Re:Can atheists refute one simple fact?
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Largest Genome Ever
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Other people spoke of the other parts of this already, but I thought I'd make a point I rarely see:
When people speak of religion being the source of morality, it becomes obvious they never actually read the bible. In it, Moses, Abraham and a few other people actually argue with God and get him to change his mind on smiting some people. If they can argue with God on smiting, then they must have a source of morality that's not God, because otherwise whatever God says is the moral thing, and there can't be an argument.
I understand that an ATM can be potentially messed with remotely.
But what people want from the ATM is money. If making a withdrawal even if you do something remotely you must eventually collect the money in person. And if you were to fake a deposit, eventually the bank will realize that the ATM has a record of money being deposited, but no physical money to match it.
1. There's strict accounting of whose account is being accessed. 2. If you're going to hack an ATM, you have to have physical access to it. 3. If you manage to steal money from an ATM, it'll be obvious. They just have to compare the amount of money there was inside with how much there should have been.
This doesn't hold with voting machines. The voter doesn't have an account, so detecting something was manipulated is much harder. Also, the money is at the physical ATM. If you're hacking it remotely, then you're not where the money is, and if you're hacking it in person then you can be quite certain you were filmed by a camera. Also there's a lot of money in it, so the bank has a lot of incentives to try to catch you if you manage to steal some.
And when the drug cartels, finding the pot business no longer lucrative, move on over to cocaine etc.. what then?
Then legalize cocaine, of course.
As long as there is something that's outlawed, there will be outlaws performing it. If you legalize it, those (and others) will move on over to the next outlawed thing. Legalizing something to take away the raison d'etra for these cartels won't work. Legalizing booze didn't make the mob vanish. They moved on over to coke and gambling. It took concerted effort from the FBI to stamp them out.
The objective should be legalizing everything that can possibly be.
Once we're done with that, what's left for the mob are things that everybody agrees are uttely vile, such as extortion and protection rackets. With things like drugs there are very large amount of people that don't think there's anything wrong with them. A dealer may fear the police, but also has people who like him, like his customers.
With things like protection rackets nobody likes the people involved, so any attempt to "do business" is extremely risky. Anybody aware is extremely likely to try to turn them in to the police. The customers for such services if they exist are going to be very few. Also I'm pretty sure that much fewer people would be willing to do something like that. Unlike with drugs, virtually everybody agrees it's wrong. And the kind of person who would break somebody's legs for money is exactly the kind of person who should be behind bars.
If legalized it can be easily grown locally in mass commercial negotiations, packaged and distributed like any other product. Without losses due to law enforcement, the need to spend large amounts of money on keeping it hidden and so on, it will be much cheaper.
And who is going to buy from some shady dealer when you can just walk into a shop and get it much easier, cheaper, of a probably better quality, and guaranteed that it's not mixed with anything funny?
What's the last time you saw a shady guy in an alley selling tobacco?
1. It's an implant. It can't be trivially removable, it's a part of yourself like your leg is 2. It's not static. It either affects the rest of the body, or is directly controlled by it.
That is, it's not natural, but it works like a body part and is a part of the body.
Not cyborg: external attachments like peg legs, glasses. Internal static devices like screws and metal plates. A bullet stuck in you doesn't make you a cyborg, so a static chunk of metal or plastic doesn't either, even if it works to your benefit.
Cyborg: implanted artificial hand linked to the nerves, controllable like a body part. Pacemakers. Internal insulin pumps that sense the current concentration and inject as needed. Artificial heart. Circuitry connected to the brain.
Just that the looms didn't do any math doesn't mean they weren't a a programmable device. Surely realizing that a programmable mechanical machine can be built is one of the steps on the way of figuring out how to make a machine that can solve arbitrary problems.
And can it be a complete coincidence that Babbage decided to use the same storage medium?
With a NAT, if you open any ports, it forwards the packets to the host behind it. So if you forwarded something exploitable, you get absolutely zero protection. With a router, if you let inbound connections pass through, it passes the packets to the hosts behind it. So if you allowed something exploitable, you get zero protection.
