Well, it was, but atheism ceased to be cool when it was widely adopted by an army of Internet cretins who combine the manners and charisma of Richard Dawkins with the intelligence of Tom Cruise. All fundamentalists believe they are right, but the atheist fundamentalists refuse to admit that they believe anything at all.
These days, agnosticism is where it's at, since agnostics don't even believe there's no God.
25 replies so far, about 20 defending those poor pirates at the TPB, in their noble crusade against copyright. Won't someone please think of the pirates? If your product can be pirated, your business model is out of date! They're only a tracker! They don't host the files! WTF? 20 out of 25 Slashdot users have no plans to make money by selling software? No wonder this place has gone downhill since the 90s.
In the early days, people defending piracy used to distinguish between not-for-profit piracy (e.g. copy an mp3 for your friend) and large scale commercial piracy (e.g. copy thousands of DVDs for sale). The intuition was that it was good to share, but not to steal - and yes it is stealing if you sell something that isn't yours, because whoever bought it has paid you rather than the owner. So here's a question: ignoring the **AA, DRM and related issues, why isn't software/music/video a type of property? Because it can be easily copied for next to nothing? Or because it's incredibly expensive to create?
TPB crossed the non-profit/commercial piracy line long ago. They are extremely successful commercial pirates. They make a fortune from advertising and they don't give any of it back to the people who actually made the games, music and films on their site. I hope they are prosecuted, because just like a pirate DVD plant churning out thousands of discs an hour, they are making $millions from other people's work.
I like to make posts such as the grandparent in the hope that someone more knowledgeable than me will tell me why I'm wrong. An RFID-based national surveillance system is clearly on the UK government "wish list", and it would be nice for everyone if it was actually impossible to build one, rather than merely expensive. I would be very pleased if physical laws prevented RFIDs being manufactured in microscopic sizes, but I suspect that this is not the case. It doesn't have to be nanoscale, it just has to be invisible to the naked eye.
However, I think you are right about the relative ease of forging RFIDs, provided you can knock out the ones you are already carrying. Another poster has pointed out that a computer could be programmed to simulate any number of RFID chips. Like DRM, this type of technology might be easily defeated by those in the know, making it useless against terrorists and smart criminals, i.e. the exact people it is supposed to protect us from.
I think all that you're missing is the scope of the plans, which are technically achievable, but are also science fiction of the David Brin variety. This is belied by the disparity between what is actually needed (a way to enforce house arrest - existing solutions are adequate) and what we are told is needed (RFID everywhere). The vision is a nationwide network combining RFID with existing surveillance technologies such as CCTV and the automatic number plate recognition system (ANPR). The problem with ANPR is that it only recognises number plates, and the problem with CCTV is that it is no good for automatically recognising anything. RFID is the answer: the tiny chips uniquely identify their carrier. So with the help of RFID you can both (1) record everything and (2) tag each recording with the people featured in it without any human intervention. A database with a record of everyone's activities is the eventual goal. Modern technology makes it possible, if unethical and expensive.
The solution to most of those problems is to use many RFID chips rather than a single one (these things are microscopic). You'll be identified by the cloud of chips that you carry - some may be implanted, some may be in your clothes, and others will be part of the gadgets you own. Failure of individual chips is no problem: indeed it is expected. The surveillance systems will be watching where most of your RFID chips go.
Forgery is possible but it's non-trivial, particularly as the chips shouldn't offer any way to reprogram the UUIDs that they broadcast. You'd need a pirate RFID manufacturing plant: possible but costly. Destroying the chips is a more likely attack, but these things will be so common in the future that it will be extremely hard to go anywhere without picking a few up by accident, so you'll soon be back on the system if you do that (albeit as an anonymous person until you do something else to identify yourself, such as using a credit card).
