Are you implying that astronomy is somehow less than a science?
I'm not implying that, I'm explicitly stating that astronomers do not perform experiments.
From that link:
nonetheless the bottom line in examining potential human-caused effects is: are these effects large enough in magnitude to be extricated from the `noise' of the natural variability of the system?
You conveniently left out the immediately following sentence: "There are few, if any, cases in which we can answer this question affirmatively."
I'm not reducing science itself, but scientific experimentation, to a protocol.
Einstein predicted gravity would bend light. The effect was accurately observed during a solar eclipse. No control group required.
But that isn't an experiment. It is an observation. The observers didn't perform any manipulations, thus there is no possiblity to control the environment. I'm content with science's use of passive observations in cases where no direct experimentation is possible, but actual experiments involving manipulation should be subject to extremely stringent repeatability requirements, as well as control requirements. IMHO.
There is a difference between observation and experimentation. If for example a cosmologist actually created a black hole, in a repeatable and controlled way, then that would be a scientific experiment. Cosmologists are largely observers, though.
The only example of a meteorological "experiment" I can think of would be cloud seeding. But please, see this page at Colorado State:
The Importance of Natural Variability.
Again, the point is that atmospheric manipulations are not repeatable.
A profound effect on the weather would be measurable and very easily noticeable. Say we manage to increase the rainfall in a region: we'd see a markedly increased rainfall which would then become the norm after several years. This rainfall might possibly adversely affect water levels elsewhere, which would also be measurable.
Ahah, you spotted the point that I left out. In addition to being controlled, experiments have to be repeatable. I can repeat the experiment with the flies and cyanide gas (to a limit, they aren't exactly the same flies). But it's impossible to repeat an atmospheric experiment. You can't arrange it so the temperature gradient is precisely so, and the wind is blowing in a particular direction, and the cloud cover is the same as before, etc. Even if you could get vaguely similar conditions to repeat an experiment, the atmosphere is so sensitive to initial conditions that the results would be nearly meaningless if you are considering longer time spans (like days).
We can manipulate the atmosphere and observe what occurs but this isn't strictly a repeatable, controlled scientific experiment. I suppose you could call it circumstantial evidence. But definitely not hard proof of anything.
At first I thought they had a program that would converse with the user and determine whether the user was human. Sort of a Turing-in-Reverse Test, where instead of the human trying to detect a computer, it's the computer trying to detect a human. That would be awesome.
Instead it's something they hacked up because new programs were getting around the old OCR blockers. Blah.
Science requires controlled conditions. Suppose you were trying to prove that cyanide gas kills fruit flies. So, you put some flies in a jar, hit them with cyanide, see them die, and write a paper. No respectable scientific journal would publish your work, because you didn't have a control. You should have had another jar, where the fruit flies were not given cyanide. Otherwise there is no way to establish a causal link between the cyanide and the deaths of the flies.
This problem makes it extremely hard to do weather modification in a scientific way. We don't have access to a "control atmosphere." There is no fixed reference point to compare results against. We can never tell if our manipulations were the true cause of the effects we observe. And if we perform experiments in closed laboratory conditions, then we are no longer studying the real atmosphere by definition.
If we gave serious thought to large-scale weather modification, we'd be insane. We only have one atmosphere. Not only is it unscientific, it's dangerous.
I'm so sick of all of these people on/. thinking that if someone breaks the law, but they do it in a really bitching way using technology, or the crime itself revolves around technology, then that person should be elevated to the status of a hero.
Some people don't believe in absolute morality. Since they cannot find heroes based on morality, they seek heroes based on intelligence.
However, this guy doesn't seem particularly intelligent, so maybe he's a hero because... what? Because he's a poor Russian being stomped by the American Man?
Are you sure you've been to college? No college student I know refers to the professors as "teachers." They're professors or instructors.
Being in class and doing anything besides participating in class in an appropriate manner is rude to the teacher and distracting your fellow students. The worst are people who come to class and then sleep. If you aren't interested, don't come.
First of all, sleeping students are great. As long as they aren't snoring or drooling onto the floor, they're much better than the dorks who sit in the front row, wriggle with excitement in their seats, and ask at least 30 questions each class session just to show how smart and attentive they are. These idiots gets in the way of my education, by forcing the instructor to waste precious minutes answering their stupid questions.
Now here's something ironic. First you say:
Mandatory attendance in a college class is (in general) stupid. There are fairly few non-lab courses where attendance actually matters. If someone prefers to get their material out of a book, let them.
