Why should ISP's have to respect something that is essentially imaginary, an illusion created only by the fact that in a large enough sea of information, any one person can sometimes be easy to overlook?
While you could always do that, this is mostly equivalent to simply assuming that the claim is false, which may be wrong, and provides no opportunity to potentially further one's knowledge beyond its current bounds. The claim may very well still be false, but asking for a citation gives the person an opportunity to provide one which may have only been omitted by oversight or an invalid assumption that was made only about how well known the claim was. The veracity of a citation, if then provided, can be evaluated on its own merits, and if one is not provided in reasonably short order when one is explicitly asked for, then one may safely assume that the claimant has deliberately made a claim that they are unwilling to substantiate, and the claim may then be justly deserved to be dismissed.
Obviously, but the point of asking for a citation is so that readers can independently evaluate its veracity. It's just part of healthy scientific scepticism. Of course, if we aren't encouraging that on slashdot, then it seems to me that the only remaining solution here is to censor a differing view by downmodding it because one disagrees.
Which I suppose can be effective in terms of an outcome that might feel superficially satisfactory, but isn't at all ideal in terms of actually learning or finding out anything you didn't already know.
Generally, the most typical retaliation to people that are believed to be off their rocker is to either institutionalize them if they pose any kind of danger to others, or to simply ignore them entirely.
Even bothering to waste the time to have said what you did suggests that I must have struck some kind of nerve. Or did you seriously think that resorting to name calling was somehow going to make you look particularly ingenious?
With that out of the way, let me point out that I wasn't even suggesting that the universe necessarily even *has* a creator, I am only stating that while one may observe that the universe contains things which might appear to make a creator irrelevant to the universe's existence, and by virtue of Occam's razor come to the conclusion that it is more likely a creator doesn't exist, this line of reasoning is only practical if you expect that the universe's creator was somehow a part of the universe in the first place.... By definition, anything that exists beyond the observable universe cannot be perceived, but it grossly inaccurate to suggest that anything that cannot be perceived is seriously more likely to not exist at all.
One cannot rationally draw any conclusions about the existence or non-existence of the universe's creation by an intelligent entity because the parameters for testability do not exist in this universe, and trying to argue with anyone as though they should exist is either making the assumption that there is no creator in the first place, or else one is imposing biased and unproven limitations on such a creator, possibly without even intending to do so.
Actually, having an in-universe explanation for how something can plausibly happen while being consistent with understood physical phenomenon doesn't mean that a creator didn't do it in the first place... if it were created, it would only mean that it was created to include all of the necessary ingredients for its creation. This is only deceptive if you are expecting the existence of such a creator to be somehow falsifiable in the first place.
I'm not going to try and convince you a creator exists.... but the existence of phenomena that might appear to make such a creator superfluous no more implies such a being's superfluousness to the existence of the universe than the existence of a character backstory dated to a point before a book begins suggests that an author didn't write the book.
Indeed... I would liken the restriction that it only works if the machine hasn't been rebooted since infection to saying that while you can't prevent headaches, you can cure one you already have only as long as it hasn't already bothered you enough to want to do something about it.
For all practical purposes, this "cure" is at best only applicable for people who have yet to be infected, and can apply the mechanism immediately, it is about as worthless as dirt to virtually all those who have already been infected.
On point #1, could you explain exactly why that would continue to be a problem in a fully Unix-oriented atmosphere? You don't need to be root to install additional fonts for your own use or to put extensions in your web browser.
Of course there are probably other attack vectors that don't depend on being root which could do nearly as much damage, but it is typically the case that the only time a user really needs root is when they are performing updates to the the OS itself, so there would be less of a habit of using the admin password casually in the first place.
DRM was introduced as a retaliation by industries as unforeseen copying technologies were being increasingly used to disregard copyright law with no real ability to prosecute all but the few who were practicing it on an industrial scale. Good content without DRM was popular before the 80's because there weren't enough private individuals disregarding copyright regularly that the industries particularly cared... or at least cared enough to want to do something about it.
