You are right, although I would like to point out that the terms "public-key cryptography" and "secret-key cryptography" (note "secret" instead of "private") are preferred because of the lower risk of confusion.
Well, I don't know. Many scientific theories cannot be directly falsified (evolution and global warming leap to mind) but are widely regarded as the best extant explanations for the data. (...)
Finding fossils that show that earth's fauna has never changed would disprove evolution. Global warming will be shown to be true of false in time, by simply monitoring temperatures. But I agree that disprovability is not the only criterion.
I'm not the only one to say there needs to be a way to disprove a theory:
There is a very important characteristic of a scientific theory or hypothesis which differentiates it from, for example, an act of faith: a theory must be ``falsifiable''.
Back to your post.
Direct falsification is only one particular method of testing theories. Not that this has much to do with UFOs, etc.
A theory that says "there are aliens on Mars, they look like green dogs and visit Earth every Friday" can be disproved by taking pictures of Mars. A theory that says "aliens cannot be detected but they exist" is unscientific because it cannot be proven wrong.
And proving something wrong is exactly what we're talking about. It can apply to dowsing of pictures of faeries, for example.
the Evidence skeptics cry for is, for all intents and purposes, unattainable. There have been a wide number of studies which have given positive results of various phenomena.
Well, well. The scientific method suggests (among other things) that anything that can be disproven is scientific. Every discovery, to be called scientific, must have some way to be shown false. This is true for all current scientific theories and some past ones, for example Newtonian physics - that have been proven wrong since.
So, to make my point short: You claim we should believe "various" phenomena (crop circles, I guess). Care to suggest an experiment that could disprove their validity? If the experiment is well-designed, I'm sure Randi would accept to go through that experiment.
You say there are many reviews that show positive results. Care to share references?
You may have had a similar experience to mine: download eclipse (looong download), run it, try to get to the file menu... file menu? Hello?
Alt-F does not work.
Don't uninstall Eclipse at this point, as I almost did, and let me save you some time of searching in the bug database to find bug 11912.
All you have to do is turn off numlock, and the keyboard shortcuts will work again!
I find it amazing that version 2 of a programming tool still has keyboard problems like this one. Am I the only one with numlock always on (you know, I only need one set of arrows on my keyboard, not two) - and who uses keyboard shortcuts when I am coding?
Lets say that OpenOffice's Impress costed 1 dollar. Is MS PowerPoint really 300 times better than OpenOffice Impress?
Please. This comparison is so wrong! What if PowerPoint can do the job but OpenOffice cannot? Then, regardless of how cheap OpenOffice is, you should get PowerPoint.
As far as the spam stuff goes there is a feature I have been thinking about that I have never seen. I would like a program that has the ability to send the e-mail back with forged headers to make it appear that the e-mail addres does not exist.
Additionally, I'm not a believer that FPS needs to be increased much more than it is.
I cannot disagree more. Film runs at 24fps, and that is not always adequate. *Every* time a movie pans rapidly one can see this. Ever tried to follow some object as it quickly moves horizontally on the screen? It jumps by several inches between each frame, and yes, you can tell!
I find it hard to believe that other people would not notice it. Maybe this is like the Sony Trinitron lines: you only notice them once someone points them out to you, and then you wish you didn't know because you cannot ignore them anymore.
We need a higher fps in the theaters, so that fast camera motion (aside from zoom) can be pain-free again.
The problem is not that CIO's should be willing to pay double the price. The root cause of this problem is that, as you in fact say, it takes twice as long to build quality software.
This delay has a huge factor in today's market, and results in an inacceptable price hike. The fact is, building good software should only take you 10% longer.
I propose that the fied needs to mature (better practices, better tools) so that quality software becomes easier to build. At that point, the market forces will cause companies to buy quality (because it'll be worth it economically speaking) and then (but only then) will software quality stop being an oxymoron.
You are right, Seti@home would not be able to detect any modern signal since they look like white noise unless you know what you are looking for.
I think that the point, however, is that seti@home is looking for signals that extraterrestrials would send *in order to be found*, as earth itself did in the past. These signals are deliberately simple, just a sort of "hello, we are out there".
There exists a system which works more or less exactly the way you describe, but it is used to deliver public-key certificates instead of just being a login server. It is used at cornell, here is all the info:
> 1. Standardized keyboard shortcuts. (...)
> If I can alt+tab between apps (or to my dos
> console to move files around) I tend to do it.
> If I can alt+F4 to kill a window or app, I'll do
> that. etc.
Actually, many windowmanagers have this as a default and almost all can be set to do it. I used Sawmill, WindowMaker and fvwm2 and all of them have alt-tab and alt-F4. Not to mention the virtual screens (cannot live without - does WindowsXP finally have them built in? No?).
So maybe all we need is that the distros (RH, for example) stop doing the wrong thing and install good defaults (or do they already? I wouldn't know, not using RH).
Back to the future, indeed. I remember a presentation about how NASA was going to be "better, cheaper". I guess the two Mars crashes have been a tough reality check...
I know this has been posted before, but it bears repeating:
Macrovision blocks a number of uses that are "fair" (such as hooking the DVD player to the VCR because the TV hookup is hard to reach). If circumventing them for legal uses was to be outlawed then we would be denied fair use.
Slashdot Mirror
I've received spam from Road-Runner, a well-established high-speed internet provider. Oh, and owned by Time Warner. Is that big enough for you?
