The point of 4'33" is not so much environmental noise as the act and experience of listening.
A friend of mine who is not a John Cage fan was once dragged to a performance of 4'33", not knowing anything about Cage or the piece. A short way into it, he got fed up, stood up and berated his companion loudly, and marched out of the room. No doubt this was one of the better performances.
Moreover, John Cage would explain that 4'33" is not simply 4'33" of silence. He did actually write a score for this piece, note by note, and comprised of three movements. He then made all the notes tacet, and added up their time at a tempo of his choice to come up with the durations for the movements. If you knew what the original notes are, however, you could imagine the piece while it is performed.
In addition, the three movements are punctuated by the performer closing and then reopening the piano lid.
Even users of the Chinese lunar calendar respect 7-day weeks. They're fundamental.
A solar year is just as arbitrary as a lunar month. If you live in the tropics, where seasonal variation is slight, and don't have widely available artificial light, the lunar cycle has much more impact on your day-to-day (or night-to-night) life than the solar one. If you want to give up arbitrary divisions properly, you can use the Julian calendar, as astronomers do. Otherwise, you're picking some naturally perceptible phenomenon as the basis for longer-period measures. Whether this makes sense depends on your particular environment.
The fundamental source of these issues is the false perception that one calendrical period needs to factor evenly into another. You can, for example, keep lunar months and solar years as independant calendars if you like, you just don't use them in tandem to specify a particular date. We already do this by allowing weeks to have seven days, completely irrespective of the length of the month or the year. We just don't care that 2004 starts on a Thursday, while 2005 starts on a Saturday. So why do we force months to start over on the first day of the year? (Some calendars don't; some allow years to have 12 or 13 months as necessary, but use year/month/monthday to specify dates, which works also.)
A sensible solar calendar divides the year into seasons, and seasons into useful subdivisions. The Gregorian calendar follows this convention by modifying months slightly so there are three in each season. Lunar/solar calendars, however, work better for agricultural users, who set planting and harvesting schedules according to available night-time light. What you advocate doesn't really serve anyone's needs, and even disrespects the seasons. If you want 6-day weeks, do something like 12 even months of five 6-day weeks, and tack on the extra days to every third month as needed so at least the solstices and equinoxes, which practically every calendar respects in some way, don't move.
Again, calendars make arbitrary decisions designed to suit some particular population. The bottom line is that the solar, lunar, and daily periods don't factor one another, so any attempt to make two of them synch up is going to have some idiosyncratic ugliness. Your case has a 5- or 6-day ugly month/week at the end, the Gregorian has ugly months, anything non-Julian has leap days, etc. The only way to eliminate the ugliness is to stop trying to force things to line up and accept the universe as it is. The extreme case is the Julian calendar; a middle-of-the-road is to use year/week number/weekday (accepting that 7-day weeks are deeply ingrained in society), or year/month/monthday with some suitable month. But every variant requires occasional adjustment because none of the periods is perfectly regular.
That's as pointless as the 10-day weeks the French tried to adopt some time ago. People like 7-day weeks and they're not going to give them up. Besides, if weeks are so important, why even have months? Why not simply use year/week/day? And you're kind of forgetting what the word "month" means. A month should at least try to be around 28 days. Otherwise call it something else.
Nobody is taking my 10 hour day plan seriously either.
That's because 10 is a stupid number to base measurement systems on. It doesn't divide by three or four, and division by two leaves a useless five, which no one can visualize. 12 is a far superior base for measures, since it relates better to one's senses, and 16 or 8 would be far better than 10.
Time is one of the few places where the "metric system" (i.e. SI) hasn't managed to completely screw things up. SI puts simplicity of manual computation ahead of natural perception, not to mention accuracy of automated computation--the result is a system that actually introduces roundoff error practically every time a measure is used in a calculation. (Read up on IEEE floating-point format if you don't know what I'm talking about.)
For simple proof of how broken SI is for the real world, just go to the grocery store and have a look around--750ml, 250g, etc.
You use "free will" when only "non-predestination" would be correct. They are different.
I agree they could be different, but I'm not sure exactly what distinction you're making. Please elaborate.
Regardless of someone else's ability to completely predict your actions, they are still YOUR actions.
That doesn't make them free. For a choice to be free, possibilities of equal physical probability must exist (or perhaps entropic compartments of equal volume?), and a free decision must be made between them. In a physical universe with a theory of everything, the only way this can happen is for the result to be influenced by a metaphysical entity, i.e. a soul. This may violate conservation of information, but there it is. Maybe the information presumably lost in black holes is returned via this effect. Or perhaps that is the origin of order in general: perhaps conservation of information is fundamentally wrong if you deny metaphysical forces.
