First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post,
as I enjoy most of your posts.
For what it's worth, I think you are an excellent writer and thinker.
Thank you very much. I think you are too kind.
I will quote you, though, if you don't mind.
While I don't have time to respond to your entire post,
I did want to highlight one point where I disagreed with you.
I have never seen anyone saying that
all of smart people or all of scientists are atheists.
Not only on Slashdot, I have never seen anyone saying
that anywhere.
I have often experienced the sentiment that
if you beleive in God you are not smart/logical/rational.
I've heard it from strangers and close friends.
There are even examples in the discussion you linked to in your last post.
On Slashdot, I have been called weak-minded for beleiving in God.
That is very strange, almost unbelievable.
Next time you might point such an ignorant person to
Perl 6 website,
and ask her to read
Apocalypses
by Larry Wall,
especially
Apocalypse 4
talking about the syntax per se,
Apocalypse 3
explaining the operators in details,
Apocalypse 5
about regular expressions,
grammar rules and
pattern matching in general,
Apocalypse 6
on subroutines, closures,
methods, submethods, multimethods, rules and macros,
and the
soon-to-be-published
Apocalypse 12
about objects, classes, traits and roles
(and I mean really read them, not merely skim or take a look at,
it is actually quite an entertaining read anyway),
which together form the most smart/logical/rational
fundamentals of programming language design
I have seen to date, and then
ask her if she still thinks that when one
believes in God one is not smart/logical/rational any more.
Indeed, Larry Wall being a hacker god (pun not intended this time)
and also being alive at the same time,
might actually be a better candidate for your Slashdot signature than
Albert Einstein himself.
Besides, Einstein never wanted to be a missionary,
if I recall correctly, and thus his faith might be questioned.
Speaking about faith and reason,
it seems rather strange that people consider
them mutually exclusive.
I myself always considered faith to be completely orthogonal
to reason.
Furthermore, I also fail to understand
any desire to prove the existance of any object of faith
(be it some deity or otherwise)
because as soon as it is proved
(assuming that it can be proved)
it is not a faith
(defined as a belief beyond evidence or logical arguments)
any more and becomes merely a knowledge of a simple fact.
Let me quote Gary Curtis.
"To believe a dogma without evidence,
or even despite counter-evidence,
is sometimes regarded as more admirable than
to believe on good evidence."
Therefore, if any religion was provable
(and subsequently proved),
there would be no need for faith any more.
Even more importantly, proving the validity
of any particular religion or faith system,
would have to inevitably disprove most of other religions
as a side effect, for most of them being mutually contradictory
cannot be valid simultaneously.
Now, if we assume faith and reason to be orthogonal
(which I believe is the only reasonable way to consider them)
then using reason to analyze faith
(which by definition would be inherently unanalyzable)
might lead to committing subtle fallacies,
like e.g. this quite popular one:
Every event must have a cause.
Therefore, there must be a cause of every event,
that is, a first cau
"I am a student at the University of Minnesota and I work with a professor performing research and managing more than ten Linux based servers. When it comes to installing services on these machines I am a die-hard build-from-source fanatic, while the professor I work with prefers to install and maintain everything from packages."
That's right.
The most important keyword here is
the maintenancability itself.
I can assure you sonny that as soon as you will get out of your cave and do some real work in the real world, your naive "fanatism" will instantly vanish in the day
(or rather in the month)
when you will have to clone a five years old multipurpose server and move it to a new remote colocation farm with barebones systems installed.
You will want to kill that stupid joker who installed everything there from sources.
You will literally want to kill him.
Do you really think your professor is stupid? Kids...
Perhaps a good open source project. In fact, it could be a big stepping stone for open source. If visual programming (no, not as in Visual C/C++, Basic, etc.) makes programming easier and faster, think of how many more people (like me) could get involved in open source projects. I actually really like this idea.
I, for one, am really looking forward.
Just imagine how many illiterate people will finally be able to work as programmers.
It might be a great breakthrough
in open source indeed, especially the number of new mp3 players, which I haven't seen lately as many as I would like to see. Once again, Bill Gates saves the day. Bravo.
That is what I call a true innovation.
I have one question, though.
Will it fit in 640kB
together with Microsoft BOB interface? I hope so.
Thanks to MS BOB I don't have to use command line any more. Thanks to the new
visual programming I won't have to write programs, either. Finally I'll be able to sell that useless keyboard on ebay. Wonderful.
I would like to hereby announce that I am going to finally sue those jokers for trademark infringement,
using my good name
and/or shameful stealing of my IP.
Furthermore, I claim patents over
basic metabolic (as well as e-metabolic)
functions, therefore please stop breathing as soon as possible. You will do a great favor
for the whole e-ndustry and humanity at large.
Thank you.
