... since any god worth mentioning is not a testable theory, your statement is logically equivalent to "atheism is the belief that no god exists."
Oh, I dunno; standard scientific methods can and often do distinguish between skepticism and active disbelief. Thus, if a species is known to live in a very narrow niche, and hasn't been seen for a while, people might suggest that the species may be extinct. This is the "skepticism" phase. If enough field workers look around in places where the species should be able to live, and none of them report finding it, eventually the species goes to "likely extinct", and eventually to "believed extinct".
Any statistician should be able to give you the numbers on such testing. As your observation set grows to a larger part of the specie's possible range, the probability that it still exists in unexamined areas decreases in a predictable way.
Actually, the statistical equations for this have a consequence that most people find counter-intuitive. Example: A few decades ago, it was calculated that there was about a 50% probability that a large mammal species "undiscovered by science" (i.e., not published in any taxonomies) still existed on Earth. The term "large" was intentionally vague, but meant something roughly human-size or larger. Then, a few years ago, a "new" species of deer was discovered in Asia. Statisticians had fun pointing out that this meant that the probability that more large mammal species exist had increased. This puzzled a lot of people. If we'd discovered one of a tiny remaining set, shouldn't there be one fewer species in that set now?
Of course, one way of making this sensible is to note that, strictly speaking, what had been shown was that scientific field work had been less effective than previously thought. In particular, this "new" species was known to the humans who lived in the area; they just hadn't been in contact with any biologists who kept lists of species. There are presumably other similar cases scattered around the world, and the discovery of one meant that we hadn't looked closely enough. Or maybe not; maybe that was the last undocumented large mammal.
Applying all this to the existence of a god or gods is straightforward. Thus, many religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, claim a god who (according to their sacred texts) has in the past often actively intervened in human affairs. He even once devastated the world and exterminated many innocent species to punish wayward humans for their sins. You'd think that it would be easy to get such a god to reveal His presence in the current world, which has even more humans in dire need of punishment for their sins.
But over the past few centuries, we have collected lots of data about the recent disasters in our world, and the data shows fairly clearly that the disasters' effects are essentially uncorrelated with the local human activity. If any god was directing our recent disasters, that god is apparently rather incompetent at punishing the right sinners. Thus, when religious people claimed that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for the sins of the residents of New Orleans (a Sin City if there ever was one), people quickly pointed out that the French Quarter (the center of the local sinning) wasn't damaged. Scientists and engineers would point out that the French Quarter is one of the few parts of the city that's above sea level, so whatever god may have been involved must be too feeble to even push the water level up by a few meters.
But the most reasonable conclusion, supported by basic textbook scientific methodology, is that our planet has no god that has the interest and ability to intervene the way our religious texts claim that God has intervened in the past. Yes, this isn't proof that there's no god around. But, as is often pointed out, absolute proof of a negative is difficult, and scientific methods rarely if ever actually "prove" anything. Sci
Facebook is an American-based company, and German citizens have to voluntarily visit facebook.com, taking them to the American site, then set up an account, and then supply them with information.
Or they can, y'know, go to facebook.de, the version that comes up on your screen auf Deutsch;-)
Actually, when I tried that URL in a firefox window, it bounced me to de-de.facebook.com, and nothing I tried could convince it otherwise. So I fired up one of the other dozen browsers that I have on this Mac, gave it facebook.de, and it's now showing the registration page - in German. It's also telling me "JavaScript ist in deinem Browser deaktiviert", which is correct for that browser.
So you were mostly wrong. Anyone want to test whether Germans using firefox will be redirected to that bizarre de-de.facebook.com site that's in English? I suppose I could indirect through a German anonymizer, but that seems rather a lot of work for just a/. discussion. And it might be doing that in my FF window because I am in fact logged into facebook via FF.
Ok, I have no idea what crazy world you're living in, but:
I'm in the US, and yes, it's pretty crazy around here at times. Where do you live, that's more sane? (Or maybe you're just accustomed to your local flavors of craziness.)
1. AFAIK telephone numbers are handed out by the regulator for free. If your telco doesn't supply numbers for free then go elsewhere,...
I've had phone service in the US since the 1960s, and I've never heard of a telco that gives out phone numbers for free. Sure, they'll tell you that the first one is "free", as in it comes with the package that you pay for. But if you want a second line, it is typically 50% - 80% of the monthly price for the first line. Businesses buy packages of phone numbers, and you pay more for more numbers (though there's generally a smaller per-number price for larger quantities.)
2. Who on earth are you getting your internet connection from? I've never come across an ISP that charges per IP address.
Again, in the US, I've never heard of one that doesn't. You get one IP address when you sign up. If it's a "home" account, you get a dynamic address that may change at any time, and you configure your machine to use DHCP to check the address several times a day. When the ISP changes your address, it can take a day or two for the DNS system to understand the change and no longer direct clients to your previous address. If you want a "static" IP address, you have to pay more (typically double) for a "business" account. If you want a second static IP address, you pay more, typically $5 to $10 per month. I've heard that the rules are different in other countries, but that's how it works here.
I've occasionally wondered how the postal system would work if the local (private) post office could change your street address at will, and you'd have to first discover this, then ask them for your new address, then send it out to everyone you communicate with. At least the DNS system can take care of it in a couple of days.;-)
3. What ISPs block "lots of ports"?
Around here, we have the luxury of three actual ISPs: Verizon, Comcast and RCN. All three block ports 21, 25 and 80, and usually a few others, for "home" accounts. They usually also block ICMP ("ping") packets. Again, in some neighborhoods you can pay double for a "business" account, and get this restriction relaxed. But sometimes they block ports anyway, somewhat at random. This may be due to incompetence. It takes a long time to get through to a support person who admits to knowing what "port blocking" means.
