...I think that is a very plausible theory that takes care of my problem very nicely...
So then, where did the rocks from space get their life forms? Of course, the earth is supported on the back of a big turtle. And then its turtles all the way down:-) !!
At the molecular level life is far more complex than Mr. Darwin ever dreamed. As far as we can tell, the properties of the elements are pretty much the same throughout the universe. Of these elements, carbon is the only one that has just the right binding energies to allow complex molecules (proteins, DNA, fats) to hold together reasonably well, yet not be attached too strongly to each other and other elements. The building blocks of life have to be of such nature to allow them to be assembled and taken apart without an undue expenditure of energy. Photosynthesis is just one example of the arrow parameters needed for living chemistry.
Therefore, as far as PHYSICAL life, based on atoms and molecules goes, no, there is no other possibility outside of the life as we know it.
....This leads me to conclude that all life must have come form one ancestor........
You can get a lot of exercise jumping to conclusions. Computers use binary codes. Therefore all computers came from a common ancestor computer. Cars have 4 wheels and so do horse drawn carriages. Does that mean that cars descended from carriages. I suppose in a sense they did, but designers of both really used proven principles of design.
How about all life, computers cars an carriages all have a designer. Could that POSSIBLY also explain the commonality?
.......believers take for granted something that the large amount of evidence points away from...........
But if there IS some evidence that agrees with the ID idea, then it either has to be explained away or the minority who accepts the evidence gets shouted down and/or ridiculed. Of course we KNOW that the majority is ALWAYS right.
.....it's easy to prove that the earth is more than a few thousand years old.......
Proving anything is very hard. Proving origins and things that took place supposedly millions of years ago is impossible. The best anyone can do is to present certain evidence. All evidence is based on certain assumptions (beliefs) which cannot be proved.
To assert that some object is N number of years old there has to be some sort of evidence of a reliable clock that has been ticking uniformly for all that time and there has to be some evidence that associates the clock with that object.
Scientists must assume (believe) that the ticks of certain clocks (radioactivity, tree rings, ice cores, deposition of minerals, magnetization etc.) are 1) equally spaced over time and 2) can be tied to time as defined by the motion of the earth around the sun (years). There is no way anyone can KNOW whether these uniformitarian assumptions (beliefs) are true. There is evidence for some rather catastrophic sudden events in the past.
There may be other "clocks", but one of the ones I mentioned, which is often cited in global warming debates is the ice core analysis, such as in the ice that now covers most of Greenland. There are clearly layers of ice. The assumption (belief) is that these are deposited at the rate of one layer annually. So they count the layers and based on the annual assumption, the bottom of the ice is hundreds of thousands years or even millions of years old.
Some aircraft that had crash landed there in WW2 were discovered after 42 years under 263 feet of ice, compressed into several distinct layers per foot. This shows that these layers are NOT annual cycles, but simply periods of warmer and colder weather. Thus this evidence shows that the assumption about the annual nature of these layers is wrong. Therefore, these layers cannot be equated to years.
Scientists have determined that roughly 400 million tons of minerals are deposited yearly into the world's oceans. Today's mineral content (mostly NaCl) is less than 4%. At today's rate, IF it were really true that the earth is over a billion years old the water of the sea should be totally saturated with minerals. At the present rate, the salt content corresponds to around only 4000 years worth of accumulation. This corresponds to about the time of the biblical flood. This is evidence that the earth is not billions of years old, but still doesn't PROVE it, since we have no way of knowing whether the rate of mineral addition has always been constant. There also could have been a mechanism to remove minerals from the water, although so far nobody has come forward with a plausible mechanism.
There is no PROOF anyone can show that the earth is billions of years old, but there is evidence for both a very young earth and universe.
.....It's fine, they just forgot that this single origin's name is Adam........
The would have to be at least two. The woman's name was Eve. They got the single origin right, but missed the place. The Garden of Eden was somewhere in what we call Iraq today.
....Quantom and decay-based randomness is believed to be truly random.....
What about the "random" noise in any resistor or the so called noise diodes? Is thermal noise not truly random because it arises from the supposedly random vibrations at the atomic level? Would a random number generator based on this not also be "truly" random?
Exactly how does a state of a computer differ from a thought, a state of mind or an emotional state? Software is distinct from hardware. It has nothing to do with magic. There is no other source for software besides a mind. That is why we call software, music compositions, literature etc. INTELLECTUAL property and have a whole separate body of law devoted to it.
Just as software is an entity that runs in some hardware, so too your mind runs in the hardware (wetware?) we call brain. Software and hardware are distinct and so are mind and brain. The hardware expresses the software. One has mass and is subject to gravity and the other is not. Mass and energy are subject to the laws of inertia and gravity.
You can arrange the bits on a disk either at random or with information. There will be no difference in weight. The same holds true for ink on paper. You can scramble up all the letters of a novel randomly and its weight will not change from the former ordered pattern. Information does not reside in the chemistry of ink on paper nor in the physics of bits of magnetism on the disk. It is ONLY their arrangement that carries the message. The same is true of DNA. It is the sequence of codes that carry the data. The DNA is like the disk drive or paper, it is only the carrier.
..... I suspect that means they were professionals (engineers? physicians? educators?) with good educations in Europe......
Your suspicions are not correct. I am an engineer. My father was a chef and baker and got a job at a bakery and my mother was a nurse, but had to take a job as a cleaning woman at minimum wage. My wife's parents managed to save enough money for a down payment and borrow the rest from a friend. Paying off that loan meant doing without even the smallest extras and a very hard and dangerous job for her dad at a local lumber mill.