Exercising my freedom of choice,
I have just chosen to post a comment about
your signature.
"The Paradox of Choice" discussion finally
makes it more on-topic than ever.
Usually when people comment your
signature they are moderated down as off-topic.
This is probably the first time
when such a duscussion might be actually very interesting
to everyone reading this thread.
Of course your signature will not be the only topic of the following text.
Nevertheless, I have chosen to "comment your sig."
First of all, let me express
my sincerest congratulations
for the best "signature troll" I have ever seen on Slashdot:
"Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin,
Maxwell and Einstein believed in God. So do I."
Truly remarkable.
Let me explain.
It is a brilliant example of rhetoric because
it is not a fallacy per se and
is therefore irrefutable, however
the most frequent ipse dixit interpretation
(at least the most frequent in the numerous follow-up comments
I have been reading for quite some time),
is obviously fallacious in many ways
and it is this very interpretation
which forms a sound pro-theist argument
what makes that signature as controversial as it
undeniably is.
Bravo. This is what I call a good sophism.
(As a sidenote,
I also admire the joke with Galileo
in the context of science and religion.
"E pur si muove" indeed!)
That unwritten conclusion is an outstanding example of
argumentum ad verecundiam
(argument from respect), i.e.
a genetic fallacy of
the appeal to misleading authority,
one of the most interesting
ignoratio elenchi informal fallacies.
The above signature is written in such a way that
most of people understand its first part
(i.e. "Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin,
Maxwell and Einstein believed in God.")
as a premiss, and the second one
("So do I.") as a conclusion.
It doesn't provide the argument though.
The only sound argument
(which is inevitably implied)
must be in the lines of:
"if this particular smart people
believed in something, it must be true"
which is undoubtedly fallacious
(and thus of course controversial)
but which is never written.
This is interesting because it is this unwritten
implied argument, the only possible link between the
premiss and the conclusion of the most popular interpretation
(not the only one, mind you,
supposedly
not even the intended one,
but the most obvious one nonetheless)
of the signature text,
which is causing the whole controversy.
This is truly beautiful.
Now, back to your supposedly intended meaning:
"My sig is meant as a counter example to those who think that only
the weak-minded beleive in God."
Counter-example to what assertion?
That every scientist is an atheist?
That every smart person is an atheist?
That every genius is an atheist?
(This is not a straw man argument.
You really need such a universal generalization
if you want to use a counter-example
to show that the argument
(or the proposition, to be precise,
which might be used as a premiss of arguments
you are actually refuting,
but which you have yet not presented to my knowledge)
is non-validating by finding
examples of few true premisses with false conclusions.
Your specific counter-example woudn't work even against
"most of smart people are atheists" so
naturally I had to assume you were talking about
a proposition
which your counter-example is actually effective against.)
I have never seen anyone saying that
all of smart people or all of scientists are atheists.
Not only on Slashdot, I have never seen anyone saying
that anywhere.
That doesn't make your intended meaning any less valid, though.
It is perfectly valid, even if completely obvious and
indisputable and thus quite pointless.
And that very indisputability
explains why such an interp
What paradox?
I'm sorry but that is not
paradoxical by any stretch of imagination!
Choices are hard for most of less intelligent people. Any choices, not necessarily those related to computer software or even the technology as a whole.
Most of people (the "unwashed masses" if you will) don't want to make choices.
Remember that most of people don't even choose such fundamental
matters
as their religion
for God's sake,
but stick to what they parents had chosen (or rather had sticked to what their parents had chosen (or... ad infinitum)) let alone such---let's face it---relatively unimportant parts of their existence as an operating system.
Most of people don't want to think more than absolutely necessary. They want automatic transmission because they don't want to think about changing gears, they want Windows because they don't want to think about recompiling the kernel, they want pop music because they don't want to think about the melody and harmony.
Other important problem is that those poeple usually want everything now.
So analogously they use automatic transmission because they don't have to learn about the gears, they use Windows because they don't want to learn bash and the new way of working and they listen to pop music becauce they don't want to play the
Second Hungarian Rhapsody by Ferenc Liszt
hundred time before they "get it"---no,
they listen to Britney Speers because they "get it" after two tacts of the repetititive piece of crap it is.
We, the Slashdot community, have to understand that as an intelligent minority. We have to understand that the majority of people unlike us don't love listening to classical music, hacking software or reading Aristoteles. They don't want fine cuisine, they want Mac Donald's.
They want crap. Why? Because that's the most they could possibly aspire to understand.
But please, don't look at them like they were morons. That is simply not true.
They were just not created to think,
unlike us, and that's fine
as long as we don't alienate too much
and understand our position.
Remember that for them we are the ones who are abnormal.
But is that a paradox? I don't think so.
Great article, nonetheless.
Is it in any way related to
the recent broadband deployments and
the legislative changes in Australia?
