You say you preserved your privacy by eschewing the variety of hosted/social networking sites that your friends and family use. Have you also eschewed credit cards? Driver's license? All airline travel? Property ownership?
What you identify as the frontier of privacy is just the most visible loss of your privacy, the publicizing of yourself. You already exist in hundreds of government and corporate databases, both your vitals and your histories, in ways that are badly protected. Your only safety is that you're part of a gigantic herd that exists there with you, making your odds of being singled out lower.
This is what Larry Ellison meant when he said "You have no privacy. Get over it." Staying off gmail and facebook and LinkedIn is a hair shirt exercise in futility. That doesn't mean you have no privacy, but that what privacy you have is the privacy of politeness--what you and others choose to discuss (or avoid discussing) in public.
The 4th amendment unquestionably prohibits this behavior; the evidence was collected under a false warrant (either knowingly or not; the warrant has been accepted by all to be false) and so the evidence is inadmissable. End of story.
You're wrong. The 4th amendment is controlled by Supreme Court decisions that provide for a "good faith exception" to the exclusionary rule, meaning that if the officers were executing a warrant in good faith (meaning that they didn't know that there was an underlying clerical error), then the results of warrant are admitted. There's no reason to punish the cops for a database error.
You can disagree with the Supreme Court rulings (United States v. Leon (468 U.S. 902) and Massachusetts v. Sheppard (468 U.S. 981)), but legally the judge was not ruling unconstitutionally.
Personally, I'd agree with you, and like to see evidence thrown out at the merest whiff of official misconduct, but you're simply mistaken when you say that the judge ruled unconstitutionally.
Probably not in general, where the cluster that they have is focused on a high level of concurrency and a low level of latency. Their database stuff might be interesting for data warehousing projects--it's mostly solid-state storage for a database that handles a really high number of transactions.
Basically what they have are a couple hundred IBM built dual Opteron blades sitting on a lot of RAMSAN SSDs, with a more conventional disk based storage system for the more persistent data. The cluster runs a lot of C code to handle persistence, networking, proxying, and account management; the game logic is all in stackless python, which is a very useful language for "agent based" multithreaded programming.
What they're talking about moving to in the article is Infiniband networking between blades because the bottleneck now is in load balancing--threads can't be shifted quickly enough from one blade to another to avoid latency for the player, which has a huge effect in certain high population regions and large space battles.
The kind of clustering they're doing probably has more importance for massively parallel scientific computing than business.
Because if we don't discuss it, vendors will think that it doesn't need to be fixed, and won't fix it. I'm all for giving vendors some lead time to come up with solutions to discovered attacks, but history has plainly shown that the only way to compel vendors to fix security problems is to publicize them.
And keep in mind: The fact that we're not discussing it doesn't mean it's not getting discussed in other circles who look to use it for less noble things than correcting defects.
I'm not saying that is merciful. I don't think that that enters into the discussion at all.
It enters the discussion because that was the point I replied to in the first place: someone's "correction" of Epicurus's dictum that a God who is able to prevent evil but unwilling to do so was merciful, rather than malicious.
Yours is an articulate argument (thank you for making it) but it starts from a basis of believing that God exists and that he made the universe a certain way that suited him. Within those assumptions, your explanation makes tremendous sense. What I've been quibbling with, though (as Epicurus did) is the concept of God and what sort of sense it makes.
If we back up to the attributes of a supposed omnipotent God, then Epicurus is basically identifying what's classically been called "the problem of evil". My point has always been that, rather than create free will and allow evil into the world, God could have simply not done it, and saved countless numbers of souls the suffering of Earthly existence and the possibility of eternal damnation.
You countered that an existence without free will would be boring, and that a freely willed choice to love God is much more satisfying to him than the chorus of angels who sing his praises because that is their nature. From our perspective, yes, that does seem true, but if we were created as constrained beings who simply existed happily in paradise, we wouldn't know what we're missing--we'd just be enjoying paradise. The introduction of free will and evil, then, is for God's pleasure, at the cost of our (perhaps eternal) suffering. Beyond "merciful", that doesn't seem benevolent at all. It seems heartless, if not malicious.
