Kaspersky (which I really like, but I may switch to avast! once my Kas license runs out) has a website from mid-2005 mentioning perhaps the first waves of the smitFraud infections. It (http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?calendar=2005-07) claims It seems that all (recent) Smitfraud variants have one thing in common: They all try to persuade the user to download PSGuard, a program which claims to remove the spyware (i.e. Smitfraud) which has been installed onto the system.
Naturally the program only disinfects the infection once the user has paid for it.
Although PSGuard is questionable in terms of motive, the program itself has no malicious payload whatsoever. This means we can't simply add detection for it to our databases.
You might want to actually read the relevant threads in that forum I mentioned. Your point is certainly valid (all hail Debian volunteers!) but loses a lot of impact when you find out what poor quality control the iceweasel releases have apparently had.
Awww... shit. You know, I wondered if that was it, so I closed all the open FFs I had and clicked the newly-installed icon which had the popup over it which says "Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 2". Surely that MUST have opened the correct one, no? No.
So you're right. Only after UNinstalling v. 2 did I get v. 3 to open, and there are some changes (including the Help -> About dialog). Thanks.
I'd never heard of Richard Milton, so went to look at his website (one of four, actually; the other three are about how to do your own PR, increase google hits, etc.). It seems to be down (and not archived by the Wayback Machine since mid-2007), but the latest incarnation may be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20061205072241/www.alternativescience.com/ .
It's interesting, and he makes some good points, but apparently he's not done much of his research so very well (see esp. the stuff on the Michelson interferometer) and when I saw this quote: "Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould has famously criticised the central feature of Darwinist thinking, gradualism, in many books" I knew the guy was not understanding at least part of that which he wrote about.
It (perhaps) seems a little faster than 2.0.0.11, but I haven't done anything "strenuous" with it yet, nor did I ever really see any problems with memory being gobbled by Firefox, so I can't tell the difference. I REALLY can't tell the difference because all of my themes, extensions and bookmarks, etc. seem to be working fine (miracle of miracles), automatically, but they've also not changed the version when you go to Help->About Mozilla Firefox.
Hell, if I were coding this stuff, I'd change the version number before I'd made any code changes, just for the hell of it!
The only complaints I've seen about Iceweasel vs. Firefox (see, for example, posts in the "Software" section of the sidux.com forum) is that the Debian maintainer may not be doing a very decent job of bug-checking before uploading releases to the repositories. Other than that, everything (every extension, theme, bookmark, password, etc.) that has worked for me in Firefox also works on my Debian machines. It looks and acts exactly the same, including plugins.
Neither is your incessant linking to that site. Luckily, I generally have JavaScript blocked; if I unblock it at that site, Bad Things happen. What the hell is up with that?
Well, that was never my original point. I'm not really advocating nonconservation as a possibility (although that whole parity violation in weak nuclear decay still makes no damned sense to me, and it probably ought to). My point was that gauge theories STILL satisfy conservation laws (automatically, by definition of gauge), but there are "weird" effects which make the whole freedom to choose an arbitrary gauge a little suspect (as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect).
You are not constrained as you are by science to external evidence and predictive capabilities of any hypothesis. Nice point. I suppose that most would say that making predictions based on suppositions which are known to be wrong, or at least uncertain, is nothing more than mental masturbation or mathematics. I suppose I would rule the same way in many situations, but I have a hard time calling such exercises "non-scientific" when they're carefully done and it is understood that their cornerstone is wrong or has limited applicability. An example is that of astrobiology -- we don't know if extraterrestrial life exists at all, nor what forms it takes if it does exist, but many of those looking for it in certain ways (Carl Sagan?) are very definitely scientists, making reasoned arguments based on what they know to be true here on Earth. Perhaps that's just science fiction, but I, personally, hesitate to call it unscientific.
Otherwise they are mere conjectures - no one respects a proposition that has not been tested. Einstein was convinced (based on nothing but a deep sense of what was "right" with the world) that quantum theory was one of hidden variables, and that things really are deterministic. The debates and gedankenexperiments he carried out with Bohr are famous now. Those particular arguments were oft-times untestable until much later, and (if one believes Bell's Theorem) often false. But I dare anyone to call them NON-science, or unrespected.
The domain of science IS EXACTLY that which is empirically testable. Things outside that domain cannot, and never have been, called science. I (perhaps -- here I'm in a bit of a quandary) mostly agree with you as to what the state of science should be. Karl Popper is famous for saying things along these lines. However, he also said "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices. The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition in having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them. The theories are passed on, not as dogmas, but rather with the challenge to discuss them and improve upon them."
You've a good point. I don't think we're talking at cross-purposes. I, at least, find these slashdot discussions to be ways in which to refine my own thinking a bit. If nothing else, it may make me a better communicator
I'm not proposing at ALL calling these hypothetical departures from "local" behavior "laws". If I gave that impression, I was mistaken and didn't mean to. I AM a proponent of testing those which have a chance of being true and which we have a chance of testing. I think that probably every scientist (or other philosopher, down to many young children) has pondered this question at one depth or another. It is nice that the NYT covered Davies' thoughts about this stuff, but it's nothing new in the philosophy of science (as I'm sure you well know, and as others in this discussion have pointed out).
