I believe you're probably right about this particular foul up not being intentional. I'm told they're having trouble getting people *on* to the system as well.
Even so, it's hard to blame people for assuming that AT&T Wireless might be up to something less than kosher. Personal experience (and that of many close friends) indicates that they are, at best, ummm... what's a polite way of calling them a bunch of lying, cheating, stealing, customer victimizing, soulless bastards?
I can buy 4 years to 3 years pretty easily. Maybe even 2 1/2 if the person is working hard and fast. In that amount of time, somebody could become an entry level engineer in training if they're really good. However, 3-6 months is plain bullshit. You must be 1) trolling, 2) a person who has never so much as attempted a real engineering degree, or 3) an engineer who wants us all to think you're far smarter than anybody else.
The other possibility is that you think "getting the job done" in engineering is the same as "getting the job done" in some sort of technician job or system administration job. Sure, you can train somebody to be a sysadmin in 6 months of intensive work. They'll probably be decent (nowhere near what a really experienced one is, but able to pass for a competent admin). Taking a person from high school and training them to do integrated circuit design in six months is basically impossible. There are a handful who could do it, but they're the same people who have PhDs in physics by the time they're 20. What you're claiming is just not reality.
The other difference is that I can go to anybody who calls himself a CPA and have a good shot at getting my taxes done correctly, whereas if I go to a random IT worker, he'll as likely as not make a tremendous mess of my IT infrastructure.
People use the same arguments to bitch about the FDA. Yes, heavy regulation drives up the cost of drugs, drives down the amount of competition, and certainly filters out a lot of viable treatments. At the same time, if there were no FDA and the drug industry ran like the IT industry does, most of the medicines on your local drugstore's shelf would be placebos if you're lucky or downright harmful if you're not. Then, you'd be stuck with going through a pharmacist for everything because you'd need somebody certified and knowledgable to protect you from the industry. And believe me, your pharmacist would be charging a pretty penny to do it.
I'm all for allowing industry to exist largely unregulated if it's not an important industry. IT is becoming a truly crucial industry, though. Anyway, I'm drifting off topic. The grandparent's point was that if IT workers want the respect that engineers get (or used to get, before every yahoo started calling himself an engineer), their industry needs to be worthy of respect. Right now, it's just like docterin' in the old west. Hang a shingle and you're ready to go. That's not an industry whose workers should be called "engineers."
Err... Are you trolling or do you really not realize that there are two Koreas? The article is referring to South Korea--the republic with universal suffrage and a GDP per capita rivaling that of many European countries. It's hardly a despotic hell hole.
Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong! I'm sorry, but I'm just keeping up the energy level.
I know you're parroting what you read in an introductory philosophy or logic book, but it's not totally right. Yes, truth is truth no matter who tells it, but there are very valid reasons for pointing out that the speaker does not have any credibility.
For example, we have a debate over whether cigarettes cause cancer or not. Pointing out that a researcher works for a cigarette manufacturer is not an invalid ad hominem argument, but rather a very valid point that the claim being put forth may be tainted. Just the same, if you cite a paper written by an independent physician and published in a medical journal, and I cite an opinion piece in a middle school newspaper, you're perfectly justified in pointing out that a twelve year old most likely doesn't know jack about lung cancer. Your pointing this out isn't an invalid personal attack against the paper's author. It's just pointing out that my source sucks.
The bottom line is, credibility matters. An irrelevant ad hominem is always a fallacy (e.g. "You're wrong because you're ugly." or "Bob is wrong because we all know he's a jerk."), but, "You're a twelve year old boy. What authority do you have to claim that childbirth is not painful?" can be very relevant to the debate at hand.
Most of the supercomputers that people whine about because they support weapons development support a lot of other research as well. In fact, a lot less research would get done if we didn't have defense departments pissing away money on anything that might possibly have weapons potential.
Lots of wrothwhile stuff gets done on those machines, believe it or not. Just like lots of worthwhile stuff gets done at Lawrence Livermore Lab. They're famous for their weapons, but the amount of other research done there is staggering.
Remember, this is a simulation, not a simple matter of solving a system of equations. Most simulations involve evaluating the same set of rules over and over again over very tiny periods of time to get an idea of what happens over long stretches of time. Think of animation: Lots of drawings, each taking time to draw. Each drawing is based on the one before it, changed slightly. Eventually, you can construct a convincing simulation of motion.
