Suppose you had a definitive, 100% guaranteed answer to the "discovered vs invented" question. What would it allow you to do that you couldn't do before? What could you predict? What would you gain?
I tend to agree. I'm reminded of the Dutch computer scientist, Dijkstra, who said that ""The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." Some questions are just meaningless.
I think the thing to learn here is that language isn't reality, it merely describes reality. Oh, and the correct answer is "discovered"
No, I think the correct answer is "Why are you asking the question?" There might be a more interesting (and perhaps answerable) question that underlies it.
That just means that modern art is so meaningless and trite that no one knows what could be included as it.
Well, I take issue with the idea that labeling something as "art" immediately puts in on some pedestal of un-questionablity. If you do question it, it's some kind of reflection on your poor understanding of "art", i.e. "the emperor has no clothes".
In my view, call anything you like "art", but some art just plain sucks monkey dick. I was at a modern art museum in Munich about a month ago, and one piece of "art" was two pieces of pink yarn, strung ceiling to floor. It was titled "pink flamingo". That was easily the biggest piece of utter crap I've ever seen in a museum. (Of course, this was a rather strange museum where the alarms went off literally every 5-10 minutes because people got too close to the art). The alarms going off, and the nazi guard that yelled at people was a hell of a lot more expressive of Bavaria than anything I saw in that museum.
We do allow some levels of "punishment" awaiting trial, getting locked up in jail for example.
That's not punishment. The reason people are locked up pending trial is because of flight risk. If you can put up a lot of money to reduce flight risk (bail), they'll let you out of jail until trial.
"this is a guy who is suspected of being involved in illegal activity right this very moment -- do not do business with him"
(emphasis mine) Which is kind of my point. We have this idea that people are innocent until proven guilty in this country. While it may be difficult to apprehend these people, that's no excuse for doling out punishment before a trial.
probably because they served a sentence and now they are out, or does slashdot now advocate life sentences for any crime?
Was not doing any sort of commerce with any business in their sentence, or part of their release agreement? If not, I'm not sure how this is legal punishment.
This seems like some kind of backdoor conviction without a trial. If the government "knows" these people are criminals, why haven't they been arrested, convicted, and sentenced? If the government is forbidding people to do business with these people, shouldn't they have a trial or some kind of public hearing where the facts are presented?
This kind of thing seems like it could lead to rampant abuse, or at least error if someone winds up on one of these lists that shouldn't be on it.
Even with a incredibly low B_6 the number is still staggeringly huge.
If you can show be a b_6 number that's "incredible low", I'll bet you I can come up with one that's lower. In fact, I'll bet you I can come up with a number where the number of civilizations is 1.
It just amazes me anyone thinks they can come up with any kind of guess for the odds of life developing on a planet. Where do these numbers come from?
Many mathematically proven that even if you call life rare, the sheer number of stars with the possibility of planets in a habitable zone means there is a crapload of civilizations out there.
Just as the number of planets and start can be very large, the chances of life can be very close to zero. We can make estimates about the number of planets and stars.. but how do you make an estimate on the chances of life arising?
I don't believe we know enough at this point to make any kind of decent stab at this, other than to say it's not zero (since we obviously exist).
Nothing is being destroyed, so the question isn't one of having to buy something vs not having to buy it.
The broken window fallacy isn't about breaking things, it's about not taking into account hidden costs. It's perfectly applicable to the situation, as the money NOT going into buying non-OSS software goes into something else (that produces more value). The question is buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, which is simple supply/demand economics. I'd go even further, and suggest that the "loss" is fictitious. It is really an overestimate of the sales on the proprietary software vendor's part.
I think that's true as well. There's multiple failings of this dumb "costs the industry 60 billion" argument. It also doesn't take into account any gains the software industry itself makes from OSS.
Health reasons? There's plenty of meat that's quite healthy for you. Most fish is low in saturated fat and cholesterol. Chicken is pretty OK. Buffalo tastes very similar to beef, but has lower saturated fat. Vegans are vegans for political reasons. These are people that don't eat gummi bears because it contains ground up bones, and don't wear anything that has leather in it. I've heard of extreme wack-jobs that won't eat honey because we've enslaved the bees. It ain't just about food.
A better answer might be: "Journalists are unreliable".
