If there is prior art, of if the invention is obvious, it'll get rejected by the examiner.
Given that the overwhelming majority of patent applications in the US are approved (unlike elsewhere in the world), and given the large number of patents approved that are obvious to any practitioner, the last decade of history disagrees rather strongly with your statement above.
Much of the Internet runs on software that was open source in some way early on -- such as bind, sendmail, perl, the original web browser (Mosaic), and so on. How many of the "backbone of the Internet" common RFC's have been implemented in open source from the get go?
Don't forget code from DECUS and other such collaborative projects.
Many of the open source projects that people are most familiar with (because it's software they interact with in an obvious way) may seem like a "copy of an existing closed source project," but under the hood there is a lot of innovate software that quietly runs things. Also don't forget that much of what open source is said to copy is software concepts that started out open before the commercial world threw money at it (think, Internet Explorer).
Keep in mind that the amount of software the average user encounters in an obvious way is not huge. It's things like the windowing system and an office suite and a browser, plus some other apps.
When open source or academics or other groups come up with something new and innovative, the commercial companies very often copy it themselves. People who come along later and don't know the history might look at later open source projects and say that they are just implementing what commercial companies have implemented.
Have you tried Windows 2003 Server? It's pretty good about not installing server software too. Yes, Microsoft are learning.
I don't have much experience with Win2k3 Server, but yes, I hear that Microsoft is getting much smarter about not installing everything by default, not configuring everything open by default, and so on. Much as people (myself included) love to bash Microsoft, they are improving. I think if they were going to write everything from scratch, they would do better. Hopefully Longhorn will be better (especially as much if it will be managed code).
But the context of the current thread is that the grandparent post compared all security advisories for a single Linux distribution to a subset of security advisories for Windows.
You quote a lot of exploits, but you are comparing apples to buicks. Most MS Windows security issues brought up on/. affect every user running MS Windows. We're not talking about SERVER complaints here. The list of Linux security issues you quote includes a lot of things the average user would never install and if installed would never configure. (Linux installs are better these days about server software not being installed by default, and if installed, not doing anything unless configured.)
To compare comparable things, you'd have to compare the list of security issues in a server version of Windows -- including all of the security issues in IIS, Exchange, MSSQL, MS Office, Active Directory, plus third party software equivalents of other Linux software that is not included with Windows.
Plus, you would have to take into account the ease of exploit of the various issues, the likelihood of exploitation, and the severity of exploitation.
Having said all that, I agree that there are a lot of zealots who defend one OS and have a totally different standard for the same kinds of flaws on another. No operating system is perfectly secure.
Look at windows: you clearly specify the installatino directory, and then *all* the files go there.
You're kidding, right? Surely you're being ironic. Files in a Windows install go all over the place. Such as the directory usually under Program Files that you get to specify, but then also several possible locations under C:\WINNT or C:\WINDOWS and also several possible locations under C:\Documents and Settings. If you install a package on a D: drive, that does not mean that no files go on the C: drive!
Also, the package managers used by Linux in specific and many UNIXes in general are far more thorough in uninstall than just about any Windows uninstaller. Most Windows uninstallers I have used leave a lot of cruft behind, including files and settings and log files plus lots of crap in the registry.
In Win32, there are fewer locations to check if you're having issues.
Have you ever actually tracked all of the system changes made to a Windows system from a typical installer? It doesn't sound like you have. Changes are made all over the map. The directory names differ from the UNIX names, and the categories of changes are broken up differently. I had a cube mate who used a utility to snapshot the system (file system and registry and environment variables) before and after a software installation so we could make sure we knew how to TOTALLY clean up after an uninstall.
Yes, a lot of the time you can do a lot of stuff in a single directory tree in Windows. That doesn't mean that removing that directory tree removes all of the stuff installed.
There are reasons that UNIX stuff is divided among different folders. The stuff in/etc is kept in several different locations under Windows: The registry plus several possible directory trees not normally accessed by users. Few packages should ever put anything in/bin and/sbin. That leaves/usr/bin and/usr/sbin and/usr/local/bin plus the odd stuff that installs under/opt. Most packages should only put executables in/usr/bin or perhaps/usr/local/bin. So while, yes, there are a number of different possible directories, practically all software added after the OS install will install executables into one of two directories --/usr/bin and/usr/local/bin.
In UNIX, I can quickly figure out where log files for a given service will be stored, and I can know pretty safely that I can read them in any text editor. Under Windows, well, there's the system Event Log viewer plus binary format log files plus various Unicode format log files plus ASCII log files -- in who knows what directories? Sometimes the log files are under "Documents and Settings" and sometimes under "Program Files" and occasionally under "WINNT"/"Windows".
You are missing the forest for the trees. Windows definitely does not have a single directory tree per app as you think it does. While I use Linux on my main server at home, at work I use mostly Win2k and WinXP plus Solaris and occasionally Linux and some embedded OSes. I have a lot of experience cleaning up after uninstallers under Windows, rooting through the registry trying to eradicate previous settings when something gets messed up.
I think the idea of lumping write permission with delete permission is that, if you can write to the file, you can write an empty file, which is the same as deleting the file. So there's no point in separating the two.
My memory of VAX/VMS is about six years old at this point, but I thought if you had write but not delete access to a file, that you could only append. Thus, without delete access, you could not write an empty file over an existing file.
My understanding is that the Class I lasers are the ones that can cause no damage under normal use because the device contains a laser, but the laser is not visible.
That cannot possibly be correct, because a UV laser could be invisible to the eye, yet cause blindness quickly if it were powerful enough. Also, you said:
My understanding is that the Class I lasers are the ones that can cause no damage under normal use because the device contains a laser, but the laser is not visible. [snip]
Even if the laser was powerful enough to burn CHA into the moon if it were pointed there, if the device contains the laser completely so that no laser is visible out of it, it is a Class I laser.