In something like fluid dynamics, these programs are actually keeping track of particles bouncing against one another and updating the current state of the system over very tiny intervals. If you try to keep track of enough particles and make the time resolution fine enough, you're going to require incredible amounts of computing power.
woah. you've got a lot of free time on your hands! wanna share some with me?:)
If only it were so. There are some things I regard as important, though. Attacks on good science on the basis of limited knowledge are one of the things I consider important, if for no other reason than they tend
to muddy the water for people who may not know much about the subject at hand. Stuff like this perpetuates the myth that science has "agreed to disagree" on this subject when the reality is, consensus was reached long ago. Even though we're well off topic, I'm not averse to using Slashdot as a message board on random stuff. Burn karma, burn!;-)
first, widespread bias != vast conspiracy. one is inevitable and the other is improbable. when you equate anti-evolutionist claims of bias in the scientific community with conspiracy, you misrepresent them. it's a illogical, inflammatory tactic, and one i've heard plenty of on both sides.
I suggest that you look into this more deeply. The major players I've seen in this game seem to prefer claiming that they don't bother submitting for publication because they anticipate widespread bias. What is illogical and inflammatory is blaming bias in a community of reviewers who usually go out of their way to be fair to opposing ideas.
Bias may explain certain slants in the number of articles published in the past century, but it hardly explains the complete dearth of such articles for over a century. What is being claimed is nothing short of conspiracy proportions. People who credulously accept the claims of widespread bias as an explanation rather than asking questions like, "How many articles have you submitted? To whom did you submit them? What, exactly, was the reply?" don't help the cause at all.
When you're rejected for publication, you get substantive responses back. Where are they? How did the biased reviewers hide their bias? Surely if the bias were as obvious as it would have to be for a slant of this magnitude, some would be apparent in the rejection letters?
I agree that every person has biases and those biases color everything he or she does, including review submissions to scholarly journals. However, that's why submissions go to several reviewers. That's why every effort is made to make the process transparent. It is largely the case that the people who complain the loudest
about bias and distortion in scholarly journals are the people who have spent the least time attempting to get published or working as a reviewer. No process is perfect, but to say that the process is so fatally flawed that no serious alternative theories have been published for the past hundred years or more is appealing to conspiracy level behavior.
Rather than choose to believe that the system that works so well for every other aspect of academia is that flawed, I tend to believe that if you can't get anything of significance published in a century or more, your ideas likely don't amount to a hill of beans.
still, you've piqued my interest about the journal publishing subject even further with the statement that anti-evolutionists don't submit work on that topic. fascinating, if true!
I strongly recommend popping over to talk.origins and joining that discussion (be sure to lurk for a while). There are several people who act as reviewers for major journals and quite a few whose livelihoods depend on getting published.
The discussion has been very enlightening to lurkers like me. Better yet, email your favorite anti-evolution scientist and ask for his or her record on publication. What articles have been submitted in and out of that field?
How many have been published? What were the responses, specifically? You may be very surprised at the responses.
my "harder to swallow" comment was not an accusation of trickery, but a claim of non-intuitiveness that came from me not using my brain well (as i've already admitted, so give it up already.)
hmm. i think it'd be more accurate to say i'm clearly not as knowledgeable about the implications of such a discovery as i'd like to believe.
Perhaps, but the root of that problem seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the evoutionary process. The idea that all species must evolve as if it's some law of physics is simply false. Populations that are not subject to selective pressures that favor changes will not change (much) over time. Some species of shark are classic examples of this. The general design of the classic "shark" shape has been the same for many millions of years. There are a number of interesting variations on it, but the general shape we see in the better known species is pretty darned solid. Why should selective pressures favor any changes at all when the current design works so well?
your point about books and internet versus biology journals is very interesting. definitely something that could be worth thinking about and looking into.
As a solid case, you referenced Dr. Michael Behe. He is a biochemist who has published his work. He is also a popular author who has published a number of works criticizing the theory evolution. For kicks, try to find any of his arguments on irrideducible complexity published in any refereed journals. You'll find that his published works outside the popular press have nothing to do with his anti-evolution stance. Dr. Behe has not produced a shred of new information worth publishing in that area. What he has done is taken the old information and put out his own analysis to a more credulous audience. It's a very different world when you have to justify every sentence to a bunch of folks who know as much as you do and whose job it is to find any possible weakness in your work.
though i must wonder just why it is anti-evolutionists (and related) types can't often (ever?) get published in those journals. no one is unbiased. objective editors are likely as much a myth as objective journalists.
There is a lively discussion on this going on on talk.origins right now. There have been similar debates in the past. By and large, the anti-evolution crowd doesn't submit anti-evolution work for publication. There aren't a lot of known cases where it has been submitted and rejected. People of the anti-evolution bent often do get published, though (see Dr. Behe)--just not their claims against evolution. Now here's where I start to get a bit talky...