Our local unix/linux "geek" club has occasionally documented the constantly-changing situation with port blocking. It tends to come and go at random, on a weekly basis. With a bit of cooperation and some network debugging software, we can usually document just where packets are being dropped, and show which machine inside the ISP is blocking which ports. The ISPs normally deny it, and give us a runaround.
Actually, the "home business" account is something relatively new. In much of the US, you couldn't get business-class Internet access in most residential neighborhoods until a few years ago. It took a fair number of lawsuits from people running home businesses to get this changed. But now the ISPs are mostly offering it, because they understand that they can charge double and do less (such as no blocking or DHCP). And they can get away with the same crappy "support" that they always provided.
When it is no longer attached to the mother. Until then, it is literally a parasite on the mother until then. Pretty simple question to answer rationally.
Actually, that wording doesn't make it simple, either. One reason is that most people who support a mother's right to an abortion (within whatever time limits) will agree that for an outsider to cause the fetus's death without her permission would be a criminal act. There's been lots of case law in lots of countries that deal with this, and courts have pretty much all agreed that, even if an abortion would have been legal, fetal death without the mother's permission isn't abortion, and is a crime if done by an "outsider".
In many societies, "abortion" has been extended past birth. Thus, newborns with obvious physical defects have often been quietly killed by their family, with no legal repercussions. It's an open secret that newborns are often killed (or sold) in countries that impose draconian limits on children. The most notorious case in recent years has been China, after their "one child" policy was adopted, resulting in a generation of kids that has a serious shortage of females.
The "parasite" point is of interest to biologists and medical people. One of the outstanding biological questions is based on this. Since a fetus is genetically different from the mother, you'd expect her immune system to recognize it as foreign and try to kill it. This does happen, but there are a lot of poorly-understood "special features" of the mammalian immune system that recognize a fetus as special and allow it to live (and extract nutrition from the host). There is a conjecture that some actual parasites take advantage of this, and fool the immune system into accepting them as a fetus (even in males).
Anyway, the whole issue isn't all that simple. ( And humans often aren't all that rational.;-)
Personhood is really what's of interest... when does the thing that could become a person... do so (and thus obviously gain the rights to protection from murder from our society).
We might want to be careful with what term we use. Consider that in the US, the legal system has conferred "personhood" on corporations. So in US law, you can be a "person" without even being alive.
Also, US law clearly doesn't protect a "person" from being murdered. It's perfectly legal for the officers of a corporate person to dissolve the corporation, ending its existence. No court would charge them with murder for such an act. It's also legal for one corporation to buy another and merge with it. If I were to kill and eat you (thus incorporating you into my "personhood"), I'd be definitely charged with a crime, but corporate "persons" do this to each other every day, and nobody blinks an eye.
So, at least in the US, asking when "personhood" begins might not be at all what you want determined. Under US law, a "person" can be created out of nothing, by filing the appropriate legal papers with the right government agency. Also, such a "person" can be legally owned by another (i.e., held in slavery), and can be destroyed at will.
Maybe there's a better term, that doesn't already have such a bizarre legal definition.
I prefer to use "able to procreate" as part of the definition, so that anything that hasn't reached sexual maturity isn't considered alive.
It could be fun to argue for such a definition of "when life begins". It immediately follows from this definition that it's OK to kill a child that hasn't reached puberty. Somehow, I sorta suspect that a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable with this.
OTOH, there's an old Jewish joke, to the effect that kids aren't considered living human beings until they get their medical or law degree.
Where exactly do you draw the line for 'life begins', and why?
Well, I don't know what the OP would say, but in scientific circles, the question was quite clearly answered back in the mid-1800s, by Louis Pasteur et al. And the clear answer was: It doesn't. We may not know what happened 4.5 billion years ago when our planet was young, but today it's rather well determined that life only continues as a branch of earlier life.
This applies to us humans as it does to everything else living on the planet. The instance of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm doesn't create a new life; it merges two previous living creatures into a single living creature. The participants are at all times alive, and no new life is created.
And note that human ova and sperm are quite definitely human. Straightforward DNA tests will verify this.
The whole religious issue of when "life" begins is bogus. It doesn't. At least, not on our planet. People who claim it does simply don't understand how our reproductive process works. (This doesn't prevent them from reproducing, of course; they don't need to understand for it to work.)
Now I'll wander off, humming Every Sperm is Sacred...
Yes, when a "white hat hacker" like this Miller guy shows up and demos a security hole to Apple, Apple's response is to pull his app and ban him.
This is supposed to reassure us of iOS's security exactly how?
The intended effect seems to be to "send a message" to others who may be playing with such things. And that message is "Don't tell us about security problems you find; we don't want to hear about them. Go sell the info to interested buyers, like any self-respecting businessman would do."
For directly connected CPE, we will allocate an individual IPv6 address (/128), since we know that only a single device is connecting, with no additional need to subnet.
We might also note that, for most people, their ISP is a local monopoly. If you don't like their Terms Of Service, you can move. Or live without Internet access.
It'd be nice if your local government would enforce the Internet standards. But we should all know the likelihood of that ever happening in any jurisdiction.
(Actually, it is conceivable that various courts might decide that offering "Internet service" means supplying all the capabilities in the RFCs. To my knowledge, this has never happened in any court. But it might be something to keep in mind, and push for if you're ever in a situation where you can explain it to the court. After all, offering "Internet service" and denying some capability in some RFC really should constitute "consumer fraud" in any honest courtroom. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this to happen.;-)
Too bad so many think Microsoft is doing this to make money from the licensing.