With a NAT, you can choose not to forward any ports. With a router, you can choose not to allow any inbound connections.
You can do exactly the same thing with a stateful firewall. Absolutely nothing stops you from making it work the same way a NAT does.
Well, explain then, how will the free market work in this case?
In my view, if there really was a free market, everybody would have 50 ISPs to choose from, and the first one to suggest such a thing would be left with no customers, because this isn't in anybody's but the ISP's interest.
Also, why would you pay for a connection from such an ISP? If it's a free market then I expect you'll be choosing the best ISP for your needs. So what in this scheme works in your favour?
Facile BS. Bandwidth is over-allocated, and at some point you need to decide "which packet goes through first, I've got 10 in line".
Dropping packets without thinking much is easy. You can limit the buffer and drop anything that won't fit, or do something like RED. You can do this without looking at the packet itself.
Dropping packets by customer requires examining the packet in detail, and deciding which priority it should have. This costs more effort, which means you need more CPU power to handle it.
There's no reason not to charge to allow someone to move to the front of the line.
The first company who pays will be happy, it will have noticeably better performance.
The second probably as well.
By the 200th or so, there will be so many "priority" customers that the situation will be effectively the same it was before, except they will be paying for that privilege of having any traffic delivered at all. If the link is so busy that priority traffic can take all of it, and it's indeed priority traffic, then everything else is going to get slowed down to a crawl if it gets delivered at all. And guess what, if you have a small website, or work at a small company, that's where your traffic will end up: at the very bottom of the pile.
Think they'll upgrade the pipe? But why would they? There must be congestion for a priority scheme to make sense.
The end state of this is considerably worse than what we have now, and in exchange for it we get no benefits. There is no reason for society to allow it.
SELinux, while flawed, is a massive step in the right direction, though. I'd liken it to at least putting up security cameras and reinforced plexi-glass at the local bank. It won't stop real hardened thieves, but it will deter the random criminal most of the time. As it is, on my Windows box, I have to have the following running:
Why not? How do you think they'll get around it?
5 programs just to get online. And it's only going to get worse until the OS makers get rightfully paranoid and distrustful.
And that reminds me why I don't use Windows anymore. Not good out of the box, lots of third party software required that slows the system down to a crawl and constantly wants attention, and which eventually is almost guaranteed to do something fishy or outright against your interests.
No, this is most definitely the entirely wrong way to do security. Not only it misses things, sometimes it actually sides with the very thing it's supposed to protect from.
You know, you could read the summary and learn it's temporary
They're probably going to spend some time figuring out what to call it, but meanwhile they have to call it something and they can't go infringing on trademarks.
No, the walled garden is just as flawed. It fails as soon whoever maintains it lets the wrong thing in.
The real security approach is more like SELinux, where any random application is prevented from the system from accessing more than it's supposed to be able to. So for instance, a secure MP3 player is only capable of playing music, even if exploited via a buffer overflow, because the process itself has no ability to do anything but reading MP3 files and outputting sound.
The problem with with Twitter is that the web moved from static content to combining code and data, so any input needs to be carefully sanitized. The fix is making sure that any input sent to Twitter is properly escaped so that it can never, ever reach outside its bounds and execute. There's no need to manually vet, or use an antivirus-like approach then.
Thing is both you and the grandparent had some sort of plan, and the ability to get it done.
The vast majority of people pointing to Gates of Zuckenberg don't. Gates didn't get where he is by just pointing to "Einstein did badly at school" and then sitting on his butt. He did work, and lots of it. He got into Harvard and left it to found MS, not because he wasn't able to finish it. He also had a lot of luck in having rich lawyers for parents, which I'm sure helped with getting him access to hardware, and probably some legal advice and perhaps financial help to fund MS. Then there was the sheer luck with DOS.
Also, business isn't for everybody. Many people don't have the dedication or the skills to get a business off the ground.
