I would completely agree with this- but I'd also point out that for many people in our materialist society, scientists have already become our defacto priests.
Did you even RTFA? The only thing the school assignment requested was to REPORT THE STRING, not VERIFY WHAT THE STRING REPORTED. No breakin is required to read that string. Who gives a rip whether the string has been spoofed or not?
Who said anything about prosecution? I just want to waste their time, while keeping them from wasting mine.
Well, the school did for one- any student caught scanning school computers will be refered to the Dean. My suggestions were to go to machines that are far less likely for anybody to be paying any attention to port scans in the logs.
As I've said, I don't know anything about your Kwakiutal relatives, but I think its a little ridiculous to say that the only thing standing between someone building a plane and building that plane is the will to do so.
Assuming there is such a thing as reality, the physical laws don't wait around for us to define them to work. Not only airplanes and gliders were around long before the Wright Brothers- but helicopters were as well. In North America the prototype for the helicopter grows on every oak tree.
I can only assume you are referring to the article? First, I would hardly consider politicians or lawyers legal
philosophers. And whether or not the constitutions prevents, say, creationism from being taught as science
is a legal question concerning the 1st amendment which I don't understand very well. However, I do think that
science class should teach what scientists by and large believe, and that evolution should not be singled out
from other theories. To tell them that scientists are unsure of evolution is lying to them in my view.
I also think it would be great if every person took a class on the philosophy of science. However,
high school is probably too young to do it.
Where I come from the other point of view- nobody should be allowed to take a science class at all until they understant the philosophy behind science. But then again, I would have done much better in school if I had Numerical Methods, a 400 level college course, in the first grade (because I would have understood WHY addition works, instead of merely memorizing it and treating it as a religion).
But science is not justified by any kind of empirical observation, only by repeatable observation by different people. Personal relevation is inherently personal.
If it were, then it would be of no use whatsoever. I'm sure there is personal relevation that is only personal- but nobody pays any attention to it because they can't find any relevancy in their own lives and they certainly do NOT build religions around it. Religions only survive if they work. If they don't work (look at the Shakers in the 19th century, who denied sex and lasted less than two generations) they simply never survive beyond the personal cult stage.
Your notion of "faith" seems to be interchangeable with my notion of "assumption." And yes, any sort of human thought seems to involve assumptions. This is still no reason to say "science is just another religion."
But nor is there any reason to claim that faith isn't involved just by relabeling it to "assumption".
I do not think the point is whether or not in principle some myth could explain how to build an airplane. The question is whether that myth is justified using the kind of rigorous, egalitarian, peer-reviewed methods of modern science or not, and if it does not use these methods for justification, whether the methods it DOES use have major differences.
Well, that's where you get into the Councilar Method and Canon Law in Christianity- and similar processes in other religions. A private revelation isn't just automatically accepted- it takes centuries.
So run a tripwire on a handful of random ports, well away from normal traffic. Trip one or two and your IP gets banned or, if you're feeling vicious, redirected to a honeypot server.
Which doesn't harm this assignment in the slightest- since the actual assignment is to report what they saw during the scan, not what is the truth. If what the student sees during the scan is exactly what the professor sees during the scan, then the student gets the grade. Likewise, you'd have to do a lot more detective work than just redirecting traffic to a honeypot server to actually tie an IP address (possibly a dialup IP address) to a name to prosecute. If your time is so unvaluable that suing people for such a minor infraction is profitable use of your time, then you should be far more worried about developers in Bangalore than some student doing a port scan who is never seen again.
Depends on the state- but I once had a burglary case thrown out of court because I left the garage door open.
Same thing with my server- some ports are a bit more sensitive than others, and certainly anybody stupid enough to connect to port 139 over the net is asking for it- but anybody looking to see if port 139 is AVAILABLE is breaking no law that I know of.
Why read logs when you have computers that do it for you?
Done properly, all the port scanner programs I've seen have a setting to defeat automatic log readers from detecting the scan: random period wait between ports. The best ones also do random access port scaning instead of sequential.
No, a string is sent each time. I can make the string be anything I like. You aren't a developer, are you?
Actually, I am- but the point is that the string sent out, for any mozilla-compatible server, is information about the operating system and server. It's available. It doesn't matter if you want to claim that the operating system is foo.bar running tomcat mail server; the assignment is to report the information recieved, not to verify that the information recieved is correct.
And if you want to be such a strong skeptic thats fine. But it is hard for such a strong skeptic to be able to say anything interesting about what ever differences did allow us to go from building huts to airplanes.
There are no differences- for instance, in the Pacific Northwest, my own Kwakiutal relatives had the laws of areodynamics figured out for the last 5000 years. Why didn't they build airplanes? Because they saw no use in it other than for toys.