I get the impression that most people wouldn't call this "licensing". The usual term is "protection racket". Microsoft basically says "We won't tell you anything about our patent claims; we're just saying that if you pay us what we're asking, we won't sue you." This is not in any sense a licensing deal. It's classical protection money against an unspecified attack.
Don't worry, the'll find a way of fucking this up too. It my take awhile, but you should never under estimate an idiot, idiots are too inventive.
Nah; the ISPs already know just how to do it, and it doesn't require an idiot. All they need to do is use the same method they've used with IP4: They only accept one address at your site, and discard any packets that didn't come from that address or is sent to that address. If you want N addresses, you'll have to pay N x $X, where $X is their current price for a routable address.
It really doesn't matter how many gazillions of addresses IPv6 makes available, you will only get one. Addresses are a commodity, to be leased for a profit.
The phone system has worked this way since the beginning of phone numbers, and nobody ever complained. The phone system also has "extension" numbers, which in the IP world are called "port" numbers. But the ISPs have caught onto this, and most of them now block lots of your port numbers. They can do the same with IPv6, with the code they already have. So if they like, they can also charge you extra for not blocking a port. They do this with IPv4 around here, where you have to pay double for a "home business" account if you want ports 21 or 25 or 80 or anything >1023 unblocked.
Can you think of any reason they can't implement exactly the same limits with IPv6 that they currently have with IPv4?
(It is sorta funny that the old phone companies never caught onto this. They could have signed you up for a phone, and then when you complained about blocking, they could say "Oh, you didn't say you wanted to accept incoming calls. That'll be another $45/month. Shall I sign you up?")
He basically proved that you could write code with trojan functionality that violated developer agreements, lie about the functionality to Apple, and get it published on the App Store. Apple found out and took his App down and then took away his developer license.
So iOS is secure against developers that tell Apple about the malware in their apps. That gives me a really warm, fuzzy feeling...
I'm waiting on a vendor coming up with a firewall program for your phone - think ZoneAlarm, where you are prompted to allow or block when apps request 'outside access'.
And if you make a version for the iPhone, it won't be approved.;)
(Of course, it is possible for iPhone users to install "disapproved" apps from other sources. But only a few knowledgeable people will do that, so you certainly won't make much money from your app that way.)
Yeah; a quick google shows that it's classified in the extinct superorder Dryolestoidea, which has an unclear relationship to modern mammals. It certainly wasn't a rodent, which are in the Euarchontoglires superorder. The rodents themselves split off from that branch a few tens of millions of years later.
This sort of bizarre misclasification, apparently for the thrill of being able to write "sabre-toothed squirrel", doesn't exactly give a lot of credibility to the article's author.
The most appropriate response to this is probably "WTF is this doing on a news-for-nerds site?"
and consider i believe we fund 3/4 of the UNESCO's budget that might be a problem for the UNESCO.
Well, you can believe whatever you like, but that doesn't make it true. Others have pointed out that the actual number is less that 1/4 of UNESCO's budget. Still others have pointed out that the US did drop its funding for UNESCO a while back, and UNESCO did pretty well during the years that it didn't have US funding. Some even argue that it did better, since during those years UNESCO's people didn't have to defend themselves against charges of being American puppets. (I'm not sure I believe that this was much of a problem, but what do I know?)
The "marbles" metaphor is probably a good one here. It does seem to a lot of the world like a children's game. It's part of why some people in the US have been suggesting that what the country needs is some adult guidance in Washington.
, of course, you are running a democracy, and want your tax money spent in accordance with the people's wishes.
Hmmm... I'm a US citizen who's voted in lots of elections. I don't recall ever seeing an item on any ballot that mentioned UNESCO, or dealt with funding of any organization anywhere.
How did I miss such attempts to determine "the people's wishes"? Were there some elections that I didn't notice?
I just read a slashdot summary and it wasn't saturated with acronyms that have several completely different meanings depending on your field of expertise.
Well, I noticed a lot of use of the term "quantum", which has radically different meanings to different people. In this case, I see strong evidence that they were using the Marketing meaning of "quantum", i.e., something vaguely defined but mysterious and powerful that will impress the marks^Wcustomers when you throw it into your ad copy.
They couldn't have been using the physicists' meaning of "quantum"; it's been decades since you could understand how a computer's solid-state components worked without understanding quantum mechanics. TFA is pushing "quantum" as something new, so they must mean something different by that buzz word.
It definitely reads as a buzz word, with lots of hype over something that's vague and fuzzy (but powerful, y'know).
... assuming that it is selected by the same time honored system that textbooks are chosen, we can assume that quality will have nothing to do with what is put on the school systems computers.
Well, yeah, but the message I replied to was saying that even a "large percentage" is essentially meaningless. The message seems to be "We don't need things like computer-aided education as long as there are a few good teachers here and there." That's an anti-education claim that's worth arguing against. And one way to do so is to counter that even if there are only a few poor teachers, it's still worthwhile (for the childrens' sake;-) to help students overcome the poor teaching somehow.
In reality, the situation is a whole lot more complex than any of this, though. As someone else just suggested, computerized lessons are useful even with good teachers, as are books, since it lets (some of) the students learn the basics on their own, and the teacher can then concentrate on dealing with questions and problems.
And yeah, I know; how often is that approach permitted? Sometimes, but not a "large percentage" of the time.
Few people have personal experience with "a large percentage of cases around the country", and those who do should generally have something they can cite to back up their claims.
Yeah, and it doesn't require large numbers to show that some teachers are competent and others are incompetent. Two example will suffice for an "existence proof".
