Exactly. That was the one basic point I was trying to get accross.
Basically I agree that it's outrageous that the conservatives highjack the political process for this sort of thing. A lot of people have misunderstood me!
Um, unsigned Java applets can't cause any damage (apart from spoofing password dialogs etc. but that can even be done in non-dynamic HTML). Or do you know something that Sun doesn't?
Look, you clueless person, next time read and digest the security advisory first before posting about something you don't understand.
Not hosting Java applets on a server will not prevent this problem, because the whole point is that hackers can introduce arbitrary APPLETs and SCRIPTs onto web pages. This is not a flaw in Java, it is a flaw in web servers. Turning off executable code on the client is a bad quick fix - the best solution is fixing the servers.
I thought it had been established that Java was secure enough for applets. Please get a clue.
Well actually, "implements" and delegation is what you probably need. Delegation can be a real irritation - I know, I've had to do it a lot in my extension collection classes - but a cool thing to do would be to code an extension to Java using the free "compiler construction kit" ANTLRCC to take some of the drugery out of it. I might just do that when I have some spare time.
Good point. But put UCITA, and the fact that a company with strong ties to the evil "Church" of Scientology is supplying a defrag utility supplied with W2K, together - and you can dream up some even more scary scenarios.
What I do have a problem with is groups that point their fingers at my family and say, "All right, now we'll set your moral standards for you.")
I'm afraid that's exactly what has to happen - that is the *meaning* of the word morality. Just read any philosohical book on ethics. There's no such thing as morality that only applies to a small group of people - it applies to everyone (under morally similar conditions), or it's not morality at all. Just think about it for one second - take some commonly accepted moral rules:
It's wrong to kill someone for fun
It's wrong to steal from a baby
It's wrong to eat people
Obviously these apply to everyone. Saying "It would be wrong for me to kill someone for fun, but not if you did it" is just ridiculous. The same goes for any other moral principle. I believe that it would be morally wrong for me to choose to eat meat, because of the animal suffering and violence involved. That *automatically* implies, by definition of morality, that it is wrong for everyone else to choose to eat meat. For people for whom it doesn't, they must be confusing morality with something less strong, like just personal taste. There's no getting away from it.
I don't agree with compulsory censorware, but your argument is completely illogical - unfortunately it's quite a common mistake.
Your moral principle is that "You shouldn't impose your moral principles on other people." But don't you see - imposing that moral principle on others is totally hypocritical!!
That's right. But the best thing to do is probably to assign them to a nonprofit like the FSF or SPI with strict instructions not to enforce the patent, just to prove your intentions. I don't know whether FSF or SPI will actually let you do that, I'm just speaking hypothetically!
They will already do so. Have you read the privacy statement on those websites? Many of them say "We will not disclose private data... unless required to do so by the police" - or words to that effect.
Indeed, the right to not be forced to self-incriminate should apply to the encryption case, but the speedtrap case is just plain silly. Speed traps are there to collect evidence - it's like saying evidence from CCTVs should be inadmissable because they allow you to "self-incriminate". Totally idiotic.
You're onto something - this is the basic idea of Steganographic File Systems (more or less). Someone in the UK is working on one for Linux right now (just search the net) - this is just the kind of thing we need to defend ourselves against this stupid law.
Interesting that...power=energy/time so Tesla learned how to make energy from nothing?
With any so-called Over-Unity Device, there is always the possibility of unknown sources of energy. And remember, a lot of physicists did cold fusion replication attempts in the early 90s - they were rigorous scientists, and they still had open enough minds to give it a fighting chance. So don't be so quick to diss.
Also, and on the other hand, I have heard that the Law of Conservation of Energy in Physics was proposed by a non-physicist and just accepted because it seemed to fit the evidence, not on the basis of any rigorous experiments designed specifically to test the theory. So maybe it isn't so crazy to believe it could be false in some circumstances. In fact, we already know it is false (in some sense) at the quantum scale - because of the quantum foam - although because of the short timescales/energies involved this has never been usefully harnessed. Comments?
With micropayment we would have to always keep an eye on the meter, no casual surfing around.
Anyone that would use such a system which took your money without asking you first, would be an idiot. Obviously, micropayment systems don't have to be like that. Security would be a big issue however.