I'm not sure that 1+1=2 is a definition. I don't think it is. Typically, one tries to prove the behavior of numbers using set theory, and I'm not all that familiar with it. But in any case, I suppose definition is a perfectly valid justification in mathematics. Justification is mathematics is still very different than in science. Science is ultimately justified by empirical observation, while most people say mathematics is not.
The problem is, religion is also justified by empirical observation for the most part. Just a different set of observations than you're familiar with. Private revelation is exactly that: empirical observation.
I think that most modern physicists at least are painfully aware that electrons may only be a model. Quantum mechanics is very strange, and almost forces one to consider that possiblity. This is part of the reason Einstien disliked quantum mechanics so much, with his famous quote "God does not play dice with the universe." Whether or not science IS just a language construct- this is something that most scientists let philosophers argue about.
But you're actually not willing to let one class of philosophers argue about it- legal philosophers. No, there you get all huffy and fundamentalist all of a sudden.
Theories are named after people to recognize thay they first thought of them. However, theories are not inherently personal. I can use experiment to verify Newton's gravity the same as he can. I can never personally verify, eg, Paul's conversion experience.
Actually a good many people seem to every year. Conversion is just learning to come to a new paradigm.
While I agree that I personally won't gain the same repect of Newton:-), Einstein certainly did, and if I were smart enough, I presumably would as will. Anything I say in principle has the same weight that anything Newton or Einstein said. Now, people are less likely to spend time listening to me than they would to Newton or Einstein obviously, but there is nothing inherent to Newton that makes what he says better than what I say; the content of what he says does that. In Christianity, Jesus is the Son of God. What he says is intrinsically worth more than what I say.
If so, you've missed a key piece of Christian theology. But my point is that Einstien will never be known for having the insight of the discovery of the laws of intertia- there can be only one first.
There was a whole program by the Catholic theologians to justify Christian thinking using pure reason: the scholastics. It is true that I don't know that much about them. I have read Descartes, who wasn't a scholastic, but certainly was in the tradition of trying to reconcile Christian belief with pure reason. At the beginning of his meditations, he is very careful to note that Christian belief is justified by first by faith and that he wishes to prove the existence of God using pure reason only to be be able to convince non-believers that God existed. So clearly Descartes at least thought that Christian thinking is ultimately justified by faith (whatever faith is, exactly.) My understanding is that this is the view of most Christians. Most modern scientists, on the other hand, would say that scientific belief in a model is justified in empirical observation that does not conflict with the model.
Descartes never satisfied me- he never proved that he could think, and therefore couldn't even prove that HE existed. However, my point is that human beings don't do any
My point wasn't that the tools are legal. My point is that all of the information requested in the assignment is public information that ALL computers running webservers broadcast. Most browsers hide it, but the operating system of the host server is sent every time you browse a site, for example. All the other information requested in the assignment is similar public information. NONE of it requires gaining root access to the server in question, or even user level access.
How so? All of the information requested in the assignement can be gotten from any server running a compliant web server, including Windows XP Personal Web Server, with a combination of port scanning tools, netstat, ping, and GRC's webhost. There shouldn't be any real break in at all- all of this information is offered up by the webserver to whomever wants it.
Legal solution #1: Contact a local business, explain you're a student learning about computer security, and ask for permission to hit their server.
Legal Solution #2: find out the address of a home computer on a broadband connection and hit that, preferably a friend who knows you're doing it or yourself.
Illegal Solution #1: Find out the address of a home computer on a broadband connection owned by the kind of luser who doesn't even know they have a log let alone how to check it.
Illegal solution #2: Hit a BUSY public server that you know is locked down well and likely to have only a single discoverable service, such as www.google.com, thus also giving the wonderful ability to turn in a two line report and STILL get the full purpose of the assignment; bonus points for mentioning the port ranges that were in stealth mode.
The last two are available due to the fact that most sysadmins aren't being paid to look at logs all day; and that home users don't have the extra cash to pay a sysadmin at all.
(and given the last 15 years of data - I'm not certain how much "cooling" we'll ever see unless interest rates climb to unheard of levels)
Given the last 30 years of import/export data, any bank not in the United States lending to the United States better be earning 500-600% annual interest if they expect to break even. We've got an awfull credit history as a country, and the housing market is just the latest example of that.
No, pure mathematics leaves no room for faith. Faith is not the same thing as belief. Google defines belief as: "impression: a vague idea in which some confidence is placed" and "any cognitive content held as true". So mathematics leaves plenty of room for belief. For example, I believe that 1+1=2 because this is a cognitive content I hold as true. As to what sense mathematical theorems are "true" - this is a complicated issue. However, mathematical theorems definitely qualify as "knowledge", which is what I said justified belief is necessary for.
I'm almost to the point where I don't believe knowledge itself exists- that it is as mythical as anything else is. However- faith is a superset of belief- faith is belief without proof. Since 1+1=2 is an unproven axiom, true by definition rather than by proof, it most certainly IS faith.