A personal example: Back in grade school, I remember when "long division" was introduced. Note that I didn't say "taught", because by the end of the Spring term, none of the students in my (5th-grade?) class got it at all. I'd been fairly good at math before that, but this was taught as a pure rote memorization exercise, with no clues as to how it worked or why anyone would ever want to do something so bizarre and incomprehensible and (apparently) useless.
But next Fall, the teacher I had quickly made a comment that went over the heads of most of the kids, but I and several others instantly picked up on it. She said that to really do it right, you should write in all the zeroes at the ends of the column of numbers, since what you were really doing was multiplying the "tens" digits at the top by the remainder of subtraction at the bottom, and all those numbers really do have zeroes to the right. But people usually leave out the zeroes, because you know they're there, and it saves a bit of time. When she explained this, what was going on instantly made sense to me (and to a few others), and I was able to do it correctly from then on. In particular, I understood why you need to be careful to keep things aligned vertically, which was the main thing that tripped up most of the kids (and is also a problem with software whose results are displayed in the variable-width fonts that the artsy "designer" crowd prefer.;-)
So right there, we have an example each of an incompetent teacher and a competent teacher for the same subject matter. A computerized lesson would (presumably) be done in the competent manner, and would make the explanation available to students who bother to read it, and would thus be better than the incompetent teacher.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, the teachers of technical subject in the lower schools are almost always incompetent. The explanation is well-known: If you're competent in math, why would you voluntarily spend your time in a low-paid job like grade-school teacher, when you could be making much better money elsewhere?
I'd suggest that computerized education might not be as good as good teachers. But until we're willing to pay what it takes to find those good teachers and attract them to teaching, we're probably stuck with the computerized stuff. And it does have the advantage that it sits there patiently waiting for the students to come along, while living teachers have lives and can't be put to sleep until a student needs them.
Because that's the real issue that most skeptics have been questioning of late.
Indeed. But there's a different take than the usual political one (denying it) that should be considered: If human activity is a major "cause" of the current warming, then it follows that human activity can indeed influence climate. This means that it is feasible for humans to control the climate for our benefit. We could stop the warming, yes, but we could also continue it for a while, or maybe reverse it a bit, if we decide that this is to our benefit.
Of course, there's a major problem that remains: Even if it's technically possible for humans to control the climate, it may turn out that we are incapable of acting together to actually do so. So far, this seems likely, but it may not be true.
We do have a bit of an example where we did pull it off: A while back we decided that atmospheric fluorocarbons were dangerous, and controls were very widely implemented. This has mostly worked, and the atmospheric fluorocarbon load has decreased significantly.
But this is somewhat of a one-off. Organizing humans on a large scale for their own benefit is known to be a very difficult problem. We can see the many reasons fairly clearly in the ongoing discussions here on/., which can mostly be characterized as nontechnical and political, and showing very little actual understanding of the issues.
But we'll see. Those of us who survive, of course.
Re:Change cannot be stopped
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The Case For Piracy
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· Score: 3, Interesting
How many people do you know that go out and by movies 40 years old? 20 years old? 10 years old? less than 5 years old? How about movies? This still holds fairly well for music,...
Huh? You must know a very different crowd of musicians than I do. There is a lively market for music over a century old. There are a lot of publishers still profiting from selling the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc., although everything they wrote is long out of copyright.
Just last night, I played for a Simchat Torah service, and we played a number of tunes that are known to be over 100 years old. The audience loved it. We also did some songs that were newer, 10 or 30 years old, and the audience sang along. A couple of days earlier, I played at a local contra dance, where we also played tunes that were several centuries old. Several were published by Playford, back in the 17th century. The dance crowd gave us lots of compliments for our music, although none of it was "new" by the recording industry's standards.
There is a serious copyright problem that is starting to hit the "old music" part of the market, though. Publishers have developed the idea that, although a tune may be public domain, their published version of it is copyrighted -- and if you play exactly the notes they published, you have violated their copyright (even if you've never seen their publication). I know a number of people who consciously refuse to play exactly the same tune that's in any of their tune books, as a result. This sorta causes problems when people are trying to play together. And it doesn't actually protect you from the threat of a lawsuit, because you can't have all the published versions in your head, or if you do, it's hard to avoid accidentally duplicating one of them occasionally.
It used to be that "copyright" existed to prevent one publisher from copying and republishing another publisher's work. Now, it's used to prevent musicians from performing music that has been published. This is a serious perversion of the original concept of copyright. In the long run, it could kill much of the publishers' market for printed music. In particular, many original editions are now available online, mostly free in academic archives. If you learn music from them, you will probably be safe from prosecution. I have a PDF of an out-of-copyright work from the 1820s on my screen right now, and I'm prepared to present it in court if any publisher sues me for copyright infringement when I perform any of the music. And I'll probably file a countersuit if they do. A lawyer friend has assured me that claiming copyright on an 1820s original manuscript is a clearcut case of consumer fraud that he'd enjoy fighting. So far, experience is that when you mention this, publishers tend to quickly back off, but you never know when they'll decide to push it.
There are lots of ways to defeat software (or humans) whose actions are based on knowing the truth or falsehood of something someone else says. That sounds like a simple concept, but there are a few logical problems with it.
I was tempted to suggest that we try polling readers about whether they could solve the puzzle, but of course the first person who gives convincing evidence of how they solved it would give away the the solution, making it impossible to know the truth value of subsequent replies.
(And I'd suggest that attributing such abduction and killing to "savages" is a quaint, old-fashioned phrasing, since nowadays they're much more likely to be agents of a "civilized" government.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
... I hope you'll at least agree that atheism *is* based on beliefs much in the same way that religion is based on beliefs.
Yeah, it's based on the belief that, as Bertrand Russell put it, one shouldn't believe anything for which there isn't any evidence.
Huh? They're talking about hydrogen that's over 13 billion years old.
