I know the feeling. I proved the Poincare Conjecture when I was 8, using a balloon a stapler. Unfortunately, I assumed it was trivial and never went public.
That's really pretty trivial, isn't it? Just blow the balloon up, squish and bend it a little bit, then let the air out. I'm pretty sure that describes an arbitrary manifold being isomorphic to a 3-sphere, especially the squishing part. I'm not sure what you used the stapler for, I thought putting rubber bands around the balloon would have been a better idea.
On the gripping hand - I saw an interview where the teen stated quite clearly "when it all started it was just like we were playing a video game". Thus, in his mind at least, there was some connection.
Now, I'm not going to lay all the blame on video games - but to pretend that they have no influence at all is ludicrous.
Criminals also blame voices, blackouts, hallucinations, and anything else they can think of to shift blame. I'm sure in the old days they said "Well, when it started it was just like a retelling of Beowulf or the Odyssey" to pretend they were coerced into committing violence.
Human brains commit criminal acts, it's not like there's some rational being sitting inside every human head weighing the options and listening to an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Fix broken brains if possible, or keep them permanently away from society.
so you'd have to make the encoding redundant enough so that most errors could be recovered by the receiver - without doubling the bandwidth. Oh, it would be fun!
That's what coding theory and forward error recovery is for. Reed Solomon coding has been used for space missions before, and they're the same codes used to make sure your CDs and DVDs play even when they're scratched. They can add any percentage of redundancy desirable, even dramatic over redundant messages for very noisy channels, or just a few percent for light noise.
And that's how it should be. Always. If you lose, you pay, with the theory that you'll learn your lesson and not do it again. Conversely, if they win, they get more money. It's a risk they took from the getgo, and have been getting away with it because there have been few real challenges against them.
The problem is that no one would sue a large company paying $5000 an hour for attorneys, for fear of losing being more costly than any possible judgment from winning. The law should limit the loser to paying only as much as his or her own attorney fees to the winner. That way it only depends on how seriously each side takes its case, and realistically it will have the same effect where it matters, namely where individuals need to sue large corporations. If they lose, they're only out twice as much as they would have paid their own lawyer, not $millions. If they win, the corporation almost certainly spent more than they did on lawyers, so they'll pay the whole bill. It makes even more sense when you consider that the corporation can essentially throw as many lawyers on the case as they want just to frighten an opponent with huge attorney fees because the lawyers are employees and they'd be paying them no matter what they were working on.
As one who has a software patent to my name, this debate is intensely interesting to me. In my case, the patent is actually more an algorithm patent than a software patent, though the actual source code for the algorithm is listed in the patent itself. It represents one possible instantiation of the algorithm. And now I can see a debate immediately arising about the difference between "software" and "algorithm".:-)
How long did it take you to develop the algorithm? What's the patent number?
I'm just curious, because most of the software patents I've seen are for relatively trivial things that any competent programmer could come up with. 25 years for a software patent is also an extremely long time.
Almost by definition, a person has to mentally damaged in order to accept religion. This is no slight against any person so damaged, any more than a person damaged by a viral infection is at fault. It is not your fault that your mind was infected by an insidious mental virus that has damaged your ability to think, in order to make you better at spreading the virus to others. But you should not be respected for having the virus, and your attempts to pass the virus on to others should be stopped.
I'd say the desire to destroy religion is just another virus trying to survive and replicate in a competitive universe. Making arbitrary value judgments about which virus should win is just part of the competitive process.
It's always fun to flood the MPAA with information about vicious acts of piracy.
I made sure to point out that not only did they infringe Forest Blog's copyright on every page view, they also stole advertising revenue from Forest Blog that would have been generated by the links that were removed from the MPAA's blog, causing at least as much financial harm as "stealing" copies of DVDs. I think the author probably has a reasonably strong civil claim to get that money back, which would hopefully pull in plenty of statutory damages for each act of infringement too.
What if someone else violated the license and made a stripped version of the code available, without any references to the original author? How in general can one tell whether one is getting the original code with intact copyright notices?
