Anyone who wonders why I'm not responding to this can compare and contrast what RM101 said originally, and how he has completely twisted it now to try to save face.
Indeed they can, and they can see, as I can, that what I said both times made exactly the same point. Unless you're childishly focusing on the "gotcha!" phrasing I might have used in the original post, where you think finding one example out of millions of others somehow invalidates my point.
(Hint: my point wasn't that there did not exist one case in the entire world where someone creates a user jail)
And you don't share your entire home directory (share ~/.ssh and ~/.gnupg? really?), but you created a sub-folder that is for files that you explicitly want shared (~/Shared, ~/Docs/Public, etc.).
What is it with reading comprehension today? Who said anything about sharing directories? We're talking about one's own user directory, which by some miracle is owned by oneself. And if one installs a P2P program under one's own account (as is typical), then the P2P app has access to everything one's user has access to.
I run my limewire under a special account called, you guessed it, limewire! After I have pulled files down and verified their integrity, I change the files ownership and copy it to my account.
And any Windows user could do this as well. What's your point?
As is the case with boycotts, voting and your girlfriend, it doesn't matter what you as an individual do, it matters what everyone does in aggregate. And very few people are going to go to the trouble to create an entirely separate jail for their P2P app. Most people want it to "just work" and are going to do a download-and-install under their own regular user, which also happens to have access to all their apps.
Actually, I would dare to say it's the people's fault for storing sensitive files in the Documents folder in the first place.
It doesn't matter where they're stored. If it's accessible, then it's accessible, whether it's on a network drive or a local drive. There's nothing that stops P2P apps from accessing network drives and searching for documents.
Why would I intentionally saddle myself with a phone that has fewer features - ALOT fewer - than my current Softbank model? A model that's 1.5 years old now?
The reason I bought it was that it had one feature that actually worked, unlike other phones -- a web browser that didn't suck. I had been waiting for that for a LONG time.
There is this concept called considering the source.
Consider the liability. Say someone puts up a web page claiming John Public molested the anonymous writer of a web site, and John Public is applying as a teacher. The school decides to be fair (by some miracle) and hire John Public, because the web page was anonymous. Now suppose that it turns out to be true! And John Public was caught again at the school.
Now imagine the lawsuit against the school by the parents, who claim the school should have known based on the fact that it was "clearly documented" that John Public was a child molestor.
Just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's not true. And in a hell of a lot of cases, people just aren't going to take the chance. *That's* the rational thing to do when you have a choice among a bunch of applicants.
... and this is why you have draconian policies in many companies about installing ANY unapproved software. I've seen people complain about "just let me do my job" and install anything they want, but the fact of the matter is that it only takes one dumb-ass like this to wreak major havoc.
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Who doesn't have their entire home directory open to their own user? And who is going to run their file sharing app so that it can't access their home directory? That's the whole point of the file sharing app! Sheesh.
Technofetishists see some shiny new product and are hypnotized by marketers into thinking it's the thing that's going to make everything better forever [...]
I'm sure you would have said the same thing when the telephone came out. Who needs it, when you can just write letters? And you don't have the damn phone ringing all day, and the damn neighbors can hear you talking... [grouch mumble damn kids with their newfangled shiny nonsense...mumble... just a damn fad, grouch mumble]
The notion that one would submit to it voluntarily, is new.
I didn't say it wasn't new, only that the reaction to new ideas is typical. See also: rock and roll, reading novels (yes, reading novels used to be considered bad form), the telephone (impersonal, don't you know), movies (the downfall of civilization), etc, etc.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that blogging, tweeting, and doling out the right for others to track your every move is anything other than narcissism.
Sheesh. It's called socialization. This may be news, but humans are social, communicative animals. Paranoid people who hate others knowing anything about them (like you) are the minority. Most people like being in communication with their friends, and this is just one more method of communication. No different than the old days of mailing a letter and giving your friend the details of what's been going on in your life.
Same old story. Every generation uses new technology, while the old generation wrings its hands and whines about the good old days. If you don't want to embrace the future, then don't. It's up to you. But don't fool yourself that it's anything other than fear of things you haven't grown up with.
The communication you have chosen inaccurately represents the idea in question. Your shorthand for the idea of "Occam's Razor" promotes misunderstanding [...]
I disagree that the words I used differ materially from the words you used. My point was that invoking God as an explanation is not the "explanation with the least number of assumptions," to use your words.