Actually, most of the universe's hydrogen is that old. And in any case, it's all fungible.
... since any god worth mentioning is not a testable theory, your statement is logically equivalent to "atheism is the belief that no god exists."
Oh, I dunno; standard scientific methods can and often do distinguish between skepticism and active disbelief. Thus, if a species is known to live in a very narrow niche, and hasn't been seen for a while, people might suggest that the species may be extinct. This is the "skepticism" phase. If enough field workers look around in places where the species should be able to live, and none of them report finding it, eventually the species goes to "likely extinct", and eventually to "believed extinct".
Any statistician should be able to give you the numbers on such testing. As your observation set grows to a larger part of the specie's possible range, the probability that it still exists in unexamined areas decreases in a predictable way.
Actually, the statistical equations for this have a consequence that most people find counter-intuitive. Example: A few decades ago, it was calculated that there was about a 50% probability that a large mammal species "undiscovered by science" (i.e., not published in any taxonomies) still existed on Earth. The term "large" was intentionally vague, but meant something roughly human-size or larger. Then, a few years ago, a "new" species of deer was discovered in Asia. Statisticians had fun pointing out that this meant that the probability that more large mammal species exist had increased. This puzzled a lot of people. If we'd discovered one of a tiny remaining set, shouldn't there be one fewer species in that set now?
Of course, one way of making this sensible is to note that, strictly speaking, what had been shown was that scientific field work had been less effective than previously thought. In particular, this "new" species was known to the humans who lived in the area; they just hadn't been in contact with any biologists who kept lists of species. There are presumably other similar cases scattered around the world, and the discovery of one meant that we hadn't looked closely enough. Or maybe not; maybe that was the last undocumented large mammal.
Applying all this to the existence of a god or gods is straightforward. Thus, many religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, claim a god who (according to their sacred texts) has in the past often actively intervened in human affairs. He even once devastated the world and exterminated many innocent species to punish wayward humans for their sins. You'd think that it would be easy to get such a god to reveal His presence in the current world, which has even more humans in dire need of punishment for their sins.
But over the past few centuries, we have collected lots of data about the recent disasters in our world, and the data shows fairly clearly that the disasters' effects are essentially uncorrelated with the local human activity. If any god was directing our recent disasters, that god is apparently rather incompetent at punishing the right sinners. Thus, when religious people claimed that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for the sins of the residents of New Orleans (a Sin City if there ever was one), people quickly pointed out that the French Quarter (the center of the local sinning) wasn't damaged. Scientists and engineers would point out that the French Quarter is one of the few parts of the city that's above sea level, so whatever god may have been involved must be too feeble to even push the water level up by a few meters.
But the most reasonable conclusion, supported by basic textbook scientific methodology, is that our planet has no god that has the interest and ability to intervene the way our religious texts claim that God has intervened in the past. Yes, this isn't proof that there's no god around. But, as is often pointed out, absolute proof of a negative is difficult, and scientific methods rarely if ever actually "prove" anything. Sci
Facebook is an American-based company, and German citizens have to voluntarily visit facebook.com, taking them to the American site, then set up an account, and then supply them with information.
Or they can, y'know, go to facebook.de, the version that comes up on your screen auf Deutsch ;-)
Actually, when I tried that URL in a firefox window, it bounced me to de-de.facebook.com, and nothing I tried could convince it otherwise. So I fired up one of the other dozen browsers that I have on this Mac, gave it facebook.de, and it's now showing the registration page - in German. It's also telling me "JavaScript ist in deinem Browser deaktiviert", which is correct for that browser.
So you were mostly wrong. Anyone want to test whether Germans using firefox will be redirected to that bizarre de-de.facebook.com site that's in English? I suppose I could indirect through a German anonymizer, but that seems rather a lot of work for just a /. discussion. And it might be doing that in my FF window because I am in fact logged into facebook via FF.
Ok, I have no idea what crazy world you're living in, but:
I'm in the US, and yes, it's pretty crazy around here at times. Where do you live, that's more sane? (Or maybe you're just accustomed to your local flavors of craziness.)
1. AFAIK telephone numbers are handed out by the regulator for free. If your telco doesn't supply numbers for free then go elsewhere, ...
I've had phone service in the US since the 1960s, and I've never heard of a telco that gives out phone numbers for free. Sure, they'll tell you that the first one is "free", as in it comes with the package that you pay for. But if you want a second line, it is typically 50% - 80% of the monthly price for the first line. Businesses buy packages of phone numbers, and you pay more for more numbers (though there's generally a smaller per-number price for larger quantities.)
2. Who on earth are you getting your internet connection from? I've never come across an ISP that charges per IP address.
Again, in the US, I've never heard of one that doesn't. You get one IP address when you sign up. If it's a "home" account, you get a dynamic address that may change at any time, and you configure your machine to use DHCP to check the address several times a day. When the ISP changes your address, it can take a day or two for the DNS system to understand the change and no longer direct clients to your previous address. If you want a "static" IP address, you have to pay more (typically double) for a "business" account. If you want a second static IP address, you pay more, typically $5 to $10 per month. I've heard that the rules are different in other countries, but that's how it works here.
I've occasionally wondered how the postal system would work if the local (private) post office could change your street address at will, and you'd have to first discover this, then ask them for your new address, then send it out to everyone you communicate with. At least the DNS system can take care of it in a couple of days. ;-)
3. What ISPs block "lots of ports"?
Around here, we have the luxury of three actual ISPs: Verizon, Comcast and RCN. All three block ports 21, 25 and 80, and usually a few others, for "home" accounts. They usually also block ICMP ("ping") packets. Again, in some neighborhoods you can pay double for a "business" account, and get this restriction relaxed. But sometimes they block ports anyway, somewhat at random. This may be due to incompetence. It takes a long time to get through to a support person who admits to knowing what "port blocking" means.