I find it interesting when I hear about people complain about errors in Wikipedia, but don't put it into the same context as errors appearing everywhere else. How many people have read an article about something they had personal knowledge of written by some journalist, and found glaring errors in it? I know I have.
People need to stop trusting single sources of information blindly. All information can be wrong, even "conventional wisdom".
I honestly believe it's a result of the roots of the OS. Windows started out as a single user system. "Just reboot!" was OK because you weren't affecting anyone but the guy in front of the machine.
Right, and you religiously do this every time after the automated update runs?
I don't recall ever seeing a critical security update in something as innocuous as bash in the last 10 years. But if there was, and it was on a system I gave a shit about, sure.
And so do all other Linux users?
I'm not "all other linux users". So I can't speak for them. Anyways, I'm not really sure what this has to do with not having to reboot being a hell of lot better than being forced to reboot. As I said, it's mostly a question of luck.
It's not a question of "luck", it's a question of knowing what the hell you're doing, and what it's going to affect. Sure, if you know NOTHING, it's safer to "just reboot". just pointing out that it may be necessary if you have your paranoia level set to high.
I've often noted that the less people know, the more they're afraid. Why not just learn the system and understand what you need to do rather than just taking the quick and easy (hard in the long run) of rebooting?
are you 100% sure you're not still running some vulnerable code?
If I've restarted the server process, yes. What if bash had a vulnerability, and you installed the new version but old bash processes were still running?
I'd kill all bash processes. if you're really lucky then the package manager will know to restart the service after installing a new version.
That's been quite standard for a long time. I know Redhat includes that in their RHEL distribution. So I wouldn't exactly call that "really lucky" But how confident are you that everything is covered?
Unless it's something critical like a shared library vulnerability, very confident. In the case of a shared lib, it might be easier to just reboot the machine than restarting all the various processes. But at least you have a choice in the matter, which 9/10 of the time you simply don't with Windows.
If it's possible to generate an exploit that quickly, we need to completely abandon the current "patch it and hope no one broke in" approach to security. It's never been a good approach, but if any idiot can generate exploits via a point-and-click program, that's obviously a big problem. This problem isn't limited to Windows, and most operating systems aren't patched within even a few hours of a patch release. There's good reasons for this, and bad ones. But no one really wants to trust their critical systems to be patched (and possibly go down and become unworkable) to an instant patch system.
The fundamental problem here is that a lot of security depends on single points of failure. A real security system relies on the "defense in depth" approach.
Ah, so there's only a 1 in 450 chance of it hitting earth, but we know which ocean it will land in if it does (7 years after it hits the satellite).
It's not so far-fetched if you consider we know the position and velocity of the earth to a VERY high precision, so we know where the earth will be facing, and the direction of the asteroid. We don't know the position and velocity of the asteroid with as high a precision (nor obviously the mass of a satellite that might not even exist yet). So it's more difficult to calculate if the asteroid will hit. Also consider the Atlantic Ocean is very large, so an hour or two of when it would hit wouldn't make much difference.
(of course, I am not an astro-physicist, but the above seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation of the somewhat strange sounding predictions)
The US dollar is very weak right now, to the point where European banks are considering propping it up. Is it really such a surprise that US salaries are comparatively low if you only consider the exchange ratio?
Exchange ratio's don't look at cost of living in each place. An economist would look at what a "basket of goods" would buy in each country to do a comparison. Exchange rates are based on market forces, and don't necessarily have anything to do with buying power in each country.
How should people start blowing the whistle on companies like this?"
If it's as bad as you're indicating, everyone learns eventually, even if it's the hard way. What you need to consider is, is it worth it?
The questions I'd ask are:
Are peoples lives at risk from these vulnerabilities? Are peoples lives going to be ruined because of these vulnerabilities? Is the company at serious threat of going under because of these vulnerabilities?
If you can answer yes to one or more of these questions, you might consider risking your job because of it, especially the first two. If you can't answer yes to any of these questions, maybe it's best to either quit, or CYA. The latter means making sure everyone knows what the situation is, and they've ignored it (be sure to get written documentation they've done this). If you're going the CYA route, you can't make a big enough stink to get fired, but you can't be quite enough that you'll eventually get the blame when it comes down.
Sure, but that's not what you said. Your claim was anyone not using rBST was forced to put a label on it about how it's no different than milk produced using rBST. As I said, you only need a disclaimer when you make a claim about how your milk wasn't produced using rBST.
