But the really, really great bit is that you can never "prove" the core axioms; your "absolute truths" will therefore always be dependent on a set of unprovable assumptions.
-- UNIX-y utilities, usually on the command line and a bit crufty in places, but free and nicely configurable -- Mac-type utilities with marvelous interfaces that will probably set you back a nice chunk of change
When I was in the business, we used Carbon Copy Cloner, but g4u, Remote Desktop 3, or just plain old rsync are all pretty good bets depending on what type of imaging you're planning to do. CCC actually has one foot in both of the two camps I just described.
Of course, I even remember the crusty old days of Assimilator.
Oh, I should just add in passing that then-AG Alberto Gonzales admitted the existence of the NSA spy program after the Times article came out. He said that it was substantially in the form reported in the press but understandably refused to provide details.
I appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism but this is absolutely not the place to administer it. Next you'll be telling me that the technical hurdles associated with going to the moon prove that we never landed men there.
You seem to have a lot of difficulty believing that any kind of computer exists that's capable of analyzing multi-gigabit data streams at wire speed. You should read about the NarusInsight, the hardware package that the whistleblowers say the NSA uses. Imagine a cybernetic zombie Snort on steroids and you start to get the idea.
More than a dozen people with positions everywhere from the NSA itself to AT&T have admitted roles in the construction and operation of the tap rooms. The fed has repeatedly invoked the state secrets exception to kill lawsuits that even tangentially involve the tap program. News agencies on every bar of the political rainbow have run reports confirming its existence and the New York Times at least was asked by the government not to go with its story. Now I could write a research paper meticulously documenting the outing of the spy program in the press but anyone with access to Google could do the same thing in five minutes. It exists. The only question remaining is how much data the NSA sifts through and whose, and the whistleblowers have been pretty clear on the point that the spooks aren't very discriminating. I'm sorry, but one guy on Slashdot saying "no, it isn't" can't undo three years of meticulous investigative journalism by the newspapers of record of both the left and right wings and the bravery of those involved who have admitted their involvement.
I am thankful every day for the fact that we live in the world's leakiest democracy, so we at least know about these wanton violations of our civil rights. But after a couple of token lawsuits the EFF essentially gave up and now wastes its time keeping my pizza orders out of the hands of my Facebook pals. It's a sad day when the only outfit I can count on to fight the government out of my private life is the government.
The sad truth is that the NSA is actually reading everything via data mining. There are pictures of the "tap rooms" inside data centers of every major ISP in the US where they set up their equipment and dip into the petabytes of data that get transferred in plaintext every day. So human beings aren't reading all of your sexy letters to your girlfriend/Linux box/dog, but I'm sure the system is set up to flag "interesting" correspondence for human analysis.
The net result for the life of the average nerd: probably not much unless you have hobbies the NSA doesn't like, such as developing cryptographic software or Islamic studies. But then killing Beacon was even less pointless privacy-wise, because it was only ever going to be used to generate data for targeting ads (which Google already does) and plastering your face on them (which Google doesn't).
I maintain that lawyers are suing the social networking services right now because it's hip and sexy and gets you on the cover of Time. There are much more effective ways to benefit the privacy of the American people but as I said above they will likely kill the political careers these 1-800-scumbags are trying to kickstart.
In short, the NSA has been reading everything sent in plaintext since Bush II, and yet the EFF spends untold millions on lawsuits to make sure that my friends on Facebook don't know what kind of pizza I order from Domino's. What a great allocation of scarce pro-privacy resources.
I know exactly why this is: if you sue Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you get your name in the papers. If you go after the NSA you get called "soft on terror" and your campaign bid for governor of East Nowhere is sunk.
The idea that "privacy" continues to exist in any shape, way, or form in a world where an NSA text-mining system reads every email, text message, blog post, and Slashdot comment you ever write is laughable. Why don't these jokers go after the people who flagrantly violate your privacy every minute of every day?
To what extent are "benign conditions" suitable to the formation of life? Without an environment that exerts selection pressure on existing organisms, there would be nothing driving the development of more complex and adapted organisms. Of course too much environmental volatility is a problem as well, but it can't just be a completely sealed biosphere or evolution could never happen.
What's more, Apple's been sued a couple of times over the definition of a gigabyte by angry idiots who didn't understand that 10^9 != 2^30. Possibly they're doing this in part to minimize their future liability.
