He cites this as if it is common knowledge. It isn't. All of the CS Theory and Math I've seen from the crypto world doesn't really inspire confidence. My wife is a crypto researcher and as a result she doesn't really trust anything. (She's typically right. I was fawning over GPG and she was extremely skeptical and said she'd never use it for anything important. Weeks later, there is a major security bug -- not in the crypto algorithms, but in the implementation.)
I'd be interested to see what he means by a mathematically provably secure system... even one that works in theory. I personally think he's just making stuff up.
Also, he says that OpenBSD's memory randomization causes esoteric debugging errors since no two programs run in the same way. I also think this is BS. Where is the proof? Has anyone else heard of this?
... ins't this like asking "Is FreeBSD the next Windows?"
AFAIK, the two ways to get inside an OS X machine are to dupe the user into entering an administrator password or to take advantage of a very novel hole. Doing either is more complex and difficult than what Windows viruses tend to do.
Since most services are turned off by default in OS X, the people who are ignorant about IT are less likely to turn them on. (Why would they turn on what they don't need or don't understand?) This makes the virus maker's lot even more difficult.
Me: Hey Mom... I'm poor as hell right now and need some help. Mom (Thinking that sending money may be a bad idea): I'll send you a peapod and get you through the month. Me: Oh dude, thank you so much, I was just busy boiling my shoe leather to try and see if it would provide sustanence....
A day or so later, a whole giant load of macaroni and cheese, milk, eggs, and spaghetti appears. Not luxury, but enough to get by on.
Go peapod! My poverty would be a little less tolerable without you (and my mom.)
I mean, like 75% of slashdot readers have written patches for the kernel, right? My 10 year-old son just started using Debian, and he's already written a few drivers for ATI cards (with a bit of reverse engineering, of course). He should be done in a day or so.
Why is he so driven? I guess he's just the regular FOSS user. Also, he was jealous that his 12-year old sister is a developer for OpenBSD and has already had over 10,000 lines of her code merged into the source tree. My boy won't feel the score is even until he's kicked the HURD kernel up out of beta.
Myself? I'm getting the Linux kernel ready for the next generation of 128-bit CPUs. That's in my spare time, when I'm not checking over particle physics calculations done recently at the CERN and Fermilab... another pasttime of mine.
But 9-5, I'm a janitor for the local elementary school.
Only OpenBSD supported my wireless card
on
OpenBSD 3.9 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
After two weeks of attempting to get the various crappy beta-quality drivers to work on linux, I switched to OpenBSD to find that it supported my wireless card perfectly. (I have a PPC machine, so ndiswrapper was not an option.)
Installing was also easy. If you have a little patience and are not afraid of a text-only install, starting OpenBSD was very easy.
I like this operating system. The man files are comprehensive and well written, and even a person with limited technical experience (me) was able to get everything working fairly quickly.
After all, if God is making policy through Bush, then the principles of open government mean that we have a right to see what the deliberative process was between the deity and the commander-in-chief.
I wonder what people would think if Bush went in front of the nation and said he was talking to Zeus, Mithras, or the channeled spirit of William the Conqueror?
Maybe then people would realize that talking to your imaginary friends to make national policy and significant decisions is completely insane.
One thing I dislike about modern physics is how they phrase things in an inappropriately magical way. And then what happens is that New Age people start hideosly misinterpreting the results, fuse one piece of magic to another, and before you know it, people saying things like "physics is just confirming what the Taoists knew thousands of years ago..." -- in short, garbage.
It is very likely that it is just a coincidence that the Riemann Zeta function describes some properties of quantum physics. If you study mathematics you will find all sorts of coincidences like these. It doesn't mean anything; more often than not it is just a consequence of the rules of arithmetic.
But I imagine that New Age people are going to interpret this as that civilizations inside of each atom are trying to signal us "Contact" style by sending out zeros of the Riemann Zeta Function.... sigh.
Seriously. If my job wasn't so boring, I wouldn't give/. any of my time. But for now it serves an important purpose keeping me from going insane due to the tedium.
I think I may code an AI script that will learn how to have conversations based on the content of slashdot. After the program has digested a few thousand posts it will surely pass the/. Turing test (Can a human distinguish this program from a typical/. poster?)
I imagine a conversation would run like this:
Human: "I'm impressed with this new Linux distro. This may actually be an operating system my grandmother can use without any problems!"
