much good either. The Christians do some evil but they do tend to do more good as well, lots of hospitals and schools around the world were started by Christians, and stuff like the Red Cross too. You can say it's for brainwashing etc, but fact is, it's been far better than nothing.
Uh there have been many married gay people. Married to the "opposite" sex.
If legal perks are what you want from marriage, just find a suitable partners and there you go.
The lesbians could marry the gay guys (consummation optional). Then they could have their gay affairs with permission from their "spouses". So far they aren't convicting the heterosexuals for adultery.
If the legal perks aren't important, isn't this marriage stuff considered "old fashioned" and anachronistic by all the "modern thinking" bunch?;)
Getting the cap tight takes time. So you basically are holding on to the bomb after you have lit the fuse, and just hope the fuse burns for long enough.
And it's a pretty crappy fuse: > It takes a known amount of time for a known mass of CO2 to turn into gas at a known temperature. There's your fuse
It's normally not a known mass and temp. It's kids shoving CO2 chunks into bottles filled with water (of poorly controlled quantity and temperature).
And when and how it blows up also depends on the strength of the bottle, cap and seal, which can vary.
"Small pieces of Dry Ice placed in an empty one liter plastic soda bottle and then filled with hot water may explode 2 to 120 seconds after the top is tightly screwed on. It also may crack anywhere and just fizzle. "
Wikipedia says: 30 seconds to 30 minutes
Such a high variation makes for rather unsafe fuse.
Like I said, you can set fireworks off in a far more controlled manner. And it's even harder to safely deal with with an unexploded dry ice bomb than with fireworks that somehow haven't gone off.
Guess what, I bought movie tickets to the latest Star Trek and Batman Begins. And I'm living in Malaysia - one of those infamous pirate countries. Over here the cinemas are packed for some movies, but not others. LOTR, Titanic, Avatar, and yes High School Musical and Twilight.
So IMO if Hollywood does stuff right, they can make money and keep making money for quite a while yet. Stop making shit people don't watch.
BTW High School Musical is cheap stuff LOTS of people watch, so it's very profitable. If I were Hollywood I'd be making more stuff that the whole family can watch, but Hollywood for some reason/agenda seems to like to push films with gratuitous sex and violence - those films don't sell as well.
While maybe it shouldn't be outlawed or heavily regulated, it actually is very dangerous, if you look at the other video some other slashdotter linked to ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTP4yp8y_NA ), just see how close those stupid kids got to seriously injuring themselves or others.
Most firecrackers and fireworks have fuses. So if you're not too stupid you can set those off in a controlled manner.
In 2005-2006 we had Dells with bad nvidia video cards that died because of bad caps.
As for Dell _wrongfully_ not admitting to the problems, I think I'd need more context/info than just what the nytimes is providing.
In the initial stages you may not be sure it's your fault (or that it's a bigger than normal problem), so you don't say it's your fault. So as long as you fix it as soon as reasonable, I don't see the problem.
Now if it's proven that they were lying to their customers later on, then sure punish them for it.
Anyway, FWIW, from anecdotal experience at work, the Dell service techs have more experience than the IBM techs, go figure why:)... The people who came to replace an IBM server motherboard were doing it for the first time (they weren't even IBM staff - they were IBM partners). Whereas the Dell service techs could probably change stuff with their eyes closed, ok so I'm exaggerating...
I like the Monty Hall explanation which involves the extrapolation to 1 million doors. 999999 goats and 1 car.
You pick a door, then Monty opens up all the other doors showing goats, except one (and your door of course) and asks if you'd like to switch to his particular unopened door.
The odds that you picked the car at the first go is 1 in a million. The odds that his unopened door contains a car is pretty high.
And yah, just a few changes to the rules or case and the whole thing changes. So I agree with your remarks on a sensible problem statement.
If the problem statement is good enough to write a computer program to simulate it, then it's easier to test it;).
Fact is I don't trust any of the CAs. So I have long removed all CA certs from one of my browsers (I use more than one browser for security and other reasons, and my browsers don't all run as the same user - so if some exploit gets one browser, it's harder for it to affect the other browser instances).
You seem to think it's so simple, let me ask you this: do you have Entrust's certs in your browser? Do you trust CNNIC? Entrust has signed at least one of CNNIC's _CA_ certs[1].
I may trust the website I'm dealing with (I have to), so if the first time I use that site, if I can lock on to that cert "forever", my actual risk exposure is quite low. If that site gets pwned, whether or not the certs get pwned doesn't matter since the _site_ is pwned. The problem is most certificates expire after a very short time.
And the main problem is the CAs are a bigger security risk than "someone happening to MITM me at just the first time". Really what are the odds? The CAs have signed the wrong certs before.
The site getting pwned is also a risk, but you have to accept that if you deal with that site anyway.