That's what I think whenever I download free music from the Internet: "Must just be a cover band releasing their work for free." I've never seen or heard any copyright notices on Free Internet Music, after all...
The nations that have OLPC programs now will be the ones that India will outsource its programming needs to in a decade. Like India, having a huge influx of money to its local talent will drive economic and intellectual development.
I did vote against him last time, and it was surprisingly close. He only got ~60% of the vote which for a "lifetime" senator is probably a little low. Maybe next election cycle...
That would be fantastic! It would prove that mutually exclusive wishes can be programmed in. "I want it red" followed by "I don't like red" followed by "I wanted it red", followed by "I told you not red".
One of these days those crazy scientists are going to do something and we will all just disappear into a mass of energy.
Don't worry, there's always an alternate universe where the experiment fails.
Re:Opposite way of thinking?
on
PHP 5 in Practice
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Is that really true? I find myself more the opposite where I know how to solve a problem theoretically but I need to know the exact syntax (and sometimes even the libraries/classes already available) to allow me to do what I want. Is this because I'm only a recent (2 yrs) CS grad? Isn't this the normal way to approach the problem due to the myriad languages used out there? It seems to me this might be true only if you're very familiar with a particular language and are trying to use that for everything which may or may not be possible.
Congratulations, you have discovered the difference between "experienced software developers" and computer scientists. Computer scientists know what they need to do and how to do it, so long as they can express it in the language they're using. Experienced software developers often know incredible amounts of detail about programming languages, but not necessarily about advanced algorithms and data structures.
Now the problem here isn't really with the definition of U, it's with the definition of A. You've logically set up a secenario such that A will inherently self-contradict itself. And you assume that a contradiction implies that it cannot exist. So far so good. This is reasonable. However, U can contain things that don't exist, because U contains absolutely _everything_, whether it exists or not. Logic does not have the means to grapple with a contradiction, so all that means is that not all members of U have properties that can be described logically.
Existence has no meaning if the universe contains everything that does and does not exist. It is impossible to tell whether any given thing exists, because the universe will contain it either way. This applies to the universe as well, because what you conceive of as the universe may simply be one of the nonexistent things contained in the "real" universe.
I make a distinction between descriptions of things and the things themselves. In one sense there is no difference between a thing and its description, assuming a perfect description language. For instance, expressions in the language of set theory can equally be said to describe and be the objects of set theory at the same time if set theory is consistent. The universe definitely contains all possible descriptions of things, because it contains all possible strings, but every string does not necessarily define an existing thing and not everything has a string that defines it. It is possible that the universe itself does not have a proper description in any language. That's the problem I see with your argument; simply naming an entity the Universe and describing it as containing everything does not necessarily describe a real object, or its properties.
The 'universe' containing everything that does not contain itself isn't the actual universe in the first place, since the universe _does_ contain itself. But yes, the real universe would contain this "sub-universe.
Which one of the following is untrue?
0. Assume the axiom of separation: {x is a member of S | P(x)} is a set, where S and x are sets and P(x) is a predicate function. The set consists of all x from S such that P(x) is true.
1. Assume the axiom of a universal set: The universe is the set U = {For All x, x is a member of U}
2. The set A = {x is a member of U | x is not a member of x} exists by separation.
3. Assume A is not a member of A, then A is a member of A by 2, a contradiction.
4. Assume A is a member of A, then A is not a member of A by 2, a contradiction.
5. At least one of the axiom of separation (0) or the axiom of the universal set (1) derives a contradiction.
The problem is that the universe cannot contain "A that contains itself" or "A that does not contain itself", even though we can describe them. That means the universe does not contain everything, or that our definition of everything is flawed, or that the universe doesn't follow consistent laws.
The word universe literally means "one all" or "one everything". This is inherently singular and refers to absolutely all that ever was, all that is, all that ever will be, and all possibilities in every configuration, past, present, future, as well as anything that might be beyond the notion of time itself. It is, quite literally _EVERYTHING_, visible and invisible, real and imagined, possible and impossible.
