Bah, given that they are independant, and each has a 232/233 chance of missing earth, that gives a (232/233)^233 or 36.7% chance of all of them missing.
It's a radical assertion perhaps, but it's my belief that security attacks are merely a symptom of some other problem (not sure entirely what it is, but I could posit some of the characteristics); beefing up security is merely like treating a toothache with painkillers; the pain goes away, but the rot is still there.
I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about, but creeping features and code complexity are major problems, of which security flaws are a symptom. As a cure for this, you should run clean, simple, stripped-down systems, without features that you don't need. These systems should be coded in a simple manner, rather than using complicated optimizations / feature implementations. Their code should be audited, and critical code should be executed often so that it will be tested.
This is the point of several operating systems, most notably OpenBSD, and several pieces of software: anything by DJB to start with, and to a lesser extent the BSD base systems, etc.
Now, I'm not suggesting that you run on OpenBSD for your servers, but it would be reasonable to run it as your firewall.
Every communication which uses passwords for authentication is susceptible to dictionary attacks. That is not a protocol weakness. If you use a random and long enough password, you'll be fine. Public key based authentication has other risks, like insufficiently secured storage of the key.
First, you will note that the attack on WEP (but not on PPTP) is not a dictionary attack and works with a computer-generated random 64- or 128-bit key. This is a protocol weakness.
Second, a good protocol does protect passwords. Either it establishes an encrypted session with the server, like SSH or SSL does, or it uses a secure password protocol like SRP. SRP in particular has the following properties:
1) The protocol is entirely public, and open-source implementations are available. 2) An eavesdropper on the wire does not get a dictionary attack on the password; without breaking the crypto behind the protocol, which nobody has been able to do yet, he gets no information. Of course, he can still do an online attack, but the server should prevent that. 3) Someone impersonating the server also does not get a dictionary attack on the password, even though the client does not need to memorize a key hash. 4) Someone who compromises the server database does get a dictionary attack on the password (this is inevitable), but they don't get the password for free. Furthermore, the password is salted, so they have some work to do.
No. They aren't fast, and more importantly they have jack worth of cache and no hyperthreading, but they're respectable due to their very low power requirements and reasonable bus speeds. They're good for building small, low-power computers, which is nice because you want that in a laptop. The latest ones have AES acceleration and random number generation on them.
The next version (due out... about... now, which means who knows when given VIA) will have additionally no-execute, SHA-1, and Montgomery multiply acceleration (i.e. multiply big numbers fast). Plus they're said to run at 2GHz at 10 Watts, and have a bigger cache. If this is actually true, it will be great for building a backup server, which would have to copy large amounts of data over SSH. Now if only they can build in bzip2...
So there's a link to a web site written on the box. Big deal. Do you think the sales droid is going to let me use his/her computer to browse the manufacturer's site in the store before I make up my mind? Yeah, sure.
Yeah, sure. If you'd RTFA, you'd know that CompUSA and Best Buy also agreed to have copies of the EULA available in-store and to post notices to this effect.
There's not much point in arguing with a skeptic about religion. As I mentioned before, it is easy to write off any apparent sign as chance, and even if the probability is vanishingly small, you can say "oh, well, the odds of something like that happening to someone sometime are decent" whether or not this is true. It's been joked that if the stars rearranged themselves to form "THERE IS A GOD" in huge letters across the night sky, someone would still offer a scientific explanation.
As for cutting and choosing, claiming that parts of the Bible are figurative but that the teachings are correct does not seem particularly arrogant to me, especially when there are contradictions. Knowing exactly which parts those are does, but making a guess based on literary style seems reasonable.
The last one, um... speciation happens too quickly... hmm... the traditional line between evolution and creationism is whether speciation happens at all. if It happens too quickly, then that is a point for evolution.
No. A lot of creationists believe that speciation happens, and has happened since creation, but does not explain the diversity of species. As for it happening too quickly, it is a strike against any theory if its predictions for some key value are off by an order of magnitude. As a believer in approximately Darwinian evolution as the mechanism of speciation, I'm playing devil's advocate here, but why is it ridiculous to believe that Someone is helping things along after doing the math n times and getting predicted speciation rates which are an order of magnitude too low?
I'm not trying to proselytize you, just to argue that religion is not as ridiculous as some skeptics would make it out to be.