In some cases Governments are a bigger threat than some random hacker.
You really think websites are going to have the same ssl certs as those fetched from DNS servers? In practice I doubt that's ever going to happen.
And if the browser bunch haven't even fixed the problem I'm talking about after 5 years, I doubt they'll find a way to use DNSSEC to actually make things more secure.
> How in hell is chatting up with your ex-girlfriend when you're married something inmoral?
Chatting with her is not necessarily immoral, but chatting up with her I don't know:).
Seriously though, that's why privacy is useful. Because life is too short to possibly provide context to everyone, and they may not still accept your version of it.
So if you can control your privacy you don't have to waste lots of resources and time dealing with things which wouldn't have been problems in the first place.
Imagine if someone accused you of being a pedophile just because a bunch of 9 year olds (who you somewhat know - via niece, church or whatever ) decided at about the same time (they often do stuff in groups) to start messaging you on MSN, and you thought "oh what's the harm in adding them to your contacts". And next thing you know some paranoid lady accuses you of being a pedo.
> and give your users the CA public key via a secure means,
If you're talking about browsers, you have to remove/disable the other CAs from your users browsers/OSes.
Otherwise those CAs can provide valid certs for your sites (or for other CAs!). Whether knowingly/complicitly or unwittingly.
If you are unwilling/unable to remove those CAs you need a browser that can warn or prevent access if server certs are signed by wrong/unexpected CAs.
Otherwise things aren't really that secure.
Do you really trust some CA in China that's probably an arm of the Chinese Government? And if some CA in the USA signs that Chinese CA's "CA certs" too, as long as your browser trusts that US CA's certs, the Chinese CA's certs are in your chain of trust whether you know it or not see:
Too bad the browser makers don't really care about security, despite this being a known problem for years you still need a firefox plugin to deal with this.
There's at least one firefox plugin (Certificate Patrol) which may help (it does trust some CAs a bit more than others but I guess you can modify it if you want).
The morons are the ones making the browsers - since the current browser architecture requires you to trust ALL CAs that are installed in your browser for ALL possible sites. This issue has been known for years but they refuse to fix it.
So if some Randomistan CA signs yourbank.us it's treated as valid even if the old cert was valid for years and was signed by some other CA.
> then one day I realized it isn't the languages so much that make the difference, it's how you use it.
To me it's not the language that make the difference but the _libraries_ that make the difference.
The more suitable and available the libraries there are to do what I want to do, the less code I have to write, document and hopefully debug (some libraries are buggy unfortunately).
And also if they are standard or defacto standard libraries in means the poor sod taking over has less code to read. Assuming he/she is not a noob and does not need to check what "standard function/method" really does.
There are powerful programming languages that allow a top programmer to do lots of stuff quickly and concisely. These may be good for the elite programmers, BUT, I'm not an elite programmer...
So instead of a language that helps in the code I write, I prefer a language that helps because of all the code I don't have to write:).
Just guessing: J formations get about the same benefit, and the birds can't be bothered to make extra effort to keep the sides balanced?
And if the lead birds on average have a tendency to drop out to one side more than the other (due to "handedness" or other reason) it results in a long J formation.
Doubt they are so concerned about the aesthetics of it, in order to burn extra energy to fly all the way to the other side to balance it just because the leaders keep dropping out right (or left).
Maybe "handedness" also plays a part - if one wing gets tired more easily I guess one side would be better:).
> the American military is in fact capable of bringing about more freedom and democracy in the world, > no matter how poorly it may have been used recently
Are there really more cases of the USA actually bringing democracy to a country significantly earlier than causing it instead to happen later (or even destroying an existing democracy?).
So far "freedom and democracy" appear to just be the "PR" reasons, with the real reasons being $$$ or other.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if you want to be scientific about it you could do a scientific statistical study of which belief system has done (and/or will do) more good for society in the long term. Of course you'd have to come up with your criteria of good. If you define "good = atheist" I doubt it'll make for a very scientific or useful study.
;). And from various evidence he's probably right too.
The belief systems are not all the same. An Atheist I know says he makes fun of Christians and not Muslims because the Christians are less likely to kill him
IMO, the Buddhists generally don't do as much evil, but they don't tend to do as much good either. The Christians do some evil but they do tend to do more good as well, lots of hospitals and schools around the world were started by Christians, and stuff like the Red Cross too. You can say it's for brainwashing etc, but fact is, it's been far better than nothing.
Uh there have been many married gay people. Married to the "opposite" sex.
;)
If legal perks are what you want from marriage, just find a suitable partners and there you go.
The lesbians could marry the gay guys (consummation optional). Then they could have their gay affairs with permission from their "spouses". So far they aren't convicting the heterosexuals for adultery.
If the legal perks aren't important, isn't this marriage stuff considered "old fashioned" and anachronistic by all the "modern thinking" bunch?