If the universe contains everything, it must contain everything that does not contain itself. The question is, does the universe contain itself? If the universe does contain itself, then it must also contain "the universe containing everything that does not contain itself" which should include the universe, but can't because it is excluded. If the universe doesn't contain "the universe containing everything that does not contain itself" or itself, then it isn't the universe by your definition since it doesn't contain everything. Welcome to Russell's Paradox.
Obviously any infinitely smart attacker with an infinite amount of time can break any encryption method.. are you sure? Just yesterday there was an article on slashdot about unsolved problems, and what do you know, The existence of one-way functions was one of them! Apparently its not so obvious after all.
One way functions are not unbreakable, just provably hard to invert (at least for finite functions, e.g. computable ones). The only way to break a true one way function is brute force, which is always able to break a cipher weaker than a one time pad (this basically means the message has meaning and is longer than the key), given enough time. An attacker with infinite time and space could defeat both. One way functions are easy, just try every possible input that the OWF could have used. One time pads are also breakable in a meta-theoretical way by an infinite attacker: Just use the infinite resources to simulate the entire universe over again and pick the desired message out of it.
It was true in 1843; it is true today. Why, exactly, do people continue to be deluded in gambling real money on the belief that some company supplying some cryptographic technology has people in it who are smarter than everybody else in the world?
Encryption is merely the process of protecting data for a given amount of time against an attacker with assumed resources. Obviously any infinitely smart attacker with an infinite amount of time can break any encryption method, but no one alive today will be able to break AES-128 within the next 50 years at least, and only then with a major mathematical breakthrough that would probably benefit humanity more than just the broken cipher. If we can't find a mathematical solution to breaking AES, it would take Moore's law approximately 100 years before computer technology was sufficient to break AES. 128 bit key lengths and longer were chosen explicitly to deal with the case that Moore's law will continue unabated and that mathematical breakthroughs are possible.
To put it in practical terms, every DES encrypted message is easily breakable now, but no one is really worried. DES encrypted data is now pretty much worthless. A lot of people overestimate the value of the data they encrypt, and often it's really only necessary to keep secret for a few years or decades at most. Even so, I doubt there will ever be an end to encryption, because even if P=NP there will be problems that are harder to solve than to pose. Such problems can be used for encryption as long as the ratio between the work to encrypt and decrypt is faster than breaking it by a sufficient margin which can usually be increased by lengthening the keys.
Follow your own advice and go there and see if you can view anybody's Sitekey. You won't be able to without being able to answer one of their security questions. The consequences of this have been hashed out extensively already in this discussion so I won't repeat them.
I couldn't remember the order, but it doesn't matter because the phisher will need to defeat the security questions one way or another, either by brute forcing the security questions or just asking the user for one or more of them. If the attacker tries to sign on enough times he'll eventually get a security question to which the victim gave him the answer. If the phisher is a true MITM he can just pass the security question and sitekey back to the victim in real time. Either way, the sitekey serves no purpose other than an additional redundant step during the logon procedure. I've long assumed that if the sitekey was missing due to a phishing attack, most users would never even notice. They would just assume a redundant step had been taken out of the login procedure. Even a "sitekey is nonfunctional at the moment due to system maintenance" notice would probably suffice.
Freedom of religion should not be extended to religions that are clearly made up. There is ample evidence to show that Hubbard pulled Scientology's belief system out his ass, the same cannot be said of any other religion from Christianity to Taoism to neo-paganism. The "Church" of Scientology is nothing more than a roving scam that exploits the first amendment to avoid taxation. It has also been shown to be a haven for systematic criminal behavior and should be considered a threat to American society.
Okay, present evidence that any supernatural event occurred as the impetus for one of the religions you listed. If you can't, you must assume that at some point it all originated in peoples' minds, which is pretty much the definition of "made up", isn't it? The legal system has no way of handling supernatural evidence, so therefore it must consider all religions "made up", and in fact it does. It respects the rights of people to hold a belief in a religion, and for ministers of religion to have certain rights like attorneys and spouses, but it certainly does not recognize any belief as being legally true based on religious claims. Granting more rights to "established" religions would actually be a violation of the 1st amendment's prohibition of laws respecting religion. Even ruling that a given religion is or is not "made up" would be a violation of the 1st amendment.