I agree with your observations about fallacious types of causality depicted in most films. I think the conflict lies in the writer's desire to preserve free will at all costs so we can care about the actions of the protagonist. Moreover, if the protagonist has no free will, neither do we (if we wish to believe we live in the same kind of universe). It is essential to the art of storytelling that we believe that the nature of one's heart or soul is revealed by one's actions.
So it's yet another lazy attempt at depicting the consequence of time travel.
You have a choice. You can have time travel with causality in your own universe, or you can have free will, but not both.
You simply can't travel into your own past without "altering" it. To be present, you have to displace air molecules. To observe you have to intercept photons. By the time you've "accidentally" stepped on a butterfly you've already "altered" things in innumerable ways. So if you "alter" the past by entering it, you must already have been there, i.e. you haven't "altered" anything at all. This means that you never had a free choice in your entire life, since it had to culminate in your returning to your own past in a predetermined physical condition.
If a film about time travel would have the guts to face the consequences to free will, it might redeem itself. But they never do; they're universally lazy in their philosophies. Bradbury's story itself makes no sense at all -- blaming the hunter for altering the present is pointless: he had no choice. The most pathetic example was Terminator 2: Sarah Connor trying to rescue free will by repeatedly claiming "There is no destiny." Uh, guess what, Sarah -- in your world, there is no free will. Kinda takes the point out of your agony, don't it? Still a fun film, but the lame attempts to rescue free will mar the story. T3 didn't bother to try, and was better for it.
Donnie Darko showed some promise in this department, but fizzled. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is the best example I've seen of an intelligent film about the juggernaut of causality, but it's dealing with a different kind of predestination: that of being a tragic pawn of the storyteller.
These "validations" aren't really worth much. I personally have evaluated a product that had passed Common Criteria, and I found numerous critical vulnerabilities, including flaws in basic SSL implementation, an obvious buffer overflow, the ability to access the entire supposedly protected database without authentication, etc. This was a closed-source product, so I'm sure there was a lot more that I missed, since all I did was test it for a couple of days.
It's much better to go with open source so at least you can audit the code yourself. Saves a lot of time.
Funny: another product I audited advertised its use of AES. As someone else pointed out, key exchange is often the problem. In this case, the key exchange mechanism used was to publish the key in plaintext after reordering the bytes, on a web page with no authentication required.
Do not trust vendors when they tell you how secure their product is, or bandy about terms like "AES" and "Common Criteria". Most closed source products are crap -- I'm speaking from experience here -- and the vendors who know that they're selling crap just lie. If you can't get the vendor to open the source to you, you're probably better off going with someone else. If there's no other option, test the hell out of it.
Not offended, but I got your point completely before. You didn't get mine.
Let's go over the problem with Pascal's Wager first. (Actually, there are a number of problems, but this one is relevant here.) Pascal's Wager is essentially a cost-benefit analysis, where the cost of betting that God exists is taken to be zero, and the benefit is taken to be either eternal happiness if God in fact does exist, or nil if He doesn't. The problem is that those aren't the only possibilities. It's entirely possible that God exists, but that He will send you to Hell if you believe in Him. It may seem irrational that He would do this, but it's certainly possible, i.e. it has non-zero probability, based on what we know, which is supposed to be nothing. Therefore, the "benefit" of betting that God exists is now one of three possibilities: eternal happiness if He exists, eternal torment if He exists, or nil if He doesn't. There is, then, no net benefit in betting that God exists. Once you start generalizing to all the possible ways God might reward or punish you for betting on His existence, you see that the Wager argues nothing, because we can't assign any relative probability to the various outcomes.
There are plenty of articles out there about Pascal's Wager if you are interested in the many ins and outs. It's clever in its perverse application of decision theory and statistical analysis to a traditionally philosophical problem, but I don't know if I'd agree that it's "one of the most brilliant fallacies ever uttered". By modern standards, where cost-benefit is something every M.B.A. knows how to do, it's pretty mundane, and it's not even thorough. If you're interested in brilliant fallacies, take a look at Anselm's ontological argument.
Taking this back to environmental science, as I said before, it's possible that human activity is in fact mitigating a natural warming effect we don't recognize. For example, strictly for argument's sake, perhaps deforestation increases radiation cooling, thus lowering land surface temperature, and perhaps this effect far outweighs the effects of releasing greenhouse gases. This is analogous to the possibility that God exists but will punish you with eternal torment for believing in Him.
We don't understand the problem of global climate change thoroughly. You're borrowing Pascal's Wager for the following argument: we can forget about trying to understand climate change completely, and can still make a "decision under uncertainty" that it's our best bet to assume that we are, in fact, causing global warming and should curtail our activities. But once you recognize that our activities may in fact be mitigating, rather than causing climate change, you find the same fallacy in your argument that exists in Pascal's.