Whether or not this form of plagiarism can be proved to be a flagrant copyright violation is up to the lawyers.
If there's no more than a minimum amount (say, a sentence at most) in common between the two, that can't be copyright violation. Copyright can only be applied to writings, and not to the information/opinions contained within those writings.
Darwin only poses Natural Selection (I believe) which is an observed, provable fact of biology.
Alright, this just really annoys me. Everyone is like, "this is just pseudoscience" when they haven't even read the book and given it a fair hearing, whereas few people are criticising Darwinism, but the truth is that neo-Darwinism has almost no empirical support either.
No, I'm not a creationist. No, I'm not crazy. I've just read this paradigm-changing book: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism by Richard Milton.
Let's briefly run down some of the key arguments: (see also this article which was censored on request of the high priest of neo-Darwinism, Richard Dawkins)
We don't actually know how old the earth is. I'll repeat that, because I'm sure someone will say I'm trying to claim the earth is 6000 years old or whatever: No, we don't actually know how old the earth is. Given that realisation, there is then no evidence whatsoever that the earth has existed long enough for the tortuously slow process of neo-Darwinian evolution to produce humans. Rocks are used to date fossils, but fossils are also used to date rocks - a totally circular argument. All forms of radiological dating are very inaccurate and untrustworthy - recent volcanic eruptions have been dated to be "thousands of years old" using radiological methods. Uniformitarian geological theories predict that stalagmites should take on the order of thousands of years to form, yet they have been observed forming in mines less than 30 years old.
There is no universally accepted definition, even among Darwinists, of what the word "species" means in Darwinian terms, so to even debate the point of whether speciation has been proven is to get mired in confusions. Darwin himself claimed to have observed speciation in Galapagos finches, but this was just trivial intra-species differentiation. No evidence has ever been discovered of significant speciation that could really prove, once and for all, that a man could evolve from an ape purely through natural selection of random mutations. It's all hypotheses - no matter how much Darwinists want to scream and shout that "it is not just a theory, there is enough evidence to be as certain as we'll ever be that it's true" - in reality, what little evidence of speciation there is (e.g. homological similarities) is purely circumstantial - suggestive but nowhere near constituting proof.
What's more, random beneficial mutations are not just very rare, they're extremely freak occurrences - there is nowhere near enough experimental evidence of random beneficial mutations to believe that they are a significant factor in evolution (if it occurs) at all. On the other hand, directed beneficial mutations in microorganisms have been observed, as other expert Slashdot posters have already noted - in repeated experiments, beneficial mutations appeared far faster than would be possible by chance alone. (Of course, there is usually a nonzero probability of the results being caused by contamination, but that possibility doesn't help neo-Darwinism either.)
Punctuated equilibrium is just an ad-hoc explanation to explain the embarrassing lack of "missing link" fossils. The only reason for adopting it is to explain away the lack of missing links. It's almost as bad as theologians getting around any awkward question, like "How did Noah's children reproduce without committing incest?" by saying "The ways of God are too deep for us mere mortals to understand."
The idea that DNA entirely determines the characteristics of the organism does not sit well with these observations -
"Fifteen years ago molecular biologists working under Dr Morris Goodman at Michigan University decided to test this hypothesis. They took the alpha haemoglobin DNA of two reptiles -- a snake and a crocodile -- which are said by Darwinists to be closely related, and the haemoglobin DNA of a bird, in this case a farmyard chicken.
They found that the two animals who had _least_ DNA sequences in common were the two reptiles, the snake and the crocodile. They had only around 5% of DNA sequences in common -- only one twentieth of their haemoglobin DNA. The two creatures whose DNA was closest were the crocodile and the chicken, where there were 17.5% of sequences in common -- nearly one fifth. The actual DNA similarities were the _reverse_ of that predicted by neo-Darwinism."
Limited Lamarkian change has been observed in the lab - see "Genetic Engineering - Dream or Nightmare" by Mae Wan Ho. Larmarkianism isn't correct either as an overarching theory of evolution, but inheritance of acquired characteristics can sometimes occur.