Didn't God create the possibility of that choice? The circumstances under which it could be exercised for good or evil? Doesn't ultimate responsibility for how that choice is used then lie with God?
To put it another way: God could have created a paradise in which we weren't free to choose, in which case we'd simply have paradise. Instead, he created the choice, and added suffering and evil and possibly eternal damnation to the universe for us to experience. Still doesn't sound 'merciful'.
First, molestation isn't a special case, it's merely an example. But I see your point: If God stops people from doing any and all bad things, we live in something like an MMO full of invisible walls--you can try to go certain places, you just can't.
Now, by your argument, allowing a little girl to be molested and murdered is merciful because refraining from acting to prevent it allows many, many other people the chance to choose Jesus as their savior. Correct?
So God creates all, including both humans and the possibility of doing evil. Then he allows people to choose good or evil, and those who choose evil are damned, and those who choose good are saved, even if it requires suffering on earth. After all, isn't an eternal paradise worth it?
Okay, but God still created the suffering of the good, and the circumstances under which evil could be done, when he could have simply created us in paradise in the first place (or put us into that invisible-walled MMO). In one alternative, you have no evil, and no suffering, just eternal paradise. In the other, you have everything in the first one, plus evil and suffering and possibly, depending upon how you choose, eternal damnation. God could have created X, but he created X+Y.
Not seeing how the latter alternative can be considered merciful. Not seeing how the addition of Y is, in any sense, merciful.
Do you realise that the same people who shout and scream about evolution being right, and that any form of design is wrong, would be the first to also instantly desert "evolution" in favour of any other future theory which seemed more paletable? - as quick as you could blink!!
Yes, and that's science's virtue. When a better theory comes along, one that better explains the data, the scientific ideal is to switch to it easily as the obviously superior theory.
Of course, sometimes scientists find it hard to abandon a pet theory, or the current orthodoxy, and that's a human failing. The perfect scientist would adopt the better theory without thinking twice about it.
It's religion that decides it's got the one true TRUTH that is correct now, and for all time, no matter what happens, no matter what we learn, no matter what we mature into understanding as mistakes.
As someone else said, when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?
Okay. So God could have prevented the tsunami that killed, what, 200,000 people? I'd call that evil. God's omnipotent, so he could have prevented it. But he didn't, so he's unwilling. Not seeing how that's merciful, letting 200,000 people die like that.
Not at all. God could strike down the sexual predator after he makes his freely willed decision to molest the child. Perhaps a simple aneurysm. Perhaps simply distracting the child at the playground so she doesn't go over to the nice man with candy. An infinite number of interventions are possible that don't impinge on the free will of the actors in the scenario.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm testing the grandparent's assertion that being able to prevent evil, but unwilling to do so, is merciful. God is able to strike down the predator, or perhaps just distract him, and prevent the evil from occurring, but he doesn't do so. That doesn't seem very merciful to me.
ispeter's comment below is correct. I don't believe in creationism, I was pointing out that, where ID keeps getting slipped into the school system, evangelical Christianity is often the dominant culture. When the dominant culture believes something, it's not obviously crazy to want that thing to be taught directly in class. Many people in those areas simply don't understand why one wouldn't want creationism taught in school, if that's what everyone there believes. And when the court rules that it infringes the first amendment, it looks like uppity northerners imposing their "faith" on the locals.
That's why, in the U.S., creationism has a far longer leash on life than it does elsewhere--that geographic concentration of believers keep it alive.
Nonsense. Evolution has been "proven" to the satisfaction of the science community, just as much as heliocentrism or the theory of gravity--which is to say that falsifiable theories have been constructed that explain more data than previous theories, and will likely be refined or replaced with better theories in the future. In purely scientific terms, evolution is one of the safest bets around.
When (virtually) all the scientists studying evolution consider its basic premises to be proven, on what grounds can you possibly say they're wrong?
Others have observed that there are a large number of christian fundamentalists in the U.S. for whom creationism is obviously true, and evolution obviously false. But more than that, they tend to be concentrated in the southern U.S., where they are the dominant culture in many towns, counties and states, and see no reason why the schools shouldn't teach what everyone (around them) already believes.