If a laser is powerful enough to burn CHA into the moon (great Tick reference!), then is it not powerful enough to vaporize an eye looking into it? Or in the latter part are you saying that the laser beam is not allowed to leave that enclosed apparatus? When you say the laser is not visible outside it, you don't say whether or not you mean the laser's beam is entirely contained, or whether it is invisible because it is outside the visible light range.
Do you believe that God is a peaceful god, or is God a vengeful and spiteful god. You can't have it both ways...
Sure you can. Unless you are limiting God to be less complex than human beings. You seem to be choosing the most restrictive, most limited interpretation possible of the Bible, and then refuting that interpretation. That's a pretty weak straw-man.
God is loving and peaceful...then why is there so much bad in the world?
Duh. Free will. If God removes all temptation and all opportunities for evil from the world, then we don't really have free will, do we? For us to truly be given free will -- in the most complete sense of the word -- we have to be provided the opportunity to make a choice and choose good or evil.
If God chooses who will be born, [snip]
Huh, where did that come from?
If God only made the Earth 10,000 years ago, why is there so much evidence to the contrary?
Assuming you believe the "young Earth" interpretation. The Bible itself does not necessarily say the Earth is young. The Bible does not give an explicit age to the Earth.
Geez... hostile much? Ever heard of a parable? If you were going to descrbe the scientific version of creation to a pre-industrial society, how would you put it? I think the Biblical version does a reasonable job of describing creation in a pre-industrial, pre-higher-mathematical way. How do you explain the Big Bang to people who don't have a concept for more than hundreds or (maybe) thousands of years? People who don't understand celestial mechanics and who are thousands of years away from such understanding?
It turns out that you're more of a Biblical literalist than most radical Creationists I've met! I'm not used to encountering people who disagree with the Bible while at the same time insisting that the only possible interpretation of the book is the most literal one.
You also assume that the Bible that we have today -- published in English -- says the same thing as earlier versions in the original languages. You assume that the translations were accurate and did not expand or subtract from any of the concepts or stories or discussions.
It is a reasonable assumption that other beings would have this desire to explore and seek out other life such as their own.
If this is the case, why then have we not been contacted?
It is depressingly likely that there is no faster-than-light travel possible. Given that and the enormous energy cost of interstellar travel, it may just be that civilizations decide it's not worth the cost. Can you imagine trying to get the US government (or any other government) to approve a $1 Trillion project to fly just to the nearest star? In a generation ship with the round trip flight taking hundreds of years?
Looking at human history, it also seems depressingly likely that civilizations don't usually last much over a couple hundred years after discovering radio.
But that being said, I still believe this is a reasonably sound argument that says creation isn't as unreasonable as it seems.
You are assuming that creation necessarily means that God created life ONLY on our planet!
How conveniently you've wrapped your twisted notion of religion.
I agree with you on this. In this discussion, there have been many very narrow-minded anti-religious statements made with a sweeping brush. (To mix my metaphors.)
Show me the missing link in the fossil record for instance.
What missing link? There is no sudden change in human fossils in the record that would need a "missing link" to describe it. None of which I'm aware at any rate. The "missing link" is a straw man argument, but not a real argument against evoluion.
Re:God of the Gaps: Glass half-full or half-empty?
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Subatomic Darwinism
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Without taking a position either way on the existence or non-existence of God, I humbly submit that the more science we do, the smarter the "God of the Gaps" has to be.
Only if you assume the Creationist "young earth" version of God. If you don't accept that description of God, then I disagree with your statement above. The laws of physics as currently understood are pretty elegant. (Notwithstanding the ugliness of the "standard model" of particle physics with its one or two dozen tunable parameters measured from experiment.) The more we learn, often, the more elegent the mathematical description. With that description, the God of the "Gaps" gets an easier job as we better understand how the universe works.
Obligatory jokes about "The Gap" left to the reader.
science is about the observable and repeatable things, while Darwinism makes claims about the past which cannot be observed
That's not an accurate statement about Darwinism, unless you define it very narrowly perhaps. Micro-evolution can and is measured. Experiments regularly study micro-evolution. Macro-evolution would need to be observed over a longer time scale, of course.
To put it more accurately, something is not scientific if it does not make a claim that is disprovable. Darwinism is disprovable, if evidence comes to light that disagrees with the claims of evolutionists. Creationism, on the other hand, is not disprovable -- by its nature. Evolution is a valid scientific theory, both as micro-evolution and as macro-evolution. Micro-evolution can be tested experimentally, and regularly is. Macro-evolution is obviously, err, difficult to study experimentally.:) But it still makes disprovable claims.
I assume that by "Darwinism" you mean "Evolution" in some form?
Getting back to the article, I think Darwinism is a very poorly chosen word for what they are talking about. I suspect it was chosen deliberately for its provacativeness. (sp) The article states (correctly) that decoherence is poorly understood, but then write about it as if it is well understood and as if this theory being discussed is solid and accepted and (if correct) is more than a mathemetically useful description. The whole description of decoherence in the article is terribly misleading.
And measurement of a system does not necessarily disturb the system in such a way that you lose information about it! The article is written in a sensational style rather than in a factual one. Quantum phenomona arise not because measurement of a system disturbs it, but because measurement itself is limited and because a system can exist in a superposition of states for some amount of time before decoherence occurs.
It's sad that so many people think that just because you can do something, that makes it ethical.
Can you give a plausible reason as to why it's not ethical to contribute changes made in one fork of a project into another fork -- as long as both are under the GPL? The GPL was explicitly and unambiguously intended to keep code free, and that means free for other people to use however they choose as long as they obey the terms of the GPL (plus any other associated licenses and terms).
On a Windows system, find a graphic file. Any file, like c:\winnt\pyramid.bmp Next, place this file path as an URL. Check the page. It doesn't break, but you will see a pyramid on your screen in MSIE and an ugly no-image in Firefox.
This is a non-feature in Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape that is very unlikely to change. I opened a Bugzilla entry for this a long time ago (132479) and the decision made then was unyielding. (I'd include an actual link to the bugzilla page, but Mozilla.org rejects links to that page that come from slashdot.)