What would a "way around" the watermark do? Presumably it would allow you to share the music you bought without the possibility of it being traced back to you. However, unlike DRM, there is no way to be sure if you have removed every watermark. If today's watermarking techniques are successfully reverse engineered, the industry can introduce new techniques without breaking compatibility with CD players etc. And in any case, removing watermarks might degrade the quality of the recording. There might be more than one watermark in each file, and some watermarks might be present in multiple copies of the same recording in order to defeat a simple differencing attack.
Watermarking is a good idea, I say. In the end I want people to be able to make money from intellectual property, whether it is music, software, video, books, whatever. But information is easily copied, so there is a need to discourage piracy without inconveniencing paying customers. DRM doesn't meet that need, but maybe watermarking does.
If you actually want to learn something about evolution, then I recommend going to http://talkorigins.org/ where there are dozens of articles dealing with all manner of evolutionary problems and explanations, with full citations so you can go to a library and check for yourself.
You might also like to see what they think in the mirror universe of "creation science". Put on your false beard and pretend to be your fundamentalist twin as you visit the creationist response to talkorigins. Then read your Bible and check for yourself!:)
This is basically what you said, but a more general point is that any explanation involving a non-naturalistic cause isn't a scientific hypothesis. Therefore, even if intelligent design was supported by heaps of excellent evidence, it still wouldn't be science. Creationists see this as a problem with science, but in fact, it is a feature. Without it, almost anything would qualify as science.
Thanks for your replies! I've heard the "evolution can't be true because of death/sin" argument from fundamentalists, but haven't previously had a chance to see what non-fundamentalists thought of it.
Just because you're good at math doesn't mean everything you believe is true.
I couldn't agree more. But that statement applies to all scientists, not just religious ones! Good scientists can keep faith and science separate and use both as appropriate: the fact that Newton produced lots of good science despite being religious indicates that being religious doesn't imply you'll be a shitty scientist.
I am not saying that it is impossible to be a theist and a scientist, but then while you are doing science you must either trust your god to not mess with you or you have to suspend your believe in god while you are doing science. Are you then a real believer if you can suspend it when it is useful to you?
Yes and yes. You assume that God isn't interfering with the world constantly, because without that assumption you can't do any science at all. But you're still a real believer: you're just applying the rules of science, which ensures that no-one can tell you that your work is invalid because it doesn't fit their own religious beliefs.
Creationists also worry about that very problem. Some genuinely believe that there is a conspiracy of atheist scientists attempting to marginalise religion by presenting the scientific assumptions of materialism as fact! Ever wondered why some scientists don't believe in God? The creationists say it's because other scientists put pressure on them to conform.
But really, science has nothing to say about faith at all. I wish that more atheists and religious people would accept that!
A serious question: some Christians say that evolution cannot be true, partly because it appears to contradict the Genesis story, but more precisely because it says that things were living and dying long before humans arrived. I am told that the Bible says that before Adam and Eve's sin, there was no such thing as death, and therefore Adam and Eve couldn't possibly have evolved. How would you reconcile that with your own belief that evolution is part of God's creation, as it seems to be?
Ah, but the science/creationist conflict is all the minds of the creationists. It's based on misinformation that they have originated. They believe that science is about truth, when in fact it is about truth given the assumption of materialism. Science can't reason about supernatural things: how do you measure them, theorise about their operation, or perform experiments on them? Here is a quote from an Scott Todd:
'Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.'
This quote is triumphantly displayed by creationists as evidence of the anti-creationist bias of the scientific establishment. However, it only reveals a misunderstanding of the scientific method. They imagine that science will accommodate everything that they believe is true, but even if creationism is true, science cannot include it because it assumes a supernatural cause:
Astrology would be considered a scientific theory if judged by the same criteria used by a well-known advocate of Intelligent Design to justify his claim that ID is science, a landmark US trial heard on Tuesday.
(Source.) So that is a good answer to the creationists - even if your claims about the creator God are true, they still aren't science! And conversely even if the theory of evolution is wrong, it still is science because it's the best materialistic explanation for the world we see.