Maybe in America, where everything seems to be about an hour away. Here the recycling center is at about 5 minutes away by car, and right along the way for driving out of the city anyway. Also the local hardware shop (which is along the way to the underground) will take them for recycling, so no need to drive anywhere even.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my art teacher. I said the US Congress has banned incandescent bulbs effective 2012. He immediately pointed out that the law doesn't directly ban incandescents. It requires a 50% reduction in energy usage. I replied that's the same effect as a direct ban because no incandescent can meet that standard, so what's the difference? None.
There's a big difference.
The reason why the law makes an efficiency requirement is because it's not the bulbs themselves that are the concern, but the energy they use. Banning incandescent light bulbs specifically would allow them to be replaced with something even less efficient, if there's an alternative that's cheap and isn't technically an "incandescent light bulb". If that happened, the law would have had the opposite of the desired effect.
By writing the law that way you don't mandate or exclude any technology. If an incandescent light bulb can be made to be efficient enough, that's just fine.
True, it's within their rights to do it. And it's within my rights to explain why it's a stupid thing to do.
Nevertheless, I hope they go ahead with it. I don't live there, so I don't care that much about what they do. I think they'll either get the worst coverage in the country, or the phone companies will get fed up and leave, leaving them with no phone service. I look forward to reading what will happen then.
Assuming signal strength is somehow harmful, they're doing the exactly wrong thing to deal with it.
By imposing those limits, they force towers to be further apart. To cover the area anyway they'll have to bring the power way up. The schools, daycare centers and so on will probably get about the same amount of RF as before, but whatever is near that tower will get cooked. And for those who protest the aesthetics, it's going to be a big ugly one as well.
What they should be doing instead is peppering the area with a weak tower on every roof. Then they can have coverage without strong emitters anywhere.
Radio signal strength decays exponentially. To give a city good coverage you have to place towers at more or less regular intervals. You cover the area with towers whose coverage overlaps like this.
If the laws are such that most of the city is out of limits for tower placement, it means that a lot of people are going to get really crappy reception. You could place the Mother of All Towers in the allowed bit, but a tower has a limit to the amount of calls it can handle, so it's not going to work very well.
information noun 1. knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance; news:information concerning a crime. 2. knowledge gained through study, communication, research, instruction, etc.; factual data:His wealth of general information is amazing. 8. Computers. 8.a. important or useful facts obtained as output from a computer by means of processing input data with a program:Using the input data, we have come up with some significant new information. 8.b. data at any stage of processing (input, output, storage, transmission, etc.).
1. It documents a fact or circumstance of a crime that was committed. 2. It's factual information about what the people represented look like. 8. It's the processed form of the data that came from a CCD, for instance.
I think the first one is the most important. The problem with such laws is that any handling of it is likely to get you in trouble, which heavily discourages reporting it to the police should somebody come across it.
I don't object paying for stuff. I pay for indie games, and donated to the musopen project and some others. Many of those are things I don't even have to pay for if I don't want to.
I object paying to parasites who want to create laws that will make it impossible for me to avoid paying them, because they want to introduce taxes on media, internet connections, and restrictions as to what my hardware can do. Simply not buying their stuff doesn't do it, because even if I don't buy or pirate a single CD they'll still put a tax on my hard disk and connection, throttle my torrent of CC licensed music, include DRM crap in my hardware, and prevent centuries old material from entering the public domain. If I don't buy, they'll say that I'm torrenting and use that as a justification for the things I've listed.
That bullshit has to be removed at the source, through laws that make it illegal and cut its funding. I'll gladly pay the artists, but I don't want to give a single cent to the parasites from the RIAA, MPAA and ASCAP.
Assumption on my part, since it's Steam we're talking about. I imagine that if you can control things remotely you'd avoid hardcoding a date. What if for whatever reason they decide to release a week earlier, or a bug results in copies shipping set to activate in 20 years? Much better to be able to change your mind at any time.
The activation server wouldn't activate until 10AM EST (not local time) because that was the release time the publishers set. The real question is why are they setting the release time in the middle of the day, and why are they selling boxed copies beforehand. It's actually pretty common for games to be sold before their release date, and then not work because the infrastructure isn't up.