You may think it's a subtle difference, but it's an important one.
I often wondered why it is that a milk manufacturer who doesn't use BST (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_somatotropin) in their product has to put a label that states something to the effect of
I don't believe that's true. You have to put a disclaimer on it if you want to put the claim that your milk wasn't produced from cows using rBST in it. If you put no label on it, there's no requirement.
This isn't any different from making any other claim designed to have a subtle implication. Airborne recently lost a lawsuit for a not-so-subtle false implication that their product cures the common cold (even though they had disclaimers on it).
Right. So where's the definition of "you" that doesn't include your subconscious? Why not? What's "decide", and why does it automatically involve only your conscious thought process? You can give answers to these questions, but that doesn't mean they're any more meaningful than anyone else's answers.
That's why "free will" is such a meaningless question, at least scientifically speaking. There's no real answers to these questions, because most of what we're talking about isn't concrete, and can be defined arbitrarily.
Free will as I understand it, means that there is no outside force controlling your decisions.
That's a definition, it's just not a very rigorous one. What counts as an outside force? What counts as controlling? Is influencing the same as controlling? When? Where do you draw the line between "you" and "outside"?
Change all the answers to those questions, and you can come up with totally different answers to whether there's "free will". That's why it's important to have concrete, definitive answers in science. People (sane people) don't really disagree about what an electron is, for instance.
That's not to say these aren't interesting or good questions to be asking. I just don't think it's a very good scientific question.
It seems completely logical to me and not even really an invasion of privacy cuz you should be ohhhh you know, DOING WORK
So if I take 5 minutes out of my day to make a doctors appointment, it should be totally cool for my employer to listen in on all the details because I should be "doing work"? I don't know where you work, but most workplaces outside of Taco Bell have a tolerance for short entries of your non-work life into the work day.
I'm not sure what the difference is if it involves a computer. It may even be legal for my employer to listen in on my calling for a doctors appt, but I wouldn't call it right or OK.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose you had a definitive, 100% guaranteed answer to the "discovered vs invented" question. What would it allow you to do that you couldn't do before? What could you predict? What would you gain?
I tend to agree. I'm reminded of the Dutch computer scientist, Dijkstra, who said that ""The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." Some questions are just meaningless.
I think the thing to learn here is that language isn't reality, it merely describes reality.
Oh, and the correct answer is "discovered"
No, I think the correct answer is "Why are you asking the question?" There might be a more interesting (and perhaps answerable) question that underlies it.
That just means that modern art is so meaningless and trite that no one knows what could be included as it.
Well, I take issue with the idea that labeling something as "art" immediately puts in on some pedestal of un-questionablity. If you do question it, it's some kind of reflection on your poor understanding of "art", i.e. "the emperor has no clothes".
In my view, call anything you like "art", but some art just plain sucks monkey dick. I was at a modern art museum in Munich about a month ago, and one piece of "art" was two pieces of pink yarn, strung ceiling to floor. It was titled "pink flamingo". That was easily the biggest piece of utter crap I've ever seen in a museum. (Of course, this was a rather strange museum where the alarms went off literally every 5-10 minutes because people got too close to the art). The alarms going off, and the nazi guard that yelled at people was a hell of a lot more expressive of Bavaria than anything I saw in that museum.
We do allow some levels of "punishment" awaiting trial, getting locked up in jail for example.
That's not punishment. The reason people are locked up pending trial is because of flight risk. If you can put up a lot of money to reduce flight risk (bail), they'll let you out of jail until trial.
"this is a guy who is suspected of being involved in illegal activity right this very moment -- do not do business with him"
(emphasis mine)
Which is kind of my point. We have this idea that people are innocent until proven guilty in this country. While it may be difficult to apprehend these people, that's no excuse for doling out punishment before a trial.
probably because they served a sentence and now they are out, or does slashdot now advocate life sentences for any crime?
Was not doing any sort of commerce with any business in their sentence, or part of their release agreement? If not, I'm not sure how this is legal punishment.
This seems like some kind of backdoor conviction without a trial. If the government "knows" these people are criminals, why haven't they been arrested, convicted, and sentenced? If the government is forbidding people to do business with these people, shouldn't they have a trial or some kind of public hearing where the facts are presented?
This kind of thing seems like it could lead to rampant abuse, or at least error if someone winds up on one of these lists that shouldn't be on it.