Maybe I should not have used the word "self-consciousness". What I meant was that a model explicity make a prediction, and that it acknowledges this is a major element of its purpose. And when one anthropomorphize something, one gives it human characteristics. I don't think anybody is arguing that an electron has a personality, or emotions, or a soul. Sometimes, we use language that an electron "wants to do something", but of course this is just a convenient language construct.
The problem comes in when we don't identify that as "just a convenient language construct". It's put forth instead as something we take on faith. We don't actually know that the electron exists- we suspect it does due to evidence, but nobody's ever actually seen one. Models themselves are just convenient language constructs from that point of view.
Again, religion typically has a tradition of personal relevation that science does not.
Science has an equal tradition of personal revelation- that's why theories are named after people.
This alone is a major, major difference.
Not really- you can never gain the respect of Newton in the field of gravity either.
Also, there are practical differences. Science is very rigorous in that what it predicts is very explicitly stated.
Maybe to another scientist- but to a layman no, science is no different than religion in that way.
Religion typically does not. This is another major difference.
The only reason you say religion doesn't is because you don't understand the religious definitions.
They are major enough such that I can build airplanes and antibiotics and bombs, and all the other wonderful and terrible things scientific inquiry has given us, while the tribesmen cannot.
What makes you think the tribesman cannot? Back to Bali for a second- science was worthless there because the theories were taken out of context and applied in a climate that they didn't make sense. My guess is that you've hidden your own faith in science to the point that you deny religion merely because you don't understand the purpose behind religion. Religions are very successfull at creating shared morality within a community- that's something science has failed to do. You can create wonderful and terrible things through scientific inquiry- but the one thing you can never create is a way to tell if a new scientific invention will be wonderful or terrible. I think you don't understand the utility of religion because you don't understand the purpose of religion.
And I would say that Christianity in general does not make a specific prediction. What would its specific prediction be? Life after death practically cannot be verified, so it does not qualify. The Revelation still has not come, but this doesn't bother most Christians.
The specific prediction of Christianity is that small groups of people can get along without killing each other. I'd say that the specific prediction of Christianity is currently unproven- and if we are to believe CS Lewis, untried.
Then in that case, you would have no problem with saying that a given theory cannot absolutely be proven- and thus you'd have no problem with the laws as written in Kansas and Utah, because that is all they actually require. I completely agree. The fundamentalist Christians have shot themselves in the philosophical foot with this one- but the fundamentalist scientists are giving them a steel toed boot by fighting against such laws.
I think I can cut this down to the chase- you're afraid of confusing the issue. But my point is this- science is just as mythical as any other thing that mankind has belief in, and therefore, *both* sides are being stupid in this. It doesn't matter one whit if the subject is confused in the mind of students- some of our best scientific discoveries have come from confusing the issue. The real danger is in being certain- in arguing that what you say is true when you know it isn't. In areas where we are certain, no new discovery is possible. This cuts both ways- people who are absolutely certain of their religion (as the creationists are) are just as wrong as those who are absolutely certain about their science or their politics.
And maybe cops plant all the guns involved in all violent crime everywhere, but the scientific mind looks for the simpler explanation.
Simpler does not always equal better- Occam's razor is as much a myth as any other axiom.
As for carbon dating, we can carbon-date things which *did* have a known time of creation (wooden things that date back hundreds of years can be carbon-dated), so unless you claim that written records dating hundreds of years ago are also false, I don't think that you have much foundation for your argument.
You don't understand my argument then. What I'm arguing is that radioactive dating such as carbon can't actually be independantly collaborated for PREHISTORIC items. I'll give you carbon dating for anything up to about 40,000 years ago (the point which cro-magnon man beat out his evolutionary cousins for supremacy of Europe) but before that is just speculation. Likewise, I'd point out that the written hitorical record oly dates back about 12,000 years- we have no examples of writing that date earlier, though we do have some cave art that might. Carbon dating is almost entirely worthless for dating anything further back than that.
I didn't say that I proved that there wasn't a god. What I just demonstrated was speciation. You can claim that some invisible gay-hating guy in the sky or a flying spaghetti monster is "really" the guiding force if you want. You can also claim that said invisible guy in the sky causes gravity, but it doesn't make a theory of gravity any less scientific.
I thought creating gods was supposed to be unscientific- my point is that your demonstration *requires* a god.
Execept that I just sped up the process a bit. Mutations always happen, at a lower rate. When you're out in the Sun, you're getting irradiated. Unless your argument is that such a mutation *could* happen only if a sentient being was involved, which is a pretty weak argument.
Actually, my argument is that we have no proof that irradiation from the Sun happened before we were a species. Or for that matter anything else. We have faith and belief that our evidence that we're currently viewing stretches into the past, but no documented *proof*.