I don't care. I don't like that the ability to deny running the game exists at all. It's not important who controls it, or for what reason the system is used.
If there wasn't Steam, or Steam didn't have the ability but the game checked an activation server at Firaxis, I wouln't like it any better. I repeat: the existence of a server anywhere that can deny me the ability to run the game for any reason is a 100% guarantee I'm not buying the game. The only exception allowed is for MMOs for the obvious reason, but I don't play any except Second Life, which has third party servers.
Last time I checked, Civ had a single player mode, for which theres absolutely no justification to require a server anywhere.
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Other people spoke of the other parts of this already, but I thought I'd make a point I rarely see:
When people speak of religion being the source of morality, it becomes obvious they never actually read the bible. In it, Moses, Abraham and a few other people actually argue with God and get him to change his mind on smiting some people. If they can argue with God on smiting, then they must have a source of morality that's not God, because otherwise whatever God says is the moral thing, and there can't be an argument.
I understand that an ATM can be potentially messed with remotely.
But what people want from the ATM is money. If making a withdrawal even if you do something remotely you must eventually collect the money in person. And if you were to fake a deposit, eventually the bank will realize that the ATM has a record of money being deposited, but no physical money to match it.
IMO, things that work in the ATM's favour:
1. There's strict accounting of whose account is being accessed.
2. If you're going to hack an ATM, you have to have physical access to it.
3. If you manage to steal money from an ATM, it'll be obvious. They just have to compare the amount of money there was inside with how much there should have been.
This doesn't hold with voting machines. The voter doesn't have an account, so detecting something was manipulated is much harder. Also, the money is at the physical ATM. If you're hacking it remotely, then you're not where the money is, and if you're hacking it in person then you can be quite certain you were filmed by a camera. Also there's a lot of money in it, so the bank has a lot of incentives to try to catch you if you manage to steal some.
Then legalize cocaine, of course.
The objective should be legalizing everything that can possibly be.
Once we're done with that, what's left for the mob are things that everybody agrees are uttely vile, such as extortion and protection rackets. With things like drugs there are very large amount of people that don't think there's anything wrong with them. A dealer may fear the police, but also has people who like him, like his customers.
With things like protection rackets nobody likes the people involved, so any attempt to "do business" is extremely risky. Anybody aware is extremely likely to try to turn them in to the police. The customers for such services if they exist are going to be very few. Also I'm pretty sure that much fewer people would be willing to do something like that. Unlike with drugs, virtually everybody agrees it's wrong. And the kind of person who would break somebody's legs for money is exactly the kind of person who should be behind bars.
The current dealers will just go out of business.
If legalized it can be easily grown locally in mass commercial negotiations, packaged and distributed like any other product. Without losses due to law enforcement, the need to spend large amounts of money on keeping it hidden and so on, it will be much cheaper.
And who is going to buy from some shady dealer when you can just walk into a shop and get it much easier, cheaper, of a probably better quality, and guaranteed that it's not mixed with anything funny?
What's the last time you saw a shady guy in an alley selling tobacco?
IMO, requirements for a cyborg:
1. It's an implant. It can't be trivially removable, it's a part of yourself like your leg is
2. It's not static. It either affects the rest of the body, or is directly controlled by it.
That is, it's not natural, but it works like a body part and is a part of the body.
Not cyborg: external attachments like peg legs, glasses. Internal static devices like screws and metal plates. A bullet stuck in you doesn't make you a cyborg, so a static chunk of metal or plastic doesn't either, even if it works to your benefit.
Cyborg: implanted artificial hand linked to the nerves, controllable like a body part. Pacemakers. Internal insulin pumps that sense the current concentration and inject as needed. Artificial heart. Circuitry connected to the brain.
Why doesn't that qualify as "building on"?
Just that the looms didn't do any math doesn't mean they weren't a a programmable device. Surely realizing that a programmable mechanical machine can be built is one of the steps on the way of figuring out how to make a machine that can solve arbitrary problems.
