This isn't about intelligence, though. It is about fear. Fear is an emotional state and not tied at all to intelligence.
It may not be about intelligence, but it certainly is all about stupidity and ignorance - traits that enhance a person's susceptibility to self-destructive fear and political manipulation.
I agree. While the addition of a simple true or return statement at the end should not make any (significant) difference in a straight-forward execution scheme, it might very well convince a simplistic "dead code" optimizer to not prevent the execution of the for loop. I say simplistic, because the optimizer (if it indeed exists in IE) should still recognize that none of the operations in the for loop have any meaning and a constant value is returned in any case (=null), but instead it probably just checks if anything happens after the loop. By the way, it would be trivial to run a few tests to investigate if this is only happening with SunSpider code. My guess would be that it works the same way for any code that exhibits this pattern.
I've also seen thermostats that, while they don't directly control the system, do alter the way the system cycles.
This might be a rational illusion your brain constructs because on one hand the thermostat control doesn't produce directly observable results, on the other hand it looks like a pretty legit button, so we just assume that the input actually goes somewhere into a complex and intelligent system where it will be observed and acted upon in some convoluted and unprovable way. Because it feels like the pedestrian signal is changing "just a bit" faster, like the elevator door is closing "just a bit" sooner, like the temperature is balancing out "just a bit" more favorably, like the ruling parties were "just a bit" impressed by your intent on election day. We construct these illusions because we want our desires and wished to matter, or when that's not possible, we at least want borderline-plausible deniability about the insignificance of our actions.
That's an excellent point, thank you! Apart from the fact that I don't really have the influence to publish some lofty new protocol standard (and make people care about it at the same time), I absolutely agree with you that things should be tested in real life first. There are many examples where I believe the committee-designed version was horrible compared to something already in practical use - such as XML Schema versus Relax NG.
Case in point, I was totally proud of the protocol I used for the prototype of my project, right up to the point where I discovered that it was horribly misguided and too error-prone. That was an awesome experience, because now I get to do a much better version and if other people ever have to re-implement it, they'll probably be thankful for it.
This is where you're simply wrong. When the user's connection breaks, he still has the cookie for server 1, which is presumably the server all business was being conducted on until the failed handover. There is nothing preventing people from clicking the "next" button one more time if their connection tragically failed on the first attempt.
Also, it is not susceptible to replay attacks, because it's a one-time auth token. In other news, you know what else actually is susceptible to replay attacks? Cookies! And not only at the moment of any handover too, but every single request! Of course SSL solves all this but why it failed to become the default web protocol, that's probably a topic for another thread...
First, this happens only rarely in practice. Most of the time these types of ID handovers are done by huge commercial sites such as eBay and even they have cleaned up their URL mess considerably in the last years. Nowadays, big sites tend to have multiple transparent front-end servers that handle incoming connections to a single domain. Using subdomains as a means of differentiating separate machines is not all that common anymore, especially when they exchange lots of data.
But if you really need this functionality, you can just as easily pass a one-time auth token by URL and create another cookie on the second server. There is really no trickery involved here. And if you need to make it very very secure, you can use OAuth, but that would be overkill for the scenarios we're talking about here.
With that restriction, you'd have had to log in to tech.slashdot.org, linux.slashdot.org, slashdot.org, and so on all separately.
Yeah, there is no technical reason to have those subdomains anyway. (Other than that it looks cool.)
As it is, you have to log into slashdot.org and {some subdomain}.slashdot.org separately.
If you really needed to pass auth tokens around through subdomains, there are other more secure schemes available to do exactly that.
But even if you're a total fan of semantic subdomains, there is a real argument to be made that you should first have to prove to the browser you actually own the root domain and the subdomain before being allowed setting cookies for them. Though such an extra step would have added complexity, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as ugly as the wildcard/TLD/heuristics mess we got today.
The world doesn't need more incompatible social networking platforms, it needs one well-defined, well-designed, social networking protocol.
I waste my time on what I feel like, thank you. What the world needs is more people who actually do things instead of sniping cheap shots from the sidelines. And my sig is completely irrelevant to this dicussion. Feel free to diss me in a private message anytime.
It's clear why it was created. I would argue, however, that the same effect can be achieved by other means on the server side and at the same time it would have made client implementations much much easier. And safer.