Slashdotbot: "Heh. Your mother should use Debian. If she uses Ubuntu she is going to get p0wn3d."
Human: "I use BSD personally on my servers, but I don't think my Grandmother has much to worry about on her computer."
/.Bot: "BSD is dying!"
Human: "Um... okay... I guess that made a little sense -- if I cross my eyes and think real hard. I wonder what will happen when I say this: I've been running YourMomOS on my laptop and she is humming away beautifully."
/.Bot: "YourMomOS used to be cool, but now it is filled with bloatware, all of the great developers have left, and it is only a matter of time until she becomes a calcified dinosaur that is no better than what is running on M$ boxen."
Human: "I think I'm on to you. Hey guy, tell me about your girl."
/.Bot: "I do not know what a 'girl' is. But I bet it sucks."
Human: "Wait. Proves nothing. But that response is suspicious. Hey guy, tell me about your 7545121116577545454."
/.Bot: "I do not know what a '7545121116577545454' is. But I bet it sucks."
Human: "This is a computer program, but I was nearly fooled. Another thousand posts and it will be absolutely indistinguishable from the average slashdot poster. You merely need to dumb down its grammar, interject more spelling mistakes, and give it more pop culture references (i.e. the mention of the word 'Ballmer' should trigger the 'make_joke_about_chairs()' subroutine) and this AI construct will truly be perfect."
For some reason, this reminds me of the time that a woman called my branch of the company and said: "We're all out of paper over here... could you fax some over?"
It is possible to build comptuers that are optimized for certain kinds of calculations.
For example, Gerald Sussman of MIT (a computer scientist) and a Jack Wisdom (a physicist) decided they wanted to do long-term modelling of the solar system's evolution over time. Long time modelling of a multi-body system requires a fantastic amount of calculation. What is the best way to do it?
Sussman and Wisdom came up with a crafty idea: build a computer that is specially configured at the hardware level to do the modelling. Sussman and his colleagues decided that with off-the-shelf parts they could build a computer that would be just as or more capable of modeling this system than a supercomputer would be. The result was the Digital Orrery, a relativlely cheap computer that gave great results. (It is now featured in the Smithsonian museum.)
Think of it: if your computer is going to be doing the Fast Fourier Transform 6.02x10^23 times per day, why not build a superfast chip that does nothing but the FFT rather than express it as software? It's a pretty cool idea. I think this is the sort of thing that Cray computers claims to want to do with its motto.
There's one small problem with your mass-charge analogy: it's completely wrong. With electricity, things with opposite charges attract. The problem with talking about a mass-charge is that all mass (to the best of our knowledge) attracts all mass. We have yet to see any mass that repels other masses through gravitational effects.
Publish your evidence of a mass causing repulsion and explain how gravitomagnetic effects combined with this repulsion will repel or nullify gravity, and you will win a Nobel prize, get published in the journal of your choice, and be able to pay Bill Gates to shine your shoes with his tongue.
Artificial gravity is not the real exitement around this experiment. The really important part is, you know, experimental evidence that may provide insight into the unification of relativity and quantum mechanics.
I wonder what the editors were thinking:
"Well, we can talk about the really exciting implications of this experiment that will be relevant to respectable physics... or we could talk about some artificial gravity field thingy that will make crackpots and sci-fi fans excited. Well, it looks pretty obvious. Defer to the crackpots."
How long before some crackpot on the threads says: "Well, if you just spin the disk backward, logically it should follow that the artificial gravity will turn into anti-gravity! I have made the greatest scientific discovery since Einstein! Wait... I better be quiet about this before the oil companies and government agencies try to sabotage me, just like they did with my zero-point energy machine and my perpetual engine (I'm still working on getting the lubricant working correctly...)"
I wish I could fine every crackpot that's wasted my time.
"Dear Sir. Your letter claiming the invention of a (perpetual motion machine/ proof of the trisection of the angle with compass and straight edge/ stock-picking program/ time cube harvester) was a complete waste of my time due to its impossibility and utter implausibility, as demonstrated by (reputable mathematics/ laws of thermodynamics/ support of your theory by George Gilder or Wired magazine, implying that it is categorically false).
"By my estimation, it required 2 minutes of my time to read your letter and throw it in the shredder and one minute to send out this form letter invoice. At my going rate of $100 per hour, this means you owe me exactly $5 U.S., payable by check, gold bullion, or paypal. Failure to pay this sum will result in a call from my attorney. Sincerely,"
I bet I could make a plush living on commissions if I were to handle the crank mail at a place like MIT or CalTech.