And can it be a complete coincidence that Babbage decided to use the same storage medium?
No, the security is exactly the same.
With a NAT, if you open any ports, it forwards the packets to the host behind it. So if you forwarded something exploitable, you get absolutely zero protection.
With a router, if you let inbound connections pass through, it passes the packets to the hosts behind it. So if you allowed something exploitable, you get zero protection.
With a NAT, you can choose not to forward any ports.
With a router, you can choose not to allow any inbound connections.
You can do exactly the same thing with a stateful firewall. Absolutely nothing stops you from making it work the same way a NAT does.
Well, explain then, how will the free market work in this case?
In my view, if there really was a free market, everybody would have 50 ISPs to choose from, and the first one to suggest such a thing would be left with no customers, because this isn't in anybody's but the ISP's interest.
Also, why would you pay for a connection from such an ISP? If it's a free market then I expect you'll be choosing the best ISP for your needs. So what in this scheme works in your favour?
Dropping packets without thinking much is easy. You can limit the buffer and drop anything that won't fit, or do something like RED. You can do this without looking at the packet itself.
Dropping packets by customer requires examining the packet in detail, and deciding which priority it should have. This costs more effort, which means you need more CPU power to handle it.
The first company who pays will be happy, it will have noticeably better performance.
The second probably as well.
By the 200th or so, there will be so many "priority" customers that the situation will be effectively the same it was before, except they will be paying for that privilege of having any traffic delivered at all. If the link is so busy that priority traffic can take all of it, and it's indeed priority traffic, then everything else is going to get slowed down to a crawl if it gets delivered at all. And guess what, if you have a small website, or work at a small company, that's where your traffic will end up: at the very bottom of the pile.
Think they'll upgrade the pipe? But why would they? There must be congestion for a priority scheme to make sense.
The end state of this is considerably worse than what we have now, and in exchange for it we get no benefits. There is no reason for society to allow it.
Why not? How do you think they'll get around it?
And that reminds me why I don't use Windows anymore. Not good out of the box, lots of third party software required that slows the system down to a crawl and constantly wants attention, and which eventually is almost guaranteed to do something fishy or outright against your interests.
Examples:
Zone Alarm, which makes it sound like it's saying you've got a virus (unless you read very carefully) and suggests to pay money.
Antivirus companies, for instance Symantec, which worked closely with the maker to avoid reporting the Sony rootkit.
No, this is most definitely the entirely wrong way to do security. Not only it misses things, sometimes it actually sides with the very thing it's supposed to protect from.
You know, you could read the summary and learn it's temporary
They're probably going to spend some time figuring out what to call it, but meanwhile they have to call it something and they can't go infringing on trademarks.
No, the walled garden is just as flawed. It fails as soon whoever maintains it lets the wrong thing in.
The real security approach is more like SELinux, where any random application is prevented from the system from accessing more than it's supposed to be able to. So for instance, a secure MP3 player is only capable of playing music, even if exploited via a buffer overflow, because the process itself has no ability to do anything but reading MP3 files and outputting sound.
The problem with with Twitter is that the web moved from static content to combining code and data, so any input needs to be carefully sanitized. The fix is making sure that any input sent to Twitter is properly escaped so that it can never, ever reach outside its bounds and execute. There's no need to manually vet, or use an antivirus-like approach then.
Thing is both you and the grandparent had some sort of plan, and the ability to get it done.
The vast majority of people pointing to Gates of Zuckenberg don't. Gates didn't get where he is by just pointing to "Einstein did badly at school" and then sitting on his butt. He did work, and lots of it. He got into Harvard and left it to found MS, not because he wasn't able to finish it. He also had a lot of luck in having rich lawyers for parents, which I'm sure helped with getting him access to hardware, and probably some legal advice and perhaps financial help to fund MS. Then there was the sheer luck with DOS.
Also, business isn't for everybody. Many people don't have the dedication or the skills to get a business off the ground.