I still think allowing cookies to span more than one distinct domain was a mistake. If we had avoided that in the beginning, cookie scope implementations would be dead simple and not much functionality would be lost on the server side. Also, JavaScript cookie manipulation is something we could easily lose for the benefit of every user, web developer and server admin. I postulate there are very few legitimate uses for document.cookie
Vint Cerf should blame himself for the IPv6 mess instead.
Exactly. I assert that the migration would already have happened (and seamlessly) if we had just extended the address space and left everything else the way it was. To be fair, I believe this is a marketing problem. At the time when IPv6 became serious, all sorts of ideas were floated and sensationalized. A bunch of journalists said stuff like "in the future, a device will have just one static IP wherever it goes" and "we'll do away with firewalls". Which sounded insane! And while it's debatable whether getting rid of NAT is a good or bad thing, the rest of IPv6 is actually more like the incremental upgrade we wanted all along, and less like the authoritarian supernet it was advertised to be.
More than anything else, this is the single best reason for keeping your security tight and your password secret - especially from caretakers, who will have free, unfettered and prolonged access to your work computers after you've gone home..
It's technically infeasible (maybe even impossible) to secure a computer at your workplace from coworkers, even if you're an expert. Sure, you can make it harder for them, but in the end they can always get to you - be it with the OS install disk or a simple keylogger. The primary loophole used in this attack was not the victim's stupidly negligent password policy, but a justice system that makes it so very easy to frame people like that. Since it's a crime where you're guilty for mere possession of the material, nobody really cares how it got on your hard drive. You can say "I didn't put it there" all day if you want, fact remains it's there and you have it. The same mechanism applies to drug possession, which is also routinely used to frame people. Mr Thompson was just exceedingly lucky because his attacker was so mindbogglingly clumsy in framing him, then he got lucky again because police and the judge actually cared about the fact that he was "innocent". One can only assume that many people are not that lucky, the best they can hope for is a guilty plea bargain to reduce the inevitably draconian sentence.
The fact that hacks keep coming out and left reasonably open for local user leads me to believe that Apple in reality don't care so much, but have an obligation to the big content producers to give "best effort" to keep the device secure.
It's only after a protracted legal fight and sheer judicial coincidence that users are legally allowed to jailbreak their own devices. For the future, you can bet on two things: 1) Apple will put in a big effort to make jailbreaking more difficult even if it further undermines the usefulness of their devices for normal users 2) The courts will rule jailbreaking illegal in the long run. It escapes me how the recent ruling was even possible with the DMCA and all, rest assured they will "fix" this again.
Also, the distinction between Apple and big content producers is invalid. Apple has impossibly close ties to Disney, a content company famous for its hardcore litigation practices, shameless lobbying efforts, and unique in the way it seeks to infuse our culture with conservative religious "values".
Oh, and yeah, on a related note: I finally bought an iPad last week. I searched very hard for a real open alternative that had just the right features, there was none.
Either that or the videos are mislabelled. Because the "good video" sure has a lot more arm flailing and rapid leg movement than the bad one.
Exactly. Either the study is either a victim of crappy journalism or the researchers simply couldn't properly analyze what they observed. The good moves are better coordinated, yes, but what seemed noteworthy to me is the use of broad/bold gestures and how much space the dancer occupies. "He" appears certainly more confident judging from his movements. And on a crowded dancefloor, this guy would also appear to be one of those jerks who gets in everybody's face all the time, which is probably what attracts women the most because it betrays the general douchebaggery required for those oh-so attractive displays of "dominance".
When A arrives, he/she quickly pulls out a telescope or some such device, turns around, and watches her own arrival. How can she already be there if she is just arriving?
She is there, why should it be a paradox to see herself? If I make a video of you and show it to you afterwards, is that a paradox?
When the speed of sound is broken by a jet, they could actually fly for quite a while, stop, turn around, and then hear the sound of them arriving.
Indeed.
Why should light be any different?
It isn't.
However, the problem here is how to actually arrive somewhere sooner than a photon would. Anything that has mass experiences a time dilation towards (but never reaching) the infinite the more it gets accelerated. Light, on the other hand, has no mass and hence moves with the maximum allowable speed through flat space. The fact that it is light specifically has nothing to do with the speed or any definitions of time. It is simply the speed of all massless particles that can carry information.
According to current understanding of spacetime, A can still arrive at a location before some light she sent out earlier. To do so, she just has to move through warped space, because there is no speed/time limit on the way space can be warped or accelerated.
