If the rich guy with a big car earned his mony, let him flaunt it. He will pay out the ass in taxes and he may look like a dick, but it is his right.
But my point is that anyone who can afford to drive a Hummer (or most SUVs) right now is already "rich" in most practical senses... and I'm not at all pursuaded that marginal increases in the price of gasoline will change their behavior enough to actually (for example) lower total gasoline use, rather than just slow its growth. Nor will extra tax money be able to offset atmospheric damage that we don't have any idea how to effectively undo.
The whole idea behind any radical changes in energy policy almost has to be that it is not your right to do whatever you want when it substantially damages the environment for everyone else. America is, for now, despite everything, a very rich country, and if our entitlement mentality makes us decide that damanging the environment is a "right" of anyone who earned and can therefore flaunt their disposable income, we'll continue to poison the atmosphere, water, etc. pretty much unchecked.
(I don't want to get into arguments over whether the US really is the worst polluter, blah blah blah. We're a pretty bad one, way beyond sustainable levels, and that's enough to require major changes.)
The problem with this is that it creates a significant added burden for poorer families who are already driving reasonably efficient vehicles, without giving a correspondingly large disincentive for the richer class that likes to flaunt their Hummers, since for them the increase will be annoying but certainly still affordable.
If you don't like hard rules about buying and selling, how about just large taxes on vehicles below a certain standard? It accomplishes a similar purpose as your suggestion, but without penalizing those who are already behaving responsibly.
Christians are protesting the DaVinci Code and developing texts refuting it. Apparently they're having difficulty believing that a book can be fiction.
You're right, in a sense, but you're overlooking a couple essential aspects of the situation:
- While most people realize that The Da Vinci Code is fiction, a lot of people accept without question the background information about the Catholic church, including a lot of arguably slanderous fictionalized history.
- More to the point, Dan Brown himself is presenting much of the book's background (i.e. the overall conspiracy, if not the literal story) as fact. He has said in interviews that he is glad that the truth about the Catholic church is finally being made public through the popularity of his books.
In combination, this means that a large number of people are accepting, on Dan Brown's authority, some pretty scandalous and usually demonstrably false (insofar as any historical fact can be, anyway) claims. So I think it's legitimate for Christians to respond by addressing the actual history behind the book.
Of course, maybe you knew that, and I just have a poor sense of humor:) In my defense, a lot of people don't realize the extent of the gap between Dan Brown's claims of historical accuracy and the actual accuracy of the books. And just for full disclosure, yes, I am a Christian...
Very true -- though I usually shy away from conspiracy theories, in this case it just seriously doesn't match up. They're requesting huge piles of data, causing all kinds of privacy issues, with the supposed aim of doing something they shouldn't be doing in the first place, and the kicker is, they could pursue these inappropriate goals just as effectively without any information request in the first place. All the information they really need to pursue their stated goal is publicly available, so the only possible reason to cause all this fuss is if they're lying about their reasons for needing it.
So why are they really doing it? No clue, but with the unauthorized request on top of lying about the purpose, presumably it's something they can't do through legitimate channels, and likely it's something that would cause even more severe privacy concerns than what they're saying so far. Kind of creepy...
They're right. Internet filters sucks, and if they can throw a court verdict after them, then maybe this will help end the censorship and convince the government that filters are a dead end.
Or maybe I'm missing something?
Sadly, you're missing something.
Their conclusion will not be "Filters are a dead end, let's give up and throw them out."
Their conclusion will be, "Filters are not absolutely 100% bullet-proof!!! Our kids are looking at PORN ON THE INTERNET!!! Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!", after which they will be free to re-pass a controversial, struck-down-by-the-courts censorship law restricting Internet porn. Sure, this will be about as effective as a law restricting the sharing of copyrighted mp3s, but even so, it's kind of sketchy that they're making these sorts of laws in the first place...
Geez... there's like a half a dozen different modded-up posts saying "If Google really wants to make the world a better place, they should be doing [whatever I think is most important]." Well they can't exactly put all their money into every one of those different ideas at once... Not that all of them are bad ideas, but come on, just because they aren't starting with your particular pet charity doesn't mean they aren't making a difference. There is more than one legitimate way to do good in the world.