The idea of bias in the scientific community is brought up all the time. Nothing wins you kook points faster than claiming a vast scientific conspiracy to keep you down. Of course, everybody has their biases, but science thrives on new ideas. You don't win Nobel Prizes for rehashing old ideas for a pat on the back. You're more likely to win one by tearing down old ideas and replacing them with new ones. The anti-evolution crowd has had 150 years to pull this off to no avail. Surely not every journal is that biased.
History is full of examples of people with new theories getting laughed at. Anti-evolution advocates love to bring this up when they're faced with overwhelming support for evolution. What they forget is that almost every one of those stories ends with the scientific establishment coming to its senses, correcting its mistake, and the theory changing. Those stories never end with, "And so he began publishing books for the uneducated masses, started a grassroots movement among people who hadn't studied the subject, and got it taught in public schools without being reviewed by the scientific community." Try to find an example of that one. It can't be done, but that's what's happening with so called "intelligent design" theory and other nonsense. Going around the goalie and the goal is not the same as scoring a goal. Skirting the scientifc dialogue does not make you a winner in this debate.
and yes, you've guessed quite well, i've not taken college-level biology. i was a comp sci
I don't want to probe too deeply into what appears to be a sensitive area for you, but the bottom line is this: If you think that the fact that there are species on Earth that haven't changed in a long time somehow presents a problem for evolutionary theory, you're clearly not as knowledgable about the topic as you're leading us to believe. There is obviously a gap in your understanding somewhere. Here is where I think you've gone wrong:
i've read plenty of books, been in plenty of debates, watched plenty of debates, and so on and so forth.
If you're reading the standard popular press type of books on evolution, you may be getting the impression that there's a lot more contention about the subject than there really is. The problem is that the people who can't get their work published in mainstream journals tend to prefer to write books and work with a more easily impressed audience. Hence the surprising ratio of pro-evolution to andi-evolution texts at Barnes and Noble. The same holds true for th Internet. I assure you that a quick look through journals that deal with biology will present you with a very different ratio.
Finally, live debates are about the worst place to look for good science. Lots of good scientists are terrible debaters and vice versa. Written format debates tend to be a little bit better, but only if they're refereed somehow (a rarity, although the talk.origins newsgroup appears to be making some progress in that area).
Perhaps this is just my 1920's stereotyping talking, but my guess is that you've never taken a college-level biology course, and if you have, it was no more than an intro class. A couple of semesters in real, major-track biology courses will teach you far more than reading evolution editorials online or popularized versions of papers that were rejected or never submitted to real scientific journals.
Before people jump on me for mentioning economists, I'd like to clarify: Economists aren't natural scientists like the other people I mentioned. However, economists do deal with empirical data and come to conclusions that those unfamiliar with their field often disagree with--something very important when forming public policy, be it educational standards or economic policy.
Your comment about "the whole debate" is very telling. The fact is, there is no real debate among biologists. There's a lot of debate among lay people in the US, but that's no surprise. If quantum mechanics were as politically polarizing as evolution, we'd all be laughing at the half of the population of uneducated non-physicists who "don't believe" in quantum mechanics. For some reason, biology seems easy enough to everybody that even people with no more than a high school education feel qualified to laugh at scientists who devote years to studying this stuff. The fact is, the question was settled a long time ago among the experts. Their task now is not to prove that the theory makes sense (they have), but to convince people who don't want to spend the time actually studying the theories.
For some reason, this has proved a lot more difficult than it has with other things people don't understand (relativity,
quantum mechanics, most of astronomy, geology, etc.). As far as I can tell, the only people who get as much flak from a bunch of know-nothings who never studied their subject beyond the high school level are economists. Let me give you and everybody else out here a hint: If you disagree with an entire branch of science, and you're only taken one or two classes in that field, you probably don't know what you're talking about. Maybe you have some uncommon insight that nobody else has had, but I doubt it.
If you want evidence, rather than waiting for it to fall in your lap on Slashdot, try http://www.talkorigins.org. Use the search engine to search for answers to your questions. These people typically actually have a background in the stuff they write about, and can correct common misconceptions like the idea that a species not changing much is evidence against common descent. They'll even answer questions in the talk.origins newsgroup.
Here's the reason why, and it's also why this industry is such a bottom feeding plague on society. Most of the people they sell goods and services to don't like getting the calls and would sign up for the list of they could. They're just not assertive enough or are otherwise easily bullied into buying things. These people hate dealing with high pressure salespeople and avoid shopping at places where they lurk. They can't, however, avoid the salespeople who take it to them. Given an opporunity, they will, and the most fertile grounds for the telemarketers will dry up. Telemarketers don't exist to tell people about products they've never heard of. They exist to push people into buying things they don't want.
You're right. It's between the telemarketer, the phone company, and the person he's calling. And the person he's calling has made it publically known that he DOES NOT want to be called. You make it sound as though the government is butting in on some sort of long standing, mutually beneficial relationship to the detriment of all. This is simply false.