Getting the cap tight takes time. So you basically are holding on to the bomb after you have lit the fuse, and just hope the fuse burns for long enough.
And it's a pretty crappy fuse:
> It takes a known amount of time for a known mass of CO2 to turn into gas at a known temperature. There's your fuse
It's normally not a known mass and temp. It's kids shoving CO2 chunks into bottles filled with water (of poorly controlled quantity and temperature).
And when and how it blows up also depends on the strength of the bottle, cap and seal, which can vary.
To quote: http://www.dryiceinfo.com/fog.htm
"Small pieces of Dry Ice placed in an empty one liter plastic soda bottle and then filled with hot water may explode 2 to 120 seconds after the top is tightly screwed on. It also may crack anywhere and just fizzle. "
Wikipedia says: 30 seconds to 30 minutes
Such a high variation makes for rather unsafe fuse.
Like I said, you can set fireworks off in a far more controlled manner. And it's even harder to safely deal with with an unexploded dry ice bomb than with fireworks that somehow haven't gone off.
Not sure why they haven't got more success with stuff like this yet: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/03/us/plastic-pancreas-in-diabetic-dogs-brings-human-tests-closer.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_pancreas#Approaches_to_an_Artificial_Pancreas
Guess what, I bought movie tickets to the latest Star Trek and Batman Begins. And I'm living in Malaysia - one of those infamous pirate countries. Over here the cinemas are packed for some movies, but not others. LOTR, Titanic, Avatar, and yes High School Musical and Twilight.
So IMO if Hollywood does stuff right, they can make money and keep making money for quite a while yet. Stop making shit people don't watch.
BTW High School Musical is cheap stuff LOTS of people watch, so it's very profitable. If I were Hollywood I'd be making more stuff that the whole family can watch, but Hollywood for some reason/agenda seems to like to push films with gratuitous sex and violence - those films don't sell as well.
Put an eye out? I think you greatly underestimate the destructive power of such bombs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxsyL_RSsUw
While maybe it shouldn't be outlawed or heavily regulated, it actually is very dangerous, if you look at the other video some other slashdotter linked to ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTP4yp8y_NA ), just see how close those stupid kids got to seriously injuring themselves or others.
Most firecrackers and fireworks have fuses. So if you're not too stupid you can set those off in a controlled manner.
Dry ice bombs like these don't.
It could depend on how often you shower.
2b) But Apple holds it wrong too ;)
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showpost.php?p=1661105&postcount=24
Too bad modern PC keyboards don't allow detection of very many keys being pressed at the same time.
FWIW, Douglas Engelbart had a chorded keyboard - keyset decades ago:
http://www.cedmagic.com/history/first-computer-mouse.html
In 2005-2006 we had Dells with bad nvidia video cards that died because of bad caps.
:)... The people who came to replace an IBM server motherboard were doing it for the first time (they weren't even IBM staff - they were IBM partners). Whereas the Dell service techs could probably change stuff with their eyes closed, ok so I'm exaggerating...
As for Dell _wrongfully_ not admitting to the problems, I think I'd need more context/info than just what the nytimes is providing.
In the initial stages you may not be sure it's your fault (or that it's a bigger than normal problem), so you don't say it's your fault. So as long as you fix it as soon as reasonable, I don't see the problem.
Now if it's proven that they were lying to their customers later on, then sure punish them for it.
Anyway, FWIW, from anecdotal experience at work, the Dell service techs have more experience than the IBM techs, go figure why
I like the Monty Hall explanation which involves the extrapolation to 1 million doors. 999999 goats and 1 car.
;).
You pick a door, then Monty opens up all the other doors showing goats, except one (and your door of course) and asks if you'd like to switch to his particular unopened door.
The odds that you picked the car at the first go is 1 in a million. The odds that his unopened door contains a car is pretty high.
And yah, just a few changes to the rules or case and the whole thing changes. So I agree with your remarks on a sensible problem statement.
If the problem statement is good enough to write a computer program to simulate it, then it's easier to test it
Do you also include the possibility that the other child is not born yet, but the sex is determinable?
The obsessive ones are the ones who'd _still_ be playing farmville over and over.
And the obsessive ones are the ones more likely to behave as you say.
You may conclude then that the editor is just cynically (and successfully) trolling us for more impressions and hits.
Fact is I don't trust any of the CAs. So I have long removed all CA certs from one of my browsers (I use more than one browser for security and other reasons, and my browsers don't all run as the same user - so if some exploit gets one browser, it's harder for it to affect the other browser instances).
You seem to think it's so simple, let me ask you this: do you have Entrust's certs in your browser? Do you trust CNNIC? Entrust has signed at least one of CNNIC's _CA_ certs[1].