I wonder if the/. editors are on the take from pharmaceutical companies that sell anti-hypertension drugs?
It seems like once a day there is an article like this that provides no real content, but may inspire limited skirmishes between hotheaded zealots. No doubt some of them are on these medications.
Or maybe the editors just like to see the ants fight after they shake up the bottle.
The evidence for a big bang (a horrible name) only mounts as time goes on. Scientists aren't trying to prove it; they already have. Now they are trying to figure out what happened afterward, what the early universe was like, and possibly what may have caused the big bang. You talk about the investigations of the big bang as if they were strenuous attempts to prove a religious doctrine. This isn't creation science.
If you say that the big bang is not a proven thing, I am looking forward to your well-documented paper detailing your experimental evidence casting significant doubt on or refuting big bang theory. Such a paper would be published in Nature or Science and would cause a great deal of excitement. Until then, the Big Bang is a fact, just like gravity, thermodynamics, relativity, and evolution. Until then, you are a wanker or a crank.
Nice philsophical point about the origin of the Universe: Bertrand Russell made it a long time ago in his book "Why I am not a Christian." (So no, I didn't hear it here first.)
Scientists don't really have much to say about whether the universe has always existed or not. It is certainly a possibility that the universe has always existed. Scientists don't get hung up about asserting that the Universe has a beginning, only religious people do.
It is possible that the Universe always was and never had a beginning. It is also possible that there is a God. It is also possible there is a teapot orbiting Mars right now. (Another crib from Russell.) Unfortunately, evidence for these three hypotheses has not yet appeared and there is little reason to believe that we will find any evidence for them. Therefore, Scientists have little reason to care about any of them. Their fascination with the "beginning" of the universe is largely due to the lack of a better word. You could say they are interested in the evolution of the present universe -- and unlike biological evolution, the evolution of the universe does not require an absolute beginning with a first moment (as opposed to biological evolution, which requires the existence of a common ancestor.)
Now to quote Richard Dawkins: "Now I had better go off and do some digging in the garden."
Troll 1 says: "My computer runs so much faster with compiled binaries!" Troll 2 says: "Balderdash! Precompiled binaries are just as good!"
Mr. Scientist says: "This sounds like a testable hypothesis! Let's get two identical computers and compare the speed of different programs! We'll get a guy with a stopwatch to measure how fast it takes to do simple tasks, like booting up. Troll 1 and Troll 2 -- you guys can't be the guy with the stopwatch; in fact, I think you guys should stay 10 miles away from the lab."
Troll 1: "But I just know that Mozilla boots 10 seconds faster if I've compiled it..."
Scientist: "SILENCE! Anecdotes are not data. Especially when they come from a biased jerk like yourself."
Troll 2: "See, these crazy gentoo guys... [mwrfff!]"
Scientist: "[Stuffing sock in Troll 2's mouth] The SOB may be right, but you'll look at the data that proves him correct and never accept it."
[Scientist lets out a deep sigh.]
Scientist: "Ok. The computers will be exactly IDENTICAL except for the different versions of the program. We will have stopwatch guy measure the speeds of each program at least 10, probably more than 40 times. Stopwatch guy will be a grad student who is more interested in girls than Linux -- wait, we will make sure that he has no idea what Linux is. We won't tell him which computer is running which version, just in case. We'll just pay him $10 an hour to do these boring ass tests."
Troll 1: "But what about the USE flags that we compile the binary with?"
Scientist: "We will do a trial for each possible USE flag. We will toggle every single variable and compare it to a control. The grad student will spend a lot of time doing this sort of thing, (but grad students are made for slave labor...)"