Belief entails many more actions than simply a thought in the brain. I highly doubt many Christians would disagree that beyond believing, a Christian must directly act on their belief which essentially means changing their entire life. Claiming that Christianity is just a simple decision is untrue, it requires dedication to several beliefs (namely anything that can be claimed from the Bible, usually plus a little cruft) and action based on those beliefs. If being saved was just considered an on-off switch, Christianity wouldn't have the influence it does, and in fact the switch could have been turned on for everyone in the world with very little change.
No, it's flawed, and I emailed them about it a couple times over the past year. The reason it's flawed is that a phisher only has to obtain the user's name to see the sitekey. Look at the site if you don't believe me. After the user puts in their username and clicks Sign In, the sitekey displays and asks for the password. It grants absolutely no more security than a simple username or password because a phisher can either brute force usernames and sitekeys in advance, or act as a simple man in the middle to get the user's password and "security question" answer.
For a while it was much worse, because their main page was completely unencrypted. They claimed that the username and password were encrypted before being sent, which is probably just as simple as a method="https://..." form or some javascript, but the real problem is that *any* man in the middle could easily replace the initial page with one that does anything they want, including stealing the username or password and redirecting to a "real" phishing site to steal the sitekey information virtually undetected. The victim would always have to view the source of the main bank of america page in order to make sure there was no javascript or other changes to the page that violated security. For several months I just entered a random username and password on the front page and waited for the redirect to an actual SSL page on the site before using my real name and password.
Whoever runs the bankofamerica site is a fool, and I'm surprised it took this long for anyone else to notice and publish the details. Turning off SSL for the main page went against everything users have been trained to look for in site security. They have since turned SSL back on (apparently not everyone was completely brain-dead) but sitekey is still annoying and useless.
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I know the feeling. I proved the Poincare Conjecture when I was 8, using a balloon a stapler. Unfortunately, I assumed it was trivial and never went public.
That's really pretty trivial, isn't it? Just blow the balloon up, squish and bend it a little bit, then let the air out. I'm pretty sure that describes an arbitrary manifold being isomorphic to a 3-sphere, especially the squishing part. I'm not sure what you used the stapler for, I thought putting rubber bands around the balloon would have been a better idea.
On the gripping hand - I saw an interview where the teen stated quite clearly "when it all started it was just like we were playing a video game". Thus, in his mind at least, there was some connection.
Now, I'm not going to lay all the blame on video games - but to pretend that they have no influence at all is ludicrous.
Criminals also blame voices, blackouts, hallucinations, and anything else they can think of to shift blame. I'm sure in the old days they said "Well, when it started it was just like a retelling of Beowulf or the Odyssey" to pretend they were coerced into committing violence.
Human brains commit criminal acts, it's not like there's some rational being sitting inside every human head weighing the options and listening to an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Fix broken brains if possible, or keep them permanently away from society.
so you'd have to make the encoding redundant enough so that most errors could be recovered by the receiver - without doubling the bandwidth. Oh, it would be fun!
That's what coding theory and forward error recovery is for. Reed Solomon coding has been used for space missions before, and they're the same codes used to make sure your CDs and DVDs play even when they're scratched. They can add any percentage of redundancy desirable, even dramatic over redundant messages for very noisy channels, or just a few percent for light noise.
And that's how it should be. Always. If you lose, you pay, with the theory that you'll learn your lesson and not do it again. Conversely, if they win, they get more money. It's a risk they took from the getgo, and have been getting away with it because there have been few real challenges against them.
The problem is that no one would sue a large company paying $5000 an hour for attorneys, for fear of losing being more costly than any possible judgment from winning. The law should limit the loser to paying only as much as his or her own attorney fees to the winner. That way it only depends on how seriously each side takes its case, and realistically it will have the same effect where it matters, namely where individuals need to sue large corporations. If they lose, they're only out twice as much as they would have paid their own lawyer, not $millions. If they win, the corporation almost certainly spent more than they did on lawyers, so they'll pay the whole bill. It makes even more sense when you consider that the corporation can essentially throw as many lawyers on the case as they want just to frighten an opponent with huge attorney fees because the lawyers are employees and they'd be paying them no matter what they were working on.