At issue is that Internet Explorer rewrites URLs containing a backslash into using instead a normal slash. On the other hand, Firefox and all its ancestors issue the URL unmodified to the server. If you take any normal web URL and replace random forward slashes with backslashes, the pages will still work under IE, but Firefox (etc) will no longer be able to find the page.
This is not because IE is better or because Netscape (et al) are missing that feature, but because it is inappropriate to rewrite a URL into your favorite canonical form before issuing the request. The remote system might have a very good reason to be using backslashes, and any such pages will NOT load correctly in IE.
Note, however, that URLs that contain forward slashes for a file:// URL will work using Internet Explorer and Windows. Try the following URLs using various browsers -- on Windows -- and see what works:
file:///c:/windows/Zapotec.bmp
file:///c:\windows\Zapotec.bmp
I'd make the links easy to click on, but slashcode appears to swallow all "/" characters on a file:// URL. Hmm. Anyway, cut and paste the above into your browser and you'll see both work under IE, so you can use the first form in URLs and it'll work everywhere.
And of course the stupidity of Netscape in embarking on a complete rewrite at the time and the utter suckiness of their 4.x browsers had _nothing_ to do with it, right ?
Netscape was their own worst enemy in a lot of ways and they made stupid decisions that hastened their demise. Otherwise, what the fellow you quoted said was accurate. The truth is that as long as IE was "good enough," only geeks were going to go through the trouble of downloading another browser over a 56k line when IE came bundled in. Gates knew that, of course.
Still, you're right that Netscape made a number of bad decisions that hastened the inevitable. Their 4.x browsers had a lot of bugs, tried to encourage use of Netscape-proprietary HTML tags, and had other problems as well. In addition to the time spent in a download or the cost ($30 as I recall?) to buy a boxed browser.
The person you quote is wrong in one other way as well. Netscape wasn't free... unless you were in school. It was free for students and teachers. Many people did not have to pay for Netscape, and those were the same people who usually had decent Internet access. Ordinary home users, however -- the kind who determined the marketplace -- would have eventually made the same decision of choosing IE, as it came bundled and free, and Microsoft punished OEMs who added Netscape to their computers (for free) before sale.
The most obvious reason for using J2EE that I can see (perhaps the only reason for the great majority of apps) is JMS. Other than that, most of the J2EE stuff is much too heavyweight for most applications.
You'll like this quote from physicist Michael Turner, from the current issue of Discover Magazine (Sep 2004 for anyone reading in the future!). The quote is on the middle of page 74.
"I coined the tern "dark energy" for the whatever-it-is that is causing the universe to speed up. The possibilities being discussed for dark energy range from quantum vacuum energy to the influence of the unseen extra dimensions predicted by string theory. Perhaps the most radical idea, and the one I am pursuing now, is that there's no dark energy at all. [snip] Instead, our incomplete understanding of gravity is at fault [snip] Maybe a new principle is involved."
I guess you wouldn't believe me if I told you I knew more than might be immediately obvious
I hadn't yet made any assumptions about what you do or do not know. I aim to make as few assumptions as I can, because assumptions are so frequently incorrect.
And yes, many of these people I have in mind are even "scientists" by trade.
I'm open to believing this. I have definitely encountered some "true believers" in physics and in other sciences. Most of the people I know and knew did not fall into that camp, but there's a selection there because I tend to find "true believers" annoying. Because by definition they are not open to evidence.
I have changed my mind on major scientific issues several times during my life. I expect I will do so on major theories at least a few more times. I certainly hope so! The alterntative is boring! Personally, I hope that they do NOT find the Higgs Boson. It will be much more interesting if they do not find it, because it is getting more difficult with time to construct a theory that can explain why we haven't found it. If the Higgs Boson is not found in the next decade, that will have serious consequences for many current theories.
Along with that, I will say that very few of non-believers I know would say that quantum machanics "makes sense".
I understand what you are saying. But quantum physics really does make sense. It's just not intuitive, because our experience with the macroscopic world does not correlate well with the behavior of very small things. You're right in that I give huge value to a theory that predicts accurately, and that I value more highly a theory with predictive power than a theory with less predictive power that is more understandable.
To a point. Adding epicycles upon epicycles blindly can become an obsessive exercise in not looking elsewhere. The good news is that lots of physicists are looking strenuously for alternative theories. Practically all of these theories get disproven within a few years, but eventually, someone will find a cleaner more beautiful theory than the current standard model -- I hope! -- that has the same or better predictive power as the current model.
The big philosophical question once the math works is -- what does the math mean? Many physicists happily totally ignore that question and just rely on the predictive power. Some other people get the accuracy of prediction confused with the concept of whether the theory or model is "true." Hey, it's just a model! No-one I know thinks that the current theory is the end of the road. What does the math mean? That is an excellent question. I am hoping for a new theory that explains at least some of the following questions:
Why three dimensions of space, and not two or four? (I'm ignoring any "curled up" dimensions which we cannot participate in.) Why do the particles we know of have the masses they have? Are space and time continuous, or discrete? What causes mass to exist? Why three "generations" of quarks and leptons, and not two or four? Is there a reason that the (observable) universe has the amount of energy that it does, and not less or more?
Well, in fact, I'd want you to stipulate, as you implied, that this may be some unknown secondary function of some other force, or maybe even that we'll discover our methods for measuring the expansion of the universe are flawed.
I'm entirely open to that. Scientific consensus has so many times been entirely wrong -- or more accurately, insufficiently correct -- that I don't believe that we have the end-all-be-all answer. You're correct, some people DO believe that we do. There are definitely people out there to whom science is a religion, as well as people who have their ego tied up in the rightness or wrongness of theory "X."