You can't win a war of attrition with gorilla fighters ( terrorists ) They will aways find a way to surprise you or sabotage your infrastructure.
True.
In my opinion you should aim to remove the objective of your enemy. Utterly destroy what the gorilla fighters are fighting to reclaim/protect. The scotched earth way. For every suicide bombing kill tenfold of the native population of your enemy. Failing that just exterminate them all.
In the case of Islamic terrorism though, that's not really possible. Standard procedure here would be to thwart the enemy's objective. An objective which in this case would be the destruction of our freedoms and the preparation for a fundamentalist takeover of our society. Sadly, they already partly succeeded. As things are right now, further terrorist acts are practically superfluous, because we're quite capable of doing the rest of the terrorists' work for them. We already declared war against our own citizens, no outside threats necessary!
This is what makes "winning" the war so difficult, because we would first have to change our society back to a free culture. And even if we could do that, we'd still have to address the actual threat of religious extremism that makes up the support network without which terrorists would simply be reduced to insane criminals with limited means. Of course, we lost that fight as well. It's no coincidence that the founder of the "911 Terror Mosque OMG!!111!" is one of Fox' majority shareholders. The same guys are funding boths "sides" (if you can call them that), both of which actually have a radical and thoroughly religious agenda optimized for their respective cultures.
So, yeah, of course it makes sense to think about attack scenarios and to do what we can to make everybody safer, but the bad news in this case is that as long as our society is actually worth defending, it will by virtue of its free nature always have a huge surface exposed to attacks.
Microsoft management knows full well that the only way to stay on top of their huge bloated codebase and architecture is to continue along the path of managed code. The only thing they're not fond of are dynamic languages, pure and simple. Support for dynamic languages was added to the.NET runtime very late in the game, and begrudgingly at that. Their current development and runtime environments rely on huge amounts of auto-generated boilerplate glue without which the simplest tasks wouldn't be possible.
The reasons for this are probably largely historical, because there are still a lot of people from the old COM days working at MS. There are fact-based arguments as well: Dynamic languages tend to be more concise but are more difficult to automatically evaluate and optimize, especially considering the way Microsoft is relying on interface contracts and access policies (all of which are either generated by static language code or in turn serve to generate such code). Besides, none of the teams working on those much-needed tools and design-helpers wants to be put out of a job, so of course they have to stay firmly committed to their huge heap of statically generated code.
A few years ago some Microsoftie told me about a new research OS they were working on, it was completely.NET-based and probably still reflects how MS would like Windows to be if they could start over from scratch today. I believe the project's name was Singularity, I don't know if it still exists. Anyway, the whole point of the OS was its completely static architecture. There was no support for dynamic languages, all executables were statically linked and completely rigid. There was no self-modification allowed for any application and as far as I remember applications couldn't even dynamically load libraries at runtime. So, in a way, they already made clear which road they are going to go down. Dynamic languages aren't in the mix anymore, but managed code will stay around for a long time at Microsoft.
I'd not played a shooter that looks like Doom. I'd not one that presented each of its figures as a stack of pixels rendered at the fever-dream intersection of real and colorful, relevant abstract. Be it dirt, blood, hair or the barrel of a gun, everything I saw was a block. Each block was a tile of a nightmare mosaic.
I love how the limitations of the time are now being re-interpreted as not only intentional but also as artistically meaningful. One has to wonder how often that happened in other historical contexts before.
I'd not played a shooter that looks like Doom. I'd not one that presented each of its figures as a stack of pixels rendered at the fever-dream intersection of real and colorful, relevant abstract. Be it dirt, blood, hair or the barrel of a gun, everything I saw was a block. Each block was a tile of a nightmare mosaic.
I love how the technical deficiencies of the time can now be re-interpreted as not only intentional but also artistic and even metaphorically meaningful... And I wonder if that happened before in other contexts.
One would assume they'd be able to generate the power themselves.
How, with diesel plants? Wouldn't that destroy the whole cost-saving efficiency effort?
Data lines are still an issue, though an optical or microwave link to shore might be feasible.
That's not working either. On the ocean, you can't assume line of sight because weather and waves are going to get in the way. The data rate wouldn't be acceptable anyway and the effort required on both ends to compensate for the motion of the waves doesn't make it feasible.