That was the whole point of that section. GGP was arguing that assuming God is silly, because then you have to ask what created God. My counter-argument was that the question of what was first is too big for us to know. I must not have put it very well, because you and someone else both assumed that I was asserting God's existence.
That "why" is answering a physical mechanism. Saying God did it, does not provide me with much guidance as to how to predict or avoid getting avalanched on in the future.
I explicitly said that religion is not a scientific theory because of its very low predictive power. That doesn't mean I shouldn't believe it. I've witnessed things which I consider minor miracles. Can I prove that they happened? Can I repeat them? No. Are there other explanations? Yes. Is it still rational to believe that they were miracles? I don't see why not.
As for "why" questions, you're largely right. If you're asking why time exists, there need not be a causative event. We can still ask by what mechanism it exists, though; this won't have any predictive power. Similarly, there exist historical questions with little or no predictive power, but which are still interesting.
If you are going to quote the bible, then I will ask you to reconcile it with the Bhagavad Gita, the writings of Buddhism (Tibetan or otherwise), Taoism, Shinto, The Koran, the Torah, and all our knowledge of at least the Norse, Roman, Greek and Egyptian Pantheons for a start. There are more Wiccans, Moonies, and Jedi knights living today than there were christians living when the bible was written.
True. Of course, Taoism is a philosophy as much as a religion. Furthermore, some of these are compatible with the Bible to a large degree (Koran, Torah). Many of them have sources which are less reliable than the Bible, or at least the latter parts. Most of them have very little historical evidence (this includes the creation story in the Bible, which I do not believe to be literally true, word for word).
Up to which prophet you follow and other comparatively minor differences, this pretty much leaves the Central Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism), Shinto, and the Near Eastern religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). And I must say that the evidence for the both Buddhism and the Judeo-Christian group is fairly compelling.
Show us evidence, reproducible results, and predictive hypotheses.
Evidence is available, as I mentioned. As for reproducible results, there are fewer of them, but you don't tend to get many reproducible results from a story (you can't make the battle of Jericho happen again...). I've witnessed events which I consider minor mirales. They are not repeatable (and I don't dare try, having nearly been killed), and I cannot prove that they were not coincidence. Remember that one can believe in something not scientifically proven (this does not mean without evidence), whether it is abstract (___ is morally wrong), supernatural, historical or non-repeatable....then there have to be good, solid reasons for why we need to literally believe Cain And Abel, but not The Three Little Pigs...
Well, some of the stories you cite are not intended to be historically accurate. Personally I believe that many accounts in Genesis and Job in particular are not historically accurate, nor were they intended to be. So I don't believe literally in Cain and Abel. But I do believe literally most of what is written in the Gospels (up to a few contradictions, mostly in fine points, many of which may be copying errors anyway, a translation from Aramaic to Greek to English, and possible failures of memory over the 30 years it took to get written down).
Religious folk seem to think they can cherry pick from the entire heritage of the earth to only refer to western civilisation,to pick only the bible as sacred Perhaps the others are sacred
I could come up with lots of plausible explanations that are a lot simpler than a god. Here's a really simple one: the universe could run in cycles. When all the energy turns into heat, it collapses upon itself and starts over. Very simple; no omniscient being required.
You are missing the big picture. You can write a very simple explanation of how things work, but not why they work this way. You must admit that it is an enormous coincidence that things work that way, or even that the universe exists at all. At that level, claiming the existence of a god seems reasonably simple. I'm not claiming God as a better explanation for this than science. I was just trying to point out that anyone can play at the game of asking big questions about cosmology. You will note that this section was countering an argument against God's existence ("what created God?"), not arguing for it.
Are you suggesting that an omnipotent being would be bound by the laws of physics (or logic, for that matter) in a world it created?
Look at what you wrote again. You just replaced a big question with an infinitely bigger question...
Look at what I wrote again. It was in response to "doesn't an omnipotent being defy the laws of logic/physics?" And my point was, so what if it does?
Do you think a sci-fi novel is evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization?
No. But as the bible is largely a history (not all of it is, some of it is letters or poetry), it is intended to be accurate as opposed to creative. If several men honestly wrote from different places very similar accounts of a strange event, and letters about it without the intent that they later be published, and believed in them so strongly as to give their lives to propagating their story, I would consider that evidence. Now, Genesis is different from, say, Mark, and old enough that most of it is not likely to be historically true. But there is historical evidence for some information in the later books of the Pentateuch, such as David's reign (at least that an important king named David existed). The Bible isn't complete BS, so you might have gotten off better comparing it to, say, historical fiction.