"Perfectly massless" was never important for neutrinos. All that was critical was that the mass be very, very small compared to the mass of an electron. Often times in physics, "much smaller than" becomes "essentially zero" which becomes "assumed to be zero until proven otherwise." I believe it was Dirac who first postulated the neutrino due to missing momentum in a particle decay. He could tell that no charge was missing. Within measurement, no mass was missing. Just momentum. So he hypothesized a "massless" particle with no charge that was carrying away the unobserved momentum.
By the distribution of the missing momentum, assuming perfect measurement ability, you could measure the mass of the unobserved particle. If the particle had a large fraction of the mass of the electron, that would noticably shape the distribution of "missing" momentum. The measured distribution of missing momentum fit the "zero mass" hypothesis, so the neutrino was dubbed "massless." But "very very light" works just as well in all theories that assume a massless neutrino.
What if two competing theories, with different postulates, come, eventually, to the same mathematical expression, and therefore exactly equal predictive capabilities?
This has, in fact, already happened! Two decades ago there were four completing unrelated formulations of string theory. Then one person proved that all four formulations were in fact different ways of saying the same thing, and that mathematical transformations could convert one theory into another.
Now, I'm not a big believer in string theory. Mostly because it's not terribly disprovable right now and I distrust theories that are not disprovable. But I bring this up as an example of what you mention above.
You're saying that a particle that travels less than the speed of light will show up before the visible light
That occurs for two reasons. One, as you suggest later in your post, is because the neutrinos are emitted before the supernova occurs, but after the supernova is inevitable. The second is because their mass is so small, the light emitted from the supernova does not outrace them across the distances where we have been able to detect supernova neutrinos.
And to an earlier poster who suggested that the very existence of neutrinos was in doubt, when multiple neutrino detectors in the world successfully detected supernova 1987A, including measuring the direction of the supernova with reasonable accuracy, that pretty much dispelled any doubt in the scientific community.
That neutrinos interact so weakly means that they leave the core of the collapsing supernova long before photons do. Photons interact strongly, especially in matter so hot and dense, and basically don't escape the core of the supernova until it explodes. The neutrinos escape well before that.
Note: The core of a supernova is so dense that the average neutrino does not make it out without multiple interactions and scatterings.
Well, it's even worse, I think, then physicists' normal tendancies to make up new particals and forces whenever they get stuck
This is not an accurate characterization. There are only four forces thus far, maybe five including "dark energy" depending on the theories. That's hardly a large number of forces, and the rules governing those forces are really very simple. And fundamental particles -- well, there are six quarks and six leptons plus the force carriers: The photon, W, Z, gluon, Higgs Boson, graviton, and this new force carrier they are talking about for dark energy. Again, hardly a huge number. Twelve fundamental particles and seven force carriers. That doesn't sound like a theory that is out of control!
All of your A, B, and C above are inaccurate:
A) You are right that "dark energy" was a manufactured concept to explain seeming acceleration of the universe's expansion. Assuming the universe is expanding, some force has to be causing that, right? Do you disagree with that? Now, they chose to call that mysterious force "dark energy" because they don't know what it is. It could turn out to be some misunderstood quirk of gravity -- maybe gravity can both suck and blow.:) It could be a vacuum energy thing. It could be many things. But until someone has a solid theory, it's called "dark energy" because we don't see it. It's not electromagnetic.
more A) And the new particle is hardly an attempt to cover up that we don't completely understand the universe! The new particle is an attempt to understand the universe more thoroughly. It is hypothesized in a disprovable manner. No-one is taking it on faith that the hypothesized particle exist. It's also not like this is a mainstream particle physics idea. It's just someone's new theory.
B) Also, none of the "changes" to neutrinos have impacted the reason for their original creation. Not "neutrinos having mass" nor this new theory change the outcome of the original neutrino experiment outcomes or any of that theory. It's not as if this theoretical change breaks any existing calculations or experimental results. If that DID happen, then no-one would take the theory seriously at all. As it is, it is someone's speculative theory, and at this moment in time, nothing more than that.
C) Since the hypothetical changes described in the article do not, in fact, break the existing theories of the neutrino, C) doesn't even apply. The new particle, in fact, is an attempt to unify two previously unrelated concepts. This doesn't mean I agree with it. It seems a stretch to me. But at least it is a disprovable theory. No-one is going to take this hypothesis on faith. Particle physics will accept the new theory only if experiments agree with its predictions.
Modern particle physics is hardly in the jumble you ascribe. There are some definite outstanding unknowns, but it's not like any particle physicist would pretend that all is known or understood. And like I said in another post, most physicists I know are hungry for a better theory, "better" meaning a theory with fewer parameters that 1) describes all current experiments and 2) accurately predicts future experiments.
Are scientists being close minded and protective of their current understanding, and plowing ahead on a path that they should, within reason, be able to predict is heading the wrong way?
I'm a particle physicist by training (although not by career). The answer to this question, IMHO, is "No." Most particle physicists I know -- of many dozens -- would prefer to find something that the current standard models clearly cannot explain. The problem is that with only a few tweaks, so far, the current standard model is been able to predict just about every measurement thrown its way, and with a dismaying degree of accuracy.
See, here's the problem. The standard model of particle physics accurately predicts all measurements made thus far to as much accuracy as people have been able to bring the calculations. Many consider the standard model to be quite ugly because it has so many "arbitrary" parameters with no underlying theory of where those values come from: It has about 20-ish measured values that go into it. Many of those arbitrary values are the measured masses of particles, and the measured interaction strength of the three forces (not including gravity).
All of the physicists I know and most of the physicists I've ever met in the particle physics field are quite willing to be pursuaded by a new theory, but no such theory has presented itself. Some have thought that string theory will be that paradigm shift, but so far there is not enough evidence to prove or disprove.
When a convincing quantum theory of gravity appears, that will probably fix many of the complaints people have about the standard model.
So the issue at hand here is some scientists who are making a hypothesis within the current framework, extending the current framework, to explain some seemingly unrelated measurements. This is not epicycles on top of epicycles, although it might appear as such.
