OTOH, with desktop apps, to compromise the app for an user you have to get into the user's computer. Compromising it for all users would mean getting into all user's computers. With web apps, you have only to attack one server to compromise all users.
Well, given the way most people use word processing, I think teaching them to use word processors properly would certainly be a win (hint: If you keep selecting fonts, you're doing it wrong).
Of course, in reality the insurance's bet is more like: Either nothing bad will happen, or they will find a way to claim that the bad thing that happened is not covered.
Sorry but the burden of proof is on your side, not the other side.
I have proven that the "proof" of the AC that we are "definitely" alone is no proof. My position is that we simply don't know if there are other life forms. Since nobody disagrees that we don't have proof for extraterrestrial life, all I have to do to is to show that the alleged proofs against it don't hold. Which I just did.
You cannot provide any evidence of life on any other planet in our solar system let alone elsewhere.
No. Nor did I claim so. However I do know that there's life here on earth, and that means there's a non-zero probability of a planet developing life. It could be that this probability is so low that life only developed here. However we have no evidence that this is so, and our mere existence speaks against it (indeed, if I wouldn't support the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, I'd say it's strong evidence because if life is so unlikely, the more likely event would have been for it to not develop at all anywhere in the universe; of course MWI tells us that if it could develop, there's a world which did develop it, no matter how unlikely it is, and it's obvious that we are in that world and not in another).
Anything else is just built on conjecture.
Yeah, like your conjecture that because I reject a flawed proof that extraterrestrial life doesn't exist, I must be convinced that extraterrestrial life does exist.
You might as well call your belief in extraterrestrial life a matter of "faith".
I don't believe in extraterrestrial life. But I also don't believe in the non-existence of extraterrestrial life. Both positions lack any evidence. And the position that there exists extraterrestrial life has actually good arguments, because after all, we know that life did develop on earth, therefore it's possible for life to develop in our universe. Claiming that life did develop only here means claiming the the earth is very special; so special indeed that there's no single other planet with the same properties in the whole universe. Which in itself is a quite extraordinary claim. One which only gets acceptable (but far from evident!) to me due to MWI.
tl;dr: If you accept MWI (as I do), the question of extraterrestrial life is strictly open. If you don't accept MWI, you have to accept extraterrestrial life.
Well, AFAIK there are several competing theories about the origin of life. One being that life started at the black smokers in the deep sea; that one would certainly not need any tides.
There is definitely no life outside of planet Earth.
Ah, so you know every planet in the universe?
The unique combinations of factors that have occurred here to allow life are exceedingly improbably to occur anywhere else
Yes, but the universe is a large place. It's like the fact that you are extremely unlikely to win the lottery, yet almost every week someone wins. And yes, a planet getting life is much less probable than winning the lottery, but then, there are many more planets in the universe than lottery players for a given lottery.
the fact that the solar system has not been visited by robotic exploration / colonization craft proves that we are alone, for the short period of time we exist before we extinguish ourselves.
No. It only proofs that there's no intelligent species which had the chance to reach us. It doesn't preclude non-intelligent life on other planets (maybe it's a highly unlikely event that intelligence evolves on planets with life), nor does it preclude intelligent life anywhere where it couldn't have reached us (I think even Andromeda is far enough that an intelligent species would have had no chance to visit us or send robots; anyway, an intelligent species 10 billion light years from here definitely wouldn't have come here.
And even for intelligent life in our galaxy, it's not a disproof of intelligent life; it just makes it more unlikely. Imagine there are exactly two intelligent species evolving in our galaxy. Then there's a 50% chance that they are behind us. And since we ourselves didn't ever get to a planet of another star, it's no surprise that they didn't come here anyway. Even three intelligent species would not make it too improbable that we are the first.
Moreover, it's not a given that any intelligent species will do space exploration beyond their solar system. Indeed, it might be that most just don't survive long enough.
Actually, in my Usenet time I spent considerable time arguing with persons who didn't interest me as person. That's because I was interested in the topic. And I believe I was by far the only one.
Actually, an easy way to test this would be to demand that from a certain point on, all nuclear reactors have to have full insurance against any sort of damage they cause. If they are indeed that safe, it shouldn't be hard to get that insurance. If they can't get the insurance, they are obviously not safe, and therefore should be shut down.
For example, you might converse with a main developer of a software project not because you care about the person, but because you care about the software. If someone else would develop the software, you'd instead converse with that other person.
Of course, if you converse long enough with a person, chances are high that the person also starts to become important for you.
You own 3 cars at the same time? Sounds quite unusual to me. Or do you count all the cars of your family? In that case, the average is of course lower because you have to divide the number of cars by the number of people in your family.