I know that the religion of capitalism says that it's not only impossible for companies to make "moral" (rather than profitable) decisions, but it's also wrong for their executives to even try, but just because that's how people look at it now doesn't mean it has to be that way.
I can't say whether Google is secretly doing this from selfish motivations so that people will think better of them... but isn't it at least possible that they're doing it because they think it's the right thing to do?
I'm not so much saying this because I think that Google in particular is morally upstanding, though I think they're a lot better than most. I'm more saying this because it bothers me how many people will post to stories like this arguing that it is essentially immoral for executives to think about real social issues and not just shareholder profit. Capitalism (within reason) seems to be the best economic system we've found so far, but that doesn't mean it should be applied indiscriminately without any sort of moral perspective.
(I know you weren't saying that exactly, but it seemed implicit in your post that the only reason they would be doing it would be for reasons of their public image.)
I couldn't say whether the findings are bogus, but your counterarguments are:
plenty of people who wound normally go to grad school insead choose to work in industry.
Yes. But the study wasn't based on what people could have done with their lives, or on some hypothesised natural ability. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense to object that some people "would normally" have gone to grad school -- if people in those circumstances would normally have done that, then the most common statistical result will be for those type of people to go to grad school, and therefore the average result (which the study was trying to capture) will still be the same. Showing individual examples that don't have a 0.3% difference doesn't imply there isn't a 0.3% average difference.
This small lifestyle difference for four years in a subject's late twenties should not effect tests given at age 65+. More likely is that some other factor is introduced by lifestyle differences between the two major career paths.
Very likely, but this in no way invalidates the study. It seems highly unlikely that anyone, let alone anyone with any training, would perform this study and then claim that the only difference in the sample groups was those four years in the subjects' late twenties. However, the number of years of education is a substantial indicator for exactly those long-term career path distinctions you mention -- someone with more years of school is more likely to spend much of their life doing work that primarily centers around their mental abilities. So "years of education" is being used because it is the easiest quantitative way to approximate "how much the subject used their brain throughout their lifetime." Obviously the correlation isn't 100%, but the average PhD will devote a lot more energy to long-term mental development and education than the typical B.S. or what have you, and this is what most studies along these lines are trying to capture.
What the RIAA doesn't realize is that there are quite a few people like me that ONLY purchase CDs so I can listen to them on my iPod.
No, they realize that. That's the reason they're doing it. CDs are bad because 1. they are too unrestricted, and 2. you have already paid for them. If they can get politicians believing this is illegal, then you'll be forced to buy all those albums again, just to continue playing them on your iPod, unless you want to be sued for $15 million in "reasonable damages" by the RIAA.
RIAA spokesman Ima Weasel spoke out today against CD players with skip protection. "With the help of these devices, millions of worthless pirates are stealing music every day. A CD player with skip protection works by internally making a 'backup' of the CD it is playing -- storing as much as several minutes of music at a time before playing it! This is completely illegal duplication of a copyrighted work! The RIAA will not stand for this blatant thievery!"
In related news, the RIAA has announced the release of "skip-protected" CDs, which are exactly the same as normal CDs except they come with an additional license to make short-term backups by playing them in skip-protected players. These new CDs are expected to cost twice as much as traditional CDs.
An amusing (to me, as a Christian who believes in evolution) point about the second link... the article says:
I see this as a variation on an old question. 'Did God really say that He created man from the dust of the ground and not through a process of molecules to man evolution?' is similar to what the serpent asked Eve... 'Did God really say... ?' The answer is, 'Yes, God really said it.'
The problem is, the passage he's referring to where the serpent talks to Eve says, "Did God really say that you are not to eat from any tree in the garden?" -- to which the answer was of course no, God had only forbidden one tree. The question was just to make her confused and defensive.
No real point here, I just find it amusing that his parallel really implies that we should say no to his question, which is of course fine with me...
Actually, though it would shock a lot of modern fundamentalists, it seems evident that a significant minority (though I believe still a minority) of the church fathers interpreted the creation story in Genesis as non-literal, long before there was a solid scientific reason to doubt it.