As one who has a software patent to my name, this debate is intensely interesting to me. In my case, the patent is actually more an algorithm patent than a software patent, though the actual source code for the algorithm is listed in the patent itself. It represents one possible instantiation of the algorithm. And now I can see a debate immediately arising about the difference between "software" and "algorithm". :-)
How long did it take you to develop the algorithm? What's the patent number?
I'm just curious, because most of the software patents I've seen are for relatively trivial things that any competent programmer could come up with. 25 years for a software patent is also an extremely long time.
C and cgi.
Amen. With critical functions (XML parser, for instance) rewritten in assembly for speed.
Almost by definition, a person has to mentally damaged in order to accept religion. This is no slight against any person so damaged, any more than a person damaged by a viral infection is at fault. It is not your fault that your mind was infected by an insidious mental virus that has damaged your ability to think, in order to make you better at spreading the virus to others. But you should not be respected for having the virus, and your attempts to pass the virus on to others should be stopped.
I'd say the desire to destroy religion is just another virus trying to survive and replicate in a competitive universe. Making arbitrary value judgments about which virus should win is just part of the competitive process.
It's always fun to flood the MPAA with information about vicious acts of piracy.
I made sure to point out that not only did they infringe Forest Blog's copyright on every page view, they also stole advertising revenue from Forest Blog that would have been generated by the links that were removed from the MPAA's blog, causing at least as much financial harm as "stealing" copies of DVDs. I think the author probably has a reasonably strong civil claim to get that money back, which would hopefully pull in plenty of statutory damages for each act of infringement too.
What if someone else violated the license and made a stripped version of the code available, without any references to the original author? How in general can one tell whether one is getting the original code with intact copyright notices?
That's what I think whenever I download free music from the Internet: "Must just be a cover band releasing their work for free." I've never seen or heard any copyright notices on Free Internet Music, after all...
The nations that have OLPC programs now will be the ones that India will outsource its programming needs to in a decade. Like India, having a huge influx of money to its local talent will drive economic and intellectual development.
I did vote against him last time, and it was surprisingly close. He only got ~60% of the vote which for a "lifetime" senator is probably a little low. Maybe next election cycle...
That would be fantastic! It would prove that mutually exclusive wishes can be programmed in. "I want it red" followed by "I don't like red" followed by "I wanted it red", followed by "I told you not red".
One word:
<blink>
Hope it passes. After someone adds an amendment stating that it only applies to Alaska.
I'm an Alaskan, you insensitive clod!
One of these days those crazy scientists are going to do something and we will all just disappear into a mass of energy.
Don't worry, there's always an alternate universe where the experiment fails.
Is that really true? I find myself more the opposite where I know how to solve a problem theoretically but I need to know the exact syntax (and sometimes even the libraries/classes already available) to allow me to do what I want. Is this because I'm only a recent (2 yrs) CS grad? Isn't this the normal way to approach the problem due to the myriad languages used out there? It seems to me this might be true only if you're very familiar with a particular language and are trying to use that for everything which may or may not be possible.
Congratulations, you have discovered the difference between "experienced software developers" and computer scientists. Computer scientists know what they need to do and how to do it, so long as they can express it in the language they're using. Experienced software developers often know incredible amounts of detail about programming languages, but not necessarily about advanced algorithms and data structures.
[ASCII text in Binary string] + 1
It's so simple that it might just work!
J think you're right! (this message hashed)
Now the problem here isn't really with the definition of U, it's with the definition of A. You've logically set up a secenario such that A will inherently self-contradict itself. And you assume that a contradiction implies that it cannot exist. So far so good. This is reasonable. However, U can contain things that don't exist, because U contains absolutely _everything_, whether it exists or not. Logic does not have the means to grapple with a contradiction, so all that means is that not all members of U have properties that can be described logically.
