Every religious person I've met seems to be lacking in humility, morality and considered thought.
...and there's a guy above who has never met an atheist who donates 10% of their time or income to charity. Threads like these are one of those great opportunities to pierce our bubbles of ignorance.
Ok, let's get something clear: giving to your church =! giving to a charity.
That's not clear at all. It depends on the specific church, and on the specific jurisdiction.
J. Random Megachurch may not do "charity" in the way you normally think of it, but most do, particularly if there's a specific need in the local community. Moreover, in many jurisdictions around the world, all kinds of community groups including choirs, sporting clubs and so on are legally classed (and taxed) as "charities".
Another possible factor is that religious institutions were there in the charity space first, and any atheists who came along later feeling the need to enter the space might judge that doubling-up the effort is pointless. If a nominally religious or religious-started charity is actually doing charitable work (and not, say, wasting time and money evangelising), then working for or otherwise supporting that is a more effective use of resources.
Your claim, if I read it correctly, is that atheists (or rather, non-religious people) aren't accustomed to the integration of charitable works into their quotidian existence.
My claim is that non-religious people, on average, give far less of themselves, both in time and money, to charity.
I'm sure you do. As I said elsewhere, you are not a statistical average.
Incidentally, I think I see where the problem was in what I originally posted, and I do see that it was clumsily-worded and easily open to misinterpretation.
I said:
Nobody, as far as I know, has ever claimed that a non-religious person can't perform moral acts as religious people do, merely that they don't.
(Bold-face emphasis added.)
I meant the phrase "they don't" to include the clause "as religious people do". I also, of course, was thinking exclusively of charitable donation as I was writing this, but didn't actually tie that in that explicitly.
MysteriousPreacher got it, which is why I didn't go back and re-read to see if I was unclear. I was unclear, and that's entirely my fault.
However, I think it'd be rather oblivious to think that the statement about moral behaviour of believers versus atheists/agnostics is essentially not under dispute. Unless charity is the only thing that morally counts in your book (pardon the pun), but you're not an idiot.
The context is a challenge posed by Christopher Hitchens to "name me one". I named one.
Religious people claim the right to define what is and what is not morally right, the right to claim it in the name of God and in the name of the whole of humanity, for the whole of humanity.
To hose down the flames even more: Some religious people do this. Most do not. Quite a few religious leaders do this. Many do not.
Also to be fair, there's a lot of that nonsense going around. Ayn Rand claimed the same right in the name of objectivity.
Citation, please. And proselytizing expenditures and church heating bills don't count.
I'll do you better than that: an interactive tool which shows the data. There's a link on that page detailing how the data was compiled. (Note that IRS data only includes people earning over $50,000 a year.)
I take offense at that.
You probably shouldn't. You're a human being, not a statistical average.
Statements like this make me despair for humanity. It's completely, utterly wrong, on the face of it. It doesn't even stand up to momentary scrutiny, and yet here you are, dismissing a very significant part of the world's population as morally bankrupt. Worse yet, you're claiming they do so by choice.
I don't think you understood my post at all. Please re-read it, and the response by MysteriousPreacher. If you still don't get it, ask again and I'll try to explain it using different words.
With all due respect to Hitchens, his "challenge" completely missed the point. (It was, of course, neither the first time nor the last this happened to him.)
Nobody, as far as I know, has ever claimed that a non-religious person can't perform moral acts as religious people do, merely that they don't. The latter claim is essentially not under dispute. Religious people give far more to charitable causes in time and (if you leave off Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, two outliers who pull the average up all by themselves) in money.
By the way, the reasons why this is the case are also fairly well-understood. It has nothing to do with identity, belief or adherence, and everything to do with regular attendance at a place of religious worship. People who are not religious typically don't have their philosophical worldview explicitly tied to charitable giving regularly every week.
For the record, I would take it as a challenge to the non-religious to do something about it.
You're saying that the computer you're using to post this, including any power cabling, batteries and telecommunications equipment, isn't certified to comply with electrical safety regulations, radio transmission regulations and other interoperability and safety requirements? How about the standard weights and measures used to construct it?
Do you grow and hunt all your own food, or do you buy a significant proportion of it from other people, trusting that they are complying with food handling and safety regulations, or laws on environmental protection and waste disposal? Do you ignore weather reports? Do you refuse GPS?
"Taxes are what we pay for civilized society." -- Liberal activist judge Oliver Wendell Holmes.
People's actions can be chilled or even lives ruined by very tenuous associations in databases. And whether through the Paul Erds/Kevin Bacon game, the assumption that correlation is the same as causation, or plain old coincidence, data mining can uncover associations which are false, or associations which are technically correct (the best kind of correct, as the Futurama bureaucrat said) but misleading.