Nonsense. Religion has, at its roots, beliefs that are accepted by faith--that God exists, that salvation is possible, etc. You can reason about derived doctrines, but in the end you are religious because you accept the basic premises on faith. That's the whole point of faith.
What the article says is that there are demonstrable reasons that are compelling, so compelling that they may be treated as fact. As compelling as the sky being blue. I don't believe that the sky is blue on faith; I believe it because the demonstration of looking up and seeing blue is so compelling that I call "the sky is blue" a fact, despite sometimes difficult philosophical arguments about skepticism and solipsism.
Evolution as a topic on/. depresses me so much because I see so many geeks, so many people who are theoretically well grounded in engineering and empiricism, make moronic equivalencies between religion and well established scientific theories.
The problem with Mechwarrior was that the licencing was a nightmare--not just expensive, but held by a bunch of different people, with a lot of cross-competing claims to various aspects of mecha. Even if you pay one guy for the rights to mech X, guy with the rights to mech Y might sue, and even if it's a bogus lawsuit, it costs more money. I suspect anyone considering a mechwarrior video game just throws up their hands at the mess.
I long for the good old days of suicide, when a real man killed himself by caving in the back of his skull with a hammer after tying himself up and laying himself across railroad tracks. These EFF pukes don't have the *balls* to really do it right.
Part of Sweeney's point that you're missing is that programmers are already writing raw shader code for DX10, and making more general use of CUDA. But more than that, DX and OpenGL are APIs to a particular model of 3D rendering that was, ten years ago, a good match to the benefits of the 3D hardware presented. Now that the GPU is a general purpose processor, the triangles pipeline model for renderers need no longer limit programmers, and they can implement different engine models (like Voxels) because it's all being done in software on a general purpose chip, whether that chip is called a CPU or a GPU.
Given how Windows is set up, there is one reason for it to want administrator privileges: To put the shortcut to the game in the All Users menu. Otherwise, users can't see the game that's installed if they didn't install it.
"True" garbage collection is an improvement over the simple, reference counted GC they were doing prior to FF3. GC now has many more advanced techniques than reference counting.
exactly what principle prevents killing of children or adults?
To get into the abortion side of the debate a bit: We already kill children and adults without much thought. You said something like "progressives have abortion and euthanasia". Well, conservatives have the death penalty and collateral damage in wartime and unrealized humanitarian opportunities to prevent starvation and disease, like in Darfur.
If you want the deepest, most honest truth about why I'm pro-choice rather than pro-life, it's because I find that opposition to abortion is hypocritical given all the other ways that we cause or allow others to die. The same demographic that opposes abortion supported the Iraq War, with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties directly caused by the invasion and its aftermath. The bottom line is that life is cheap on this planet of ours; to sanctify embryos while allowing real children and adults to starve to death, to die from bombs or bullets, to suffer the depradations of warlords, or to be executed for crimes committed, is blasphemous to the very principles that are claimed to be upheld.
Now you're confusing the science somewhat. Yes, a blastocyst is at least three days old. You assert that there is a narrow window in which experimentation might occur by implying that stem cells must necessarily progress to differentiated cells that lead to a brain, heart, etc. This is wrong. Stem cells differentiate in response to a stimulus to do so, which is a normal part of pregnancy. Cultured (i.e., in vitro) stem cells can be maintained in an undifferentiated state (i.e., continually reproducing without progressing towards differentiation) indefinitely.
In other words, what we're talking about here isn't experimentation on humans within a narrow window during which it's not recognizably human. You're correct in suggesting that those circumstances might lead to uncomfortable border cases where experimentation was being carried out on something more recognizably human. What we're talking about is preventing progression of the blastocyst to a further stage. It never reaches a stage at which the cells differentiate, or take on specific functional forms; the blank slate is never written on. There's no rush to experiment during a window. It's a different path taken entirely that in no way flirts with human development. A hole in the ground has the potential to hold the foundations for a skyscraper, or a landfill that gets covered over. Choosing one end over the other does not injure the possible development not pursued.
To reach for a different metaphor: This is like taking a skin sample and cultivating those cells into a culture of adult stem cells. Those cells could be cultured to become a clone of you; or they could be cultured to produce, say, a skin graft for you. Does that mean that those cells are off limits because one possible direction in which they could develop is that of a human being?
