At work we need to send and receive client information to and from billing companies and OpenPGP is used along with a handful of SFTP and FTPS servers. Getting a new business partner set up with OpenPGP-compatible software is usually not a big problem (we've only had one private key emailed to us) and it just works after it's set up.
I have a personal PGP key and so far only use it to encrypt backups generated from a cronjob and send them to offsite storage.
A dog will curl up with and by all appearances 'love' its owner. My dog is doing this now. However, I know full well that the dog's 'love' is only ingrained pack behavior by a 'beta' male to his 'alpha', bred over time as 'loyalty' to be amplified. I know it's fake, because if I keeled over dead right now, that dog would start eating me the moment his food bowl got empty. OTOH, my wife willingly married me, and we spend our lives loving each other not because we feel we have to, but simply because we want to, and are eager to. There is nothing in the way of measurable factors (we don't and won't have children, we both work for a living, etc) that keeps us together otherwise.
Your dog is eager and wants to follow you. How do you actually differentiate the causes in your own mind from the causes in your dog's mind? People have eaten other people when they were starving, and dogs have stayed by their dead master's side for several days until they're found by someone else. I think all you can conclude is that some dogs and some people will turn on their former loved ones under certain circumstances.
You can understand how a dog's brain would feel a desire to be your companion but you can't conceive of your own brain or that of your wife having exactly the same impulses, amplified only by your more abstract intelligence? How would you explain the loyalty that humans feel to leaders, including evil leaders? Loyalty, love, and emotion spring from the same sources in all minds, whether human or dog. We feel that we have free will only because we can not predict what our future decisions will be and because often our decisions appear irrational. We are loathe to accept the fact that we are less than perfect and irrational beings, so we ascribe our decisions to our free will.
If there is a divine component to the human mind then it too must have a cause, and that cause must be responsible for everything that the divine portion of the human mind decides. How is simply putting your free will in an inaccessible divine universe changing the fact that all events are causal? Just because you can't see the divine rules doesn't mean they don't exist. If the divine world were acausal then you would choose randomly and without reason. Consider the decision to not to return God's love; why would any divine human mind choose something so antithetical to its own existence unless it was caused by something outside that human mind's control? Assume that at each instant in time there are a set of possible actions that a divine human can make; what force actually causes one of them to be chosen? That force, which you call free will, must have rules for how it operates, and initial conditions that the rules operate on to evolve it to its decision-making state. Those rules completely determine the outcome as much as a naturalistic explanation of the world explains the decisions of a brain as the effect of the rules of physics.
More specifically it's blindly following Pauline cherry-picking of the Jewish scriptures. Why, if Jesus came to free people from the law including all the dietary prohibitions and other old social customs, did Jesus not come to free people from the old laws against homosexuality? Why would Jesus also apparently get rid of the laws against usury given his tantrum in the temple against the currency speculators? The fact is that the writings the Catholic church could find to build a Canon out of just happened to mention of a few of the many, many Jewish laws in a positive or negative light, most likely written essentially at the whim of the author.
You would be far more inconsistent if you raised half of your children with one set of rules and the other half with vastly different rules, say by raising all the children you had before an arbitrary date (oh, like say 33 AD) under one set of rules and all the children after that date with the other set of rules. Especially if you led each set of children to believe that they should follow the rules no matter what and not warn them of the specific date when you were going to make the change. Even worse if you had some strange dirty kid from across the street stand in your yard and yell that a change was coming as the only warning.
"We hate your Jehovah, so we're going to have our own little religion, in which a gay saviour will rule the world under a rainbow!"
A savior who never married, and whose best friend was a dead guy he personally raised from the dead, perhaps? He could tell his disciples to eat his manflesh and be into S&M and get trussed up naked on a piece of wood to suffer an imaginary death and then let another one of his male friends stick his fingers into holes in his body.
Clearly he meant "show me the source code for everything from the assembler to the final application and I'll hand translate the assembler to machine code and then bootstrap the compiler with it, running on my discrete transistor processor that I designed and hand-assembled from individual parts."
