The problem is that these high level managed code environments tend to breed dumb programmers. I have found it easier to trash content and/or steal data from java servlet based apps than perl cgi's from the outside (I do this on the side for freinds, to test their code before they give it to some unwitting customer). Java programmers (at least the ones I know) tend to not think through all of the security ramifications of what they are doing - and the fact that they are so abstracted from what's really going on is partly to blame.
Hydrogen is not a net energy source, it is merely a medium for storage and transportation of energy.
I haven't heard of this farm-based synthetic crude, but if it works out anything like ethanol from corn has, it'll be a net energy loss.
And while sure, alternate fuels will become *relatively* less expensive as oil skyrockets, that doesn't make them any more viable.
Without something revolutionary, like the sudden development of viable net-gain fusion reactors all over the world, or some type of space-based solar, we're kinda screwed. When it costs more energy to get the oil out than the energy the oil provides, pumping the remaining oil becomes senseless.
The nice thing about linux though is that we have several major distributions built around the linux kernel that do these things differently than each other. It provides for healthy competition and innovation within the linux-space. If you like the FreeBSD ports system, you'd probably love Gentoo's linux package management system, which was very much inspired by the ports system, and is called "portage".
I'm of the mind that the optimal interface will be more like the "2.5D" type of thing. It will essentially resemble and interact like our 2D GUI today, but just have a bit of added depth or layering, so that you can toss things sideways to the edges, visually slide windows between each other, etc.
Picture something like the Sun 3D desktop demo that came out a while back, add in the thingy on slashdot the other day about peeling windows out of the way during drag/drop, and you've got the basics of a future 2.5D desktop system.
Note that it takes a pitifully small amount of power to accelerate a car under normal conditions. A regular-speed acceleration can be executed with under 50HP, of course depending on the weight of the car.
I see you've become so used to your hybrid Prius that you've lost all perspective on what acceleration is:)
The difference is that cheating can be engaging and entertaining to your brain, whereas most white-collar jobs these days are mind-numbing and pointless. But hey, society pays better for sitting on your ass in white-collar-land than it does to get out and do some real work, so that's what those who can will do.
I've never seen the calculations for that, but I would guess there's a good chance that even fusion reactions in bombs didn't surpass the break-even point. You have to consider the amount of energy expended in the harvesting and processing of the raw materials and construction of the device itself.
I can go door to door around here and find thousands of porn-surfers, yet even in my own office building among a group of unix guys, I can only find one other real programmer.
By filtering what I meant was SafeSearch-like ideas when searching indexed web, picture, and video in the long-run. Parents like that kind of thing, and it will be a major selling point when Google is delivering the metadata services for the set-top box in everyone's home or whatever down the road.
Secure remote storage is much easier to do right in Google's technical model than in the predecessors'. We just need good standards for the whole process of keeping your keys local (USB drive or some such) and accessing your remote encrypted data via standard browing interfaces. A good Firefox plugin could handle that.
Re:Still Logging In? The System Isn't Finished.
on
Weighing the Internet
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Linux is already capable of booting extremely fast, but it's the distro guys that are lagging on making it happen. Basically, a large part of the boot time is starting a bunch of services sequentially. However, if you have proper service dependency information (like LSB-based distros should all have, and Gentoo has for sure), instead of just boot order numbers (/etc/rc2.d/SNNsomeservice), you can parallelize a lot of the boot process. Add to that the fact that except for kernel upgrades, you don't really need to reboot linux anyways, and 2.6 has integrated software suspend to HDD, and you can boot even faster by just suspending to disk instead of shutting down.
Gmail seemed like a really cool idea for about 10 minutes, until everybody suddenly remembered that we don't care about web-based e-mail.
Perhaps you don't care, but millions of people do. There are really two "classes" of email account out there. There's personal email, and there's corporate email. In the realm of personal email, webmail is the "in" thing, and will only become moreso. That's because with webmail, it's easy to change your address, make new accounts, and to keep your email alive through ISP changes, computer replacements/upgrades, and even physical moves across the country which might entail both. It gives you a floating identity out in the ether which you can always access so long as you can find a functioning web browser. You don't have to lug your laptop to a friend's place or to the cafe, just use a random machine with a browser to get your mail.
