> Science just isn't intended to answer every question. One question it doesn't answer is WHY.
Very often, science does answer the "Why?" question. For example, "Why do apples fall toward the earth rather than in some other direction?", "Why can we construct a nested hierarchy of species on the basis of their morphology?", "Why can we construct a nested hierarchy of species on the basis of the mutations in their genes?", etc.
> Science can give you many equally valid explanations of HOW species could have resulted, stemming from different base assumptions, demonstrating which one is accurate is completely outside of the realm of science.
This goes on in every field of science. Meaningfully different hypotheses have different implications for potentially observable phenomena, so we try to make the relevant observations and discard the hypotheses that aren't compatible with what we see.
> Think back to your science fair days, Can it be reproduced? Can it be verified?
We can't reproduce the reactions that we know happen in the heart of the sun, and yet for some reason we don't have thousands of preachers ranting against that knowledge every Sunday morning.
> Evolution is religion and superstition just as much as Creationism or Hinduism.
Ah, the last desperate argument of the creationist rears its ugly head.
> It's no more provable than either, at least, until you die.
Science isn't in the business of "proving" anything. Science is in the business of explaining observations. The theory of evolution explains lots of observations; the religion of creationism explains none.
> Is it actually easier for crackers to find bugs when they have access to the code?
I wonder about this as well. However, I find it hard to imagine a cracker reading through thousands of lines of code looking for exploitable bugs. Surely it's less trouble and equally effective to try the same techniques used for cracking closed source software? The latter method requires patience, but the former requires patience and very intense concentration.
Though a quick skim might be the best way of finding things like hardcoded backdoor passwords.
> Good Lord - the amount of Muzak one would have to listen to on the trip to the moon should be enough to stop a project like this in its tracks!
Red Dwarf occasionally makes a good joke about this, though it's usually about watching an advertising movie rather than listening to the "elevator" music.
> The obvious issues are that it will introduce bugs and that it will be at the same time very hard to debug.
Yes, I'm trying to imagine what a big application is going to look like a couple of years after it has been released, when it has collected a couple of years' worth of AO "quick fixes" for bugs and new feature requests.
I'm not trying very hard to imagine it, because I really don't think it's something I want to see. Let alone maintain. Another popular "write only" programming paradigm that makes something incredibly easy for me now and incredibly difficult for someone else later. Fine and dandy, until it's my turn to be the someone else.
But it makes a refreshing change to the buzzword landscape. Or rather, it did for the first 100 times I heard it hyped up.
> Regardless, I read the exploit has been known since January of this year. Is this correct? If so, I find it hard to believe The Office of Homeland Security kept this under wraps and away from the hacker community for this long a period of time. The announcement and fix to this exploit are anything but timely.
Sorry, but they were too busy buying up stock in duct tape and plastic wrap last month. Everything in good time, my man.
> Speaking of the Dept. of Homeland Security, here's an link [democratic...ground.org] to an article with some suggestions to Tom Ridge on how to improve his department, so that it actually keeps the citizenry well-informed and aware of possible terrorist threats and how to handle them (as opposed to keeping them scared and in an information blackout).
You're making a mighty big assumption about what the DoHS was created for.
> What if most of the mass in the universe isn't even like ours?
That and any other difference from here is cool, so long as the evidence justifies including such a claim in our model. The whole point of the "sameness" assumption is to raise the bar for people who would otherwise make wild assumptions about the universe to support their claims.
> Secondly, we want to slowly erode the powerbase of the Governments of the region, by demonstrating the benefits of social and economic freedoms that are often used as the core principles of the U.S.
Despite your apparent trolling, that's actually pretty close to what the neocons (Wolfowitz) have in mind. As for me, I'm dubious about the notion that democracy can be forced onto a nation without a strong democratic tradition at gunpoint. (Indeed, democracy seems to be sliding down the sewer pipe in the USA, despite our ancient traditions.)
> Thirdly, the business in Iraq was left half-assed because Bush senior caved to the U.N.'s whining, and refused to depose Saddam.
*ding* Historical revisionism detected. The USA called off Gulf War I unilaterally, not because of the UN, but because the goal of kicking him out of Kuwait had been met and the US public was starting to recoil at the slaughter. Deposing Saddam was never on the agenda. The idea that the USA would go around replacing governments that don't dance to our tune didn't come into vogue until the neocons found a spineless/brainless president willing to danced to their tune.