Troll 1: "I'm sorry, what were you talking about? We were busy writing more posts to this slashdot thread thoroughly trashing each other." Troll 2: "Yeah, I'm pointing out to this jerk that I've been a sysadmin for my basement Beowulf cluster of NetBSD equipped toasters for over a decade, and my extensive experience says that it takes forever to compile anything on a Toaster, so the net time I would lose through compiling would outweigh any runtime advantages until I've toasted 4 gigaloafs... only at that point would I begin to save time." Troll 1: "And I'm pointing out how I installed Gentoo on the aerofoil of my car and the friction on my wheels is up over 0.1%, effectively overclocking my car's engine by over 5 horsepower -- never mind that my 57 horsepower engine never gets up to speeds large enough to experience any significant gain..." Troll 2: "You installed Gentoo on your car? How do you compile using a car? Do you lift it off the ground and spin your wheels in the air for three weekends..." Troll 1: "You're so old. I've even managed to compile Gentoo on my girlfriend..." Troll 2: "No doubt a RealDoll equipped with the vibration pack from a Nintendo 64-" Troll 1: "-I wrote my own vibrate driver and installed it in the RealDol-" Troll 2: "-Man, that is nothing compared to the driver I wrote that toasts a devil shape into the toast-" Scientist: "-excuse me-" Troll 1: "-when I'm overclocking my girlfriend sometimes I have to cool her off with liquid nitrogen-" Scientist: "-sweet lord! I can't take this crap anymore! It's like watching a debate between Flat Earthers and Intelligent Designers! I only did this to get my own IgNobel, but it just isn't worth it anymore. Get the hell out of my office, and stop using my wireless, you pathetic losers!."
I am not being sarcastic, everything I say below is true.
My health care just ended and my supply of those "sedatives" you speak of so negatively just ran out a couple of days ago.
I can't stay still, read a book, barely can type this entry. I was waiting for a train today and I needed to walk up and down the platform six or more times just to manage the extreme discomfort I felt in all parts of my body. I walked instead of shaking in place because walking is more acceptable than looking like you're absolutely mad.
I hate it when people bash ADHD drugs. Without mine I feel like I am a great mind trapped inside of a body that can't be controlled for any reason, like a million vectors of high magnitude going in all direction and adding to nothing.
The meds are a solution to a problem: the solution to the problem that I can't read, stay still, or not look like an insane epileptic in public. They're a solution to the problem that my hands shake so bad that my handwriting is illegible. They're a solution to the problem that I've tried EVERYTHING else and nothing else works.
I don't want to wait around for a perfect solution. Perfection is for people who live in a platonic ideal world. I hate to say it, but we live in a dirty, pragmatic world.
Giving everything an IP address is not an intrinsically bad idea. It _would_ be a bad idea if the hypothetical nuclear reactor was controlled remotely, but do you think anyone would be that stupid? If we were to remove everything that _could_ be misconfigured, broken, or hacked we would quickly run out of possessions (the first thing gone would be your beloved computer.)
To convince you that it is not intrinsically stupid, look at this thumbnail strategy for protecting the IP connected water mains.
Case 1. Use the IP connection only for checking status. The checking apparatus will have no control over the operation of the water main. Allow it only to receive connections from inside the Harvard network to protect from external attack. To protect from attack within the Harvard network, log traffic into the main. The worst thing that can happen is a DOS attack, and in that case, make the water main capable of being monitored manually.
Case 2. If you want to use IP connections for monitoring and controlling the water main, restrict access like in Case 1, but add the restrictions that the password not be set by users but be provided by one of those RSA keychain things. This is a hedge against the typical weakest point in many security systems -- crappy passwords. Eliminate all unnecessary services and accounts on the computer responsible for the water main control. And then, most importantly, incorporate a network-independent failsafe control that will override the IP-controlled computer if the watermain tries to do something catastrophically stupid at the command of a hacker or a user mistake.
I'm no expert, but this strategy seems like it minimizes risk enough. If you stick with Case number 1, then things should probably go nicely.
And of course, it can still be hacked (although that is unlikely.)
We all can't be experts, but we are all spectacularly good consumers of information.
Wikipedia is a fine knowledge aggregator. I would not trust its interpretations on world events or much else, but I feel that I can look up an article, see an outline of what is important about, and -- most importantly -- be referred to a couple of dozen great third-party supporting articles written by respectable authorities.
Every time I've used the wikipedia it wasn't to provide an alternate interpretation of the implications of the Austro-Hungarian wars of succession -- it was to say, "I think these people would benefit from reading this article, I'll splice it in and reference it."
I think the wikipedia is only as good as its third party sources, and 100 monkeys can assemble more of those than 1 expert.
the grandparent is totally nuts. This is just like the right wing blaming Abu Ghraib on pornography and women's lib.
No, really. The right wing tried to blame Abu Ghraib on pornography and women's lib.