You are only talking about visible teapots. Teapots could be hiding behind objects other than the sun, and teapots could be located anyplace where you aren't pointing your telescope at a given instant. There could be a teapot in orbit behind your head this instant.
Well there we go, I said give me a quantitative measurement and you give me a vague English word. Suppose we just define Jupiter as a Teapot?
If your entire argument boils down to "English is not specific enough to derive quantitative measurements from" then congratulations. At least you could have argued that the quantum probability distribution of the solar system includes teapots everywhere at very low probabilities.
I see an easy way to combine this 'smell launcher' and 'taste catapult' into one device, using renewable resources. Can fire trucks plug into manholes for their source?
You can't talk about the Higgs Boson in general without specifying which quantitative theories you are considering. Otherwise you run into the problem of whether or not a Creationist could verify the existence of "the" Higgs Boson (for their definition of the Higgs Boson) through prayer, for instance.
Except that it is fairly easy to demonstrate that no teapot is orbiting anywhere in the solar system. Everything that orbits must at some point be visible from Earth except for an object ~180 degrees out of phase in Earth's own orbit, and a satellite sent out of the plane of the elliptical could cover that situation. An optical telescope of sufficient power is all that's required to observe the solar system for the longest conceivable orbital period of a satellite and demonstrate that every visible object is not, according to some quantitative measurement, a teapot.
This sort of systematic searching for the presence or absence of an object is precisely what the Higgs Boson experiments are doing.
If for no other reason, corporate personhood seems like an excellent reason to keep taxing corporations. After all, if they have all the benefits (plus some) of being a citizen, they might as well pay for it like everyone else.
4. In extension of 3, functional programming is getting away from how the hardware actually works
I don't know about your hardware, but mine happens to be modeled simply as a function of the current computer state and I/O that's evaluated each clock tick. state_t+1 = F(state_t, I/O_t). Any imperative nature of the machine language is just emulated by endless repetitions of that single function.
Just ask to be able to log into their bank's website and examine their cash balance six times a day, at random times. Gotta make sure the paycheck won't bounce.
My guess is only a few IT systems in the world would last more than a week without love and attention from system administrators. The most likely result of legislation like this is IT unionization and strikes. See how much the 1% screams when their computerized trading floors stop working.
And all who believe in Jesus AND the Singularity will live forever + billions of years in a transcendent and eventually eternal physical body, measurably longer than the Jesus-believers who don't get life extension. Sounds exactly like Pascal's Wager to me...
Don't kid yourself; if easy, non-intrusive radical life extension became available today you and 99% of the other fundamentalists would jump on the bandwagon calling it a "gift from god."
metamoderation used to work like that. You couldn't see who had rated comments, but you could metamoderate their moderations. Of course a quick google search would show exactly who had posted the comment and circumvent the double blind portion of the study, but randomizing which comments a user can moderate would significantly reduce the problem. If each user can only moderate, say, 10 random comments per article it would both encourage users to use all their mod points directly (I generally waste too much time deciding which comments would most benefit from my mod points, which is counterproductive) and discourage burying the comments of individual users. Instead of needing enough accounts with mod points to moderate a single comment 5 times, you'd need number_of_comments_per_article/10 times that many on average.
Another possibility to maintain double-blind moderation would just be to completely remove identity from comments, except perhaps for subscribers. Does anyone really care what the name of the person is? The content matters. The only loss would be lowest-UID threads and the friend/enemy system. This would not necessarily prevent burying comments because it is generally the content that is the target of negative moderation and not a particular user, although I've seen exceptions to the latter.
Free will and omniscience are mutually exclusive. In order to know what will happen in the future every personal decision must be known. If every personal decision is known by god beforehand it is not chosen freely because there actually was no other possible choice. A different choice would cause a different future than the one known to god, breaking omniscience.
The perfect baseball bat is almost certainly made from aluminum or carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer.