It'd probably make more sense as a big render farm or compute farm, where the machines can chew on the task for a day and then the result is pooped back out, rather than a bunch of servers constantly being hit by requests.
That's actually a good use, I didn't think of that. But still, if I rented CPU power, I would very likely be interested in monitoring the results as they come in as opposed to firing the button and be surprised by the result and the huge bill one day later. Also, if they generate their own power out on the sea they would probably be more expensive than traditional server farms.
While the ships themselves are immune to flooding, their cables would still be susceptible to any large movements. Re-attaching the ship after the conncetion has been severed, even if it had been done deliberately, is not going to be a simple matter of plug-and-play, too. There'll be hundreds of cables to connect, then comes the task of actually booting up the servers again. And if you were a company, would you buy webspace/storage/whatever on a vessel that could go offline at any moment for an uncertain duration?
They still need massive data and power lines coming from the grid, and because servers need to be connected to the internet without even the slightest interruption, a floating server rack cannot be mobile. In fact, special steps would have to be undertaken to make sure it stays in one place during storms and other maritime crises. Wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a piece of land near the sea and simply pump the ocean water around for cooling? Throw in a few photovoltaic cells and a wind turbine and you'd get a far cheaper, more reliable land-based data center.
Yes, earth is definitely the point of origin. But it's still possible (though unlikely) that a previous civilization left Earth to colonize space or ascend in a singularity-type event, not leaving anything behind. While unlikely because we would usually assume that some structures would be left behind by such people, it's not all that unrealistic either if we consider how fast our current stuff would deteriorate into nothingness once we're gone.
I think Apple's intentions are way more sinister. In fact, patenting stuff like "Where to"s UI only makes sense if the company has already recognized that prior art is a concept that doesn't really hold up in court like it's supposed to. In fact, many (if not most) software patents are granted and enforced despite completely obvious prior art ("but our app does the same thing on a mobile device, completely different thing!!11!"). And even if prior art was still a meaningful concept, which it isn't, patent trolls like Apple would still win every court battle, because the average software company cannot possibly defend itself in court on account of the absolutely preposterous amounts of money necessary to even give it a try. In addition to all that, most countries have institutionalized a reversal of the burden of proof in patent cases, so the defendant has to first conclusively prove they don't violate a given patent and if they cannot do that (by any arbitrary measure), the accuser wins by default.
But as far as I know, the question is still unresolved. If space is curved in on itself, we could in fact go (with a spacecraft) a finite distance in one direction and arrive back where we started. If not, we'd just go on and on forever, at one point our spacecraft would overtake the current extent of matter and we'd pass into unoccupied space where the only thing left is radiation from the (slow) matter-filled part.
So the universe has no center is space is curved, but then only if the curvature is smaller than or equal to the current extent of matter. As far as I recall, we still don't really know because the distances are so vast a curved universe and a flat universe look pretty much the same from where we stand. If the curvature were really small, we would be able to see multiple versions of galaxies further away, kind of like bouncing reflections between two mirrors. But alas, it is not;-)
In fact, the notion of fire being an element is something the ancient Greeks thought up, not something you'll find in the Bible. Ironically, they came to this conclusion after the rejection of religion and insistence upon observation of nature.
I was talking about alchemy, and the point was that this was the last time when chemistry was compatible with and encouraged by the Christian leadership. Which is still correct, but I apologize if I failed to bring that point across. Have mercy on a non-native English speaker;-)
We don't read the Bible as if it's a scientific treatise.
No, most of "you" replace the Bible with scientific treatise and the rest of "you" thinks the Bible should supersede science whenever it seems necessary. But so as not to generalize too much, I'll just talk about your position as I perceived it, which is more closely related to the latter.
When it says that God created Man, we can believe that without knowing all of the details of how he did it.
I believe that you do indeed try to live according to that. It's a few lines further down when you state the opposite by professing that religion does not cherish ignorance where I have trouble keeping my sarcasm in check. But let's not dwell on that, let's instead talk about facts, not perceived intentions. Trouble is, God did demonstrably not create Man (or woman for that matter). You see, science cannot just glance over certain areas of nature, just because "we can believe the Bible without knowing the details".