Certainly in order to reconcile a Biblically grounded faith with modern science, one needs to interpret some passages as metaphorical, but this does not mean that the choice about what is and is not metaphorical is somehow "arbitrary" -- it simply means we need to be careful in determining what the author of the text was trying to communicate (and since the entirety of the Bible was written long before modernism or the scientific method, the authors were rarely trying to communicate scientific ideas or natural history).
Christian (and Islamic and Judaeic) dogma inevitably and logically results in fundamentalism and rejection of all secular (ie, rational) thought...
This only follows from your assumptions about how one needs to interpret scripture. Since many (though sadly not all) of the people who actually have faith and are thus compelled to interpret scripture in an applied way disagree with those assumptions, your conclusions about the inevitable results don't follow.
...some research group claimed that we are past the point of no return meaning that it doesn't matter what we do at this point...
...I think it's time to make peace with whatever the future holds and enjoy the moment like the 80's....
Geez. I mean, I think it's silly to dismiss global warming entirely as a conspiracy or paranoia or something, but because "some research group" claims it's too late we should just give up? I think I'd rather try and improve the situation as much as possible, which is what most climatologists seem to recommend. If our grandkids see in their history class that the reason things went completely to hell instead of eventually stabilizing was because we were busy "enjoying the moment," they're liable to stop by the nursing home just to kick us in the nuts...
This breakthrough completely renders useles the concept of the so-called one-way function
Not at all -- if you believe that quantum computers will actually work well enough to factor in the real world (many computer scientists don't -- the degree of precision required would be many orders of magnitude greater than any observations of any physical laws have ever been in a real experiment), you're only talking about making some particular one-way functions (in this case, factoring) useless.
In fact, part of the power of quantum computing is that (even without the somewhat less plausible factoring algorithm) we would have real secure encryption -- secure based not on the assumption that factoring is hard (which it may not be), but that quantum physics is true (which it may not be, but a lot of people seem more comfortable with this assumption, at least as far as cryptography is involved).
That isn't the point -- most of us "alarmists" haven't alleged that there was wide-scale systematic fraud in the recent elections (though of course there is a minority that believes that). What concerns most of us is that there is no way for anyone to check, ever. Sure, maybe there was no fraud this time, but do you really think that it's good to set a precedent of unverifiable election results?
Even if they work most of the time, I'm nervous about a black-box machine with persistent (albeit non-fraudulent) technical problems just telling me who is in charge of the country without being able to provide any evidence. That's what causes the real alarm -- regardless of any fraud that did or didn't happen in the past, we need to find a way we can be reasonably sure it doesn't happen in the future, and desensitizing people to the enormous technical problems with existing e-voting systems is a huge step in the wrong direction.
It's been a couple days, but maybe you'll still see this:
My standards of proof are higher than most highschool educations provide -- I heard assertions that evolution is true, and very vague, inconclusive evidence, but I wasn't shown rigorous evidence anymore than I was shown a concrete proof of the quadratic formula -- I was expected to believe and to memorize the relevant facts, and to be able to apply them, but they were never very strongly justified. And as with the quadratic formula, ambitious students could perhaps find better evidence on their own -- I did exactly that with a lot of math problems that were stated without proof -- but it's not at all true that anyone who goes through highschool has seen the evidence for evolution.
And the evidence isn't quite as simple as you seem to suggest in your post -- fossils of extinct species don't directly imply that all life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor. All they directly imply is that there have been species in the past that are no longer alive now, and that there have been significant geological changes since those species were alive. But where those species came from, or their potential relation to modern species, is a much more involved question.
One thing I think a lot of people tend to forget once they've accepted evolution is just how mind-bogglingly implausible it seems when you're coming from a naive perspective. A lot of people get into the mindset that evolution is completely self-evident, and that isn't the case. Certainly with a lot of investigation the evidence for it is overwhelming, but with the standard of "scientific proof" used in typical highschool education things seem much less conclusive. Now, I'm convinced that it's true, but it's still pretty amazing that something as complicated as a human being descended from single-celled organisms. With such strong cultural forces insisting that the evidence is inconclusive, or that scientists don't agree about it, it isn't immediately obvious who to believe.
I can see from some of the other replies to my post that some people think it is obvious who to believe, and that something was wrong with me that I wasn't born knowing all of this already... sigh. I wish people (both religious and non) didn't consider being right as a kind of moral superiority.