Could any Australian posts
some statistics of
P2P networks traffic
in Australian backbones?
It could be interesting if that could be used as an argument that file sharing
(or "piracy" if you will)
might be actually good to artists all over the world. Very interesting indeed.
Mars terraforming is unfortunately unavoidable
on
Mars Terraforming Debate
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The terraforming of Mars seems to be, in my opinion, unfortunately quite unavoidable,
to say the very least,
and that is because of all of us who are "marsaforming" Earth so well that soon we sadly will be unable to live here any more. That's very sad. It might not be a problem for us, but for our children or grandchildren.
I am sure one day someone will
remember the timeless implications of our today's Slashdot discussion looking at the Mars University and will say:
"Very impressive. Back in the 20th century we had no idea there was a
university on Mars,"
to which his professor will answer:
"Well in those days Mars was just a dreary uninhabitable
wasteland... much like Utah. But unlike Utah, it was eventually made livable,
when the university was founded in 2636."
That will be a great day in our history.
I am very excited.
I dream of being able to ski on Mars one day.
That would be amazing.
We definitely have to bring some water there
and lower the temperature somehow to freeze it
(we could use the process of so caled desublimacion
to change the steam---a product of
hydrogen and oxygen synthesis---directly into snow). That would be great.
I am so excited.
I haven't read such an exciting article for a long time.
With no doubt, this
must be the
biggest security hole
I have seen lately.
802.11g directly to the hard drive. Bravo.
Is this an April Fool's joke
posted prematurely
or are they really out of their minds
thinking that anyone would
be so stupid to buy such a
hard drive, which is basically asking to be cracked?
I find it insulting.
I hope
script kiddies
willhavelotsoffun.
Being targetted by SCO would then become a can't-win situation. Either you pay SCO and then get shunned by the Linux world, or you don't pay and SCO sues you to death.
[emphasis added]
I'm sorry but you are very wrong.
Have
The SCO Group
ever
sued anyone who had never
paid them before?
No.
At this point
EV1Servers.net's CEO
(who will never see my money again)
doing any
business with The SCO Group
whatsoever
is not only
dishonorable but also
utterly stupid.
I will never do any business again with
them---not only because they pay for spreading the lies about free software I use and love, but also becuase they are incompetent businessmen. Period.
It's called an analogy. Dont take it out of context, ok? That being said, trusted computing is evil because it is about taking away the rights and choices of others in the name of profit. The fact that it is intended to be brought in a manner such that there is no alternative only attestifies to it's evil nature. There is absolutely no consumer benefit to trusted computing. Even the name is inherintly dishonest as trusted computers cant be trusted by their owners. My point was that trusted computing is fundamentaly evil, and my point stands. Benefiting from the evil does not make it any less evil. Got it?
I wholeheartedly second everything you said here. I would only like to comment on the meaning of the word "trusted" as used in
"trusted computing."
When I was doing some contracting for the.gov (no matter if it was the army, DoD or NSA)
everywhere "trusted system"
had a very specific meaning of
something which has the power to break the security or privacy policy.
It might seem strange at first, but the point is that you don't need to trust someone/something who/which cannot do anything bad to you. You just know that your computer will do what you command it to do right now. But as soon as you stop controlling it yourself, you have to trust it. Hence "trusted computing."
Whilst people seem to have a knee-jerk reaction against "Trusted Computing", I think there is one crucial issue that actually determines wether or not it's a Good Idea(tm). And that is: Who holds the master keys to my computer?
My God, that is status quo,
for God's sake!
You already
hold the master keys to your computer
right now!
You don't need any hardware change
to preserve the status quo!
Ofcourse, that's pretty guaranteed not what MS wants to push, but still - when discussing "Trusted" architectures in general, I think it's a valid point. It could for instance enable me to say that I trust the FSF's list of trustworthy applications - and viruses and other malware would actually be physically unable to run on my workbox. How could that be wrong?
You don't need "trusted computing" system to do that, for God's sake!
You don't need temper-resistant chip
in your computer for the most basic cryptography for the love of God!
My God, every single
"I could use it control my machine"
argument I have read so far
(and I have been following the discussions for quite a few years now)
was describing a feature which can be
implemented
(or even already have been implemented,
like in the case of your Score:5, Insightful idea)
in software
to achieve exactly the same functionality as when being implemented using temper-proof hardware,
the only difference being the fact that the owner can control it.
That's it.
This whole discussion is a complete waste of my time. Why people post such a crap before even
searching Google for trusted computing and reading the first God damn link is beyond me.
To implement a system that would do this wouldn't require any new technology. The ability to sense grid changes before problems occur has been happening in some places for years. The ability to reroute power is already there. It's just a matter of integrating the technology together and installing it all over. That is where the problem would fall as it would cost a lot of $$$$$.