I think these factors contributed far more:
Working in an overcrowded, dangerous place (Abu Ghraib was shelled regularly and dangerously understaffed)
Assigning people with no prison training to not only watch but "prepare" (i.e. break through torture) inmates for interrogation
The not-so-subtle indoctrination that the Abu Ghraib prisoners were terrorists, instead of common criminals or innocent people (according to the red cross, anywheres from 60-80% of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were innocent people, rounded up in raids)
Slashdot Mirror
He cites this as if it is common knowledge. It isn't. All of the CS Theory and Math I've seen from the crypto world doesn't really inspire confidence. My wife is a crypto researcher and as a result she doesn't really trust anything. (She's typically right. I was fawning over GPG and she was extremely skeptical and said she'd never use it for anything important. Weeks later, there is a major security bug -- not in the crypto algorithms, but in the implementation.)
I'd be interested to see what he means by a mathematically provably secure system... even one that works in theory. I personally think he's just making stuff up.
Also, he says that OpenBSD's memory randomization causes esoteric debugging errors since no two programs run in the same way. I also think this is BS. Where is the proof? Has anyone else heard of this?
... ins't this like asking "Is FreeBSD the next Windows?"
AFAIK, the two ways to get inside an OS X machine are to dupe the user into entering an administrator password or to take advantage of a very novel hole. Doing either is more complex and difficult than what Windows viruses tend to do.
Since most services are turned off by default in OS X, the people who are ignorant about IT are less likely to turn them on. (Why would they turn on what they don't need or don't understand?) This makes the virus maker's lot even more difficult.
I'm no expert, but this looks like FUD to me.
Me: Hey Mom... I'm poor as hell right now and need some help.
Mom (Thinking that sending money may be a bad idea): I'll send you a peapod and get you through the month.
Me: Oh dude, thank you so much, I was just busy boiling my shoe leather to try and see if it would provide sustanence....
A day or so later, a whole giant load of macaroni and cheese, milk, eggs, and spaghetti appears. Not luxury, but enough to get by on.
Go peapod! My poverty would be a little less tolerable without you (and my mom.)
I mean, like 75% of slashdot readers have written patches for the kernel, right? My 10 year-old son just started using Debian, and he's already written a few drivers for ATI cards (with a bit of reverse engineering, of course). He should be done in a day or so.
Why is he so driven? I guess he's just the regular FOSS user. Also, he was jealous that his 12-year old sister is a developer for OpenBSD and has already had over 10,000 lines of her code merged into the source tree. My boy won't feel the score is even until he's kicked the HURD kernel up out of beta.
Myself? I'm getting the Linux kernel ready for the next generation of 128-bit CPUs. That's in my spare time, when I'm not checking over particle physics calculations done recently at the CERN and Fermilab... another pasttime of mine.
But 9-5, I'm a janitor for the local elementary school.
After two weeks of attempting to get the various crappy beta-quality drivers to work on linux, I switched to OpenBSD to find that it supported my wireless card perfectly. (I have a PPC machine, so ndiswrapper was not an option.)
Installing was also easy. If you have a little patience and are not afraid of a text-only install, starting OpenBSD was very easy.
I like this operating system. The man files are comprehensive and well written, and even a person with limited technical experience (me) was able to get everything working fairly quickly.
"Linux is so stable and reliable that the FAA uses it. If you need a reminder who the FAA is: they keep the planes from falling out of the sky."
After all, if God is making policy through Bush, then the principles of open government mean that we have a right to see what the deliberative process was between the deity and the commander-in-chief.
I wonder what people would think if Bush went in front of the nation and said he was talking to Zeus, Mithras, or the channeled spirit of William the Conqueror?
Maybe then people would realize that talking to your imaginary friends to make national policy and significant decisions is completely insane.
"Hello. Would you like to touch my krumm?"
I think that if it didn't scream itself into a short circuit on watching this Ali G skit, it should get some reprogramming.
One thing I dislike about modern physics is how they phrase things in an inappropriately magical way. And then what happens is that New Age people start hideosly misinterpreting the results, fuse one piece of magic to another, and before you know it, people saying things like "physics is just confirming what the Taoists knew thousands of years ago..." -- in short, garbage.
It is very likely that it is just a coincidence that the Riemann Zeta function describes some properties of quantum physics. If you study mathematics you will find all sorts of coincidences like these. It doesn't mean anything; more often than not it is just a consequence of the rules of arithmetic.
But I imagine that New Age people are going to interpret this as that civilizations inside of each atom are trying to signal us "Contact" style by sending out zeros of the Riemann Zeta Function.... sigh.