If you believe in science AND god then your a bloody hypocrite because the scientific method can never be used on god.
No! That's what some creationists say, but it is a fallacy. It is well known that science makes the materialistic assumption that everything has a natural cause, and this obviously excludes supernatural things such as God. However, that doesn't mean that scientists must believe in ontological materialism in order to be scientists. They just need to understand it. It is perfectly possible for someone to "think like a scientist" and also have strong religious faith, and there is a long list of scientists who have done so, including the "father of physics" Isaac Newton.
The logic thing is interesting. Religious people often say that God can do anything, but it seems that this must be limited by what is logically possible, otherwise God could create a logical paradox like your example of a challenge that he cannot complete. It's not enough to say that logic only applies in our Universe (so God is outside) because logic is not part of our reality. It's more fundamental than that. For example, is there any possible form of existence in which God could do something that's known to be totally impossible, like writing a Turing machine program that solves the halting problem, or changing the value of pi to 3?
That aside, you are of course right that there's no way to prove or disprove God's existence.
Also - there is a sneaky dodge for the impossible challenge paradox: God is omnipotent, so he has the power to stop being omnipotent and run in "user mode" temporarily.
But if the software fork bomb has a physical analogue in this Universe (e.g. anything that self-replicates in parallel, such as rabbits, humans and sci-fi nanobot "grey goo") then it won't be enough to know how many there are. You'll also need to know where they are and what they are doing in order to observe them. So the Universe will need to model the physical behaviour of all of them.
However I think it's all a moot point because the Universe already has laws that bound parallel self-replication: thermodynamics, conservation of mass/energy, etc. I doubt there is an "exploit" for those laws, since the Universe is presumably very well tested by now. But if there is... well, it's unlimited free energy for everyone I guess.
He is proposing something similar to what I proposed in this post, but I suggested testing it, not by finding some natural process inherently incomputable, but by "overloading the system" by increasing our observations to the point that it cannot keep up with the computations necessary, and has to take a "short cut" that violates known laws of physics. Though in fairness, instead of taking shortcuts, it could just end the simulation.
Like a fork bomb? A fork bomb can overwhelm any system with a finite amount of memory since it grows exponentially. We wouldn't notice if the speed of the Universe was reduced because we are part of it, but a fork bomb would force the Universe to stop completely, since all possible resources would be consumed in log N time (measured within the Universe). The Universe must be resistant to that sort of effect, otherwise it would be destroyed as soon as a fork bomb came together by chance.
And it is resistant. There are self-replicating structures that behave a bit like fork bombs. These "life forms" are bounded by conservation of mass and energy, so they can't consume all of the resources. The conservation laws provide a natural "ulimit" to protect us from runaway processes.
This must be why the company have called themselves Microvision. The MPAA is not afraid of their eternal allies at Macrovision, the company that provides Orwellian "quality protection" by selling mandatory devices that degrade video signals. If everything goes to plan, the MPAA will assume the product is a new type of DRM and lobby Congress to force everyone to buy one.
This is why I only use cracked software. Even if I purchase the software, which all of mine actually is, i run it cracked with lot of firewall rules.
Cracked software might be even worse - who knows what else the crack is installing? Cracks seem to be an ideal way to distribute malware: after all, you have to run the program!
I think instead that it's a good argument for free software, or for putting all of your Windows/Mac boxes on a private LAN without an Internet connection.
Sometimes they are both. The automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) network uses CCTV cameras to (a) enforce special road taxes like the "congestion charge", (b) make a timestamped record of every number plate that passes each camera, and (c) enforce speed limits.
This is arguably worse than non-automated CCTV systems even though a human operator may never see the pictures that are recorded. The number plate information goes into a database, where it may be stored indefinitely for "crime prevention purposes". Bruce Schneier wrote that 'It's not "follow that car," it's "follow every car."' So there are certainly valid political reasons to object to this type of surveillance beyond simply objecting to a speed limit. It is nice to see people who actually give a shit about this stuff, even if I do not agree with their methods, since most Brits couldn't give a fuck about anything the Government does.