I did not make the assumption that this universe is the end-all and be-all of existence. I explicitly mentioned how tuning the initial conditions to send fewer people to hell should be a primary concern of a benevolent god. An alternative solution is universal reconciliation, but that doesn't seem to be a very popular belief for some reason. The perfect universe would not send immortal souls to eternal torment, in any case.
I'm not sure I would go so far as to say that a belief in causality is a religion. It sounds more like a fit thing to believe because it allows an organism to predict the future state of its environment and plan to exist and have reproduced in that future state and then take actions which, if successful, result in a future close enough for natural selection to pick organisms that believe in causality. This does not have to be a mental process. Viruses work because their shape causes them to replicate in other cells. From causality it is a straight road to science which is the practice of observing the effects of experiments to determine the nature of the causes that result in the observations.
It would be very informative. Students would only be able to pass by either providing a testable theory of creationism and testing it, or describing in detail the reasons that it is not a scientific theory. Every degree program should have a bullshit-detection course.
Now, what if what we refer to as "God' has an unmitigated perspective on our fourth-dimensional objects? God is able to observe all our aspects and the choices we make throughout our three-dimensional existence. This isn't as much predestination as it is omniscience. We still have free will to make the choice, but God knows the choice we make.
And by choosing the initial conditions of the universe each "free will" decision would be obvious from the very beginning and thus simply an effect of the choice of initial conditions. So there's an infinite class of predicates over the initial conditions like has_sin(IC) or has_death_and_suffering(IC) and god just happened to pick a universe that satisfied both of those predicates? Why not satisfy candyfloss_for_everyone(IC) and indefinite_but_personally_chosen_lifespan(IC) or even free_energy(IC)? Not to mention that it would be fairly obvious from the beginning how many humans would spend eternity in everlasting torment (if you buy into that particular belief). It seems like a good god might want to optimize that number a little better than many current beliefs suggest.
It would also be simple for an omniscient god to know the complete results of every possible choice of initial conditions before choosing which universe to create and pick the best possible universe. Most importantly, a truly benevolent god would be wise enough not to create any universe at all if the best possible universe wasn't perfect.
PGP provides a model for partial trust in a public key based on the trust placed in signers of that key. I think a similar model would work much better for SSL certificates than either the current forest of fully trusted root CAs or projects like Convergence because it would allow long term trust in entities instead of merely the ephemeral keys used for SSL connections while also providing offline security and the ability to separate the keys used for privacy and identification.
If I wanted to validate the hypothetically secure https://slashdot.org/ I would be happy seeing an SSL certificate signed by Geeknet's PGP key (assuming they cared enough to be in the strong set), but even happier if it was also signed by a couple certificate authorities and some other folks in the strong set. I would assign partial trust to each of the certificate authorities' root certificates and use PGP to measure the partial trust of other signatures and set a threshold for the security of any SSL site, perhaps requiring "full trust" for automatic acceptance of an SSL certificate, a warning for marginal trust, and a bigger warning for anything less.
One of the primary advantages is separation of privacy and identification; the private key for identifying an entity would only be used to sign SSL certificates, reducing the likelihood of an attacker compromising an identity certificate. Notaries, as in Convergence, would simply be entities who sign a large number of SSL certificates after verifying the owner's identity through the existing trust network. The advantage for notaries is that they would not need to keep their private keys online and would only serve signatures. SSL sites could also just include the signatures in the initial SSL/TLS exchange, shifting bandwidth costs to the entities that benefit from the signatures. Site owners could also pre-distribute new SSL keys to certificate authorities and notaries to obtain signatures similar to the way that the existing PKI works, without relying on projects like Convergence to correctly identify a legitimate key change through heuristics.
The biggest advantage is a much more robust framework for trusting the privacy and identify of web sites. The likelihood of obtaining fraudulent SSL certificates signed by enough entities to achieve full trust is much lower than the likelihood of compromising a single fully trusted root CA or tricking a Convergence-style network into trusting a fraudulent SSL certificate by DNS poisoning or other methods.
Do you think this is a workable and, if so, good idea?
