I think that while it's not ideal, government backing is still needed.
What you say would work if we had perfect information. But we don't. We can only watch the external performance of the bank. We can't get into the meeting rooms where the real decisions are made, and find out that the guy who just ascended into a position of influence is a complete moron that will drive the bank bankrupt in some insane bid to get rich that makes no sense.
Sooner or later, some big bank will go bust. That will leave millions of people screwed, and millions of people in a desperate situation are very dangerous. Even if those people for some reason avoid doing anything dramatic, you still have millions of people suddenly having to figure out how to survive, which harms the economy even more than the bank going bust does.
That would be absolutely hellish. To make that command in a wizard you'd have to click through 20 screens or so, and if that didn't work, do it all from the beginning again.
Not that it can't be done in a GUI, but a wizard interface is a horribly wrong way of doing this particular task.
How would that help any? Supposing I was willing and able to go chop heads off animals for the sake of experimentation, unless the result of that was a peer reviewed article, I don't think it'd be particularly trustworthy. I can say whatever I want in a comment after all.
The important thing is not the distribution, but what you personally need. I've been running Ubuntu for years now, and I completely missed the introduction of Unity. Haven't ever seen it.
I run KDE, regardless of what the distribution does by default. First thing I disable all the "user friendly" crap and enable the advanced menus, fix the color prompt ("the focus in a terminal window should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt", my ass), alias dir to "ls -l --color=auto", and get to work.
It doesn't involve decision fatigue because I made the decisions years ago. The distribution is unimportant, it only matters for package availabilty, so I generally go with whatever is popular, and switch only if it turns out to be too buggy.
Besides, you're mixing things up. That article is about short term fatigue. It doesn't say anything about long term decisions.
The question IMO is whether the patents as a whole are doing what they're supposed to: promoting innovation.
In the software field, it's pretty obvious that they aren't doing that. Instead they're used as weapons to prevent new companies gaining access to markets. That is exactly the reverse of what is supposed to happen.
On those grounds alone I advocate for their complete elimination, regardless of any obviousness or lack of it.
It's very cool but seems impractical. Noisy, lots of water needed, and I think color is going to be tricky, as how are you going to reach a drop that's enclosed in different colored drops?
I have not, and I hope it stays that way. The only reason why I would contemplate it is in self-defense. But then that's unlikely to happen since I have no guns, no permit to use one, and no interest in obtaining it.
It is not exactly a pain-free way to kill an animal, and I can assure you that hunted meat is not up to the hygiene standards of halal, kosher, or industrial slaughter.
So? That one wrong is being committed doesn't mean that other wrongs are fine too.
I'm in favour of banning hunting as well.
I seriously doubt that bans on kosher or halal meat are about health more than about making life hard for Jews and especially Muslims (given what I know of the politics of Holland and that fact that observant Muslims will eat kosher meat if halal meat is unavailable). I would accept the health argument if rather than ban the meat, they government simply refused to certify its safety (but still left open the option of buying it).
It's not about the health, it's about the welfare of the animals. I oppose it solely on the grounds that it's inhumane. I don't care who does it and for what reason, and I repeat that religion absolutely has no place in this decision.
That disagrees with accounts that suggest that beheading (which is a lot faster than you can manage with a knife) doesn't always result in immediate loss of consciousness.
Also, a good deal of the muscles that move the head seem to be positioned in such a way that they are probably severed when the neck is slashed. There may not be much struggling possible at that point.
And like I said, religion has absolutely no place in this. The decision should be undertaken exclusively based on research, and not on respect for old traditions. The last research I heard of suggests that clots form quite often, an arteries constrict to try to attempt to slow the flow, so unconsciousness doesn't always follow immediately.
"Reduction of suffering" can be twisted into an excuse to ban anything. How about requiring vegetarianism by requiring a reduction of suffering to zero?
That, however, should not be twisted into an excuse to keep the same bad practices. If it's clear that we can do better, then we should.
If not, is there an objective measure of how much suffering is OK?
I would say that as little as possible, and bleeding to death by having the neck slashed sounds very painful.
Long term I hope for it to be eliminated entirely, by switching by growing the meat itself. Some progress already has been made in that direction.