Well, since there's no predefined definition of version numbers, you have considerable freedom in defining them. For example:
Version numbers a.b.c and d.e.f are added by forming the ordinals (w^2 a + w b + c) and (w^2 d + w e + f) where w is the smallest infinite ordinal, then adding those (note that ordinal addition is not commutative!), giving an expression of the form (w^2 f + w g + h) which then is concerted back to the version number f.g.h in the obvious way
For example, we would get 2.6.40 + 0.0.1 = 2.6.41, 2.6.40 + 0.1.0 = 2.7.0 and 2.6.40 + 1.0.0 = 3.0.0 -- which actually makes some sense. Also note that version comparison reduced to ordinal comparison would give the correct ordering.
Note that the above definition assumes that all version number components are nonnegative (there is no such thing as a negative ordinal). However, the major version number could be allowed to be an arbitrary ordinal number:-)
Of course if your attack isn't time critical, you could have the communication go the same way as the infection: A stick is infected with software to transmit the data back, and as soon as it is connected to a computer with internet access, the data is sent. Basically, the USB sticks would be used as high-latency network connections.
Yes, neutrinos are more common near nuke plants. At least that is what theory tells us. If you find a cheap way to PROVE this experimentally, you would become moderately famous among physicists. Getting extra glitches from memory would qualify...
I have an unpatched Windows 2000 machine behind a cheap Netgear router.
I highlighted the relevant poar for you.
No,. your Windows computer isn't on the internet. It is on the LAN. The LAN is connected to the internet. And it does NAT on the border. There simply is no way your computer could be accessed from outside.
And yet, Many Worlds *does* require a special interaction that that distinguishes an observer who becomes entangled with a system in a special way as distinct from a superposition of states (e.g. two entangled photons) in a laboratory.
No.
The distinction is that with two entangled photons, an observer can observe the superposition; but as far as we know an observer cannot observe his own superposition: he always finds himself in one state (or one World, if you prefer) or another.
That's because in this case, he's part of that superposition (also one of the things I glossed over is that he's also in constant interaction with the environment, so to observe the entanglement even from outside, one would in addition have to know the exact state of the environment as well).
Note that an electron cannot observe its own entanglement either (that is, you cannot make an experiment on a single electron to tell whether it is entangled or not). Indeed, it's impossible to prove that a single particle is entangled. Entanglement can only be seen in statistical correlations between both partners. There's not an experiment where you can send in an entangled pair (let alone one particle of a pair) and get "this pair was entangled" for entangled pairs and "this pair was not entangled" for non-entangled pairs. You need a large number of such pairs, identically prepared, to see entanglement. The observer in his subjective view is always a single system (even if there were identical copies of him, each single copy would easily distinguish itself from all other copies). So how would you think you'd do the necessary correlation statistics to prove entanglement, if you have only one copy to begin with (and in addition the fact mentioned above that the observer interacts with the environment, thus making the superposition quickly unobservable in practice even if you had such an ensemble).
Observers are special.
Only in their own view. Not in an absolute sense. Especially every observer is special only in his own view, not in the view of any other observer.
So again, Many Worlds fails to explain what this observation is or when it takes place; nor what an observer's perception is; nor even what an observer is.
Well, an observer is any system which interacts with the other system and is decoherent. Of course to actually perceive anything you need more, but those details are irrelevant for MWI, because the self-observation, however it works, cannot read anything which isn't observable in the self-observing system. And what is observable and what isn't is well known.
In fact, Many Worlds suffers from much the same Measurement Problem as the Copenhagen Interpretation: there is no rigorous definition of when an observation (or the perception of an observation, whatever that means -- I can't find "perception" in the wave equation anywhere?) takes place.
No, it doesn't, because in the MWI the measurement isn't a special operation. It's just an interaction like any other, and it is sufficient that in the time scales we can perceive, only the results we can perceive can occur. We don't have to make a clear split "this is a measurement, that isn't", it's no problem if there turn out to be things like "half a measurement" as long as it doesn't happen with macroscopic observers like us, in timeframes we can observe. Yes, that might mean that a hypothetical microscopic intelligent being would perceive quantum events differently, not following Copenhagen rules. So what? The Copenhagen rules explain how we perceive the world. That's what an interpretation has to explain.
I also don't know what this "outside view" you refer to is.
The "outside view" is the view of an observer who knows what happens (maybe he arranged it so the "insid
Not if you believe that the Bible is the literal Word of God.
To be exact: If you believe that the bible is the literal word of god, and that god told the humans the exact truth about everything, instead of stories which keep them happy.