Slashdot Mirror
At work we need to send and receive client information to and from billing companies and OpenPGP is used along with a handful of SFTP and FTPS servers. Getting a new business partner set up with OpenPGP-compatible software is usually not a big problem (we've only had one private key emailed to us) and it just works after it's set up.
I have a personal PGP key and so far only use it to encrypt backups generated from a cronjob and send them to offsite storage.
A dog will curl up with and by all appearances 'love' its owner. My dog is doing this now. However, I know full well that the dog's 'love' is only ingrained pack behavior by a 'beta' male to his 'alpha', bred over time as 'loyalty' to be amplified. I know it's fake, because if I keeled over dead right now, that dog would start eating me the moment his food bowl got empty. OTOH, my wife willingly married me, and we spend our lives loving each other not because we feel we have to, but simply because we want to, and are eager to. There is nothing in the way of measurable factors (we don't and won't have children, we both work for a living, etc) that keeps us together otherwise.
Your dog is eager and wants to follow you. How do you actually differentiate the causes in your own mind from the causes in your dog's mind? People have eaten other people when they were starving, and dogs have stayed by their dead master's side for several days until they're found by someone else. I think all you can conclude is that some dogs and some people will turn on their former loved ones under certain circumstances.
You can understand how a dog's brain would feel a desire to be your companion but you can't conceive of your own brain or that of your wife having exactly the same impulses, amplified only by your more abstract intelligence? How would you explain the loyalty that humans feel to leaders, including evil leaders? Loyalty, love, and emotion spring from the same sources in all minds, whether human or dog. We feel that we have free will only because we can not predict what our future decisions will be and because often our decisions appear irrational. We are loathe to accept the fact that we are less than perfect and irrational beings, so we ascribe our decisions to our free will.
If there is a divine component to the human mind then it too must have a cause, and that cause must be responsible for everything that the divine portion of the human mind decides. How is simply putting your free will in an inaccessible divine universe changing the fact that all events are causal? Just because you can't see the divine rules doesn't mean they don't exist. If the divine world were acausal then you would choose randomly and without reason. Consider the decision to not to return God's love; why would any divine human mind choose something so antithetical to its own existence unless it was caused by something outside that human mind's control? Assume that at each instant in time there are a set of possible actions that a divine human can make; what force actually causes one of them to be chosen? That force, which you call free will, must have rules for how it operates, and initial conditions that the rules operate on to evolve it to its decision-making state. Those rules completely determine the outcome as much as a naturalistic explanation of the world explains the decisions of a brain as the effect of the rules of physics.
More specifically it's blindly following Pauline cherry-picking of the Jewish scriptures. Why, if Jesus came to free people from the law including all the dietary prohibitions and other old social customs, did Jesus not come to free people from the old laws against homosexuality? Why would Jesus also apparently get rid of the laws against usury given his tantrum in the temple against the currency speculators? The fact is that the writings the Catholic church could find to build a Canon out of just happened to mention of a few of the many, many Jewish laws in a positive or negative light, most likely written essentially at the whim of the author.
You would be far more inconsistent if you raised half of your children with one set of rules and the other half with vastly different rules, say by raising all the children you had before an arbitrary date (oh, like say 33 AD) under one set of rules and all the children after that date with the other set of rules. Especially if you led each set of children to believe that they should follow the rules no matter what and not warn them of the specific date when you were going to make the change. Even worse if you had some strange dirty kid from across the street stand in your yard and yell that a change was coming as the only warning.
"We hate your Jehovah, so we're going to have our own little religion, in which a gay saviour will rule the world under a rainbow!"
A savior who never married, and whose best friend was a dead guy he personally raised from the dead, perhaps? He could tell his disciples to eat his manflesh and be into S&M and get trussed up naked on a piece of wood to suffer an imaginary death and then let another one of his male friends stick his fingers into holes in his body.
And THEN the rainbows.
Clearly he meant "show me the source code for everything from the assembler to the final application and I'll hand translate the assembler to machine code and then bootstrap the compiler with it, running on my discrete transistor processor that I designed and hand-assembled from individual parts."
Everything but the Z line and the N2xx series Atoms are 64-bit.
