As bad as I feel about it, after blocking the entire IP blocks of China and Russia at my firewall, attacks (and spam) have dropped to almost zero. I know that some people can't do this for various reasons and I know that it goes against the spirit of the internet, but I think it was worth the peace of mind for me.
I really wish you would log in or create an account before posting in a philosophical discussion. Discussing stuff like this with ACs is like having a conversation with a series of different, but superficially interchangeable, shadows. There's a continuous moving of goalposts and redefining of terms that make it a distinctly unpleasant experience. I'm having this discussion here because I enjoy it and it's less enjoyable if I can't be sure that there's a common set of terminology.
On that note, your entire argument is about semantics and that is the most boring kind of argument there is. Back in junior high, I used to debate with my friends for days about stuff that only came down to a difference in the definitions of terms before we decided that agreeing to a common set of terminology was important to having a productive debate. When we came across words that didn't have an agreed upon definition, we would work out the definition before assuming that the argument of the other was bunk. In this light, your argument (which may be valid and insightful, but appears to hinge entirely upon differing semantics) looks very sophomoric. If you work on that, you might find yourself engaged in more rewarding debates.
You're absolutely correct about the use of "evidence" in place of "proof". Mixing up the two is a huge pet peeve of mine and I'm absolutely horrified that I did it myself.
On the other hand, I don't agree that it's rational to claim evidence of God without actually testing the hypothesis. If God actually has a measurable influence in our world, then you should be able to construct a framework that describes and predicts that influence, just like any other force. If that influence isn't predictable and testable, either because it seems random or because God is actively thwarting efforts to test it, then your framework is inadequate or the concept of God having a measurable influence is meaningless. Either way, claiming single otherwise unexplained incidents as evidence of God isn't rational.
Your claim that we are judged for our own actions, punished if we err, but forgiven if we worship sounds just like the corrupt court I described before. The idea that paying homage to the judge relieves you of guilt and punishment is horribly corrupt. If we commit crimes in our lives then we should all pay for them equally. That bribing the judge lets some of us off the hook isn't justice.
On your discussion of honor, I don't think we have any common ground at all. It sounds like a lot of authority worship that I don't understand at all. Expecting deference based on station or social standing is a very animal trait, and an extremely negative one at that. That failing to honor someone is some sort of grievous crime is something I can't get behind in the least. To take offense at not being honored is one of the most pathetic and small behaviors a man can exhibit. That a deity would not only take offense, but punish, a weaker being for that makes the deity sound like some sort of wild dog biting the neck of its smaller pack mate. I have no respect for that at all.
The guy I was talking to when I wrote that post. It's close enough that I didn't even realize I wrote it until after it was submitted. Behold the ravages of age. I'm not even that old, yet.:(
The hero is precisely the sort of person they would send instead of the shiny people. He's healthy enough to serve and not going to get any worse genetically by Gattaca standards. And he'd be far cheaper because of the huge bias against employing such people.
I'm not so sure of that. We pick our shiniest people as astronauts and we have relatively few of them. Really, with his myopia and the (putative) heart condition, he would have a hard time making astronaut selection today.
Anyway, the radiation issue was presumably solved in some way. They boarded the ship in pressed suits, so it's clearly not going to be that rough of a ride (although the contacts he's wearing are going to get a little uncomfortable after a few months).
...but there is a reason that I don't find the atheist position workable.
I think that this may be once place that our communication is breaking down. A scientific position is not the same thing as an atheist position. Since God is metaphysical and unmeasurable, science has no applicability with regard to its existence. Science is a method for testing measurable aspects of the world around us. It shares no ground with spirituality at all.
Dawson et al's statements are not coming from a place of science, but from a place of logic and reason. They are saying that believing something of which you have no proof is irrational. Logic and reason are the foundation of science, but they are not the same thing. Their position is best described as agnostic, anyway, which is how I would describe myself. I don't maintain that there is no God, I'm simply not in a place to know if there is.