I look at Google and ask myself, "how are they actually going to be making money in ten years?" It's hard to come up with any kind of solid answer.
I know exactly how they'll be making enormous gobs of money in ten years. They'll have most of the first-world by the throat, in total depedence on Google Magic for their day-to-day needs related to the flow of information. Search, email, blogs, photos, video, mapping, satellite data, filtering, secure remote storage, etc. Just as the first-world has become entrenched in web culture and dependent on it, they will become entrenched in Google culture and come to depend on it as well. They're taking a pragmatic peicemeal approach to the age-old plan of replacing your operating system with something in a browser - what Netscape had hoped for so long ago (and fittingly, Firefox will help Google too). Eventually whatevfer your home computing device is (PC, game console, media center, or some hybrid thereof), all that will matter is that it has a fast net connection and a browser, and while the large content may come from varying places, the small content, the metadata, and the glue that links it all together will come from Google.
You say the customer can't be locked in to these free standards-based tools, and that's true. But with the minds they have employed at Google, the infrastructure and highly-prized domain-specific knowledge they've built up, and their brand name, good luck to any company that wants to overtake them at their own game. It's Google's game to lose, and it's pretty unlikely that they'll lose it in the next decade.
Stevens' books are always great, and this one is no exception. I use this book regularly and I highly recommend it. But that aside, there is another shorter and somewhat overlapping book: Advanced Unix Programming: 2nd Edition by Marc J. Rockhind, that I highly recommend anyone who might like the reviewed Stevens book should check out as well. Link was the only bn.com reference to it that I saw, but my copy is softcover, whereas the link appears to be hardcover.
The simple fact of the matter is that hackers generally don't need to be very brilliant to pull off events which can cost companies millions. A mediocre hacker can spend a few hours of effort one evening and cost society "billions" with some viral construct or other. This level of asymmetry in effort vs damage done is because of the lack of solid security employed by individuals, corporations, infrastructure companies, and the software vendors that sell crap to all three.
The right frame of mind for considering the solution to this problem is to ask yourself: "If I'm responsible for something worth millions or billions of dollars, is it not my duty to make sure that it is better protected?". The good hackers out there are just making points - making fun of the insecure nature of things if you will. They're simultaneously laughing at you, exploiting you, and trying to show you why you should be worried if a person with *really* bad intentions went after you electronically. They're sending you a wake-up call, and you've failed to answer for decades now.
Think about it. If some little punk can cause so much pain, imagine what happens when some foreign punk in the employ of a competing nation gets paid to cause pain. It's our job to design for this so that it's not so easy, and we consistently fail. Software vendors, users, companies, policy-makers - all of us.
It's like setting a priceless painting in the middle of the street, watching it get run over and destroyed, and then trying to sue the driver for maliciously causing you to lose millions. Sure the driver did the damage, sure he could've just changed lanes and not done so, but what the hell were you thinking putting a priceless peice of art in the middle of the street to begin with??
PAM has been in use in multiple *nix environments for a long time. PAM will quite likely outlive the fingerprint-auth-fad. You write a simple interface library/module to get at the fingerprint reader, and from there you write on top of that a PAM module, Firefox plugin, etc. There's no need for whatever this overdone BioAPI thing is.
Five years ago or so, I wrecked a 1999-model car. I was wearing my properly adjusted and tensioned seatbelt, and the car was equipped with perfectly functioning airbags. The main impact in this spinning wreck was to the passenger's side rear corner of the car, almost at a 45 degree angle into said corner, but a little more from the side than from the back.
Because this is not a "typical" angle and location for a major impact (and it was major, it literally tore the rear wheel off the axle and then crumpled the subframe and floor of the car), the seatbelt completely failed to lock, and the airbag did not deploy. My head was slammed forward at an angle into the steering wheel. Luckily the top edge of my eye socket struck it, rather than my eye itself. I ended up with a fairly major concussion, short term memory loss for a few hours, and a nice scar over my eyelid.