You are only talking about visible teapots. Teapots could be hiding behind objects other than the sun, and teapots could be located anyplace where you aren't pointing your telescope at a given instant. There could be a teapot in orbit behind your head this instant.
Well there we go, I said give me a quantitative measurement and you give me a vague English word. Suppose we just define Jupiter as a Teapot?
If your entire argument boils down to "English is not specific enough to derive quantitative measurements from" then congratulations. At least you could have argued that the quantum probability distribution of the solar system includes teapots everywhere at very low probabilities.
I see an easy way to combine this 'smell launcher' and 'taste catapult' into one device, using renewable resources. Can fire trucks plug into manholes for their source?
Also mirrors.
You can't talk about the Higgs Boson in general without specifying which quantitative theories you are considering. Otherwise you run into the problem of whether or not a Creationist could verify the existence of "the" Higgs Boson (for their definition of the Higgs Boson) through prayer, for instance.
Except that it is fairly easy to demonstrate that no teapot is orbiting anywhere in the solar system. Everything that orbits must at some point be visible from Earth except for an object ~180 degrees out of phase in Earth's own orbit, and a satellite sent out of the plane of the elliptical could cover that situation. An optical telescope of sufficient power is all that's required to observe the solar system for the longest conceivable orbital period of a satellite and demonstrate that every visible object is not, according to some quantitative measurement, a teapot.
This sort of systematic searching for the presence or absence of an object is precisely what the Higgs Boson experiments are doing.
If for no other reason, corporate personhood seems like an excellent reason to keep taxing corporations. After all, if they have all the benefits (plus some) of being a citizen, they might as well pay for it like everyone else.
4. In extension of 3, functional programming is getting away from how the hardware actually works
I don't know about your hardware, but mine happens to be modeled simply as a function of the current computer state and I/O that's evaluated each clock tick. state_t+1 = F(state_t, I/O_t). Any imperative nature of the machine language is just emulated by endless repetitions of that single function.
Just ask to be able to log into their bank's website and examine their cash balance six times a day, at random times. Gotta make sure the paycheck won't bounce.
My guess is only a few IT systems in the world would last more than a week without love and attention from system administrators. The most likely result of legislation like this is IT unionization and strikes. See how much the 1% screams when their computerized trading floors stop working.
And all who believe in Jesus AND the Singularity will live forever + billions of years in a transcendent and eventually eternal physical body, measurably longer than the Jesus-believers who don't get life extension. Sounds exactly like Pascal's Wager to me...
Don't kid yourself; if easy, non-intrusive radical life extension became available today you and 99% of the other fundamentalists would jump on the bandwagon calling it a "gift from god."
metamoderation used to work like that. You couldn't see who had rated comments, but you could metamoderate their moderations. Of course a quick google search would show exactly who had posted the comment and circumvent the double blind portion of the study, but randomizing which comments a user can moderate would significantly reduce the problem. If each user can only moderate, say, 10 random comments per article it would both encourage users to use all their mod points directly (I generally waste too much time deciding which comments would most benefit from my mod points, which is counterproductive) and discourage burying the comments of individual users. Instead of needing enough accounts with mod points to moderate a single comment 5 times, you'd need number_of_comments_per_article/10 times that many on average.
Another possibility to maintain double-blind moderation would just be to completely remove identity from comments, except perhaps for subscribers. Does anyone really care what the name of the person is? The content matters. The only loss would be lowest-UID threads and the friend/enemy system. This would not necessarily prevent burying comments because it is generally the content that is the target of negative moderation and not a particular user, although I've seen exceptions to the latter.
Free will and omniscience are mutually exclusive. In order to know what will happen in the future every personal decision must be known. If every personal decision is known by god beforehand it is not chosen freely because there actually was no other possible choice. A different choice would cause a different future than the one known to god, breaking omniscience.
The perfect baseball bat is almost certainly made from aluminum or carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer.