That's not quite the Christian position; the position is that you stand condemned because of the very substantial bad that you (and all others) do and have done. If the standard on a test is to get a 100% or fail, its no good to point at all of the questions you got right while ignoring the many you got wrong. And if in fact there is a Christian God who is responsible for your very existence, it stands to reason that your ignoring and refusal to acknowledge or honor that God would be a very serious thing indeed.
This is just more of the capriciousness that I was talking about before. I'm judged for the actions of another and good deeds and intentions aren't enough to redeem me? But if I honor (appease) the angry God, I will not be punished? That's not justice. If our courts worked that way, we would decry them as irredeemably corrupt.
Why does God (an omnipotent, omniscient being) need to be acknowledged and honored by its creation in order to not torture it? This is the very description of a petulant child, not a wise God. In this view, The Gnostics's description of Yahweh as the demiurge was very apt. No perfect being acts like that.
I thought the treadmill scene, where his erratic heartbeat plays instead of the 'metronome' and he runs to the locker room clutching his chest, was supposed to show that he actually did have a heart condition.
Human spirit and all, I think the mushroom was right. At the very least, he was living on borrowed time. Not cool.
I think I must have misunderstood what you were going for there. The creation of the universe is a problem that we humans are unlikely to ever explain satisfactorily. The religious explanation isn't any more solid or testable than the multiverse, etc explanations, so the most rational approach is to suspend judgement on the matter until a sound, testable explanation is proposed.
In my mind, the existence of God falls in the same category. I have no way to know whether a deity exists or not, so it doesn't make sense to come to any sort of conclusion on the matter.
[From a more humanistic standpoint, I reject the idea that living my life as a good person is not enough to win the approval of a just god. The idea that I could be punished eternally for doing all the good I can in the world, but not following arbitrary customs or worshiping some deity, is nonsensical and repulsive. That a good god would give us a sense of Justice, and then turn around and judge us like a capricious dictator or a petulant child doesn't follow. By that reasoning, it shouldn't matter whether or not I believe in God, even if there turns out to be one.]
If I can try to sum up your position, you chose your religion because some things are currently unexplainable and you need to have an explanation, any explanation, for those things. Instead of admitting that we don't, and may never, know how the universe began, you've adopted a belief system that makes assertions about things that can't be proven (similarly, speculation about what preceded the birth of our universe isn't [absent any evidence or falsifiable claims] real empirical science). You don't seem to have any problems with any of the things that science does explain well, so is it safe to assume that your god is one of the gaps?
You've given no particular reason to have chosen Christianity, so it makes sense to assume that if you were born to Muslim parents, you would presumably be Muslim, and likewise for any other religion. Most people inherit the religion of their parents or communities, which doesn't paint a picture of religions representing universal truth. It's a learned behavior (addressing each unknown with "God did it."), just like eating, driving, and hygiene habits. If you hadn't been taught Christianity by your [parents, community, etc], would you have come up with it on your own? Then how can it be the truth?
Nobody in their right mind would actually sell a plastic gun due to the liability issues involved. Gets smuggled past a metal detector = massive law suits from relatives of victims = no more company.
Even if there was no crime aspect to consider, nobody would sell these for the potential liability involved in normal legal use. I don't think you can disclaim the implied warranty of fitness on a product that causes grave bodily harm when it fails in a predictable fashion.
Today, we are launching our version initially into the CM 10.2 nightly stream to test the server load and make sure things are working at scale. Once things are dialed in, we’ll also enable this for CM 11 builds moving forward.
Depending on how it's implemented, the whole system may depend on a central server that facilitates the initial key exchange (prekeys). That, in itself, seems like a massive compromise vector. Why should users need to trust a third party server for key exchange? It'd be much better to use a system like ZRTP where the users are expected to compare fingerprints out of band.
There is a method of key exchange that doesn't use the server (KeyExchangeMessage), but it isn't clear whether the user gets to choose which method is used (or whether there is even a system to verify fingerprints). On the [ convenient --- secure ] scale, this system looks to be dialed way toward convenient. Transparent to the users, both for good and bad.