Our local unix/linux "geek" club has occasionally documented the constantly-changing situation with port blocking. It tends to come and go at random, on a weekly basis. With a bit of cooperation and some network debugging software, we can usually document just where packets are being dropped, and show which machine inside the ISP is blocking which ports. The ISPs normally deny it, and give us a runaround.
Actually, the "home business" account is something relatively new. In much of the US, you couldn't get business-class Internet access in most residential neighborhoods until a few years ago. It took a fair number of lawsuits from people running home businesses to get this changed. But now the ISPs are mostly offering it, because they understand that they can charge double and do less (such as no blocking or DHCP). And they can get away with the same crappy "support" that they always provided.
We don't expect IPv6 to change any of this.
When it is no longer attached to the mother. Until then, it is literally a parasite on the mother until then. Pretty simple question to answer rationally.
Actually, that wording doesn't make it simple, either. One reason is that most people who support a mother's right to an abortion (within whatever time limits) will agree that for an outsider to cause the fetus's death without her permission would be a criminal act. There's been lots of case law in lots of countries that deal with this, and courts have pretty much all agreed that, even if an abortion would have been legal, fetal death without the mother's permission isn't abortion, and is a crime if done by an "outsider".
In many societies, "abortion" has been extended past birth. Thus, newborns with obvious physical defects have often been quietly killed by their family, with no legal repercussions. It's an open secret that newborns are often killed (or sold) in countries that impose draconian limits on children. The most notorious case in recent years has been China, after their "one child" policy was adopted, resulting in a generation of kids that has a serious shortage of females.
The "parasite" point is of interest to biologists and medical people. One of the outstanding biological questions is based on this. Since a fetus is genetically different from the mother, you'd expect her immune system to recognize it as foreign and try to kill it. This does happen, but there are a lot of poorly-understood "special features" of the mammalian immune system that recognize a fetus as special and allow it to live (and extract nutrition from the host). There is a conjecture that some actual parasites take advantage of this, and fool the immune system into accepting them as a fetus (even in males).
Anyway, the whole issue isn't all that simple. ( And humans often aren't all that rational. ;-)
Personhood is really what's of interest ... when does the thing that could become a person ... do so (and thus obviously gain the rights to protection from murder from our society).
We might want to be careful with what term we use. Consider that in the US, the legal system has conferred "personhood" on corporations. So in US law, you can be a "person" without even being alive.
Also, US law clearly doesn't protect a "person" from being murdered. It's perfectly legal for the officers of a corporate person to dissolve the corporation, ending its existence. No court would charge them with murder for such an act. It's also legal for one corporation to buy another and merge with it. If I were to kill and eat you (thus incorporating you into my "personhood"), I'd be definitely charged with a crime, but corporate "persons" do this to each other every day, and nobody blinks an eye.
So, at least in the US, asking when "personhood" begins might not be at all what you want determined. Under US law, a "person" can be created out of nothing, by filing the appropriate legal papers with the right government agency. Also, such a "person" can be legally owned by another (i.e., held in slavery), and can be destroyed at will.
Maybe there's a better term, that doesn't already have such a bizarre legal definition.
I prefer to use "able to procreate" as part of the definition, so that anything that hasn't reached sexual maturity isn't considered alive.
It could be fun to argue for such a definition of "when life begins". It immediately follows from this definition that it's OK to kill a child that hasn't reached puberty. Somehow, I sorta suspect that a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable with this.
OTOH, there's an old Jewish joke, to the effect that kids aren't considered living human beings until they get their medical or law degree.
Where exactly do you draw the line for 'life begins', and why?
Well, I don't know what the OP would say, but in scientific circles, the question was quite clearly answered back in the mid-1800s, by Louis Pasteur et al. And the clear answer was: It doesn't. We may not know what happened 4.5 billion years ago when our planet was young, but today it's rather well determined that life only continues as a branch of earlier life.
This applies to us humans as it does to everything else living on the planet. The instance of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm doesn't create a new life; it merges two previous living creatures into a single living creature. The participants are at all times alive, and no new life is created.
And note that human ova and sperm are quite definitely human. Straightforward DNA tests will verify this.
The whole religious issue of when "life" begins is bogus. It doesn't. At least, not on our planet. People who claim it does simply don't understand how our reproductive process works. (This doesn't prevent them from reproducing, of course; they don't need to understand for it to work.)
Now I'll wander off, humming Every Sperm is Sacred ...
Yes, when a "white hat hacker" like this Miller guy shows up and demos a security hole to Apple, Apple's response is to pull his app and ban him.
This is supposed to reassure us of iOS's security exactly how?
The intended effect seems to be to "send a message" to others who may be playing with such things. And that message is "Don't tell us about security problems you find; we don't want to hear about them. Go sell the info to interested buyers, like any self-respecting businessman would do."
For directly connected CPE, we will allocate an individual IPv6 address (/128), since we know that only a single device is connecting, with no additional need to subnet.
-- from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
Heh. So much for ISPs implementing standards.
We might also note that, for most people, their ISP is a local monopoly. If you don't like their Terms Of Service, you can move. Or live without Internet access.
It'd be nice if your local government would enforce the Internet standards. But we should all know the likelihood of that ever happening in any jurisdiction.
(Actually, it is conceivable that various courts might decide that offering "Internet service" means supplying all the capabilities in the RFCs. To my knowledge, this has never happened in any court. But it might be something to keep in mind, and push for if you're ever in a situation where you can explain it to the court. After all, offering "Internet service" and denying some capability in some RFC really should constitute "consumer fraud" in any honest courtroom. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this to happen. ;-)
Too bad so many think Microsoft is doing this to make money from the licensing.