We investigate everything, because we have to. Science would not even work if important pieces of the puzzle were off-limits. So we researched. And we found out how the universe came into existence, we found out how matter interacts, and we found out how life works. In great detail, and we're not even close to finished. In some areas, and for some of us, those results may be troubling or directly contradict the teachings of our ancestors. But they exist nonetheless, and wishful thinking cannot rewrite reality. It becomes a question of whether you either accept what you found out and move on, or you willingly ignore what you learned and stay with a world view that is entirely based on fiction.
I'll now move on to the depressing Bible passage you posted that, if nothing else, apparently demonstrates to both of us how scripture is designed to be interpreted however one likes it:
That men may appreciate wisdom and discipline, may understand words of intelligence; May receive training in wise conduct, in what is right, just and honest;
I liked that, but in the back of my head there was the creeping suspicion that those words meant something else for the author than they do for us today. And indeed, here comes the resolution:
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; wisdom and instruction fools despise.
So many things wrong with that, on so many levels, where to start... First off, if your God rules through fear, he is first and foremost a complete douche-bag and following tyrants is generally considered an act of cowardice if not treason. However, once again I have to concede that this argument is not exactly on-topic anymore.
Let's stay with the part where God is placed on top of every scientific observation. That's just not possible anymore, even if a scientist somehow tried it, their results would be severely compromised. This is exactly what pushed Einstein over the cliff and why Boltzmann killed himself. Now, nearly a century later, it has become even more futile to unify science and religion, especially for people who want to stay true to both.
You see, religion isn't content with merely the explanation of natural phenomenon, but seeks to understand all aspects of reality - including the supernatural, the spiritual, and the moral as
Slashdot Mirror
It may not be about intelligence, but it certainly is all about stupidity and ignorance - traits that enhance a person's susceptibility to self-destructive fear and political manipulation.
I agree. While the addition of a simple true or return statement at the end should not make any (significant) difference in a straight-forward execution scheme, it might very well convince a simplistic "dead code" optimizer to not prevent the execution of the for loop. I say simplistic, because the optimizer (if it indeed exists in IE) should still recognize that none of the operations in the for loop have any meaning and a constant value is returned in any case (=null), but instead it probably just checks if anything happens after the loop. By the way, it would be trivial to run a few tests to investigate if this is only happening with SunSpider code. My guess would be that it works the same way for any code that exhibits this pattern.
This might be a rational illusion your brain constructs because on one hand the thermostat control doesn't produce directly observable results, on the other hand it looks like a pretty legit button, so we just assume that the input actually goes somewhere into a complex and intelligent system where it will be observed and acted upon in some convoluted and unprovable way. Because it feels like the pedestrian signal is changing "just a bit" faster, like the elevator door is closing "just a bit" sooner, like the temperature is balancing out "just a bit" more favorably, like the ruling parties were "just a bit" impressed by your intent on election day. We construct these illusions because we want our desires and wished to matter, or when that's not possible, we at least want borderline-plausible deniability about the insignificance of our actions.
That's an excellent point, thank you! Apart from the fact that I don't really have the influence to publish some lofty new protocol standard (and make people care about it at the same time), I absolutely agree with you that things should be tested in real life first. There are many examples where I believe the committee-designed version was horrible compared to something already in practical use - such as XML Schema versus Relax NG.
Case in point, I was totally proud of the protocol I used for the prototype of my project, right up to the point where I discovered that it was horribly misguided and too error-prone. That was an awesome experience, because now I get to do a much better version and if other people ever have to re-implement it, they'll probably be thankful for it.
This is where you're simply wrong. When the user's connection breaks, he still has the cookie for server 1, which is presumably the server all business was being conducted on until the failed handover. There is nothing preventing people from clicking the "next" button one more time if their connection tragically failed on the first attempt.
Also, it is not susceptible to replay attacks, because it's a one-time auth token. In other news, you know what else actually is susceptible to replay attacks? Cookies! And not only at the moment of any handover too, but every single request! Of course SSL solves all this but why it failed to become the default web protocol, that's probably a topic for another thread...
First, this happens only rarely in practice. Most of the time these types of ID handovers are done by huge commercial sites such as eBay and even they have cleaned up their URL mess considerably in the last years. Nowadays, big sites tend to have multiple transparent front-end servers that handle incoming connections to a single domain. Using subdomains as a means of differentiating separate machines is not all that common anymore, especially when they exchange lots of data.