The moral of the story is that if you want to really be safe, even the combination of an airbag and a standard seatbelt is not enough. Had I been locked into a racing harness and/or wearing a racing helment with neck-brace, the injury could have been avoided.
When it's your company on the line, and the cost of professional intrusion could be in the millions, there's almost no such thing as too many layers of security.
Re:Manifestation of liturgical commentary.
on
The New C Standard
·
· Score: 1
But there are some of us out there. I've only glanced through the PDF so far, mostly section 0, but also the commentary on the standard itself a little. Even with the PDF already in hand, I would buy this book for whatever it could cost to publish profitably. I'm not about to print and bind 1616 pages at home and be happy with it, and I will use this for reference (and, perhaps sadly, even read random sections in leisure time).
While the book is clearly structured around the C Standard, it's value goes far beyond the C language. While I feel my C skills are still fairly sharp (as are my assembly skills), I spend about 90% of my coding time these days in Perl, and I still find the book to be something I would refer to at least weekly. To some degree this has to do with "Leaky Abstractions" (Joel on Software column from a while back). Even when I work in Perl, I work on very complex things, and invariably what lies underneath shines through Perl's leaky abstractions fairly often. On my most recent large Perl project, I've actually spent more time looking things up in "Advanced UNIX Programming" (which is entirely C-oriented) than any Perl book.
Similarly, there are things in this book of value even to people who code only in Java (like the sections on floating point accuracy and hardware and the standards surrounding such stuff).
Section 0, especially, could really almost survive as a seperate book on its own. It holds a number of interesting and insightful things, and is very broadly applicable to programming in general. It's 150 A4 pages in PDF, so it would be a rather thin book on its own, but still...
I suppose I've wandered all over the map now. The point is, I'd buy this, and with the right marketing and book reviews and whatnot, I bet there's a decent-sized market out there who would also buy it, and I feel it's a shame it hasn't been published.
The bottom line is, according to archive.org, apache themselves claimed the "a patchy server" explanation on their own FAQ page from 1997 through Oct 2002.
Somewhere in there, they started tacking on an extra paragraph saying that to some developers, it also connoted the Indian meaning.
Somewhere between Oct 2003 and Feb 2003, they started calling the "a patchy server" explanation a myth, and saying the real explanation was the Indian thing.
Those of us who were around back when people used to run things like CERN httpd and NCSA httpd remember well that Apache was originally just a set of patches to fix/improve NCSA httpd, before it finally branched off into it's own seperate product. The "patch server" explanation fits the facts of the matter best.
Logic is logic. Logic is not a faith. Logic is an applied form of mathematics.
A is True B is True Therefore, A And B is True.
Logic defines the meaning of the word "And" above, in a mathematical sense. It also defines many other related terms.
Logic is an exact system, much like basic math. There is no faith or mysticism required. Logic allows one to start with a given set of premises, and from those premises draw a set of conclusions. If the logic leading from the premises to the conclusion is executed flawlessly, then any argument about the truth of the conclusion can be reduced to an argument about the truth of the premises. What your premises are, and whether or not they are valid, is entirely outside the scope of Logic.
They talk in the article of a "1's and 0's" concept of brain function, but they fail (at least through what is in the PR release about their experiment) to disprove that the brain operates on binary data.
Even computer software, which is known to operate on a strict binary system at the lowest layers, can have the appearance of linear, curving outputs as the data fed to it changes. This linearity breaks down at some granularity if you look closely enough at the output and see it jumping from one value to the next value at some minimum discreet distance away.
Unless they think that watching a student draw a curve on a screen with a mouse provides them so hi-definition a picture of the brain's decision making that they could see the granularity, the experiment is meaningless. Chances are high that even in a brain which operates on discreet binary information at the lowest level, the "output resolution" of something like mouse motor skills is capable of being considerably finer-grained than the resolution of the mouse being operated (or the muscles controlling it).
I should add that an excellent blind scientific test would be this: From a large sampling of patients with various diseases who are known to be non-religious, christian healers should attempt to cure half of them without their knowledge, and then track the results. They could do this by praying for these people remotely, or praying or other ritualistic acts when the person is sleeping. I suppose you'd have to have consent from the hospital involved for such a study.