It appears that you're hung up on the word "simple", but if you review your dictionary, you'll find that (in my opinion) it fits the context of what we're talking about (and in fact, 'simple' is used often used in science for things that lack complexity). I might grant that your words are more precise, but mine are hardly misleading or inaccurate.
Yes. But we can grant the existence of those, and the question isn't where energy and chemistry come from, the question is about life and consciousness. "Why is the Universe here" is a totally different question from "Can life come from chemistry."
if you want to boil it down, "God did it" is an even simpler explanation.
That's a shorter explanation, not a simpler explanation. If you want to drag a God in as an explanation, then that requires that you define exactly what God is and how he does it. Making life a question of energy and chemistry doesn't require anything else, though it does require a viable theory of abiogenesis, for which we don't have a (conclusive) one yet.
In any case it's laughably easy to turn your arguments against you. The arguments are almost trite at this point: 1) Atheists don't disbelieve in God, they just hate Him (Her, It, Them), 2) They KNOW God exists and He (Her, It, They, Shim?) is angry at them for denying it, 3) They're terrified of going to Hell, which is where they're destined for (damn disbelievers!)
The argument doesn't work in reverse. Saying that an Atheist "hates God" just introduces the question of, "Which God?" Does an Atheist hate Ra? Hate Zeus? The funny thing about religion is that most assume that there has never been any other God theories that have nothing to do with the Abrahamic God. Do you ever wonder if the ancient Egyptians had it right all along, since Ra is older than the Bible?
Of course, I don't presume to tell you what's in your heart, so please don't presume to tell me what's in mine.
You admit you've had a "crisis of faith". How do you get over that? Ultimately, you have to swallow your questions and suppress them. But that core of disbelief is still in your gut. You're just choosing in your high-level mind to act as though God exists.
Or to put it another way, I don't have a "seed of doubt" in my gut about the fact that the Earth orbits the sun, even though there is a theoretical possibility that the sun actually orbits the Earth and I've been lied to all my life. That's the difference between knowing something to be true and pretending that something is true.
How do you know that when you die you're going to wink out of existence?
Because the ONLY evidence we have is that our consciousness is a produce of our physical brain. The best evidence for this is how much our personality and "who we are" changes when the brain is damaged. Read some of the books by Oliver Sacks, who is a neurologist who writes of very odd brain problems.
There simply is zero evidence for supernatural theories of 'self', and a mountain of evidence against it. Of course, nothing can be "proven" about the afterlife, and many people out of fear will continue to hope and believe in it out of desperation.
That's not very scientific. It may follow logically that consciousness ends at death, but if you're going to be totally honest, you can neither prove nor disprove that there is life after death, because human consciousness post-death is not observable (and therefore not reportable).
Of course nothing about life after death is "provable", but then, nothing about the physical universe is provable either, except your own existence (your senses could be lying to you). At some point, we have to fall back on Occaam's Razor, which tells us that, all else being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the "best". And all the major religions of the world have absolutely no evidence for them. So if they're all equally likely, then the best conclusion is that they are equally false.
The simplest explanation is that life is exactly as it appears to be: a very, very complex self-reproducing chemical reaction that is powered by the sun. THAT is the simplest explanation that fits the facts that we have.
That we experience things is incredible. Where does consciousness "live?" I can explain the outward behaviors of organisms by saying that they are governed by amazingly complicated differential equations that give rise to all of this. But what about consciousness, experience?
Life in unto itself is incredible. But you're skimming close to the "God of the Gaps" argument, where any gap in our knowledge has to be ascribed to supernatural forces.
But what really explains your question is the Anthropic Principle. If consciousness hadn't arisen, then we wouldn't be here to think about that fact. Perhaps the universe has cycled billions of times before beings arose that could actually think about the fact of their own existence.
Consciousness is a truly amazing thing, but that doesn't mean it has to be supernatural. It's much more likely that it's simply is whatever it is -- a side effect of how our brains developed. And someday we'll be able to define what it is in concrete detail, and the mystery will be solved, just like every other mystery that used to be ascribed to supernatural forces. Like Eclipses, for example. Think how mysterious it was when the sun was blanked out! Surely there is no stronger proof of god(s) than the power to block out the power of the sun.
but what hope do people have who REFUSE to believe in ANY higher power?
Hope for what? Life after death? Why do you need "hope" in *anything*? What's going to happen is going to happen, regardless of what you believe. And what's going to happen is that you wink out of existence when you die.