Existence has no meaning if the universe contains everything that does and does not exist. It is impossible to tell whether any given thing exists, because the universe will contain it either way. This applies to the universe as well, because what you conceive of as the universe may simply be one of the nonexistent things contained in the "real" universe.
I make a distinction between descriptions of things and the things themselves. In one sense there is no difference between a thing and its description, assuming a perfect description language. For instance, expressions in the language of set theory can equally be said to describe and be the objects of set theory at the same time if set theory is consistent. The universe definitely contains all possible descriptions of things, because it contains all possible strings, but every string does not necessarily define an existing thing and not everything has a string that defines it. It is possible that the universe itself does not have a proper description in any language. That's the problem I see with your argument; simply naming an entity the Universe and describing it as containing everything does not necessarily describe a real object, or its properties.
The 'universe' containing everything that does not contain itself isn't the actual universe in the first place, since the universe _does_ contain itself. But yes, the real universe would contain this "sub-universe.
Which one of the following is untrue?
0. Assume the axiom of separation: {x is a member of S | P(x)} is a set, where S and x are sets and P(x) is a predicate function. The set consists of all x from S such that P(x) is true.
1. Assume the axiom of a universal set: The universe is the set U = {For All x, x is a member of U}
2. The set A = {x is a member of U | x is not a member of x} exists by separation.
3. Assume A is not a member of A, then A is a member of A by 2, a contradiction.
4. Assume A is a member of A, then A is not a member of A by 2, a contradiction.
5. At least one of the axiom of separation (0) or the axiom of the universal set (1) derives a contradiction.
The problem is that the universe cannot contain "A that contains itself" or "A that does not contain itself", even though we can describe them. That means the universe does not contain everything, or that our definition of everything is flawed, or that the universe doesn't follow consistent laws.
The word universe literally means "one all" or "one everything". This is inherently singular and refers to absolutely all that ever was, all that is, all that ever will be, and all possibilities in every configuration, past, present, future, as well as anything that might be beyond the notion of time itself. It is, quite literally _EVERYTHING_, visible and invisible, real and imagined, possible and impossible.
If the universe contains everything, it must contain everything that does not contain itself. The question is, does the universe contain itself? If the universe does contain itself, then it must also contain "the universe containing everything that does not contain itself" which should include the universe, but can't because it is excluded. If the universe doesn't contain "the universe containing everything that does not contain itself" or itself, then it isn't the universe by your definition since it doesn't contain everything. Welcome to Russell's Paradox.
Obviously any infinitely smart attacker with an infinite amount of time can break any encryption method .. are you sure? Just yesterday there was an article on slashdot about unsolved problems, and what do you know, The existence of one-way functions was one of them! Apparently its not so obvious after all.
One way functions are not unbreakable, just provably hard to invert (at least for finite functions, e.g. computable ones). The only way to break a true one way function is brute force, which is always able to break a cipher weaker than a one time pad (this basically means the message has meaning and is longer than the key), given enough time. An attacker with infinite time and space could defeat both. One way functions are easy, just try every possible input that the OWF could have used. One time pads are also breakable in a meta-theoretical way by an infinite attacker: Just use the infinite resources to simulate the entire universe over again and pick the desired message out of it.
It was true in 1843; it is true today. Why, exactly, do people continue to be deluded in gambling real money on the belief that some company supplying some cryptographic technology has people in it who are smarter than everybody else in the world?
Encryption is merely the process of protecting data for a given amount of time against an attacker with assumed resources. Obviously any infinitely smart attacker with an infinite amount of time can break any encryption method, but no one alive today will be able to break AES-128 within the next 50 years at least, and only then with a major mathematical breakthrough that would probably benefit humanity more than just the broken cipher. If we can't find a mathematical solution to breaking AES, it would take Moore's law approximately 100 years before computer technology was sufficient to break AES. 128 bit key lengths and longer were chosen explicitly to deal with the case that Moore's law will continue unabated and that mathematical breakthroughs are possible.