Of course, just like any other idea
with Internet and power grid since
the great Media Fusion scam...
In other words,
The legend of Luke Stewart -- a self-proclaimed national treasure -- carries on...
Too bad no one wants to hear about it.
I have only one question.
When will people learn?
When will that madness finally end?
So, it is
"self-healing" this time.
It's not "billion gigabits per second"
any more.
I wonder what the next snake oil will be.
Maybe selfconscious for God's sake!
Please, people, do we really have to
give free publicity to
yet another scam artist?
Why won't we post a story
about perpetuum mobile
or homeopathy, while we're at it?
This post will probably get moderated
as Flamebait, just like every post
when I dare to say the truth
about some scam.
I guess it's more exciting to talk about
another perpetuum mobile design
than to accept the much less exciting truth.
Moderators, do your duty.
Mod me down for telling the truth and
wasting the fun.
At first, the concept of a global authentication system seems great.
No,
I'm sorry but it does not
for anyone
who is serious about security.
We all have too many passwords to remember, the idea behind Passport seems great.
There is much better solution
for that problem,
Password Safe:
"Many computer users today have to keep track of dozens of passwords: for network accounts, online services, premium web sites. Some write their passwords on a piece of paper, leaving their accounts vulnerable to thieves or in-house snoops. Others choose the same password for different applications, which makes life easy for intruders of all kinds."
"Password Safe protects passwords with the Blowfish encryption algorithm, a fast, free alternative to DES. The program's security has been thoroughly verified by Counterpane Labs under the supervision of Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptography and creator of the Blowfish algorithm."
But in reality, there isn't anyone who is secure enough, trustworthy enough, powerful enough and smart enough to pull off a system that would work and would be trusted.
Of course there isn't anyone
who might be able to implement such a system,
becuase the whole idea is inherently flawed.
"Phoenix DRM Reads Your E-Mail"
is very misleading.
I would recommend changing it as soon as possible. It is not "Your E-Mail" but only
Microsoft Outlook data format on a Microsoft Windows partition and file system!
I realize that
uneducated people
often say
"e-mail virus"
when they really mean "Microsoft Outlook virus"
but this is Slashdot for god's sake, not FOX News!
Please mod parent up. It is very informative. Parent has posted the most interesting parts and the rest of this article is basically in the lines of: "this feature sucks ass but we can all be absolutely sure that it will be wonderful when it is ready." All of the true interesting and insightful content is in the parent post.
Oh please... You are too kind...
I strongly believe that posting Informative, Interesting
and especially Insightful comments
is my holy duty as a Slashdotter.
I do it for the great people who are reading it right now
and have a chance to become smarter
thanks to my texts.
I would like to dedicate all of my
insightfulness to them.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, indeed.
As much as I would love to believe otherwise,
this is nothing but a classical example of
non causa pro causa
informal fallacy,
namely: post hoc ergo propter hoc.
I am sure everyone who is even remotely familiar with logic (id est a great majority of Slashdotters) will agree that we cannot
disprove one
post hoc ergo propter hoc
argument
(RIAA: CD sales dropped after Napster,
so they must have dropped because of Napster; Slashdot: No, they dropped indeed, but because of the overall economy trends
[economical data here])
while at the same time
using the same fallacious arguments
when they "prove" our agenda.
That would be completely unacceptable for
anyone who dares to call oneself
a philosopher, or a Slashdotter for that matter.
We must have higher standards than the RIAA motherfuckers or otherwise we have already lost. Let us not level the playing field that way. We shall win because our morals are better then theirs, not because we know better
refutation tricks!
We do not
need any low and cheap rhetorical tricks whatsoever! Please let us remember that fact
during this and future battles with RIAA.
Otherwise we will have never succeeded
in destroying them.
I, for one,
don't want my great grandchildren to
ask me a question:
"Where have you been when
they took the freedom to sing away?"
and be forced to answer:
"I was a coward
using cheap
non causa pro causa
arguments
to get a warm and fuzzy feeling instead
of acting, my dear."
The most important examples of the words not yet spoken
are: "sdfSDcasdcASc,"
"dOCIJHCIFOAWED,"
"#$R!@#$RE,"
"RTLHKMRK563w56tKGSFG,"
"$_{$_}++||--$_"
and
"sdf434Gsfdy5gSrghBw."
"According to my knowledge,"
said developer Chuck Jorgensen with pride,
"those words has never been spoken yet!"
And he added:
"Some of them turned out to be
valid Perl programs, though."
His response was to invent ANNA ("NORA's little sister," he explains), a system that "anonymizes" data by an encryption technique called hashing. Because the data are scrambled, private records can be shared with the government and secret watch lists can be distributed to private entities, all without fear--because they can't be read.