The religions practice part of it should be entirely ignored.
The question should be settled entirely on empirical grounds: Does Halal meat production pass the standards of quality, hygiene, and reduction of suffering? All meat production must be held according to the same standards.
If Halal meat complies with the minimum requirements, then it should be allowed. If not, it should be banned. Religion should at no point come into it.
And how does that help you? If you're in a place like that you already know the government heavily restricts net use.
This situation makes the entire net have a security status of "unknown". You can't possibly know if anything is safe or not, so what are your options? Don't connect to anything? Connect and hope nobody is watching?
A certificate based system offers a bit more of hope: if you trust your CAs, and don't connect if the cert check fails, all the government can do is to deny your connection. Either you connect and it's secure, or the check fails and you don't transfer any data. Of course it takes properly pruning your CA list and sticking with the ones you really can trust.
The ideal situation for somebody spying would be to create a situation where it either seems things are safe, or you can't be certain either way.
For a government/telco it's trivial to block these systems.
Convergence and Perspectives require a constant connection to their servers. They can be blocked by IP or by port. The current lists are public, making that easy. Or they can just block connections to anything besides selected services like gmail, ensuring the remaining notaries are all local and present the "official" view.
New servers can be detected by trivial traffic analysis: A convergence/perspectives user will connect to their notary after connecting to a SSL service. It just takes some trivial stats collection.
These systems will only help if your government is only partially corrupt: meaning, you live in a country where the government doesn't yet do MITM on a global scale, but only when they consider it necessary. If you're in Iran or China, this probably won't help you.
Does copyleft mean that if you use something what you release has to also be open source and free?
Not if "what you release" is something that runs on the JVM.
The copyleft part only applies to you if "what you release" is the modified JVM, or something that reuses parts of its code. The license specifically contains a linking exception, so linking to the JVM (eg, using the class library that comes with it) doesn't fall under the copyleft license.
Hope plays no part, there is a substantial amount of software running on servers that have hiigher risks of faults than RAM. And that includes all those fancy database engines of yours.
If it does, it's a crap DB. Most of the reason for a database's existence is to securely and reliably store data. If it crashes even once in anything but very obscure conditions, something is badly wrong.
What is quite puzzling is that you take an argument against Upstart by attacking a functionality of it that has been severely lacking on Linux for years.
It's decent functionality on a desktop. However, such things done automatically do not belong on a server. That is my main problem with it: upstart is a heavily desktop targeted tech that works there fine, but that isn't necessarily a good idea on a server.
For instance, if you have an attacker trying to get into your box by exploiting a buffer overflow, giving them multiple tries through automatic restarts isn't a good thing.
And Linux never lacked the functionality. You could always put stuff in/etc/inittab, run monit, or launch stuff from cron.
As a skeptic, I had to ask, "What's the big deal with the video? Why can't he just tell us what his arguments were, and summarize the arguments of the other side?" After all, it's the substance of the debate that matters. It's not like a video in which the cops are caught beating some guy up; nothing on the video is evidence for anything, and so it's entirely inconsequential.
Why should he?
He was promised there would be a video. All he demanded was for the promise to be upheld. And the video is the best proof possible of what happened. A retelling from memory would almost certainly be inaccurate.
It's not like a video in which the cops are caught beating some guy up; nothing on the video is evidence for anything, and so it's entirely inconsequential.
Wrong, the video is evidence of the debate. With the video you can't argue that Coyne misrepresents what happened in his retelling, you see exactly what went on.
And what is the ratio of bad RAM vs segfault in program due to bug which is fixed by restarting the service now;-)
Hopefully, bad RAM happens more often. Databases are critical software and very well tested. I've never had one segfault on me.
And of course if say mysql would segfault, then what percentage of admins wouldn't just type "/etc/init.d/mysql restart" ?
Certainly not me. A segfault in a database is serious business, and a potential for corruption. At the very least I'd check the logs, try to make a copy of the database just in case, run a few tests to make sure everything seems to be in order, and try to find out if the error was reported on the mailing list.
Also I definitely wouldn't restart it 20 times if it kept dying. After the second time, it's time to look at the issue very seriously.