To put it in practical terms, every DES encrypted message is easily breakable now, but no one is really worried. DES encrypted data is now pretty much worthless. A lot of people overestimate the value of the data they encrypt, and often it's really only necessary to keep secret for a few years or decades at most. Even so, I doubt there will ever be an end to encryption, because even if P=NP there will be problems that are harder to solve than to pose. Such problems can be used for encryption as long as the ratio between the work to encrypt and decrypt is faster than breaking it by a sufficient margin which can usually be increased by lengthening the keys.
Follow your own advice and go there and see if you can view anybody's Sitekey. You won't be able to without being able to answer one of their security questions. The consequences of this have been hashed out extensively already in this discussion so I won't repeat them.
I couldn't remember the order, but it doesn't matter because the phisher will need to defeat the security questions one way or another, either by brute forcing the security questions or just asking the user for one or more of them. If the attacker tries to sign on enough times he'll eventually get a security question to which the victim gave him the answer. If the phisher is a true MITM he can just pass the security question and sitekey back to the victim in real time. Either way, the sitekey serves no purpose other than an additional redundant step during the logon procedure. I've long assumed that if the sitekey was missing due to a phishing attack, most users would never even notice. They would just assume a redundant step had been taken out of the login procedure. Even a "sitekey is nonfunctional at the moment due to system maintenance" notice would probably suffice.
Freedom of religion should not be extended to religions that are clearly made up. There is ample evidence to show that Hubbard pulled Scientology's belief system out his ass, the same cannot be said of any other religion from Christianity to Taoism to neo-paganism. The "Church" of Scientology is nothing more than a roving scam that exploits the first amendment to avoid taxation. It has also been shown to be a haven for systematic criminal behavior and should be considered a threat to American society.
Okay, present evidence that any supernatural event occurred as the impetus for one of the religions you listed. If you can't, you must assume that at some point it all originated in peoples' minds, which is pretty much the definition of "made up", isn't it? The legal system has no way of handling supernatural evidence, so therefore it must consider all religions "made up", and in fact it does. It respects the rights of people to hold a belief in a religion, and for ministers of religion to have certain rights like attorneys and spouses, but it certainly does not recognize any belief as being legally true based on religious claims. Granting more rights to "established" religions would actually be a violation of the 1st amendment's prohibition of laws respecting religion. Even ruling that a given religion is or is not "made up" would be a violation of the 1st amendment.
Actually, no. Just "X", which is John 14:6.
Belief entails many more actions than simply a thought in the brain. I highly doubt many Christians would disagree that beyond believing, a Christian must directly act on their belief which essentially means changing their entire life. Claiming that Christianity is just a simple decision is untrue, it requires dedication to several beliefs (namely anything that can be claimed from the Bible, usually plus a little cruft) and action based on those beliefs. If being saved was just considered an on-off switch, Christianity wouldn't have the influence it does, and in fact the switch could have been turned on for everyone in the world with very little change.
No, it's flawed, and I emailed them about it a couple times over the past year. The reason it's flawed is that a phisher only has to obtain the user's name to see the sitekey. Look at the site if you don't believe me. After the user puts in their username and clicks Sign In, the sitekey displays and asks for the password. It grants absolutely no more security than a simple username or password because a phisher can either brute force usernames and sitekeys in advance, or act as a simple man in the middle to get the user's password and "security question" answer.
For a while it was much worse, because their main page was completely unencrypted. They claimed that the username and password were encrypted before being sent, which is probably just as simple as a method="https://..." form or some javascript, but the real problem is that *any* man in the middle could easily replace the initial page with one that does anything they want, including stealing the username or password and redirecting to a "real" phishing site to steal the sitekey information virtually undetected. The victim would always have to view the source of the main bank of america page in order to make sure there was no javascript or other changes to the page that violated security. For several months I just entered a random username and password on the front page and waited for the redirect to an actual SSL page on the site before using my real name and password.
Whoever runs the bankofamerica site is a fool, and I'm surprised it took this long for anyone else to notice and publish the details. Turning off SSL for the main page went against everything users have been trained to look for in site security. They have since turned SSL back on (apparently not everyone was completely brain-dead) but sitekey is still annoying and useless.