Aha... is that based on a precomputed sieve with 10^100 elements, by any chance? ;-)
(it's googol, by the way. Google.com is obviously not prime, based on the fact that they haven't IPO'd yet)
You are right, although I would like to point out that the terms "public-key cryptography" and "secret-key cryptography" (note "secret" instead of "private") are preferred because of the lower risk of confusion.
-
Well, I don't know. Many scientific theories cannot be directly falsified (evolution and global warming leap to mind) but are widely regarded as the best extant explanations for the data. (...)
Finding fossils that show that earth's fauna has never changed would disprove evolution. Global warming will be shown to be true of false in time, by simply monitoring temperatures. But I agree that disprovability is not the only criterion.I'm not the only one to say there needs to be a way to disprove a theory:
- There is a very important characteristic of a scientific theory or hypothesis which differentiates it from, for example, an act of faith: a theory must be ``falsifiable''.
Back to your post.-
Direct falsification is only one particular method of testing theories. Not that this has much to do with UFOs, etc.
A theory that says "there are aliens on Mars, they look like green dogs and visit Earth every Friday" can be disproved by taking pictures of Mars. A theory that says "aliens cannot be detected but they exist" is unscientific because it cannot be proven wrong.And proving something wrong is exactly what we're talking about. It can apply to dowsing of pictures of faeries, for example.
-
the Evidence skeptics cry for is, for all intents and purposes, unattainable. There have been a wide number of studies which have given positive results of various phenomena.
Well, well. The scientific method suggests (among other things) that anything that can be disproven is scientific. Every discovery, to be called scientific, must have some way to be shown false. This is true for all current scientific theories and some past ones, for example Newtonian physics - that have been proven wrong since.So, to make my point short: You claim we should believe "various" phenomena (crop circles, I guess). Care to suggest an experiment that could disprove their validity? If the experiment is well-designed, I'm sure Randi would accept to go through that experiment.
You say there are many reviews that show positive results. Care to share references?
Alt-F does not work.
Don't uninstall Eclipse at this point, as I almost did, and let me save you some time of searching in the bug database to find bug 11912.
All you have to do is turn off numlock, and the keyboard shortcuts will work again!
I find it amazing that version 2 of a programming tool still has keyboard problems like this one. Am I the only one with numlock always on (you know, I only need one set of arrows on my keyboard, not two) - and who uses keyboard shortcuts when I am coding?
-
Lets say that OpenOffice's Impress costed 1 dollar. Is MS PowerPoint really 300 times better than OpenOffice Impress?
Please. This comparison is so wrong! What if PowerPoint can do the job but OpenOffice cannot? Then, regardless of how cheap OpenOffice is, you should get PowerPoint.looks broken to me - I'm using the 5/21 nightly and I don't see any toolbar appear, not any new option anywhere.
-
As far as the spam stuff goes there is a feature I have been thinking about that I have never seen. I would like a program that has the ability to send the e-mail back with forged headers to make it appear that the e-mail addres does not exist.
It's called "bounce", and pine has it.-
Because ACPI is deprecated, in favour of APM. Is that a good enough reason? God forbid we should actually move forward and embrace new standards.
Good try, but in fact the reverse is true: APM is deprecated, and ACPI is the new standard.I find it hard to believe that other people would not notice it. Maybe this is like the Sony Trinitron lines: you only notice them once someone points them out to you, and then you wish you didn't know because you cannot ignore them anymore.
We need a higher fps in the theaters, so that fast camera motion (aside from zoom) can be pain-free again.
The problem is not that CIO's should be willing to pay double the price. The root cause of this problem is that, as you in fact say, it takes twice as long to build quality software.
This delay has a huge factor in today's market, and results in an inacceptable price hike. The fact is, building good software should only take you 10% longer.
I propose that the fied needs to mature (better practices, better tools) so that quality software becomes easier to build. At that point, the market forces will cause companies to buy quality (because it'll be worth it economically speaking) and then (but only then) will software quality stop being an oxymoron.
You are right, Seti@home would not be able to detect any modern signal since they look like white noise unless you know what you are looking for.
I think that the point, however, is that seti@home is looking for signals that extraterrestrials would send *in order to be found*, as earth itself did in the past. These signals are deliberately simple, just a sort of "hello, we are out there".
Or does it?
This is not a trojan, nor a worm.
It's a backdooring virus. Don't you think the "security experts" who wrote the article should know their own terminology?
nuff said.
>To bad no such system exists, eh?
There exists a system which works more or less exactly the way you describe, but it is used to deliver public-key certificates instead of just being a login server. It is used at cornell, here is all the info:
http://www.cis.cornell.edu/iai/coca.htm
> 1. Standardized keyboard shortcuts. (...)
> If I can alt+tab between apps (or to my dos
> console to move files around) I tend to do it.
> If I can alt+F4 to kill a window or app, I'll do
> that. etc.
Actually, many windowmanagers have this as a default and almost all can be set to do it. I used Sawmill, WindowMaker and fvwm2 and all of them have alt-tab and alt-F4. Not to mention the virtual screens (cannot live without - does WindowsXP finally have them built in? No?).
So maybe all we need is that the distros (RH, for example) stop doing the wrong thing and install good defaults (or do they already? I wouldn't know, not using RH).
Back to the future, indeed. I remember a presentation about how NASA was going to be "better, cheaper". I guess the two Mars crashes have been a tough reality check...
I know this has been posted before, but it bears repeating:
Macrovision blocks a number of uses that are "fair" (such as hooking the DVD player to the VCR because the TV hookup is hard to reach). If circumventing them for legal uses was to be outlawed then we would be denied fair use.