The telemarketer calls people to make money. The phone company carries phone calls to make money. The end user has his time wasted and life interrupted for no benefit to speak of. This is not a group of 3 satisfied business partners. One of them wants out, has said he wants out, and now wants the government to enforce his wishes to get out. Trying to paint this as some sort of private agreement among the three is distortion at best.
Of course you can, but can you repeatedly ring somebody's doorbell in protest to convince them of your political views, even when you know that they don't want to hear from you? Trespassing laws aside, that's harassment. All the DNC list is is a list of people who *don't want ot hear from you*. There's a big difference between expressing your views in a public place and taking them straight to me in my home when all I want is for you to leave me alone.
I think that some people are confused about the likelihood of a collision with MD5 hashing. The probability of any two hashes in a given set colliding isn't all that bad compared to the probability of finding a string of bytes that will collide with another given string. I think you're right on this point. An often cited example of this confusion is birthdays:
In a classroom with 30 students in it, the probability is better than 0.5 that two of them will have the same birthday. (I believe that the number of events required to produce a probability of greater than 0.5 given n possible outcomes for that event is soemthing like 1.2 * n ^ (1/2), but I could be wrong.)
However, given one particular student, the probability that another student in the class shares that student's birthday should be 29/365 (or 366). People sometimes use the first statistic to confuse you on an issue when the more accurate analogy is actually the second (looking for something whose hash collides with a particular value). There are analogous situations in cryptography for both of these examples, but I believe that password cracking is more of the latter. The book _Applied Cryptography_ should clear up any confusion about this. As for me, it's late and I'm a bit foggy.;-)
When I said "fast" I didn't mean exhausting the whole keyspace or doing the MD5 calculation. In fact, as you note, the MD5 calculation is quite CPU intensive. Here's what makes cracking a machine fast:
We have agreed that 6 bits per character is reasonable. So, the size of the keyspace is 2^(6*8) = 2^48 = 281474976710656. To totally exhaust that space at 4000 keys/second will take you 2331 years (might as well wait 3 years for a faster computer and cut that time in half, no?).
The trick is this: How many words are there in the English language? Better yet, how many are there in the average person's vocabulary. Let's (generously) say that the number is 35,000. How many are over 8 chracters? Let's (generously) say 30,000. Your machine can search that key space in under 8 seconds. Let's allow for a person to add number from 1 to 1000 after the password (ignoring the fact that this reduces our English word selection to those that are 4 characters or less). We're still under 3 hours.
Add to that a clever algorithm that puts words that are hard to type (like stewardesses) at the end (people hate passwords that are hard to type). Add to that the fact that there are usually a few accounts in the passwd file. Eight accounts means 8 times as many chances for a hit. Basically, you can't explore the whole keyspace without a really good algorithm and several really good computers, but you can easily explore the small portion of the keyspace where most of the hits will be.
The result? We wasted our 256 bit hash by hashing 48 bit values. We wasted our 48 bit keyspace by using only a small subset of it. The bottom line is, if you have weak passwords, john or crack will find them in short order--not because they're brilliantly fast (although they are optimized for this sort of thing), but because they're clever about what order they search a small keyspace in.
This is true, but that doesn't mean that text passwords could generate 2^256 different combinations. If you have only 8 characters of 8 bit ASCII, you get a max of 64 bits. Many of those characters (like \a) aren't valid password characters, though, so 6 bits per usable ASCII value is probably valid. In effect, it's really only about 48 bits. Sure, it's possible to generate a string of bytes that will hash to every one of the 256 bit long hashes in your shadow file, but the vast majority of those are not valid passwords (they have non-printing characters in them or they're more than 8 bytes). Most of that 256 bit hash space is wasted on 8 character passwords. Crackers work by generating all possible 8 character passwords, hashing the results, and comparing the hashes. That's fast. The other option would be trying to generate a string that has a particular 256 bit hash. That's a much nastier task.
Exactly. My favorite thing about this debate is people who think that the textbooks and established science are a bad way to go. "Use common sense," they say. If science were all just common sense, people wouldn't devote their lives to scientific study. Quantum mechanics isn't common sense. Relativity is not common sense. Lay people generally accept those ideas because they see generations of physicists who have spent their lives in intensive study of those subjects, and they see the results of the work. Suddenly, when it comes to biology, everybody is enough of an expert to laugh at those silly academics.
Why people think that the core ideas of biology should be something you can accept or reject after a few minutes of armchair quarterback thought without so much as a textbook is beyond me. The arrogance is astounding.