So, sorry, but we are nowhere near the same 'semantic axis'. Arg... Semantic axis... or how to profess complicated vocabulary to let the people think you are clever. My God ! (Am I betting, anyway ?)
Not clear to me what you are saying here, so I guess you are correct. But I'll say it again and maybe it'll be clearer this time: to compare outcomes you need to either show that one outcome is logically better than another (eternal happiness vs. eternal torment) or assign them numerical results that are logically comparable, i.e. the numbers lie on the same semantic axis, e.g. 3 chickens vs. 1 chicken. It's no use comparing chickens with goats unless you can relate the value of a chicken with that of a goat.
that it's more likely that you'll spend eternity in Hell if you don't believe in God than if you do.
That's wrong. A concile of high ranked christians said so in the 9th century (I'll find the precise date if you want). I'm not saying it's true, but it was worth a logical implication at that time.
It doesn't matter what a bunch of Christians say -- u
Citing Pascal's Wager doesn't do much for your argument, given that it's a well-known logical/statistical fallacy.
The fallacy has an analogue here as well: it's possible that anthropogenic effects are actually mitigating a warming trend caused by something else that hasn't been identified. I'm not saying this is the case, but its probability is non-zero.
You don't get anywhere with statistical arguments unless you can relate one statistic to another, either logically or by assigning them numerical values on the same semantic axis. Pascal's fallacy was that he didn't show that it's more likely that you'll spend eternity in Hell if you don't believe in God than if you do.
The excerpt arguing for "There are as many numbers [0,1] as [0,0.1]" just illustrates a common misconception of people - that we can somehow count infinity.
You can count infinity. That's how we know there are infinities of different sizes. You can't enumerate an infinite set in finite time, obviously, but you can count an infinite set by defining a one-to-one mapping with another infinite set. If you can show that such a mapping is impossible, you know the infinities are of different sizes. (E.g.C = 2 ** aleph-null.)
Here's a kicker: when a security audit was planned for one of the machines, DOI pulled the plug when they knew it would be getting scanned!
Without knowing the rules of engagement, I'd say this sounds totally justified, based on the apparent equation of "security audit" with "scan". A lot of the bozo "security auditors" who rely on scanning (because it's cheap) instead of actual auditing don't bother to secure the traffic between their company's network and the target of the scan. Meanwhile, they may require you to poke a big hole in your perimeter just to let their scan in. Consequently, any vulnerabilities in the target system get exposed to any observer on the network path. In these cases, it's better to pull while the idiots scan, report the idiot to your local inspector general, and then do the audit yourself with the scant funds left over after the idiots (still) get paid.
Furthermore, pulling the system in advance of the scan may have been the prescribed response to detecting the scan's imminence based on IDS logs or other activity. Again, we need to know the actual rules of engagement to know whether the admins were avoiding their duties or fulfilling them.
Auditing security is a lot more complex than running nmap or Retina. Doing it properly is expensive and time-consuming, and involves understanding the system and network architecture, mapping out trust relationships, logging into systems and auditing their patch levels and network and process profiles, groveling through code, possibly lots of it, possibly incoherent and uncommented, etc. Too many vendors want to come in with scanners and charge a queen's ransom for a couple of hours of real work, without providing any real security.
How hard could it be to install a virus-scanner, proxy server (squid anyone?), and a firewall? Then only leave open necessary ports (25, 110, 443, 80, etc). How come government is given a free pass when it comes to incompetence? If stuff like this happened in the private sector, shareholders would be calling for heads on platters.
Right, that's why vulnerabilities are never reported in commercial software. Oh, wait -- they are.
The fact is that the U.S. government is not so bad at security as a some folks seem to think. Yes, federal employees don't often get fired, but guess what: most IT systems management is done by contractors, who are quite easy to replace.
Also, I have news for you: the techniques you have in mind don't protect you against a huge variety of attacks. Many compromises these days exploit vulnerabilities in vendor-supplied web-based products, which are totally exposed in your rudimentary protection regime. Your ideas about how to protect a network are fine when you've got one/24 under centralized management. The approach you're talking about doesn't work in the real world of trash vendor software. Unfortunately,.gov folks are at the mercy of vendors, and usually much more so than in the private sector because there aren't that many.gov positions for actual programmers, and the wages are often too low to attract people with even a clue about security.
Oh riiighht. All you have to do to prevent tampering with an on-line computer is to "wrap it in tamper-proof tape." Sure. Uh huh.
I've followed the developments in Maryland closely, and what's been noticeably absent from every report I've seen on the subject has been any discussion of what the consequences would be if the tamper-proof tape shows tampering.