This is what I don't understand. How is it better to believe in a lie that you know isn't true?
[I'm fairly convinced that all religious people know, in their deepest, darkest, secret place that most will never admit, they know that the God and the bible is a bunch of nonsense. But the idea frightens them to their core.]
No, it's my sense of direction out of wack. I know where all parts of my body are, but it feels like my orientation relative to the world is "wrong" from what I intellectually know is true.
After locating on few, I decided to click the button to download the Microsoft Installer package containing the executable and/or files that automatically enable the DVD Library feature in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate -- on my XP Media Center. 'Surely, MS will use some scripting, HTTP User-Agent sniffing, or even Genuine Windows validation to verify that I am running Vista,' I thought. It did not and I canceled the download when I received the prompt to save the file.
Is this guy really that big of a dumb-ass? Does he really think that Microsoft should forbid the *downloading* -- not running, downloading -- of a file because of the operating system string?
Maybe, just maybe, I might want to download a file on a DIFFERENT computer and transfer it to my broken computer.
Of course the human body adapts to all kinds of situations pretty well but if you have to choose between losing any of the basic five insticts or balance, I'd say balance is the smallest nuisance.
Hmmm. Smell or balance? I might be underappreciating smell, but on the whole, I'd probably take balance over smell. It seems like your lifestyle would be impacted much more by not being able to navigate effectively through the world than not being able to smell it, as much as it's nice to smell things. I suppose you'd need to take steps to have smoke detectors for safety.
Maybe there's a little bit of residual prewiring in the human brain for such a directional sense, which is why the vibrator belt experiment worked so well.
I think it's mostly that humans already have a built-in mechanism for dead-reckoning, which is enhanced when we get something to give us additional external cues. Humans generally keep track of which way is north, but it can get out of whack over time.
I can actually fool my dead-reckoning sense by lying in my bed with my eyes closed and rolling my body over my head, somersault-style. If I don't open my eyes, it feels like I've flipped the bed around in my room. If I open my eyes, the effect immediately vanishes and my direction is restored.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who wonders why I'm not responding to this can compare and contrast what RM101 said originally, and how he has completely twisted it now to try to save face.
Indeed they can, and they can see, as I can, that what I said both times made exactly the same point. Unless you're childishly focusing on the "gotcha!" phrasing I might have used in the original post, where you think finding one example out of millions of others somehow invalidates my point.
(Hint: my point wasn't that there did not exist one case in the entire world where someone creates a user jail)
And you don't share your entire home directory (share ~/.ssh and ~/.gnupg? really?), but you created a sub-folder that is for files that you explicitly want shared (~/Shared, ~/Docs/Public, etc.).
What is it with reading comprehension today? Who said anything about sharing directories? We're talking about one's own user directory, which by some miracle is owned by oneself. And if one installs a P2P program under one's own account (as is typical), then the P2P app has access to everything one's user has access to.
I run my limewire under a special account called, you guessed it, limewire! After I have pulled files down and verified their integrity, I change the files ownership and copy it to my account.
And any Windows user could do this as well. What's your point?
As is the case with boycotts, voting and your girlfriend, it doesn't matter what you as an individual do, it matters what everyone does in aggregate. And very few people are going to go to the trouble to create an entirely separate jail for their P2P app. Most people want it to "just work" and are going to do a download-and-install under their own regular user, which also happens to have access to all their apps.
Actually, I would dare to say it's the people's fault for storing sensitive files in the Documents folder in the first place.
It doesn't matter where they're stored. If it's accessible, then it's accessible, whether it's on a network drive or a local drive. There's nothing that stops P2P apps from accessing network drives and searching for documents.
Why would I intentionally saddle myself with a phone that has fewer features - ALOT fewer - than my current Softbank model? A model that's 1.5 years old now?
The reason I bought it was that it had one feature that actually worked, unlike other phones -- a web browser that didn't suck. I had been waiting for that for a LONG time.
There is this concept called considering the source.
Consider the liability. Say someone puts up a web page claiming John Public molested the anonymous writer of a web site, and John Public is applying as a teacher. The school decides to be fair (by some miracle) and hire John Public, because the web page was anonymous. Now suppose that it turns out to be true! And John Public was caught again at the school.
Now imagine the lawsuit against the school by the parents, who claim the school should have known based on the fact that it was "clearly documented" that John Public was a child molestor.