> They've pushed the U.S. for more than a decade, and we finally have the political power to push him back.
Actually, the USA has been kicking him around for the past 12 years.
> Those that oppose a war are a fairly small minority of the wing of the left that are generally NONE_TOO_BRIGHT.
Wow, a small minority of the left wing makes up almost half the US population, and 80%-90% of the population of lots of European nations - including Turkey?
> Post-Saddam Iraq is only going to be a better place.
Yes, because the USA will be bombing the separatists rather than Saddam's regime. Much better!
> You have to be a pretty decently detached ding-dong to spout pacifist drivel and ignore the actual benefits to the people long-suffering under the current administration of Iraq.
Yep, now they can enjoy conquest and subsequent civil war rather than repression by their own home-grown regime. I'll believe those human benefits when I see them. I'll also notice that whatever benefits they do receive (if any) will last exactly as long as the USA is willing to occupy the country to prop them up. Then we'll probably get another Islamic fundamentalist state as the reward for our labors.
BTW, regarding the public recoiling from the slaughter as in Gulf War I, Bush had better hope he can win the street battle for Bhagdad within 2 or 3 days, because otherwise he'll be trying to finish a war without any public support to speak of. The US public is fond of wars where not many people get hurt, but as soon as the public finds out that people are dying they start questioning the policy behind the war.
And sadly, Bush isn't smart enough to arm himself with a face-saving exit strategy. It has been "regime change!" since day one, so disarmament isn't going to prevent the war, and a bloodbath isn't going to stop it once it starts.
> They all fall victim to anthromorphism. We know of one place where life (or intelligence) exists, Earth. If we take Earth out of the equation, like we should as good,unbiased scientists, all we have evidence of a cold, harsh, sterile universe with no life in it.
No, because the most general assumption that scientists make is, "In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'll assume nature works elsewhere the same way it does here." Life here is an exercise in chemistry, and we see no reason to think chemistry isn't universal. Thus scientists are perfectly willing to accept the idea that the universe may be filled with life. (The logic is almost exactly the opposite of what you espouse. With only one data point, you take that datum as the tentative norm rather than discarding it as an outlier.)
> Occam's razor says that our conclusion should be that it's unlikely life could exist at all.
Ah, no, it doesn't say anything of the sort. The razor is advice against adding "pork barrel" riders to your explanations of what you observe in nature.
> The map itself was relatively featureless at this stage of development but boasted some great grass textures and trees, which were occasionally shadowed by the suggestion of clouds passing overhead.
> I want to know why the Gnome developers decided that control-A should "select all" instead of "move to beginning of line" like it does in almost every other (read: emacs editing command-compliant) X application.
\meetoo. I get tired of typing ctrl-w in an editable field and having my application window close.
Supposedly you can change it in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 by adding the line:
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"
but parent widgets seem to catch it and interpret it as an accelerator instead.
I also HATE the standardization of the "OK/Cancel" buttons in reversed positions compared to all the other applications I use.
> I personally grow tired of the drive to "simplify, man!" and yearn for the days of configurable sawfish and a galeon with 1,000,000 options in the preferences dialog.
\meetoo!
> Anyone have any suggestions as to where I should look? I'm completely open.
Nope, but if I had time to take on another big hobby project I'd back up to the GNOME 1.4 sources and fork off a new desktop from there. I'd call it GNOME is Forked or something.
Slashdot Mirror
> Science just isn't intended to answer every question. One question it doesn't answer is WHY.
Very often, science does answer the "Why?" question. For example, "Why do apples fall toward the earth rather than in some other direction?", "Why can we construct a nested hierarchy of species on the basis of their morphology?", "Why can we construct a nested hierarchy of species on the basis of the mutations in their genes?", etc.
> Science can give you many equally valid explanations of HOW species could have resulted, stemming from different base assumptions, demonstrating which one is accurate is completely outside of the realm of science.
This goes on in every field of science. Meaningfully different hypotheses have different implications for potentially observable phenomena, so we try to make the relevant observations and discard the hypotheses that aren't compatible with what we see.
> Think back to your science fair days, Can it be reproduced? Can it be verified?