The latter can be even more damaging than the former. This is perfectly illustrated by this story. There were something like 35-40 people killed or injured in the Melbourne gangland war, and only two or tree were "innocent" in the way most people think; everyone else was a gangster or associate, or a former gangster or associate. (Some had become informants.)
Everyone who followed it, and you couldn't really help following it, knows this. In the mind of the public, that means that pretty much everyone involved with the war was involved in crime. If you read the story, he raises several examples of real harm done to him because people think he's a gangster, when he's actually not.
Now it would be correct to argue that people shouldn't base decisions on associations made by Google's machine learning algorithms. It is, ultimately, the responsibility of the person making the decision to evaluate the strength of the evidence rationally.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, people have to make decisions about who to hire quickly. These databases exist and people rely on it. How much responsibility should be placed on those maintaining the databases for making sure that the contents are accurate, particularly clearing up a mistake when it is pointed out? Is there additional responsibility if the database is accessible to the public?
I don't know the answer. Perhaps this particular case was decided incorrectly, but I'm not prepared to give Google a free pass in the general case. Their mission is supposedly "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The inclusion of misinformation makes it less useful.
No. The Brits managed to reverse engineer an Enigma machine based on traffic analysis and the materials provided by Polish crypographers. The Poles, in turn, managed to reverse engineer an Enigma machine based on traffic analysis, and a copy of the original patent, and a bunch of stolen material.
The British crypographers also had one trick up their sleeve which wasn't available to the Polish ones: they could mount a fairly effective known-plaintext attack. They would send ships out to be deliberately "spotted" by Germain submarines and then listen for the inevitable signal, using direction-finding to be certain that they were capturing the correct one. These reports would have a fixed structure, and since they knew exactly where and when the ship was spotted, they effectively had the plaintext as well as the ciphertext.
Actually, it was even worse than that. The same physical wires were used both for "input" and "output".
Let me try to explain. Each rotor was a short cylinder with 26 contacts on each end. Inside the wheel were wires which connected the pads on one end with the pads on the other end. Typically, these were not the same pads. So applying a voltage to a pad on one side would make the voltage appear on some corresponding pad on the other side. This effectively implemented a permutation of the alphabet.
The machines, of course, had several (interchangable) rotors, which rotated after every keypress. Ignoring the rotation for the moment, pressing a key would apply a voltage to one of the pads on the first wheel, then the voltage would be transferred through the wheels to the other side, so you'd apply one permutation, followed by another, followed by another.
However, the lamps which indicated the "output" letter were not (electrically speaking) on the other side of the rotors. They were back on the keyboard side. On the other side of the rotors was a component known as the "reflector ring", which implemented yet another permutation which never mapped a letter back to itself, and then reflected the electrical signal back through the rotors. The lamps were wired to the same side of the rotors as the keys.
That's the main reason why Enigma could never substitute a letter with itself: you need a separate return path to make a circuit.
(Note: This is the basic Enigma design. The actual machines changed throughout the 30s and 40s, usually implementing a new security measure withing weeks or months of the Polish or British cryptographers cracking the previous one. The introduction of the steckerboard was the biggest hurdle, and famously it was Alan Turing himself who worked out a method of breaking it. I digress.)
The weakness wasn't actually that Enigma couldn't map a letter to itself, though that did help a little. The weakness was actually that the permutation applied by the rotors in one direction was "undone" on the way out, which revealed an awful lot about the design of the system to anyone who knows some group theory. Someone like Marian Rejewski, in particular.
You see, the bare Enigma can be thought of as a group action on an alphabet. We'll call the group action of the rotors W, and the group action of the reflector ring R. Then the overall cipher is C = W' R W. Now here's the neat bit: C and R have the same conjugacy class and hence the same cycle structure. By analysing the cycle structure of C (which you can do by traffic analysis, since all operators in the same domain started off with the same rotor settings every day), you can completely recover R.
This theorem, by the way, is informally known as the theorem which won World War II.
Yes, I was considering mentioning this, but didn't.
Padding to a five-letter boundary is indeed very common. However, for completeness, it's rare to pad more than that when the encryption is done by hand, as appears to be the case here.
One-time pads are impossible to crack, in the sense that all messages are equally likely. Think about this for a moment. You can think of many plaintexts of that length. Each one could be the result of a different pad. Since those pads are equally likely, the plaintexts are also equally likely.
We do have the message length, and we also have some information in cleartext (e.g. the time it was sent and who sent it). That's it.
There are weaknesses in an OTP system, but they are typically due to poor key management.
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Don't you dare talk about our Prime Minister that way!