[on Joan of Arc] What miracles?
Well, she could have just been a schizo and also a charismatic tactical genius. Repelling forces greater in number has been done before, but I consider this to be at least decent evidence. It's not scientific because it's not repeatable, but as I mentioned, this isn't science. Furthermore, you aren't going to find any historical miracles which were double-blind tested.
Many miracles have been submitted for testing to scientific groups, who are unable to explain the events within the bounds of science, and were convinced that something strange was going on (strange meaning supernatural, or natural but previously undocumented, as opposed to faked).
There have been several involving apparently terminally ill patients making dramatic recoveries. I don't have links for them.
Assuming that "heating" is supposed to be "healing," I would say they are full of it.
No. I mean heating. Google tumo. You take a yogi up into the mountains next to naked, pile snow on him as he meditates, and he melts it. If you did this to a normal person, he would quite obviously freeze to death. Tumo is quite repeatable; it supposedly takes a long time to learn, but there are a reasonable number of people who can do it. I wouldn't be surprised if this has a convincing natural explanation, but none is known.
For instance, it is not difficult to design an experiment which tests if prayer has any effect on the probability of curing a terminal disease. The thing is, these experiments never show any significant results (when they are properly conducted).
Terminal diseases are almost never cured and curing is anything but repeatable miracle or none, but there are have been studies with less serious diseases, as
"Computation power," while requiring energy (computation in general is thermodynamically unfavorable) does not actually output energy from the CPU. It all goes into heat, radio waves, etc, and into power from the output pins. This power is not included in power consumption, and even it is eventually consumed (turned into heat) by capacitance on the motherboard and such.
Sure, more effecient, same power usage, that extra energy has to go somewhere, so it goes into heat.
What extra energy?
Essentially all the energy put into a computer goes into heat. A small amount comes out as light (from LEDs, cold cathode if you're a modder, and monitor if you count it), sound (clicky hard drive, fans and speakers), radio waves (see: tempest attack; please shut down computers before landing), and kinetic energy (from convection and/or fannage) but the vast majority is heat. This is especially true of the CPU.
Therefore, at the same power consumption, two CPUs will produce almost exactly the same amount of heat. When they talk about efficiency, this is in terms of computations done vs power consumed and heat produced.
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You failed science class, didn't you? You don't assume things and then try to disprove them. You take the knowledge you have, produce a hypothesis that logically follows from that knowledge, and test it, thereby acquiring new knowledge. Just because it's impossible to disprove the existence of green hairy aliens on Alpha Centauri doesn't imply that you can claim they are there.
This is exactly his point: for "intelligent design" to be "proved" (or supported) scientifically, it must be possible to disprove it. That is, one must run tests which could have more than one outcome in order to give it scientific credibility. Of course, it could still have non-scientific credibility.
If you still want to argue, how about some classic mind-twisters: if some intelligent being created life, who created the intelligent being? How the hell did he become all-powerful?
You can make arguments like this against any cosmology. If there is no God, then what was the first event? What caused it? Why is there time? And space? Physics will never explain these. (Hint: explaining time and space as sections of or approximations to a 27-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold might (if superstring theory holds) explain why time and space look like they do, but then you're stuck explaining why the universe looks like such a manifold). The best physical explanation for a universe favorable to life is the Anthropic Principle, but even that makes rather large assumptions. Humans can't know everything, and this question is simply too big for us.
Similarly, no religion will ever explain why there is a god, or many gods.
Does this not violate the basic laws of physics as well as produce logical contradictions?
Are you suggesting that an omnipotent being would be bound by the laws of physics (or logic, for that matter) in a world it created?
What evidence do you have for the existence of such a being?
The bible. Doesn't seem to be entirely historically accurate (eg, location of the city of Ai), but it's not too far off on stuff that can be tested. Scores of prophets, most of which had pretty good prediction rates of specific events. Thousands of saints, and associated miracles (many with shady evidence surrounding them, eg the virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, but some are fairly well-documented, eg Joan of Arc). Many miracles have been submitted for testing to scientific groups, who are unable to explain the events within the bounds of science, and were convinced that something strange was going on (strange meaning supernatural, or natural but previously undocumented, as opposed to faked).