Then you say:
Finally, don't be so arrogant and assume you know what is important about a subject better than the teacher. There is usually a reason the teacher is lecturing on the material they choose.
Isn't assuming that "attendence doesn't matter in most cases" a pretty arrogant assumption?
If some moron chooses to attend class, to not attend class, to pick his nose, to not pick his nose, whatever, why should I care? As long as he doesn't waste my time, the instructors time, or anyone else's time (and therefore money), who cares what students do?
If you work on some sort of project requiring a power source, you could use your old phone and battery as a power source. The phone becomes a very fancy charger. The cell battery itself is pretty nifty, and it's basically free since you were going to throw it out anyway.
Think about it - the main problem in terms of pushing computing power these days is electron migration, caused by extremely high clock rates.
Say it with me: There is no such thing as electron migration. There is, however, something called electromigration and it has nothing to do with clock rate. The problem is that as electrons flow in a conductor, they collide with lattice ions and push these ions around a little bit. This isn't a problem in the macroscopic world since wires are so big, but in a microscopic (or nanoscopic) scale this can lead to melting and diffusion of the conductor into the surrounding medium. The copper atoms slowly diffuse into the silicon around them, almost like a gas (a very slow moving gas).
Since these motions are caused entirely by the force of electrons colliding with the atoms, they are completely determined by the kinetic energy of the electrons -- i.e., how fast they move. And that in turn depends on the mean-free-path length (a property of the conductor) and the electric field within the conductor. It has absolutely nothing to do with clock rates.
Newer, high-speed chips may suffer more from electromigration than slower chips, but this is only because the new chips have much thinner wires and are therefore subjected to a greater current density at a given voltage. I.e., more electrons flow per unit area, so the number of electron-atom collisions goes up.
I subscribe to several mailing lists at work, for work-related reasons. There's no easy way to disguise my address. Any spam bot can come along and either subscribe to the list as a lurker or just download the list archives.
One of the irritating things is the spam that comes to one of our internal mail aliases. I.e., the one that goes to all the developers. No one has ever sent a mail to the outside world using that address -- some spam software just guessed it. I've been bitching to have them close that address so only internal people can send to it...
I don't want to pay that
on
ISP Chief on Spam
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As stupid as it sounds... Would I still be "allowed" to have my own mail server that sends messages free of charge? Or would there some law declaring me to be a spam terrorist if I provide free email service?
Hash cash seems more reasonable, but in order to really stop a spammer you want to delay him/her (it?) for probably on the order of a second per message, at least. Even if you find some algorithm to do that, it'll really annoy me to have to wait a second to send regular email also. So, I'm bitching about a second. But those can add up.
Now, maybe what you could do is charge for bounced email messages. The recipient decides whether he/she wants to open the message. If they open it, it is automatically free of charge. If they bounce it without opening it, the sender gets a small charge. The idea being, you get payed for the unwanted mail people send to you.
The article used jpeg compression on the pictures, I'll never be able to see properly again!
You know, JPEG compression and MP3 compression aren't that dissimilar. The only major difference is that in MP3, the quantizer changes from one sound frame to the next, while in JPEG the quantizer is static. Both techniques ultimately work by identifying which subbands are least important, and throwing them away.
So if human visual perception of high-frequency spatial variations depended on some sort of autocalibration, then we all might be going blind from looking at JPEGs.
But since we're not, I have even more doubt about this guy's claims.
CS and DS are segment registers which control where the CPU gets it data from when reading code or data, respectively. A logical address is actually a 48-bit (32+16) value: 16 bits to select the appropriate segment descriptor, 32 bits to specify an offset.
What he's saying is that if the code and data segment selectors point to different memory areas, a buffer overflow becomes impossible because a data segment can be set such that code cannot execute from it.
While correct, the idea is bad because it assumes that all platforms have a concept of segmentation (definitely not the case), and that there are no impacts of setting the CS != DS. On Linux, for example, the segment registers are set to global descriptors at boot time, and are mostly unused from then on. Linux is a paging based system, not a segmentation based one.
Second, a lot of code assumes that the data segment is executable. GCC sometimes emits "trampoline" code which actually places code on the stack and executes it! There are legitimate uses of executable stack pages. Trying to change this would break too many things.
You could also prevent stack overflows by causing the stack to grow upward in memory instead of downward (because function return addresses would come before buffers in memory, not after), but nobody does this either because of some deeply ingrained assumptions in all modern operating systems.