I would be willing to bet that it bears out that a non-believer who is unaware of being sprititually healed fares no better than a non-believer who is actually not being spiritually healed. And if that proves to be the case, then the logical conclusion is that since one actually has to be aware of the healing for it to have any effect, then the effect is psychosomatic.
Some will attribute these things to the "mysterious power of the mind" or some other naturalistic, but unexplained phenomenon, and with them I would have an entirely different sort of conversation, far more than I could ever hope to encapsulate in a post.
In the *very rare* cases that unexpected healing of some disease/trauma has verifiably occured, where a real doctor in a real hospital was both a witness to and a diagnoser of the original malady and the subsequent cure, the best possible scientific explanation is in fact Psychosomatic healing.
Psychosomatic effects, both positive and negative, have been well-studied and well-documented in medical literature, even if all of the mechanisms are not known.
Psychosomatic effects (both positive and negative) are not simple "mysterious powers of the mind" or other unexplained natural phenomena. They verifiably do happen.
And since psychosomatic effects would seem to naturally depend largely on a person's state of mind, will, and faith/hope in a good outcome, it would be very natural for a devout Christian who is praying for healing from Christ (and/or has others praying for them, and/or has a spiritual healer-person present who claims to heal with the power of God) to have a higher than average chance of experience positive psychosomatic effects due to the strength of their beliefs.
I have a licensed Crossover Office installation (Wine + a lot of hacks to try to smooth things over for end users). I tried installing Google Earth as an "unsupported app" under the cxoffice setup. With the operating system set to "Win XP", the installer completed fine, but the application failed to launch. The most illuminating error message I could squeeze out of it was:
err:module:import_dll No implementation for KERNEL32.dll.Module32NextW imported from L"C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Earth Plus\\base.dll", setting to 0xdeadbeef err:module:import_dll No implementation for KERNEL32.dll.Module32FirstW imported from L"C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Earth Plus\\base.dll", setting to 0xdeadbeef err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Earth Plus\\GoogleEarth.exe" failed, status c0000142
I gave up for now. I'll try this out when I get home and can boot into native windows - I'm all linux here at the office.
Rather than trying to maintain a static database of AP locations and signal strengths, they should just put some live wifi nodes out there with real GPS on them and track the AP map in realtime as it shifts. Or they could give free service to a select small percentage of customers in return for attaching a GPS device and helping recalibrate the map with some background software once a month or something.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that these high level managed code environments tend to breed dumb programmers. I have found it easier to trash content and/or steal data from java servlet based apps than perl cgi's from the outside (I do this on the side for freinds, to test their code before they give it to some unwitting customer). Java programmers (at least the ones I know) tend to not think through all of the security ramifications of what they are doing - and the fact that they are so abstracted from what's really going on is partly to blame.
Hydrogen is not a net energy source, it is merely a medium for storage and transportation of energy.
I haven't heard of this farm-based synthetic crude, but if it works out anything like ethanol from corn has, it'll be a net energy loss.
And while sure, alternate fuels will become *relatively* less expensive as oil skyrockets, that doesn't make them any more viable.
Without something revolutionary, like the sudden development of viable net-gain fusion reactors all over the world, or some type of space-based solar, we're kinda screwed. When it costs more energy to get the oil out than the energy the oil provides, pumping the remaining oil becomes senseless.
The nice thing about linux though is that we have several major distributions built around the linux kernel that do these things differently than each other. It provides for healthy competition and innovation within the linux-space. If you like the FreeBSD ports system, you'd probably love Gentoo's linux package management system, which was very much inspired by the ports system, and is called "portage".
I'm of the mind that the optimal interface will be more like the "2.5D" type of thing. It will essentially resemble and interact like our 2D GUI today, but just have a bit of added depth or layering, so that you can toss things sideways to the edges, visually slide windows between each other, etc.
Picture something like the Sun 3D desktop demo that came out a while back, add in the thingy on slashdot the other day about peeling windows out of the way during drag/drop, and you've got the basics of a future 2.5D desktop system.