Just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's not true. And in a hell of a lot of cases, people just aren't going to take the chance. *That's* the rational thing to do when you have a choice among a bunch of applicants.
... and this is why you have draconian policies in many companies about installing ANY unapproved software. I've seen people complain about "just let me do my job" and install anything they want, but the fact of the matter is that it only takes one dumb-ass like this to wreak major havoc.
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Who doesn't have their entire home directory open to their own user? And who is going to run their file sharing app so that it can't access their home directory? That's the whole point of the file sharing app! Sheesh.
Technofetishists see some shiny new product and are hypnotized by marketers into thinking it's the thing that's going to make everything better forever [...]
I'm sure you would have said the same thing when the telephone came out. Who needs it, when you can just write letters? And you don't have the damn phone ringing all day, and the damn neighbors can hear you talking... [grouch mumble damn kids with their newfangled shiny nonsense ...mumble... just a damn fad, grouch mumble]
The notion that one would submit to it voluntarily, is new.
I didn't say it wasn't new, only that the reaction to new ideas is typical. See also: rock and roll, reading novels (yes, reading novels used to be considered bad form), the telephone (impersonal, don't you know), movies (the downfall of civilization), etc, etc.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that blogging, tweeting, and doling out the right for others to track your every move is anything other than narcissism.
Sheesh. It's called socialization. This may be news, but humans are social, communicative animals. Paranoid people who hate others knowing anything about them (like you) are the minority. Most people like being in communication with their friends, and this is just one more method of communication. No different than the old days of mailing a letter and giving your friend the details of what's been going on in your life.
Same old story. Every generation uses new technology, while the old generation wrings its hands and whines about the good old days. If you don't want to embrace the future, then don't. It's up to you. But don't fool yourself that it's anything other than fear of things you haven't grown up with.
The communication you have chosen inaccurately represents the idea in question. Your shorthand for the idea of "Occam's Razor" promotes misunderstanding [...]
I disagree that the words I used differ materially from the words you used. My point was that invoking God as an explanation is not the "explanation with the least number of assumptions," to use your words.
It appears that you're hung up on the word "simple", but if you review your dictionary, you'll find that (in my opinion) it fits the context of what we're talking about (and in fact, 'simple' is used often used in science for things that lack complexity). I might grant that your words are more precise, but mine are hardly misleading or inaccurate.
It's not the simplest explanation. It's the (sufficient) explanation with the least number of assumptions.
You are (mis-)arguing semantics.
It does require chemistry and energy, though...
Yes. But we can grant the existence of those, and the question isn't where energy and chemistry come from, the question is about life and consciousness. "Why is the Universe here" is a totally different question from "Can life come from chemistry."
if you want to boil it down, "God did it" is an even simpler explanation.
That's a shorter explanation, not a simpler explanation. If you want to drag a God in as an explanation, then that requires that you define exactly what God is and how he does it. Making life a question of energy and chemistry doesn't require anything else, though it does require a viable theory of abiogenesis, for which we don't have a (conclusive) one yet.
In any case it's laughably easy to turn your arguments against you. The arguments are almost trite at this point: 1) Atheists don't disbelieve in God, they just hate Him (Her, It, Them), 2) They KNOW God exists and He (Her, It, They, Shim?) is angry at them for denying it, 3) They're terrified of going to Hell, which is where they're destined for (damn disbelievers!)
The argument doesn't work in reverse. Saying that an Atheist "hates God" just introduces the question of, "Which God?" Does an Atheist hate Ra? Hate Zeus? The funny thing about religion is that most assume that there has never been any other God theories that have nothing to do with the Abrahamic God. Do you ever wonder if the ancient Egyptians had it right all along, since Ra is older than the Bible?
Of course, I don't presume to tell you what's in your heart, so please don't presume to tell me what's in mine.
You admit you've had a "crisis of faith". How do you get over that? Ultimately, you have to swallow your questions and suppress them. But that core of disbelief is still in your gut. You're just choosing in your high-level mind to act as though God exists.
Or to put it another way, I don't have a "seed of doubt" in my gut about the fact that the Earth orbits the sun, even though there is a theoretical possibility that the sun actually orbits the Earth and I've been lied to all my life. That's the difference between knowing something to be true and pretending that something is true.
How do you know that when you die you're going to wink out of existence?