"Natural selection" is an empty tautology. Fitness is defined as "leaving most offspring" - so what it actually means is that "Those who leave most offspring will leave most offspring". Which says nothing at all. What's crucial to realise is that there is a related, non-empty, insight here - that the distribution of offspring with certain characteristics can be a factor in changing characteristics of organisms - and this is the insight that Darwin should be rightly recognised for; but it's quite a trivial one, and says nothing about how significant that factor is in relation to other factors such as, say, directed mutation.
In conclusion, neo-Darwinism is as full of holes as a fishing net, and should not be accepted as proven by an serious scientist.
Where, in this "quantum evolution" theory, does it actually contradict Darwinism?
Don't jump the gun - the book hasn't even been published yet. None of us have actually read a rigorous statement of what the theory says. I've just pre-ordered the book though.
Nothing in there is complicated. Um, protein folding? That's quite a biggie. No-one understands how that works yet. My bet is there has to be either quantum "lookahead" or morphogenetic fields, involved there, or both - there are just too many permutations for it to fold into the same configuration at the speed that it does in a classical kind of way.
It's known in Britain as "Intellectual Impostures", incidentally.
Only, Sokal and his co-author demonstrate most of science terms and concepts they use are mangled and meaningless even to the scientists that invented them.
Not at all. I've read the book. Freud (not really mentiond in the book at all) was not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination - his theories were not even properly testable, so it's not surprising he didn't actually bother to test them - so please don't bring him in here.
Yes, these postmodernist buffoons use scientific words inappropriately and combine them in meaningless ways. But phrases and words like "imaginary number", "topology" and "mobius strip" do have well-defined meanings, and they are not as you state "meaningless even to the scientists that invented them".
theologists and wacko's use it as proof that science's used to be rigidly deterministic
Yes they do - but of course chaos theory is applied to deterministic systems, so that's very muddled. A sure sign of scientific cluelessness is confusing chaos theory with the indeterminism of some (not all) interpretations of quantum physics.
However, part of what they say happens to be trivially correct - it was a basic change in science that took place around the start of this (20th) century. Before quantum physics, many people, like Laplace, really did think that the world was entirely deterministic. Now although the many-worlds interpretation is fully deterministic at the multiverse level, as has been said, the majority view now is that, on the contrary, there is something really weird going on at the quantum level, something both indeterministic and fundamentally non-local - so there has been a major shift in scientific opinion from determinism, and certainly even the multiverse view is worlds apart from Laplace's determinism.
Re:Why UseNet will remain popular
on
Is Usenet Dying?
·
· Score: 1
This specifically means binary postings, for instance. If a user desperately needs them (and I'm sure many do:), then www.deja.com remains an option.
Unfortunately, deja.com doesn't allow access to many binary ngs. I suspect it's because they just wouldn't be able to handle the load and/or storage requirements.
Duh, because not enough people realise it - and even of those who do, some people still vote on the "lesser of two evils" principle (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
See above (in "sort by score" mode). I don't know Javascript, but there are some Javascript URLs up there that display your slashdot password (which is stored in a cookie, remember) in a popup. These could very easily be sent to any server!
I'm worried now. I will have to be more careful what I click on!
I agree. The most ridiculous thing is, the original poster was using moronic "free market / libertarian" type arguments to argue FOR a law that takes AWAY consumer's freedoms!! How contradictory is that!:-)
But it's not so different to most free-market libertarians, after all. It's just that mosttimes, their arguments are slightly less obviously silly. Always ask yourself questions like "What about the child laborers in sweatshops? What kind of freedom do they have? Doesn't their lack of freedom and their horrible living conditions make the so-called 'lack of freedom' induced by taxation of the rich pale by comparison?"
Wiht most software vendors, that can be done (for a sufficiently large corporation, note, but not for many small and medium sized businesses). But if a corporation believes it has no alternative but to use NT and/or MS Office at the present time, which many corporations seem to, they have to accept whatever license MS wants.
That's why non-software-corporations should be very scared.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically I agree that it's outrageous that the conservatives highjack the political process for this sort of thing. A lot of people have misunderstood me!
Um, unsigned Java applets can't cause any damage (apart from spoofing password dialogs etc. but that can even be done in non-dynamic HTML). Or do you know something that Sun doesn't?
