That's a generational issue -- I'd rather deal with a few levels of menus than have to explain to five people in a row what my problem with, each time being forwarded to a different department.
Dude, as I posted to the other respondant -- look up the stats yourself. Its not religious opinion. YES, condoms _help_ prevent HIV, yes, to a significant degree, but no, not to an anywhere near perfect level, as the statistics the UN commissioned found, but believe what you like.
The typical use pregnancy rate among condom users varies depending on the population being studied, ranging from 10-18% per year.[32] The perfect use pregnancy rate of condoms is 2% per year.[3]
(see Wikipedia), also:
According to a 2000 report by the National Institutes of Health, correct and consistent use of latex condoms reduces the risk of HIV/AIDS transmission by approximately 85% relative to risk when unprotected, putting the seroconversion rate (infection rate) at 0.9 per 100 person-years with condom, down from 6.7 per 100 person-years.
Feel free to go look up the numbers on any legitimate website. In fact Wikipedia has the stats cited there as well -- 2% failure rate on _perfect_ condom use for pregnancy protection.
HIV protection is lower yet, of course.
PS, the _actual_ _average_ failure rate is between 10 and 20% on condom use for pregnancy prevention, partly due to not always following directions.
Good luck with believing what you believe though -- and I'm not a prude -- I believe in truth, not making up facts to justify your own behaviours.
Go read some statistics. Condoms really suck at preventing even pregnancy, and that requires only blocking items of greater than cellular size, not viral.
Last package I checked actually required keeping the condoms refrigerated until use and double-wrapping to actually hit their (already less than stellar) prevention rate... FOR PREGNANCY.
That's what's wrong with them -- they suck at what they're supposed to do.
A complete lack of capitalization is the latest craze, but it and block-caps typing are often each a very rapid indicator of the intelligence of the typer in my experience.
My user ID's not under 50k though, so who am I to say?:-)
We're pretty sure gravity exists and we can describe very accurately how it will affect things in the physical world, but do we really understand why there is gravity and how it functions?
We assume things about gravity based on our theories thereof and tried to get rockets to the moon and succeeded. We assumed other things (such as dependency on mass) and managed to slingshot spacecraft out of our own solar system. We can accurately predict the effects of gravity within a number of parameters. I challenge you to come up with similar tests of evolutionary theory. I'd like to note that assuming something about a species then finding a species or fossil that may or may not validate that assumption is very different here than predictable experimentation.
But does that mean doubting the theory of gravity is productive and makes one a better scientist?
Go back and read the article on the Higgs Boson -- many (most?) particle physicists doubt Einsteins theory of Special Relativity and try to experiment to prove their own theories instead. Others believe Special Relativity is a better way of describing things and make their own experiments instead. Until Einstein, nobody seriously challenged what we believed about gravity for many years.
In response to another poster, should he simply have stood on the shoulders of thought before him and ignored what he theorized as crazy talk? Should his peers?
The more you understand about anything, the more you should be coming to grips with how little humanity knows about that subject. Biology is one of those areas where most milestones lead us to a better understanding of how little we really understand (see Human Genome Project). I've learned to take everything with a grain of salt these days, and a lot of healthy skepticism keeps me from agreeing with some others about some subjects, but I'm not too concerned about it.
Interestingly and perhaps ironically, you were replying to a deeply religious person. I know him well:-)
Religious belief and critical thought are not necessarily disconnected -- there's a specific modernistic worldview that precludes the two being compatible but its not a required worldview nor a provably correct one.
The process of evolution is a highly confirmed theory, to the point that most of us just go ahead and refer to it as a fact. To say it's only a theory at this point requires an esoteric discussion of the definition of theory vs fact, and the only rational people I know who have any lingering doubts about it are deeply religious and take the Bible quite literally.
... or have a bad habit of believing everything they're taught instead of researching it for themselves. People who doubt evolution make better scientists than those who believe it because its well accepted. Doubt is good. Doubt is a healthy part of critical thinking. Combined with research and possibly experimentation (although mostly research in evolution's case), this makes for good science.
The facts of it are that we have an extremely limited knowledge of the process of evolution. The scientific community is pretty good with the effects as observed, but not the process, although there are some good sub-theories about that.