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You say you preserved your privacy by eschewing the variety of hosted/social networking sites that your friends and family use. Have you also eschewed credit cards? Driver's license? All airline travel? Property ownership?
What you identify as the frontier of privacy is just the most visible loss of your privacy, the publicizing of yourself. You already exist in hundreds of government and corporate databases, both your vitals and your histories, in ways that are badly protected. Your only safety is that you're part of a gigantic herd that exists there with you, making your odds of being singled out lower.
This is what Larry Ellison meant when he said "You have no privacy. Get over it." Staying off gmail and facebook and LinkedIn is a hair shirt exercise in futility. That doesn't mean you have no privacy, but that what privacy you have is the privacy of politeness--what you and others choose to discuss (or avoid discussing) in public.
You're wrong. The 4th amendment is controlled by Supreme Court decisions that provide for a "good faith exception" to the exclusionary rule, meaning that if the officers were executing a warrant in good faith (meaning that they didn't know that there was an underlying clerical error), then the results of warrant are admitted. There's no reason to punish the cops for a database error.
You can disagree with the Supreme Court rulings (United States v. Leon (468 U.S. 902) and Massachusetts v. Sheppard (468 U.S. 981)), but legally the judge was not ruling unconstitutionally.
Personally, I'd agree with you, and like to see evidence thrown out at the merest whiff of official misconduct, but you're simply mistaken when you say that the judge ruled unconstitutionally.
Probably not in general, where the cluster that they have is focused on a high level of concurrency and a low level of latency. Their database stuff might be interesting for data warehousing projects--it's mostly solid-state storage for a database that handles a really high number of transactions.
Basically what they have are a couple hundred IBM built dual Opteron blades sitting on a lot of RAMSAN SSDs, with a more conventional disk based storage system for the more persistent data. The cluster runs a lot of C code to handle persistence, networking, proxying, and account management; the game logic is all in stackless python, which is a very useful language for "agent based" multithreaded programming.
What they're talking about moving to in the article is Infiniband networking between blades because the bottleneck now is in load balancing--threads can't be shifted quickly enough from one blade to another to avoid latency for the player, which has a huge effect in certain high population regions and large space battles.
The kind of clustering they're doing probably has more importance for massively parallel scientific computing than business.
Because if we don't discuss it, vendors will think that it doesn't need to be fixed, and won't fix it. I'm all for giving vendors some lead time to come up with solutions to discovered attacks, but history has plainly shown that the only way to compel vendors to fix security problems is to publicize them.
And keep in mind: The fact that we're not discussing it doesn't mean it's not getting discussed in other circles who look to use it for less noble things than correcting defects.
It enters the discussion because that was the point I replied to in the first place: someone's "correction" of Epicurus's dictum that a God who is able to prevent evil but unwilling to do so was merciful, rather than malicious.
Yours is an articulate argument (thank you for making it) but it starts from a basis of believing that God exists and that he made the universe a certain way that suited him. Within those assumptions, your explanation makes tremendous sense. What I've been quibbling with, though (as Epicurus did) is the concept of God and what sort of sense it makes.
If we back up to the attributes of a supposed omnipotent God, then Epicurus is basically identifying what's classically been called "the problem of evil". My point has always been that, rather than create free will and allow evil into the world, God could have simply not done it, and saved countless numbers of souls the suffering of Earthly existence and the possibility of eternal damnation.
You countered that an existence without free will would be boring, and that a freely willed choice to love God is much more satisfying to him than the chorus of angels who sing his praises because that is their nature. From our perspective, yes, that does seem true, but if we were created as constrained beings who simply existed happily in paradise, we wouldn't know what we're missing--we'd just be enjoying paradise. The introduction of free will and evil, then, is for God's pleasure, at the cost of our (perhaps eternal) suffering. Beyond "merciful", that doesn't seem benevolent at all. It seems heartless, if not malicious.
Didn't God create the possibility of that choice? The circumstances under which it could be exercised for good or evil? Doesn't ultimate responsibility for how that choice is used then lie with God?
