Why would you laugh at 0000-12-25? Is it because of the mix-up of dates and year lengths between different calendars or something else?
Even as an atheist, I have to believe that for such a story to hold for over 2000 years, there has to be someone named "Jesus" who was born about 2000 years ago, messiah or not.
Its not the idea that there was some guy named Jesus born around then who was probably some type of preacher/prophet/messiah/cult of personality/whatever that I was laughing at of course. It was the fact that even as 10 year old I knew that the date December 25th was arbitrarily set by some church at some point and setting that date in order to "go see" Jesus' birth is quite a clever joke. Discussing this with my fundamentalist friend and finding out that he believed that Dec 25th was the actual date of the birth was quite the revelation to me (no pun intended). After that we discussed many more tenets of his fundamentalist beliefs and I was shocked. I had no idea up until that time that anyone could teach their kids such pointless crap and the amount of mental gymnastics required to hold on to those beliefs. It was a very eye-opening experience for me.
This whole thing reminds of the Back to the Future movie. I was 10 or 11 or so when it came out and I distinctly remember seeing that movie with a kid raised in a fundamentalist baptist household. When Doc Brown said "so do you want to see the birth of Christ" and then set the time machine to Dec 25 0000 I laughed quite hard. The other guy asked me why I thought that was so funny and I spent about 45 minutes trying to explain it to him after the movie. He never got it and was somewhat offended that I found it so funny. After another couple of days discussing this and other things (like creation in 6 days etc.) I finally realized how deeply misinformed people become by being taught about literal interpretation of the bible. I was absolutely amazed at that understanding of the world and it was my first real exposure to this insanity. Up to that day I had always understood bible stories as being just stories (I was raised mildly Catholic but my family was really just going through the motions).
It actually makes me very sad to think back to that experience.
Actually us pavement engineer types do this all the time. Basically the input to the function is the profile of the pavement measured by a pavement profilometer which essentially captures pavement elevation about every 6 in or so. (http://www.dynatest.com/functional-rsp.php)
Then this profile is fed through an algorithm that models the response of a hypothetical "quarter car" (basically a spring above a tire to simulate the amount of movement experienced by something on the axle). This measurement is called the International Roughness Index and it has been correlated to "Ride Quality" perceived by highway users. It is not a perfect measurement but it is used quite frequently to help decide pavement projects. if you are more interested....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Roughness_Indexhttp://www.umtri.umich.edu/content/LittleBook98R.pdf
So for this thing they would need some other model to calculate the "movement" induced by road profile on the vehicle much like IRI. Once you have that you could correlate it to Ride Quality, have they done that? That is the question...
BS. No one in real scientific circles maintains that evolution is inviolate, only that *real* scientific method based critiques are allowed in a science class.
If tomorrow a new Einstein emerges in biological sciences and produces a theory that shatters current thinking on Evolution, the science world would be bound to accept it IF it were experimentally tested and proven to be a good working model through the rigorous application of the SCIENTIFIC method. These idiots are not doing this, not by a long shot.
By the way it is not a bad thing that it takes some time for new theories to become accepted by the scientific community.
I remember many years ago on the Pennsylvania Turnpike after you exit the system you would get back a copy of the card it had some checkboxes next to a code on it like "Lost Ticket" etc. One of those was "excessive speed" I always figured it made some kind of calculation just like this.
That was before EZPass.
Hell yeah I have had Ubuntu on my laptop for a year now and I still cannot get it to work with WPA2.
I love Ubuntu it is quite nice, but I was willing to fight with it to get the wireless working, The average person would never put up with that.
It took many posts 2 weeks and settings changes etc and finally a new upgrade to the kernel made it operate with WPA on my standard Dell Laptop. It has still never worked with WPA2.
No matter what people say Linux will never become widespread until things just work for the average person the first time it is installed and right away.
What you lose is the shared calendaring, but surely you can live without that.
Actually the calendar shared contacts and public folders are the whole reason we use Exchange.
It is a sad hole in the open source world that nothing works well with Exchange. I understand that it is not necessarily the open source world's fault (certainly M$ has no reason to share how to communicate with Exchange) but in the end it comes down to what works and it just does not work in Linux.