That's not clear at all. It depends on the specific church, and on the specific jurisdiction.
J. Random Megachurch may not do "charity" in the way you normally think of it, but most do, particularly if there's a specific need in the local community. Moreover, in many jurisdictions around the world, all kinds of community groups including choirs, sporting clubs and so on are legally classed (and taxed) as "charities".
The person who effectively started this pissing contest is Christopher Hitchens. Unfortunately, he's dead and we can't ask him.
Another possible factor is that religious institutions were there in the charity space first, and any atheists who came along later feeling the need to enter the space might judge that doubling-up the effort is pointless. If a nominally religious or religious-started charity is actually doing charitable work (and not, say, wasting time and money evangelising), then working for or otherwise supporting that is a more effective use of resources.
That's a fair point. I'm Australian, FWIW, and I know that Australian culture is generally more generous than US culture.
I don't know you, but I'd think you're negative binomial at least. Perhaps Poisson.
Your claim, if I read it correctly, is that atheists (or rather, non-religious people) aren't accustomed to the integration of charitable works into their quotidian existence.
My claim is that non-religious people, on average, give far less of themselves, both in time and money, to charity.
I'm sure you do. As I said elsewhere, you are not a statistical average.
Incidentally, I think I see where the problem was in what I originally posted, and I do see that it was clumsily-worded and easily open to misinterpretation.
I said:
(Bold-face emphasis added.)
I meant the phrase "they don't" to include the clause "as religious people do". I also, of course, was thinking exclusively of charitable donation as I was writing this, but didn't actually tie that in that explicitly.
MysteriousPreacher got it, which is why I didn't go back and re-read to see if I was unclear. I was unclear, and that's entirely my fault.
By the way: Good for you!
The context is a challenge posed by Christopher Hitchens to "name me one". I named one.
To hose down the flames even more: Some religious people do this. Most do not. Quite a few religious leaders do this. Many do not.
Also to be fair, there's a lot of that nonsense going around. Ayn Rand claimed the same right in the name of objectivity.
Citation, please. And proselytizing expenditures and church heating bills don't count.
I'll do you better than that: an interactive tool which shows the data. There's a link on that page detailing how the data was compiled. (Note that IRS data only includes people earning over $50,000 a year.)
I take offense at that.
You probably shouldn't. You're a human being, not a statistical average.
That is indeed utter rubbish, which is one of the reasons why I didn't actually claim that (in context).
I don't think you understood my post at all. Please re-read it, and the response by MysteriousPreacher. If you still don't get it, ask again and I'll try to explain it using different words.
With all due respect to Hitchens, his "challenge" completely missed the point. (It was, of course, neither the first time nor the last this happened to him.)
Nobody, as far as I know, has ever claimed that a non-religious person can't perform moral acts as religious people do, merely that they don't. The latter claim is essentially not under dispute. Religious people give far more to charitable causes in time and (if you leave off Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, two outliers who pull the average up all by themselves) in money.
By the way, the reasons why this is the case are also fairly well-understood. It has nothing to do with identity, belief or adherence, and everything to do with regular attendance at a place of religious worship. People who are not religious typically don't have their philosophical worldview explicitly tied to charitable giving regularly every week.
For the record, I would take it as a challenge to the non-religious to do something about it.
The word is "arsehole", you insensitive clod.
"BP" used to stand for "British Petroleum". Today, it officially does not abbreviate anything, just like "KFC".
You're saying that the computer you're using to post this, including any power cabling, batteries and telecommunications equipment, isn't certified to comply with electrical safety regulations, radio transmission regulations and other interoperability and safety requirements? How about the standard weights and measures used to construct it?
Do you grow and hunt all your own food, or do you buy a significant proportion of it from other people, trusting that they are complying with food handling and safety regulations, or laws on environmental protection and waste disposal? Do you ignore weather reports? Do you refuse GPS?
"Taxes are what we pay for civilized society." -- Liberal activist judge Oliver Wendell Holmes.
BP is a multinational company, just like every large company that you think is "an American company".
Yes, exactly this. Step back a moment and think about this in the context of big data and the rise of government and corporate surveillance.
We all know the stories of people being placed on TSA watchlists, arrested, interrogated, and even tortured for having a similar name to a bad guy or being the second cousin of a bad guy.
People's actions can be chilled or even lives ruined by very tenuous associations in databases. And whether through the Paul Erds/Kevin Bacon game, the assumption that correlation is the same as causation, or plain old coincidence, data mining can uncover associations which are false, or associations which are technically correct (the best kind of correct, as the Futurama bureaucrat said) but misleading.