From reading the article, it appears that this hypothesis is disprovable, and thus a strong scientific hypothesis. It will be interesting to see how this theory holds up against evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is prior art, of if the invention is obvious, it'll get rejected by the examiner.
Given that the overwhelming majority of patent applications in the US are approved (unlike elsewhere in the world), and given the large number of patents approved that are obvious to any practitioner, the last decade of history disagrees rather strongly with your statement above.
Much of the Internet runs on software that was open source in some way early on -- such as bind, sendmail, perl, the original web browser (Mosaic), and so on. How many of the "backbone of the Internet" common RFC's have been implemented in open source from the get go?
Don't forget code from DECUS and other such collaborative projects.
Many of the open source projects that people are most familiar with (because it's software they interact with in an obvious way) may seem like a "copy of an existing closed source project," but under the hood there is a lot of innovate software that quietly runs things. Also don't forget that much of what open source is said to copy is software concepts that started out open before the commercial world threw money at it (think, Internet Explorer).
Keep in mind that the amount of software the average user encounters in an obvious way is not huge. It's things like the windowing system and an office suite and a browser, plus some other apps.
When open source or academics or other groups come up with something new and innovative, the commercial companies very often copy it themselves. People who come along later and don't know the history might look at later open source projects and say that they are just implementing what commercial companies have implemented.
Have you tried Windows 2003 Server? It's pretty good about not installing server software too. Yes, Microsoft are learning.
I don't have much experience with Win2k3 Server, but yes, I hear that Microsoft is getting much smarter about not installing everything by default, not configuring everything open by default, and so on. Much as people (myself included) love to bash Microsoft, they are improving. I think if they were going to write everything from scratch, they would do better. Hopefully Longhorn will be better (especially as much if it will be managed code).
But the context of the current thread is that the grandparent post compared all security advisories for a single Linux distribution to a subset of security advisories for Windows.
You quote a lot of exploits, but you are comparing apples to buicks. Most MS Windows security issues brought up on /. affect every user running MS Windows. We're not talking about SERVER complaints here. The list of Linux security issues you quote includes a lot of things the average user would never install and if installed would never configure. (Linux installs are better these days about server software not being installed by default, and if installed, not doing anything unless configured.)
To compare comparable things, you'd have to compare the list of security issues in a server version of Windows -- including all of the security issues in IIS, Exchange, MSSQL, MS Office, Active Directory, plus third party software equivalents of other Linux software that is not included with Windows.
Plus, you would have to take into account the ease of exploit of the various issues, the likelihood of exploitation, and the severity of exploitation.
Having said all that, I agree that there are a lot of zealots who defend one OS and have a totally different standard for the same kinds of flaws on another. No operating system is perfectly secure.
Look at windows: you clearly specify the installatino directory, and then *all* the files go there.
You're kidding, right? Surely you're being ironic. Files in a Windows install go all over the place. Such as the directory usually under Program Files that you get to specify, but then also several possible locations under C:\WINNT or C:\WINDOWS and also several possible locations under C:\Documents and Settings. If you install a package on a D: drive, that does not mean that no files go on the C: drive!
Also, the package managers used by Linux in specific and many UNIXes in general are far more thorough in uninstall than just about any Windows uninstaller. Most Windows uninstallers I have used leave a lot of cruft behind, including files and settings and log files plus lots of crap in the registry.
In Win32, there are fewer locations to check if you're having issues.
Have you ever actually tracked all of the system changes made to a Windows system from a typical installer? It doesn't sound like you have. Changes are made all over the map. The directory names differ from the UNIX names, and the categories of changes are broken up differently. I had a cube mate who used a utility to snapshot the system (file system and registry and environment variables) before and after a software installation so we could make sure we knew how to TOTALLY clean up after an uninstall.
Yes, a lot of the time you can do a lot of stuff in a single directory tree in Windows. That doesn't mean that removing that directory tree removes all of the stuff installed.
There are reasons that UNIX stuff is divided among different folders. The stuff in /etc is kept in several different locations under Windows: The registry plus several possible directory trees not normally accessed by users. Few packages should ever put anything in /bin and /sbin. That leaves /usr/bin and /usr/sbin and /usr/local/bin plus the odd stuff that installs under /opt. Most packages should only put executables in /usr/bin or perhaps /usr/local/bin. So while, yes, there are a number of different possible directories, practically all software added after the OS install will install executables into one of two directories -- /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin.
In UNIX, I can quickly figure out where log files for a given service will be stored, and I can know pretty safely that I can read them in any text editor. Under Windows, well, there's the system Event Log viewer plus binary format log files plus various Unicode format log files plus ASCII log files -- in who knows what directories? Sometimes the log files are under "Documents and Settings" and sometimes under "Program Files" and occasionally under "WINNT"/"Windows".
You are missing the forest for the trees. Windows definitely does not have a single directory tree per app as you think it does. While I use Linux on my main server at home, at work I use mostly Win2k and WinXP plus Solaris and occasionally Linux and some embedded OSes. I have a lot of experience cleaning up after uninstallers under Windows, rooting through the registry trying to eradicate previous settings when something gets messed up.
I think the idea of lumping write permission with delete permission is that, if you can write to the file, you can write an empty file, which is the same as deleting the file. So there's no point in separating the two.
My memory of VAX/VMS is about six years old at this point, but I thought if you had write but not delete access to a file, that you could only append. Thus, without delete access, you could not write an empty file over an existing file.
My understanding is that the Class I lasers are the ones that can cause no damage under normal use because the device contains a laser, but the laser is not visible.
That cannot possibly be correct, because a UV laser could be invisible to the eye, yet cause blindness quickly if it were powerful enough. Also, you said:
My understanding is that the Class I lasers are the ones that can cause no damage under normal use because the device contains a laser, but the laser is not visible. [snip] Even if the laser was powerful enough to burn CHA into the moon if it were pointed there, if the device contains the laser completely so that no laser is visible out of it, it is a Class I laser.