This one lays fine metal dust and then fuses it with a laser. Other printers do the same with plastic. Or squirt glue from a printing head. Or lay down molten plastic. There's more than one way to do it.
What incredible industrial process? It's similar to a beefy laser printer, and there are machines for it that are the size of a fridge. It may not be a home sized printer just yet, but by no means an entire industrial production line either.
That sounds like a bad idea. A service crash indicates something is badly wrong. Blindly restarting risks making whatever went wrong worse.
For instance, if you have a bad RAM module, one thing you really don't want is to keep restarting a crashed database and making it more and more corrupted. Even if you have backups, you risk serving corrupted data, or bringing down the rest of the service.
Again, you are positing a scientific investigation of the physical universe in your hypothesis about the testability of religion. You assume that "correct religion" involves miracles and smitings, i.e. physical phenomena, where religious believer does X which generates result Y.
Of course it has to. Every religion claims it. For instance, Jesus claimed faith could move mountains. That's a very physical claim. Christians surely pray because they think it has some real-world effect.
Do you always get Y when you do X with a human being? No, of course not, we're not programmed robots. So it would be silly to view God has some repeatable phenomena or universal rule, for one religious example.
Of course we do. What do you think medicine is based on? You give somebody an aspirin, and the amount of pain they feel decreases. Of course its not 100% exact, some people may be alergic, some may need a higher dose, but the effect is extremely reliable and very much detectable.
So same with religion. If it worked, it'd be detectable. It doesn't need to be 100% reproducible even. If it works, it will have a very much measurable effect somewhere. For instance, if Christian prayer for somebody's health worked even 5% of the time, there'd be a very noticeable amount of people Christians pray for mysteriously getting better with (say) the Jews experiencing no such thing.
If you're seriously stating that God's actions can't be possibly detected, you're effectively saying that he either never interferes with the world, or affects everybody equally, so there's no measurable difference by any parameter between Christians, Jews, Buddhist or atheists.
I would posit there are spiritual laws, just like their are physical laws. God is an engineer, of course. So different religions might get similar results for some sorts of actions, regardless of the non-spiritual trappings they tossed on them. But that's just a hypothesis/speculation. As a Christian I believe the universe has an active, personal creator who remains fully engaged with his creation, so things can be modified as necessary.
No, you don't believe that. You just implied God doesn't have a physical effect. So he doesn't modify anything.
There has also been a high amount of agreement at various times in history on very incorrect scientific beliefs. Again, more or less correct is more important than how many opinions there are.
Most of those are mesurably at least "half right". For instance, Newton didn't have the entire truth, but in the conditions he tested in, what he found still works.
Also, while epicycles weren't correct, they still predicted the positions of the planets with a pretty good precision, which is why the idea stuck for quite some time.
Also, there's a steady progression towards being more and more correct. While in comparison, the bible gets ever more and more metaphorical, with most people pretending Leviticus doesn't exist, for instance.
As an aside, according to the Bible, human beings are spiritually dead because of sin. I posit this means our ability to perceive the supernatural/spiritual universe is very limited.
In this case, we can't measure or detect anything related, and you have absolutely no reason to believe that whatever you think is correct. You have no feedback about whether you're on the right path or not.
The anti-religious wants to believe that science will eventually map out the human biological entity to show that every action we take is predictable by physical laws, thus reducing us to "mere machines". This is a faith belief, just like my belief that we each have a spiritual soul as well as our physical spirit and body.
Why, there's a good reason to think that way: There's a very long history of religion ever shrinking. We went from needing religi
You are trying to be right by avoiding properly qualifying your answer. You meant was that since there is no scientific physical evidence, the question is not answerable by science. I'm glad we agree.
It's not answerable by any method, because there's nothing to base an answer on.
If any religion was correct, the result would be visible. The adherents of the right religion would be magically healed, or be able to have their deity smite their enemies, or perform miracles, or something of that kind. But there's no evidence of any religion working better than any other, and vast civilizations went for many years practicing the wrong religion without visible negative consequences.
I remember reading an account of a Wiccan's account of experimenting with ceremonies and discovering to their astonishment that any kind of ceremony seemed to work equally well. It didn't matter if they used scented candles or not, chanted something or not, and so on. If religion worked that would be testable, and something would work better than something else, even if science was unable to explain why.