That's not really that good of a long-term strategy, though. Laws can be changed and being passive aggressive instead of proactive doesn't change their situation for the better.
They could stop receiving favorable treatment from the government.
They could start receiving very hostile treatment from the government.
Laws could be passed that require them to be more responsive to requests.
Laws could be passed that allocate (more) money to handle these requests quickly.
None of these would be particularly hard to put in effect and all of them would hurt the companies. (The last option would make them appear even more complicit and would drive the exodus into overdrive.)
It's happened once before, it could certainly happen again. Google can remotely install applications to an Android phone (with Google's app store installed) at the click of a button. How else do you think apps are automatically installed when you buy them on the Play website or updated in the background. Apple may have some means to do this as well.
There are ways to make your phone more secure, but most phones are under the control of third parties.
The way it's described in TFA, you can't "access it on a website" (whatever that means).
It's a USB device that generates and stores passwords. The stored passwords are encrypted using a key contained in a smartcard. When you want a password, you use the touchscreen on the device to generate or decrypt a password and spit it out to the computer (presumably, the device looks to the computer like a HID keyboard device).
The only communication would, therefore, be from the device to the computer. All user interaction is through the device's touchscreen. The smartcard handles the security.
It's not a bad approach, though it would/could be ridiculously clumsy to use once you have accumulated hundreds or thousands of passwords.
Yeah, that claim is a little dubious. Considering the size of the US, most birds will never see a tall building in their entire life. Malnutrition and starvation accounts for many bird deaths, too, especially of young ones.
Of course it's expected. The question is if it should be expected. Is it the right allocation of work to maximize scientific progress. Filling out spreadsheets with huge sets of random numbers would be a lot of work, too, but that would have little value, so it's not expected.
Is promoting the publication of lots of papers, which tend to be superficial and trivial, preferable to encouraging researchers to tackle profound problems, which may not result in a single publication for years? If requiring a high number of publications actively discourages researchers from tackling hard problems, is our chosen metric having the desired outcome?
This whole discussion is about whether our expectations are reasonable and productive.
Your proposed solution is the same solution we have now, just applied to a different part of the pyramid and with different (and just as unproven) metrics. Instead of limiting the number of professors, you propose to limit the number of PhDs. All of this based on an arbitrary metric. In the current case: number of publications. In your case: scores on exams.
Simplifying the whole selection process to a metric only ends up selecting people who can most superficially meet that metric. Shifting the metrics around isn't the solution to the problems, especially if the metrics are simple and don't represent what we need to test.
Not everyone will do something really profound, and there's no way (yet) to find the people who will do something profound. The problem that the OP was describing is that the P&T committee is applying the criteria that Higgs is complaining about while they could not even meet those standards (ie, double standards in the least useful metrics).
They (who likely never achieved anything really profound or published a prodigious number of papers) are pushing the field farther from where it should be.
A labmate of mine just defended and one of the dinosaurs on his committee frowned when he saw the thin dissertation. His work was sound, but he writes in a very concise manner and kept the figures only as large as they needed to be. He passed alright, but he got much more gruff from this one professor and the consensus seems to be that the short length is partially to blame.
(The dinosaur's lab is well-established, with students who fly through in no time by running established experiments on new materials. Their dissertations contain nothing but new numbers for the tables, but they get to publish each one. Technicians, basically, with huge publication lists and long dissertations (with full page figures) really please this guy. Our (new faculty) lab works on brand new problems, but you can't just publish raw data in our subfield.)
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Anything less is hypocrisy.
I'm all for animal rights and the ethical treatment of animals, but how is not extending human rights to animals hypocrisy?
As bad as I feel about it, after blocking the entire IP blocks of China and Russia at my firewall, attacks (and spam) have dropped to almost zero. I know that some people can't do this for various reasons and I know that it goes against the spirit of the internet, but I think it was worth the peace of mind for me.