I think I may code an AI script that will learn how to have conversations based on the content of slashdot. After the program has digested a few thousand posts it will surely pass the
I imagine a conversation would run like this:
Human: "I'm impressed with this new Linux distro. This may actually be an operating system my grandmother can use without any problems!"
Slashdotbot: "Heh. Your mother should use Debian. If she uses Ubuntu she is going to get p0wn3d."
Human: "I use BSD personally on my servers, but I don't think my Grandmother has much to worry about on her computer."
Human: "Um... okay... I guess that made a little sense -- if I cross my eyes and think real hard. I wonder what will happen when I say this: I've been running YourMomOS on my laptop and she is humming away beautifully."
Human: "I think I'm on to you. Hey guy, tell me about your girl."
Human: "Wait. Proves nothing. But that response is suspicious. Hey guy, tell me about your 7545121116577545454."
Human: "This is a computer program, but I was nearly fooled. Another thousand posts and it will be absolutely indistinguishable from the average slashdot poster. You merely need to dumb down its grammar, interject more spelling mistakes, and give it more pop culture references (i.e. the mention of the word 'Ballmer' should trigger the 'make_joke_about_chairs()' subroutine) and this AI construct will truly be perfect."
For some reason, this reminds me of the time that a woman called my branch of the company and said: "We're all out of paper over here... could you fax some over?"
It is possible to build comptuers that are optimized for certain kinds of calculations.
For example, Gerald Sussman of MIT (a computer scientist) and a Jack Wisdom (a physicist) decided they wanted to do long-term modelling of the solar system's evolution over time. Long time modelling of a multi-body system requires a fantastic amount of calculation. What is the best way to do it?
Sussman and Wisdom came up with a crafty idea: build a computer that is specially configured at the hardware level to do the modelling. Sussman and his colleagues decided that with off-the-shelf parts they could build a computer that would be just as or more capable of modeling this system than a supercomputer would be. The result was the Digital Orrery, a relativlely cheap computer that gave great results. (It is now featured in the Smithsonian museum.)
Think of it: if your computer is going to be doing the Fast Fourier Transform 6.02x10^23 times per day, why not build a superfast chip that does nothing but the FFT rather than express it as software? It's a pretty cool idea. I think this is the sort of thing that Cray computers claims to want to do with its motto.
There's one small problem with your mass-charge analogy: it's completely wrong. With electricity, things with opposite charges attract. The problem with talking about a mass-charge is that all mass (to the best of our knowledge) attracts all mass. We have yet to see any mass that repels other masses through gravitational effects.
Publish your evidence of a mass causing repulsion and explain how gravitomagnetic effects combined with this repulsion will repel or nullify gravity, and you will win a Nobel prize, get published in the journal of your choice, and be able to pay Bill Gates to shine your shoes with his tongue.
Hey, RTFP man, that comment was made by my hypothetical crackpot, not me.
Artificial gravity is not the real exitement around this experiment. The really important part is, you know, experimental evidence that may provide insight into the unification of relativity and quantum mechanics.
... or we could talk about some artificial gravity field thingy that will make crackpots and sci-fi fans excited. Well, it looks pretty obvious. Defer to the crackpots."
I wonder what the editors were thinking:
"Well, we can talk about the really exciting implications of this experiment that will be relevant to respectable physics
How long before some crackpot on the threads says: "Well, if you just spin the disk backward, logically it should follow that the artificial gravity will turn into anti-gravity! I have made the greatest scientific discovery since Einstein! Wait... I better be quiet about this before the oil companies and government agencies try to sabotage me, just like they did with my zero-point energy machine and my perpetual engine (I'm still working on getting the lubricant working correctly...)"
Nice job, guys.
Perfect reference.
I wish I could fine every crackpot that's wasted my time.
"Dear Sir. Your letter claiming the invention of a (perpetual motion machine/ proof of the trisection of the angle with compass and straight edge/ stock-picking program/ time cube harvester) was a complete waste of my time due to its impossibility and utter implausibility, as demonstrated by (reputable mathematics/ laws of thermodynamics/ support of your theory by George Gilder or Wired magazine, implying that it is categorically false).
"By my estimation, it required 2 minutes of my time to read your letter and throw it in the shredder and one minute to send out this form letter invoice. At my going rate of $100 per hour, this means you owe me exactly $5 U.S., payable by check, gold bullion, or paypal. Failure to pay this sum will result in a call from my attorney. Sincerely,"
I bet I could make a plush living on commissions if I were to handle the crank mail at a place like MIT or CalTech.