I see you've become so used to your hybrid Prius that you've lost all perspective on what acceleration is
The difference is that cheating can be engaging and entertaining to your brain, whereas most white-collar jobs these days are mind-numbing and pointless. But hey, society pays better for sitting on your ass in white-collar-land than it does to get out and do some real work, so that's what those who can will do.
I've never seen the calculations for that, but I would guess there's a good chance that even fusion reactions in bombs didn't surpass the break-even point. You have to consider the amount of energy expended in the harvesting and processing of the raw materials and construction of the device itself.
I can go door to door around here and find thousands of porn-surfers, yet even in my own office building among a group of unix guys, I can only find one other real programmer.
By filtering what I meant was SafeSearch-like ideas when searching indexed web, picture, and video in the long-run. Parents like that kind of thing, and it will be a major selling point when Google is delivering the metadata services for the set-top box in everyone's home or whatever down the road.
Secure remote storage is much easier to do right in Google's technical model than in the predecessors'. We just need good standards for the whole process of keeping your keys local (USB drive or some such) and accessing your remote encrypted data via standard browing interfaces. A good Firefox plugin could handle that.
Nope, I don't own a single share.
Linux is already capable of booting extremely fast, but it's the distro guys that are lagging on making it happen. Basically, a large part of the boot time is starting a bunch of services sequentially. However, if you have proper service dependency information (like LSB-based distros should all have, and Gentoo has for sure), instead of just boot order numbers (/etc/rc2.d/SNNsomeservice), you can parallelize a lot of the boot process. Add to that the fact that except for kernel upgrades, you don't really need to reboot linux anyways, and 2.6 has integrated software suspend to HDD, and you can boot even faster by just suspending to disk instead of shutting down.
Perhaps you don't care, but millions of people do. There are really two "classes" of email account out there. There's personal email, and there's corporate email. In the realm of personal email, webmail is the "in" thing, and will only become moreso. That's because with webmail, it's easy to change your address, make new accounts, and to keep your email alive through ISP changes, computer replacements/upgrades, and even physical moves across the country which might entail both. It gives you a floating identity out in the ether which you can always access so long as you can find a functioning web browser. You don't have to lug your laptop to a friend's place or to the cafe, just use a random machine with a browser to get your mail.
I know exactly how they'll be making enormous gobs of money in ten years. They'll have most of the first-world by the throat, in total depedence on Google Magic for their day-to-day needs related to the flow of information. Search, email, blogs, photos, video, mapping, satellite data, filtering, secure remote storage, etc. Just as the first-world has become entrenched in web culture and dependent on it, they will become entrenched in Google culture and come to depend on it as well. They're taking a pragmatic peicemeal approach to the age-old plan of replacing your operating system with something in a browser - what Netscape had hoped for so long ago (and fittingly, Firefox will help Google too). Eventually whatevfer your home computing device is (PC, game console, media center, or some hybrid thereof), all that will matter is that it has a fast net connection and a browser, and while the large content may come from varying places, the small content, the metadata, and the glue that links it all together will come from Google.
You say the customer can't be locked in to these free standards-based tools, and that's true. But with the minds they have employed at Google, the infrastructure and highly-prized domain-specific knowledge they've built up, and their brand name, good luck to any company that wants to overtake them at their own game. It's Google's game to lose, and it's pretty unlikely that they'll lose it in the next decade.
Stevens' books are always great, and this one is no exception. I use this book regularly and I highly recommend it. But that aside, there is another shorter and somewhat overlapping book: Advanced Unix Programming: 2nd Edition by Marc J. Rockhind, that I highly recommend anyone who might like the reviewed Stevens book should check out as well. Link was the only bn.com reference to it that I saw, but my copy is softcover, whereas the link appears to be hardcover.
The simple fact of the matter is that hackers generally don't need to be very brilliant to pull off events which can cost companies millions. A mediocre hacker can spend a few hours of effort one evening and cost society "billions" with some viral construct or other. This level of asymmetry in effort vs damage done is because of the lack of solid security employed by individuals, corporations, infrastructure companies, and the software vendors that sell crap to all three.