Calm down. I didn't say that Christianity was a load of superstitious nonsense in the post (actually, I do I believe that this is the case, now that you bring it up, but it wasn't a part of the earlier post). Nothing in there said anything about what happens with humans. You claimed that speciation and evolution were non-testable and non-scientific. I demonstrated that you were wrong, at least WRT speciation, by giving an example of such a test. That's all.
You're the one who needs to calm down. I'll admit I should have said with respect to humans- but your test was fatally flawed anyway because it required a being with god like powers to achieve.
Observed speciation? Here are some examples [talkorigins.org]. Here is a more detailed account of more examples [talkorigins.org]. Oh, and here are yet more examples [talkorigins.org]. All of it well documented and referenced. Argument by ignorance is not really effective.
How do I know that the people who wrote those documents aren't lying? How do I know they didn't just purchase their degrees on e-bay? You're missing the main point here- which is that fundamentalists are certain, but real scientists always have some doubt. I say fundamentalism has no place in our schools- so I'm equally against saying that "Evolution is entirely correct" as I am "Creationism is entirely correct". Both are essentially religious viewpoints put together by highly biased idividuals.
For the most part dating of strata is determined by which layers are on top of which, and more recently confirmed via radioactive dating methods. It's worth noting that dating of geologic strata notably predates the theory of evolution.
All that really does is make more circular theories. How do you know that newer layers are on top of older layers, and that volcanic activity, erosion, or earthquakes haven't mixed them up? By comparing the fossils found in them to other layers elsewhere on the earth. And the same goes for calibrating the radioactivity tests- we do so by "known" ages of other rocks, conviently ignoring the fact that we don't really KNOW anything about the ages of prehistoric stuff at all- just educated guesses.
This is a western (I don't know about eastern, etc.) philosophical tradition that justified belief is knowledge. (And don't ask me to say much more on this, I'm not a professional philosopher.) You certainly can't say that you know something to be true of you don't also believe it to be true. You seem to want to lump everything under the notion of "religion" which is fine, except that then of course any sort of belief or knowledge becomes "religious", because belief is a prerequisite for knowledge.
The problem, as I see it, comes into the fact that this philosophy, that justified belief is knowledge, is DIRECTLY CONTRADICTORY, to the following idea:
Science, on the other hand, is squarely in the tradition of pure reason and mathematics.
But pure reason and mathematics leave no room for faith or belief- and therefore can never lead to knowledge by themselves.
You also are misunderstanding my use of the word "utility". A model has utility if it makes a particular prediction that is verified (or, more technically, if it makes a prediction that is not falsified.) So, by this argument, I suppose that if your villagers believed that they were doing their religious practices to make the crops grow better, then in some sense, yes, they had a model that could be acknowledged as "true". However, I would say that typically, models have a degree of rigour to them, which I would guess was lacking from your island tribe. I would say that a model has a degree of self-consciousness to it- it states explicitly that it is trying to make a prediction, and that this is its purpose. A better example, and the one that is usually used, would be Ptolemy's epicircles. Ptolemy of course assume the earth to be the center of the universe, and was able to describe the motion of the planets with a series of circles. We typically think of him as wrong, but his epicycles worked quite well for his purposes, so perhaps he was, in a sense, quite correct.
The real problem is that models don't have self-consciousness at all- they're just models, thought constructs. We anthromorphisize them in the same way that primitive people anthromorphisized their Gods- but that doesn't make us any better, just different. A lack of ethical understanding is still a lack of ethical understanding. And it's important to acknowledge that pershaps, other systems of thought, other religions if you prefer, may have an evolutionary reason for their existance.
For this reason, your example of the airplane, while clever, does not invalidate my notion of "utility." My point, which I didn't make clear, was that the models make specific predictions in a way that is so dramatically true that we are able to build the airplane. Whether that airplane is ultimately good for society as a whole or not is quite irrelevant as far as my meaning of "utility" goes. This does not mean, of course, that it is unimportant.
And yet, by having an ethicless version of utility, how is your worship of models and justification by utility any different than the primitive tribesman basing the timing of his planting on some myth of a god? It isn't. There is no difference at all. We claim a difference- but both make specific predictions for specific outcomes. And in the long run, the evolved faith has centuries of thought behind it that the new scientific theory does not- leading to less utility from a wider point of view.
So? That just means that the model is accurate enough to create a CRT or an LCD, not that the model has anything to do with reality.
A similar model might be that elves in the Cathode Ray Tube play pool with atoms in the phosphorus coating of the screen, and the theory works just as well. It doesn't matter if you're calling them elves or electrons- the theory works either way. That's why I say that the existance of the electron is mythical- it doesn't mean that the theory doesn't work, it just means that we've made up words to explain the theory.
Slashdot Mirror
I would completely agree with this- but I'd also point out that for many people in our materialist society, scientists have already become our defacto priests.