Maybe in America, where everything seems to be about an hour away. Here the recycling center is at about 5 minutes away by car, and right along the way for driving out of the city anyway. Also the local hardware shop (which is along the way to the underground) will take them for recycling, so no need to drive anywhere even.
There's a big difference.
The reason why the law makes an efficiency requirement is because it's not the bulbs themselves that are the concern, but the energy they use. Banning incandescent light bulbs specifically would allow them to be replaced with something even less efficient, if there's an alternative that's cheap and isn't technically an "incandescent light bulb". If that happened, the law would have had the opposite of the desired effect.
By writing the law that way you don't mandate or exclude any technology. If an incandescent light bulb can be made to be efficient enough, that's just fine.
Whoops. Thanks for the correction.
True, it's within their rights to do it. And it's within my rights to explain why it's a stupid thing to do.
Nevertheless, I hope they go ahead with it. I don't live there, so I don't care that much about what they do. I think they'll either get the worst coverage in the country, or the phone companies will get fed up and leave, leaving them with no phone service. I look forward to reading what will happen then.
Assuming signal strength is somehow harmful, they're doing the exactly wrong thing to deal with it.
By imposing those limits, they force towers to be further apart. To cover the area anyway they'll have to bring the power way up. The schools, daycare centers and so on will probably get about the same amount of RF as before, but whatever is near that tower will get cooked. And for those who protest the aesthetics, it's going to be a big ugly one as well.
What they should be doing instead is peppering the area with a weak tower on every roof. Then they can have coverage without strong emitters anywhere.
I don't think you get it.
Radio signal strength decays exponentially. To give a city good coverage you have to place towers at more or less regular intervals. You cover the area with towers whose coverage overlaps like this.
If the laws are such that most of the city is out of limits for tower placement, it means that a lot of people are going to get really crappy reception. You could place the Mother of All Towers in the allowed bit, but a tower has a limit to the amount of calls it can handle, so it's not going to work very well.
It is, in several senses.
1. It documents a fact or circumstance of a crime that was committed.
2. It's factual information about what the people represented look like.
8. It's the processed form of the data that came from a CCD, for instance.
I think the first one is the most important. The problem with such laws is that any handling of it is likely to get you in trouble, which heavily discourages reporting it to the police should somebody come across it.
No, it's not about that.
I don't object paying for stuff. I pay for indie games, and donated to the musopen project and some others. Many of those are things I don't even have to pay for if I don't want to.
I object paying to parasites who want to create laws that will make it impossible for me to avoid paying them, because they want to introduce taxes on media, internet connections, and restrictions as to what my hardware can do. Simply not buying their stuff doesn't do it, because even if I don't buy or pirate a single CD they'll still put a tax on my hard disk and connection, throttle my torrent of CC licensed music, include DRM crap in my hardware, and prevent centuries old material from entering the public domain. If I don't buy, they'll say that I'm torrenting and use that as a justification for the things I've listed.
That bullshit has to be removed at the source, through laws that make it illegal and cut its funding. I'll gladly pay the artists, but I don't want to give a single cent to the parasites from the RIAA, MPAA and ASCAP.
Assumption on my part, since it's Steam we're talking about. I imagine that if you can control things remotely you'd avoid hardcoding a date. What if for whatever reason they decide to release a week earlier, or a bug results in copies shipping set to activate in 20 years? Much better to be able to change your mind at any time.
I don't care. I don't like that the ability to deny running the game exists at all. It's not important who controls it, or for what reason the system is used.
If there wasn't Steam, or Steam didn't have the ability but the game checked an activation server at Firaxis, I wouln't like it any better. I repeat: the existence of a server anywhere that can deny me the ability to run the game for any reason is a 100% guarantee I'm not buying the game. The only exception allowed is for MMOs for the obvious reason, but I don't play any except Second Life, which has third party servers.
Last time I checked, Civ had a single player mode, for which theres absolutely no justification to require a server anywhere.
Now the history brute forcing is creative, and rather creepy as well. Browsers should close that hole.