As for why I didn't try reading scientific proofs in a library -- well, I don't know if I have a very good excuse for that. I did try to some extent, but it wasn't a subject I had to deal with very often, so I didn't feel like it was particularly pressing, though I would occasionally read things here and there. But most literature gives very simplified views, and either starts out assuming evolution is true, without giving much evidence (not that I'm objecting to that -- certainly it isn't the job of every evolutionist to prove things all over again at the beginning of everything they write -- I'm just saying that it took more work than I felt like investing to actually track down the real evidence), or tries to prove that it's false. Like I said, that isn't really a defense for why I didn't believe evolution, it's more of an explanation for why I was able to maintain that view.
If you're interested, the evidence that finally pushed me over the edge was 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, which is a wonderful article -- rigorous, logical, objective, and convincing. It also completely avoids potentially inflammatory rhetoric, which I really appreciate since that is an extreme rarity given the topic -- the only time the author even comes across as a little annoyed is when refuting the counter-counter-counter arguments by an ID supporter, where the ID guy is pretty blatantly misrepresenting his claims;)
Anyway, for whatever it's worth -- let's hope we can lessen the anger on both sides of the fence, and refocus on real discussion and education...
The information has been out there for ages. Why couldn't you have looked it up for yourself?
I'm not in the biological sciences, and most rigorous evidence that is published for mainstream audiences is not scientifically or logically rigorous. I'm not saying rigorous evidence is not available, but I made some efforts to find it, and failed, and since most arguments I was exposed to were more on the level of personal insults than reasonable debate, I didn't feel a particularly strong need to keep looking.
Now, I'm not saying creationists have no responsibility if they don't keep investigating the facts -- and I'm not really trying to defend myself for not pursuing the topic more persistently. I'm just saying that, at least in a few cases, respectful and open discussion can change the minds even of "closed-minded" creationists, whereas insults and personal attacks will not.
Moreover, this sort of condescending tolerance creates a social atmosphere of intellectual dishonesty
I partly agree, but speaking as a former creationist myself, the thing that made it easy for me to persist in my beliefs was that most people responded to them either with condescending tolerance or with personal attacks and insults -- there was no middle ground. For many years, I heard no consistent, logical evidence for evolution -- not because I wasn't listening to opposing views, but because most people would immediately assume I was an idiot for even considering creationism. It was especially frustrating to be constantly labelled as stupid and closed-minded, when I'm pretty sure I'm not stupid (and have at least some academic achievements to back that up), and if I was really that closed-minded I would probably not believe in evolution now.
So why do I believe in evolution now? Because some people finally swallowed their pride for long enough to actually respectfully explain some of the hard evidence to me, and after thinking about it for a while, it convinced me. But now in discussions like this, I see people bashing creationists as though they're a deliberately hostile force that is irredeemably stupid and purposefully closed-minded. Certainly some of them are, just like in any sufficiently large group of people, but it's not true of everyone, and accusing them of being such is likely to make them dismiss you out of hand.
Yes, condescending tolerance can be destructive, but the opposite extreme is possibly even worse, since it actively pushes people away.
When I was an undergraduate, the "Student Information Online" system would go down for a few days after each semester while grades were processed. You couldn't look at your grades until the final deadline.
However, a guy I know found a workaround -- if you went to SIO, logged in, and after getting the "SIO is offline until December XX" message, appended "grades.html" to the URL, you could view your grades anyway (provided your professors had already submitted them, anyway). This workaround quickly spread to most of the students in department.
Now, was what we were doing unethical? I would argue it wasn't, though it may have been "against the rules" in a strict sense. What Harvard is doing sounds like if my school had told us that everyone who "hacked into the system" by appending an obvious string to the URL would be failing all their classes for the semester. That seems disproportionate to the offense, unless this policy was spelled out in advance. I know that none of us who added "grades.html" to the end of the URL considered ourselves to be breaking into the university's system, and I'd wager the same is true of the people who appended their login hash to the Harvard system's URL, so it shouldn't be trivially covered by some policy about "hacking into systems" (which obviously would be unethical). Why such a drastic response?
First of all, if you run Linux, you're not booting much.