Did you even RTFA? The only thing the school assignment requested was to REPORT THE STRING, not VERIFY WHAT THE STRING REPORTED. No breakin is required to read that string. Who gives a rip whether the string has been spoofed or not?
Who said anything about prosecution? I just want to waste their time, while keeping them from wasting mine.
Well, the school did for one- any student caught scanning school computers will be refered to the Dean. My suggestions were to go to machines that are far less likely for anybody to be paying any attention to port scans in the logs.
As I've said, I don't know anything about your Kwakiutal relatives, but I think its a little ridiculous to say that the only thing standing between someone building a plane and building that plane is the will to do so.
Assuming there is such a thing as reality, the physical laws don't wait around for us to define them to work. Not only airplanes and gliders were around long before the Wright Brothers- but helicopters were as well. In North America the prototype for the helicopter grows on every oak tree.
I can only assume you are referring to the article? First, I would hardly consider politicians or lawyers legal philosophers. And whether or not the constitutions prevents, say, creationism from being taught as science is a legal question concerning the 1st amendment which I don't understand very well. However, I do think that science class should teach what scientists by and large believe, and that evolution should not be singled out from other theories. To tell them that scientists are unsure of evolution is lying to them in my view. I also think it would be great if every person took a class on the philosophy of science. However, high school is probably too young to do it.
Where I come from the other point of view- nobody should be allowed to take a science class at all until they understant the philosophy behind science. But then again, I would have done much better in school if I had Numerical Methods, a 400 level college course, in the first grade (because I would have understood WHY addition works, instead of merely memorizing it and treating it as a religion).
But science is not justified by any kind of empirical observation, only by repeatable observation by different people. Personal relevation is inherently personal.
If it were, then it would be of no use whatsoever. I'm sure there is personal relevation that is only personal- but nobody pays any attention to it because they can't find any relevancy in their own lives and they certainly do NOT build religions around it. Religions only survive if they work. If they don't work (look at the Shakers in the 19th century, who denied sex and lasted less than two generations) they simply never survive beyond the personal cult stage.
Your notion of "faith" seems to be interchangeable with my notion of "assumption." And yes, any sort of human thought seems to involve assumptions. This is still no reason to say "science is just another religion."
But nor is there any reason to claim that faith isn't involved just by relabeling it to "assumption".
I do not think the point is whether or not in principle some myth could explain how to build an airplane. The question is whether that myth is justified using the kind of rigorous, egalitarian, peer-reviewed methods of modern science or not, and if it does not use these methods for justification, whether the methods it DOES use have major differences.
Well, that's where you get into the Councilar Method and Canon Law in Christianity- and similar processes in other religions. A private revelation isn't just automatically accepted- it takes centuries.
So run a tripwire on a handful of random ports, well away from normal traffic. Trip one or two and your IP gets banned or, if you're feeling vicious, redirected to a honeypot server.
Which doesn't harm this assignment in the slightest- since the actual assignment is to report what they saw during the scan, not what is the truth. If what the student sees during the scan is exactly what the professor sees during the scan, then the student gets the grade. Likewise, you'd have to do a lot more detective work than just redirecting traffic to a honeypot server to actually tie an IP address (possibly a dialup IP address) to a name to prosecute. If your time is so unvaluable that suing people for such a minor infraction is profitable use of your time, then you should be far more worried about developers in Bangalore than some student doing a port scan who is never seen again.
Depends on the state- but I once had a burglary case thrown out of court because I left the garage door open.
Same thing with my server- some ports are a bit more sensitive than others, and certainly anybody stupid enough to connect to port 139 over the net is asking for it- but anybody looking to see if port 139 is AVAILABLE is breaking no law that I know of.
Why read logs when you have computers that do it for you?
Done properly, all the port scanner programs I've seen have a setting to defeat automatic log readers from detecting the scan: random period wait between ports. The best ones also do random access port scaning instead of sequential.
No, a string is sent each time. I can make the string be anything I like. You aren't a developer, are you?
Actually, I am- but the point is that the string sent out, for any mozilla-compatible server, is information about the operating system and server. It's available. It doesn't matter if you want to claim that the operating system is foo.bar running tomcat mail server; the assignment is to report the information recieved, not to verify that the information recieved is correct.
And if you want to be such a strong skeptic thats fine. But it is hard for such a strong skeptic to be able to say anything interesting about what ever differences did allow us to go from building huts to airplanes.
:-), Einstein certainly did, and if I were smart enough, I presumably would as will. Anything I say in principle has the same weight that anything Newton or Einstein said. Now, people are less likely to spend time listening to me than they would to Newton or Einstein obviously, but there is nothing inherent to Newton that makes what he says better than what I say; the content of what he says does that. In Christianity, Jesus is the Son of God. What he says is intrinsically worth more than what I say.
There are no differences- for instance, in the Pacific Northwest, my own Kwakiutal relatives had the laws of areodynamics figured out for the last 5000 years. Why didn't they build airplanes? Because they saw no use in it other than for toys.