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on whether or not you're about to under go a paradigm shift or not. If you plot scientific agreement versus the timeline of history, you see lots of disagreement by scientists. And any case, arguments that "x% majority of scientists believes Y" has no value. The truth is the truth, and how many people believe or don't believe in it doesn't change what the truth is.
It's not about x%, it's about the number of competing opinions. If there were 500 different models of the Solar System, neither of which seemed to predict the movement of the planets better than any other, then it would be quite likely that none of them are correct.
No, it means someone is more or less right. The universe is what it is, we are trying to determine what the truth is. Our understanding may contain elements of the actual set of truth, and it may contain elements not in that set. So our current understanding is not the total set of truth. Those with more actual truth in their understanding are more right, those with less are less right (by empirical weight, I'm sure you could try to make an argument on another basis by trying to assigning different weighted values to each truth or subset of truth).
The process of determining truth is called "science". We try different ideas, and see which one works better. When neither idea is obviously better, then the most likely event is that everybody is wrong and we need to consider other options.
In a good study, you have two groups, one you pray for, and one you tell you pray for but don't. Done that way you can't possibly conclude the improvement is due to a placebo, as that should affect both groups equally. From there, either prayer makes something statistically different, or it doesn't.
I have nothing against them. I was merely pointing out that your philosophy also fits into that category. Why not debate the matter instead of an arbitrary "fail again"?
Of course it does, that's the point. Things that are related to reality can be universally agreed on. On matters of belief there's nothing to agree on, because it's not in any way verifiable. Anybody is free to say anything they want and so far nobody is getting smitten for it.
Sure prayer works. There are even some scientific studies on it. Mostly they attribute the effects to coincidence and the placebo effect. I will assert though that the effects are not always reproducible, so I don't assert there is a scientific reason to accept prayer.
Nope, that's the very definition of it not working. In trials, things are tested against a placebo. Something "working" is defined by being better than a placebo.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that while it's not ideal, government backing is still needed.
What you say would work if we had perfect information. But we don't. We can only watch the external performance of the bank. We can't get into the meeting rooms where the real decisions are made, and find out that the guy who just ascended into a position of influence is a complete moron that will drive the bank bankrupt in some insane bid to get rich that makes no sense.
Sooner or later, some big bank will go bust. That will leave millions of people screwed, and millions of people in a desperate situation are very dangerous. Even if those people for some reason avoid doing anything dramatic, you still have millions of people suddenly having to figure out how to survive, which harms the economy even more than the bank going bust does.
That would be absolutely hellish. To make that command in a wizard you'd have to click through 20 screens or so, and if that didn't work, do it all from the beginning again.
Not that it can't be done in a GUI, but a wizard interface is a horribly wrong way of doing this particular task.
Wow. The thing is right next to the planet, probably would make a big "kaboom" if it actually hit, and all we have so far is a badly pixelated image.
I think the tech could use a bit more funding to have more advance warning.
How would that help any? Supposing I was willing and able to go chop heads off animals for the sake of experimentation, unless the result of that was a peer reviewed article, I don't think it'd be particularly trustworthy. I can say whatever I want in a comment after all.
You're doing it wrong, I think.
The important thing is not the distribution, but what you personally need. I've been running Ubuntu for years now, and I completely missed the introduction of Unity. Haven't ever seen it.
I run KDE, regardless of what the distribution does by default. First thing I disable all the "user friendly" crap and enable the advanced menus, fix the color prompt ("the focus in a terminal window should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt", my ass), alias dir to "ls -l --color=auto", and get to work.
It doesn't involve decision fatigue because I made the decisions years ago. The distribution is unimportant, it only matters for package availabilty, so I generally go with whatever is popular, and switch only if it turns out to be too buggy.
Besides, you're mixing things up. That article is about short term fatigue. It doesn't say anything about long term decisions.
The question IMO is whether the patents as a whole are doing what they're supposed to: promoting innovation.
In the software field, it's pretty obvious that they aren't doing that. Instead they're used as weapons to prevent new companies gaining access to markets. That is exactly the reverse of what is supposed to happen.