There is no easy fix-all solution to the problem. The real way to avoid buffer overflows is to write code that isn't vulnerable to them.
Because of the way data is stored in memory. It is common in C code to declare buffers as local variables, causing them to be allocated from the stack. The stack, as it happens, is also used for execution control.
By overflowing a buffer on the stack, it's possible to maliciously change a particular piece of information (the function call return address) to cause the program to jump to a new piece of code: the code you just overflowed the buffer with!
Stack overflow exploits are very common because programmers often declare fixed-length buffers as stack variables and are too lazy to perform proper checking to make sure data never overflows the buffer. This problem in WinAmp is no different than any other buffer overflow, it's just much more severe due to its widespread use.
Just because a technical solution is theoretically possible doesn't mean it's the right way to solve the problem.
The correct solution is for the editors to actually give a shit about their own site. Duplicate stories are not only irritating, they are disheartening. Everytime I see one I picture Taco (or whoever posted it) sitting around drooling on himself.. Probably laughing at how he can sit around and fuck off and get payed for it. It really pisses me off. If I let myself get away with such shit-poor work I'd kill myself.
As far as I'm concerned: if Tolkien were alive today, and he enjoyed the movie, then that's all I would need to hear. Too bad we can't ask him. I'm sure he would have made some allowances for the big screen...
Actually, I wonder what his son would think of it.
Why would the kernel developers deserve to be called that? They are developing a system that is intended for users whose primary interest is technical computing and computer science research. That the project has been successful enough to have merit in the network server market is just a perk.
The fact is, Linux has users whether the kernel developers like it or not. If they don't want to respond to user issues, they will drive away the user base. And without a user base, what is the point of this entire exercise? Fun?
Maybe I'm too idealistic, but I think the kernel developers, being in positions of power and respect, should be gracious to the user base. Regardless of their individual political and ethical motivations, they have a real base of millions of people depending on them, and they should at least acknowledge that without the users their own efforts are pointless...
So, wait.. you accuse the kernel devs of "blackmail" because new drivers (which may or may not be written by the kernel devs) aren't usually ported to older versions.
I never said so on the list or in private to anyone. That's just how I feel about it.
The "rant" was the result of me being extremely pissed. And I believe justifiably so. There was something in the kernel that Andre considered a "defect." He had a simple piece of code to fix it. The kernel people rejected this, because "in theory, someone can get around this, so there's no point plugging a hole which someone can reopen."
At this point, I made some remark about how it would boost user morale if the patch were in place, regardless of any real technical merit. I made some statement to the effect of, "You guys should care more about what the users want, even if you think you know better than them." I didn't mean it in a combative sense. I was just growing irritated with their arrogance, and wanted to say so. I had earlier made some comment about how BeOS offered some feature that I wanted, and of course this got used as ammo against me, claiming that I was trying to blackmail the kernel developers by threatening to leave Linux -- as if my sole usership was pivotal to their existence. I'm not idiotic enough to make such a claim.
I've tried the "ya know, this really needs changing, and here's a few reasons why..." approach. The response I've gotten was "No. You're an idiot. Your idea is stupid. We'll never do that. Go away."
You can use the old kernel, you can use the new kernel, you can use your own kernel.
Everyone can make whatever they want.
Untrue. Most people are incapable of hacking kernel code, or any kind of code.
The kernel developers can use their abilities and positions to essentially blackmail the user base. New hardware drivers aren't usually backported to older kernels, so in order to get modern support for most things you have to run the latest. Want to run on modern hardware? You have to upgrade to a new kernel, with a new license, new restrictions, etc.
They don't owe you anything.
This is hilarious. You know, I once posted a rant on LKML about some particular issue (details unimportant). I essentially said that if it wasn't addressed, I might consider moving to BeOS (which was looking very good to me at the time). I have the freedom to make that choice, right? They don't OWE me anything, right? So clearly I most not owe THEM anything.
But I got several responses accusing me of BLACKMAIL, saying that I was "threatening" to move to BeOS in order to force someone to do something.
I could understand if there was some disagreement on a technical point, but by that point the conversation had degenerated into a flamethrowing competition between Andre Hendrick and the rest of the list. I was the only guy backing up Hendrick.
Anyway, I know from experience that many kernel developers are elitist, arrogant people. I guess they think that because their code runs in Ring 0 they must be somehow superior to the rest of us.