As a Christian, I'm obviously both biased toward and more knowledgeable about Christian miracles, but other religions have theirs. Nobody knows a natural explanation for tumo (Buddhist spiritual heating), although it is reasonable to believe that one exists.
Of course, one might argue that while many of these "miracles" lie outside of known science and/or probability theory, they don't constitute testable results. And most of them don't (however see tumo, studies of prayer, etc). But as I stated above, religion is not a scientific theory, and so has different standards of evidence.
This technique will allow transistors to react 24% faster. That doesn't neccesarily translate into faster cpus. For example, if this makes transistors run hotter, they will have to lower density. Furthermore, Intel already uses a version of this.
Well, they claimed that it doesn't affect, or even marginally decreases, power consumption.
You might want to try thttpd, mathopd or something similar for serving static content. They don't fork, and so scale very well, until you run out of file descriptors.
Lemee see.. A monolithic free kernel versus a microkernel with darn near everything as userspace;-) Hell, the only other microkernel worth its salt is Plan9, and it's "NOT FREE".
Whirlpool is a 256-bit hashing algorithm, derived from the Rijndael encryption algorithm. Rijndael is known to be strong, and has been approved by NIST, but the conversion to a hash function has not been sufficiently tested.
Um. No cryptographic algorithm is ever known to be strong, except for theoretical things like the one-time pad. Rijndael is believed to be strong, but who knows whether it will be broken in 20 years?
Where time isn't critical (eg: creating and validating checksums for files), I'd say use both. The overhead isn't great, and you'd get much more security.
Where time is critical AND you don't have to be concerned with computers not under your control, use Whirlpool. Rijndael is fast, SHA-1 is slow. Whirlpool also offers a longer hash string than SHA-1.
Either way, make it an option which hash to use. That's fast, and if one is broken, you can fall back on the other.
However for a hash to be considered secure, it's only required that finding two files with the same hash must be as hard as trying (in md5's case 2^127 different files), but in md5's case you can compute those collisions much cheaper under certain circumstances
Actually, you can do it in 2^64-ish time with a "birthday attack": you hash about 2^64 different files, and compare the hashes; you should get about one pair that turns out the same. This is like the phenomenon that once there are at least 23 people in a room, odds are >1/2 that two of them have the same birthday.
It should still take about 2^127 files to find something which hashes to a particular value, a much more difficult problem.
Who will be able to predict the market in 2008? With spam, viruses and hacker attacks escalating, and Longhorn due to be released... who really knows what the market will be like then?
Wells' is an acceptable plural of Wells. Wells's is less ambiguous (or would be to a non-native speaker), but you can just append an apostrophe to any word ending in s. Some style guides say that you can also do so to words ending in x or z, or that context indicates when you should append 's and when ' (' only if the noun is plural or proper, or the next word starts with an s, etc).
The funny thing is, the OO system of ocaml actually doesn't really fit into the type system that well. Methods can't be polymorphic (i.e. they have to take real types, not 'a).
# object
method trivialPolyMethod x = x
end ;; - : < trivialPolyMethod : 'a -> 'a > = <obj>
Still, you're right, in that you occasionally have to use hacks, like casting self to its own class, to deal with bugs (or design failures) in the type checker.
IM clients piss me off, always in your face. They have pop ups, blink in your tool bar, whatever to get your attention. Then to top it off there are 4 major IM's and the good multi-im clients tend to have bugs and not support all the features.
Meh. Adium is good enough for me. No pop-ups since it's 3rd-party. It jumps up and down in the dock, but that's an option and I like it that way (makes sure I don't miss a message while Slashdotting). Adium occasionally has bugs (the most noticeable one recently is that once an hour or so it beachballs for a couple seconds), but nothing serious recently.
It has aliases and metacontacts, and customizability galore. It supports file transfer, profiles, . The only thing iChat has that Adium doesn't is video messaging (a biggie, but there is no open source equivalent yet).
It also has themable contact lists and message views. The themes are basically [X]HTML+CSS and get rendered by WebKit. Call it bloat, but it's respectably light, lighter than iChat or AIM. And these are plugins, you can remove them and use an old message view if you must save that extra megabyte.
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Bah, given that they are independant, and each has a 232/233 chance of missing earth, that gives a (232/233)^233 or 36.7% chance of all of them missing.