The funny thing is that AV software has been almost totally useless ever since we moved from floppy disks to Net connections - long before they started whitelisting malware from major corporations. As soon as it became possible to distribute malware more quickly than AV updates, AV software was dead in the water. And even before then, the writing was on the wall: the problem of detecting a virus is undecidable and you can't change the laws of math.
Good luck convincing your boss that AV software is snake-oil though. Best carry on paying and taking a performance hit every time you open a file.
Slashdot Mirror
where athiesm is the site relgion
Well, it was, but atheism ceased to be cool when it was widely adopted by an army of Internet cretins who combine the manners and charisma of Richard Dawkins with the intelligence of Tom Cruise. All fundamentalists believe they are right, but the atheist fundamentalists refuse to admit that they believe anything at all.
These days, agnosticism is where it's at, since agnostics don't even believe there's no God.
25 replies so far, about 20 defending those poor pirates at the TPB, in their noble crusade against copyright. Won't someone please think of the pirates? If your product can be pirated, your business model is out of date! They're only a tracker! They don't host the files! WTF? 20 out of 25 Slashdot users have no plans to make money by selling software? No wonder this place has gone downhill since the 90s.
In the early days, people defending piracy used to distinguish between not-for-profit piracy (e.g. copy an mp3 for your friend) and large scale commercial piracy (e.g. copy thousands of DVDs for sale). The intuition was that it was good to share, but not to steal - and yes it is stealing if you sell something that isn't yours, because whoever bought it has paid you rather than the owner. So here's a question: ignoring the **AA, DRM and related issues, why isn't software/music/video a type of property? Because it can be easily copied for next to nothing? Or because it's incredibly expensive to create?
TPB crossed the non-profit/commercial piracy line long ago. They are extremely successful commercial pirates. They make a fortune from advertising and they don't give any of it back to the people who actually made the games, music and films on their site. I hope they are prosecuted, because just like a pirate DVD plant churning out thousands of discs an hour, they are making $millions from other people's work.
Bye bye karma.
BTW, Drod is awesome. Thanks.
I like to make posts such as the grandparent in the hope that someone more knowledgeable than me will tell me why I'm wrong. An RFID-based national surveillance system is clearly on the UK government "wish list", and it would be nice for everyone if it was actually impossible to build one, rather than merely expensive. I would be very pleased if physical laws prevented RFIDs being manufactured in microscopic sizes, but I suspect that this is not the case. It doesn't have to be nanoscale, it just has to be invisible to the naked eye.
However, I think you are right about the relative ease of forging RFIDs, provided you can knock out the ones you are already carrying. Another poster has pointed out that a computer could be programmed to simulate any number of RFID chips. Like DRM, this type of technology might be easily defeated by those in the know, making it useless against terrorists and smart criminals, i.e. the exact people it is supposed to protect us from.
I think all that you're missing is the scope of the plans, which are technically achievable, but are also science fiction of the David Brin variety. This is belied by the disparity between what is actually needed (a way to enforce house arrest - existing solutions are adequate) and what we are told is needed (RFID everywhere). The vision is a nationwide network combining RFID with existing surveillance technologies such as CCTV and the automatic number plate recognition system (ANPR). The problem with ANPR is that it only recognises number plates, and the problem with CCTV is that it is no good for automatically recognising anything. RFID is the answer: the tiny chips uniquely identify their carrier. So with the help of RFID you can both (1) record everything and (2) tag each recording with the people featured in it without any human intervention. A database with a record of everyone's activities is the eventual goal. Modern technology makes it possible, if unethical and expensive.