What an arrogant attitude. The kernel developers need to be reminded that widespread acceptance of Linux might very well require the support of big commercial enterprises, not just hobbiests and open source enthusiasts
If you read over the LKML mailing list archives, it will become quite clear to you that the kernel developers don't give a cold shit in hell about user requests or complaints. They do what they want, and fuck everyone else.
At least, that was the sense I got from the conversation..
I don't believe that it does. The universe got along quite well without us--there isn't, AFAIK, a standing theory that requires life for the universe to exist, like the Zen "it's all imaginary" line does.
Whoa, hold on. I never said (nor does Zen ever state) that the universe is "imaginary." That is meaningless bullshit, and people unfortunately often misinterpret Zen that way. What Zen (and all forms of Buddhism, really) states is that there is no objective universe. The universe does not exist independently of any observer or "object" within it. It is the dualism between observer and universe which is illusion. You've taken my original statement ("A and B are equivalent") and interpretted it as "A cannot exist without B." That doesn't follow logically.
The objective universe exists. But once we get to a fine enough scale, it's simply impossible to measure something without changing it. What's so counterintuitive about that?
Nothing, in a lot of cases. The classic example is trying to measure the temperature of a thimbleful of water with a thermometer -- by putting the thermometer in the thimble, you change the water's temperature. But Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead, until I (the observer) look in the box. Are you saying that isn't counterintuitive? Or are you saying Schrodinger was wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not implying that, I'm explicitly stating that astronomers do not perform experiments.
From that link:
nonetheless the bottom line in examining potential human-caused effects is: are these effects large enough in magnitude to be extricated from the `noise' of the natural variability of the system?
You conveniently left out the immediately following sentence: "There are few, if any, cases in which we can answer this question affirmatively."
From the same site, have at look at this: The Dangers of Overselling.
This guy is not "out in left field," this is a fairly moderate opinion.
Einstein predicted gravity would bend light. The effect was accurately observed during a solar eclipse. No control group required.
But that isn't an experiment. It is an observation. The observers didn't perform any manipulations, thus there is no possiblity to control the environment. I'm content with science's use of passive observations in cases where no direct experimentation is possible, but actual experiments involving manipulation should be subject to extremely stringent repeatability requirements, as well as control requirements. IMHO.
The only example of a meteorological "experiment" I can think of would be cloud seeding. But please, see this page at Colorado State: The Importance of Natural Variability.
Again, the point is that atmospheric manipulations are not repeatable.
Ahah, you spotted the point that I left out. In addition to being controlled, experiments have to be repeatable. I can repeat the experiment with the flies and cyanide gas (to a limit, they aren't exactly the same flies). But it's impossible to repeat an atmospheric experiment. You can't arrange it so the temperature gradient is precisely so, and the wind is blowing in a particular direction, and the cloud cover is the same as before, etc. Even if you could get vaguely similar conditions to repeat an experiment, the atmosphere is so sensitive to initial conditions that the results would be nearly meaningless if you are considering longer time spans (like days).
We can manipulate the atmosphere and observe what occurs but this isn't strictly a repeatable, controlled scientific experiment. I suppose you could call it circumstantial evidence. But definitely not hard proof of anything.
Instead it's something they hacked up because new programs were getting around the old OCR blockers. Blah.
This problem makes it extremely hard to do weather modification in a scientific way. We don't have access to a "control atmosphere." There is no fixed reference point to compare results against. We can never tell if our manipulations were the true cause of the effects we observe. And if we perform experiments in closed laboratory conditions, then we are no longer studying the real atmosphere by definition.
If we gave serious thought to large-scale weather modification, we'd be insane. We only have one atmosphere. Not only is it unscientific, it's dangerous.
Some people don't believe in absolute morality. Since they cannot find heroes based on morality, they seek heroes based on intelligence.
However, this guy doesn't seem particularly intelligent, so maybe he's a hero because... what? Because he's a poor Russian being stomped by the American Man?
Funny. That's what Tim McVeigh used on the Murrah building. Ok, so it wasn't petroleum distillates but close enough for government.
It sucks how you have to watch what you say these days...
Being in class and doing anything besides participating in class in an appropriate manner is rude to the teacher and distracting your fellow students. The worst are people who come to class and then sleep. If you aren't interested, don't come.