How and Why are good questions. Ask them more, explain your answers if you think you have them, and don't put down people who doubt if they're willing to listen and make good counter-arguments; those things will just help you refine your own thinking.
Sure, the poster was wrong about the distance issue, but in normal viewing situations, HD resolutions make a lot of sense for TV and movie watching (not to mention the increased audio quality).
I've seen the charts that show the supposed ability of the human eye to distinguish certain resolutions, and they all fail to take into account how the brain processes the signal over time as your eye moves (giving you a much higher resolution of vision).
Sure, if you watch a 17" screen from 10' away, its doubtful you can tell if its running at 640x480 or 1920x1280, but you wouldn't watch TV like that in the first place, would you?
Under most circumstances, I can't imagine (these days) configuring myself a MythTV like box without HD output capabilities.
PS, I use a PS3 with its DLNA UPnP features to watch my downloaded / ripped shows and movies in HD or upscaled on a 30" 1080i CRT.
Sony has been saying since day one that they were bundling in the things they needed to make sure the console had a 10 year life. Yeah, the price started out higher than a lot of people would have liked, but the price has been steadily dropping.
And yet people didn't listen on Day 1 and mostly bought 360s, not PS3s. Sony got lambasted by geeks and reviewers alike for making a system that's too expensive with too many "useless" features and without a real competitive advantage to the 360.
If they didn't listen then, why would they start tomorrow? People who bought a 360 on Day 1 have had it for over two years. Many of those with the disposable income for a "NeXTBox" (sorry Jobs) who don't buy them are the PC game players who are already buying new parts every 6 months or more to keep up. I'm not sure Microsoft realizes that the game industry profits come from making your hardware last 10 years or being very unique and cheap, not from being expensive with a short shelf-life and high defect rates.
Maybe they'll clue in, but again, they haven't yet.
Numb3rs has been reviewed by one of MIT's publications because it is so factual about its math in many cases. Many of the cases (at least in the first season) were based on actual cases solved using those actual math techniques.
Sure, they dramatize the whole thing, and you don't watch code-monkeys plugging away at computers for hours at a time, but the math itself is quite solid and the data input and extrapolations based on that math are based in reality.
Or for that matter, a $399 PS3 that plays BD movies and also plays all but the exclusive 360 games on the market.
Of course, according to Microsoft, people don't care if their game system can play high definition content (ditto to Nintendo, who actually publishes and encourages unique games).
Microsoft's ONLY gimmick (and I don't use that word negatively) is their online Live feature. Sure the system has a few exclusives, and will surely have more, but the Playstation 3 also has exclusives, and a motion-sensitive controller, and free online gaming. The Wii has an even more motion-based control system and some unique games as a result.
In my opinion (which hasn't changed since the PS3 was released) is that Microsoft will be bringing out a third XBox much sooner than you'd expect to try and leapfrog the PS3's technology advantages. Microsoft HAS historically "got it right" (or at least sunk its competitors) with version 3 products, and we'll have to wait and see if that happens again with the next Xbox, but this one isn't it.
Many people will have noticed by now that those who believe they can do things are usually the same people who cannot in fact do those things.
"I can write an uncrackable encryption system", "I can write the ultimate compression algorithm" and other statements of their ilk show up around here frequently enough to make me nauseous.
Making a good, fast, efficient filesystem is hard enough without also making it competitive and stable.
BD also has a higher transfer rate, which is more important than some of the other issues that get so much notice.
A higher transfer rate means being able to use higher maximum bitrates in whatever codec you choose, meaning higher quality in high-motion scenes for example.
Personally I watch my downloads / rips with my PS3 using its network media player. I'd still rather purchase a BD movie if I like it more than a rental than purchase a downloaded movie.
The only way I'd purchase downloadable movies is if I can back them up in a generic format that can be played back easily with open standards based software.
I should have qualified my comments. Torture as a way of extracting reliable information from prisoners is not effective in general. Torture as a method of conducting terrorism works great (which is what you described at the end).
Its a good thing the US doesn't do things like say, repeatedly play videos of cops taking down suspects and criminals with prejudice with the effect of scaring people into compliance in general.
Find me a person who knows how to even FIND the IPSec keys and will also give them up, and I'll be impressed.