The right frame of mind for considering the solution to this problem is to ask yourself: "If I'm responsible for something worth millions or billions of dollars, is it not my duty to make sure that it is better protected?". The good hackers out there are just making points - making fun of the insecure nature of things if you will. They're simultaneously laughing at you, exploiting you, and trying to show you why you should be worried if a person with *really* bad intentions went after you electronically. They're sending you a wake-up call, and you've failed to answer for decades now.
Think about it. If some little punk can cause so much pain, imagine what happens when some foreign punk in the employ of a competing nation gets paid to cause pain. It's our job to design for this so that it's not so easy, and we consistently fail. Software vendors, users, companies, policy-makers - all of us.
It's like setting a priceless painting in the middle of the street, watching it get run over and destroyed, and then trying to sue the driver for maliciously causing you to lose millions. Sure the driver did the damage, sure he could've just changed lanes and not done so, but what the hell were you thinking putting a priceless peice of art in the middle of the street to begin with??
PAM has been in use in multiple *nix environments for a long time. PAM will quite likely outlive the fingerprint-auth-fad. You write a simple interface library/module to get at the fingerprint reader, and from there you write on top of that a PAM module, Firefox plugin, etc. There's no need for whatever this overdone BioAPI thing is.
Five years ago or so, I wrecked a 1999-model car. I was wearing my properly adjusted and tensioned seatbelt, and the car was equipped with perfectly functioning airbags. The main impact in this spinning wreck was to the passenger's side rear corner of the car, almost at a 45 degree angle into said corner, but a little more from the side than from the back.
Because this is not a "typical" angle and location for a major impact (and it was major, it literally tore the rear wheel off the axle and then crumpled the subframe and floor of the car), the seatbelt completely failed to lock, and the airbag did not deploy. My head was slammed forward at an angle into the steering wheel. Luckily the top edge of my eye socket struck it, rather than my eye itself. I ended up with a fairly major concussion, short term memory loss for a few hours, and a nice scar over my eyelid.
The moral of the story is that if you want to really be safe, even the combination of an airbag and a standard seatbelt is not enough. Had I been locked into a racing harness and/or wearing a racing helment with neck-brace, the injury could have been avoided.
When it's your company on the line, and the cost of professional intrusion could be in the millions, there's almost no such thing as too many layers of security.
But there are some of us out there. I've only glanced through the PDF so far, mostly section 0, but also the commentary on the standard itself a little. Even with the PDF already in hand, I would buy this book for whatever it could cost to publish profitably. I'm not about to print and bind 1616 pages at home and be happy with it, and I will use this for reference (and, perhaps sadly, even read random sections in leisure time).
While the book is clearly structured around the C Standard, it's value goes far beyond the C language. While I feel my C skills are still fairly sharp (as are my assembly skills), I spend about 90% of my coding time these days in Perl, and I still find the book to be something I would refer to at least weekly. To some degree this has to do with "Leaky Abstractions" (Joel on Software column from a while back). Even when I work in Perl, I work on very complex things, and invariably what lies underneath shines through Perl's leaky abstractions fairly often. On my most recent large Perl project, I've actually spent more time looking things up in "Advanced UNIX Programming" (which is entirely C-oriented) than any Perl book.
Similarly, there are things in this book of value even to people who code only in Java (like the sections on floating point accuracy and hardware and the standards surrounding such stuff).
Section 0, especially, could really almost survive as a seperate book on its own. It holds a number of interesting and insightful things, and is very broadly applicable to programming in general. It's 150 A4 pages in PDF, so it would be a rather thin book on its own, but still...
I suppose I've wandered all over the map now. The point is, I'd buy this, and with the right marketing and book reviews and whatnot, I bet there's a decent-sized market out there who would also buy it, and I feel it's a shame it hasn't been published.
Oops, that third paragraph should have started "Somewhere between Oct 2002 and Feb 2003 ..."
The bottom line is, according to archive.org, apache themselves claimed the "a patchy server" explanation on their own FAQ page from 1997 through Oct 2002.
Somewhere in there, they started tacking on an extra paragraph saying that to some developers, it also connoted the Indian meaning.
Somewhere between Oct 2003 and Feb 2003, they started calling the "a patchy server" explanation a myth, and saying the real explanation was the Indian thing.