I wonder if the /. editors are on the take from pharmaceutical companies that sell anti-hypertension drugs?
It seems like once a day there is an article like this that provides no real content, but may inspire limited skirmishes between hotheaded zealots. No doubt some of them are on these medications.
Or maybe the editors just like to see the ants fight after they shake up the bottle.
Franklin Hoenikker, is that you?
No. You're wrong.
The evidence for a big bang (a horrible name) only mounts as time goes on. Scientists aren't trying to prove it; they already have. Now they are trying to figure out what happened afterward, what the early universe was like, and possibly what may have caused the big bang. You talk about the investigations of the big bang as if they were strenuous attempts to prove a religious doctrine. This isn't creation science.
If you say that the big bang is not a proven thing, I am looking forward to your well-documented paper detailing your experimental evidence casting significant doubt on or refuting big bang theory. Such a paper would be published in Nature or Science and would cause a great deal of excitement. Until then, the Big Bang is a fact, just like gravity, thermodynamics, relativity, and evolution. Until then, you are a wanker or a crank.
Nice philsophical point about the origin of the Universe: Bertrand Russell made it a long time ago in his book "Why I am not a Christian." (So no, I didn't hear it here first.)
Scientists don't really have much to say about whether the universe has always existed or not. It is certainly a possibility that the universe has always existed. Scientists don't get hung up about asserting that the Universe has a beginning, only religious people do.
It is possible that the Universe always was and never had a beginning. It is also possible that there is a God. It is also possible there is a teapot orbiting Mars right now. (Another crib from Russell.) Unfortunately, evidence for these three hypotheses has not yet appeared and there is little reason to believe that we will find any evidence for them. Therefore, Scientists have little reason to care about any of them. Their fascination with the "beginning" of the universe is largely due to the lack of a better word. You could say they are interested in the evolution of the present universe -- and unlike biological evolution, the evolution of the universe does not require an absolute beginning with a first moment (as opposed to biological evolution, which requires the existence of a common ancestor.)
Now to quote Richard Dawkins: "Now I had better go off and do some digging in the garden."
Its called an "experiment". This is the idea:
Troll 1 says: "My computer runs so much faster with compiled binaries!"
Troll 2 says: "Balderdash! Precompiled binaries are just as good!"
Mr. Scientist says: "This sounds like a testable hypothesis! Let's get two identical computers and compare the speed of different programs! We'll get a guy with a stopwatch to measure how fast it takes to do simple tasks, like booting up. Troll 1 and Troll 2 -- you guys can't be the guy with the stopwatch; in fact, I think you guys should stay 10 miles away from the lab."
Troll 1: "But I just know that Mozilla boots 10 seconds faster if I've compiled it..."
Scientist: "SILENCE! Anecdotes are not data. Especially when they come from a biased jerk like yourself."
Troll 2: "See, these crazy gentoo guys... [mwrfff!]"
Scientist: "[Stuffing sock in Troll 2's mouth] The SOB may be right, but you'll look at the data that proves him correct and never accept it."
[Scientist lets out a deep sigh.]
Scientist: "Ok. The computers will be exactly IDENTICAL except for the different versions of the program. We will have stopwatch guy measure the speeds of each program at least 10, probably more than 40 times. Stopwatch guy will be a grad student who is more interested in girls than Linux -- wait, we will make sure that he has no idea what Linux is. We won't tell him which computer is running which version, just in case. We'll just pay him $10 an hour to do these boring ass tests."
Troll 1: "But what about the USE flags that we compile the binary with?"
Scientist: "We will do a trial for each possible USE flag. We will toggle every single variable and compare it to a control. The grad student will spend a lot of time doing this sort of thing, (but grad students are made for slave labor...)"
Troll 1: "I'm sorry, what were you talking about? We were busy writing more posts to this slashdot thread thoroughly trashing each other."
Troll 2: "Yeah, I'm pointing out to this jerk that I've been a sysadmin for my basement Beowulf cluster of NetBSD equipped toasters for over a decade, and my extensive experience says that it takes forever to compile anything on a Toaster, so the net time I would lose through compiling would outweigh any runtime advantages until I've toasted 4 gigaloafs... only at that point would I begin to save time."