In other news,
CIA decided to change/etc/shadow permissions to 644.
We asked about this move
Jeff Jonas, founder of System Research and Development, who introduced this novel idea to CIA.
His response was to use MD5 ("MD4's successor,"
he explains), a system that "anonymizes" data by an encryption technique called hashing. Because the data are scrambled, our passwords can be shared with terrorists and script kiddies, all without fear--because they can't be read.
"Who's Alec Muffet? Brute-what? I have no more comments," he added after hearing some questions from the audience.
This character actually responds to and buys from spam.
This character, on the other hand, actually responds to spam, but doesn't buy from said spam,
being 300 times funnier at the same time.
I wonder why he haven't ever been mentioned on Slashdot. Probably because it's better to write about something stupid than something insightful... *sigh*
how many times have you hacked something together in perl that ended up being relied on for some pretty important stuff, only to find 6 months down the track that there's some condition (db connects fine, but fails halfway through script execution as an example) you didn't consider and the whole thing just collapses in a heap - a nasty to recover heap cause you didn't write much logging code either.
The proper answer to this loaded
and overly complex question is of course: "Countless."
I did
not need a "fault tolerant" shell, though,
but
real asynchronous I/O with good exception handling subsystem and events.
That is why I look forward to
Perl 6
and Parrot.
This would REALLY be useful when you're connecting to services external to yourself - network glitches cause more problems with my code than ANYTHING else, and it's a pain in the arse to write code to deal with it gracefully. i'd really really like to see a universal "try this for 5 minutes" wrapper, which, if it still failed, you'd only have one exit condition to worry about. hey, what the hell, maybe i'll spend a few days and write one myself.
Now, if only I had a car computer... But seriously, this is a very good news
for everyone
who has any contacts with automotive
or computer industry at large, id est
pretty much every single human being
whatsoever.
One has to wonder what are the next plans of congress in regard to propritary software world as aw hole. There is a fine line between
revealing the secrets of car computers
and
revealing the secrets of
car robots, which I, for one, would be most certainly much more interested in.
Slippery slipe? I hope not.
This was a very interesting article
in my opinion and
like almost everything written by Pope begs
lots of very important questions,
which is always a good omen
in the techno world we live today.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you very much. I think you are too kind. I will quote you, though, if you don't mind.
That is very strange, almost unbelievable. Next time you might point such an ignorant person to Perl 6 website, and ask her to read Apocalypses by Larry Wall, especially Apocalypse 4 talking about the syntax per se, Apocalypse 3 explaining the operators in details, Apocalypse 5 about regular expressions, grammar rules and pattern matching in general, Apocalypse 6 on subroutines, closures, methods, submethods, multimethods, rules and macros, and the soon-to-be-published Apocalypse 12 about objects, classes, traits and roles (and I mean really read them, not merely skim or take a look at, it is actually quite an entertaining read anyway), which together form the most smart/logical/rational fundamentals of programming language design I have seen to date, and then ask her if she still thinks that when one believes in God one is not smart/logical/rational any more.
Indeed, Larry Wall being a hacker god (pun not intended this time) and also being alive at the same time, might actually be a better candidate for your Slashdot signature than Albert Einstein himself. Besides, Einstein never wanted to be a missionary, if I recall correctly, and thus his faith might be questioned.
Speaking about faith and reason, it seems rather strange that people consider them mutually exclusive. I myself always considered faith to be completely orthogonal to reason. Furthermore, I also fail to understand any desire to prove the existance of any object of faith (be it some deity or otherwise) because as soon as it is proved (assuming that it can be proved) it is not a faith (defined as a belief beyond evidence or logical arguments) any more and becomes merely a knowledge of a simple fact. Let me quote Gary Curtis. "To believe a dogma without evidence, or even despite counter-evidence, is sometimes regarded as more admirable than to believe on good evidence."
Therefore, if any religion was provable (and subsequently proved), there would be no need for faith any more. Even more importantly, proving the validity of any particular religion or faith system, would have to inevitably disprove most of other religions as a side effect, for most of them being mutually contradictory cannot be valid simultaneously.
Now, if we assume faith and reason to be orthogonal (which I believe is the only reasonable way to consider them) then using reason to analyze faith (which by definition would be inherently unanalyzable) might lead to committing subtle fallacies, like e.g. this quite popular one:
"I am a student at the University of Minnesota and I work with a professor performing research and managing more than ten Linux based servers. When it comes to installing services on these machines I am a die-hard build-from-source fanatic, while the professor I work with prefers to install and maintain everything from packages."
That's right. The most important keyword here is the maintenancability itself. I can assure you sonny that as soon as you will get out of your cave and do some real work in the real world, your naive "fanatism" will instantly vanish in the day (or rather in the month) when you will have to clone a five years old multipurpose server and move it to a new remote colocation farm with barebones systems installed. You will want to kill that stupid joker who installed everything there from sources. You will literally want to kill him. Do you really think your professor is stupid? Kids...