I get the impression that most people wouldn't call this "licensing". The usual term is "protection racket". Microsoft basically says "We won't tell you anything about our patent claims; we're just saying that if you pay us what we're asking, we won't sue you." This is not in any sense a licensing deal. It's classical protection money against an unspecified attack.
Don't worry, the'll find a way of fucking this up too. It my take awhile, but you should never under estimate an idiot, idiots are too inventive.
Nah; the ISPs already know just how to do it, and it doesn't require an idiot. All they need to do is use the same method they've used with IP4: They only accept one address at your site, and discard any packets that didn't come from that address or is sent to that address. If you want N addresses, you'll have to pay N x $X, where $X is their current price for a routable address.
It really doesn't matter how many gazillions of addresses IPv6 makes available, you will only get one. Addresses are a commodity, to be leased for a profit.
The phone system has worked this way since the beginning of phone numbers, and nobody ever complained. The phone system also has "extension" numbers, which in the IP world are called "port" numbers. But the ISPs have caught onto this, and most of them now block lots of your port numbers. They can do the same with IPv6, with the code they already have. So if they like, they can also charge you extra for not blocking a port. They do this with IPv4 around here, where you have to pay double for a "home business" account if you want ports 21 or 25 or 80 or anything >1023 unblocked.
Can you think of any reason they can't implement exactly the same limits with IPv6 that they currently have with IPv4?
(It is sorta funny that the old phone companies never caught onto this. They could have signed you up for a phone, and then when you complained about blocking, they could say "Oh, you didn't say you wanted to accept incoming calls. That'll be another $45/month. Shall I sign you up?")
He basically proved that you could write code with trojan functionality that violated developer agreements, lie about the functionality to Apple, and get it published on the App Store. Apple found out and took his App down and then took away his developer license.
So iOS is secure against developers that tell Apple about the malware in their apps. That gives me a really warm, fuzzy feeling ...
I'm waiting on a vendor coming up with a firewall program for your phone - think ZoneAlarm, where you are prompted to allow or block when apps request 'outside access'.
And if you make a version for the iPhone, it won't be approved. ;)
(Of course, it is possible for iPhone users to install "disapproved" apps from other sources. But only a few knowledgeable people will do that, so you certainly won't make much money from your app that way.)
Yeah; a quick google shows that it's classified in the extinct superorder Dryolestoidea, which has an unclear relationship to modern mammals. It certainly wasn't a rodent, which are in the Euarchontoglires superorder. The rodents themselves split off from that branch a few tens of millions of years later.
This sort of bizarre misclasification, apparently for the thrill of being able to write "sabre-toothed squirrel", doesn't exactly give a lot of credibility to the article's author.
The most appropriate response to this is probably "WTF is this doing on a news-for-nerds site?"
and consider i believe we fund 3/4 of the UNESCO's budget that might be a problem for the UNESCO.
Well, you can believe whatever you like, but that doesn't make it true. Others have pointed out that the actual number is less that 1/4 of UNESCO's budget. Still others have pointed out that the US did drop its funding for UNESCO a while back, and UNESCO did pretty well during the years that it didn't have US funding. Some even argue that it did better, since during those years UNESCO's people didn't have to defend themselves against charges of being American puppets. (I'm not sure I believe that this was much of a problem, but what do I know?)
The "marbles" metaphor is probably a good one here. It does seem to a lot of the world like a children's game. It's part of why some people in the US have been suggesting that what the country needs is some adult guidance in Washington.
, of course, you are running a democracy, and want your tax money spent in accordance with the people's wishes.
Hmmm ... I'm a US citizen who's voted in lots of elections. I don't recall ever seeing an item on any ballot that mentioned UNESCO, or dealt with funding of any organization anywhere.
How did I miss such attempts to determine "the people's wishes"? Were there some elections that I didn't notice?
I just read a slashdot summary and it wasn't saturated with acronyms that have several completely different meanings depending on your field of expertise.
Well, I noticed a lot of use of the term "quantum", which has radically different meanings to different people. In this case, I see strong evidence that they were using the Marketing meaning of "quantum", i.e., something vaguely defined but mysterious and powerful that will impress the marks^Wcustomers when you throw it into your ad copy.
They couldn't have been using the physicists' meaning of "quantum"; it's been decades since you could understand how a computer's solid-state components worked without understanding quantum mechanics. TFA is pushing "quantum" as something new, so they must mean something different by that buzz word.
It definitely reads as a buzz word, with lots of hype over something that's vague and fuzzy (but powerful, y'know).
... assuming that it is selected by the same time honored system that textbooks are chosen, we can assume that quality will have nothing to do with what is put on the school systems computers.
Yeah; you're probably right. Depressing, isn't it?
Well, yeah, but the message I replied to was saying that even a "large percentage" is essentially meaningless. The message seems to be "We don't need things like computer-aided education as long as there are a few good teachers here and there." That's an anti-education claim that's worth arguing against. And one way to do so is to counter that even if there are only a few poor teachers, it's still worthwhile (for the childrens' sake ;-) to help students overcome the poor teaching somehow.
In reality, the situation is a whole lot more complex than any of this, though. As someone else just suggested, computerized lessons are useful even with good teachers, as are books, since it lets (some of) the students learn the basics on their own, and the teacher can then concentrate on dealing with questions and problems.
And yeah, I know; how often is that approach permitted? Sometimes, but not a "large percentage" of the time.
Few people have personal experience with "a large percentage of cases around the country", and those who do should generally have something they can cite to back up their claims.