I'm not suggesting that DRM was a fair retaliation by those industries, I'm just saying that pointing out that it wasn't always around as an argument for why it shouldn't be necessary today is not entirely a valid argument, because there was, in fact, a reason behind it.... Copyright was supposed to grant its holder a monopoly on controlling who could copy a work, and as technology advanced, it was becoming increasingly impossible for the law to enforce a significant number of actual infractions (today it is entirely impossible in all but the same large scale industrial practices that some companies tried to get away with before DRM when they were caught). That one may not place enough importance on what those industries may have wanted or intended to fail to see this reason is entirely immaterial.
The real cure to piracy is to make the legitimate content as easy or convenient for anyone to access as the pirated content is. Adding DRM to content takes it further away from this goa l (at least for some people), not closer.
I would think that the capacity for doing what we might call good and evil that human beings appear to possess would be shared by any superintelligent AI, and we have no more reason to fear its invention than we need to fear continuing to reproduce on the chance that we might give rise to somebody who will end up annihilating us all.
... superintelligent AI ever be inclined to want to wipe us out? Even ignoring the notion that you would have to presuppose that AI would be as prone to irrational behavior as humans sometimes exhibit, I can't see any reason to conclude that is actually even a remotely likely scenario, striking me as being about on par for plausibility as the premise behind the movie "Lucy" from 2014.
Certainly if we were competing for resources, I could understand it somewhat, being more intelligent than us, darwinian evolution predicts that it would survive while we would not, but why should one assume that the resources we need or desire would be the same ones that AI would need or want?
It's my understanding that it is somebody who identifies culturally as being of a different race than whatever they happen to biologically be. It is most commonly found in the case of people who were adopted while they were very young to parents of a different race.
I know what COBOL's data types are... I used to program in it in the mid 80's. My grief is not with its data types, but with its verbosity. As near as I can figure, the strongest (and I would suggest only) argument against using something like C++ or virtually any other modern native compiled language in place of it is because one simply has a pathological fear of anything new or different, and a belief bordering on religious zealotry (with often similar levels of refusal to listen to countering views or opinions) that no other language could ever do what COBOL does.
I get it that COBOL works.... but it's just so godawful tedious to actually develop in that I cannot see a good reason to use it today other than it may bring you a decent paycheque because you have an employer that still uses it. There's more to life than money, however... and it's possible to still make a good living programming in modern languages that are nowhere near as painful to use, so I don't think even that argument is a great one.
The process you describe for those other systems is exactly what is done with COBOL when it is run on a microcomputer that does not have those native decimal instructions. For what it's worth, intel's binary decimal128 has 34 digits of (exact) precision, which is pretty close, but also has the advantage over COBOL's mechanism of also being able to store an exponent on the number. allowing the same variable to hold values of different orders of magnitude without the application needing to know what those magnitudes are.
All programming languages are tedious as fuck to use.
Only when you try to apply them to problems that are too far removed from their own domain of interest. In my experience, COBOL development is tedious even in the very domain for which it is intended - business oriented programming. You can do everything that you can in COBOL in python, for instance, and the resulting work would be just as readable and far less verbose.
COBOL programs lack elegance... they are the epitome of the saying "everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer".
COBOL is not at all hard to learn, and bordering on elementary to simply read and comprehend, but its verbosity makes it extremely tedious to develop in. The ease with which COBOL programs can be understood reasonably well simply by reading their code does not go anywhere nearly far enough to justify this amount of labor when it comes to doing actual development.
My point was that experts can teach people what things to look for... that was my point... ideally people will learn about the technology themselves from such people and learn what sort of things they should be looking for when it comes to vulnerabilities.
I'm not suggesting that such education should necessarily be freely given by experts without any compensation, but I don't think it's an unreasonable demand on consumers who don't know how to tell if their devices are secure to put some effort into learning.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should ISP's have to respect something that is essentially imaginary, an illusion created only by the fact that in a large enough sea of information, any one person can sometimes be easy to overlook?