If a laser is powerful enough to burn CHA into the moon (great Tick reference!), then is it not powerful enough to vaporize an eye looking into it? Or in the latter part are you saying that the laser beam is not allowed to leave that enclosed apparatus? When you say the laser is not visible outside it, you don't say whether or not you mean the laser's beam is entirely contained, or whether it is invisible because it is outside the visible light range.
Do you believe that God is a peaceful god, or is God a vengeful and spiteful god. You can't have it both ways...
Sure you can. Unless you are limiting God to be less complex than human beings. You seem to be choosing the most restrictive, most limited interpretation possible of the Bible, and then refuting that interpretation. That's a pretty weak straw-man.
God is loving and peaceful...then why is there so much bad in the world?
Duh. Free will. If God removes all temptation and all opportunities for evil from the world, then we don't really have free will, do we? For us to truly be given free will -- in the most complete sense of the word -- we have to be provided the opportunity to make a choice and choose good or evil.
If God chooses who will be born, [snip]
Huh, where did that come from?
If God only made the Earth 10,000 years ago, why is there so much evidence to the contrary?
Assuming you believe the "young Earth" interpretation. The Bible itself does not necessarily say the Earth is young. The Bible does not give an explicit age to the Earth.
For fucks sake, a day is a fucking day.
Geez ... hostile much? Ever heard of a parable? If you were going to descrbe the scientific version of creation to a pre-industrial society, how would you put it? I think the Biblical version does a reasonable job of describing creation in a pre-industrial, pre-higher-mathematical way. How do you explain the Big Bang to people who don't have a concept for more than hundreds or (maybe) thousands of years? People who don't understand celestial mechanics and who are thousands of years away from such understanding?
It turns out that you're more of a Biblical literalist than most radical Creationists I've met! I'm not used to encountering people who disagree with the Bible while at the same time insisting that the only possible interpretation of the book is the most literal one.
You also assume that the Bible that we have today -- published in English -- says the same thing as earlier versions in the original languages. You assume that the translations were accurate and did not expand or subtract from any of the concepts or stories or discussions.
It is a reasonable assumption that other beings would have this desire to explore and seek out other life such as their own. If this is the case, why then have we not been contacted?
It is depressingly likely that there is no faster-than-light travel possible. Given that and the enormous energy cost of interstellar travel, it may just be that civilizations decide it's not worth the cost. Can you imagine trying to get the US government (or any other government) to approve a $1 Trillion project to fly just to the nearest star? In a generation ship with the round trip flight taking hundreds of years?
Looking at human history, it also seems depressingly likely that civilizations don't usually last much over a couple hundred years after discovering radio.
But that being said, I still believe this is a reasonably sound argument that says creation isn't as unreasonable as it seems.
You are assuming that creation necessarily means that God created life ONLY on our planet!
How conveniently you've wrapped your twisted notion of religion.
I agree with you on this. In this discussion, there have been many very narrow-minded anti-religious statements made with a sweeping brush. (To mix my metaphors.)
Show me the missing link in the fossil record for instance.
What missing link? There is no sudden change in human fossils in the record that would need a "missing link" to describe it. None of which I'm aware at any rate. The "missing link" is a straw man argument, but not a real argument against evoluion.
Without taking a position either way on the existence or non-existence of God, I humbly submit that the more science we do, the smarter the "God of the Gaps" has to be.
Only if you assume the Creationist "young earth" version of God. If you don't accept that description of God, then I disagree with your statement above. The laws of physics as currently understood are pretty elegant. (Notwithstanding the ugliness of the "standard model" of particle physics with its one or two dozen tunable parameters measured from experiment.) The more we learn, often, the more elegent the mathematical description. With that description, the God of the "Gaps" gets an easier job as we better understand how the universe works.
Obligatory jokes about "The Gap" left to the reader.
science is about the observable and repeatable things, while Darwinism makes claims about the past which cannot be observed
That's not an accurate statement about Darwinism, unless you define it very narrowly perhaps. Micro-evolution can and is measured. Experiments regularly study micro-evolution. Macro-evolution would need to be observed over a longer time scale, of course.
To put it more accurately, something is not scientific if it does not make a claim that is disprovable. Darwinism is disprovable, if evidence comes to light that disagrees with the claims of evolutionists. Creationism, on the other hand, is not disprovable -- by its nature. Evolution is a valid scientific theory, both as micro-evolution and as macro-evolution. Micro-evolution can be tested experimentally, and regularly is. Macro-evolution is obviously, err, difficult to study experimentally. :) But it still makes disprovable claims.
I assume that by "Darwinism" you mean "Evolution" in some form?
Getting back to the article, I think Darwinism is a very poorly chosen word for what they are talking about. I suspect it was chosen deliberately for its provacativeness. (sp) The article states (correctly) that decoherence is poorly understood, but then write about it as if it is well understood and as if this theory being discussed is solid and accepted and (if correct) is more than a mathemetically useful description. The whole description of decoherence in the article is terribly misleading.
And measurement of a system does not necessarily disturb the system in such a way that you lose information about it! The article is written in a sensational style rather than in a factual one. Quantum phenomona arise not because measurement of a system disturbs it, but because measurement itself is limited and because a system can exist in a superposition of states for some amount of time before decoherence occurs.
It's sad that so many people think that just because you can do something, that makes it ethical.
Can you give a plausible reason as to why it's not ethical to contribute changes made in one fork of a project into another fork -- as long as both are under the GPL? The GPL was explicitly and unambiguously intended to keep code free, and that means free for other people to use however they choose as long as they obey the terms of the GPL (plus any other associated licenses and terms).
On a Windows system, find a graphic file. Any file, like c:\winnt\pyramid.bmp Next, place this file path as an URL. Check the page. It doesn't break, but you will see a pyramid on your screen in MSIE and an ugly no-image in Firefox.
This is a non-feature in Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape that is very unlikely to change. I opened a Bugzilla entry for this a long time ago (132479) and the decision made then was unyielding. (I'd include an actual link to the bugzilla page, but Mozilla.org rejects links to that page that come from slashdot.)