Not hosting Java applets on a server will not prevent this problem, because the whole point is that hackers can introduce arbitrary APPLETs and SCRIPTs onto web pages. This is not a flaw in Java, it is a flaw in web servers. Turning off executable code on the client is a bad quick fix - the best solution is fixing the servers.
I thought it had been established that Java was secure enough for applets. Please get a clue.
I'm afraid that's exactly what has to happen - that is the *meaning* of the word morality. Just read any philosohical book on ethics. There's no such thing as morality that only applies to a small group of people - it applies to everyone (under morally similar conditions), or it's not morality at all. Just think about it for one second - take some commonly accepted moral rules:
- It's wrong to kill someone for fun
- It's wrong to steal from a baby
- It's wrong to eat people
Obviously these apply to everyone. Saying "It would be wrong for me to kill someone for fun, but not if you did it" is just ridiculous. The same goes for any other moral principle. I believe that it would be morally wrong for me to choose to eat meat, because of the animal suffering and violence involved. That *automatically* implies, by definition of morality, that it is wrong for everyone else to choose to eat meat. For people for whom it doesn't, they must be confusing morality with something less strong, like just personal taste. There's no getting away from it.I don't agree with compulsory censorware, but your argument is completely illogical - unfortunately it's quite a common mistake.
Your moral principle is that "You shouldn't impose your moral principles on other people." But don't you see - imposing that moral principle on others is totally hypocritical!!
With any so-called Over-Unity Device, there is always the possibility of unknown sources of energy. And remember, a lot of physicists did cold fusion replication attempts in the early 90s - they were rigorous scientists, and they still had open enough minds to give it a fighting chance. So don't be so quick to diss.
Also, and on the other hand, I have heard that the Law of Conservation of Energy in Physics was proposed by a non-physicist and just accepted because it seemed to fit the evidence, not on the basis of any rigorous experiments designed specifically to test the theory. So maybe it isn't so crazy to believe it could be false in some circumstances. In fact, we already know it is false (in some sense) at the quantum scale - because of the quantum foam - although because of the short timescales/energies involved this has never been usefully harnessed. Comments?
Anyone that would use such a system which took your money without asking you first, would be an idiot. Obviously, micropayment systems don't have to be like that. Security would be a big issue however.
If there's no more than a minimum amount (say, a sentence at most) in common between the two, that can't be copyright violation. Copyright can only be applied to writings, and not to the information/opinions contained within those writings.
Alright, this just really annoys me. Everyone is like, "this is just pseudoscience" when they haven't even read the book and given it a fair hearing, whereas few people are criticising Darwinism, but the truth is that neo-Darwinism has almost no empirical support either.
No, I'm not a creationist. No, I'm not crazy. I've just read this paradigm-changing book: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism by Richard Milton.
Let's briefly run down some of the key arguments: (see also this article which was censored on request of the high priest of neo-Darwinism, Richard Dawkins)
- We don't actually know how old the earth is. I'll repeat that, because I'm sure someone will say I'm trying to claim the earth is 6000 years old or whatever: No, we don't actually know how old the earth is. Given that realisation, there is then no evidence whatsoever that the earth has existed long enough for the tortuously slow process of neo-Darwinian evolution to produce humans. Rocks are used to date fossils, but fossils are also used to date rocks - a totally circular argument. All forms of radiological dating are very inaccurate and untrustworthy - recent volcanic eruptions have been dated to be "thousands of years old" using radiological methods. Uniformitarian geological theories predict that stalagmites should take on the order of thousands of years to form, yet they have been observed forming in mines less than 30 years old.
- There is no universally accepted definition, even among Darwinists, of what the word "species" means in Darwinian terms, so to even debate the point of whether speciation has been proven is to get mired in confusions. Darwin himself claimed to have observed speciation in Galapagos finches, but this was just trivial intra-species differentiation. No evidence has ever been discovered of significant speciation that could really prove, once and for all, that a man could evolve from an ape purely through natural selection of random mutations. It's all hypotheses - no matter how much Darwinists want to scream and shout that "it is not just a theory, there is enough evidence to be as certain as we'll ever be that it's true" - in reality, what little evidence of speciation there is (e.g. homological similarities) is purely circumstantial - suggestive but nowhere near constituting proof.