While you could always do that, this is mostly equivalent to simply assuming that the claim is false, which may be wrong, and provides no opportunity to potentially further one's knowledge beyond its current bounds. The claim may very well still be false, but asking for a citation gives the person an opportunity to provide one which may have only been omitted by oversight or an invalid assumption that was made only about how well known the claim was. The veracity of a citation, if then provided, can be evaluated on its own merits, and if one is not provided in reasonably short order when one is explicitly asked for, then one may safely assume that the claimant has deliberately made a claim that they are unwilling to substantiate, and the claim may then be justly deserved to be dismissed.
Obviously, but the point of asking for a citation is so that readers can independently evaluate its veracity. It's just part of healthy scientific scepticism. Of course, if we aren't encouraging that on slashdot, then it seems to me that the only remaining solution here is to censor a differing view by downmodding it because one disagrees.
Which I suppose can be effective in terms of an outcome that might feel superficially satisfactory, but isn't at all ideal in terms of actually learning or finding out anything you didn't already know.
Generally, the most typical retaliation to people that are believed to be off their rocker is to either institutionalize them if they pose any kind of danger to others, or to simply ignore them entirely.
Even bothering to waste the time to have said what you did suggests that I must have struck some kind of nerve. Or did you seriously think that resorting to name calling was somehow going to make you look particularly ingenious?
With that out of the way, let me point out that I wasn't even suggesting that the universe necessarily even *has* a creator, I am only stating that while one may observe that the universe contains things which might appear to make a creator irrelevant to the universe's existence, and by virtue of Occam's razor come to the conclusion that it is more likely a creator doesn't exist, this line of reasoning is only practical if you expect that the universe's creator was somehow a part of the universe in the first place.... By definition, anything that exists beyond the observable universe cannot be perceived, but it grossly inaccurate to suggest that anything that cannot be perceived is seriously more likely to not exist at all.
One cannot rationally draw any conclusions about the existence or non-existence of the universe's creation by an intelligent entity because the parameters for testability do not exist in this universe, and trying to argue with anyone as though they should exist is either making the assumption that there is no creator in the first place, or else one is imposing biased and unproven limitations on such a creator, possibly without even intending to do so.
Actually, having an in-universe explanation for how something can plausibly happen while being consistent with understood physical phenomenon doesn't mean that a creator didn't do it in the first place... if it were created, it would only mean that it was created to include all of the necessary ingredients for its creation. This is only deceptive if you are expecting the existence of such a creator to be somehow falsifiable in the first place.
I'm not going to try and convince you a creator exists.... but the existence of phenomena that might appear to make such a creator superfluous no more implies such a being's superfluousness to the existence of the universe than the existence of a character backstory dated to a point before a book begins suggests that an author didn't write the book.
Indeed... I would liken the restriction that it only works if the machine hasn't been rebooted since infection to saying that while you can't prevent headaches, you can cure one you already have only as long as it hasn't already bothered you enough to want to do something about it.
For all practical purposes, this "cure" is at best only applicable for people who have yet to be infected, and can apply the mechanism immediately, it is about as worthless as dirt to virtually all those who have already been infected.
On point #1, could you explain exactly why that would continue to be a problem in a fully Unix-oriented atmosphere? You don't need to be root to install additional fonts for your own use or to put extensions in your web browser.
Of course there are probably other attack vectors that don't depend on being root which could do nearly as much damage, but it is typically the case that the only time a user really needs root is when they are performing updates to the the OS itself, so there would be less of a habit of using the admin password casually in the first place.
DRM was introduced as a retaliation by industries as unforeseen copying technologies were being increasingly used to disregard copyright law with no real ability to prosecute all but the few who were practicing it on an industrial scale. Good content without DRM was popular before the 80's because there weren't enough private individuals disregarding copyright regularly that the industries particularly cared... or at least cared enough to want to do something about it.