I really wish you would log in or create an account before posting in a philosophical discussion. Discussing stuff like this with ACs is like having a conversation with a series of different, but superficially interchangeable, shadows. There's a continuous moving of goalposts and redefining of terms that make it a distinctly unpleasant experience. I'm having this discussion here because I enjoy it and it's less enjoyable if I can't be sure that there's a common set of terminology.
On that note, your entire argument is about semantics and that is the most boring kind of argument there is. Back in junior high, I used to debate with my friends for days about stuff that only came down to a difference in the definitions of terms before we decided that agreeing to a common set of terminology was important to having a productive debate. When we came across words that didn't have an agreed upon definition, we would work out the definition before assuming that the argument of the other was bunk. In this light, your argument (which may be valid and insightful, but appears to hinge entirely upon differing semantics) looks very sophomoric. If you work on that, you might find yourself engaged in more rewarding debates.
You're absolutely correct about the use of "evidence" in place of "proof". Mixing up the two is a huge pet peeve of mine and I'm absolutely horrified that I did it myself.
On the other hand, I don't agree that it's rational to claim evidence of God without actually testing the hypothesis. If God actually has a measurable influence in our world, then you should be able to construct a framework that describes and predicts that influence, just like any other force. If that influence isn't predictable and testable, either because it seems random or because God is actively thwarting efforts to test it, then your framework is inadequate or the concept of God having a measurable influence is meaningless. Either way, claiming single otherwise unexplained incidents as evidence of God isn't rational.
Your claim that we are judged for our own actions, punished if we err, but forgiven if we worship sounds just like the corrupt court I described before. The idea that paying homage to the judge relieves you of guilt and punishment is horribly corrupt. If we commit crimes in our lives then we should all pay for them equally. That bribing the judge lets some of us off the hook isn't justice.
On your discussion of honor, I don't think we have any common ground at all. It sounds like a lot of authority worship that I don't understand at all. Expecting deference based on station or social standing is a very animal trait, and an extremely negative one at that. That failing to honor someone is some sort of grievous crime is something I can't get behind in the least. To take offense at not being honored is one of the most pathetic and small behaviors a man can exhibit. That a deity would not only take offense, but punish, a weaker being for that makes the deity sound like some sort of wild dog biting the neck of its smaller pack mate. I have no respect for that at all.
The guy I was talking to when I wrote that post. It's close enough that I didn't even realize I wrote it until after it was submitted. Behold the ravages of age. I'm not even that old, yet. :(
The hero is precisely the sort of person they would send instead of the shiny people. He's healthy enough to serve and not going to get any worse genetically by Gattaca standards. And he'd be far cheaper because of the huge bias against employing such people.
I'm not so sure of that. We pick our shiniest people as astronauts and we have relatively few of them. Really, with his myopia and the (putative) heart condition, he would have a hard time making astronaut selection today.
Anyway, the radiation issue was presumably solved in some way. They boarded the ship in pressed suits, so it's clearly not going to be that rough of a ride (although the contacts he's wearing are going to get a little uncomfortable after a few months).
...but there is a reason that I don't find the atheist position workable.
I think that this may be once place that our communication is breaking down. A scientific position is not the same thing as an atheist position. Since God is metaphysical and unmeasurable, science has no applicability with regard to its existence. Science is a method for testing measurable aspects of the world around us. It shares no ground with spirituality at all.
Dawson et al's statements are not coming from a place of science, but from a place of logic and reason. They are saying that believing something of which you have no proof is irrational. Logic and reason are the foundation of science, but they are not the same thing. Their position is best described as agnostic, anyway, which is how I would describe myself. I don't maintain that there is no God, I'm simply not in a place to know if there is.
That's not quite the Christian position; the position is that you stand condemned because of the very substantial bad that you (and all others) do and have done. If the standard on a test is to get a 100% or fail, its no good to point at all of the questions you got right while ignoring the many you got wrong. And if in fact there is a Christian God who is responsible for your very existence, it stands to reason that your ignoring and refusal to acknowledge or honor that God would be a very serious thing indeed.