I, for one, am really looking forward. Just imagine how many illiterate people will finally be able to work as programmers. It might be a great breakthrough in open source indeed, especially the number of new mp3 players, which I haven't seen lately as many as I would like to see. Once again, Bill Gates saves the day. Bravo. That is what I call a true innovation. I have one question, though. Will it fit in 640kB together with Microsoft BOB interface? I hope so. Thanks to MS BOB I don't have to use command line any more. Thanks to the new visual programming I won't have to write programs, either. Finally I'll be able to sell that useless keyboard on ebay. Wonderful.
That's it!
I would like to hereby announce that I am going to finally sue those jokers for trademark infringement, using my good name and/or shameful stealing of my IP. Furthermore, I claim patents over basic metabolic (as well as e-metabolic) functions, therefore please stop breathing as soon as possible. You will do a great favor for the whole e-ndustry and humanity at large. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Pan with IP shamefully stolen.
Exercising my freedom of choice, I have just chosen to post a comment about your signature. "The Paradox of Choice" discussion finally makes it more on-topic than ever. Usually when people comment your signature they are moderated down as off-topic. This is probably the first time when such a duscussion might be actually very interesting to everyone reading this thread. Of course your signature will not be the only topic of the following text. Nevertheless, I have chosen to "comment your sig."
First of all, let me express my sincerest congratulations for the best "signature troll" I have ever seen on Slashdot: "Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin, Maxwell and Einstein believed in God. So do I." Truly remarkable.
Let me explain. It is a brilliant example of rhetoric because it is not a fallacy per se and is therefore irrefutable, however the most frequent ipse dixit interpretation (at least the most frequent in the numerous follow-up comments I have been reading for quite some time), is obviously fallacious in many ways and it is this very interpretation which forms a sound pro-theist argument what makes that signature as controversial as it undeniably is. Bravo. This is what I call a good sophism. (As a sidenote, I also admire the joke with Galileo in the context of science and religion. "E pur si muove" indeed!)
That unwritten conclusion is an outstanding example of argumentum ad verecundiam (argument from respect), i.e. a genetic fallacy of the appeal to misleading authority, one of the most interesting ignoratio elenchi informal fallacies. The above signature is written in such a way that most of people understand its first part (i.e. "Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin, Maxwell and Einstein believed in God.") as a premiss, and the second one ("So do I.") as a conclusion. It doesn't provide the argument though.
The only sound argument (which is inevitably implied) must be in the lines of: "if this particular smart people believed in something, it must be true" which is undoubtedly fallacious (and thus of course controversial) but which is never written. This is interesting because it is this unwritten implied argument, the only possible link between the premiss and the conclusion of the most popular interpretation (not the only one, mind you, supposedly not even the intended one, but the most obvious one nonetheless) of the signature text, which is causing the whole controversy. This is truly beautiful.
Now, back to your supposedly intended meaning: "My sig is meant as a counter example to those who think that only the weak-minded beleive in God." Counter-example to what assertion? That every scientist is an atheist? That every smart person is an atheist? That every genius is an atheist?
(This is not a straw man argument. You really need such a universal generalization if you want to use a counter-example to show that the argument (or the proposition, to be precise, which might be used as a premiss of arguments you are actually refuting, but which you have yet not presented to my knowledge) is non-validating by finding examples of few true premisses with false conclusions. Your specific counter-example woudn't work even against "most of smart people are atheists" so naturally I had to assume you were talking about a proposition which your counter-example is actually effective against.)
I have never seen anyone saying that all of smart people or all of scientists are atheists. Not only on Slashdot, I have never seen anyone saying that anywhere.
That doesn't make your intended meaning any less valid, though. It is perfectly valid, even if completely obvious and indisputable and thus quite pointless. And that very indisputability explains why such an interp
What paradox? I'm sorry but that is not paradoxical by any stretch of imagination!
Choices are hard for most of less intelligent people. Any choices, not necessarily those related to computer software or even the technology as a whole.
Most of people (the "unwashed masses" if you will) don't want to make choices. Remember that most of people don't even choose such fundamental matters as their religion for God's sake, but stick to what they parents had chosen (or rather had sticked to what their parents had chosen (or... ad infinitum)) let alone such---let's face it---relatively unimportant parts of their existence as an operating system.
Most of people don't want to think more than absolutely necessary. They want automatic transmission because they don't want to think about changing gears, they want Windows because they don't want to think about recompiling the kernel, they want pop music because they don't want to think about the melody and harmony.