Troll 1: "And I'm pointing out how I installed Gentoo on the aerofoil of my car and the friction on my wheels is up over 0.1%, effectively overclocking my car's engine by over 5 horsepower -- never mind that my 57 horsepower engine never gets up to speeds large enough to experience any significant gain..."
Troll 2: "You installed Gentoo on your car? How do you compile using a car? Do you lift it off the ground and spin your wheels in the air for three weekends..."
Troll 1: "You're so old. I've even managed to compile Gentoo on my girlfriend..."
Troll 2: "No doubt a RealDoll equipped with the vibration pack from a Nintendo 64-"
Troll 1: "-I wrote my own vibrate driver and installed it in the RealDol-"
Troll 2: "-Man, that is nothing compared to the driver I wrote that toasts a devil shape into the toast-"
Scientist: "-excuse me-"
Troll 1: "-when I'm overclocking my girlfriend sometimes I have to cool her off with liquid nitrogen-"
Scientist: "-sweet lord! I can't take this crap anymore! It's like watching a debate between Flat Earthers and Intelligent Designers! I only did this to get my own IgNobel, but it just isn't worth it anymore. Get the hell out of my office, and stop using my wireless, you pathetic losers!."
Why did this guy copy his comment directly from Funroll-loops ?
I am not being sarcastic, everything I say below is true.
My health care just ended and my supply of those "sedatives" you speak of so negatively just ran out a couple of days ago.
I can't stay still, read a book, barely can type this entry. I was waiting for a train today and I needed to walk up and down the platform six or more times just to manage the extreme discomfort I felt in all parts of my body. I walked instead of shaking in place because walking is more acceptable than looking like you're absolutely mad.
I hate it when people bash ADHD drugs. Without mine I feel like I am a great mind trapped inside of a body that can't be controlled for any reason, like a million vectors of high magnitude going in all direction and adding to nothing.
The meds are a solution to a problem: the solution to the problem that I can't read, stay still, or not look like an insane epileptic in public. They're a solution to the problem that my hands shake so bad that my handwriting is illegible. They're a solution to the problem that I've tried EVERYTHING else and nothing else works.
I don't want to wait around for a perfect solution. Perfection is for people who live in a platonic ideal world. I hate to say it, but we live in a dirty, pragmatic world.
Sigh.
Giving everything an IP address is not an intrinsically bad idea. It _would_ be a bad idea if the hypothetical nuclear reactor was controlled remotely, but do you think anyone would be that stupid? If we were to remove everything that _could_ be misconfigured, broken, or hacked we would quickly run out of possessions (the first thing gone would be your beloved computer.)
To convince you that it is not intrinsically stupid, look at this
thumbnail strategy for protecting the IP connected water mains.
Case 1. Use the IP connection only for checking status. The checking apparatus will have no control over the operation of the water main.
Allow it only to receive connections from inside the Harvard network to protect from external attack. To protect from attack within the Harvard network, log traffic into the main. The worst thing that can happen is a DOS attack, and in that case, make the water main capable of being monitored manually.
Case 2. If you want to use IP connections for monitoring and controlling the water main, restrict access like in Case 1, but add the restrictions that the password not be set by users but be provided by one of those RSA keychain things. This is a hedge against the typical weakest point in many security systems -- crappy passwords. Eliminate all unnecessary services and accounts on the computer responsible for the water main control. And then, most importantly, incorporate a network-independent failsafe control that will override the IP-controlled computer if the watermain tries to do something catastrophically stupid at the command of a hacker or a user mistake.
I'm no expert, but this strategy seems like it minimizes risk enough. If you stick with Case number 1, then things should probably go nicely.
And of course, it can still be hacked (although that is unlikely.)
We all can't be experts, but we are all spectacularly good consumers of information.
Wikipedia is a fine knowledge aggregator. I would not trust its interpretations on world events or much else, but I feel that I can look up an article, see an outline of what is important about, and -- most importantly -- be referred to a couple of dozen great third-party supporting articles written by respectable authorities.
Every time I've used the wikipedia it wasn't to provide an alternate interpretation of the implications of the Austro-Hungarian wars of succession -- it was to say, "I think these people would benefit from reading this article, I'll splice it in and reference it."
I think the wikipedia is only as good as its third party sources, and 100 monkeys can assemble more of those than 1 expert.
No, really. The right wing tried to blame Abu Ghraib on pornography and women's lib.
I think these factors contributed far more: