Re:The Failure of the Intelligent Design Argument
on
Calculating God
·
· Score: 2
3.It also contains many characteristics that are fine-tuned, showing future usefulness and intelligent design.
First part yes, second part no. The argument against is called the Strong Anthropic Principle, which basically states if the 'settings' of the universe were not such as to be able to support life, we wouldn't be here to observe it. Thus, since we ARE here to observe it, the 'settings' are within those to support life. If you have an infinitely repeating series of universes, each with different settings, you will have one universe in which our kind of life can exist, so we are here to observe it. No designer necessary.
A that a creator can not be inside or part of His creation, it logically stands to reason that He is outside of it.
This argument completely obliterates the possiblity of an interventionist god.
Noah's flood was similarly a "natural" occurrance, although some of the details are still being debated.
Yeah, like the details of if it happened at all. There are LOTS of details which say it didn't. Not a good topic for furthering a discussion pro bible.
...phil
Re:p0.00001 means I believe in God?
on
Calculating God
·
· Score: 2
The problem is that, depending on the kind of god you postulate, Occam's Razor does a fairly neat job of eliminating all the evidence for that god. What's left is generally a god that is so watered down that it pretty much can be ignored.
Actually, in a sense, this is a "beowolf cluster" - it's a big collection of separate machines with high-speed interconnections. It probably doesn't use "Beowolf" technology, however. Read the press release.
...and that lawyers will sue anyone for anything, even if they don't have a clue about the situation.
That's because lawyers are hired guns. You pay them money, they sue somebody for you. Aim your ire at the people who's name is on the suit, not the lawyers who did the gruntwork.
If they switch the format for the Office suite to XML, that means we'd have a fighting chance to develop compatible applications, even without MS publishing the schema. That would be nice.
As part of this announcement, M$ also announced that their Office products would be provided on a "subscription" basis. This could be unbelieveably bad - if you fail to pay your subscription fees, you could find yourself locked out of your own documents. No corporation will be willing to put itself in the position of being held hostage to Redmond.
I remember back in the Usenet glory days. It was like watching an amplified intelligence. Something would happen involving some topic, somebody would post something about it, and immediately (in usenet terms), people were all over it: reporting other instances, disecting and analyzing. I especially liked watching things like Urban Legends migrate around the country, and various reports popping up in the folklore newsgroups as the mainstream media picked them up.
To me, that's what the New Media ought to be in it's finest instance - totally decentralized, a billion eyeballs all on an equal basis. It was also self-selecting - you decided what news was important or interesting to you. You didn't get your news on a plate.
Slashdot is like this a little, at least in the area of the eyeballs and the analysis. It suffers the bottleneck of editorial picking and choosing of the topics, but it has the advantage of an attempt to reduce the noise level in the discussion by moderation. (Anybody notice an ongoing pattern of attack meta-moderation recently?)
Why he insists on preaching to the choir like this is beyond me..
Did you ask him?
Personally, I think he's trying the articles out here before he sends them on to a more mainstream publication. If he gets feedback which makes for a better article, then when he submits it to Rolling Stone or some other old-style media outlet that gets more attention, it has more impact there. (Of course, if he's not sending the articles, then I'm blowing hot air. I haven't asked him either.)
That option is available to you, if you care to take advantage of it. You can go into your preferences and deselect the Jon Katz category, and you'll not see any more articles written by him.
If you choose not to do that, then it just shows that you're more interested in bitching about his writing than avoiding it, all your claims to the contrary.
If you don't like it, don't read it. Nobody's forcing you to.
Back when I was in school (showing my age), we had some Perkin-Elmer machines in the computer science department. One of the interesting features of these machines was user-accessable microcode - we could create our own instruction set if we wanted to.
The IBM 360 and 370 series not only had microcode-based hardware, but IBM could and did ship out microcode updates (originally on 8-inch floppy). Among other things, IBM got in trouble with the anti-trust folks because they would send out microcode "updates" that just happened to break 3rd party peripherals - you installed the REQUIRED update and your Amdahl hard drives stopped working, for instance. IBM also would put high-level instruction code support into their microcode. For a long time, IBM's sort software package ran faster than anybody else's because they had microcode instruction assist - kind of a secret machine instruction that the competitors didn't have. It's like the private APIs in Windows.
...the whole article is clumsy, messy and convoluted...
That's because the whole topic is clumsy, messy and convoluted. I thought he did a good job of laying out the background and discussing what is really a pretty complex topic.
Right now, the primary criteria for AES candidates is security. After that, they are evaluated based on implematation issues (how scalable is it, will it run in a smart-card up to a mainframe, how easy is the code to implement, etc). But, those other issues are irrelevant if the algorithm has a hole, so that's what they are looking for first.
But I fail to understand the problem here. If the user is a moron and wants to run unsafe programs on their computer, why not let [him/her]?
Don't let your elitism show quite so much. Most computer users probably fall into your "moron" class, and they really aren't "morons" if they don't know any better. Lots of people drive without knowing the fine details of their cars, and doing a good job of computer security requires a knowledge of computers at the same detailed level. What kind of computing education would you like to require?
In the case of having mostly relatively uneducated users, it's not unreasonable to ask why the infrastructure doesn't do a better job of preventing unwanted security exposure. No, I won't accept a MSBob view of computing either, but we should be able to develop an approach that gives us security without comprimising convenience. That includes not letting mail programs blindly execute programs that can directly modify the computing environment (both the mail program and the operating system are at fault here).
People only see the convenience factor, not the dangers. It's the same reason that Win95/98 doesn't have a security model to speak of - that means increased complexity, and increased complexity means decreased convenience.
The solution will involve multiple layers: improved security on the part of the operating system (no more immediate execution of mail attachments), improved configurations on the part of network providers (how to do this without strangling the two-way nature of the net is hard - I'd like to see people still be able to run servers from their bedroom), and improved education all around. I'm not hopeful.
Slashdot Mirror
First part yes, second part no. The argument against is called the Strong Anthropic Principle, which basically states if the 'settings' of the universe were not such as to be able to support life, we wouldn't be here to observe it. Thus, since we ARE here to observe it, the 'settings' are within those to support life. If you have an infinitely repeating series of universes, each with different settings, you will have one universe in which our kind of life can exist, so we are here to observe it. No designer necessary.
A that a creator can not be inside or part of His creation, it logically stands to reason that He is outside of it.
This argument completely obliterates the possiblity of an interventionist god.
...phil
Yeah, like the details of if it happened at all. There are LOTS of details which say it didn't. Not a good topic for furthering a discussion pro bible.
...phil
The problem is that, depending on the kind of god you postulate, Occam's Razor does a fairly neat job of eliminating all the evidence for that god. What's left is generally a god that is so watered down that it pretty much can be ignored.
...phil
Actually, in a sense, this is a "beowolf cluster" - it's a big collection of separate machines with high-speed interconnections. It probably doesn't use "Beowolf" technology, however. Read the press release.
...phil
Just for the record, when the Paramal Observatory is finished as planned, it will have 4 large telescopes running in an optical array.
...phil
And, M$ has submitted this language to the "standards bodies". Looks like they are trying to really poke Sun in the eye with a sharp stick.
...phil
You can have Junkbuster substitute the User Agent header with something that the proxy finds more to it's liking.
...phil
That's because lawyers are hired guns. You pay them money, they sue somebody for you. Aim your ire at the people who's name is on the suit, not the lawyers who did the gruntwork.
...phil
Unfortunately, no. It appears to be Slashdotted.
...phil
If they switch the format for the Office suite to XML, that means we'd have a fighting chance to develop compatible applications, even without MS publishing the schema. That would be nice.
...phil
As part of this announcement, M$ also announced that their Office products would be provided on a "subscription" basis. This could be unbelieveably bad - if you fail to pay your subscription fees, you could find yourself locked out of your own documents. No corporation will be willing to put itself in the position of being held hostage to Redmond.
...phil
I remember back in the Usenet glory days. It was like watching an amplified intelligence. Something would happen involving some topic, somebody would post something about it, and immediately (in usenet terms), people were all over it: reporting other instances, disecting and analyzing. I especially liked watching things like Urban Legends migrate around the country, and various reports popping up in the folklore newsgroups as the mainstream media picked them up.
To me, that's what the New Media ought to be in it's finest instance - totally decentralized, a billion eyeballs all on an equal basis. It was also self-selecting - you decided what news was important or interesting to you. You didn't get your news on a plate.
Slashdot is like this a little, at least in the area of the eyeballs and the analysis. It suffers the bottleneck of editorial picking and choosing of the topics, but it has the advantage of an attempt to reduce the noise level in the discussion by moderation. (Anybody notice an ongoing pattern of attack meta-moderation recently?)
...phil
Did you ask him?
Personally, I think he's trying the articles out here before he sends them on to a more mainstream publication. If he gets feedback which makes for a better article, then when he submits it to Rolling Stone or some other old-style media outlet that gets more attention, it has more impact there. (Of course, if he's not sending the articles, then I'm blowing hot air. I haven't asked him either.)
...phil
If you choose not to do that, then it just shows that you're more interested in bitching about his writing than avoiding it, all your claims to the contrary.
If you don't like it, don't read it. Nobody's forcing you to.
...phil
Well, since Hitchhiker's Guide was first out in the late '70s to early '80s, I suspect it came before Dangermouse.
...phil
Not even that. All we have to do is apply multiple cycles of Phil's Law of Program Optimization:
- Every program can be made one byte smaller.
- Every program has at least one bug.
Conclusion: Every program can be optimized until it's only one byte long. But, it will be the wrong byte.That makes it a perfect match for your single-instruction x86.
...phil
The IBM 360 and 370 series not only had microcode-based hardware, but IBM could and did ship out microcode updates (originally on 8-inch floppy). Among other things, IBM got in trouble with the anti-trust folks because they would send out microcode "updates" that just happened to break 3rd party peripherals - you installed the REQUIRED update and your Amdahl hard drives stopped working, for instance. IBM also would put high-level instruction code support into their microcode. For a long time, IBM's sort software package ran faster than anybody else's because they had microcode instruction assist - kind of a secret machine instruction that the competitors didn't have. It's like the private APIs in Windows.
...phil
That's because the whole topic is clumsy, messy and convoluted. I thought he did a good job of laying out the background and discussing what is really a pretty complex topic.
...phil
Not hardly. Most of the entrants in the Pro Football and Baseball Halls were inducted while they were alive.
...phil
Right now, the primary criteria for AES candidates is security. After that, they are evaluated based on implematation issues (how scalable is it, will it run in a smart-card up to a mainframe, how easy is the code to implement, etc). But, those other issues are irrelevant if the algorithm has a hole, so that's what they are looking for first.
...phil
Then they will probably try to hang you out to dry via the DMCA provisions about defeating a copyright control mechanism.
...phil
2. The customer shall not disclose the results of any benchmark test to any third party without Network Associates' prior written approval.
3. The customer will not publish reviews of the product without prior consent from Network Associates.
(copied and pasted from their FTP site greeting).
...phil
Don't let your elitism show quite so much. Most computer users probably fall into your "moron" class, and they really aren't "morons" if they don't know any better. Lots of people drive without knowing the fine details of their cars, and doing a good job of computer security requires a knowledge of computers at the same detailed level. What kind of computing education would you like to require?
In the case of having mostly relatively uneducated users, it's not unreasonable to ask why the infrastructure doesn't do a better job of preventing unwanted security exposure. No, I won't accept a MSBob view of computing either, but we should be able to develop an approach that gives us security without comprimising convenience. That includes not letting mail programs blindly execute programs that can directly modify the computing environment (both the mail program and the operating system are at fault here).
...phil
- The hacked machine will be used for remote solitare.
- The hacked machine will be used for a DDoS attack
Which do you honestly think will be more likely?...phil
The solution will involve multiple layers: improved security on the part of the operating system (no more immediate execution of mail attachments), improved configurations on the part of network providers (how to do this without strangling the two-way nature of the net is hard - I'd like to see people still be able to run servers from their bedroom), and improved education all around. I'm not hopeful.
...phil