I may trust the website I'm dealing with (I have to), so if the first time I use that site, if I can lock on to that cert "forever", my actual risk exposure is quite low. If that site gets pwned, whether or not the certs get pwned doesn't matter since the _site_ is pwned. The problem is most certificates expire after a very short time.
And the main problem is the CAs are a bigger security risk than "someone happening to MITM me at just the first time". Really what are the odds? The CAs have signed the wrong certs before.
The site getting pwned is also a risk, but you have to accept that if you deal with that site anyway.
In some cases Governments are a bigger threat than some random hacker.
[1] http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.security.policy/browse_thread/thread/7ba51ca49de0f6cf/82ae68bc8d4292f8?show_docid=82ae68bc8d4292f8#
How's DNSSEC going to help?
You really think websites are going to have the same ssl certs as those fetched from DNS servers? In practice I doubt that's ever going to happen.
And if the browser bunch haven't even fixed the problem I'm talking about after 5 years, I doubt they'll find a way to use DNSSEC to actually make things more secure.
> How in hell is chatting up with your ex-girlfriend when you're married something inmoral?
:).
Chatting with her is not necessarily immoral, but chatting up with her I don't know
Seriously though, that's why privacy is useful. Because life is too short to possibly provide context to everyone, and they may not still accept your version of it.
So if you can control your privacy you don't have to waste lots of resources and time dealing with things which wouldn't have been problems in the first place.
Imagine if someone accused you of being a pedophile just because a bunch of 9 year olds (who you somewhat know - via niece, church or whatever ) decided at about the same time (they often do stuff in groups) to start messaging you on MSN, and you thought "oh what's the harm in adding them to your contacts". And next thing you know some paranoid lady accuses you of being a pedo.
> and give your users the CA public key via a secure means,
If you're talking about browsers, you have to remove/disable the other CAs from your users browsers/OSes.
Otherwise those CAs can provide valid certs for your sites (or for other CAs!). Whether knowingly/complicitly or unwittingly.
If you are unwilling/unable to remove those CAs you need a browser that can warn or prevent access if server certs are signed by wrong/unexpected CAs.
Otherwise things aren't really that secure.
Do you really trust some CA in China that's probably an arm of the Chinese Government? And if some CA in the USA signs that Chinese CA's "CA certs" too, as long as your browser trusts that US CA's certs, the Chinese CA's certs are in your chain of trust whether you know it or not see:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.security.policy/browse_thread/thread/eea04805fbd98045#87b9eab77242b4af
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.security.policy/browse_thread/thread/7ba51ca49de0f6cf/82ae68bc8d4292f8?show_docid=82ae68bc8d4292f8
Too bad the browser makers don't really care about security, despite this being a known problem for years you still need a firefox plugin to deal with this.
There's at least one firefox plugin (Certificate Patrol) which may help (it does trust some CAs a bit more than others but I guess you can modify it if you want).
The morons are the ones making the browsers - since the current browser architecture requires you to trust ALL CAs that are installed in your browser for ALL possible sites. This issue has been known for years but they refuse to fix it.
So if some Randomistan CA signs yourbank.us it's treated as valid even if the old cert was valid for years and was signed by some other CA.
There's mention of rental sisters here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
It's not forever. For a math and science geek he sure has a poor understanding of forever.
> then one day I realized it isn't the languages so much that make the difference, it's how you use it.
:).
To me it's not the language that make the difference but the _libraries_ that make the difference.
The more suitable and available the libraries there are to do what I want to do, the less code I have to write, document and hopefully debug (some libraries are buggy unfortunately).
And also if they are standard or defacto standard libraries in means the poor sod taking over has less code to read. Assuming he/she is not a noob and does not need to check what "standard function/method" really does.
There are powerful programming languages that allow a top programmer to do lots of stuff quickly and concisely. These may be good for the elite programmers, BUT, I'm not an elite programmer...
So instead of a language that helps in the code I write, I prefer a language that helps because of all the code I don't have to write
Just guessing:
:).
J formations get about the same benefit, and the birds can't be bothered to make extra effort to keep the sides balanced?
And if the lead birds on average have a tendency to drop out to one side more than the other (due to "handedness" or other reason) it results in a long J formation.
Doubt they are so concerned about the aesthetics of it, in order to burn extra energy to fly all the way to the other side to balance it just because the leaders keep dropping out right (or left).
Maybe "handedness" also plays a part - if one wing gets tired more easily I guess one side would be better
> the American military is in fact capable of bringing about more freedom and democracy in the world,
> no matter how poorly it may have been used recently
Are there really more cases of the USA actually bringing democracy to a country significantly earlier than causing it instead to happen later (or even destroying an existing democracy?).
So far "freedom and democracy" appear to just be the "PR" reasons, with the real reasons being $$$ or other.
The other earlier posts however seem to suffer from some sort of processing or data corruption/error.