Also known as very slighly less than 1/e.
It's a radical assertion perhaps, but it's my belief that security attacks are merely a symptom of some other problem (not sure entirely what it is, but I could posit some of the characteristics); beefing up security is merely like treating a toothache with painkillers; the pain goes away, but the rot is still there.
I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about, but creeping features and code complexity are major problems, of which security flaws are a symptom. As a cure for this, you should run clean, simple, stripped-down systems, without features that you don't need. These systems should be coded in a simple manner, rather than using complicated optimizations / feature implementations. Their code should be audited, and critical code should be executed often so that it will be tested.
This is the point of several operating systems, most notably OpenBSD, and several pieces of software: anything by DJB to start with, and to a lesser extent the BSD base systems, etc.
Now, I'm not suggesting that you run on OpenBSD for your servers, but it would be reasonable to run it as your firewall.
Every communication which uses passwords for authentication is susceptible to dictionary attacks. That is not a protocol weakness. If you use a random and long enough password, you'll be fine. Public key based authentication has other risks, like insufficiently secured storage of the key.
First, you will note that the attack on WEP (but not on PPTP) is not a dictionary attack and works with a computer-generated random 64- or 128-bit key. This is a protocol weakness.
Second, a good protocol does protect passwords. Either it establishes an encrypted session with the server, like SSH or SSL does, or it uses a secure password protocol like SRP. SRP in particular has the following properties:
1) The protocol is entirely public, and open-source implementations are available.
2) An eavesdropper on the wire does not get a dictionary attack on the password; without breaking the crypto behind the protocol, which nobody has been able to do yet, he gets no information. Of course, he can still do an online attack, but the server should prevent that.
3) Someone impersonating the server also does not get a dictionary attack on the password, even though the client does not need to memorize a key hash.
4) Someone who compromises the server database does get a dictionary attack on the password (this is inevitable), but they don't get the password for free. Furthermore, the password is salted, so they have some work to do.
No. They aren't fast, and more importantly they have jack worth of cache and no hyperthreading, but they're respectable due to their very low power requirements and reasonable bus speeds. They're good for building small, low-power computers, which is nice because you want that in a laptop. The latest ones have AES acceleration and random number generation on them.
The next version (due out... about... now, which means who knows when given VIA) will have additionally no-execute, SHA-1, and Montgomery multiply acceleration (i.e. multiply big numbers fast). Plus they're said to run at 2GHz at 10 Watts, and have a bigger cache. If this is actually true, it will be great for building a backup server, which would have to copy large amounts of data over SSH. Now if only they can build in bzip2...
So there's a link to a web site written on the box. Big deal. Do you think the sales droid is going to let me use his/her computer to browse the manufacturer's site in the store before I make up my mind? Yeah, sure.
Yeah, sure. If you'd RTFA, you'd know that CompUSA and Best Buy also agreed to have copies of the EULA available in-store and to post notices to this effect.
There's not much point in arguing with a skeptic about religion. As I mentioned before, it is easy to write off any apparent sign as chance, and even if the probability is vanishingly small, you can say "oh, well, the odds of something like that happening to someone sometime are decent" whether or not this is true. It's been joked that if the stars rearranged themselves to form "THERE IS A GOD" in huge letters across the night sky, someone would still offer a scientific explanation.
As for cutting and choosing, claiming that parts of the Bible are figurative but that the teachings are correct does not seem particularly arrogant to me, especially when there are contradictions. Knowing exactly which parts those are does, but making a guess based on literary style seems reasonable.
The last one, um... speciation happens too quickly... hmm... the traditional line between evolution and creationism is whether speciation happens at all. if It happens too quickly, then that is a point for evolution.
No. A lot of creationists believe that speciation happens, and has happened since creation, but does not explain the diversity of species. As for it happening too quickly, it is a strike against any theory if its predictions for some key value are off by an order of magnitude. As a believer in approximately Darwinian evolution as the mechanism of speciation, I'm playing devil's advocate here, but why is it ridiculous to believe that Someone is helping things along after doing the math n times and getting predicted speciation rates which are an order of magnitude too low?
I'm not trying to proselytize you, just to argue that religion is not as ridiculous as some skeptics would make it out to be.
Be a grown up. Admit you don't know...