I did not make the assumption that this universe is the end-all and be-all of existence. I explicitly mentioned how tuning the initial conditions to send fewer people to hell should be a primary concern of a benevolent god. An alternative solution is universal reconciliation, but that doesn't seem to be a very popular belief for some reason. The perfect universe would not send immortal souls to eternal torment, in any case.
I'm not sure I would go so far as to say that a belief in causality is a religion. It sounds more like a fit thing to believe because it allows an organism to predict the future state of its environment and plan to exist and have reproduced in that future state and then take actions which, if successful, result in a future close enough for natural selection to pick organisms that believe in causality. This does not have to be a mental process. Viruses work because their shape causes them to replicate in other cells. From causality it is a straight road to science which is the practice of observing the effects of experiments to determine the nature of the causes that result in the observations.
It would be very informative. Students would only be able to pass by either providing a testable theory of creationism and testing it, or describing in detail the reasons that it is not a scientific theory. Every degree program should have a bullshit-detection course.
Now, what if what we refer to as "God' has an unmitigated perspective on our fourth-dimensional objects? God is able to observe all our aspects and the choices we make throughout our three-dimensional existence. This isn't as much predestination as it is omniscience. We still have free will to make the choice, but God knows the choice we make.
And by choosing the initial conditions of the universe each "free will" decision would be obvious from the very beginning and thus simply an effect of the choice of initial conditions. So there's an infinite class of predicates over the initial conditions like has_sin(IC) or has_death_and_suffering(IC) and god just happened to pick a universe that satisfied both of those predicates? Why not satisfy candyfloss_for_everyone(IC) and indefinite_but_personally_chosen_lifespan(IC) or even free_energy(IC)? Not to mention that it would be fairly obvious from the beginning how many humans would spend eternity in everlasting torment (if you buy into that particular belief). It seems like a good god might want to optimize that number a little better than many current beliefs suggest.
It would also be simple for an omniscient god to know the complete results of every possible choice of initial conditions before choosing which universe to create and pick the best possible universe. Most importantly, a truly benevolent god would be wise enough not to create any universe at all if the best possible universe wasn't perfect.
As usual, smarter people have already implemented my ideas. It's nice that they fixed ssh too.
PGP provides a model for partial trust in a public key based on the trust placed in signers of that key. I think a similar model would work much better for SSL certificates than either the current forest of fully trusted root CAs or projects like Convergence because it would allow long term trust in entities instead of merely the ephemeral keys used for SSL connections while also providing offline security and the ability to separate the keys used for privacy and identification.
If I wanted to validate the hypothetically secure https://slashdot.org/ I would be happy seeing an SSL certificate signed by Geeknet's PGP key (assuming they cared enough to be in the strong set), but even happier if it was also signed by a couple certificate authorities and some other folks in the strong set. I would assign partial trust to each of the certificate authorities' root certificates and use PGP to measure the partial trust of other signatures and set a threshold for the security of any SSL site, perhaps requiring "full trust" for automatic acceptance of an SSL certificate, a warning for marginal trust, and a bigger warning for anything less.
One of the primary advantages is separation of privacy and identification; the private key for identifying an entity would only be used to sign SSL certificates, reducing the likelihood of an attacker compromising an identity certificate. Notaries, as in Convergence, would simply be entities who sign a large number of SSL certificates after verifying the owner's identity through the existing trust network. The advantage for notaries is that they would not need to keep their private keys online and would only serve signatures. SSL sites could also just include the signatures in the initial SSL/TLS exchange, shifting bandwidth costs to the entities that benefit from the signatures. Site owners could also pre-distribute new SSL keys to certificate authorities and notaries to obtain signatures similar to the way that the existing PKI works, without relying on projects like Convergence to correctly identify a legitimate key change through heuristics.
The biggest advantage is a much more robust framework for trusting the privacy and identify of web sites. The likelihood of obtaining fraudulent SSL certificates signed by enough entities to achieve full trust is much lower than the likelihood of compromising a single fully trusted root CA or tricking a Convergence-style network into trusting a fraudulent SSL certificate by DNS poisoning or other methods.
Do you think this is a workable and, if so, good idea?