The solution to most of those problems is to use many RFID chips rather than a single one (these things are microscopic). You'll be identified by the cloud of chips that you carry - some may be implanted, some may be in your clothes, and others will be part of the gadgets you own. Failure of individual chips is no problem: indeed it is expected. The surveillance systems will be watching where most of your RFID chips go.
Forgery is possible but it's non-trivial, particularly as the chips shouldn't offer any way to reprogram the UUIDs that they broadcast. You'd need a pirate RFID manufacturing plant: possible but costly. Destroying the chips is a more likely attack, but these things will be so common in the future that it will be extremely hard to go anywhere without picking a few up by accident, so you'll soon be back on the system if you do that (albeit as an anonymous person until you do something else to identify yourself, such as using a credit card).
What would a "way around" the watermark do? Presumably it would allow you to share the music you bought without the possibility of it being traced back to you. However, unlike DRM, there is no way to be sure if you have removed every watermark. If today's watermarking techniques are successfully reverse engineered, the industry can introduce new techniques without breaking compatibility with CD players etc. And in any case, removing watermarks might degrade the quality of the recording. There might be more than one watermark in each file, and some watermarks might be present in multiple copies of the same recording in order to defeat a simple differencing attack.
Watermarking is a good idea, I say. In the end I want people to be able to make money from intellectual property, whether it is music, software, video, books, whatever. But information is easily copied, so there is a need to discourage piracy without inconveniencing paying customers. DRM doesn't meet that need, but maybe watermarking does.
If you actually want to learn something about evolution, then I recommend going to http://talkorigins.org/ where there are dozens of articles dealing with all manner of evolutionary problems and explanations, with full citations so you can go to a library and check for yourself.
:)
You might also like to see what they think in the mirror universe of "creation science". Put on your false beard and pretend to be your fundamentalist twin as you visit the creationist response to talkorigins. Then read your Bible and check for yourself!
Would you say that quantum theory is a fact? What about relativity?
Plenty of evidence for those, too. Are they facts?
This is basically what you said, but a more general point is that any explanation involving a non-naturalistic cause isn't a scientific hypothesis. Therefore, even if intelligent design was supported by heaps of excellent evidence, it still wouldn't be science. Creationists see this as a problem with science, but in fact, it is a feature. Without it, almost anything would qualify as science.
Nice, but your 8 bit dupe counter is not likely to survive Zonk's next session at the controls :).
Thanks for your replies! I've heard the "evolution can't be true because of death/sin" argument from fundamentalists, but haven't previously had a chance to see what non-fundamentalists thought of it.
Just because you're good at math doesn't mean everything you believe is true.
I couldn't agree more. But that statement applies to all scientists, not just religious ones! Good scientists can keep faith and science separate and use both as appropriate: the fact that Newton produced lots of good science despite being religious indicates that being religious doesn't imply you'll be a shitty scientist.
I am not saying that it is impossible to be a theist and a scientist, but then while you are doing science you must either trust your god to not mess with you or you have to suspend your believe in god while you are doing science. Are you then a real believer if you can suspend it when it is useful to you?
Yes and yes. You assume that God isn't interfering with the world constantly, because without that assumption you can't do any science at all. But you're still a real believer: you're just applying the rules of science, which ensures that no-one can tell you that your work is invalid because it doesn't fit their own religious beliefs.
Creationists also worry about that very problem. Some genuinely believe that there is a conspiracy of atheist scientists attempting to marginalise religion by presenting the scientific assumptions of materialism as fact! Ever wondered why some scientists don't believe in God? The creationists say it's because other scientists put pressure on them to conform.
But really, science has nothing to say about faith at all. I wish that more atheists and religious people would accept that!
A serious question: some Christians say that evolution cannot be true, partly because it appears to contradict the Genesis story, but more precisely because it says that things were living and dying long before humans arrived. I am told that the Bible says that before Adam and Eve's sin, there was no such thing as death, and therefore Adam and Eve couldn't possibly have evolved. How would you reconcile that with your own belief that evolution is part of God's creation, as it seems to be?