In my configurations (and I specified well-configured, did I not?), I install the keys on the VPN gateways and nowhere else. I keep copies of the public keys on backup media, and in case of a system failure, a secondary set of new keys can be installed and used (for which the public keys have already been distributed) but to which the customer has had no prior access.
IPSec VPNs configured at borders between networks are very fun.
More interestingly, the psychological condition of the person being tortured must be considered. Many people in torturous conditions believe either they will eventually be set free (and therefore have no need to give up information) or believe they will never be set free and/or killed once they are of no use (and therefore shouldn't give up information).
Modern evolutionists (and I use that term explicitly) speak of evolution as though it were conscious, which it obviously is not. Of course, the way some evolutionists speak of evolution, you'd think they were creationists with all that intelligent design rhetoric. Of course anyone who actually considers the situation realizes that there would be many more failed evolutions of a species than successful ones, and that many of these evolutionary steps are really quite huge undertakings. A lung or a gill isn't the issue, a covered eye or uncovered, we're talking billions of cells in cooperation, not a widget that spontaneously shows up.
PS, an evolutionist in my vocabulary is one who preaches the gospel of evolution, as opposed to a scientist who believes evolution to be the most probable explanation for something we have a hard time observing because of the time scale involved.
On the contrary -- people who say torture works watch too many movies. Ditto for people who think lie detectors work. You do realize the CIA has admitted to never actually outing an agent with a lie detector, right?
Torture is a useful way to justify your own actions and beliefs, and it may be a way to get information from someone IF they have that information but it is NOT a good reliable way of ascertaining if they even know that information nor if the information they give you is accurate.
Some people you can beat half to death and they'll just let you kill them out of spite. Some people will lie from the start just to see if they can outwit you. Some will give up everything after being threatened once. Can you tell the difference? I'll tell you one thing, a lot of those doing the torturing sure can't, not to mention that you wouldn't be able to admit to having torture training in the first place.
Not to mention that LUKS is easier to configure and works beautifully out of the box on any distro I use.
If you use Linux and haven't configured LUKS yet, give it a try, its fun. I automatically configure all my swap partitions as LUKS volumes with a randomly assigned key at boot (one of the LUKS options) so unless you can figure out what the never-saved key was after a power outage, that swap data is gone forever, like the RAM it emulates.
I'm very proud to be Canadian for several reasons, and one of them is our stance on Copyright and fair use. I quiver in fear (as I commented in my blog just yesterday) at the thought of us introducing draconian DMCA-like legislation, but I think in general Canadians really do get it more than our American counterparts.
Most telling is how the ISPs and judges have stood on these issues in the past. A judge in Canada recently compared the use of file sharing software having illegal uses to a photocopier in a library being usable for illegally reproducing entire books. Do you remove photocopiers from libraries just because they could be used for illegal purposes? Exactly.
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That's a generational issue -- I'd rather deal with a few levels of menus than have to explain to five people in a row what my problem with, each time being forwarded to a different department.
Feel free to go look up the numbers on any legitimate website. In fact Wikipedia has the stats cited there as well -- 2% failure rate on _perfect_ condom use for pregnancy protection.
HIV protection is lower yet, of course.
PS, the _actual_ _average_ failure rate is between 10 and 20% on condom use for pregnancy prevention, partly due to not always following directions.
Good luck with believing what you believe though -- and I'm not a prude -- I believe in truth, not making up facts to justify your own behaviours.
Go read some statistics. Condoms really suck at preventing even pregnancy, and that requires only blocking items of greater than cellular size, not viral.
... FOR PREGNANCY.
Last package I checked actually required keeping the condoms refrigerated until use and double-wrapping to actually hit their (already less than stellar) prevention rate
That's what's wrong with them -- they suck at what they're supposed to do.
A complete lack of capitalization is the latest craze, but it and block-caps typing are often each a very rapid indicator of the intelligence of the typer in my experience.
:-)
My user ID's not under 50k though, so who am I to say?
I said no such thing and your comment barely warrants a response as a result -- a good understanding of grammar helps in a debate.
I said skepticism shouldn't be disdained. I doubt Newton would disagree.
We assume things about gravity based on our theories thereof and tried to get rockets to the moon and succeeded. We assumed other things (such as dependency on mass) and managed to slingshot spacecraft out of our own solar system. We can accurately predict the effects of gravity within a number of parameters. I challenge you to come up with similar tests of evolutionary theory. I'd like to note that assuming something about a species then finding a species or fossil that may or may not validate that assumption is very different here than predictable experimentation.