The latter can be even more damaging than the former. This is perfectly illustrated by this story. There were something like 35-40 people killed or injured in the Melbourne gangland war, and only two or tree were "innocent" in the way most people think; everyone else was a gangster or associate, or a former gangster or associate. (Some had become informants.)
Everyone who followed it, and you couldn't really help following it, knows this. In the mind of the public, that means that pretty much everyone involved with the war was involved in crime. If you read the story, he raises several examples of real harm done to him because people think he's a gangster, when he's actually not.
Now it would be correct to argue that people shouldn't base decisions on associations made by Google's machine learning algorithms. It is, ultimately, the responsibility of the person making the decision to evaluate the strength of the evidence rationally.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, people have to make decisions about who to hire quickly. These databases exist and people rely on it. How much responsibility should be placed on those maintaining the databases for making sure that the contents are accurate, particularly clearing up a mistake when it is pointed out? Is there additional responsibility if the database is accessible to the public?
I don't know the answer. Perhaps this particular case was decided incorrectly, but I'm not prepared to give Google a free pass in the general case. Their mission is supposedly "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The inclusion of misinformation makes it less useful.
No. The Brits managed to reverse engineer an Enigma machine based on traffic analysis and the materials provided by Polish crypographers. The Poles, in turn, managed to reverse engineer an Enigma machine based on traffic analysis, and a copy of the original patent, and a bunch of stolen material.
The British crypographers also had one trick up their sleeve which wasn't available to the Polish ones: they could mount a fairly effective known-plaintext attack. They would send ships out to be deliberately "spotted" by Germain submarines and then listen for the inevitable signal, using direction-finding to be certain that they were capturing the correct one. These reports would have a fixed structure, and since they knew exactly where and when the ship was spotted, they effectively had the plaintext as well as the ciphertext.
Actually, it was even worse than that. The same physical wires were used both for "input" and "output".
Let me try to explain. Each rotor was a short cylinder with 26 contacts on each end. Inside the wheel were wires which connected the pads on one end with the pads on the other end. Typically, these were not the same pads. So applying a voltage to a pad on one side would make the voltage appear on some corresponding pad on the other side. This effectively implemented a permutation of the alphabet.
The machines, of course, had several (interchangable) rotors, which rotated after every keypress. Ignoring the rotation for the moment, pressing a key would apply a voltage to one of the pads on the first wheel, then the voltage would be transferred through the wheels to the other side, so you'd apply one permutation, followed by another, followed by another.
However, the lamps which indicated the "output" letter were not (electrically speaking) on the other side of the rotors. They were back on the keyboard side. On the other side of the rotors was a component known as the "reflector ring", which implemented yet another permutation which never mapped a letter back to itself, and then reflected the electrical signal back through the rotors. The lamps were wired to the same side of the rotors as the keys.
That's the main reason why Enigma could never substitute a letter with itself: you need a separate return path to make a circuit.
(Note: This is the basic Enigma design. The actual machines changed throughout the 30s and 40s, usually implementing a new security measure withing weeks or months of the Polish or British cryptographers cracking the previous one. The introduction of the steckerboard was the biggest hurdle, and famously it was Alan Turing himself who worked out a method of breaking it. I digress.)
The weakness wasn't actually that Enigma couldn't map a letter to itself, though that did help a little. The weakness was actually that the permutation applied by the rotors in one direction was "undone" on the way out, which revealed an awful lot about the design of the system to anyone who knows some group theory. Someone like Marian Rejewski, in particular.
You see, the bare Enigma can be thought of as a group action on an alphabet. We'll call the group action of the rotors W, and the group action of the reflector ring R. Then the overall cipher is C = W' R W. Now here's the neat bit: C and R have the same conjugacy class and hence the same cycle structure. By analysing the cycle structure of C (which you can do by traffic analysis, since all operators in the same domain started off with the same rotor settings every day), you can completely recover R.
This theorem, by the way, is informally known as the theorem which won World War II.
Yes, I was considering mentioning this, but didn't.
Padding to a five-letter boundary is indeed very common. However, for completeness, it's rare to pad more than that when the encryption is done by hand, as appears to be the case here.
Ah, but in the UK, they're called "sweet peppers" or just "peppers". Maybe it's a duress code?
One-time pads are impossible to crack, in the sense that all messages are equally likely. Think about this for a moment. You can think of many plaintexts of that length. Each one could be the result of a different pad. Since those pads are equally likely, the plaintexts are also equally likely.
We do have the message length, and we also have some information in cleartext (e.g. the time it was sent and who sent it). That's it.
There are weaknesses in an OTP system, but they are typically due to poor key management.
Not really, no. It's more like a cross-section.
Erm they do essentially take a hash.
No. They look for 13 specific short tandem repeat loci which are known to have fairly good discriminating power.