I actually just did the same thing about 4 weeks ago. I installed UBUNTU on my laptop just to see how much I could use it and avoid windows. My results:
1. One of my VPN connections doesn't work because a client does not exist for Linux (SonicWall)
2. Evolution Exchange Connector is absolutely horrible and unusable (it crashes constantly and locks up). Seems to me that this is the biggest obstacle to more general Linux use, I have to use Exchange and until I can effectively use it in Linux I cannot get away from Windows. (OWA in FireFox is just as bad, but maybe I could do the IE/Wine thing...)
3. I have not had the occasion to use Visio yet, but that will hurt when the time comes.
4. I had a very difficult time getting my wireless card working. However now that it works it is solid. But the things I needed to do to get it to work would be very intimidating for the average person.
On the good side...
I was very surprised at how easy it was to get things like RDP clients, plugins for FireFox( multimedia, FLash etc) and other things up and running.
I like the overall feel of it it is very friendly and easy to use. I was able to find my way around quite easily.
Thanks
My 2c.
Has anyone from the open source community tried to write secure software for this?
I suspect that it may not be possible(thus no one is trying) but has there ever been a real, open, reviewable effort to try?
Maybe the real answer is that the problem is insolvable thus the only "solutions" are ones that cannot be verified (closed source, proprietary etc).
Personally the whole idea gives me the creeps. Everything I have read shows that this whole idea is bad. What I find amazing is that very smart people whose whole careers rely on putting computers to good use are the ones who most strongly recommend that computer systems in this arena are bad.
In any case I just wonder if there ever has been an open effort to provide software/hardware combination that those security experts would agree upon. I have seen requirements for voter verified paper trail etc, but are there any open systems out there that meet these requirements?
I hope we read this in about 100 years....
About 100 years ago, the Dover Pennsylvania school board very nearly succeeded in enforcing 'introducing a new scientific truth,' that would have erroneously established intelligent design as a rational alternative to evolution. The story explaining the rationale behind the idiocy is best described by the federal judge who prevented the school board from....
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Why would you laugh at 0000-12-25? Is it because of the mix-up of dates and year lengths between different calendars or something else?
Even as an atheist, I have to believe that for such a story to hold for over 2000 years, there has to be someone named "Jesus" who was born about 2000 years ago, messiah or not.
Its not the idea that there was some guy named Jesus born around then who was probably some type of preacher/prophet/messiah/cult of personality/whatever that I was laughing at of course. It was the fact that even as 10 year old I knew that the date December 25th was arbitrarily set by some church at some point and setting that date in order to "go see" Jesus' birth is quite a clever joke. Discussing this with my fundamentalist friend and finding out that he believed that Dec 25th was the actual date of the birth was quite the revelation to me (no pun intended). After that we discussed many more tenets of his fundamentalist beliefs and I was shocked. I had no idea up until that time that anyone could teach their kids such pointless crap and the amount of mental gymnastics required to hold on to those beliefs. It was a very eye-opening experience for me.
This whole thing reminds of the Back to the Future movie. I was 10 or 11 or so when it came out and I distinctly remember seeing that movie with a kid raised in a fundamentalist baptist household. When Doc Brown said "so do you want to see the birth of Christ" and then set the time machine to Dec 25 0000 I laughed quite hard. The other guy asked me why I thought that was so funny and I spent about 45 minutes trying to explain it to him after the movie. He never got it and was somewhat offended that I found it so funny. After another couple of days discussing this and other things (like creation in 6 days etc.) I finally realized how deeply misinformed people become by being taught about literal interpretation of the bible. I was absolutely amazed at that understanding of the world and it was my first real exposure to this insanity. Up to that day I had always understood bible stories as being just stories (I was raised mildly Catholic but my family was really just going through the motions). It actually makes me very sad to think back to that experience.