If you believe in science AND god then your a bloody hypocrite because the scientific method can never be used on god.
No! That's what some creationists say, but it is a fallacy. It is well known that science makes the materialistic assumption that everything has a natural cause, and this obviously excludes supernatural things such as God. However, that doesn't mean that scientists must believe in ontological materialism in order to be scientists. They just need to understand it. It is perfectly possible for someone to "think like a scientist" and also have strong religious faith, and there is a long list of scientists who have done so, including the "father of physics" Isaac Newton.
The logic thing is interesting. Religious people often say that God can do anything, but it seems that this must be limited by what is logically possible, otherwise God could create a logical paradox like your example of a challenge that he cannot complete. It's not enough to say that logic only applies in our Universe (so God is outside) because logic is not part of our reality. It's more fundamental than that. For example, is there any possible form of existence in which God could do something that's known to be totally impossible, like writing a Turing machine program that solves the halting problem, or changing the value of pi to 3?
That aside, you are of course right that there's no way to prove or disprove God's existence.
Also - there is a sneaky dodge for the impossible challenge paradox: God is omnipotent, so he has the power to stop being omnipotent and run in "user mode" temporarily.
But if the software fork bomb has a physical analogue in this Universe (e.g. anything that self-replicates in parallel, such as rabbits, humans and sci-fi nanobot "grey goo") then it won't be enough to know how many there are. You'll also need to know where they are and what they are doing in order to observe them. So the Universe will need to model the physical behaviour of all of them.
However I think it's all a moot point because the Universe already has laws that bound parallel self-replication: thermodynamics, conservation of mass/energy, etc. I doubt there is an "exploit" for those laws, since the Universe is presumably very well tested by now. But if there is... well, it's unlimited free energy for everyone I guess.
And it is resistant. There are self-replicating structures that behave a bit like fork bombs. These "life forms" are bounded by conservation of mass and energy, so they can't consume all of the resources. The conservation laws provide a natural "ulimit" to protect us from runaway processes.
This must be why the company have called themselves Microvision. The MPAA is not afraid of their eternal allies at Macrovision, the company that provides Orwellian "quality protection" by selling mandatory devices that degrade video signals. If everything goes to plan, the MPAA will assume the product is a new type of DRM and lobby Congress to force everyone to buy one.
This is why I only use cracked software. Even if I purchase the software, which all of mine actually is, i run it cracked with lot of firewall rules.
Cracked software might be even worse - who knows what else the crack is installing? Cracks seem to be an ideal way to distribute malware: after all, you have to run the program!
I think instead that it's a good argument for free software, or for putting all of your Windows/Mac boxes on a private LAN without an Internet connection.
Sometimes they are both. The automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) network uses CCTV cameras to (a) enforce special road taxes like the "congestion charge", (b) make a timestamped record of every number plate that passes each camera, and (c) enforce speed limits.
This is arguably worse than non-automated CCTV systems even though a human operator may never see the pictures that are recorded. The number plate information goes into a database, where it may be stored indefinitely for "crime prevention purposes". Bruce Schneier wrote that 'It's not "follow that car," it's "follow every car."' So there are certainly valid political reasons to object to this type of surveillance beyond simply objecting to a speed limit. It is nice to see people who actually give a shit about this stuff, even if I do not agree with their methods, since most Brits couldn't give a fuck about anything the Government does.
The funny thing is that AV software has been almost totally useless ever since we moved from floppy disks to Net connections - long before they started whitelisting malware from major corporations. As soon as it became possible to distribute malware more quickly than AV updates, AV software was dead in the water. And even before then, the writing was on the wall: the problem of detecting a virus is undecidable and you can't change the laws of math.
Good luck convincing your boss that AV software is snake-oil though. Best carry on paying and taking a performance hit every time you open a file.
No, Dr. Jones....You do!