I've always found it interesting that MS hardware is so much better than its software. It seems like that's a strong piece of evidence that it lacks sufficient competition in the software market. In hardware, MS has to contend with quality goods from established players like Logitech--companies it can't just run into the ground by changing a standard. The software world has no such established competitors to force MS to provide the same level of quality control for products like Windows.
Not that I'm a supporter of music piracy, but there is a way to explain this. Economists would call this a "free rider" problem. Production of intellectual property in many ways mirrors the production of a public good. Digital music is for all intents and purposes nonrival (one person having it doesn't preclude another from having it at basically no extra cost). Other examples of this are military protection (the army can't just protect people who pay lots of taxes) or roads (once they're made, they're available at little marginal cost per user). The problem is that somebody needs to pay for them to be made initially. For government services, taxes take care of this for us. For intellectual property, it's royalties. If you don't pay taxes, you're not "stealing" roads and the services of a fire department. You're a free rider. You let other people pay the fixed costs of creation, and then you take advantage of the fact that the marginal cost is essentially zero.
This is definitely not a nice thing to do (note that "free rider" has a pretty negative connotation), but there's a clear difference between free riding and stealing rival goods from another person. Both are bad for the general welfare, but they're very different behaviors and should have different solutions. Trying to make copyright infringement into theft by creating artificial scarcity has had obvious problems. I don't have the solution, and I suppose lawsuits could be better than nothing, but lumping these two problems together seems less than optimal.
Yes, they are equally valid, but notice that one and only one of them is true. The same goes for the evolution vs. Creation debate. We'll all see, some day, who was right; but just in case we Creationists are right, why even take the chance that being wrong could throw you into the hands of a righteously angry God? Might as well join up with us now, so you don't face that chance.
False dichotomy. How do you know it's a choice between evolution and an angry god? Any theological decision risks the wrath of an angry god who doesn't agree with you if you happen to be wrong. What if the real truth is that there's a god out there who will punish you for all eternity for being a creationist? Or damnation for not worshipping O.J. Simpson? You might as well go with what you actually think is right rather than adopting a particular theology "just in case." Anyway, if you're only believing in God "just in case" don't you think that He, as an omniscient being, sees right through the BS?
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you're probably right about this particular foul up not being intentional. I'm told they're having trouble getting people *on* to the system as well.
Even so, it's hard to blame people for assuming that AT&T Wireless might be up to something less than kosher. Personal experience (and that of many close friends) indicates that they are, at best, ummm... what's a polite way of calling them a bunch of lying, cheating, stealing, customer victimizing, soulless bastards?
The other possibility is that you think "getting the job done" in engineering is the same as "getting the job done" in some sort of technician job or system administration job. Sure, you can train somebody to be a sysadmin in 6 months of intensive work. They'll probably be decent (nowhere near what a really experienced one is, but able to pass for a competent admin). Taking a person from high school and training them to do integrated circuit design in six months is basically impossible. There are a handful who could do it, but they're the same people who have PhDs in physics by the time they're 20. What you're claiming is just not reality.
People use the same arguments to bitch about the FDA. Yes, heavy regulation drives up the cost of drugs, drives down the amount of competition, and certainly filters out a lot of viable treatments. At the same time, if there were no FDA and the drug industry ran like the IT industry does, most of the medicines on your local drugstore's shelf would be placebos if you're lucky or downright harmful if you're not. Then, you'd be stuck with going through a pharmacist for everything because you'd need somebody certified and knowledgable to protect you from the industry. And believe me, your pharmacist would be charging a pretty penny to do it.
I'm all for allowing industry to exist largely unregulated if it's not an important industry. IT is becoming a truly crucial industry, though. Anyway, I'm drifting off topic. The grandparent's point was that if IT workers want the respect that engineers get (or used to get, before every yahoo started calling himself an engineer), their industry needs to be worthy of respect. Right now, it's just like docterin' in the old west. Hang a shingle and you're ready to go. That's not an industry whose workers should be called "engineers."
As a professor of mine once said, "It's strange to see this happening. I remember when war was about people. People killing people."
My God! That's the combination to the lock on my luggage...
Err... Are you trolling or do you really not realize that there are two Koreas? The article is referring to South Korea--the republic with universal suffrage and a GDP per capita rivaling that of many European countries. It's hardly a despotic hell hole.
I know you're parroting what you read in an introductory philosophy or logic book, but it's not totally right. Yes, truth is truth no matter who tells it, but there are very valid reasons for pointing out that the speaker does not have any credibility.
For example, we have a debate over whether cigarettes cause cancer or not. Pointing out that a researcher works for a cigarette manufacturer is not an invalid ad hominem argument, but rather a very valid point that the claim being put forth may be tainted. Just the same, if you cite a paper written by an independent physician and published in a medical journal, and I cite an opinion piece in a middle school newspaper, you're perfectly justified in pointing out that a twelve year old most likely doesn't know jack about lung cancer. Your pointing this out isn't an invalid personal attack against the paper's author. It's just pointing out that my source sucks.