I'm not sure that 1+1=2 is a definition. I don't think it is. Typically, one tries to prove the behavior of numbers using set theory, and I'm not all that familiar with it. But in any case, I suppose definition is a perfectly valid justification in mathematics. Justification is mathematics is still very different than in science. Science is ultimately justified by empirical observation, while most people say mathematics is not.
The problem is, religion is also justified by empirical observation for the most part. Just a different set of observations than you're familiar with. Private revelation is exactly that: empirical observation.
I think that most modern physicists at least are painfully aware that electrons may only be a model. Quantum mechanics is very strange, and almost forces one to consider that possiblity. This is part of the reason Einstien disliked quantum mechanics so much, with his famous quote "God does not play dice with the universe." Whether or not science IS just a language construct- this is something that most scientists let philosophers argue about.
But you're actually not willing to let one class of philosophers argue about it- legal philosophers. No, there you get all huffy and fundamentalist all of a sudden.
Theories are named after people to recognize thay they first thought of them. However, theories are not inherently personal. I can use experiment to verify Newton's gravity the same as he can. I can never personally verify, eg, Paul's conversion experience.
Actually a good many people seem to every year. Conversion is just learning to come to a new paradigm.
While I agree that I personally won't gain the same repect of Newton
If so, you've missed a key piece of Christian theology. But my point is that Einstien will never be known for having the insight of the discovery of the laws of intertia- there can be only one first.
There was a whole program by the Catholic theologians to justify Christian thinking using pure reason: the scholastics. It is true that I don't know that much about them. I have read Descartes, who wasn't a scholastic, but certainly was in the tradition of trying to reconcile Christian belief with pure reason. At the beginning of his meditations, he is very careful to note that Christian belief is justified by first by faith and that he wishes to prove the existence of God using pure reason only to be be able to convince non-believers that God existed. So clearly Descartes at least thought that Christian thinking is ultimately justified by faith (whatever faith is, exactly.) My understanding is that this is the view of most Christians. Most modern scientists, on the other hand, would say that scientific belief in a model is justified in empirical observation that does not conflict with the model.
Descartes never satisfied me- he never proved that he could think, and therefore couldn't even prove that HE existed. However, my point is that human beings don't do any
But that wasn't the assignment. The assignment was merely to note that port 21 was open and thus there *might* be an FTP server there.
To use your car analogy, it's more like somebody walking by took note that the car windows were left open.
If she doesn't pull the shades, yes, it is legal. The relevant legal principle is that there is no expectation of privacy in the public sphere.
My point wasn't that the tools are legal. My point is that all of the information requested in the assignment is public information that ALL computers running webservers broadcast. Most browsers hide it, but the operating system of the host server is sent every time you browse a site, for example. All the other information requested in the assignment is similar public information. NONE of it requires gaining root access to the server in question, or even user level access.
How so? All of the information requested in the assignement can be gotten from any server running a compliant web server, including Windows XP Personal Web Server, with a combination of port scanning tools, netstat, ping, and GRC's webhost. There shouldn't be any real break in at all- all of this information is offered up by the webserver to whomever wants it.
Legal solution #1: Contact a local business, explain you're a student learning about computer security, and ask for permission to hit their server.
Legal Solution #2: find out the address of a home computer on a broadband connection and hit that, preferably a friend who knows you're doing it or yourself.
Illegal Solution #1: Find out the address of a home computer on a broadband connection owned by the kind of luser who doesn't even know they have a log let alone how to check it.
Illegal solution #2: Hit a BUSY public server that you know is locked down well and likely to have only a single discoverable service, such as www.google.com, thus also giving the wonderful ability to turn in a two line report and STILL get the full purpose of the assignment; bonus points for mentioning the port ranges that were in stealth mode.
The last two are available due to the fact that most sysadmins aren't being paid to look at logs all day; and that home users don't have the extra cash to pay a sysadmin at all.
(and given the last 15 years of data - I'm not certain how much "cooling" we'll ever see unless interest rates climb to unheard of levels)
Given the last 30 years of import/export data, any bank not in the United States lending to the United States better be earning 500-600% annual interest if they expect to break even. We've got an awfull credit history as a country, and the housing market is just the latest example of that.
No, pure mathematics leaves no room for faith. Faith is not the same thing as belief. Google defines belief as: "impression: a vague idea in which some confidence is placed" and "any cognitive content held as true". So mathematics leaves plenty of room for belief. For example, I believe that 1+1=2 because this is a cognitive content I hold as true. As to what sense mathematical theorems are "true" - this is a complicated issue. However, mathematical theorems definitely qualify as "knowledge", which is what I said justified belief is necessary for.