To put it another way: God could have created a paradise in which we weren't free to choose, in which case we'd simply have paradise. Instead, he created the choice, and added suffering and evil and possibly eternal damnation to the universe for us to experience. Still doesn't sound 'merciful'.
That's another deep philosophical problem for the faithful. I don't see how they can be reconciled.
First, molestation isn't a special case, it's merely an example. But I see your point: If God stops people from doing any and all bad things, we live in something like an MMO full of invisible walls--you can try to go certain places, you just can't.
Now, by your argument, allowing a little girl to be molested and murdered is merciful because refraining from acting to prevent it allows many, many other people the chance to choose Jesus as their savior. Correct?
So God creates all, including both humans and the possibility of doing evil. Then he allows people to choose good or evil, and those who choose evil are damned, and those who choose good are saved, even if it requires suffering on earth. After all, isn't an eternal paradise worth it?
Okay, but God still created the suffering of the good, and the circumstances under which evil could be done, when he could have simply created us in paradise in the first place (or put us into that invisible-walled MMO). In one alternative, you have no evil, and no suffering, just eternal paradise. In the other, you have everything in the first one, plus evil and suffering and possibly, depending upon how you choose, eternal damnation. God could have created X, but he created X+Y.
Not seeing how the latter alternative can be considered merciful. Not seeing how the addition of Y is, in any sense, merciful.
Yes, and that's science's virtue. When a better theory comes along, one that better explains the data, the scientific ideal is to switch to it easily as the obviously superior theory.
Of course, sometimes scientists find it hard to abandon a pet theory, or the current orthodoxy, and that's a human failing. The perfect scientist would adopt the better theory without thinking twice about it.
It's religion that decides it's got the one true TRUTH that is correct now, and for all time, no matter what happens, no matter what we learn, no matter what we mature into understanding as mistakes.
As someone else said, when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?
Okay. So God could have prevented the tsunami that killed, what, 200,000 people? I'd call that evil. God's omnipotent, so he could have prevented it. But he didn't, so he's unwilling. Not seeing how that's merciful, letting 200,000 people die like that.
Not at all. God could strike down the sexual predator after he makes his freely willed decision to molest the child. Perhaps a simple aneurysm. Perhaps simply distracting the child at the playground so she doesn't go over to the nice man with candy. An infinite number of interventions are possible that don't impinge on the free will of the actors in the scenario.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm testing the grandparent's assertion that being able to prevent evil, but unwilling to do so, is merciful. God is able to strike down the predator, or perhaps just distract him, and prevent the evil from occurring, but he doesn't do so. That doesn't seem very merciful to me.
ispeter's comment below is correct. I don't believe in creationism, I was pointing out that, where ID keeps getting slipped into the school system, evangelical Christianity is often the dominant culture. When the dominant culture believes something, it's not obviously crazy to want that thing to be taught directly in class. Many people in those areas simply don't understand why one wouldn't want creationism taught in school, if that's what everyone there believes. And when the court rules that it infringes the first amendment, it looks like uppity northerners imposing their "faith" on the locals.
That's why, in the U.S., creationism has a far longer leash on life than it does elsewhere--that geographic concentration of believers keep it alive.
Nonsense. Evolution has been "proven" to the satisfaction of the science community, just as much as heliocentrism or the theory of gravity--which is to say that falsifiable theories have been constructed that explain more data than previous theories, and will likely be refined or replaced with better theories in the future. In purely scientific terms, evolution is one of the safest bets around.
When (virtually) all the scientists studying evolution consider its basic premises to be proven, on what grounds can you possibly say they're wrong?
Others have observed that there are a large number of christian fundamentalists in the U.S. for whom creationism is obviously true, and evolution obviously false. But more than that, they tend to be concentrated in the southern U.S., where they are the dominant culture in many towns, counties and states, and see no reason why the schools shouldn't teach what everyone (around them) already believes.
How is it merciful for God to allow a sexual predator to abuse and murder a small child?
Nonsense. Religion has, at its roots, beliefs that are accepted by faith--that God exists, that salvation is possible, etc. You can reason about derived doctrines, but in the end you are religious because you accept the basic premises on faith. That's the whole point of faith.