Other important problem is that those poeple usually want everything now. So analogously they use automatic transmission because they don't have to learn about the gears, they use Windows because they don't want to learn bash and the new way of working and they listen to pop music becauce they don't want to play the Second Hungarian Rhapsody by Ferenc Liszt hundred time before they "get it"---no, they listen to Britney Speers because they "get it" after two tacts of the repetititive piece of crap it is.
We, the Slashdot community, have to understand that as an intelligent minority. We have to understand that the majority of people unlike us don't love listening to classical music, hacking software or reading Aristoteles. They don't want fine cuisine, they want Mac Donald's. They want crap. Why? Because that's the most they could possibly aspire to understand.
But please, don't look at them like they were morons. That is simply not true. They were just not created to think, unlike us, and that's fine as long as we don't alienate too much and understand our position. Remember that for them we are the ones who are abnormal. But is that a paradox? I don't think so. Great article, nonetheless.
...then hurry up before it's completely terraformed!
Is it in any way related to the recent broadband deployments and the legislative changes in Australia? Could any Australian posts some statistics of P2P networks traffic in Australian backbones? It could be interesting if that could be used as an argument that file sharing (or "piracy" if you will) might be actually good to artists all over the world. Very interesting indeed.
The terraforming of Mars seems to be, in my opinion, unfortunately quite unavoidable, to say the very least, and that is because of all of us who are "marsaforming" Earth so well that soon we sadly will be unable to live here any more. That's very sad. It might not be a problem for us, but for our children or grandchildren.
I am sure one day someone will remember the timeless implications of our today's Slashdot discussion looking at the Mars University and will say: "Very impressive. Back in the 20th century we had no idea there was a university on Mars," to which his professor will answer: "Well in those days Mars was just a dreary uninhabitable wasteland... much like Utah. But unlike Utah, it was eventually made livable, when the university was founded in 2636." That will be a great day in our history.
I am very excited. I dream of being able to ski on Mars one day. That would be amazing. We definitely have to bring some water there and lower the temperature somehow to freeze it (we could use the process of so caled desublimacion to change the steam---a product of hydrogen and oxygen synthesis---directly into snow). That would be great. I am so excited. I haven't read such an exciting article for a long time.
With no doubt, this must be the biggest security hole I have seen lately. 802.11g directly to the hard drive. Bravo. Is this an April Fool's joke posted prematurely or are they really out of their minds thinking that anyone would be so stupid to buy such a hard drive, which is basically asking to be cracked? I find it insulting. I hope script kiddies will have lots of fun.
I'm sorry but you are very wrong. Have The SCO Group ever sued anyone who had never paid them before? No. At this point EV1Servers.net's CEO (who will never see my money again) doing any business with The SCO Group whatsoever is not only dishonorable but also utterly stupid. I will never do any business again with them---not only because they pay for spreading the lies about free software I use and love, but also becuase they are incompetent businessmen. Period.
I wholeheartedly second everything you said here. I would only like to comment on the meaning of the word "trusted" as used in "trusted computing." When I was doing some contracting for the .gov (no matter if it was the army, DoD or NSA)
everywhere "trusted system"
had a very specific meaning of
something which has the power to break the security or privacy policy.
It might seem strange at first, but the point is that you don't need to trust someone/something who/which cannot do anything bad to you. You just know that your computer will do what you command it to do right now. But as soon as you stop controlling it yourself, you have to trust it. Hence "trusted computing."
My God, that is status quo, for God's sake! You already hold the master keys to your computer right now! You don't need any hardware change to preserve the status quo!
You don't need "trusted computing" system to do that, for God's sake! You don't need temper-resistant chip in your computer for the most basic cryptography for the love of God! My God, every single "I could use it control my machine" argument I have read so far (and I have been following the discussions for quite a few years now) was describing a feature which can be implemented (or even already have been implemented, like in the case of your Score:5, Insightful idea) in software to achieve exactly the same functionality as when being implemented using temper-proof hardware, the only difference being the fact that the owner can control it. That's it. This whole discussion is a complete waste of my time. Why people post such a crap before even searching Google for trusted computing and reading the first God damn link is beyond me.
Of course, just like any other idea with Internet and power grid since the great Media Fusion scam... In other words, The legend of Luke Stewart -- a self-proclaimed national treasure -- carries on... Too bad no one wants to hear about it. I have only one question. When will people learn? When will that madness finally end? So, it is "self-healing" this time. It's not "billion gigabits per second" any more. I wonder what the next snake oil will be. Maybe selfconscious for God's sake! Please, people, do we really have to give free publicity to yet another scam artist? Why won't we post a story about perpetuum mobile or homeopathy, while we're at it? This post will probably get moderated as Flamebait, just like every post when I dare to say the truth about some scam. I guess it's more exciting to talk about another perpetuum mobile design than to accept the much less exciting truth. Moderators, do your duty. Mod me down for telling the truth and wasting the fun.