At issue is that Internet Explorer rewrites URLs containing a backslash into using instead a normal slash. On the other hand, Firefox and all its ancestors issue the URL unmodified to the server. If you take any normal web URL and replace random forward slashes with backslashes, the pages will still work under IE, but Firefox (etc) will no longer be able to find the page.
This is not because IE is better or because Netscape (et al) are missing that feature, but because it is inappropriate to rewrite a URL into your favorite canonical form before issuing the request. The remote system might have a very good reason to be using backslashes, and any such pages will NOT load correctly in IE.
Note, however, that URLs that contain forward slashes for a file:// URL will work using Internet Explorer and Windows. Try the following URLs using various browsers -- on Windows -- and see what works:
file:///c:/windows/Zapotec.bmp
file:///c:\windows\Zapotec.bmp
I'd make the links easy to click on, but slashcode appears to swallow all "/" characters on a file:// URL. Hmm. Anyway, cut and paste the above into your browser and you'll see both work under IE, so you can use the first form in URLs and it'll work everywhere.
And of course the stupidity of Netscape in embarking on a complete rewrite at the time and the utter suckiness of their 4.x browsers had _nothing_ to do with it, right ?
Netscape was their own worst enemy in a lot of ways and they made stupid decisions that hastened their demise. Otherwise, what the fellow you quoted said was accurate. The truth is that as long as IE was "good enough," only geeks were going to go through the trouble of downloading another browser over a 56k line when IE came bundled in. Gates knew that, of course.
Still, you're right that Netscape made a number of bad decisions that hastened the inevitable. Their 4.x browsers had a lot of bugs, tried to encourage use of Netscape-proprietary HTML tags, and had other problems as well. In addition to the time spent in a download or the cost ($30 as I recall?) to buy a boxed browser.
The person you quote is wrong in one other way as well. Netscape wasn't free ... unless you were in school. It was free for students and teachers. Many people did not have to pay for Netscape, and those were the same people who usually had decent Internet access. Ordinary home users, however -- the kind who determined the marketplace -- would have eventually made the same decision of choosing IE, as it came bundled and free, and Microsoft punished OEMs who added Netscape to their computers (for free) before sale.
The most obvious reason for using J2EE that I can see (perhaps the only reason for the great majority of apps) is JMS. Other than that, most of the J2EE stuff is much too heavyweight for most applications.
You'll like this quote from physicist Michael Turner, from the current issue of Discover Magazine (Sep 2004 for anyone reading in the future!). The quote is on the middle of page 74.
"I coined the tern "dark energy" for the whatever-it-is that is causing the universe to speed up. The possibilities being discussed for dark energy range from quantum vacuum energy to the influence of the unseen extra dimensions predicted by string theory. Perhaps the most radical idea, and the one I am pursuing now, is that there's no dark energy at all. [snip] Instead, our incomplete understanding of gravity is at fault [snip] Maybe a new principle is involved."
I guess you wouldn't believe me if I told you I knew more than might be immediately obvious
I hadn't yet made any assumptions about what you do or do not know. I aim to make as few assumptions as I can, because assumptions are so frequently incorrect.
And yes, many of these people I have in mind are even "scientists" by trade.
I'm open to believing this. I have definitely encountered some "true believers" in physics and in other sciences. Most of the people I know and knew did not fall into that camp, but there's a selection there because I tend to find "true believers" annoying. Because by definition they are not open to evidence.
I have changed my mind on major scientific issues several times during my life. I expect I will do so on major theories at least a few more times. I certainly hope so! The alterntative is boring! Personally, I hope that they do NOT find the Higgs Boson. It will be much more interesting if they do not find it, because it is getting more difficult with time to construct a theory that can explain why we haven't found it. If the Higgs Boson is not found in the next decade, that will have serious consequences for many current theories.
Along with that, I will say that very few of non-believers I know would say that quantum machanics "makes sense".
I understand what you are saying. But quantum physics really does make sense. It's just not intuitive, because our experience with the macroscopic world does not correlate well with the behavior of very small things. You're right in that I give huge value to a theory that predicts accurately, and that I value more highly a theory with predictive power than a theory with less predictive power that is more understandable.
To a point. Adding epicycles upon epicycles blindly can become an obsessive exercise in not looking elsewhere. The good news is that lots of physicists are looking strenuously for alternative theories. Practically all of these theories get disproven within a few years, but eventually, someone will find a cleaner more beautiful theory than the current standard model -- I hope! -- that has the same or better predictive power as the current model.
The big philosophical question once the math works is -- what does the math mean? Many physicists happily totally ignore that question and just rely on the predictive power. Some other people get the accuracy of prediction confused with the concept of whether the theory or model is "true." Hey, it's just a model! No-one I know thinks that the current theory is the end of the road. What does the math mean? That is an excellent question. I am hoping for a new theory that explains at least some of the following questions:
Why three dimensions of space, and not two or four? (I'm ignoring any "curled up" dimensions which we cannot participate in.) Why do the particles we know of have the masses they have? Are space and time continuous, or discrete? What causes mass to exist? Why three "generations" of quarks and leptons, and not two or four? Is there a reason that the (observable) universe has the amount of energy that it does, and not less or more?
Well, in fact, I'd want you to stipulate, as you implied, that this may be some unknown secondary function of some other force, or maybe even that we'll discover our methods for measuring the expansion of the universe are flawed.
I'm entirely open to that. Scientific consensus has so many times been entirely wrong -- or more accurately, insufficiently correct -- that I don't believe that we have the end-all-be-all answer. You're correct, some people DO believe that we do. There are definitely people out there to whom science is a religion, as well as people who have their ego tied up in the rightness or wrongness of theory "X."
"Perfectly massless" was never important for neutrinos. All that was critical was that the mass be very, very small compared to the mass of an electron. Often times in physics, "much smaller than" becomes "essentially zero" which becomes "assumed to be zero until proven otherwise." I believe it was Dirac who first postulated the neutrino due to missing momentum in a particle decay. He could tell that no charge was missing. Within measurement, no mass was missing. Just momentum. So he hypothesized a "massless" particle with no charge that was carrying away the unobserved momentum.