On those grounds alone I advocate for their complete elimination, regardless of any obviousness or lack of it.
Like this?
It's very cool but seems impractical. Noisy, lots of water needed, and I think color is going to be tricky, as how are you going to reach a drop that's enclosed in different colored drops?
That disagrees with accounts that suggest that beheading (which is a lot faster than you can manage with a knife) doesn't always result in immediate loss of consciousness.
Also, a good deal of the muscles that move the head seem to be positioned in such a way that they are probably severed when the neck is slashed. There may not be much struggling possible at that point.
And like I said, religion has absolutely no place in this. The decision should be undertaken exclusively based on research, and not on respect for old traditions. The last research I heard of suggests that clots form quite often, an arteries constrict to try to attempt to slow the flow, so unconsciousness doesn't always follow immediately.
That, however, should not be twisted into an excuse to keep the same bad practices. If it's clear that we can do better, then we should.
I would say that as little as possible, and bleeding to death by having the neck slashed sounds very painful.
Long term I hope for it to be eliminated entirely, by switching by growing the meat itself. Some progress already has been made in that direction.
The religions practice part of it should be entirely ignored.
The question should be settled entirely on empirical grounds: Does Halal meat production pass the standards of quality, hygiene, and reduction of suffering? All meat production must be held according to the same standards.
If Halal meat complies with the minimum requirements, then it should be allowed. If not, it should be banned. Religion should at no point come into it.
And how does that help you? If you're in a place like that you already know the government heavily restricts net use.
This situation makes the entire net have a security status of "unknown". You can't possibly know if anything is safe or not, so what are your options? Don't connect to anything? Connect and hope nobody is watching?
A certificate based system offers a bit more of hope: if you trust your CAs, and don't connect if the cert check fails, all the government can do is to deny your connection. Either you connect and it's secure, or the check fails and you don't transfer any data. Of course it takes properly pruning your CA list and sticking with the ones you really can trust.
The ideal situation for somebody spying would be to create a situation where it either seems things are safe, or you can't be certain either way.
For a government/telco it's trivial to block these systems.
Convergence and Perspectives require a constant connection to their servers. They can be blocked by IP or by port. The current lists are public, making that easy. Or they can just block connections to anything besides selected services like gmail, ensuring the remaining notaries are all local and present the "official" view.
New servers can be detected by trivial traffic analysis: A convergence/perspectives user will connect to their notary after connecting to a SSL service. It just takes some trivial stats collection.
These systems will only help if your government is only partially corrupt: meaning, you live in a country where the government doesn't yet do MITM on a global scale, but only when they consider it necessary. If you're in Iran or China, this probably won't help you.
Not if "what you release" is something that runs on the JVM.
The copyleft part only applies to you if "what you release" is the modified JVM, or something that reuses parts of its code. The license specifically contains a linking exception, so linking to the JVM (eg, using the class library that comes with it) doesn't fall under the copyleft license.
If it does, it's a crap DB. Most of the reason for a database's existence is to securely and reliably store data. If it crashes even once in anything but very obscure conditions, something is badly wrong.
It's decent functionality on a desktop. However, such things done automatically do not belong on a server. That is my main problem with it: upstart is a heavily desktop targeted tech that works there fine, but that isn't necessarily a good idea on a server.
For instance, if you have an attacker trying to get into your box by exploiting a buffer overflow, giving them multiple tries through automatic restarts isn't a good thing.
And Linux never lacked the functionality. You could always put stuff in /etc/inittab, run monit, or launch stuff from cron.
That risk existed on every space shuttle flight. Doesn't seem to have been a problem.
Why should he?
He was promised there would be a video. All he demanded was for the promise to be upheld. And the video is the best proof possible of what happened. A retelling from memory would almost certainly be inaccurate.
Wrong, the video is evidence of the debate. With the video you can't argue that Coyne misrepresents what happened in his retelling, you see exactly what went on.
Hopefully, bad RAM happens more often. Databases are critical software and very well tested. I've never had one segfault on me.
Certainly not me. A segfault in a database is serious business, and a potential for corruption. At the very least I'd check the logs, try to make a copy of the database just in case, run a few tests to make sure everything seems to be in order, and try to find out if the error was reported on the mailing list.