No, I'm sorry but it does not for anyone who is serious about security.
There is much better solution for that problem, Password Safe:
"Many computer users today have to keep track of dozens of passwords: for network accounts, online services, premium web sites. Some write their passwords on a piece of paper, leaving their accounts vulnerable to thieves or in-house snoops. Others choose the same password for different applications, which makes life easy for intruders of all kinds."
"Password Safe protects passwords with the Blowfish encryption algorithm, a fast, free alternative to DES. The program's security has been thoroughly verified by Counterpane Labs under the supervision of Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptography and creator of the Blowfish algorithm."
Of course there isn't anyone who might be able to implement such a system, becuase the whole idea is inherently flawed.
Because Programmers Don't Shower?
Am I the only one who read the headline as "U.S. Prepares to Get Naked" and instantly thought "Pan T. Hose, PhD, Prepares to Get Green Card"?
(And please don't tell me what Sigmund Freud would say...)
"Phoenix DRM Reads Your E-Mail" is very misleading. I would recommend changing it as soon as possible. It is not "Your E-Mail" but only Microsoft Outlook data format on a Microsoft Windows partition and file system! I realize that uneducated people often say "e-mail virus" when they really mean "Microsoft Outlook virus" but this is Slashdot for god's sake, not FOX News!
Oh please... You are too kind... I strongly believe that posting Informative, Interesting and especially Insightful comments is my holy duty as a Slashdotter. I do it for the great people who are reading it right now and have a chance to become smarter thanks to my texts. I would like to dedicate all of my insightfulness to them. Thank you. Thank you very much, indeed.
As much as I would love to believe otherwise, this is nothing but a classical example of non causa pro causa informal fallacy, namely: post hoc ergo propter hoc. I am sure everyone who is even remotely familiar with logic (id est a great majority of Slashdotters) will agree that we cannot disprove one post hoc ergo propter hoc argument (RIAA: CD sales dropped after Napster, so they must have dropped because of Napster; Slashdot: No, they dropped indeed, but because of the overall economy trends [economical data here]) while at the same time using the same fallacious arguments when they "prove" our agenda. That would be completely unacceptable for anyone who dares to call oneself a philosopher, or a Slashdotter for that matter. We must have higher standards than the RIAA motherfuckers or otherwise we have already lost. Let us not level the playing field that way. We shall win because our morals are better then theirs, not because we know better refutation tricks! We do not need any low and cheap rhetorical tricks whatsoever! Please let us remember that fact during this and future battles with RIAA. Otherwise we will have never succeeded in destroying them. I, for one, don't want my great grandchildren to ask me a question: "Where have you been when they took the freedom to sing away?" and be forced to answer: "I was a coward using cheap non causa pro causa arguments to get a warm and fuzzy feeling instead of acting, my dear."
The most important examples of the words not yet spoken are: "sdfSDcasdcASc," "dOCIJHCIFOAWED," "#$R!@#$RE," "RTLHKMRK563w56tKGSFG," "$_{$_}++||--$_" and "sdf434Gsfdy5gSrghBw."
"According to my knowledge," said developer Chuck Jorgensen with pride, "those words has never been spoken yet!" And he added: "Some of them turned out to be valid Perl programs, though."
In other news, CIA decided to change /etc/shadow permissions to 644.
We asked about this move
Jeff Jonas, founder of System Research and Development, who introduced this novel idea to CIA.
His response was to use MD5 ("MD4's successor,"
he explains), a system that "anonymizes" data by an encryption technique called hashing. Because the data are scrambled, our passwords can be shared with terrorists and script kiddies, all without fear--because they can't be read.
"Who's Alec Muffet? Brute-what? I have no more comments," he added after hearing some questions from the audience.
This character actually responds to and buys from spam.
This character, on the other hand, actually responds to spam, but doesn't buy from said spam, being 300 times funnier at the same time. I wonder why he haven't ever been mentioned on Slashdot. Probably because it's better to write about something stupid than something insightful... *sigh*
The proper answer to this loaded and overly complex question is of course: "Countless." I did not need a "fault tolerant" shell, though, but real asynchronous I/O with good exception handling subsystem and events. That is why I look forward to Perl 6 and Parrot.
Good luck then.
Now, if only I had a car computer... But seriously, this is a very good news for everyone who has any contacts with automotive or computer industry at large, id est pretty much every single human being whatsoever. One has to wonder what are the next plans of congress in regard to propritary software world as aw hole. There is a fine line between revealing the secrets of car computers and revealing the secrets of car robots, which I, for one, would be most certainly much more interested in. Slippery slipe? I hope not. This was a very interesting article in my opinion and like almost everything written by Pope begs lots of very important questions, which is always a good omen in the techno world we live today.