Those of us who were around back when people used to run things like CERN httpd and NCSA httpd remember well that Apache was originally just a set of patches to fix/improve NCSA httpd, before it finally branched off into it's own seperate product. The "patch server" explanation fits the facts of the matter best.
Logic is logic. Logic is not a faith. Logic is an applied form of mathematics.
A is True
B is True
Therefore, A And B is True.
Logic defines the meaning of the word "And" above, in a mathematical sense. It also defines many other related terms.
Logic is an exact system, much like basic math. There is no faith or mysticism required. Logic allows one to start with a given set of premises, and from those premises draw a set of conclusions. If the logic leading from the premises to the conclusion is executed flawlessly, then any argument about the truth of the conclusion can be reduced to an argument about the truth of the premises. What your premises are, and whether or not they are valid, is entirely outside the scope of Logic.
They talk in the article of a "1's and 0's" concept of brain function, but they fail (at least through what is in the PR release about their experiment) to disprove that the brain operates on binary data.
Even computer software, which is known to operate on a strict binary system at the lowest layers, can have the appearance of linear, curving outputs as the data fed to it changes. This linearity breaks down at some granularity if you look closely enough at the output and see it jumping from one value to the next value at some minimum discreet distance away.
Unless they think that watching a student draw a curve on a screen with a mouse provides them so hi-definition a picture of the brain's decision making that they could see the granularity, the experiment is meaningless. Chances are high that even in a brain which operates on discreet binary information at the lowest level, the "output resolution" of something like mouse motor skills is capable of being considerably finer-grained than the resolution of the mouse being operated (or the muscles controlling it).
I should add that an excellent blind scientific test would be this: From a large sampling of patients with various diseases who are known to be non-religious, christian healers should attempt to cure half of them without their knowledge, and then track the results. They could do this by praying for these people remotely, or praying or other ritualistic acts when the person is sleeping. I suppose you'd have to have consent from the hospital involved for such a study.
I would be willing to bet that it bears out that a non-believer who is unaware of being sprititually healed fares no better than a non-believer who is actually not being spiritually healed. And if that proves to be the case, then the logical conclusion is that since one actually has to be aware of the healing for it to have any effect, then the effect is psychosomatic.
In the *very rare* cases that unexpected healing of some disease/trauma has verifiably occured, where a real doctor in a real hospital was both a witness to and a diagnoser of the original malady and the subsequent cure, the best possible scientific explanation is in fact Psychosomatic healing.
Psychosomatic effects, both positive and negative, have been well-studied and well-documented in medical literature, even if all of the mechanisms are not known.
Psychosomatic effects (both positive and negative) are not simple "mysterious powers of the mind" or other unexplained natural phenomena. They verifiably do happen.
And since psychosomatic effects would seem to naturally depend largely on a person's state of mind, will, and faith/hope in a good outcome, it would be very natural for a devout Christian who is praying for healing from Christ (and/or has others praying for them, and/or has a spiritual healer-person present who claims to heal with the power of God) to have a higher than average chance of experience positive psychosomatic effects due to the strength of their beliefs.
I have a licensed Crossover Office installation (Wine + a lot of hacks to try to smooth things over for end users). I tried installing Google Earth as an "unsupported app" under the cxoffice setup. With the operating system set to "Win XP", the installer completed fine, but the application failed to launch. The most illuminating error message I could squeeze out of it was:
err:module:import_dll No implementation for KERNEL32.dll.Module32NextW imported from L"C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Earth Plus\\base.dll", setting to 0xdeadbeef
err:module:import_dll No implementation for KERNEL32.dll.Module32FirstW imported from L"C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Earth Plus\\base.dll", setting to 0xdeadbeef
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Earth Plus\\GoogleEarth.exe" failed, status c0000142
I gave up for now. I'll try this out when I get home and can boot into native windows - I'm all linux here at the office.
Rather than trying to maintain a static database of AP locations and signal strengths, they should just put some live wifi nodes out there with real GPS on them and track the AP map in realtime as it shifts. Or they could give free service to a select small percentage of customers in return for attaching a GPS device and helping recalibrate the map with some background software once a month or something.