Also I definitely wouldn't restart it 20 times if it kept dying. After the second time, it's time to look at the issue very seriously.
No, we don't. It's a 3D printer.
This one lays fine metal dust and then fuses it with a laser. Other printers do the same with plastic. Or squirt glue from a printing head. Or lay down molten plastic. There's more than one way to do it.
What incredible industrial process? It's similar to a beefy laser printer, and there are machines for it that are the size of a fridge. It may not be a home sized printer just yet, but by no means an entire industrial production line either.
That sounds like a bad idea. A service crash indicates something is badly wrong. Blindly restarting risks making whatever went wrong worse.
For instance, if you have a bad RAM module, one thing you really don't want is to keep restarting a crashed database and making it more and more corrupted. Even if you have backups, you risk serving corrupted data, or bringing down the rest of the service.
Of course it has to. Every religion claims it. For instance, Jesus claimed faith could move mountains. That's a very physical claim. Christians surely pray because they think it has some real-world effect.
Of course we do. What do you think medicine is based on? You give somebody an aspirin, and the amount of pain they feel decreases. Of course its not 100% exact, some people may be alergic, some may need a higher dose, but the effect is extremely reliable and very much detectable.
So same with religion. If it worked, it'd be detectable. It doesn't need to be 100% reproducible even. If it works, it will have a very much measurable effect somewhere. For instance, if Christian prayer for somebody's health worked even 5% of the time, there'd be a very noticeable amount of people Christians pray for mysteriously getting better with (say) the Jews experiencing no such thing.
If you're seriously stating that God's actions can't be possibly detected, you're effectively saying that he either never interferes with the world, or affects everybody equally, so there's no measurable difference by any parameter between Christians, Jews, Buddhist or atheists.
No, you don't believe that. You just implied God doesn't have a physical effect. So he doesn't modify anything.
Most of those are mesurably at least "half right". For instance, Newton didn't have the entire truth, but in the conditions he tested in, what he found still works.
Also, while epicycles weren't correct, they still predicted the positions of the planets with a pretty good precision, which is why the idea stuck for quite some time.
Also, there's a steady progression towards being more and more correct. While in comparison, the bible gets ever more and more metaphorical, with most people pretending Leviticus doesn't exist, for instance.
In this case, we can't measure or detect anything related, and you have absolutely no reason to believe that whatever you think is correct. You have no feedback about whether you're on the right path or not.
Why, there's a good reason to think that way: There's a very long history of religion ever shrinking. We went from needing religi
It's not answerable by any method, because there's nothing to base an answer on.
If any religion was correct, the result would be visible. The adherents of the right religion would be magically healed, or be able to have their deity smite their enemies, or perform miracles, or something of that kind. But there's no evidence of any religion working better than any other, and vast civilizations went for many years practicing the wrong religion without visible negative consequences.
I remember reading an account of a Wiccan's account of experimenting with ceremonies and discovering to their astonishment that any kind of ceremony seemed to work equally well. It didn't matter if they used scented candles or not, chanted something or not, and so on. If religion worked that would be testable, and something would work better than something else, even if science was unable to explain why.
It's not about x%, it's about the number of competing opinions. If there were 500 different models of the Solar System, neither of which seemed to predict the movement of the planets better than any other, then it would be quite likely that none of them are correct.
The process of determining truth is called "science". We try different ideas, and see which one works better. When neither idea is obviously better, then the most likely event is that everybody is wrong and we need to consider other options.
Done properly, we get ever closer to the truth.
That's a badly run study then.
In a good study, you have two groups, one you pray for, and one you tell you pray for but don't. Done that way you can't possibly conclude the improvement is due to a placebo, as that should affect both groups equally. From there, either prayer makes something statistically different, or it doesn't.
Of course it does, that's the point. Things that are related to reality can be universally agreed on. On matters of belief there's nothing to agree on, because it's not in any way verifiable. Anybody is free to say anything they want and so far nobody is getting smitten for it.
Nope, that's the very definition of it not working. In trials, things are tested against a placebo. Something "working" is defined by being better than a placebo.