But if you really need this functionality, you can just as easily pass a one-time auth token by URL and create another cookie on the second server. There is really no trickery involved here. And if you need to make it very very secure, you can use OAuth, but that would be overkill for the scenarios we're talking about here.
Yeah, there is no technical reason to have those subdomains anyway. (Other than that it looks cool.)
If you really needed to pass auth tokens around through subdomains, there are other more secure schemes available to do exactly that.
But even if you're a total fan of semantic subdomains, there is a real argument to be made that you should first have to prove to the browser you actually own the root domain and the subdomain before being allowed setting cookies for them. Though such an extra step would have added complexity, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as ugly as the wildcard/TLD/heuristics mess we got today.
I waste my time on what I feel like, thank you. What the world needs is more people who actually do things instead of sniping cheap shots from the sidelines. And my sig is completely irrelevant to this dicussion. Feel free to diss me in a private message anytime.
It's clear why it was created. I would argue, however, that the same effect can be achieved by other means on the server side and at the same time it would have made client implementations much much easier. And safer.
I still think allowing cookies to span more than one distinct domain was a mistake. If we had avoided that in the beginning, cookie scope implementations would be dead simple and not much functionality would be lost on the server side. Also, JavaScript cookie manipulation is something we could easily lose for the benefit of every user, web developer and server admin. I postulate there are very few legitimate uses for document.cookie
Exactly. I assert that the migration would already have happened (and seamlessly) if we had just extended the address space and left everything else the way it was. To be fair, I believe this is a marketing problem. At the time when IPv6 became serious, all sorts of ideas were floated and sensationalized. A bunch of journalists said stuff like "in the future, a device will have just one static IP wherever it goes" and "we'll do away with firewalls". Which sounded insane! And while it's debatable whether getting rid of NAT is a good or bad thing, the rest of IPv6 is actually more like the incremental upgrade we wanted all along, and less like the authoritarian supernet it was advertised to be.
It's technically infeasible (maybe even impossible) to secure a computer at your workplace from coworkers, even if you're an expert. Sure, you can make it harder for them, but in the end they can always get to you - be it with the OS install disk or a simple keylogger. The primary loophole used in this attack was not the victim's stupidly negligent password policy, but a justice system that makes it so very easy to frame people like that. Since it's a crime where you're guilty for mere possession of the material, nobody really cares how it got on your hard drive. You can say "I didn't put it there" all day if you want, fact remains it's there and you have it. The same mechanism applies to drug possession, which is also routinely used to frame people. Mr Thompson was just exceedingly lucky because his attacker was so mindbogglingly clumsy in framing him, then he got lucky again because police and the judge actually cared about the fact that he was "innocent". One can only assume that many people are not that lucky, the best they can hope for is a guilty plea bargain to reduce the inevitably draconian sentence.
No, Apple would like to sue jailbreakers for their last penny if they could:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jailbreaking/
It's only after a protracted legal fight and sheer judicial coincidence that users are legally allowed to jailbreak their own devices. For the future, you can bet on two things:
1) Apple will put in a big effort to make jailbreaking more difficult even if it further undermines the usefulness of their devices for normal users
2) The courts will rule jailbreaking illegal in the long run. It escapes me how the recent ruling was even possible with the DMCA and all, rest assured they will "fix" this again.
Also, the distinction between Apple and big content producers is invalid. Apple has impossibly close ties to Disney, a content company famous for its hardcore litigation practices, shameless lobbying efforts, and unique in the way it seeks to infuse our culture with conservative religious "values".
Oh, and yeah, on a related note: I finally bought an iPad last week. I searched very hard for a real open alternative that had just the right features, there was none.
Exactly. Either the study is either a victim of crappy journalism or the researchers simply couldn't properly analyze what they observed. The good moves are better coordinated, yes, but what seemed noteworthy to me is the use of broad/bold gestures and how much space the dancer occupies. "He" appears certainly more confident judging from his movements. And on a crowded dancefloor, this guy would also appear to be one of those jerks who gets in everybody's face all the time, which is probably what attracts women the most because it betrays the general douchebaggery required for those oh-so attractive displays of "dominance".
(Why, yes, I'm single, what a coincidence...)
She is there, why should it be a paradox to see herself? If I make a video of you and show it to you afterwards, is that a paradox?
Indeed.
It isn't.