This is just more of the capriciousness that I was talking about before. I'm judged for the actions of another and good deeds and intentions aren't enough to redeem me? But if I honor (appease) the angry God, I will not be punished? That's not justice. If our courts worked that way, we would decry them as irredeemably corrupt.
Why does God (an omnipotent, omniscient being) need to be acknowledged and honored by its creation in order to not torture it? This is the very description of a petulant child, not a wise God. In this view, The Gnostics's description of Yahweh as the demiurge was very apt. No perfect being acts like that.
Vincent likely didn't have a heart condition.
I thought the treadmill scene, where his erratic heartbeat plays instead of the 'metronome' and he runs to the locker room clutching his chest, was supposed to show that he actually did have a heart condition.
Human spirit and all, I think the mushroom was right. At the very least, he was living on borrowed time. Not cool.
I think I must have misunderstood what you were going for there. The creation of the universe is a problem that we humans are unlikely to ever explain satisfactorily. The religious explanation isn't any more solid or testable than the multiverse, etc explanations, so the most rational approach is to suspend judgement on the matter until a sound, testable explanation is proposed.
In my mind, the existence of God falls in the same category. I have no way to know whether a deity exists or not, so it doesn't make sense to come to any sort of conclusion on the matter.
[From a more humanistic standpoint, I reject the idea that living my life as a good person is not enough to win the approval of a just god. The idea that I could be punished eternally for doing all the good I can in the world, but not following arbitrary customs or worshiping some deity, is nonsensical and repulsive. That a good god would give us a sense of Justice, and then turn around and judge us like a capricious dictator or a petulant child doesn't follow. By that reasoning, it shouldn't matter whether or not I believe in God, even if there turns out to be one.]
If I can try to sum up your position, you chose your religion because some things are currently unexplainable and you need to have an explanation, any explanation, for those things. Instead of admitting that we don't, and may never, know how the universe began, you've adopted a belief system that makes assertions about things that can't be proven (similarly, speculation about what preceded the birth of our universe isn't [absent any evidence or falsifiable claims] real empirical science). You don't seem to have any problems with any of the things that science does explain well, so is it safe to assume that your god is one of the gaps?
You've given no particular reason to have chosen Christianity, so it makes sense to assume that if you were born to Muslim parents, you would presumably be Muslim, and likewise for any other religion. Most people inherit the religion of their parents or communities, which doesn't paint a picture of religions representing universal truth. It's a learned behavior (addressing each unknown with "God did it."), just like eating, driving, and hygiene habits. If you hadn't been taught Christianity by your [parents, community, etc], would you have come up with it on your own? Then how can it be the truth?
Nobody in their right mind would actually sell a plastic gun due to the liability issues involved. Gets smuggled past a metal detector = massive law suits from relatives of victims = no more company.
Even if there was no crime aspect to consider, nobody would sell these for the potential liability involved in normal legal use. I don't think you can disclaim the implied warranty of fitness on a product that causes grave bodily harm when it fails in a predictable fashion.
Oh, I agree with you there. I just foresaw this thread continuing on in that manner forever and I wanted to make it stop!
He's talking about the American Revolution. His coy act is obnoxious, but your deliberate obtuseness is annoying, too.
Today, we are launching our version initially into the CM 10.2 nightly stream to test the server load and make sure things are working at scale. Once things are dialed in, we’ll also enable this for CM 11 builds moving forward.
Depending on how it's implemented, the whole system may depend on a central server that facilitates the initial key exchange (prekeys). That, in itself, seems like a massive compromise vector. Why should users need to trust a third party server for key exchange? It'd be much better to use a system like ZRTP where the users are expected to compare fingerprints out of band.
There is a method of key exchange that doesn't use the server (KeyExchangeMessage), but it isn't clear whether the user gets to choose which method is used (or whether there is even a system to verify fingerprints). On the [ convenient --- secure ] scale, this system looks to be dialed way toward convenient. Transparent to the users, both for good and bad.