That's fair enough, I guess I was just pining for the good old days with my 12" Powerbook dualbooting OS 9 and X and my Visor Edge... from the article I got the impression that Apple had just nuked iSync support, but it's possible it was a casualty of the 32/64-bit transition (or maybe the Palm-specific code had been running in Rosetta all this time anyway).
Before anyone gets down on me, let me say I am a big-time Apple junkie. I have an iPhone, an iMac, a Macbook, hell, even an Apple TV. I code in Perl and Objective-C.
That said, this is totally unconscionable. Apple has an obligation to its users not to break things that used to work for no good reason, and suddenly killing Palm sync support with no good reason other than a big Nelson Muntz "ha-ha" is kind of a red flag.
Anyone who had a serious Palm jones already used The Missing Sync anyhow, but this is seriously irresponsible.
At its core a virus scanner is just a wrapper around a multipattern byte matcher, so maybe it's better to ask whether they're using Aho-Corasick or Wu-Manber...
To prove someone is female, you have to define what "female" means first. Is a female human one with breasts and/or a vagina? Two X chromosomes? A certain balance of hormones in the blood? One whose birth certificate reads "GENDER: FEMALE?"
An athlete may have an "advantage" over other athletes by virtue of an innate genetic difference, whether that difference improves circulation, O2 sats, lactic acid removal, or whatever. You can't call it "unfair" unless the advantage was conferred deliberately in an attempt to boost performance. No one disagrees that A-Rod, Manny, and Ortiz all got an unfair advantage in baseball because they were taking steroids to boost muscle mass. But would you call Jeter or Ellsbury's agility "unfair?" They got it in the same genetic lottery in which we all participate at birth.
Give me UNIX for my databases and servers any day.
So considering that OS X is a flavor of Unix (BSD, Unix 03 certified) and Linux isn't, you're throwing your weight behind OS X then, or are you just confused?
Anyone who thinks that the Darwin-BSD codebase and XNU kernel are as prone to exploitation as Windows kernelspace is dreaming. For one thing Darwin-XNU is open source, so anyone who likes can peek under the hood and suggest improvements. Now XNU isn't perfect, but the Windows kernel is a train wreck at 35,000 feet.
The problem is that Mac users think their computers are invulnerable to exploits and then don't practice safe hex. But if you think your Windows box is just as safe as your Mac box you're going to get a nasty wakeup call at some point in the near future.
Actually, the "corruptions" appear in every new Bible. They are listed in the footnotes. The King James text actually contains all of them in the text itself. This dynamic is well understood and nobody is freaking out over it.
Well, nobody who practices Christianity. It's an example of deliberate blindness to textual defects that would cause infinitely more doubt and discussion if their context was not as emotionally felt as one's relationship with one's God.
These variants were never problems in the early church and they are not not in Catholicism and the Orthodox churches because there is a very long tradition among them that church fathers, even today, can transmit to their followers the ultimate meaning of God's message and effectively channel God's will through themselves. Protestants are long since severed from that tradition, and their dependence on the determinacy of the text destroys the power of their message. I'm convinced that you cannot have a good knowledge of the history of the textual transmission of the Bible and be a Protestant.
Papyrus fragments predating Siniaticus contain most of the New Testament if you look at all of them as a whole.
That's possibly true but totally irrelevant. The intrinsic reliability of a papyrus fragment is not determined by its age, and if you try to piece together a text based on nothing but papyri of completely different provenances and values you're going to get a Frankentext that looks far worse than even a comparatively late but integral and complete exemplar.
I am extremely well-trained in textual criticism and I don't appreciate your snarky comments. If you want to whip out your degrees I'd be happy to compare, but don't think that passive-aggressive appeals to what you think is my lack of understanding will help you.
We need to be able to download the full-resolution digital images of the manuscript (or something reasonable, say, 150DPI downsamples) and then redistribute them without restriction. But the British are the absolute worst monsters in terms of copyright restriction, and there's no way the British Library would ever permit that kind of freedom with the images.
If there's a substantial OT manuscript dating to the 4th cent. BCE on consensus then I'd love to see it.
The reason why Sinaiticus is so important is because it substantially a transcript of what is agreed to be the most accurate record of the original text of the New Testament. It's called the "Alexandrian text-type." Almost all of the tiny fragments that predate the fourth century (and they are very scanty indeed) agree with the text of Sinaiticus extensively. As a result, Bible scholars believe that the alterations we find in later manuscripts are untrustworthy corruptions rather than viable alternate readings.
As to the textual corruption that took place in the late first and second centuries AD we have very little evidence and therefore no remedy. Christians believe that God would not have permitted His word to be corrupted beyond our ability to understand it. I am an atheist and work extensively on ancient Greek textual criticism so you can imagine I do not have much patience for this point of view, but the fact is that the New Testament is the most well-attested ancient Greek or Latin text still in existence. Even Vergil's Aeneid, for which we have three manuscripts predating the fifth century CE, is not supported so well, and in the cases like the tragedies of Sophocles we are on much shakier footing.
Sinaiticus is arguably one of the most important discoveries in the history of the textual transmission of the New Testament. Add an exciting controversy involving either idiot Greek monks who had quite literally dumped it in the wastepaper bin or a conniving Russian manuscript hunter-turned-thief making up lies to cover his crimes and you've got a great story that never fails to turn up fundraising dollars.
That said, I wish they could produce software for the examination of the codex that doesn't suck. But because they refuse to release the database of manuscript photos for public download (even though, at least in the United States, those images are uncopyrightable and therefore in the public domain) enterprising folks like me can't build a better system and give it away to people. So you have to suffer with their terrible system if you want to examine the manuscript. It's typical conservator behavior, building unnecessary walls against access to information that should be free.
We really really need to start making sure that digital copies of the ancient literary patrimony are available for free with no conditions -- i.e., in the public domain, but apparently everyone is too interested in fighting for scarce research grant dollars to produce something that all of their academic competitors could use.
Slashdot Mirror
But the really, really great bit is that you can never "prove" the core axioms; your "absolute truths" will therefore always be dependent on a set of unprovable assumptions.
And people think I work in a "soft science."
"BT is clinging on to an old business model which is supported by illegal downloading."
Doesn't that pretty well describe the music industry to a T right now?
You have two choices in general on the Mac side:
-- UNIX-y utilities, usually on the command line and a bit crufty in places, but free and nicely configurable
-- Mac-type utilities with marvelous interfaces that will probably set you back a nice chunk of change
When I was in the business, we used Carbon Copy Cloner, but g4u, Remote Desktop 3, or just plain old rsync are all pretty good bets depending on what type of imaging you're planning to do. CCC actually has one foot in both of the two camps I just described.
Of course, I even remember the crusty old days of Assimilator.
Oh, I should just add in passing that then-AG Alberto Gonzales admitted the existence of the NSA spy program after the Times article came out. He said that it was substantially in the form reported in the press but understandably refused to provide details.
I appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism but this is absolutely not the place to administer it. Next you'll be telling me that the technical hurdles associated with going to the moon prove that we never landed men there.
You seem to have a lot of difficulty believing that any kind of computer exists that's capable of analyzing multi-gigabit data streams at wire speed. You should read about the NarusInsight, the hardware package that the whistleblowers say the NSA uses. Imagine a cybernetic zombie Snort on steroids and you start to get the idea.
More than a dozen people with positions everywhere from the NSA itself to AT&T have admitted roles in the construction and operation of the tap rooms. The fed has repeatedly invoked the state secrets exception to kill lawsuits that even tangentially involve the tap program. News agencies on every bar of the political rainbow have run reports confirming its existence and the New York Times at least was asked by the government not to go with its story. Now I could write a research paper meticulously documenting the outing of the spy program in the press but anyone with access to Google could do the same thing in five minutes. It exists. The only question remaining is how much data the NSA sifts through and whose, and the whistleblowers have been pretty clear on the point that the spooks aren't very discriminating. I'm sorry, but one guy on Slashdot saying "no, it isn't" can't undo three years of meticulous investigative journalism by the newspapers of record of both the left and right wings and the bravery of those involved who have admitted their involvement.
I am thankful every day for the fact that we live in the world's leakiest democracy, so we at least know about these wanton violations of our civil rights. But after a couple of token lawsuits the EFF essentially gave up and now wastes its time keeping my pizza orders out of the hands of my Facebook pals. It's a sad day when the only outfit I can count on to fight the government out of my private life is the government.