No, you're not booting much. My computer rarely crashes, but I still turn the computer off when I'm not using it -- it's noisy, and produces a lot of heat.
Boot time doesn't have to be an arduous wait. Yes, on out-of-the-box distros it can be incredible, but I blame the distro, not Linux.
Sure, maybe it's the distro and not Linux, but that's missing the point. The idea with this tool is to find ways to improve out-of-the-box distro boot time. The guy isn't knocking the Linux kernel for long boot times, he's trying to improve boot times on typical installs.
If you choose to not fiddle, then you choose to have boot times that are increasing.
That's a strange perspective... if I choose not to fiddle, then do I choose to have an insecure system? Or a slow one? Granted, maybe I could make my system slightly more secure, or slightly faster, by detailed tweaking, but that's no excuse for making inefficient and insecure default settings. It's not reasonable to say "Well, you obviously don't care about boot time if you aren't willing to work on it yourself, so I'll just choose the simplest and least efficient configuration possible," when there are definite steps that distros can take to improve the situation.
People who run IIS and then subject it to a/.ing should be drug into the street and shot for being an idiot.
Now it will even mean that shooter games will be won by the smartest - not the most physically capable
That analogy doesn't really work, though -- games with a mental interface won't be won by the "smartest" any more than games with a physical interface are won by the strongest. It'll probably still be an issue of reflexes, and of some sort of "mental coordination"...
Slashdot Mirror
But my point is that anyone who can afford to drive a Hummer (or most SUVs) right now is already "rich" in most practical senses... and I'm not at all pursuaded that marginal increases in the price of gasoline will change their behavior enough to actually (for example) lower total gasoline use, rather than just slow its growth. Nor will extra tax money be able to offset atmospheric damage that we don't have any idea how to effectively undo.
The whole idea behind any radical changes in energy policy almost has to be that it is not your right to do whatever you want when it substantially damages the environment for everyone else. America is, for now, despite everything, a very rich country, and if our entitlement mentality makes us decide that damanging the environment is a "right" of anyone who earned and can therefore flaunt their disposable income, we'll continue to poison the atmosphere, water, etc. pretty much unchecked.
(I don't want to get into arguments over whether the US really is the worst polluter, blah blah blah. We're a pretty bad one, way beyond sustainable levels, and that's enough to require major changes.)
If you don't like hard rules about buying and selling, how about just large taxes on vehicles below a certain standard? It accomplishes a similar purpose as your suggestion, but without penalizing those who are already behaving responsibly.
And on this, at least, we are completely in agreement...
You're right, in a sense, but you're overlooking a couple essential aspects of the situation:
- While most people realize that The Da Vinci Code is fiction, a lot of people accept without question the background information about the Catholic church, including a lot of arguably slanderous fictionalized history.
- More to the point, Dan Brown himself is presenting much of the book's background (i.e. the overall conspiracy, if not the literal story) as fact. He has said in interviews that he is glad that the truth about the Catholic church is finally being made public through the popularity of his books.
In combination, this means that a large number of people are accepting, on Dan Brown's authority, some pretty scandalous and usually demonstrably false (insofar as any historical fact can be, anyway) claims. So I think it's legitimate for Christians to respond by addressing the actual history behind the book.
Of course, maybe you knew that, and I just have a poor sense of humor :) In my defense, a lot of people don't realize the extent of the gap between Dan Brown's claims of historical accuracy and the actual accuracy of the books. And just for full disclosure, yes, I am a Christian...
So why are they really doing it? No clue, but with the unauthorized request on top of lying about the purpose, presumably it's something they can't do through legitimate channels, and likely it's something that would cause even more severe privacy concerns than what they're saying so far. Kind of creepy...
Or maybe I'm missing something?
Sadly, you're missing something.
Their conclusion will not be "Filters are a dead end, let's give up and throw them out."
Their conclusion will be, "Filters are not absolutely 100% bullet-proof!!! Our kids are looking at PORN ON THE INTERNET!!! Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!", after which they will be free to re-pass a controversial, struck-down-by-the-courts censorship law restricting Internet porn. Sure, this will be about as effective as a law restricting the sharing of copyrighted mp3s, but even so, it's kind of sketchy that they're making these sorts of laws in the first place...