However, the problem here is how to actually arrive somewhere sooner than a photon would. Anything that has mass experiences a time dilation towards (but never reaching) the infinite the more it gets accelerated. Light, on the other hand, has no mass and hence moves with the maximum allowable speed through flat space. The fact that it is light specifically has nothing to do with the speed or any definitions of time. It is simply the speed of all massless particles that can carry information.
According to current understanding of spacetime, A can still arrive at a location before some light she sent out earlier. To do so, she just has to move through warped space, because there is no speed/time limit on the way space can be warped or accelerated.
True.
In the case of Islamic terrorism though, that's not really possible. Standard procedure here would be to thwart the enemy's objective. An objective which in this case would be the destruction of our freedoms and the preparation for a fundamentalist takeover of our society. Sadly, they already partly succeeded. As things are right now, further terrorist acts are practically superfluous, because we're quite capable of doing the rest of the terrorists' work for them. We already declared war against our own citizens, no outside threats necessary!
This is what makes "winning" the war so difficult, because we would first have to change our society back to a free culture. And even if we could do that, we'd still have to address the actual threat of religious extremism that makes up the support network without which terrorists would simply be reduced to insane criminals with limited means. Of course, we lost that fight as well. It's no coincidence that the founder of the "911 Terror Mosque OMG!!111!" is one of Fox' majority shareholders. The same guys are funding boths "sides" (if you can call them that), both of which actually have a radical and thoroughly religious agenda optimized for their respective cultures.
So, yeah, of course it makes sense to think about attack scenarios and to do what we can to make everybody safer, but the bad news in this case is that as long as our society is actually worth defending, it will by virtue of its free nature always have a huge surface exposed to attacks.
Microsoft management knows full well that the only way to stay on top of their huge bloated codebase and architecture is to continue along the path of managed code. The only thing they're not fond of are dynamic languages, pure and simple. Support for dynamic languages was added to the .NET runtime very late in the game, and begrudgingly at that. Their current development and runtime environments rely on huge amounts of auto-generated boilerplate glue without which the simplest tasks wouldn't be possible.
The reasons for this are probably largely historical, because there are still a lot of people from the old COM days working at MS. There are fact-based arguments as well: Dynamic languages tend to be more concise but are more difficult to automatically evaluate and optimize, especially considering the way Microsoft is relying on interface contracts and access policies (all of which are either generated by static language code or in turn serve to generate such code). Besides, none of the teams working on those much-needed tools and design-helpers wants to be put out of a job, so of course they have to stay firmly committed to their huge heap of statically generated code.
A few years ago some Microsoftie told me about a new research OS they were working on, it was completely .NET-based and probably still reflects how MS would like Windows to be if they could start over from scratch today. I believe the project's name was Singularity, I don't know if it still exists. Anyway, the whole point of the OS was its completely static architecture. There was no support for dynamic languages, all executables were statically linked and completely rigid. There was no self-modification allowed for any application and as far as I remember applications couldn't even dynamically load libraries at runtime. So, in a way, they already made clear which road they are going to go down. Dynamic languages aren't in the mix anymore, but managed code will stay around for a long time at Microsoft.
I love how the limitations of the time are now being re-interpreted as not only intentional but also as artistically meaningful.
One has to wonder how often that happened in other historical contexts before.
I love how the technical deficiencies of the time can now be re-interpreted as not only intentional but also artistic and even metaphorically meaningful...
And I wonder if that happened before in other contexts.
How, with diesel plants? Wouldn't that destroy the whole cost-saving efficiency effort?
That's not working either. On the ocean, you can't assume line of sight because weather and waves are going to get in the way. The data rate wouldn't be acceptable anyway and the effort required on both ends to compensate for the motion of the waves doesn't make it feasible.
That's actually a good use, I didn't think of that. But still, if I rented CPU power, I would very likely be interested in monitoring the results as they come in as opposed to firing the button and be surprised by the result and the huge bill one day later. Also, if they generate their own power out on the sea they would probably be more expensive than traditional server farms.
While the ships themselves are immune to flooding, their cables would still be susceptible to any large movements. Re-attaching the ship after the conncetion has been severed, even if it had been done deliberately, is not going to be a simple matter of plug-and-play, too. There'll be hundreds of cables to connect, then comes the task of actually booting up the servers again. And if you were a company, would you buy webspace/storage/whatever on a vessel that could go offline at any moment for an uncertain duration?