The sad truth is that the NSA is actually reading everything via data mining. There are pictures of the "tap rooms" inside data centers of every major ISP in the US where they set up their equipment and dip into the petabytes of data that get transferred in plaintext every day. So human beings aren't reading all of your sexy letters to your girlfriend/Linux box/dog, but I'm sure the system is set up to flag "interesting" correspondence for human analysis.
The net result for the life of the average nerd: probably not much unless you have hobbies the NSA doesn't like, such as developing cryptographic software or Islamic studies. But then killing Beacon was even less pointless privacy-wise, because it was only ever going to be used to generate data for targeting ads (which Google already does) and plastering your face on them (which Google doesn't).
I maintain that lawyers are suing the social networking services right now because it's hip and sexy and gets you on the cover of Time. There are much more effective ways to benefit the privacy of the American people but as I said above they will likely kill the political careers these 1-800-scumbags are trying to kickstart.
You should try to read for comprehension
And you need to work on reading anything at all. You'll see plenty from reputable sources on NSA data mining. UTFG man.
Report: Obama to use NSA to monitor Net (USA Today)
NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven, Top Spy Says (Wired)
In short, the NSA has been reading everything sent in plaintext since Bush II, and yet the EFF spends untold millions on lawsuits to make sure that my friends on Facebook don't know what kind of pizza I order from Domino's. What a great allocation of scarce pro-privacy resources.
I know exactly why this is: if you sue Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you get your name in the papers. If you go after the NSA you get called "soft on terror" and your campaign bid for governor of East Nowhere is sunk.
The idea that "privacy" continues to exist in any shape, way, or form in a world where an NSA text-mining system reads every email, text message, blog post, and Slashdot comment you ever write is laughable. Why don't these jokers go after the people who flagrantly violate your privacy every minute of every day?
To what extent are "benign conditions" suitable to the formation of life? Without an environment that exerts selection pressure on existing organisms, there would be nothing driving the development of more complex and adapted organisms. Of course too much environmental volatility is a problem as well, but it can't just be a completely sealed biosphere or evolution could never happen.
What's more, Apple's been sued a couple of times over the definition of a gigabyte by angry idiots who didn't understand that 10^9 != 2^30. Possibly they're doing this in part to minimize their future liability.
That's fair enough, I guess I was just pining for the good old days with my 12" Powerbook dualbooting OS 9 and X and my Visor Edge... from the article I got the impression that Apple had just nuked iSync support, but it's possible it was a casualty of the 32/64-bit transition (or maybe the Palm-specific code had been running in Rosetta all this time anyway).
Before anyone gets down on me, let me say I am a big-time Apple junkie. I have an iPhone, an iMac, a Macbook, hell, even an Apple TV. I code in Perl and Objective-C.
That said, this is totally unconscionable. Apple has an obligation to its users not to break things that used to work for no good reason, and suddenly killing Palm sync support with no good reason other than a big Nelson Muntz "ha-ha" is kind of a red flag.
Anyone who had a serious Palm jones already used The Missing Sync anyhow, but this is seriously irresponsible.
At its core a virus scanner is just a wrapper around a multipattern byte matcher, so maybe it's better to ask whether they're using Aho-Corasick or Wu-Manber...
To prove someone is female, you have to define what "female" means first. Is a female human one with breasts and/or a vagina? Two X chromosomes? A certain balance of hormones in the blood? One whose birth certificate reads "GENDER: FEMALE?"
An athlete may have an "advantage" over other athletes by virtue of an innate genetic difference, whether that difference improves circulation, O2 sats, lactic acid removal, or whatever. You can't call it "unfair" unless the advantage was conferred deliberately in an attempt to boost performance. No one disagrees that A-Rod, Manny, and Ortiz all got an unfair advantage in baseball because they were taking steroids to boost muscle mass. But would you call Jeter or Ellsbury's agility "unfair?" They got it in the same genetic lottery in which we all participate at birth.
Or if you called Yankees games on the radio, you'd be a sterling stirling Sterling Sterling.
Of course. What exactly did you think
means?
Give me UNIX for my databases and servers any day.
So considering that OS X is a flavor of Unix (BSD, Unix 03 certified) and Linux isn't, you're throwing your weight behind OS X then, or are you just confused?