First of all, sleeping students are great. As long as they aren't snoring or drooling onto the floor, they're much better than the dorks who sit in the front row, wriggle with excitement in their seats, and ask at least 30 questions each class session just to show how smart and attentive they are. These idiots gets in the way of my education, by forcing the instructor to waste precious minutes answering their stupid questions.
Now here's something ironic. First you say:
Mandatory attendance in a college class is (in general) stupid. There are fairly few non-lab courses where attendance actually matters. If someone prefers to get their material out of a book, let them.
Then you say:
Finally, don't be so arrogant and assume you know what is important about a subject better than the teacher. There is usually a reason the teacher is lecturing on the material they choose.
Isn't assuming that "attendence doesn't matter in most cases" a pretty arrogant assumption?
If some moron chooses to attend class, to not attend class, to pick his nose, to not pick his nose, whatever, why should I care? As long as he doesn't waste my time, the instructors time, or anyone else's time (and therefore money), who cares what students do?
If you work on some sort of project requiring a power source, you could use your old phone and battery as a power source. The phone becomes a very fancy charger. The cell battery itself is pretty nifty, and it's basically free since you were going to throw it out anyway.
Say it with me: There is no such thing as electron migration. There is, however, something called electromigration and it has nothing to do with clock rate. The problem is that as electrons flow in a conductor, they collide with lattice ions and push these ions around a little bit. This isn't a problem in the macroscopic world since wires are so big, but in a microscopic (or nanoscopic) scale this can lead to melting and diffusion of the conductor into the surrounding medium. The copper atoms slowly diffuse into the silicon around them, almost like a gas (a very slow moving gas).
Since these motions are caused entirely by the force of electrons colliding with the atoms, they are completely determined by the kinetic energy of the electrons -- i.e., how fast they move. And that in turn depends on the mean-free-path length (a property of the conductor) and the electric field within the conductor. It has absolutely nothing to do with clock rates.
Newer, high-speed chips may suffer more from electromigration than slower chips, but this is only because the new chips have much thinner wires and are therefore subjected to a greater current density at a given voltage. I.e., more electrons flow per unit area, so the number of electron-atom collisions goes up.
One of the irritating things is the spam that comes to one of our internal mail aliases. I.e., the one that goes to all the developers. No one has ever sent a mail to the outside world using that address -- some spam software just guessed it. I've been bitching to have them close that address so only internal people can send to it...
Hash cash seems more reasonable, but in order to really stop a spammer you want to delay him/her (it?) for probably on the order of a second per message, at least. Even if you find some algorithm to do that, it'll really annoy me to have to wait a second to send regular email also. So, I'm bitching about a second. But those can add up.
Now, maybe what you could do is charge for bounced email messages. The recipient decides whether he/she wants to open the message. If they open it, it is automatically free of charge. If they bounce it without opening it, the sender gets a small charge. The idea being, you get payed for the unwanted mail people send to you.
You know, JPEG compression and MP3 compression aren't that dissimilar. The only major difference is that in MP3, the quantizer changes from one sound frame to the next, while in JPEG the quantizer is static. Both techniques ultimately work by identifying which subbands are least important, and throwing them away.
So if human visual perception of high-frequency spatial variations depended on some sort of autocalibration, then we all might be going blind from looking at JPEGs.
But since we're not, I have even more doubt about this guy's claims.
GCC Trampolines
What he's saying is that if the code and data segment selectors point to different memory areas, a buffer overflow becomes impossible because a data segment can be set such that code cannot execute from it.
While correct, the idea is bad because it assumes that all platforms have a concept of segmentation (definitely not the case), and that there are no impacts of setting the CS != DS. On Linux, for example, the segment registers are set to global descriptors at boot time, and are mostly unused from then on. Linux is a paging based system, not a segmentation based one.
Second, a lot of code assumes that the data segment is executable. GCC sometimes emits "trampoline" code which actually places code on the stack and executes it! There are legitimate uses of executable stack pages. Trying to change this would break too many things.
You could also prevent stack overflows by causing the stack to grow upward in memory instead of downward (because function return addresses would come before buffers in memory, not after), but nobody does this either because of some deeply ingrained assumptions in all modern operating systems.
There is no easy fix-all solution to the problem. The real way to avoid buffer overflows is to write code that isn't vulnerable to them.
By overflowing a buffer on the stack, it's possible to maliciously change a particular piece of information (the function call return address) to cause the program to jump to a new piece of code: the code you just overflowed the buffer with!