More to the point: can anyone disenfranchise a whole bunch of voters by just damaging the tape, deliberately or accidentally, while voting?
Thy/thine are like a/an: use the latter form before a word whose spoken equivalent begins with a vowel. "Thine enemy", but "thy fukeng manuyle". Same deal with my/mine.
Also, "readeth" is indicative, not imperative, and third person, not second.
That should be "RTFP". The letter you've written as "Y" is a thorn (þ or &254; in iso-8859-1) and stands for "th". That letter is not present in Modern English, so it should be written out as "th". Unfortunately, slashdot won't pass through these character entities for rendering, so you'll have to imagine what it looks like, but its vague similarity to "Y", especially in older writing, along with the custom of substituting "Y" for thorn in early press printing (no thorns in the type collection), has perpetuated this confusion. The word you intended to use, "þe", is "the", and is pronounced that way. "Ye" is the plural of "you", not a definite article.
There's a lot that can be done here to reduce the complexity of the markup. It seems like they did everything they could to specify every detail of every note every time that note was needed.
Perhaps XSLT or something similar could factor out the problems you're talking about. Define an XSL document to generate specific phrases in the detailed language and process a high-level XML document through it to generate the final XML for rendering. One of the major benefits of XML is that it's so easy to transform one document into another, or to write complex macros to represent different layers of content in different documents. It may even be feasible to use XSLT to generate counterpoint.
For those concerned about the size, give me a break. XML compresses very nicely for transport over the network, and for local storage, I don't know anyone who's hurting for disk space these days.
I think you need to look up the word arbitrary in a dictionary. All fundamental constants are arbitrary, unless you can show that a divine creator derived them from something external to our universe, in which case that external thing is arbitrary, as is the creator's decision to base the speed of light upon it. If the speed of light is a fundamental constant, it is arbitrary. And regardless of that, 299792458 is certainly arbitrary.
I see. So let's take that logic a step further. Are you ready to learn Esperanto, along with the rest of the world? Just think how many problems we could solve by forcing everyone to use the same language. Or maybe Esperanto isn't a good choice -- maybe we should standardize on Mandarin, since so many people speak it already.
One of the advantages I believe Europeans have over U.S. citizens is that they almost universally learn a second, and often a third, language. I admire this. Similarly, I also think it's nice that U.S. citizens learn more than one system of measurement, as we all do in grade school. And it's not a big deal, you know. Both systems are pretty easy.
Practically speaking, nearly everyone in the U.S. gets by with inch, foot, yard, mile, ounce, pound, fluid ounce, quart, gallon. Those who cook need teaspoon, tablespoon, cup, and sometimes pint. Those who farm need rod, furlong, and acre. Some people need bushel. In the end, it amounts to fewer terms than gram, meter, liter, hectare, femto, pico, nano, micro, milli, centi, deci, deka, hecto, kilo, myria, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa.
because everyone is keen to argue about metric vs. U.S. units, and apparently no one has noticed that the cause of the problem was not anything to do with how broken the U.S. system is.
This accident was a version control breakdown, not a unit conversion problem. When the units on the drawing were changed, the dimensions were also changed, deliberately. The specified axle diameter was changed from 44.14 mm to 45 mm. Parts were then ordered from the wrong drawing, but if the unit conversion had been the only change, those parts would have worked correctly.
Lovers of the SI system (which is fundamentally broken in a number of ways) love to crow every time something like this happens. The last time was when the Mars Orbiter failed because of a unit conversion problem. Again, people blamed it on SI/U.S. unit conversion, when the actual problem was that the wrong units were used, not that U.S. units were used. If the teams had been working in meters and kilometers, respectively, instead of miles and kilometers, the problem would still have occurred, because they would still be using differing units. In this case, the solution would have been to designate the units used in all specified measures.
Now I'll be a hypocrite and go off-topic like the rest of you. Why SI is broken:
Two words: base 10. Try putting 0.1 into a computer in IEEE floating point format and notice that you immediately get roundoff error. Crank on measurements taken in SI and pretty soon you have significant roundoff accumulation. Given that science is done with computers these days, making calculations easy to perform by hand while inherently inaccurate when performed by computer is just dumb.
SI calculations cannot be performed easily using real objects. Measurement systems are more useful if defined in a base that can be calculated in reality. Try deriving 1 deciliter from a 1 liter volume using 10 containers of equal volume. It's practically impossible. Try dividing a unit length or area by a factor of 10 using your visual cortex. No, your brain was not designed for that, but it does factors of 2, 3, or 4, trivially. Try dividing a weight by a factor of 10 using a set of scales. No, sorry, you have to weigh it first using standardized counterweights and then divide the result. Try doubling a recipe in SI; it's much easier in the U.S. system. The simple fact that 10 is the wrong base is evident in the sale of many products in quantities such as 750 milliliters. Gee, where do you suppose 750 came from?