Geez... there's like a half a dozen different modded-up posts saying "If Google really wants to make the world a better place, they should be doing [whatever I think is most important]." Well they can't exactly put all their money into every one of those different ideas at once... Not that all of them are bad ideas, but come on, just because they aren't starting with your particular pet charity doesn't mean they aren't making a difference. There is more than one legitimate way to do good in the world.
I can't say whether Google is secretly doing this from selfish motivations so that people will think better of them... but isn't it at least possible that they're doing it because they think it's the right thing to do?
I'm not so much saying this because I think that Google in particular is morally upstanding, though I think they're a lot better than most. I'm more saying this because it bothers me how many people will post to stories like this arguing that it is essentially immoral for executives to think about real social issues and not just shareholder profit. Capitalism (within reason) seems to be the best economic system we've found so far, but that doesn't mean it should be applied indiscriminately without any sort of moral perspective.
(I know you weren't saying that exactly, but it seemed implicit in your post that the only reason they would be doing it would be for reasons of their public image.)
No problem -- I hear DNF is being written in Perl 6, so it should be highly cross-platform...
plenty of people who wound normally go to grad school insead choose to work in industry.
Yes. But the study wasn't based on what people could have done with their lives, or on some hypothesised natural ability. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense to object that some people "would normally" have gone to grad school -- if people in those circumstances would normally have done that, then the most common statistical result will be for those type of people to go to grad school, and therefore the average result (which the study was trying to capture) will still be the same. Showing individual examples that don't have a 0.3% difference doesn't imply there isn't a 0.3% average difference.
This small lifestyle difference for four years in a subject's late twenties should not effect tests given at age 65+. More likely is that some other factor is introduced by lifestyle differences between the two major career paths.
Very likely, but this in no way invalidates the study. It seems highly unlikely that anyone, let alone anyone with any training, would perform this study and then claim that the only difference in the sample groups was those four years in the subjects' late twenties. However, the number of years of education is a substantial indicator for exactly those long-term career path distinctions you mention -- someone with more years of school is more likely to spend much of their life doing work that primarily centers around their mental abilities. So "years of education" is being used because it is the easiest quantitative way to approximate "how much the subject used their brain throughout their lifetime." Obviously the correlation isn't 100%, but the average PhD will devote a lot more energy to long-term mental development and education than the typical B.S. or what have you, and this is what most studies along these lines are trying to capture.
No, they realize that. That's the reason they're doing it. CDs are bad because 1. they are too unrestricted, and 2. you have already paid for them. If they can get politicians believing this is illegal, then you'll be forced to buy all those albums again, just to continue playing them on your iPod, unless you want to be sued for $15 million in "reasonable damages" by the RIAA.
In related news, the RIAA has announced the release of "skip-protected" CDs, which are exactly the same as normal CDs except they come with an additional license to make short-term backups by playing them in skip-protected players. These new CDs are expected to cost twice as much as traditional CDs.
I see this as a variation on an old question. 'Did God really say that He created man from the dust of the ground and not through a process of molecules to man evolution?' is similar to what the serpent asked Eve ... 'Did God really say ... ?' The answer is, 'Yes, God really said it.'
The problem is, the passage he's referring to where the serpent talks to Eve says, "Did God really say that you are not to eat from any tree in the garden?" -- to which the answer was of course no, God had only forbidden one tree. The question was just to make her confused and defensive.
No real point here, I just find it amusing that his parallel really implies that we should say no to his question, which is of course fine with me...
Certainly in order to reconcile a Biblically grounded faith with modern science, one needs to interpret some passages as metaphorical, but this does not mean that the choice about what is and is not metaphorical is somehow "arbitrary" -- it simply means we need to be careful in determining what the author of the text was trying to communicate (and since the entirety of the Bible was written long before modernism or the scientific method, the authors were rarely trying to communicate scientific ideas or natural history).
Christian (and Islamic and Judaeic) dogma inevitably and logically results in fundamentalism and rejection of all secular (ie, rational) thought...
This only follows from your assumptions about how one needs to interpret scripture. Since many (though sadly not all) of the people who actually have faith and are thus compelled to interpret scripture in an applied way disagree with those assumptions, your conclusions about the inevitable results don't follow.