I'm almost to the point where I don't believe knowledge itself exists- that it is as mythical as anything else is. However- faith is a superset of belief- faith is belief without proof. Since 1+1=2 is an unproven axiom, true by definition rather than by proof, it most certainly IS faith.
Maybe I should not have used the word "self-consciousness". What I meant was that a model explicity make a prediction, and that it acknowledges this is a major element of its purpose. And when one anthropomorphize something, one gives it human characteristics. I don't think anybody is arguing that an electron has a personality, or emotions, or a soul. Sometimes, we use language that an electron "wants to do something", but of course this is just a convenient language construct.
The problem comes in when we don't identify that as "just a convenient language construct". It's put forth instead as something we take on faith. We don't actually know that the electron exists- we suspect it does due to evidence, but nobody's ever actually seen one. Models themselves are just convenient language constructs from that point of view.
Again, religion typically has a tradition of personal relevation that science does not.
Science has an equal tradition of personal revelation- that's why theories are named after people.
This alone is a major, major difference.
Not really- you can never gain the respect of Newton in the field of gravity either.
Also, there are practical differences. Science is very rigorous in that what it predicts is very explicitly stated.
Maybe to another scientist- but to a layman no, science is no different than religion in that way.
Religion typically does not. This is another major difference.
The only reason you say religion doesn't is because you don't understand the religious definitions.
They are major enough such that I can build airplanes and antibiotics and bombs, and all the other wonderful and terrible things scientific inquiry has given us, while the tribesmen cannot.
What makes you think the tribesman cannot? Back to Bali for a second- science was worthless there because the theories were taken out of context and applied in a climate that they didn't make sense. My guess is that you've hidden your own faith in science to the point that you deny religion merely because you don't understand the purpose behind religion. Religions are very successfull at creating shared morality within a community- that's something science has failed to do. You can create wonderful and terrible things through scientific inquiry- but the one thing you can never create is a way to tell if a new scientific invention will be wonderful or terrible. I think you don't understand the utility of religion because you don't understand the purpose of religion.
And I would say that Christianity in general does not make a specific prediction. What would its specific prediction be? Life after death practically cannot be verified, so it does not qualify. The Revelation still has not come, but this doesn't bother most Christians.
The specific prediction of Christianity is that small groups of people can get along without killing each other. I'd say that the specific prediction of Christianity is currently unproven- and if we are to believe CS Lewis, untried.
Then in that case, you would have no problem with saying that a given theory cannot absolutely be proven- and thus you'd have no problem with the laws as written in Kansas and Utah, because that is all they actually require. I completely agree. The fundamentalist Christians have shot themselves in the philosophical foot with this one- but the fundamentalist scientists are giving them a steel toed boot by fighting against such laws.
I think I can cut this down to the chase- you're afraid of confusing the issue. But my point is this- science is just as mythical as any other thing that mankind has belief in, and therefore, *both* sides are being stupid in this. It doesn't matter one whit if the subject is confused in the mind of students- some of our best scientific discoveries have come from confusing the issue. The real danger is in being certain- in arguing that what you say is true when you know it isn't. In areas where we are certain, no new discovery is possible. This cuts both ways- people who are absolutely certain of their religion (as the creationists are) are just as wrong as those who are absolutely certain about their science or their politics.
And maybe cops plant all the guns involved in all violent crime everywhere, but the scientific mind looks for the simpler explanation.
Simpler does not always equal better- Occam's razor is as much a myth as any other axiom.
As for carbon dating, we can carbon-date things which *did* have a known time of creation (wooden things that date back hundreds of years can be carbon-dated), so unless you claim that written records dating hundreds of years ago are also false, I don't think that you have much foundation for your argument.
You don't understand my argument then. What I'm arguing is that radioactive dating such as carbon can't actually be independantly collaborated for PREHISTORIC items. I'll give you carbon dating for anything up to about 40,000 years ago (the point which cro-magnon man beat out his evolutionary cousins for supremacy of Europe) but before that is just speculation. Likewise, I'd point out that the written hitorical record oly dates back about 12,000 years- we have no examples of writing that date earlier, though we do have some cave art that might. Carbon dating is almost entirely worthless for dating anything further back than that.
I didn't say that I proved that there wasn't a god. What I just demonstrated was speciation. You can claim that some invisible gay-hating guy in the sky or a flying spaghetti monster is "really" the guiding force if you want. You can also claim that said invisible guy in the sky causes gravity, but it doesn't make a theory of gravity any less scientific.
I thought creating gods was supposed to be unscientific- my point is that your demonstration *requires* a god.
Execept that I just sped up the process a bit. Mutations always happen, at a lower rate. When you're out in the Sun, you're getting irradiated. Unless your argument is that such a mutation *could* happen only if a sentient being was involved, which is a pretty weak argument.
Actually, my argument is that we have no proof that irradiation from the Sun happened before we were a species. Or for that matter anything else. We have faith and belief that our evidence that we're currently viewing stretches into the past, but no documented *proof*.