...then there have to be good, solid reasons for why we need to literally believe Cain And Abel, but not The Three Little Pigs...
That was the whole point of that section. GGP was arguing that assuming God is silly, because then you have to ask what created God. My counter-argument was that the question of what was first is too big for us to know. I must not have put it very well, because you and someone else both assumed that I was asserting God's existence.
That "why" is answering a physical mechanism. Saying God did it, does not provide me with much guidance as to how to predict or avoid getting avalanched on in the future.
I explicitly said that religion is not a scientific theory because of its very low predictive power. That doesn't mean I shouldn't believe it. I've witnessed things which I consider minor miracles. Can I prove that they happened? Can I repeat them? No. Are there other explanations? Yes. Is it still rational to believe that they were miracles? I don't see why not.
As for "why" questions, you're largely right. If you're asking why time exists, there need not be a causative event. We can still ask by what mechanism it exists, though; this won't have any predictive power. Similarly, there exist historical questions with little or no predictive power, but which are still interesting.
If you are going to quote the bible, then I will ask you to reconcile it with the Bhagavad Gita, the writings of Buddhism (Tibetan or otherwise), Taoism, Shinto, The Koran, the Torah, and all our knowledge of at least the Norse, Roman, Greek and Egyptian Pantheons for a start. There are more Wiccans, Moonies, and Jedi knights living today than there were christians living when the bible was written.
True. Of course, Taoism is a philosophy as much as a religion. Furthermore, some of these are compatible with the Bible to a large degree (Koran, Torah). Many of them have sources which are less reliable than the Bible, or at least the latter parts. Most of them have very little historical evidence (this includes the creation story in the Bible, which I do not believe to be literally true, word for word).
Up to which prophet you follow and other comparatively minor differences, this pretty much leaves the Central Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism), Shinto, and the Near Eastern religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). And I must say that the evidence for the both Buddhism and the Judeo-Christian group is fairly compelling.
Show us evidence, reproducible results, and predictive hypotheses.
Evidence is available, as I mentioned. As for reproducible results, there are fewer of them, but you don't tend to get many reproducible results from a story (you can't make the battle of Jericho happen again...). I've witnessed events which I consider minor mirales. They are not repeatable (and I don't dare try, having nearly been killed), and I cannot prove that they were not coincidence. Remember that one can believe in something not scientifically proven (this does not mean without evidence), whether it is abstract (___ is morally wrong), supernatural, historical or non-repeatable.
Well, some of the stories you cite are not intended to be historically accurate. Personally I believe that many accounts in Genesis and Job in particular are not historically accurate, nor were they intended to be. So I don't believe literally in Cain and Abel. But I do believe literally most of what is written in the Gospels (up to a few contradictions, mostly in fine points, many of which may be copying errors anyway, a translation from Aramaic to Greek to English, and possible failures of memory over the 30 years it took to get written down).
Religious folk seem to think they can cherry pick from the entire heritage of the earth to only refer to western civilisation,to pick only the bible as sacred
Perhaps the others are sacred
I could come up with lots of plausible explanations that are a lot simpler than a god. Here's a really simple one: the universe could run in cycles. When all the energy turns into heat, it collapses upon itself and starts over. Very simple; no omniscient being required.
You are missing the big picture. You can write a very simple explanation of how things work, but not why they work this way. You must admit that it is an enormous coincidence that things work that way, or even that the universe exists at all. At that level, claiming the existence of a god seems reasonably simple. I'm not claiming God as a better explanation for this than science. I was just trying to point out that anyone can play at the game of asking big questions about cosmology. You will note that this section was countering an argument against God's existence ("what created God?"), not arguing for it.
Are you suggesting that an omnipotent being would be bound by the laws of physics (or logic, for that matter) in a world it created?
Look at what you wrote again. You just replaced a big question with an infinitely bigger question...
Look at what I wrote again. It was in response to "doesn't an omnipotent being defy the laws of logic/physics?" And my point was, so what if it does?
Do you think a sci-fi novel is evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization?
No. But as the bible is largely a history (not all of it is, some of it is letters or poetry), it is intended to be accurate as opposed to creative. If several men honestly wrote from different places very similar accounts of a strange event, and letters about it without the intent that they later be published, and believed in them so strongly as to give their lives to propagating their story, I would consider that evidence. Now, Genesis is different from, say, Mark, and old enough that most of it is not likely to be historically true. But there is historical evidence for some information in the later books of the Pentateuch, such as David's reign (at least that an important king named David existed). The Bible isn't complete BS, so you might have gotten off better comparing it to, say, historical fiction.