...I think it's time to make peace with whatever the future holds and enjoy the moment like the 80's....
Geez. I mean, I think it's silly to dismiss global warming entirely as a conspiracy or paranoia or something, but because "some research group" claims it's too late we should just give up? I think I'd rather try and improve the situation as much as possible, which is what most climatologists seem to recommend. If our grandkids see in their history class that the reason things went completely to hell instead of eventually stabilizing was because we were busy "enjoying the moment," they're liable to stop by the nursing home just to kick us in the nuts...
Oh, now Reilly...
It's not theft, it's copyright infringement ;)
Not at all -- if you believe that quantum computers will actually work well enough to factor in the real world (many computer scientists don't -- the degree of precision required would be many orders of magnitude greater than any observations of any physical laws have ever been in a real experiment), you're only talking about making some particular one-way functions (in this case, factoring) useless.
In fact, part of the power of quantum computing is that (even without the somewhat less plausible factoring algorithm) we would have real secure encryption -- secure based not on the assumption that factoring is hard (which it may not be), but that quantum physics is true (which it may not be, but a lot of people seem more comfortable with this assumption, at least as far as cryptography is involved).
Even if they work most of the time, I'm nervous about a black-box machine with persistent (albeit non-fraudulent) technical problems just telling me who is in charge of the country without being able to provide any evidence. That's what causes the real alarm -- regardless of any fraud that did or didn't happen in the past, we need to find a way we can be reasonably sure it doesn't happen in the future, and desensitizing people to the enormous technical problems with existing e-voting systems is a huge step in the wrong direction.
My standards of proof are higher than most highschool educations provide -- I heard assertions that evolution is true, and very vague, inconclusive evidence, but I wasn't shown rigorous evidence anymore than I was shown a concrete proof of the quadratic formula -- I was expected to believe and to memorize the relevant facts, and to be able to apply them, but they were never very strongly justified. And as with the quadratic formula, ambitious students could perhaps find better evidence on their own -- I did exactly that with a lot of math problems that were stated without proof -- but it's not at all true that anyone who goes through highschool has seen the evidence for evolution.
And the evidence isn't quite as simple as you seem to suggest in your post -- fossils of extinct species don't directly imply that all life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor. All they directly imply is that there have been species in the past that are no longer alive now, and that there have been significant geological changes since those species were alive. But where those species came from, or their potential relation to modern species, is a much more involved question.
One thing I think a lot of people tend to forget once they've accepted evolution is just how mind-bogglingly implausible it seems when you're coming from a naive perspective. A lot of people get into the mindset that evolution is completely self-evident, and that isn't the case. Certainly with a lot of investigation the evidence for it is overwhelming, but with the standard of "scientific proof" used in typical highschool education things seem much less conclusive. Now, I'm convinced that it's true, but it's still pretty amazing that something as complicated as a human being descended from single-celled organisms. With such strong cultural forces insisting that the evidence is inconclusive, or that scientists don't agree about it, it isn't immediately obvious who to believe.
I can see from some of the other replies to my post that some people think it is obvious who to believe, and that something was wrong with me that I wasn't born knowing all of this already... sigh. I wish people (both religious and non) didn't consider being right as a kind of moral superiority.
As for why I didn't try reading scientific proofs in a library -- well, I don't know if I have a very good excuse for that. I did try to some extent, but it wasn't a subject I had to deal with very often, so I didn't feel like it was particularly pressing, though I would occasionally read things here and there. But most literature gives very simplified views, and either starts out assuming evolution is true, without giving much evidence (not that I'm objecting to that -- certainly it isn't the job of every evolutionist to prove things all over again at the beginning of everything they write -- I'm just saying that it took more work than I felt like investing to actually track down the real evidence), or tries to prove that it's false. Like I said, that isn't really a defense for why I didn't believe evolution, it's more of an explanation for why I was able to maintain that view.
If you're interested, the evidence that finally pushed me over the edge was 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, which is a wonderful article -- rigorous, logical, objective, and convincing. It also completely avoids potentially inflammatory rhetoric, which I really appreciate since that is an extreme rarity given the topic -- the only time the author even comes across as a little annoyed is when refuting the counter-counter-counter arguments by an ID supporter, where the ID guy is pretty blatantly misrepresenting his claims ;)
Anyway, for whatever it's worth -- let's hope we can lessen the anger on both sides of the fence, and refocus on real discussion and education...