- What's more, random beneficial mutations are not just very rare, they're extremely freak occurrences - there is nowhere near enough experimental evidence of random beneficial mutations to believe that they are a significant factor in evolution (if it occurs) at all. On the other hand, directed beneficial mutations in microorganisms have been observed, as other expert Slashdot posters have already noted - in repeated experiments, beneficial mutations appeared far faster than would be possible by chance alone. (Of course, there is usually a nonzero probability of the results being caused by contamination, but that possibility doesn't help neo-Darwinism either.)
- Punctuated equilibrium is just an ad-hoc explanation to explain the embarrassing lack of "missing link" fossils. The only reason for adopting it is to explain away the lack of missing links. It's almost as bad as theologians getting around any awkward question, like "How did Noah's children reproduce without committing incest?" by saying "The ways of God are too deep for us mere mortals to understand."
- The idea that DNA entirely determines the characteristics of the organism does not sit well with these observations -
- Limited Lamarkian change has been observed in the lab - see "Genetic Engineering - Dream or Nightmare" by Mae Wan Ho. Larmarkianism isn't correct either as an overarching theory of evolution, but inheritance of acquired characteristics can sometimes occur.
- "Natural selection" is an empty tautology. Fitness is defined as "leaving most offspring" - so what it actually means is that "Those who leave most offspring will leave most offspring". Which says nothing at all. What's crucial to realise is that there is a related, non-empty, insight here - that the distribution of offspring with certain characteristics can be a factor in changing characteristics of organisms - and this is the insight that Darwin should be rightly recognised for; but it's quite a trivial one, and says nothing about how significant that factor is in relation to other factors such as, say, directed mutation.
In conclusion, neo-Darwinism is as full of holes as a fishing net, and should not be accepted as proven by an serious scientist.Don't jump the gun - the book hasn't even been published yet. None of us have actually read a rigorous statement of what the theory says. I've just pre-ordered the book though.
Nothing in there is complicated. Um, protein folding? That's quite a biggie. No-one understands how that works yet. My bet is there has to be either quantum "lookahead" or morphogenetic fields, involved there, or both - there are just too many permutations for it to fold into the same configuration at the speed that it does in a classical kind of way.
Only, Sokal and his co-author demonstrate most of science terms and concepts they use are mangled and meaningless even to the scientists that invented them.
Not at all. I've read the book. Freud (not really mentiond in the book at all) was not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination - his theories were not even properly testable, so it's not surprising he didn't actually bother to test them - so please don't bring him in here.
Yes, these postmodernist buffoons use scientific words inappropriately and combine them in meaningless ways. But phrases and words like "imaginary number", "topology" and "mobius strip" do have well-defined meanings, and they are not as you state "meaningless even to the scientists that invented them".
theologists and wacko's use it as proof that science's used to be rigidly deterministic
Yes they do - but of course chaos theory is applied to deterministic systems, so that's very muddled. A sure sign of scientific cluelessness is confusing chaos theory with the indeterminism of some (not all) interpretations of quantum physics.
However, part of what they say happens to be trivially correct - it was a basic change in science that took place around the start of this (20th) century. Before quantum physics, many people, like Laplace, really did think that the world was entirely deterministic. Now although the many-worlds interpretation is fully deterministic at the multiverse level, as has been said, the majority view now is that, on the contrary, there is something really weird going on at the quantum level, something both indeterministic and fundamentally non-local - so there has been a major shift in scientific opinion from determinism, and certainly even the multiverse view is worlds apart from Laplace's determinism.
Unfortunately, deja.com doesn't allow access to many binary ngs. I suspect it's because they just wouldn't be able to handle the load and/or storage requirements.
Not necessarily. Remember SourceForge is itself open-sourced. They do put their principles into practice.
See also dmoz listings for Open Source hosting.
There really is no simple solution.
I'm worried now. I will have to be more careful what I click on!
But it's not so different to most free-market libertarians, after all. It's just that mosttimes, their arguments are slightly less obviously silly. Always ask yourself questions like "What about the child laborers in sweatshops? What kind of freedom do they have? Doesn't their lack of freedom and their horrible living conditions make the so-called 'lack of freedom' induced by taxation of the rich pale by comparison?"
That's why non-software-corporations should be very scared.