Some SI units are not intelligible to the senses. The meter is too long to measure visually or by hand, and doesn't have a visceral meaning -- hence people measure height in centimeters; a base unit on the order of the centimeter or decimeter would have made the system more natural for casual use. The gram is too light for anyone to sense, so everyone uses kg in daily life. If the base units were easy to comprehend, learning the system would be easier.
Deci vs. deka. The choice to use two so similar prefixes creates confusion, especially when the abbreviated forms are used. This became especially apparent when the new infix system for base 2 measurements was introduced, and debibit and debibyte became ambiguous terms, by definition.
Every time this issue comes up it turns into an opportunity to bash the U.S. It would be nice if lovers of SI would open their eyes and see the problems in the system that make it unattractive to a society that is getting by just fine with measures that are based, for the most part, on factors of 2 and 3. A new system that resolved the problems listed above would be much more useful, but the SI users are just as entrenched in their broken system as the U.S. is in its own.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of 4'33" is not so much environmental noise as the act and experience of listening.
A friend of mine who is not a John Cage fan was once dragged to a performance of 4'33", not knowing anything about Cage or the piece. A short way into it, he got fed up, stood up and berated his companion loudly, and marched out of the room. No doubt this was one of the better performances.
Moreover, John Cage would explain that 4'33" is not simply 4'33" of silence. He did actually write a score for this piece, note by note, and comprised of three movements. He then made all the notes tacet, and added up their time at a tempo of his choice to come up with the durations for the movements. If you knew what the original notes are, however, you could imagine the piece while it is performed.
In addition, the three movements are punctuated by the performer closing and then reopening the piano lid.
Even users of the Chinese lunar calendar respect 7-day weeks. They're fundamental.
A solar year is just as arbitrary as a lunar month. If you live in the tropics, where seasonal variation is slight, and don't have widely available artificial light, the lunar cycle has much more impact on your day-to-day (or night-to-night) life than the solar one. If you want to give up arbitrary divisions properly, you can use the Julian calendar, as astronomers do. Otherwise, you're picking some naturally perceptible phenomenon as the basis for longer-period measures. Whether this makes sense depends on your particular environment.
The fundamental source of these issues is the false perception that one calendrical period needs to factor evenly into another. You can, for example, keep lunar months and solar years as independant calendars if you like, you just don't use them in tandem to specify a particular date. We already do this by allowing weeks to have seven days, completely irrespective of the length of the month or the year. We just don't care that 2004 starts on a Thursday, while 2005 starts on a Saturday. So why do we force months to start over on the first day of the year? (Some calendars don't; some allow years to have 12 or 13 months as necessary, but use year/month/monthday to specify dates, which works also.)
A sensible solar calendar divides the year into seasons, and seasons into useful subdivisions. The Gregorian calendar follows this convention by modifying months slightly so there are three in each season. Lunar/solar calendars, however, work better for agricultural users, who set planting and harvesting schedules according to available night-time light. What you advocate doesn't really serve anyone's needs, and even disrespects the seasons. If you want 6-day weeks, do something like 12 even months of five 6-day weeks, and tack on the extra days to every third month as needed so at least the solstices and equinoxes, which practically every calendar respects in some way, don't move.
Again, calendars make arbitrary decisions designed to suit some particular population. The bottom line is that the solar, lunar, and daily periods don't factor one another, so any attempt to make two of them synch up is going to have some idiosyncratic ugliness. Your case has a 5- or 6-day ugly month/week at the end, the Gregorian has ugly months, anything non-Julian has leap days, etc. The only way to eliminate the ugliness is to stop trying to force things to line up and accept the universe as it is. The extreme case is the Julian calendar; a middle-of-the-road is to use year/week number/weekday (accepting that 7-day weeks are deeply ingrained in society), or year/month/monthday with some suitable month. But every variant requires occasional adjustment because none of the periods is perfectly regular.
That's as pointless as the 10-day weeks the French tried to adopt some time ago. People like 7-day weeks and they're not going to give them up. Besides, if weeks are so important, why even have months? Why not simply use year/week/day? And you're kind of forgetting what the word "month" means. A month should at least try to be around 28 days. Otherwise call it something else.
That's because 10 is a stupid number to base measurement systems on. It doesn't divide by three or four, and division by two leaves a useless five, which no one can visualize. 12 is a far superior base for measures, since it relates better to one's senses, and 16 or 8 would be far better than 10.