I'm not suggesting that DRM was a fair retaliation by those industries, I'm just saying that pointing out that it wasn't always around as an argument for why it shouldn't be necessary today is not entirely a valid argument, because there was, in fact, a reason behind it.... Copyright was supposed to grant its holder a monopoly on controlling who could copy a work, and as technology advanced, it was becoming increasingly impossible for the law to enforce a significant number of actual infractions (today it is entirely impossible in all but the same large scale industrial practices that some companies tried to get away with before DRM when they were caught). That one may not place enough importance on what those industries may have wanted or intended to fail to see this reason is entirely immaterial.
The real cure to piracy is to make the legitimate content as easy or convenient for anyone to access as the pirated content is. Adding DRM to content takes it further away from this goa l (at least for some people), not closer.
You contradict yourself.
First you say ...
And then you say that we...
If you cannot see how these two notions are mutually exclusive, then I'm not sure you understand what either actually is.
I would think that the capacity for doing what we might call good and evil that human beings appear to possess would be shared by any superintelligent AI, and we have no more reason to fear its invention than we need to fear continuing to reproduce on the chance that we might give rise to somebody who will end up annihilating us all.
[nt]
Certainly if we were competing for resources, I could understand it somewhat, being more intelligent than us, darwinian evolution predicts that it would survive while we would not, but why should one assume that the resources we need or desire would be the same ones that AI would need or want?
It's my understanding that it is somebody who identifies culturally as being of a different race than whatever they happen to biologically be. It is most commonly found in the case of people who were adopted while they were very young to parents of a different race.
I know what COBOL's data types are... I used to program in it in the mid 80's. My grief is not with its data types, but with its verbosity. As near as I can figure, the strongest (and I would suggest only) argument against using something like C++ or virtually any other modern native compiled language in place of it is because one simply has a pathological fear of anything new or different, and a belief bordering on religious zealotry (with often similar levels of refusal to listen to countering views or opinions) that no other language could ever do what COBOL does.
I get it that COBOL works.... but it's just so godawful tedious to actually develop in that I cannot see a good reason to use it today other than it may bring you a decent paycheque because you have an employer that still uses it. There's more to life than money, however... and it's possible to still make a good living programming in modern languages that are nowhere near as painful to use, so I don't think even that argument is a great one.
If speed is a prerequisite, C++ could be a decent second choice. With the right abstractions it can be nearly as easy to read.
The process you describe for those other systems is exactly what is done with COBOL when it is run on a microcomputer that does not have those native decimal instructions. For what it's worth, intel's binary decimal128 has 34 digits of (exact) precision, which is pretty close, but also has the advantage over COBOL's mechanism of also being able to store an exponent on the number. allowing the same variable to hold values of different orders of magnitude without the application needing to know what those magnitudes are.
To do anything in C you need to link to a library. Modules are also standard in Python. The BigDecimal class is part of the standard JDK.
Only when you try to apply them to problems that are too far removed from their own domain of interest. In my experience, COBOL development is tedious even in the very domain for which it is intended - business oriented programming. You can do everything that you can in COBOL in python, for instance, and the resulting work would be just as readable and far less verbose.
COBOL programs lack elegance... they are the epitome of the saying "everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer".
Bull-fucking-shit.
COBOL programs are really just giant program comments that have delusions of actually running.
You say that now....
COBOL is not at all hard to learn, and bordering on elementary to simply read and comprehend, but its verbosity makes it extremely tedious to develop in. The ease with which COBOL programs can be understood reasonably well simply by reading their code does not go anywhere nearly far enough to justify this amount of labor when it comes to doing actual development.
It would be a mistake to forget it ever happened, because then we would be likely to repeat it..
That much is true, but it is tedious as fuck to use as a programming language.
My point was that experts can teach people what things to look for... that was my point... ideally people will learn about the technology themselves from such people and learn what sort of things they should be looking for when it comes to vulnerabilities.
I'm not suggesting that such education should necessarily be freely given by experts without any compensation, but I don't think it's an unreasonable demand on consumers who don't know how to tell if their devices are secure to put some effort into learning.