Go back and read the article on the Higgs Boson -- many (most?) particle physicists doubt Einsteins theory of Special Relativity and try to experiment to prove their own theories instead. Others believe Special Relativity is a better way of describing things and make their own experiments instead. Until Einstein, nobody seriously challenged what we believed about gravity for many years.
In response to another poster, should he simply have stood on the shoulders of thought before him and ignored what he theorized as crazy talk? Should his peers?
The more you understand about anything, the more you should be coming to grips with how little humanity knows about that subject. Biology is one of those areas where most milestones lead us to a better understanding of how little we really understand (see Human Genome Project). I've learned to take everything with a grain of salt these days, and a lot of healthy skepticism keeps me from agreeing with some others about some subjects, but I'm not too concerned about it.
Interestingly and perhaps ironically, you were replying to a deeply religious person. I know him well :-)
Religious belief and critical thought are not necessarily disconnected -- there's a specific modernistic worldview that precludes the two being compatible but its not a required worldview nor a provably correct one.
The facts of it are that we have an extremely limited knowledge of the process of evolution. The scientific community is pretty good with the effects as observed, but not the process, although there are some good sub-theories about that.
How and Why are good questions. Ask them more, explain your answers if you think you have them, and don't put down people who doubt if they're willing to listen and make good counter-arguments; those things will just help you refine your own thinking.
Sure, the poster was wrong about the distance issue, but in normal viewing situations, HD resolutions make a lot of sense for TV and movie watching (not to mention the increased audio quality).
I've seen the charts that show the supposed ability of the human eye to distinguish certain resolutions, and they all fail to take into account how the brain processes the signal over time as your eye moves (giving you a much higher resolution of vision).
Sure, if you watch a 17" screen from 10' away, its doubtful you can tell if its running at 640x480 or 1920x1280, but you wouldn't watch TV like that in the first place, would you?
Under most circumstances, I can't imagine (these days) configuring myself a MythTV like box without HD output capabilities.
PS, I use a PS3 with its DLNA UPnP features to watch my downloaded / ripped shows and movies in HD or upscaled on a 30" 1080i CRT.
And yet people didn't listen on Day 1 and mostly bought 360s, not PS3s. Sony got lambasted by geeks and reviewers alike for making a system that's too expensive with too many "useless" features and without a real competitive advantage to the 360.
If they didn't listen then, why would they start tomorrow? People who bought a 360 on Day 1 have had it for over two years. Many of those with the disposable income for a "NeXTBox" (sorry Jobs) who don't buy them are the PC game players who are already buying new parts every 6 months or more to keep up. I'm not sure Microsoft realizes that the game industry profits come from making your hardware last 10 years or being very unique and cheap, not from being expensive with a short shelf-life and high defect rates.
Maybe they'll clue in, but again, they haven't yet.
Numb3rs has been reviewed by one of MIT's publications because it is so factual about its math in many cases. Many of the cases (at least in the first season) were based on actual cases solved using those actual math techniques.
Sure, they dramatize the whole thing, and you don't watch code-monkeys plugging away at computers for hours at a time, but the math itself is quite solid and the data input and extrapolations based on that math are based in reality.
Or for that matter, a $399 PS3 that plays BD movies and also plays all but the exclusive 360 games on the market.
Of course, according to Microsoft, people don't care if their game system can play high definition content (ditto to Nintendo, who actually publishes and encourages unique games).
Microsoft's ONLY gimmick (and I don't use that word negatively) is their online Live feature. Sure the system has a few exclusives, and will surely have more, but the Playstation 3 also has exclusives, and a motion-sensitive controller, and free online gaming. The Wii has an even more motion-based control system and some unique games as a result.
In my opinion (which hasn't changed since the PS3 was released) is that Microsoft will be bringing out a third XBox much sooner than you'd expect to try and leapfrog the PS3's technology advantages. Microsoft HAS historically "got it right" (or at least sunk its competitors) with version 3 products, and we'll have to wait and see if that happens again with the next Xbox, but this one isn't it.
Many people will have noticed by now that those who believe they can do things are usually the same people who cannot in fact do those things.