That's not really that good of a long-term strategy, though. Laws can be changed and being passive aggressive instead of proactive doesn't change their situation for the better.
None of these would be particularly hard to put in effect and all of them would hurt the companies. (The last option would make them appear even more complicit and would drive the exodus into overdrive.)
Literally, neighbors are asking people, 'Why are you spying on Grandma?'
So, they're hoping that the public approval of the president will keep them from having to come up with an answer to that question?
I guess nothing alleviates the need for thoughtful introspection like a big pat on the head from the master.
It's happened once before, it could certainly happen again. Google can remotely install applications to an Android phone (with Google's app store installed) at the click of a button. How else do you think apps are automatically installed when you buy them on the Play website or updated in the background. Apple may have some means to do this as well.
There are ways to make your phone more secure, but most phones are under the control of third parties.
The way it's described in TFA, you can't "access it on a website" (whatever that means).
It's a USB device that generates and stores passwords. The stored passwords are encrypted using a key contained in a smartcard. When you want a password, you use the touchscreen on the device to generate or decrypt a password and spit it out to the computer (presumably, the device looks to the computer like a HID keyboard device).
The only communication would, therefore, be from the device to the computer. All user interaction is through the device's touchscreen. The smartcard handles the security.
It's not a bad approach, though it would/could be ridiculously clumsy to use once you have accumulated hundreds or thousands of passwords.
Yeah, that claim is a little dubious. Considering the size of the US, most birds will never see a tall building in their entire life. Malnutrition and starvation accounts for many bird deaths, too, especially of young ones.
Of course it's expected. The question is if it should be expected. Is it the right allocation of work to maximize scientific progress. Filling out spreadsheets with huge sets of random numbers would be a lot of work, too, but that would have little value, so it's not expected.
Is promoting the publication of lots of papers, which tend to be superficial and trivial, preferable to encouraging researchers to tackle profound problems, which may not result in a single publication for years? If requiring a high number of publications actively discourages researchers from tackling hard problems, is our chosen metric having the desired outcome?
This whole discussion is about whether our expectations are reasonable and productive.
Your proposed solution is the same solution we have now, just applied to a different part of the pyramid and with different (and just as unproven) metrics. Instead of limiting the number of professors, you propose to limit the number of PhDs. All of this based on an arbitrary metric. In the current case: number of publications. In your case: scores on exams.
Simplifying the whole selection process to a metric only ends up selecting people who can most superficially meet that metric. Shifting the metrics around isn't the solution to the problems, especially if the metrics are simple and don't represent what we need to test.
Not everyone will do something really profound, and there's no way (yet) to find the people who will do something profound. The problem that the OP was describing is that the P&T committee is applying the criteria that Higgs is complaining about while they could not even meet those standards (ie, double standards in the least useful metrics).
They (who likely never achieved anything really profound or published a prodigious number of papers) are pushing the field farther from where it should be.
A labmate of mine just defended and one of the dinosaurs on his committee frowned when he saw the thin dissertation. His work was sound, but he writes in a very concise manner and kept the figures only as large as they needed to be. He passed alright, but he got much more gruff from this one professor and the consensus seems to be that the short length is partially to blame.
(The dinosaur's lab is well-established, with students who fly through in no time by running established experiments on new materials. Their dissertations contain nothing but new numbers for the tables, but they get to publish each one. Technicians, basically, with huge publication lists and long dissertations (with full page figures) really please this guy. Our (new faculty) lab works on brand new problems, but you can't just publish raw data in our subfield.)
Nexus devices don't have them because somebody at Google doesn't seem to like them.
SD cards reduce your reliance on "the cloud". It's not surprising that Google doesn't like them.
Except that every car mentioned in this thread so far is Japanese.
My Honda had these, without a fail-open spring (which I've never actually seen on any car), and it also had a knob to crank them open.