Yeah, and it doesn't require large numbers to show that some teachers are competent and others are incompetent. Two example will suffice for an "existence proof".
A personal example: Back in grade school, I remember when "long division" was introduced. Note that I didn't say "taught", because by the end of the Spring term, none of the students in my (5th-grade?) class got it at all. I'd been fairly good at math before that, but this was taught as a pure rote memorization exercise, with no clues as to how it worked or why anyone would ever want to do something so bizarre and incomprehensible and (apparently) useless.
But next Fall, the teacher I had quickly made a comment that went over the heads of most of the kids, but I and several others instantly picked up on it. She said that to really do it right, you should write in all the zeroes at the ends of the column of numbers, since what you were really doing was multiplying the "tens" digits at the top by the remainder of subtraction at the bottom, and all those numbers really do have zeroes to the right. But people usually leave out the zeroes, because you know they're there, and it saves a bit of time. When she explained this, what was going on instantly made sense to me (and to a few others), and I was able to do it correctly from then on. In particular, I understood why you need to be careful to keep things aligned vertically, which was the main thing that tripped up most of the kids (and is also a problem with software whose results are displayed in the variable-width fonts that the artsy "designer" crowd prefer. ;-)
So right there, we have an example each of an incompetent teacher and a competent teacher for the same subject matter. A computerized lesson would (presumably) be done in the competent manner, and would make the explanation available to students who bother to read it, and would thus be better than the incompetent teacher.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, the teachers of technical subject in the lower schools are almost always incompetent. The explanation is well-known: If you're competent in math, why would you voluntarily spend your time in a low-paid job like grade-school teacher, when you could be making much better money elsewhere?
I'd suggest that computerized education might not be as good as good teachers. But until we're willing to pay what it takes to find those good teachers and attract them to teaching, we're probably stuck with the computerized stuff. And it does have the advantage that it sits there patiently waiting for the students to come along, while living teachers have lives and can't be put to sleep until a student needs them.
Because that's the real issue that most skeptics have been questioning of late.
Indeed. But there's a different take than the usual political one (denying it) that should be considered: If human activity is a major "cause" of the current warming, then it follows that human activity can indeed influence climate. This means that it is feasible for humans to control the climate for our benefit. We could stop the warming, yes, but we could also continue it for a while, or maybe reverse it a bit, if we decide that this is to our benefit.
Of course, there's a major problem that remains: Even if it's technically possible for humans to control the climate, it may turn out that we are incapable of acting together to actually do so. So far, this seems likely, but it may not be true.
We do have a bit of an example where we did pull it off: A while back we decided that atmospheric fluorocarbons were dangerous, and controls were very widely implemented. This has mostly worked, and the atmospheric fluorocarbon load has decreased significantly.
But this is somewhat of a one-off. Organizing humans on a large scale for their own benefit is known to be a very difficult problem. We can see the many reasons fairly clearly in the ongoing discussions here on /., which can mostly be characterized as nontechnical and political, and showing very little actual understanding of the issues.
But we'll see. Those of us who survive, of course.
How many people do you know that go out and by movies 40 years old? 20 years old? 10 years old? less than 5 years old? How about movies? This still holds fairly well for music, ...
Huh? You must know a very different crowd of musicians than I do. There is a lively market for music over a century old. There are a lot of publishers still profiting from selling the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc., although everything they wrote is long out of copyright.
Just last night, I played for a Simchat Torah service, and we played a number of tunes that are known to be over 100 years old. The audience loved it. We also did some songs that were newer, 10 or 30 years old, and the audience sang along. A couple of days earlier, I played at a local contra dance, where we also played tunes that were several centuries old. Several were published by Playford, back in the 17th century. The dance crowd gave us lots of compliments for our music, although none of it was "new" by the recording industry's standards.
There is a serious copyright problem that is starting to hit the "old music" part of the market, though. Publishers have developed the idea that, although a tune may be public domain, their published version of it is copyrighted -- and if you play exactly the notes they published, you have violated their copyright (even if you've never seen their publication). I know a number of people who consciously refuse to play exactly the same tune that's in any of their tune books, as a result. This sorta causes problems when people are trying to play together. And it doesn't actually protect you from the threat of a lawsuit, because you can't have all the published versions in your head, or if you do, it's hard to avoid accidentally duplicating one of them occasionally.
It used to be that "copyright" existed to prevent one publisher from copying and republishing another publisher's work. Now, it's used to prevent musicians from performing music that has been published. This is a serious perversion of the original concept of copyright. In the long run, it could kill much of the publishers' market for printed music. In particular, many original editions are now available online, mostly free in academic archives. If you learn music from them, you will probably be safe from prosecution. I have a PDF of an out-of-copyright work from the 1820s on my screen right now, and I'm prepared to present it in court if any publisher sues me for copyright infringement when I perform any of the music. And I'll probably file a countersuit if they do. A lawyer friend has assured me that claiming copyright on an 1820s original manuscript is a clearcut case of consumer fraud that he'd enjoy fighting. So far, experience is that when you mention this, publishers tend to quickly back off, but you never know when they'll decide to push it.
Well, I'd just say "I'll be burned at the stake."
There are lots of ways to defeat software (or humans) whose actions are based on knowing the truth or falsehood of something someone else says. That sounds like a simple concept, but there are a few logical problems with it.
I was tempted to suggest that we try polling readers about whether they could solve the puzzle, but of course the first person who gives convincing evidence of how they solved it would give away the the solution, making it impossible to know the truth value of subsequent replies.
(And I'd suggest that attributing such abduction and killing to "savages" is a quaint, old-fashioned phrasing, since nowadays they're much more likely to be agents of a "civilized" government. ;-)