Time is one of the few places where the "metric system" (i.e. SI) hasn't managed to completely screw things up. SI puts simplicity of manual computation ahead of natural perception, not to mention accuracy of automated computation--the result is a system that actually introduces roundoff error practically every time a measure is used in a calculation. (Read up on IEEE floating-point format if you don't know what I'm talking about.)
For simple proof of how broken SI is for the real world, just go to the grocery store and have a look around--750ml, 250g, etc.
The larger size is due to the power supply for the electroshock device.
That's correct. The cited terms are initialisms, but not acronyms.
I agree they could be different, but I'm not sure exactly what distinction you're making. Please elaborate.
That doesn't make them free. For a choice to be free, possibilities of equal physical probability must exist (or perhaps entropic compartments of equal volume?), and a free decision must be made between them. In a physical universe with a theory of everything, the only way this can happen is for the result to be influenced by a metaphysical entity, i.e. a soul. This may violate conservation of information, but there it is. Maybe the information presumably lost in black holes is returned via this effect. Or perhaps that is the origin of order in general: perhaps conservation of information is fundamentally wrong if you deny metaphysical forces.
I agree with your observations about fallacious types of causality depicted in most films. I think the conflict lies in the writer's desire to preserve free will at all costs so we can care about the actions of the protagonist. Moreover, if the protagonist has no free will, neither do we (if we wish to believe we live in the same kind of universe). It is essential to the art of storytelling that we believe that the nature of one's heart or soul is revealed by one's actions.
So it's yet another lazy attempt at depicting the consequence of time travel.
You have a choice. You can have time travel with causality in your own universe, or you can have free will, but not both.
You simply can't travel into your own past without "altering" it. To be present, you have to displace air molecules. To observe you have to intercept photons. By the time you've "accidentally" stepped on a butterfly you've already "altered" things in innumerable ways. So if you "alter" the past by entering it, you must already have been there, i.e. you haven't "altered" anything at all. This means that you never had a free choice in your entire life, since it had to culminate in your returning to your own past in a predetermined physical condition.
If a film about time travel would have the guts to face the consequences to free will, it might redeem itself. But they never do; they're universally lazy in their philosophies. Bradbury's story itself makes no sense at all -- blaming the hunter for altering the present is pointless: he had no choice. The most pathetic example was Terminator 2: Sarah Connor trying to rescue free will by repeatedly claiming "There is no destiny." Uh, guess what, Sarah -- in your world, there is no free will. Kinda takes the point out of your agony, don't it? Still a fun film, but the lame attempts to rescue free will mar the story. T3 didn't bother to try, and was better for it.
Donnie Darko showed some promise in this department, but fizzled. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is the best example I've seen of an intelligent film about the juggernaut of causality, but it's dealing with a different kind of predestination: that of being a tragic pawn of the storyteller.
These "validations" aren't really worth much. I personally have evaluated a product that had passed Common Criteria, and I found numerous critical vulnerabilities, including flaws in basic SSL implementation, an obvious buffer overflow, the ability to access the entire supposedly protected database without authentication, etc. This was a closed-source product, so I'm sure there was a lot more that I missed, since all I did was test it for a couple of days.
It's much better to go with open source so at least you can audit the code yourself. Saves a lot of time.
Funny: another product I audited advertised its use of AES. As someone else pointed out, key exchange is often the problem. In this case, the key exchange mechanism used was to publish the key in plaintext after reordering the bytes, on a web page with no authentication required.
Do not trust vendors when they tell you how secure their product is, or bandy about terms like "AES" and "Common Criteria". Most closed source products are crap -- I'm speaking from experience here -- and the vendors who know that they're selling crap just lie. If you can't get the vendor to open the source to you, you're probably better off going with someone else. If there's no other option, test the hell out of it.
Not offended, but I got your point completely before. You didn't get mine.
Let's go over the problem with Pascal's Wager first. (Actually, there are a number of problems, but this one is relevant here.) Pascal's Wager is essentially a cost-benefit analysis, where the cost of betting that God exists is taken to be zero, and the benefit is taken to be either eternal happiness if God in fact does exist, or nil if He doesn't. The problem is that those aren't the only possibilities. It's entirely possible that God exists, but that He will send you to Hell if you believe in Him. It may seem irrational that He would do this, but it's certainly possible, i.e. it has non-zero probability, based on what we know, which is supposed to be nothing. Therefore, the "benefit" of betting that God exists is now one of three possibilities: eternal happiness if He exists, eternal torment if He exists, or nil if He doesn't. There is, then, no net benefit in betting that God exists. Once you start generalizing to all the possible ways God might reward or punish you for betting on His existence, you see that the Wager argues nothing, because we can't assign any relative probability to the various outcomes.