Anyone who thinks that the Darwin-BSD codebase and XNU kernel are as prone to exploitation as Windows kernelspace is dreaming. For one thing Darwin-XNU is open source, so anyone who likes can peek under the hood and suggest improvements. Now XNU isn't perfect, but the Windows kernel is a train wreck at 35,000 feet.
The problem is that Mac users think their computers are invulnerable to exploits and then don't practice safe hex. But if you think your Windows box is just as safe as your Mac box you're going to get a nasty wakeup call at some point in the near future.
Isn't Dow part of the corn lobby?
But isn't that exactly the kind of software that *doesn't* deserve patent protection because of how mundane and obvious it is?
Actually, the "corruptions" appear in every new Bible. They are listed in the footnotes. The King James text actually contains all of them in the text itself. This dynamic is well understood and nobody is freaking out over it.
Well, nobody who practices Christianity. It's an example of deliberate blindness to textual defects that would cause infinitely more doubt and discussion if their context was not as emotionally felt as one's relationship with one's God. These variants were never problems in the early church and they are not not in Catholicism and the Orthodox churches because there is a very long tradition among them that church fathers, even today, can transmit to their followers the ultimate meaning of God's message and effectively channel God's will through themselves. Protestants are long since severed from that tradition, and their dependence on the determinacy of the text destroys the power of their message. I'm convinced that you cannot have a good knowledge of the history of the textual transmission of the Bible and be a Protestant.
Papyrus fragments predating Siniaticus contain most of the New Testament if you look at all of them as a whole.
That's possibly true but totally irrelevant. The intrinsic reliability of a papyrus fragment is not determined by its age, and if you try to piece together a text based on nothing but papyri of completely different provenances and values you're going to get a Frankentext that looks far worse than even a comparatively late but integral and complete exemplar. I am extremely well-trained in textual criticism and I don't appreciate your snarky comments. If you want to whip out your degrees I'd be happy to compare, but don't think that passive-aggressive appeals to what you think is my lack of understanding will help you.
We need to be able to download the full-resolution digital images of the manuscript (or something reasonable, say, 150DPI downsamples) and then redistribute them without restriction. But the British are the absolute worst monsters in terms of copyright restriction, and there's no way the British Library would ever permit that kind of freedom with the images.
If there's a substantial OT manuscript dating to the 4th cent. BCE on consensus then I'd love to see it.
The reason why Sinaiticus is so important is because it substantially a transcript of what is agreed to be the most accurate record of the original text of the New Testament. It's called the "Alexandrian text-type." Almost all of the tiny fragments that predate the fourth century (and they are very scanty indeed) agree with the text of Sinaiticus extensively. As a result, Bible scholars believe that the alterations we find in later manuscripts are untrustworthy corruptions rather than viable alternate readings.
As to the textual corruption that took place in the late first and second centuries AD we have very little evidence and therefore no remedy. Christians believe that God would not have permitted His word to be corrupted beyond our ability to understand it. I am an atheist and work extensively on ancient Greek textual criticism so you can imagine I do not have much patience for this point of view, but the fact is that the New Testament is the most well-attested ancient Greek or Latin text still in existence. Even Vergil's Aeneid, for which we have three manuscripts predating the fifth century CE, is not supported so well, and in the cases like the tragedies of Sophocles we are on much shakier footing.
Sinaiticus is arguably one of the most important discoveries in the history of the textual transmission of the New Testament. Add an exciting controversy involving either idiot Greek monks who had quite literally dumped it in the wastepaper bin or a conniving Russian manuscript hunter-turned-thief making up lies to cover his crimes and you've got a great story that never fails to turn up fundraising dollars.
That said, I wish they could produce software for the examination of the codex that doesn't suck. But because they refuse to release the database of manuscript photos for public download (even though, at least in the United States, those images are uncopyrightable and therefore in the public domain) enterprising folks like me can't build a better system and give it away to people. So you have to suffer with their terrible system if you want to examine the manuscript. It's typical conservator behavior, building unnecessary walls against access to information that should be free.
We really really need to start making sure that digital copies of the ancient literary patrimony are available for free with no conditions -- i.e., in the public domain, but apparently everyone is too interested in fighting for scarce research grant dollars to produce something that all of their academic competitors could use.