I'm also somewhat saddened by the standard in which "falsifiability" is held. I think that if something is falsifiable, it should probably be tested, and things that are not presently falsifiable are really rather weak as hypotheses. Things which will never be falsifiable (because of the physical impossibility of doing certain experiments, or the ability to "move the boundaries" which define the problem -- as in "Intelligent Design") are very probably worthless and most certainly impractical. However, they are still quite interesting, if for no other reason that they provide some illustration of the point at which one should probably STOP thinking about them, or putting any faith in them.
I've always been leery of this "jump" which our guesses about the world can make if we test them enough. As I understand it, a "theory" is quite analogous to a "theorem" in mathematics; it may be built up from very basic building blocks, which we suppose to be true, using small reasoning steps which we also suppose to be true. Theories are often eminently testable; if they are not, they may be a step or two beyond their building-block theories which ARE eminently testable (and tested), but we still suppose our reasoning holds in extrapolating to them.
A "law" may be based on very little reasoning, but just seems to work every time we happen to glance its way, whether we have a series of stepping-stones to it or not. I would say that Newton's law of gravitation (that with the force falling off as the inverse-square of the distance, and so forth) was very definitely a law until Minkowski and Einstein came along (and after them, as a special case), but no one could remotely map out a nice way of getting there from "simpler" principles. If one puts one trust in the process of getting to a conclusion, laws are often very slippery, tentative beasts, whereas theories are well-rooted and understood. Laws just happen to have never failed (which may be a much stronger argument for their validity, but wouldn't satisfy a pure mathematician at all).
I'm also of the opinion that based upon my ramblings above, something can easily be a "law" and a "theory" at the same time, if it has been shown to hold true every time we've (validly) tested it, and is built out of simpler steps. In this way, the "Theory of Evolution", in my opinion, is very probably a law, since it's both been tested so much, and is built upon some very well-tested blocks.
From a scientific standpoint it doesn't matter. You're absolutely right, if your definition of "scientific" includes only what is empirically testable. On the other hand, Paul Davies is no slacker, Steven Weinberg isn't, nor Hawking, nor were Einstein, Faraday, Maxwell, or Newton. They have all been involved in this "untestable" philosophy of science (the findings of which may eventually "mature" into real testable things as we understand them better or develop more precise/higher energy ways of experimenting), which is at least interesting enough to warrant their attention, that of the experts on slashdot, and that of such kooks as the electricuniverse folks.
I mean, you can certainly argue that they could change over bazillions of years or light-years, so that's why we "think" conservation laws hold -- that is, they only hold "locally" for some definition of "local" -- but what would be the point of this in the absence of experimental evidence? Yeah, which is a point raised by the original article, and implied by Feynman's quote. On the other hand, it's quite worth looking for these changes over bazillions of light-years (in my opinion; people more concerned with short-term practicality -- for a large value of "short"! -- will argue that it's a wasted bit of effort, and that those scientists need to focus on more pressing issues).
Dirac has argued that the mere existence of _one_ magnetic monopole somewhere in the universe would explain electric charge. So far as we know, magnetic monopoles don't exist, but they sure would explain a lot if we could find them!
Yes, that's why I specified "gauge" change, not just tacking on some constants. I'll still believe Noether's Theorem until they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Kaspersky (which I really like, but I may switch to avast! once my Kas license runs out) has a website from mid-2005 mentioning perhaps the first waves of the smitFraud infections. It (http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?calendar=2005-07) claims It seems that all (recent) Smitfraud variants have one thing in common: They all try to persuade the user to download PSGuard, a program which claims to remove the spyware (i.e. Smitfraud) which has been installed onto the system.
Naturally the program only disinfects the infection once the user has paid for it.
Although PSGuard is questionable in terms of motive, the program itself has no malicious payload whatsoever. This means we can't simply add detection for it to our databases.
Is this still the way it works?
You might want to actually read the relevant threads in that forum I mentioned. Your point is certainly valid (all hail Debian volunteers!) but loses a lot of impact when you find out what poor quality control the iceweasel releases have apparently had.
Awww... shit. You know, I wondered if that was it, so I closed all the open FFs I had and clicked the newly-installed icon which had the popup over it which says "Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 2". Surely that MUST have opened the correct one, no? No.
So you're right. Only after UNinstalling v. 2 did I get v. 3 to open, and there are some changes (including the Help -> About dialog). Thanks.
I'd never heard of Richard Milton, so went to look at his website (one of four, actually; the other three are about how to do your own PR, increase google hits, etc.). It seems to be down (and not archived by the Wayback Machine since mid-2007), but the latest incarnation may be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20061205072241/www.alternativescience.com/ .