We can't reproduce the reactions that we know happen in the heart of the sun, and yet for some reason we don't have thousands of preachers ranting against that knowledge every Sunday morning.
> Evolution is religion and superstition just as much as Creationism or Hinduism.
Ah, the last desperate argument of the creationist rears its ugly head.
> It's no more provable than either, at least, until you die.
Science isn't in the business of "proving" anything. Science is in the business of explaining observations. The theory of evolution explains lots of observations; the religion of creationism explains none.
> Is it actually easier for crackers to find bugs when they have access to the code?
I wonder about this as well. However, I find it hard to imagine a cracker reading through thousands of lines of code looking for exploitable bugs. Surely it's less trouble and equally effective to try the same techniques used for cracking closed source software? The latter method requires patience, but the former requires patience and very intense concentration.
Though a quick skim might be the best way of finding things like hardcoded backdoor passwords.
> Good Lord - the amount of Muzak one would have to listen to on the trip to the moon should be enough to stop a project like this in its tracks!
Red Dwarf occasionally makes a good joke about this, though it's usually about watching an advertising movie rather than listening to the "elevator" music.
> Now I will get twice as many BUSINESS PROPOSALS...
Think supply and demand! You can drive a harder bargin when there's competition.
> Sounds so Orwellian for an American groupie country. Whats going on?
Orwellian is 'in' this year in the USA, so groupie countries can be expected to follow suit.
Put lower priorities on p0rn, MP3s, Windows viruses, and Slashdot referrals. That should speed everything else up by about two orders of magnitude.
> How many non-players would it take for the group of them to have the same chance of winning as a single ticket-holder? What does n/0 approach again?
What is the expected gain for a group of 1000 non-players as compared to a group of 1000 players?
> The obvious issues are that it will introduce bugs and that it will be at the same time very hard to debug.
Yes, I'm trying to imagine what a big application is going to look like a couple of years after it has been released, when it has collected a couple of years' worth of AO "quick fixes" for bugs and new feature requests.
I'm not trying very hard to imagine it, because I really don't think it's something I want to see. Let alone maintain. Another popular "write only" programming paradigm that makes something incredibly easy for me now and incredibly difficult for someone else later. Fine and dandy, until it's my turn to be the someone else.
But it makes a refreshing change to the buzzword landscape. Or rather, it did for the first 100 times I heard it hyped up.
> Regardless, I read the exploit has been known since January of this year. Is this correct? If so, I find it hard to believe The Office of Homeland Security kept this under wraps and away from the hacker community for this long a period of time. The announcement and fix to this exploit are anything but timely.
Sorry, but they were too busy buying up stock in duct tape and plastic wrap last month. Everything in good time, my man.
> Speaking of the Dept. of Homeland Security, here's an link [democratic...ground.org] to an article with some suggestions to Tom Ridge on how to improve his department, so that it actually keeps the citizenry well-informed and aware of possible terrorist threats and how to handle them (as opposed to keeping them scared and in an information blackout).
You're making a mighty big assumption about what the DoHS was created for.
> Sendmail is a very flexible mail package...too flexible for most people.
9 out of 10 haxors say it's "just right".
> That "inferior technology" tends to work on other platforms.
And Microsoft is eager for that because...?
> In fact, he fired an intern who logged in as root.
Shouldn't he have fired whoever gave the root password to an intern, instead?
> What if most of the mass in the universe isn't even like ours?
That and any other difference from here is cool, so long as the evidence justifies including such a claim in our model. The whole point of the "sameness" assumption is to raise the bar for people who would otherwise make wild assumptions about the universe to support their claims.
> Secondly, we want to slowly erode the powerbase of the Governments of the region, by demonstrating the benefits of social and economic freedoms that are often used as the core principles of the U.S.
Despite your apparent trolling, that's actually pretty close to what the neocons (Wolfowitz) have in mind. As for me, I'm dubious about the notion that democracy can be forced onto a nation without a strong democratic tradition at gunpoint. (Indeed, democracy seems to be sliding down the sewer pipe in the USA, despite our ancient traditions.)
> Thirdly, the business in Iraq was left half-assed because Bush senior caved to the U.N.'s whining, and refused to depose Saddam.