"I can write an uncrackable encryption system", "I can write the ultimate compression algorithm" and other statements of their ilk show up around here frequently enough to make me nauseous.
Making a good, fast, efficient filesystem is hard enough without also making it competitive and stable.
BD also has a higher transfer rate, which is more important than some of the other issues that get so much notice.
A higher transfer rate means being able to use higher maximum bitrates in whatever codec you choose, meaning higher quality in high-motion scenes for example.
Personally I watch my downloads / rips with my PS3 using its network media player. I'd still rather purchase a BD movie if I like it more than a rental than purchase a downloaded movie.
The only way I'd purchase downloadable movies is if I can back them up in a generic format that can be played back easily with open standards based software.
I should have qualified my comments. Torture as a way of extracting reliable information from prisoners is not effective in general. Torture as a method of conducting terrorism works great (which is what you described at the end).
Its a good thing the US doesn't do things like say, repeatedly play videos of cops taking down suspects and criminals with prejudice with the effect of scaring people into compliance in general.
Find me a person who knows how to even FIND the IPSec keys and will also give them up, and I'll be impressed.
In my configurations (and I specified well-configured, did I not?), I install the keys on the VPN gateways and nowhere else. I keep copies of the public keys on backup media, and in case of a system failure, a secondary set of new keys can be installed and used (for which the public keys have already been distributed) but to which the customer has had no prior access.
IPSec VPNs configured at borders between networks are very fun.
More interestingly, the psychological condition of the person being tortured must be considered. Many people in torturous conditions believe either they will eventually be set free (and therefore have no need to give up information) or believe they will never be set free and/or killed once they are of no use (and therefore shouldn't give up information).
More interestingly, will a BD player play DVD media with HD-DVD content (assuming you re-compressed it to fit).
Modern evolutionists (and I use that term explicitly) speak of evolution as though it were conscious, which it obviously is not. Of course, the way some evolutionists speak of evolution, you'd think they were creationists with all that intelligent design rhetoric. Of course anyone who actually considers the situation realizes that there would be many more failed evolutions of a species than successful ones, and that many of these evolutionary steps are really quite huge undertakings. A lung or a gill isn't the issue, a covered eye or uncovered, we're talking billions of cells in cooperation, not a widget that spontaneously shows up.
PS, an evolutionist in my vocabulary is one who preaches the gospel of evolution, as opposed to a scientist who believes evolution to be the most probable explanation for something we have a hard time observing because of the time scale involved.
On the contrary -- people who say torture works watch too many movies. Ditto for people who think lie detectors work. You do realize the CIA has admitted to never actually outing an agent with a lie detector, right?
Torture is a useful way to justify your own actions and beliefs, and it may be a way to get information from someone IF they have that information but it is NOT a good reliable way of ascertaining if they even know that information nor if the information they give you is accurate.
Some people you can beat half to death and they'll just let you kill them out of spite. Some people will lie from the start just to see if they can outwit you. Some will give up everything after being threatened once. Can you tell the difference? I'll tell you one thing, a lot of those doing the torturing sure can't, not to mention that you wouldn't be able to admit to having torture training in the first place.
Not to mention that LUKS is easier to configure and works beautifully out of the box on any distro I use.
If you use Linux and haven't configured LUKS yet, give it a try, its fun. I automatically configure all my swap partitions as LUKS volumes with a randomly assigned key at boot (one of the LUKS options) so unless you can figure out what the never-saved key was after a power outage, that swap data is gone forever, like the RAM it emulates.
Really now? Feel free to tell me how a 'skilled' hacker cracks a properly established IPSec tunnel using AES256 and pre-arranged 2048bit public keys.
I'm still waiting.
I'm very proud to be Canadian for several reasons, and one of them is our stance on Copyright and fair use. I quiver in fear (as I commented in my blog just yesterday) at the thought of us introducing draconian DMCA-like legislation, but I think in general Canadians really do get it more than our American counterparts.
Most telling is how the ISPs and judges have stood on these issues in the past. A judge in Canada recently compared the use of file sharing software having illegal uses to a photocopier in a library being usable for illegally reproducing entire books. Do you remove photocopiers from libraries just because they could be used for illegal purposes? Exactly.
Lets hope, pray and protest to keep these rights.