Just imagine the situation:
Moses: OK, so how did it all start? God: Well, in the beginning I created space, time and matter in a big bang... Moses: In a what? God: In a big bang. All of space and all the matter was concentrated in a point... Moses: Where was this point? God: Everywhere. Moses: But that doesn't make sense. God: It makes perfect sense. You just don't understand it. Moses: Nor will the other people. I need something I can tell them and which they will understand! God: But it's exactly what I did! Moses: But the people don't care if that is so. They want something they can understand, even if it is wrong! God: sigh Well, then, what about that: In the beginning I created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void...
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, with desktop apps, to compromise the app for an user you have to get into the user's computer. Compromising it for all users would mean getting into all user's computers. With web apps, you have only to attack one server to compromise all users.
It also makes sure that search engines will understand it.
Well, given the way most people use word processing, I think teaching them to use word processors properly would certainly be a win (hint: If you keep selecting fonts, you're doing it wrong).
Of course, in reality the insurance's bet is more like: Either nothing bad will happen, or they will find a way to claim that the bad thing that happened is not covered.
Did they include a death's head symbol?
I'm just waiting for the first virus that warns when downloading the official update that it were fake and you shouldn't install it ...
I have proven that the "proof" of the AC that we are "definitely" alone is no proof.
My position is that we simply don't know if there are other life forms. Since nobody disagrees that we don't have proof for extraterrestrial life, all I have to do to is to show that the alleged proofs against it don't hold. Which I just did.
No. Nor did I claim so. However I do know that there's life here on earth, and that means there's a non-zero probability of a planet developing life. It could be that this probability is so low that life only developed here. However we have no evidence that this is so, and our mere existence speaks against it (indeed, if I wouldn't support the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, I'd say it's strong evidence because if life is so unlikely, the more likely event would have been for it to not develop at all anywhere in the universe; of course MWI tells us that if it could develop, there's a world which did develop it, no matter how unlikely it is, and it's obvious that we are in that world and not in another).
Yeah, like your conjecture that because I reject a flawed proof that extraterrestrial life doesn't exist, I must be convinced that extraterrestrial life does exist.
I don't believe in extraterrestrial life. But I also don't believe in the non-existence of extraterrestrial life. Both positions lack any evidence. And the position that there exists extraterrestrial life has actually good arguments, because after all, we know that life did develop on earth, therefore it's possible for life to develop in our universe. Claiming that life did develop only here means claiming the the earth is very special; so special indeed that there's no single other planet with the same properties in the whole universe. Which in itself is a quite extraordinary claim. One which only gets acceptable (but far from evident!) to me due to MWI.
tl;dr: If you accept MWI (as I do), the question of extraterrestrial life is strictly open. If you don't accept MWI, you have to accept extraterrestrial life.
Well, AFAIK there are several competing theories about the origin of life. One being that life started at the black smokers in the deep sea; that one would certainly not need any tides.
Ah, so you know every planet in the universe?
Yes, but the universe is a large place. It's like the fact that you are extremely unlikely to win the lottery, yet almost every week someone wins. And yes, a planet getting life is much less probable than winning the lottery, but then, there are many more planets in the universe than lottery players for a given lottery.
No. It only proofs that there's no intelligent species which had the chance to reach us. It doesn't preclude non-intelligent life on other planets (maybe it's a highly unlikely event that intelligence evolves on planets with life), nor does it preclude intelligent life anywhere where it couldn't have reached us (I think even Andromeda is far enough that an intelligent species would have had no chance to visit us or send robots; anyway, an intelligent species 10 billion light years from here definitely wouldn't have come here.
And even for intelligent life in our galaxy, it's not a disproof of intelligent life; it just makes it more unlikely. Imagine there are exactly two intelligent species evolving in our galaxy. Then there's a 50% chance that they are behind us. And since we ourselves didn't ever get to a planet of another star, it's no surprise that they didn't come here anyway. Even three intelligent species would not make it too improbable that we are the first.
Moreover, it's not a given that any intelligent species will do space exploration beyond their solar system. Indeed, it might be that most just don't survive long enough.
They pulled it out of the atmosphere of Uranus?
Actually, in my Usenet time I spent considerable time arguing with persons who didn't interest me as person. That's because I was interested in the topic. And I believe I was by far the only one.
Not only that. They were spraying insecticides! We should tell Greenpeace about their ecological wrongdoing!
Actually, an easy way to test this would be to demand that from a certain point on, all nuclear reactors have to have full insurance against any sort of damage they cause. If they are indeed that safe, it shouldn't be hard to get that insurance. If they can't get the insurance, they are obviously not safe, and therefore should be shut down.
We didn't find highly radioactive nuclear waste in the ground. We only found weakly radioactive uranium there.
For example, you might converse with a main developer of a software project not because you care about the person, but because you care about the software. If someone else would develop the software, you'd instead converse with that other person.