*ding* Historical revisionism detected. The USA called off Gulf War I unilaterally, not because of the UN, but because the goal of kicking him out of Kuwait had been met and the US public was starting to recoil at the slaughter. Deposing Saddam was never on the agenda. The idea that the USA would go around replacing governments that don't dance to our tune didn't come into vogue until the neocons found a spineless/brainless president willing to danced to their tune.
> They've pushed the U.S. for more than a decade, and we finally have the political power to push him back.
Actually, the USA has been kicking him around for the past 12 years.
> Those that oppose a war are a fairly small minority of the wing of the left that are generally NONE_TOO_BRIGHT.
Wow, a small minority of the left wing makes up almost half the US population, and 80%-90% of the population of lots of European nations - including Turkey?
> Post-Saddam Iraq is only going to be a better place.
Yes, because the USA will be bombing the separatists rather than Saddam's regime. Much better!
> You have to be a pretty decently detached ding-dong to spout pacifist drivel and ignore the actual benefits to the people long-suffering under the current administration of Iraq.
Yep, now they can enjoy conquest and subsequent civil war rather than repression by their own home-grown regime. I'll believe those human benefits when I see them. I'll also notice that whatever benefits they do receive (if any) will last exactly as long as the USA is willing to occupy the country to prop them up. Then we'll probably get another Islamic fundamentalist state as the reward for our labors.
BTW, regarding the public recoiling from the slaughter as in Gulf War I, Bush had better hope he can win the street battle for Bhagdad within 2 or 3 days, because otherwise he'll be trying to finish a war without any public support to speak of. The US public is fond of wars where not many people get hurt, but as soon as the public finds out that people are dying they start questioning the policy behind the war.
And sadly, Bush isn't smart enough to arm himself with a face-saving exit strategy. It has been "regime change!" since day one, so disarmament isn't going to prevent the war, and a bloodbath isn't going to stop it once it starts.
> They all fall victim to anthromorphism. We know of one place where life (or intelligence) exists, Earth. If we take Earth out of the equation, like we should as good,unbiased scientists, all we have evidence of a cold, harsh, sterile universe with no life in it.
No, because the most general assumption that scientists make is, "In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'll assume nature works elsewhere the same way it does here." Life here is an exercise in chemistry, and we see no reason to think chemistry isn't universal. Thus scientists are perfectly willing to accept the idea that the universe may be filled with life. (The logic is almost exactly the opposite of what you espouse. With only one data point, you take that datum as the tentative norm rather than discarding it as an outlier.)
> Occam's razor says that our conclusion should be that it's unlikely life could exist at all.
Ah, no, it doesn't say anything of the sort. The razor is advice against adding "pork barrel" riders to your explanations of what you observe in nature.
> > Does the military have to release their code because they are running on a GPL platform?
> They would have to provide access to the code to people they distribute binaries to.
So, if they use Linux for the guidance system in a cruise missle, do they have to tape a source floppy to it before they launch?
> The map itself was relatively featureless at this stage of development but boasted some great grass textures and trees, which were occasionally shadowed by the suggestion of clouds passing overhead.
Sounds like a great game - can't wait!
but parent widgets seem to catch it and interpret it as an accelerator instead.> I want to know why the Gnome developers decided that control-A should "select all" instead of "move to beginning of line" like it does in almost every other (read: emacs editing command-compliant) X application.
\meetoo. I get tired of typing ctrl-w in an editable field and having my application window close.
Supposedly you can change it in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 by adding the line:
I also HATE the standardization of the "OK/Cancel" buttons in reversed positions compared to all the other applications I use.
> I personally grow tired of the drive to "simplify, man!" and yearn for the days of configurable sawfish and a galeon with 1,000,000 options in the preferences dialog.
\meetoo!
> Anyone have any suggestions as to where I should look? I'm completely open.
Nope, but if I had time to take on another big hobby project I'd back up to the GNOME 1.4 sources and fork off a new desktop from there. I'd call it GNOME is Forked or something.
> Next you know, they'll be doing crap like [...] give Adrian Paul another show to suck in (http://www.scifi.com/tracker/)
Actually, I liked Tracker. Modulo a few of the episodes.
>
I would have volunteered to help her with her breathing.
> Mormonism: religion -> science fiction
> Scientology: science fiction -> religion
Thanks, dude. Now they have to kill all of us.