The bottom line is, credibility matters. An irrelevant ad hominem is always a fallacy (e.g. "You're wrong because you're ugly." or "Bob is wrong because we all know he's a jerk."), but, "You're a twelve year old boy. What authority do you have to claim that childbirth is not painful?" can be very relevant to the debate at hand.
Lots of wrothwhile stuff gets done on those machines, believe it or not. Just like lots of worthwhile stuff gets done at Lawrence Livermore Lab. They're famous for their weapons, but the amount of other research done there is staggering.
In something like fluid dynamics, these programs are actually keeping track of particles bouncing against one another and updating the current state of the system over very tiny intervals. If you try to keep track of enough particles and make the time resolution fine enough, you're going to require incredible amounts of computing power.
If only it were so. There are some things I regard as important, though. Attacks on good science on the basis of limited knowledge are one of the things I consider important, if for no other reason than they tend to muddy the water for people who may not know much about the subject at hand. Stuff like this perpetuates the myth that science has "agreed to disagree" on this subject when the reality is, consensus was reached long ago. Even though we're well off topic, I'm not averse to using Slashdot as a message board on random stuff. Burn karma, burn! ;-)
first, widespread bias != vast conspiracy. one is inevitable and the other is improbable. when you equate anti-evolutionist claims of bias in the scientific community with conspiracy, you misrepresent them. it's a illogical, inflammatory tactic, and one i've heard plenty of on both sides.
I suggest that you look into this more deeply. The major players I've seen in this game seem to prefer claiming that they don't bother submitting for publication because they anticipate widespread bias. What is illogical and inflammatory is blaming bias in a community of reviewers who usually go out of their way to be fair to opposing ideas. Bias may explain certain slants in the number of articles published in the past century, but it hardly explains the complete dearth of such articles for over a century. What is being claimed is nothing short of conspiracy proportions. People who credulously accept the claims of widespread bias as an explanation rather than asking questions like, "How many articles have you submitted? To whom did you submit them? What, exactly, was the reply?" don't help the cause at all. When you're rejected for publication, you get substantive responses back. Where are they? How did the biased reviewers hide their bias? Surely if the bias were as obvious as it would have to be for a slant of this magnitude, some would be apparent in the rejection letters?
I agree that every person has biases and those biases color everything he or she does, including review submissions to scholarly journals. However, that's why submissions go to several reviewers. That's why every effort is made to make the process transparent. It is largely the case that the people who complain the loudest about bias and distortion in scholarly journals are the people who have spent the least time attempting to get published or working as a reviewer. No process is perfect, but to say that the process is so fatally flawed that no serious alternative theories have been published for the past hundred years or more is appealing to conspiracy level behavior. Rather than choose to believe that the system that works so well for every other aspect of academia is that flawed, I tend to believe that if you can't get anything of significance published in a century or more, your ideas likely don't amount to a hill of beans.
still, you've piqued my interest about the journal publishing subject even further with the statement that anti-evolutionists don't submit work on that topic. fascinating, if true!
I strongly recommend popping over to talk.origins and joining that discussion (be sure to lurk for a while). There are several people who act as reviewers for major journals and quite a few whose livelihoods depend on getting published. The discussion has been very enlightening to lurkers like me. Better yet, email your favorite anti-evolution scientist and ask for his or her record on publication. What articles have been submitted in and out of that field? How many have been published? What were the responses, specifically? You may be very surprised at the responses.
my "harder to swallow" comment was not an accusation of trickery, but a claim of non-intuitiveness that came from me not using my brain well (as i've already admitted, so give it up already.)
You seem to wa
Perhaps, but the root of that problem seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the evoutionary process. The idea that all species must evolve as if it's some law of physics is simply false. Populations that are not subject to selective pressures that favor changes will not change (much) over time. Some species of shark are classic examples of this. The general design of the classic "shark" shape has been the same for many millions of years. There are a number of interesting variations on it, but the general shape we see in the better known species is pretty darned solid. Why should selective pressures favor any changes at all when the current design works so well?
your point about books and internet versus biology journals is very interesting. definitely something that could be worth thinking about and looking into.