There are plenty of articles out there about Pascal's Wager if you are interested in the many ins and outs. It's clever in its perverse application of decision theory and statistical analysis to a traditionally philosophical problem, but I don't know if I'd agree that it's "one of the most brilliant fallacies ever uttered". By modern standards, where cost-benefit is something every M.B.A. knows how to do, it's pretty mundane, and it's not even thorough. If you're interested in brilliant fallacies, take a look at Anselm's ontological argument.
Taking this back to environmental science, as I said before, it's possible that human activity is in fact mitigating a natural warming effect we don't recognize. For example, strictly for argument's sake, perhaps deforestation increases radiation cooling, thus lowering land surface temperature, and perhaps this effect far outweighs the effects of releasing greenhouse gases. This is analogous to the possibility that God exists but will punish you with eternal torment for believing in Him.
We don't understand the problem of global climate change thoroughly. You're borrowing Pascal's Wager for the following argument: we can forget about trying to understand climate change completely, and can still make a "decision under uncertainty" that it's our best bet to assume that we are, in fact, causing global warming and should curtail our activities. But once you recognize that our activities may in fact be mitigating, rather than causing climate change, you find the same fallacy in your argument that exists in Pascal's.
Not clear to me what you are saying here, so I guess you are correct. But I'll say it again and maybe it'll be clearer this time: to compare outcomes you need to either show that one outcome is logically better than another (eternal happiness vs. eternal torment) or assign them numerical results that are logically comparable, i.e. the numbers lie on the same semantic axis, e.g. 3 chickens vs. 1 chicken. It's no use comparing chickens with goats unless you can relate the value of a chicken with that of a goat.
It doesn't matter what a bunch of Christians say -- u
Citing Pascal's Wager doesn't do much for your argument, given that it's a well-known logical/statistical fallacy.
The fallacy has an analogue here as well: it's possible that anthropogenic effects are actually mitigating a warming trend caused by something else that hasn't been identified. I'm not saying this is the case, but its probability is non-zero.
You don't get anywhere with statistical arguments unless you can relate one statistic to another, either logically or by assigning them numerical values on the same semantic axis. Pascal's fallacy was that he didn't show that it's more likely that you'll spend eternity in Hell if you don't believe in God than if you do.
Those are initialisms, not acronyms.
You can count infinity. That's how we know there are infinities of different sizes. You can't enumerate an infinite set in finite time, obviously, but you can count an infinite set by defining a one-to-one mapping with another infinite set. If you can show that such a mapping is impossible, you know the infinities are of different sizes. (E.g.C = 2 ** aleph-null.)
Without knowing the rules of engagement, I'd say this sounds totally justified, based on the apparent equation of "security audit" with "scan". A lot of the bozo "security auditors" who rely on scanning (because it's cheap) instead of actual auditing don't bother to secure the traffic between their company's network and the target of the scan. Meanwhile, they may require you to poke a big hole in your perimeter just to let their scan in. Consequently, any vulnerabilities in the target system get exposed to any observer on the network path. In these cases, it's better to pull while the idiots scan, report the idiot to your local inspector general, and then do the audit yourself with the scant funds left over after the idiots (still) get paid.
Furthermore, pulling the system in advance of the scan may have been the prescribed response to detecting the scan's imminence based on IDS logs or other activity. Again, we need to know the actual rules of engagement to know whether the admins were avoiding their duties or fulfilling them.
Auditing security is a lot more complex than running nmap or Retina. Doing it properly is expensive and time-consuming, and involves understanding the system and network architecture, mapping out trust relationships, logging into systems and auditing their patch levels and network and process profiles, groveling through code, possibly lots of it, possibly incoherent and uncommented, etc. Too many vendors want to come in with scanners and charge a queen's ransom for a couple of hours of real work, without providing any real security.
Right, that's why vulnerabilities are never reported in commercial software. Oh, wait -- they are.
If you think .gov systems are so insecure, I suggest you pop on over to the zone-h defacement mirror and do some stats on .gov versus .com/.net/.org defacements.
The fact is that the U.S. government is not so bad at security as a some folks seem to think. Yes, federal employees don't often get fired, but guess what: most IT systems management is done by contractors, who are quite easy to replace.
Also, I have news for you: the techniques you have in mind don't protect you against a huge variety of attacks. Many compromises these days exploit vulnerabilities in vendor-supplied web-based products, which are totally exposed in your rudimentary protection regime. Your ideas about how to protect a network are fine when you've got one /24 under centralized management. The approach you're talking about doesn't work in the real world of trash vendor software. Unfortunately, .gov folks are at the mercy of vendors, and usually much more so than in the private sector because there aren't that many .gov positions for actual programmers, and the wages are often too low to attract people with even a clue about security.