I'm not in the biological sciences, and most rigorous evidence that is published for mainstream audiences is not scientifically or logically rigorous. I'm not saying rigorous evidence is not available, but I made some efforts to find it, and failed, and since most arguments I was exposed to were more on the level of personal insults than reasonable debate, I didn't feel a particularly strong need to keep looking.
Now, I'm not saying creationists have no responsibility if they don't keep investigating the facts -- and I'm not really trying to defend myself for not pursuing the topic more persistently. I'm just saying that, at least in a few cases, respectful and open discussion can change the minds even of "closed-minded" creationists, whereas insults and personal attacks will not.
I partly agree, but speaking as a former creationist myself, the thing that made it easy for me to persist in my beliefs was that most people responded to them either with condescending tolerance or with personal attacks and insults -- there was no middle ground. For many years, I heard no consistent, logical evidence for evolution -- not because I wasn't listening to opposing views, but because most people would immediately assume I was an idiot for even considering creationism. It was especially frustrating to be constantly labelled as stupid and closed-minded, when I'm pretty sure I'm not stupid (and have at least some academic achievements to back that up), and if I was really that closed-minded I would probably not believe in evolution now.
So why do I believe in evolution now? Because some people finally swallowed their pride for long enough to actually respectfully explain some of the hard evidence to me, and after thinking about it for a while, it convinced me. But now in discussions like this, I see people bashing creationists as though they're a deliberately hostile force that is irredeemably stupid and purposefully closed-minded. Certainly some of them are, just like in any sufficiently large group of people, but it's not true of everyone, and accusing them of being such is likely to make them dismiss you out of hand.
Yes, condescending tolerance can be destructive, but the opposite extreme is possibly even worse, since it actively pushes people away.
However, a guy I know found a workaround -- if you went to SIO, logged in, and after getting the "SIO is offline until December XX" message, appended "grades.html" to the URL, you could view your grades anyway (provided your professors had already submitted them, anyway). This workaround quickly spread to most of the students in department.
Now, was what we were doing unethical? I would argue it wasn't, though it may have been "against the rules" in a strict sense. What Harvard is doing sounds like if my school had told us that everyone who "hacked into the system" by appending an obvious string to the URL would be failing all their classes for the semester. That seems disproportionate to the offense, unless this policy was spelled out in advance. I know that none of us who added "grades.html" to the end of the URL considered ourselves to be breaking into the university's system, and I'd wager the same is true of the people who appended their login hash to the Harvard system's URL, so it shouldn't be trivially covered by some policy about "hacking into systems" (which obviously would be unethical). Why such a drastic response?
No, you're not booting much. My computer rarely crashes, but I still turn the computer off when I'm not using it -- it's noisy, and produces a lot of heat.
Boot time doesn't have to be an arduous wait. Yes, on out-of-the-box distros it can be incredible, but I blame the distro, not Linux.
Sure, maybe it's the distro and not Linux, but that's missing the point. The idea with this tool is to find ways to improve out-of-the-box distro boot time. The guy isn't knocking the Linux kernel for long boot times, he's trying to improve boot times on typical installs.
If you choose to not fiddle, then you choose to have boot times that are increasing.
That's a strange perspective... if I choose not to fiddle, then do I choose to have an insecure system? Or a slow one? Granted, maybe I could make my system slightly more secure, or slightly faster, by detailed tweaking, but that's no excuse for making inefficient and insecure default settings. It's not reasonable to say "Well, you obviously don't care about boot time if you aren't willing to work on it yourself, so I'll just choose the simplest and least efficient configuration possible," when there are definite steps that distros can take to improve the situation.
People who run IIS and then subject it to a /.ing should be drug into the street and shot for being an idiot.
Alright, I'm with you on this one ;)
That analogy doesn't really work, though -- games with a mental interface won't be won by the "smartest" any more than games with a physical interface are won by the strongest. It'll probably still be an issue of reflexes, and of some sort of "mental coordination"...