[on Joan of Arc] What miracles?
Well, she could have just been a schizo and also a charismatic tactical genius. Repelling forces greater in number has been done before, but I consider this to be at least decent evidence. It's not scientific because it's not repeatable, but as I mentioned, this isn't science. Furthermore, you aren't going to find any historical miracles which were double-blind tested.
Many miracles have been submitted for testing to scientific groups, who are unable to explain the events within the bounds of science, and were convinced that something strange was going on (strange meaning supernatural, or natural but previously undocumented, as opposed to faked).
There have been several involving apparently terminally ill patients making dramatic recoveries. I don't have links for them.
Assuming that "heating" is supposed to be "healing," I would say they are full of it.
No. I mean heating. Google tumo. You take a yogi up into the mountains next to naked, pile snow on him as he meditates, and he melts it. If you did this to a normal person, he would quite obviously freeze to death. Tumo is quite repeatable; it supposedly takes a long time to learn, but there are a reasonable number of people who can do it. I wouldn't be surprised if this has a convincing natural explanation, but none is known.
For instance, it is not difficult to design an experiment which tests if prayer has any effect on the probability of curing a terminal disease. The thing is, these experiments never show any significant results (when they are properly conducted).
Terminal diseases are almost never cured and curing is anything but repeatable miracle or none, but there are have been studies with less serious diseases, as
"Computation power," while requiring energy (computation in general is thermodynamically unfavorable) does not actually output energy from the CPU. It all goes into heat, radio waves, etc, and into power from the output pins. This power is not included in power consumption, and even it is eventually consumed (turned into heat) by capacitance on the motherboard and such.
Sure, more effecient, same power usage, that extra energy has to go somewhere, so it goes into heat.
What extra energy?
Essentially all the energy put into a computer goes into heat. A small amount comes out as light (from LEDs, cold cathode if you're a modder, and monitor if you count it), sound (clicky hard drive, fans and speakers), radio waves (see: tempest attack; please shut down computers before landing), and kinetic energy (from convection and/or fannage) but the vast majority is heat. This is especially true of the CPU.
Therefore, at the same power consumption, two CPUs will produce almost exactly the same amount of heat. When they talk about efficiency, this is in terms of computations done vs power consumed and heat produced.
You failed science class, didn't you? You don't assume things and then try to disprove them. You take the knowledge you have, produce a hypothesis that logically follows from that knowledge, and test it, thereby acquiring new knowledge. Just because it's impossible to disprove the existence of green hairy aliens on Alpha Centauri doesn't imply that you can claim they are there.
This is exactly his point: for "intelligent design" to be "proved" (or supported) scientifically, it must be possible to disprove it. That is, one must run tests which could have more than one outcome in order to give it scientific credibility. Of course, it could still have non-scientific credibility.
If you still want to argue, how about some classic mind-twisters: if some intelligent being created life, who created the intelligent being? How the hell did he become all-powerful?
You can make arguments like this against any cosmology. If there is no God, then what was the first event? What caused it? Why is there time? And space? Physics will never explain these. (Hint: explaining time and space as sections of or approximations to a 27-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold might (if superstring theory holds) explain why time and space look like they do, but then you're stuck explaining why the universe looks like such a manifold). The best physical explanation for a universe favorable to life is the Anthropic Principle, but even that makes rather large assumptions. Humans can't know everything, and this question is simply too big for us.
Similarly, no religion will ever explain why there is a god, or many gods.
Does this not violate the basic laws of physics as well as produce logical contradictions?
Are you suggesting that an omnipotent being would be bound by the laws of physics (or logic, for that matter) in a world it created?
What evidence do you have for the existence of such a being?
The bible. Doesn't seem to be entirely historically accurate (eg, location of the city of Ai), but it's not too far off on stuff that can be tested. Scores of prophets, most of which had pretty good prediction rates of specific events. Thousands of saints, and associated miracles (many with shady evidence surrounding them, eg the virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, but some are fairly well-documented, eg Joan of Arc). Many miracles have been submitted for testing to scientific groups, who are unable to explain the events within the bounds of science, and were convinced that something strange was going on (strange meaning supernatural, or natural but previously undocumented, as opposed to faked).