I've followed the developments in Maryland closely, and what's been noticeably absent from every report I've seen on the subject has been any discussion of what the consequences would be if the tamper-proof tape shows tampering.
More to the point: can anyone disenfranchise a whole bunch of voters by just damaging the tape, deliberately or accidentally, while voting?
Thy/thine are like a/an: use the latter form before a word whose spoken equivalent begins with a vowel. "Thine enemy", but "thy fukeng manuyle". Same deal with my/mine.
Also, "readeth" is indicative, not imperative, and third person, not second.
That should be "RTFP". The letter you've written as "Y" is a thorn (þ or &254; in iso-8859-1) and stands for "th". That letter is not present in Modern English, so it should be written out as "th". Unfortunately, slashdot won't pass through these character entities for rendering, so you'll have to imagine what it looks like, but its vague similarity to "Y", especially in older writing, along with the custom of substituting "Y" for thorn in early press printing (no thorns in the type collection), has perpetuated this confusion. The word you intended to use, "þe", is "the", and is pronounced that way. "Ye" is the plural of "you", not a definite article.
Perhaps XSLT or something similar could factor out the problems you're talking about. Define an XSL document to generate specific phrases in the detailed language and process a high-level XML document through it to generate the final XML for rendering. One of the major benefits of XML is that it's so easy to transform one document into another, or to write complex macros to represent different layers of content in different documents. It may even be feasible to use XSLT to generate counterpoint.
For those concerned about the size, give me a break. XML compresses very nicely for transport over the network, and for local storage, I don't know anyone who's hurting for disk space these days.
Uh, no. Computers that do floating-point operations flawlessly also introduce roundoff error whenever converting to and from base 10.
Try this:
You get:
Try it again with x initialized to 0.125, and you get:
So what have we learned here today, kiddies?
I think you need to look up the word arbitrary in a dictionary. All fundamental constants are arbitrary, unless you can show that a divine creator derived them from something external to our universe, in which case that external thing is arbitrary, as is the creator's decision to base the speed of light upon it. If the speed of light is a fundamental constant, it is arbitrary. And regardless of that, 299792458 is certainly arbitrary.
I'm disappointed to see this post modded as flamebait, considering how insightful it is. It is decidedly not flamebait.
I see. So let's take that logic a step further. Are you ready to learn Esperanto, along with the rest of the world? Just think how many problems we could solve by forcing everyone to use the same language. Or maybe Esperanto isn't a good choice -- maybe we should standardize on Mandarin, since so many people speak it already.
One of the advantages I believe Europeans have over U.S. citizens is that they almost universally learn a second, and often a third, language. I admire this. Similarly, I also think it's nice that U.S. citizens learn more than one system of measurement, as we all do in grade school. And it's not a big deal, you know. Both systems are pretty easy.
Practically speaking, nearly everyone in the U.S. gets by with inch, foot, yard, mile, ounce, pound, fluid ounce, quart, gallon. Those who cook need teaspoon, tablespoon, cup, and sometimes pint. Those who farm need rod, furlong, and acre. Some people need bushel. In the end, it amounts to fewer terms than gram, meter, liter, hectare, femto, pico, nano, micro, milli, centi, deci, deka, hecto, kilo, myria, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa.
because everyone is keen to argue about metric vs. U.S. units, and apparently no one has noticed that the cause of the problem was not anything to do with how broken the U.S. system is.
This accident was a version control breakdown, not a unit conversion problem. When the units on the drawing were changed, the dimensions were also changed, deliberately. The specified axle diameter was changed from 44.14 mm to 45 mm. Parts were then ordered from the wrong drawing, but if the unit conversion had been the only change, those parts would have worked correctly.
Lovers of the SI system (which is fundamentally broken in a number of ways) love to crow every time something like this happens. The last time was when the Mars Orbiter failed because of a unit conversion problem. Again, people blamed it on SI/U.S. unit conversion, when the actual problem was that the wrong units were used, not that U.S. units were used. If the teams had been working in meters and kilometers, respectively, instead of miles and kilometers, the problem would still have occurred, because they would still be using differing units. In this case, the solution would have been to designate the units used in all specified measures.
Now I'll be a hypocrite and go off-topic like the rest of you. Why SI is broken:
Every time this issue comes up it turns into an opportunity to bash the U.S. It would be nice if lovers of SI would open their eyes and see the problems in the system that make it unattractive to a society that is getting by just fine with measures that are based, for the most part, on factors of 2 and 3. A new system that resolved the problems listed above would be much more useful, but the SI users are just as entrenched in their broken system as the U.S. is in its own.