As a solid case, you referenced Dr. Michael Behe. He is a biochemist who has published his work. He is also a popular author who has published a number of works criticizing the theory evolution. For kicks, try to find any of his arguments on irrideducible complexity published in any refereed journals. You'll find that his published works outside the popular press have nothing to do with his anti-evolution stance. Dr. Behe has not produced a shred of new information worth publishing in that area. What he has done is taken the old information and put out his own analysis to a more credulous audience. It's a very different world when you have to justify every sentence to a bunch of folks who know as much as you do and whose job it is to find any possible weakness in your work.
though i must wonder just why it is anti-evolutionists (and related) types can't often (ever?) get published in those journals. no one is unbiased. objective editors are likely as much a myth as objective journalists.
There is a lively discussion on this going on on talk.origins right now. There have been similar debates in the past. By and large, the anti-evolution crowd doesn't submit anti-evolution work for publication. There aren't a lot of known cases where it has been submitted and rejected. People of the anti-evolution bent often do get published, though (see Dr. Behe)--just not their claims against evolution. Now here's where I start to get a bit talky...
The idea of bias in the scientific community is brought up all the time. Nothing wins you kook points faster than claiming a vast scientific conspiracy to keep you down. Of course, everybody has their biases, but science thrives on new ideas. You don't win Nobel Prizes for rehashing old ideas for a pat on the back. You're more likely to win one by tearing down old ideas and replacing them with new ones. The anti-evolution crowd has had 150 years to pull this off to no avail. Surely not every journal is that biased.
History is full of examples of people with new theories getting laughed at. Anti-evolution advocates love to bring this up when they're faced with overwhelming support for evolution. What they forget is that almost every one of those stories ends with the scientific establishment coming to its senses, correcting its mistake, and the theory changing. Those stories never end with, "And so he began publishing books for the uneducated masses, started a grassroots movement among people who hadn't studied the subject, and got it taught in public schools without being reviewed by the scientific community." Try to find an example of that one. It can't be done, but that's what's happening with so called "intelligent design" theory and other nonsense. Going around the goalie and the goal is not the same as scoring a goal. Skirting the scientifc dialogue does not make you a winner in this debate.
and yes, you've guessed quite well, i've not taken college-level biology. i was a comp sci
i've read plenty of books, been in plenty of debates, watched plenty of debates, and so on and so forth.
If you're reading the standard popular press type of books on evolution, you may be getting the impression that there's a lot more contention about the subject than there really is. The problem is that the people who can't get their work published in mainstream journals tend to prefer to write books and work with a more easily impressed audience. Hence the surprising ratio of pro-evolution to andi-evolution texts at Barnes and Noble. The same holds true for th Internet. I assure you that a quick look through journals that deal with biology will present you with a very different ratio.
Finally, live debates are about the worst place to look for good science. Lots of good scientists are terrible debaters and vice versa. Written format debates tend to be a little bit better, but only if they're refereed somehow (a rarity, although the talk.origins newsgroup appears to be making some progress in that area).
Perhaps this is just my 1920's stereotyping talking, but my guess is that you've never taken a college-level biology course, and if you have, it was no more than an intro class. A couple of semesters in real, major-track biology courses will teach you far more than reading evolution editorials online or popularized versions of papers that were rejected or never submitted to real scientific journals.
Before people jump on me for mentioning economists, I'd like to clarify: Economists aren't natural scientists like the other people I mentioned. However, economists do deal with empirical data and come to conclusions that those unfamiliar with their field often disagree with--something very important when forming public policy, be it educational standards or economic policy.
For some reason, this has proved a lot more difficult than it has with other things people don't understand (relativity, quantum mechanics, most of astronomy, geology, etc.). As far as I can tell, the only people who get as much flak from a bunch of know-nothings who never studied their subject beyond the high school level are economists. Let me give you and everybody else out here a hint: If you disagree with an entire branch of science, and you're only taken one or two classes in that field, you probably don't know what you're talking about. Maybe you have some uncommon insight that nobody else has had, but I doubt it.
If you want evidence, rather than waiting for it to fall in your lap on Slashdot, try http://www.talkorigins.org. Use the search engine to search for answers to your questions. These people typically actually have a background in the stuff they write about, and can correct common misconceptions like the idea that a species not changing much is evidence against common descent. They'll even answer questions in the talk.origins newsgroup.
Here's the reason why, and it's also why this industry is such a bottom feeding plague on society. Most of the people they sell goods and services to don't like getting the calls and would sign up for the list of they could. They're just not assertive enough or are otherwise easily bullied into buying things. These people hate dealing with high pressure salespeople and avoid shopping at places where they lurk. They can't, however, avoid the salespeople who take it to them. Given an opporunity, they will, and the most fertile grounds for the telemarketers will dry up. Telemarketers don't exist to tell people about products they've never heard of. They exist to push people into buying things they don't want.
The telemarketer calls people to make money. The phone company carries phone calls to make money. The end user has his time wasted and life interrupted for no benefit to speak of. This is not a group of 3 satisfied business partners. One of them wants out, has said he wants out, and now wants the government to enforce his wishes to get out. Trying to paint this as some sort of private agreement among the three is distortion at best.