Even with a incredibly low B_6 the number is still staggeringly huge.
If you can show be a b_6 number that's "incredible low", I'll bet you I can come up with one that's lower. In fact, I'll bet you I can come up with a number where the number of civilizations is 1.
It just amazes me anyone thinks they can come up with any kind of guess for the odds of life developing on a planet. Where do these numbers come from?
Many mathematically proven that even if you call life rare, the sheer number of stars with the possibility of planets in a habitable zone means there is a crapload of civilizations out there.
Just as the number of planets and start can be very large, the chances of life can be very close to zero. We can make estimates about the number of planets and stars.. but how do you make an estimate on the chances of life arising?
I don't believe we know enough at this point to make any kind of decent stab at this, other than to say it's not zero (since we obviously exist).
Nothing is being destroyed, so the question isn't one of having to buy something vs not having to buy it.
The broken window fallacy isn't about breaking things, it's about not taking into account hidden costs. It's perfectly applicable to the situation, as the money NOT going into buying non-OSS software goes into something else (that produces more value).
The question is buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, which is simple supply/demand economics. I'd go even further, and suggest that the "loss" is fictitious. It is really an overestimate of the sales on the proprietary software vendor's part.
I think that's true as well. There's multiple failings of this dumb "costs the industry 60 billion" argument. It also doesn't take into account any gains the software industry itself makes from OSS.
If it for health reasons
Health reasons? There's plenty of meat that's quite healthy for you. Most fish is low in saturated fat and cholesterol. Chicken is pretty OK. Buffalo tastes very similar to beef, but has lower saturated fat. Vegans are vegans for political reasons. These are people that don't eat gummi bears because it contains ground up bones, and don't wear anything that has leather in it. I've heard of extreme wack-jobs that won't eat honey because we've enslaved the bees. It ain't just about food.
The "easy" answer is: "Wikipedia is unreliable".
A better answer might be: "Journalists are unreliable".
I find it interesting when I hear about people complain about errors in Wikipedia, but don't put it into the same context as errors appearing everywhere else. How many people have read an article about something they had personal knowledge of written by some journalist, and found glaring errors in it? I know I have.
People need to stop trusting single sources of information blindly. All information can be wrong, even "conventional wisdom".
I don't know why they chose to do it this way
I honestly believe it's a result of the roots of the OS. Windows started out as a single user system. "Just reboot!" was OK because you weren't affecting anyone but the guy in front of the machine.
Right, and you religiously do this every time after the automated update runs?
I don't recall ever seeing a critical security update in something as innocuous as bash in the last 10 years. But if there was, and it was on a system I gave a shit about, sure.
And so do all other Linux users?
I'm not "all other linux users". So I can't speak for them. Anyways, I'm not really sure what this has to do with not having to reboot being a hell of lot better than being forced to reboot.
As I said, it's mostly a question of luck.
It's not a question of "luck", it's a question of knowing what the hell you're doing, and what it's going to affect. Sure, if you know NOTHING, it's safer to "just reboot".
just pointing out that it may be necessary if you have your paranoia level set to high.
I've often noted that the less people know, the more they're afraid. Why not just learn the system and understand what you need to do rather than just taking the quick and easy (hard in the long run) of rebooting?
Commodore did that all the time. I'd recommend "On the Edge" (which details a lot of other semi-shady practices of the whole industry).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0973864907/ref=pd_bbs_olp_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208554130&sr=8-2
are you 100% sure you're not still running some vulnerable code?
If I've restarted the server process, yes.
What if bash had a vulnerability, and you installed the new version but old bash processes were still running?
I'd kill all bash processes.
if you're really lucky then the package manager will know to restart the service after installing a new version.
That's been quite standard for a long time. I know Redhat includes that in their RHEL distribution. So I wouldn't exactly call that "really lucky"
But how confident are you that everything is covered?
Unless it's something critical like a shared library vulnerability, very confident. In the case of a shared lib, it might be easier to just reboot the machine than restarting all the various processes. But at least you have a choice in the matter, which 9/10 of the time you simply don't with Windows.
If it's possible to generate an exploit that quickly, we need to completely abandon the current "patch it and hope no one broke in" approach to security. It's never been a good approach, but if any idiot can generate exploits via a point-and-click program, that's obviously a big problem. This problem isn't limited to Windows, and most operating systems aren't patched within even a few hours of a patch release. There's good reasons for this, and bad ones. But no one really wants to trust their critical systems to be patched (and possibly go down and become unworkable) to an instant patch system.