By the distribution of the missing momentum, assuming perfect measurement ability, you could measure the mass of the unobserved particle. If the particle had a large fraction of the mass of the electron, that would noticably shape the distribution of "missing" momentum. The measured distribution of missing momentum fit the "zero mass" hypothesis, so the neutrino was dubbed "massless." But "very very light" works just as well in all theories that assume a massless neutrino.
What if two competing theories, with different postulates, come, eventually, to the same mathematical expression, and therefore exactly equal predictive capabilities?
This has, in fact, already happened! Two decades ago there were four completing unrelated formulations of string theory. Then one person proved that all four formulations were in fact different ways of saying the same thing, and that mathematical transformations could convert one theory into another.
Now, I'm not a big believer in string theory. Mostly because it's not terribly disprovable right now and I distrust theories that are not disprovable. But I bring this up as an example of what you mention above.
You're saying that a particle that travels less than the speed of light will show up before the visible light
That occurs for two reasons. One, as you suggest later in your post, is because the neutrinos are emitted before the supernova occurs, but after the supernova is inevitable. The second is because their mass is so small, the light emitted from the supernova does not outrace them across the distances where we have been able to detect supernova neutrinos.
And to an earlier poster who suggested that the very existence of neutrinos was in doubt, when multiple neutrino detectors in the world successfully detected supernova 1987A, including measuring the direction of the supernova with reasonable accuracy, that pretty much dispelled any doubt in the scientific community.
That neutrinos interact so weakly means that they leave the core of the collapsing supernova long before photons do. Photons interact strongly, especially in matter so hot and dense, and basically don't escape the core of the supernova until it explodes. The neutrinos escape well before that.
Note: The core of a supernova is so dense that the average neutrino does not make it out without multiple interactions and scatterings.
Well, it's even worse, I think, then physicists' normal tendancies to make up new particals and forces whenever they get stuck
This is not an accurate characterization. There are only four forces thus far, maybe five including "dark energy" depending on the theories. That's hardly a large number of forces, and the rules governing those forces are really very simple. And fundamental particles -- well, there are six quarks and six leptons plus the force carriers: The photon, W, Z, gluon, Higgs Boson, graviton, and this new force carrier they are talking about for dark energy. Again, hardly a huge number. Twelve fundamental particles and seven force carriers. That doesn't sound like a theory that is out of control!
All of your A, B, and C above are inaccurate:
A) You are right that "dark energy" was a manufactured concept to explain seeming acceleration of the universe's expansion. Assuming the universe is expanding, some force has to be causing that, right? Do you disagree with that? Now, they chose to call that mysterious force "dark energy" because they don't know what it is. It could turn out to be some misunderstood quirk of gravity -- maybe gravity can both suck and blow. :) It could be a vacuum energy thing. It could be many things. But until someone has a solid theory, it's called "dark energy" because we don't see it. It's not electromagnetic.
more A) And the new particle is hardly an attempt to cover up that we don't completely understand the universe! The new particle is an attempt to understand the universe more thoroughly. It is hypothesized in a disprovable manner. No-one is taking it on faith that the hypothesized particle exist. It's also not like this is a mainstream particle physics idea. It's just someone's new theory.
B) Also, none of the "changes" to neutrinos have impacted the reason for their original creation. Not "neutrinos having mass" nor this new theory change the outcome of the original neutrino experiment outcomes or any of that theory. It's not as if this theoretical change breaks any existing calculations or experimental results. If that DID happen, then no-one would take the theory seriously at all. As it is, it is someone's speculative theory, and at this moment in time, nothing more than that.
C) Since the hypothetical changes described in the article do not, in fact, break the existing theories of the neutrino, C) doesn't even apply. The new particle, in fact, is an attempt to unify two previously unrelated concepts. This doesn't mean I agree with it. It seems a stretch to me. But at least it is a disprovable theory. No-one is going to take this hypothesis on faith. Particle physics will accept the new theory only if experiments agree with its predictions.
Modern particle physics is hardly in the jumble you ascribe. There are some definite outstanding unknowns, but it's not like any particle physicist would pretend that all is known or understood. And like I said in another post, most physicists I know are hungry for a better theory, "better" meaning a theory with fewer parameters that 1) describes all current experiments and 2) accurately predicts future experiments.
Are scientists being close minded and protective of their current understanding, and plowing ahead on a path that they should, within reason, be able to predict is heading the wrong way?
I'm a particle physicist by training (although not by career). The answer to this question, IMHO, is "No." Most particle physicists I know -- of many dozens -- would prefer to find something that the current standard models clearly cannot explain. The problem is that with only a few tweaks, so far, the current standard model is been able to predict just about every measurement thrown its way, and with a dismaying degree of accuracy.
See, here's the problem. The standard model of particle physics accurately predicts all measurements made thus far to as much accuracy as people have been able to bring the calculations. Many consider the standard model to be quite ugly because it has so many "arbitrary" parameters with no underlying theory of where those values come from: It has about 20-ish measured values that go into it. Many of those arbitrary values are the measured masses of particles, and the measured interaction strength of the three forces (not including gravity).
All of the physicists I know and most of the physicists I've ever met in the particle physics field are quite willing to be pursuaded by a new theory, but no such theory has presented itself. Some have thought that string theory will be that paradigm shift, but so far there is not enough evidence to prove or disprove.
When a convincing quantum theory of gravity appears, that will probably fix many of the complaints people have about the standard model.
So the issue at hand here is some scientists who are making a hypothesis within the current framework, extending the current framework, to explain some seemingly unrelated measurements. This is not epicycles on top of epicycles, although it might appear as such.
From reading the article, it appears that this hypothesis is disprovable, and thus a strong scientific hypothesis. It will be interesting to see how this theory holds up against evidence.