Of course you can, but can you repeatedly ring somebody's doorbell in protest to convince them of your political views, even when you know that they don't want to hear from you? Trespassing laws aside, that's harassment. All the DNC list is is a list of people who *don't want ot hear from you*. There's a big difference between expressing your views in a public place and taking them straight to me in my home when all I want is for you to leave me alone.
In a classroom with 30 students in it, the probability is better than 0.5 that two of them will have the same birthday. (I believe that the number of events required to produce a probability of greater than 0.5 given n possible outcomes for that event is soemthing like 1.2 * n ^ (1/2), but I could be wrong.)
However, given one particular student, the probability that another student in the class shares that student's birthday should be 29/365 (or 366). People sometimes use the first statistic to confuse you on an issue when the more accurate analogy is actually the second (looking for something whose hash collides with a particular value). There are analogous situations in cryptography for both of these examples, but I believe that password cracking is more of the latter. The book _Applied Cryptography_ should clear up any confusion about this. As for me, it's late and I'm a bit foggy. ;-)
We have agreed that 6 bits per character is reasonable. So, the size of the keyspace is 2^(6*8) = 2^48 = 281474976710656. To totally exhaust that space at 4000 keys/second will take you 2331 years (might as well wait 3 years for a faster computer and cut that time in half, no?).
The trick is this: How many words are there in the English language? Better yet, how many are there in the average person's vocabulary. Let's (generously) say that the number is 35,000. How many are over 8 chracters? Let's (generously) say 30,000. Your machine can search that key space in under 8 seconds. Let's allow for a person to add number from 1 to 1000 after the password (ignoring the fact that this reduces our English word selection to those that are 4 characters or less). We're still under 3 hours.
Add to that a clever algorithm that puts words that are hard to type (like stewardesses) at the end (people hate passwords that are hard to type). Add to that the fact that there are usually a few accounts in the passwd file. Eight accounts means 8 times as many chances for a hit. Basically, you can't explore the whole keyspace without a really good algorithm and several really good computers, but you can easily explore the small portion of the keyspace where most of the hits will be.
The result? We wasted our 256 bit hash by hashing 48 bit values. We wasted our 48 bit keyspace by using only a small subset of it. The bottom line is, if you have weak passwords, john or crack will find them in short order--not because they're brilliantly fast (although they are optimized for this sort of thing), but because they're clever about what order they search a small keyspace in.
This is true, but that doesn't mean that text passwords could generate 2^256 different combinations. If you have only 8 characters of 8 bit ASCII, you get a max of 64 bits. Many of those characters (like \a) aren't valid password characters, though, so 6 bits per usable ASCII value is probably valid. In effect, it's really only about 48 bits. Sure, it's possible to generate a string of bytes that will hash to every one of the 256 bit long hashes in your shadow file, but the vast majority of those are not valid passwords (they have non-printing characters in them or they're more than 8 bytes). Most of that 256 bit hash space is wasted on 8 character passwords. Crackers work by generating all possible 8 character passwords, hashing the results, and comparing the hashes. That's fast. The other option would be trying to generate a string that has a particular 256 bit hash. That's a much nastier task.
Why people think that the core ideas of biology should be something you can accept or reject after a few minutes of armchair quarterback thought without so much as a textbook is beyond me. The arrogance is astounding.
I've always found it interesting that MS hardware is so much better than its software. It seems like that's a strong piece of evidence that it lacks sufficient competition in the software market. In hardware, MS has to contend with quality goods from established players like Logitech--companies it can't just run into the ground by changing a standard. The software world has no such established competitors to force MS to provide the same level of quality control for products like Windows.
This is definitely not a nice thing to do (note that "free rider" has a pretty negative connotation), but there's a clear difference between free riding and stealing rival goods from another person. Both are bad for the general welfare, but they're very different behaviors and should have different solutions. Trying to make copyright infringement into theft by creating artificial scarcity has had obvious problems. I don't have the solution, and I suppose lawsuits could be better than nothing, but lumping these two problems together seems less than optimal.
False dichotomy. How do you know it's a choice between evolution and an angry god? Any theological decision risks the wrath of an angry god who doesn't agree with you if you happen to be wrong. What if the real truth is that there's a god out there who will punish you for all eternity for being a creationist? Or damnation for not worshipping O.J. Simpson? You might as well go with what you actually think is right rather than adopting a particular theology "just in case." Anyway, if you're only believing in God "just in case" don't you think that He, as an omniscient being, sees right through the BS?
The full adder and half adder are digital design constructs (for those who don't get the joke). One of the better puns I've seen on /.