Actually us pavement engineer types do this all the time. Basically the input to the function is the profile of the pavement measured by a pavement profilometer which essentially captures pavement elevation about every 6 in or so. (http://www.dynatest.com/functional-rsp.php) Then this profile is fed through an algorithm that models the response of a hypothetical "quarter car" (basically a spring above a tire to simulate the amount of movement experienced by something on the axle). This measurement is called the International Roughness Index and it has been correlated to "Ride Quality" perceived by highway users. It is not a perfect measurement but it is used quite frequently to help decide pavement projects. if you are more interested.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Roughness_Index http://www.umtri.umich.edu/content/LittleBook98R.pdf So for this thing they would need some other model to calculate the "movement" induced by road profile on the vehicle much like IRI. Once you have that you could correlate it to Ride Quality, have they done that? That is the question...
BS. No one in real scientific circles maintains that evolution is inviolate, only that *real* scientific method based critiques are allowed in a science class. If tomorrow a new Einstein emerges in biological sciences and produces a theory that shatters current thinking on Evolution, the science world would be bound to accept it IF it were experimentally tested and proven to be a good working model through the rigorous application of the SCIENTIFIC method. These idiots are not doing this, not by a long shot. By the way it is not a bad thing that it takes some time for new theories to become accepted by the scientific community.
+1 Love this book, may be a bit dense for the average teenager though.
This book is very accessible and has some very interesting things and relationships about numbers. http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Mysteries-Beauty-Magic-Numbers/dp/0738202592/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234144461&sr=1-1
I remember many years ago on the Pennsylvania Turnpike after you exit the system you would get back a copy of the card it had some checkboxes next to a code on it like "Lost Ticket" etc. One of those was "excessive speed" I always figured it made some kind of calculation just like this. That was before EZPass.
Hell yeah I have had Ubuntu on my laptop for a year now and I still cannot get it to work with WPA2. I love Ubuntu it is quite nice, but I was willing to fight with it to get the wireless working, The average person would never put up with that. It took many posts 2 weeks and settings changes etc and finally a new upgrade to the kernel made it operate with WPA on my standard Dell Laptop. It has still never worked with WPA2. No matter what people say Linux will never become widespread until things just work for the average person the first time it is installed and right away.
The book Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire is another book accessible by the vaguely mathematically inclined as well.
Oh cool!!!! I will try it Thanks for the tip!
I actually just did the same thing about 4 weeks ago. I installed UBUNTU on my laptop just to see how much I could use it and avoid windows. My results: 1. One of my VPN connections doesn't work because a client does not exist for Linux (SonicWall) 2. Evolution Exchange Connector is absolutely horrible and unusable (it crashes constantly and locks up). Seems to me that this is the biggest obstacle to more general Linux use, I have to use Exchange and until I can effectively use it in Linux I cannot get away from Windows. (OWA in FireFox is just as bad, but maybe I could do the IE/Wine thing...) 3. I have not had the occasion to use Visio yet, but that will hurt when the time comes. 4. I had a very difficult time getting my wireless card working. However now that it works it is solid. But the things I needed to do to get it to work would be very intimidating for the average person. On the good side... I was very surprised at how easy it was to get things like RDP clients, plugins for FireFox( multimedia, FLash etc) and other things up and running. I like the overall feel of it it is very friendly and easy to use. I was able to find my way around quite easily. Thanks My 2c.
Agreed! Like I said this gives me the creeps, a solution in need of a problem (for more money no less). As you said Jeez.
Has anyone from the open source community tried to write secure software for this? I suspect that it may not be possible(thus no one is trying) but has there ever been a real, open, reviewable effort to try? Maybe the real answer is that the problem is insolvable thus the only "solutions" are ones that cannot be verified (closed source, proprietary etc). Personally the whole idea gives me the creeps. Everything I have read shows that this whole idea is bad. What I find amazing is that very smart people whose whole careers rely on putting computers to good use are the ones who most strongly recommend that computer systems in this arena are bad. In any case I just wonder if there ever has been an open effort to provide software/hardware combination that those security experts would agree upon. I have seen requirements for voter verified paper trail etc, but are there any open systems out there that meet these requirements?
I hope we read this in about 100 years.... About 100 years ago, the Dover Pennsylvania school board very nearly succeeded in enforcing 'introducing a new scientific truth,' that would have erroneously established intelligent design as a rational alternative to evolution. The story explaining the rationale behind the idiocy is best described by the federal judge who prevented the school board from ....