Of course, if you converse long enough with a person, chances are high that the person also starts to become important for you.
You own 3 cars at the same time? Sounds quite unusual to me. Or do you count all the cars of your family? In that case, the average is of course lower because you have to divide the number of cars by the number of people in your family.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_arithmetic
Well, since there's no predefined definition of version numbers, you have considerable freedom in defining them. For example:
Version numbers a.b.c and d.e.f are added by forming the ordinals (w^2 a + w b + c) and (w^2 d + w e + f) where w is the smallest infinite ordinal, then adding those (note that ordinal addition is not commutative!), giving an expression of the form (w^2 f + w g + h) which then is concerted back to the version number f.g.h in the obvious way
For example, we would get 2.6.40 + 0.0.1 = 2.6.41, 2.6.40 + 0.1.0 = 2.7.0 and 2.6.40 + 1.0.0 = 3.0.0 -- which actually makes some sense. Also note that version comparison reduced to ordinal comparison would give the correct ordering.
Note that the above definition assumes that all version number components are nonnegative (there is no such thing as a negative ordinal). However, the major version number could be allowed to be an arbitrary ordinal number :-)
Of course if your attack isn't time critical, you could have the communication go the same way as the infection: A stick is infected with software to transmit the data back, and as soon as it is connected to a computer with internet access, the data is sent. Basically, the USB sticks would be used as high-latency network connections.
With the analog systems, you'd need access to the internal wiring, which is one level more.
Of course, I doubt they would have accessible USB ports in a power plant.
Too late.
Assuming we're still talking about the Kindle
So they can make it so I can take out the battery and the page I'm reading won't disappear?
Yes
I suspect the screens take some power to keep on
No
Indeed, you need power to make the page disappear.
I highlighted the relevant poar for you.
No,. your Windows computer isn't on the internet. It is on the LAN. The LAN is connected to the internet. And it does NAT on the border. There simply is no way your computer could be accessed from outside.
No.
That's because in this case, he's part of that superposition (also one of the things I glossed over is that he's also in constant interaction with the environment, so to observe the entanglement even from outside, one would in addition have to know the exact state of the environment as well).
Note that an electron cannot observe its own entanglement either (that is, you cannot make an experiment on a single electron to tell whether it is entangled or not). Indeed, it's impossible to prove that a single particle is entangled. Entanglement can only be seen in statistical correlations between both partners. There's not an experiment where you can send in an entangled pair (let alone one particle of a pair) and get "this pair was entangled" for entangled pairs and "this pair was not entangled" for non-entangled pairs. You need a large number of such pairs, identically prepared, to see entanglement. The observer in his subjective view is always a single system (even if there were identical copies of him, each single copy would easily distinguish itself from all other copies). So how would you think you'd do the necessary correlation statistics to prove entanglement, if you have only one copy to begin with (and in addition the fact mentioned above that the observer interacts with the environment, thus making the superposition quickly unobservable in practice even if you had such an ensemble).
Only in their own view. Not in an absolute sense. Especially every observer is special only in his own view, not in the view of any other observer.
Well, an observer is any system which interacts with the other system and is decoherent. Of course to actually perceive anything you need more, but those details are irrelevant for MWI, because the self-observation, however it works, cannot read anything which isn't observable in the self-observing system. And what is observable and what isn't is well known.
No, it doesn't, because in the MWI the measurement isn't a special operation. It's just an interaction like any other, and it is sufficient that in the time scales we can perceive, only the results we can perceive can occur. We don't have to make a clear split "this is a measurement, that isn't", it's no problem if there turn out to be things like "half a measurement" as long as it doesn't happen with macroscopic observers like us, in timeframes we can observe. Yes, that might mean that a hypothetical microscopic intelligent being would perceive quantum events differently, not following Copenhagen rules. So what? The Copenhagen rules explain how we perceive the world. That's what an interpretation has to explain.
The "outside view" is the view of an observer who knows what happens (maybe he arranged it so the "insid
To be exact: If you believe that the bible is the literal word of god, and that god told the humans the exact truth about everything, instead of stories which keep them happy.
Just imagine the situation:
Moses: OK, so how did it all start? ... ... ...
God: Well, in the beginning I created space, time and matter in a big bang
Moses: In a what?
God: In a big bang. All of space and all the matter was concentrated in a point
Moses: Where was this point?
God: Everywhere.
Moses: But that doesn't make sense.
God: It makes perfect sense. You just don't understand it.
Moses: Nor will the other people. I need something I can tell them and which they will understand!
God: But it's exactly what I did!
Moses: But the people don't care if that is so. They want something they can understand, even if it is wrong!
God: sigh Well, then, what about that: In the beginning I created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void