What the article says is that there are demonstrable reasons that are compelling, so compelling that they may be treated as fact. As compelling as the sky being blue. I don't believe that the sky is blue on faith; I believe it because the demonstration of looking up and seeing blue is so compelling that I call "the sky is blue" a fact, despite sometimes difficult philosophical arguments about skepticism and solipsism.
Evolution as a topic on /. depresses me so much because I see so many geeks, so many people who are theoretically well grounded in engineering and empiricism, make moronic equivalencies between religion and well established scientific theories.
The problem with Mechwarrior was that the licencing was a nightmare--not just expensive, but held by a bunch of different people, with a lot of cross-competing claims to various aspects of mecha. Even if you pay one guy for the rights to mech X, guy with the rights to mech Y might sue, and even if it's a bogus lawsuit, it costs more money. I suspect anyone considering a mechwarrior video game just throws up their hands at the mess.
I long for the good old days of suicide, when a real man killed himself by caving in the back of his skull with a hammer after tying himself up and laying himself across railroad tracks. These EFF pukes don't have the *balls* to really do it right.
Part of Sweeney's point that you're missing is that programmers are already writing raw shader code for DX10, and making more general use of CUDA. But more than that, DX and OpenGL are APIs to a particular model of 3D rendering that was, ten years ago, a good match to the benefits of the 3D hardware presented. Now that the GPU is a general purpose processor, the triangles pipeline model for renderers need no longer limit programmers, and they can implement different engine models (like Voxels) because it's all being done in software on a general purpose chip, whether that chip is called a CPU or a GPU.
Given how Windows is set up, there is one reason for it to want administrator privileges: To put the shortcut to the game in the All Users menu. Otherwise, users can't see the game that's installed if they didn't install it.
"True" garbage collection is an improvement over the simple, reference counted GC they were doing prior to FF3. GC now has many more advanced techniques than reference counting.
If you'd RTFA, you'd know that the same conclusion was reached in by the Ars Technica writer. It's the summary that balls.
To get into the abortion side of the debate a bit: We already kill children and adults without much thought. You said something like "progressives have abortion and euthanasia". Well, conservatives have the death penalty and collateral damage in wartime and unrealized humanitarian opportunities to prevent starvation and disease, like in Darfur.
If you want the deepest, most honest truth about why I'm pro-choice rather than pro-life, it's because I find that opposition to abortion is hypocritical given all the other ways that we cause or allow others to die. The same demographic that opposes abortion supported the Iraq War, with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties directly caused by the invasion and its aftermath. The bottom line is that life is cheap on this planet of ours; to sanctify embryos while allowing real children and adults to starve to death, to die from bombs or bullets, to suffer the depradations of warlords, or to be executed for crimes committed, is blasphemous to the very principles that are claimed to be upheld.
Now you're confusing the science somewhat. Yes, a blastocyst is at least three days old. You assert that there is a narrow window in which experimentation might occur by implying that stem cells must necessarily progress to differentiated cells that lead to a brain, heart, etc. This is wrong. Stem cells differentiate in response to a stimulus to do so, which is a normal part of pregnancy. Cultured (i.e., in vitro) stem cells can be maintained in an undifferentiated state (i.e., continually reproducing without progressing towards differentiation) indefinitely.
In other words, what we're talking about here isn't experimentation on humans within a narrow window during which it's not recognizably human. You're correct in suggesting that those circumstances might lead to uncomfortable border cases where experimentation was being carried out on something more recognizably human. What we're talking about is preventing progression of the blastocyst to a further stage. It never reaches a stage at which the cells differentiate, or take on specific functional forms; the blank slate is never written on. There's no rush to experiment during a window. It's a different path taken entirely that in no way flirts with human development. A hole in the ground has the potential to hold the foundations for a skyscraper, or a landfill that gets covered over. Choosing one end over the other does not injure the possible development not pursued.
To reach for a different metaphor: This is like taking a skin sample and cultivating those cells into a culture of adult stem cells. Those cells could be cultured to become a clone of you; or they could be cultured to produce, say, a skin graft for you. Does that mean that those cells are off limits because one possible direction in which they could develop is that of a human being?