They still need massive data and power lines coming from the grid, and because servers need to be connected to the internet without even the slightest interruption, a floating server rack cannot be mobile. In fact, special steps would have to be undertaken to make sure it stays in one place during storms and other maritime crises. Wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a piece of land near the sea and simply pump the ocean water around for cooling? Throw in a few photovoltaic cells and a wind turbine and you'd get a far cheaper, more reliable land-based data center.
Yes, earth is definitely the point of origin. But it's still possible (though unlikely) that a previous civilization left Earth to colonize space or ascend in a singularity-type event, not leaving anything behind. While unlikely because we would usually assume that some structures would be left behind by such people, it's not all that unrealistic either if we consider how fast our current stuff would deteriorate into nothingness once we're gone.
I think Apple's intentions are way more sinister. In fact, patenting stuff like "Where to"s UI only makes sense if the company has already recognized that prior art is a concept that doesn't really hold up in court like it's supposed to. In fact, many (if not most) software patents are granted and enforced despite completely obvious prior art ("but our app does the same thing on a mobile device, completely different thing!!11!"). And even if prior art was still a meaningful concept, which it isn't, patent trolls like Apple would still win every court battle, because the average software company cannot possibly defend itself in court on account of the absolutely preposterous amounts of money necessary to even give it a try. In addition to all that, most countries have institutionalized a reversal of the burden of proof in patent cases, so the defendant has to first conclusively prove they don't violate a given patent and if they cannot do that (by any arbitrary measure), the accuser wins by default.
But as far as I know, the question is still unresolved. If space is curved in on itself, we could in fact go (with a spacecraft) a finite distance in one direction and arrive back where we started. If not, we'd just go on and on forever, at one point our spacecraft would overtake the current extent of matter and we'd pass into unoccupied space where the only thing left is radiation from the (slow) matter-filled part.
So the universe has no center is space is curved, but then only if the curvature is smaller than or equal to the current extent of matter. As far as I recall, we still don't really know because the distances are so vast a curved universe and a flat universe look pretty much the same from where we stand. If the curvature were really small, we would be able to see multiple versions of galaxies further away, kind of like bouncing reflections between two mirrors. But alas, it is not ;-)
I was talking about alchemy, and the point was that this was the last time when chemistry was compatible with and encouraged by the Christian leadership. Which is still correct, but I apologize if I failed to bring that point across. Have mercy on a non-native English speaker ;-)
No, most of "you" replace the Bible with scientific treatise and the rest of "you" thinks the Bible should supersede science whenever it seems necessary. But so as not to generalize too much, I'll just talk about your position as I perceived it, which is more closely related to the latter.
I believe that you do indeed try to live according to that. It's a few lines further down when you state the opposite by professing that religion does not cherish ignorance where I have trouble keeping my sarcasm in check. But let's not dwell on that, let's instead talk about facts, not perceived intentions. Trouble is, God did demonstrably not create Man (or woman for that matter). You see, science cannot just glance over certain areas of nature, just because "we can believe the Bible without knowing the details".
We investigate everything, because we have to. Science would not even work if important pieces of the puzzle were off-limits. So we researched. And we found out how the universe came into existence, we found out how matter interacts, and we found out how life works. In great detail, and we're not even close to finished. In some areas, and for some of us, those results may be troubling or directly contradict the teachings of our ancestors. But they exist nonetheless, and wishful thinking cannot rewrite reality. It becomes a question of whether you either accept what you found out and move on, or you willingly ignore what you learned and stay with a world view that is entirely based on fiction.
I'll now move on to the depressing Bible passage you posted that, if nothing else, apparently demonstrates to both of us how scripture is designed to be interpreted however one likes it:
I liked that, but in the back of my head there was the creeping suspicion that those words meant something else for the author than they do for us today. And indeed, here comes the resolution:
So many things wrong with that, on so many levels, where to start... First off, if your God rules through fear, he is first and foremost a complete douche-bag and following tyrants is generally considered an act of cowardice if not treason. However, once again I have to concede that this argument is not exactly on-topic anymore.
Let's stay with the part where God is placed on top of every scientific observation. That's just not possible anymore, even if a scientist somehow tried it, their results would be severely compromised. This is exactly what pushed Einstein over the cliff and why Boltzmann killed himself. Now, nearly a century later, it has become even more futile to unify science and religion, especially for people who want to stay true to both.