Calm down. I didn't say that Christianity was a load of superstitious nonsense in the post (actually, I do I believe that this is the case, now that you bring it up, but it wasn't a part of the earlier post). Nothing in there said anything about what happens with humans. You claimed that speciation and evolution were non-testable and non-scientific. I demonstrated that you were wrong, at least WRT speciation, by giving an example of such a test. That's all.
You're the one who needs to calm down. I'll admit I should have said with respect to humans- but your test was fatally flawed anyway because it required a being with god like powers to achieve.
Observed speciation? Here are some examples [talkorigins.org]. Here is a more detailed account of more examples [talkorigins.org]. Oh, and here are yet more examples [talkorigins.org]. All of it well documented and referenced. Argument by ignorance is not really effective.
How do I know that the people who wrote those documents aren't lying? How do I know they didn't just purchase their degrees on e-bay? You're missing the main point here- which is that fundamentalists are certain, but real scientists always have some doubt. I say fundamentalism has no place in our schools- so I'm equally against saying that "Evolution is entirely correct" as I am "Creationism is entirely correct". Both are essentially religious viewpoints put together by highly biased idividuals.
For the most part dating of strata is determined by which layers are on top of which, and more recently confirmed via radioactive dating methods. It's worth noting that dating of geologic strata notably predates the theory of evolution.
All that really does is make more circular theories. How do you know that newer layers are on top of older layers, and that volcanic activity, erosion, or earthquakes haven't mixed them up? By comparing the fossils found in them to other layers elsewhere on the earth. And the same goes for calibrating the radioactivity tests- we do so by "known" ages of other rocks, conviently ignoring the fact that we don't really KNOW anything about the ages of prehistoric stuff at all- just educated guesses.
This is a western (I don't know about eastern, etc.) philosophical tradition that justified belief is knowledge. (And don't ask me to say much more on this, I'm not a professional philosopher.) You certainly can't say that you know something to be true of you don't also believe it to be true. You seem to want to lump everything under the notion of "religion" which is fine, except that then of course any sort of belief or knowledge becomes "religious", because belief is a prerequisite for knowledge.
The problem, as I see it, comes into the fact that this philosophy, that justified belief is knowledge, is DIRECTLY CONTRADICTORY, to the following idea:
Science, on the other hand, is squarely in the tradition of pure reason and mathematics.
But pure reason and mathematics leave no room for faith or belief- and therefore can never lead to knowledge by themselves.
You also are misunderstanding my use of the word "utility". A model has utility if it makes a particular prediction that is verified (or, more technically, if it makes a prediction that is not falsified.) So, by this argument, I suppose that if your villagers believed that they were doing their religious practices to make the crops grow better, then in some sense, yes, they had a model that could be acknowledged as "true". However, I would say that typically, models have a degree of rigour to them, which I would guess was lacking from your island tribe. I would say that a model has a degree of self-consciousness to it- it states explicitly that it is trying to make a prediction, and that this is its purpose. A better example, and the one that is usually used, would be Ptolemy's epicircles. Ptolemy of course assume the earth to be the center of the universe, and was able to describe the motion of the planets with a series of circles. We typically think of him as wrong, but his epicycles worked quite well for his purposes, so perhaps he was, in a sense, quite correct.
The real problem is that models don't have self-consciousness at all- they're just models, thought constructs. We anthromorphisize them in the same way that primitive people anthromorphisized their Gods- but that doesn't make us any better, just different. A lack of ethical understanding is still a lack of ethical understanding. And it's important to acknowledge that pershaps, other systems of thought, other religions if you prefer, may have an evolutionary reason for their existance.
For this reason, your example of the airplane, while clever, does not invalidate my notion of "utility." My point, which I didn't make clear, was that the models make specific predictions in a way that is so dramatically true that we are able to build the airplane. Whether that airplane is ultimately good for society as a whole or not is quite irrelevant as far as my meaning of "utility" goes. This does not mean, of course, that it is unimportant.
And yet, by having an ethicless version of utility, how is your worship of models and justification by utility any different than the primitive tribesman basing the timing of his planting on some myth of a god? It isn't. There is no difference at all. We claim a difference- but both make specific predictions for specific outcomes. And in the long run, the evolved faith has centuries of thought behind it that the new scientific theory does not- leading to less utility from a wider point of view.
So? That just means that the model is accurate enough to create a CRT or an LCD, not that the model has anything to do with reality.
A similar model might be that elves in the Cathode Ray Tube play pool with atoms in the phosphorus coating of the screen, and the theory works just as well. It doesn't matter if you're calling them elves or electrons- the theory works either way. That's why I say that the existance of the electron is mythical- it doesn't mean that the theory doesn't work, it just means that we've made up words to explain the theory.
Exactly my point- I cannot prove that I think, so I cannot prove that I exist.