It's interesting, and he makes some good points, but apparently he's not done much of his research so very well (see esp. the stuff on the Michelson interferometer) and when I saw this quote: "Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould has famously criticised the central feature of Darwinist thinking, gradualism, in many books" I knew the guy was not understanding at least part of that which he wrote about.
It (perhaps) seems a little faster than 2.0.0.11, but I haven't done anything "strenuous" with it yet, nor did I ever really see any problems with memory being gobbled by Firefox, so I can't tell the difference. I REALLY can't tell the difference because all of my themes, extensions and bookmarks, etc. seem to be working fine (miracle of miracles), automatically, but they've also not changed the version when you go to Help->About Mozilla Firefox.
Hell, if I were coding this stuff, I'd change the version number before I'd made any code changes, just for the hell of it!
http://web.glandium.org/blog/?p=97
The only complaints I've seen about Iceweasel vs. Firefox (see, for example, posts in the "Software" section of the sidux.com forum) is that the Debian maintainer may not be doing a very decent job of bug-checking before uploading releases to the repositories. Other than that, everything (every extension, theme, bookmark, password, etc.) that has worked for me in Firefox also works on my Debian machines. It looks and acts exactly the same, including plugins.
Perhaps you should just talk to your mom about controlling her websurfing habit.
Yeesh, you people are so negative! The hint is right there in his username!
Neither is your incessant linking to that site. Luckily, I generally have JavaScript blocked; if I unblock it at that site, Bad Things happen. What the hell is up with that?
Yeah, use witches instead!
Yes, and it makes me smile a very baboon-like smile :)
Well, that was never my original point. I'm not really advocating nonconservation as a possibility (although that whole parity violation in weak nuclear decay still makes no damned sense to me, and it probably ought to). My point was that gauge theories STILL satisfy conservation laws (automatically, by definition of gauge), but there are "weird" effects which make the whole freedom to choose an arbitrary gauge a little suspect (as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect).
It's DD's all the way down.
Aw... shit. I just failed junior high English based on that. I should have said, "That metaphor stinks!".
That simile stinks!
You've a good point. I don't think we're talking at cross-purposes. I, at least, find these slashdot discussions to be ways in which to refine my own thinking a bit. If nothing else, it may make me a better communicator
I'm not proposing at ALL calling these hypothetical departures from "local" behavior "laws". If I gave that impression, I was mistaken and didn't mean to. I AM a proponent of testing those which have a chance of being true and which we have a chance of testing. I think that probably every scientist (or other philosopher, down to many young children) has pondered this question at one depth or another. It is nice that the NYT covered Davies' thoughts about this stuff, but it's nothing new in the philosophy of science (as I'm sure you well know, and as others in this discussion have pointed out).
I'm also somewhat saddened by the standard in which "falsifiability" is held. I think that if something is falsifiable, it should probably be tested, and things that are not presently falsifiable are really rather weak as hypotheses. Things which will never be falsifiable (because of the physical impossibility of doing certain experiments, or the ability to "move the boundaries" which define the problem -- as in "Intelligent Design") are very probably worthless and most certainly impractical. However, they are still quite interesting, if for no other reason that they provide some illustration of the point at which one should probably STOP thinking about them, or putting any faith in them.
I've always been leery of this "jump" which our guesses about the world can make if we test them enough. As I understand it, a "theory" is quite analogous to a "theorem" in mathematics; it may be built up from very basic building blocks, which we suppose to be true, using small reasoning steps which we also suppose to be true. Theories are often eminently testable; if they are not, they may be a step or two beyond their building-block theories which ARE eminently testable (and tested), but we still suppose our reasoning holds in extrapolating to them.
A "law" may be based on very little reasoning, but just seems to work every time we happen to glance its way, whether we have a series of stepping-stones to it or not. I would say that Newton's law of gravitation (that with the force falling off as the inverse-square of the distance, and so forth) was very definitely a law until Minkowski and Einstein came along (and after them, as a special case), but no one could remotely map out a nice way of getting there from "simpler" principles. If one puts one trust in the process of getting to a conclusion, laws are often very slippery, tentative beasts, whereas theories are well-rooted and understood. Laws just happen to have never failed (which may be a much stronger argument for their validity, but wouldn't satisfy a pure mathematician at all).
I'm also of the opinion that based upon my ramblings above, something can easily be a "law" and a "theory" at the same time, if it has been shown to hold true every time we've (validly) tested it, and is built out of simpler steps. In this way, the "Theory of Evolution", in my opinion, is very probably a law, since it's both been tested so much, and is built upon some very well-tested blocks.
Stop summarizing issues in clear, concise manners! What the hell will we have to argue about at this point?
Dirac has argued that the mere existence of _one_ magnetic monopole somewhere in the universe would explain electric charge. So far as we know, magnetic monopoles don't exist, but they sure would explain a lot if we could find them!
Yes, that's why I specified "gauge" change, not just tacking on some constants. I'll still believe Noether's Theorem until they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Hah! Mine's much simpler, but unfortunately slashcode won't allow perl.