As a Christian, I'm obviously both biased toward and more knowledgeable about Christian miracles, but other religions have theirs. Nobody knows a natural explanation for tumo (Buddhist spiritual heating), although it is reasonable to believe that one exists.
Of course, one might argue that while many of these "miracles" lie outside of known science and/or probability theory, they don't constitute testable results. And most of them don't (however see tumo, studies of prayer, etc). But as I stated above, religion is not a scientific theory, and so has different standards of evidence.
This technique will allow transistors to react 24% faster. That doesn't neccesarily translate into faster cpus. For example, if this makes transistors run hotter, they will have to lower density. Furthermore, Intel already uses a version of this.
Well, they claimed that it doesn't affect, or even marginally decreases, power consumption.
You might want to try thttpd, mathopd or something similar for serving static content. They don't fork, and so scale very well, until you run out of file descriptors.
Lemee see.. A monolithic free kernel versus a microkernel with darn near everything as userspace ;-) Hell, the only other microkernel worth its salt is Plan9, and it's "NOT FREE".
And Mach. And QNX.
... it's always too busy.
Whirlpool is a 256-bit hashing algorithm, derived from the Rijndael encryption algorithm. Rijndael is known to be strong, and has been approved by NIST, but the conversion to a hash function has not been sufficiently tested.
Um. No cryptographic algorithm is ever known to be strong, except for theoretical things like the one-time pad. Rijndael is believed to be strong, but who knows whether it will be broken in 20 years?
Where time isn't critical (eg: creating and validating checksums for files), I'd say use both. The overhead isn't great, and you'd get much more security.
Where time is critical AND you don't have to be concerned with computers not under your control, use Whirlpool. Rijndael is fast, SHA-1 is slow. Whirlpool also offers a longer hash string than SHA-1.
Either way, make it an option which hash to use. That's fast, and if one is broken, you can fall back on the other.
However for a hash to be considered secure, it's only required that finding two files with the same hash must be as hard as trying (in md5's case 2^127 different files), but in md5's case you can compute those collisions much cheaper under certain circumstances
Actually, you can do it in 2^64-ish time with a "birthday attack": you hash about 2^64 different files, and compare the hashes; you should get about one pair that turns out the same. This is like the phenomenon that once there are at least 23 people in a room, odds are >1/2 that two of them have the same birthday.
It should still take about 2^127 files to find something which hashes to a particular value, a much more difficult problem.
Who will be able to predict the market in 2008? With spam, viruses and hacker attacks escalating, and Longhorn due to be released... who really knows what the market will be like then?
It should be Wells's, since he is only one person
Wells' is an acceptable plural of Wells. Wells's is less ambiguous (or would be to a non-native speaker), but you can just append an apostrophe to any word ending in s. Some style guides say that you can also do so to words ending in x or z, or that context indicates when you should append 's and when ' (' only if the noun is plural or proper, or the next word starts with an s, etc).
</english nazi>
Sorry to bother you while you're making a joke, but you are supposed to X the appropriate bubbles, not random ones.
IM clients piss me off, always in your face. They have pop ups, blink in your tool bar, whatever to get your attention. Then to top it off there are 4 major IM's and the good multi-im clients tend to have bugs and not support all the features.
Meh. Adium is good enough for me. No pop-ups since it's 3rd-party. It jumps up and down in the dock, but that's an option and I like it that way (makes sure I don't miss a message while Slashdotting). Adium occasionally has bugs (the most noticeable one recently is that once an hour or so it beachballs for a couple seconds), but nothing serious recently.
It has aliases and metacontacts, and customizability galore. It supports file transfer, profiles, . The only thing iChat has that Adium doesn't is video messaging (a biggie, but there is no open source equivalent yet).
It also has themable contact lists and message views. The themes are basically [X]HTML+CSS and get rendered by WebKit. Call it bloat, but it's respectably light, lighter than iChat or AIM. And these are plugins, you can remove them and use an old message view if you must save that extra megabyte.
and the eMac
I have an eMac 700 MHz. It's quite loud.
STR:5
INT:17
WIS:13
DEX:14
CON:10
CHR:11
Geez, I'm so unbalanced. Those stats sound like something a munchkin wizard would make with +3 max bonuses...