Stack overflow exploits are very common because programmers often declare fixed-length buffers as stack variables and are too lazy to perform proper checking to make sure data never overflows the buffer. This problem in WinAmp is no different than any other buffer overflow, it's just much more severe due to its widespread use.
Just because a technical solution is theoretically possible doesn't mean it's the right way to solve the problem.
The correct solution is for the editors to actually give a shit about their own site. Duplicate stories are not only irritating, they are disheartening. Everytime I see one I picture Taco (or whoever posted it) sitting around drooling on himself.. Probably laughing at how he can sit around and fuck off and get payed for it. It really pisses me off. If I let myself get away with such shit-poor work I'd kill myself.
Actually, I wonder what his son would think of it.
Glad to see I'm not a lunatic, after all.
The fact is, Linux has users whether the kernel developers like it or not. If they don't want to respond to user issues, they will drive away the user base. And without a user base, what is the point of this entire exercise? Fun?
Maybe I'm too idealistic, but I think the kernel developers, being in positions of power and respect, should be gracious to the user base. Regardless of their individual political and ethical motivations, they have a real base of millions of people depending on them, and they should at least acknowledge that without the users their own efforts are pointless...
I never said so on the list or in private to anyone. That's just how I feel about it.
The "rant" was the result of me being extremely pissed. And I believe justifiably so. There was something in the kernel that Andre considered a "defect." He had a simple piece of code to fix it. The kernel people rejected this, because "in theory, someone can get around this, so there's no point plugging a hole which someone can reopen."
At this point, I made some remark about how it would boost user morale if the patch were in place, regardless of any real technical merit. I made some statement to the effect of, "You guys should care more about what the users want, even if you think you know better than them." I didn't mean it in a combative sense. I was just growing irritated with their arrogance, and wanted to say so. I had earlier made some comment about how BeOS offered some feature that I wanted, and of course this got used as ammo against me, claiming that I was trying to blackmail the kernel developers by threatening to leave Linux -- as if my sole usership was pivotal to their existence. I'm not idiotic enough to make such a claim.
I've tried the "ya know, this really needs changing, and here's a few reasons why..." approach. The response I've gotten was "No. You're an idiot. Your idea is stupid. We'll never do that. Go away."
Kinda makes one bitter, you know...
Untrue. Most people are incapable of hacking kernel code, or any kind of code.
The kernel developers can use their abilities and positions to essentially blackmail the user base. New hardware drivers aren't usually backported to older kernels, so in order to get modern support for most things you have to run the latest. Want to run on modern hardware? You have to upgrade to a new kernel, with a new license, new restrictions, etc.
They don't owe you anything.
This is hilarious. You know, I once posted a rant on LKML about some particular issue (details unimportant). I essentially said that if it wasn't addressed, I might consider moving to BeOS (which was looking very good to me at the time). I have the freedom to make that choice, right? They don't OWE me anything, right? So clearly I most not owe THEM anything.
But I got several responses accusing me of BLACKMAIL, saying that I was "threatening" to move to BeOS in order to force someone to do something.
I could understand if there was some disagreement on a technical point, but by that point the conversation had degenerated into a flamethrowing competition between Andre Hendrick and the rest of the list. I was the only guy backing up Hendrick.
Anyway, I know from experience that many kernel developers are elitist, arrogant people. I guess they think that because their code runs in Ring 0 they must be somehow superior to the rest of us.
If you read over the LKML mailing list archives, it will become quite clear to you that the kernel developers don't give a cold shit in hell about user requests or complaints. They do what they want, and fuck everyone else.
At least, that was the sense I got from the conversation..
Whoa, hold on. I never said (nor does Zen ever state) that the universe is "imaginary." That is meaningless bullshit, and people unfortunately often misinterpret Zen that way. What Zen (and all forms of Buddhism, really) states is that there is no objective universe. The universe does not exist independently of any observer or "object" within it. It is the dualism between observer and universe which is illusion. You've taken my original statement ("A and B are equivalent") and interpretted it as "A cannot exist without B." That doesn't follow logically.
The objective universe exists. But once we get to a fine enough scale, it's simply impossible to measure something without changing it. What's so counterintuitive about that?
Nothing, in a lot of cases. The classic example is trying to measure the temperature of a thimbleful of water with a thermometer -- by putting the thermometer in the thimble, you change the water's temperature. But Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead, until I (the observer) look in the box. Are you saying that isn't counterintuitive? Or are you saying Schrodinger was wrong?