Because the ONLY evidence we have is that our consciousness is a produce of our physical brain. The best evidence for this is how much our personality and "who we are" changes when the brain is damaged. Read some of the books by Oliver Sacks, who is a neurologist who writes of very odd brain problems.
There simply is zero evidence for supernatural theories of 'self', and a mountain of evidence against it. Of course, nothing can be "proven" about the afterlife, and many people out of fear will continue to hope and believe in it out of desperation.
That's not very scientific. It may follow logically that consciousness ends at death, but if you're going to be totally honest, you can neither prove nor disprove that there is life after death, because human consciousness post-death is not observable (and therefore not reportable).
Of course nothing about life after death is "provable", but then, nothing about the physical universe is provable either, except your own existence (your senses could be lying to you). At some point, we have to fall back on Occaam's Razor, which tells us that, all else being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the "best". And all the major religions of the world have absolutely no evidence for them. So if they're all equally likely, then the best conclusion is that they are equally false.
The simplest explanation is that life is exactly as it appears to be: a very, very complex self-reproducing chemical reaction that is powered by the sun. THAT is the simplest explanation that fits the facts that we have.
That we experience things is incredible. Where does consciousness "live?" I can explain the outward behaviors of organisms by saying that they are governed by amazingly complicated differential equations that give rise to all of this. But what about consciousness, experience?
Life in unto itself is incredible. But you're skimming close to the "God of the Gaps" argument, where any gap in our knowledge has to be ascribed to supernatural forces.
But what really explains your question is the Anthropic Principle. If consciousness hadn't arisen, then we wouldn't be here to think about that fact. Perhaps the universe has cycled billions of times before beings arose that could actually think about the fact of their own existence.
Consciousness is a truly amazing thing, but that doesn't mean it has to be supernatural. It's much more likely that it's simply is whatever it is -- a side effect of how our brains developed. And someday we'll be able to define what it is in concrete detail, and the mystery will be solved, just like every other mystery that used to be ascribed to supernatural forces. Like Eclipses, for example. Think how mysterious it was when the sun was blanked out! Surely there is no stronger proof of god(s) than the power to block out the power of the sun.
but what hope do people have who REFUSE to believe in ANY higher power?
Hope for what? Life after death? Why do you need "hope" in *anything*? What's going to happen is going to happen, regardless of what you believe. And what's going to happen is that you wink out of existence when you die.
This is what I don't understand. How is it better to believe in a lie that you know isn't true?
[I'm fairly convinced that all religious people know, in their deepest, darkest, secret place that most will never admit, they know that the God and the bible is a bunch of nonsense. But the idea frightens them to their core.]
No, it's my sense of direction out of wack. I know where all parts of my body are, but it feels like my orientation relative to the world is "wrong" from what I intellectually know is true.
After locating on few, I decided to click the button to download the Microsoft Installer package containing the executable and/or files that automatically enable the DVD Library feature in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate -- on my XP Media Center. 'Surely, MS will use some scripting, HTTP User-Agent sniffing, or even Genuine Windows validation to verify that I am running Vista,' I thought. It did not and I canceled the download when I received the prompt to save the file.
Is this guy really that big of a dumb-ass? Does he really think that Microsoft should forbid the *downloading* -- not running, downloading -- of a file because of the operating system string?
Maybe, just maybe, I might want to download a file on a DIFFERENT computer and transfer it to my broken computer.
How did this article make the front page?
Of course the human body adapts to all kinds of situations pretty well but if you have to choose between losing any of the basic five insticts or balance, I'd say balance is the smallest nuisance.
Hmmm. Smell or balance? I might be underappreciating smell, but on the whole, I'd probably take balance over smell. It seems like your lifestyle would be impacted much more by not being able to navigate effectively through the world than not being able to smell it, as much as it's nice to smell things. I suppose you'd need to take steps to have smoke detectors for safety.
Maybe there's a little bit of residual prewiring in the human brain for such a directional sense, which is why the vibrator belt experiment worked so well.
I think it's mostly that humans already have a built-in mechanism for dead-reckoning, which is enhanced when we get something to give us additional external cues. Humans generally keep track of which way is north, but it can get out of whack over time.
I can actually fool my dead-reckoning sense by lying in my bed with my eyes closed and rolling my body over my head, somersault-style. If I don't open my eyes, it feels like I've flipped the bed around in my room. If I open my eyes, the effect immediately vanishes and my direction is restored.
Your lack of a sense of grammar takes away one, though.