The fundamental problem here is that a lot of security depends on single points of failure. A real security system relies on the "defense in depth" approach.
Ah, so there's only a 1 in 450 chance of it hitting earth, but we know which ocean it will land in if it does (7 years after it hits the satellite).
It's not so far-fetched if you consider we know the position and velocity of the earth to a VERY high precision, so we know where the earth will be facing, and the direction of the asteroid. We don't know the position and velocity of the asteroid with as high a precision (nor obviously the mass of a satellite that might not even exist yet). So it's more difficult to calculate if the asteroid will hit. Also consider the Atlantic Ocean is very large, so an hour or two of when it would hit wouldn't make much difference.
(of course, I am not an astro-physicist, but the above seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation of the somewhat strange sounding predictions)
(the above poster mailed me that he forgot to add the following to hist post)
Get off my lawn!
The US dollar is very weak right now, to the point where European banks are considering propping it up. Is it really such a surprise that US salaries are comparatively low if you only consider the exchange ratio?
Exchange ratio's don't look at cost of living in each place. An economist would look at what a "basket of goods" would buy in each country to do a comparison. Exchange rates are based on market forces, and don't necessarily have anything to do with buying power in each country.
How should people start blowing the whistle on companies like this?"
If it's as bad as you're indicating, everyone learns eventually, even if it's the hard way. What you need to consider is, is it worth it?
The questions I'd ask are:
Are peoples lives at risk from these vulnerabilities?
Are peoples lives going to be ruined because of these vulnerabilities?
Is the company at serious threat of going under because of these vulnerabilities?
If you can answer yes to one or more of these questions, you might consider risking your job because of it, especially the first two. If you can't answer yes to any of these questions, maybe it's best to either quit, or CYA. The latter means making sure everyone knows what the situation is, and they've ignored it (be sure to get written documentation they've done this). If you're going the CYA route, you can't make a big enough stink to get fired, but you can't be quite enough that you'll eventually get the blame when it comes down.
Sure, but that's not what you said. Your claim was anyone not using rBST was forced to put a label on it about how it's no different than milk produced using rBST. As I said, you only need a disclaimer when you make a claim about how your milk wasn't produced using rBST.
You may think it's a subtle difference, but it's an important one.
I often wondered why it is that a milk manufacturer who doesn't use BST (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_somatotropin) in their product has to put a label that states something to the effect of
I don't believe that's true. You have to put a disclaimer on it if you want to put the claim that your milk wasn't produced from cows using rBST in it. If you put no label on it, there's no requirement.
This isn't any different from making any other claim designed to have a subtle implication. Airborne recently lost a lawsuit for a not-so-subtle false implication that their product cures the common cold (even though they had disclaimers on it).
Right. So where's the definition of "you" that doesn't include your subconscious? Why not? What's "decide", and why does it automatically involve only your conscious thought process? You can give answers to these questions, but that doesn't mean they're any more meaningful than anyone else's answers.
That's why "free will" is such a meaningless question, at least scientifically speaking. There's no real answers to these questions, because most of what we're talking about isn't concrete, and can be defined arbitrarily.
Free will as I understand it, means that there is no outside force controlling your decisions.
That's a definition, it's just not a very rigorous one. What counts as an outside force? What counts as controlling? Is influencing the same as controlling? When? Where do you draw the line between "you" and "outside"?
Change all the answers to those questions, and you can come up with totally different answers to whether there's "free will". That's why it's important to have concrete, definitive answers in science. People (sane people) don't really disagree about what an electron is, for instance.
That's not to say these aren't interesting or good questions to be asking. I just don't think it's a very good scientific question.
It seems completely logical to me and not even really an invasion of privacy cuz you should be ohhhh you know, DOING WORK
So if I take 5 minutes out of my day to make a doctors appointment, it should be totally cool for my employer to listen in on all the details because I should be "doing work"? I don't know where you work, but most workplaces outside of Taco Bell have a tolerance for short entries of your non-work life into the work day.
I'm not sure what the difference is if it involves a computer. It may even be legal for my employer to listen in on my calling for a doctors appt, but I wouldn't call it right or OK.