We know a young man of hispanic descent, born in LA, who was in prison until a little over a year ago, yet now has a good job with a road construction company. It is not an easy job for him, but we know he is a hard worker. It still is possible to get out of an economic hole by hard work.
Although there are some employers that needlessly require college for some entry level jobs, it is still possible to get good jobs as a high school graduate. Some employers are willing to train motivated young people. I talked to the owner of a farm machinery dealer about two weeks ago, at a wedding, who spoke very highly of the young groom he recently employed and will train as a mechanic. People who have a good attitude and high integrity level still are able to make it in our society.
Reasoning doesn't add knowledge, but only manipulates your existing knowledge into other conclusions and results. Btw. Mutations also do not generate any new information, but result in a loss of data.
(....But if I told you that I know that this is going to happen, because my neighbor's cat had a dream about it (I know about the dream because I'm a pet psychic, you see), you'd say I was nuts....)
Not necessarily. My belief or disbelief would depend in a large measure by your track record of truthfulness and success at prophecy. If you had a 100% track record at correctly foretelling events that came true in the past, I would be inclined to believe you about the future. There are some amazing predictions in the Bible that have come true and some of them are coming true in our time, before our eyes. In ancient Israel, prophets who were NOT 100% accurate were executed. A prophet who said such and such would happen before a certain time or after a certain event had better be right. Ask miss Cleo or anyone else claiming prophetic powers why they have not yet won the lottery or gotten rich in the stock market.
(....know that they are irrational.....)
The only one who can KNOW what is rational or irrational is someone who knows EVERYTHING, ie. is omniscient. You and I can only believe. Belief in resurrection, for example seems irrational only because we don't have even the slightest knowledge of the technology and mechanisms behind it. The operation of wireless communication devices would likely seem irrational and magical to a person living in ancient Rome.
(.....Surely you don't think the story of Jesus is the only resurrection....)
Of course not. In the Bible we can read of a number of instances where people came back from death. We were discussing the very concept of resurrections and an existence beyond our present physical time-space dimensions.
(....but believing in them without extraordinary evidence is still irrational....)
Belief of evidence depends mostly on two things. The nature of the evidence is one. What exactly do you mean by "extraordinary"? Wireless communication or other modern technology would be considered extraordinary by a first century person, but we who understand somewhat at least, the principles behind these, consider them ordinary every day things. To God resurrection technology is quite ordinary.
The other is the credibility of the witnesses. Dr. Simon Greenleaf, one of the founders of the Harvard Law School, wrote THE book on the rules of evidence, as it relates to courts of law. Every law student must still study it today. You might want to read another little treatise about evidence he wrote called "Testimony of the Evangelists". His original goal was to try to discredit the Gospels and especially the Resurrection.
(.....How does a newborn baby commit "treason" against anyone?.....)
Not as a newborn, but as soon as he/she puts self above others. My guess is that you have never raised kids. Who teaches a little one to tell untruth as soon as they can talk or to take things that are not theirs? Jesus was the only human who could ever successfully challenge friend and foe alike: "Which of you can prove any wrong against me?" If you can truthfully issue such a challenge and receive no reply, from man or from God, then you will be ushered into the presence of the Almighty, standing on your own merit. For the rest of us there is grace, received by admitting guilt and then being forgiven. I have never even lived one day, without having transgressed some aspect of God's commands. If you are honest, you probably haven't either. One of the 10 commandments (not options) is "Thou shalt not covet....". Have you ever wanted something someone else had and were envious? If so, you are guilty and have violated Gods perfection.
Phrases beginning with "Truly I say to you...." is recorded over 50 times as utterances of Jesus. You can choose to classify these as repeated lies, foolish i
.....are likely white, well-educated, and not scrabbling just to pay the rent.........
Indeed true, but that was NOT the case for my parents. The came to the US after WW2, with not much more than the clothes on their backs and in debt. Their education was not recognized at all in the US and none of us knew English. By hard work they were able to provide for their children. As a kid, to contribute to the family I delivered about 150 newspapers every day after school. I often walked to school, rather than spend the nickel transit bus fare, saving me all of 50 cents each week.
The same is true for my wife, whose parents came to Canada at that time. Both of her parents also worked very hard and instilled this work ethic in their children also. She and her brothers had to help run their family farm. Farmers get up early and so did they, working hard, before the school bus came and again after it delivered them home, after school.
We both have taught our children to stay out of or at least minimize debt and to never use a credit card for anything other than a book keeping convenience. The daughter I wrote about has taken this to heart and practices these admonitions. The other one has been less diligent in this regard and has gotten herself into a credit pit out of which she only recently climbed out.
Neither the US nor Canada had any kind of governmental welfare system in place back then. Handouts, including rent subsidies, food stamps etc. tend to discourage hard work. The advertising and credit industries encourage people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, in order to impress others they don't even like. It's not only the money a person earns, that counts, but even more so, the money one keeps through frugal habits.
They key word here is "potential" which to me means theoretical. In practical terms, Mac OSX is much safer than and Windows box. That was the point of my post. So far at least all threats against the Mac were academic vulnerabilities, touted by various security companies, in order for them to scare Mac users into wasting oodles of money on their garbage software which 90% of the time reduces the functionality and usefulness of the systems it infests. Until I read a headline that says something along the line: "Thousands of Macs infected by xxxx virus or worm", I'll tell my clients; "Yes, any computer can be infected, especially if you cooperate by giving permission for such infections, but for now, and the foreseeable future, in practical terms, you'll be MUCH safer with a Mac." That is an unarguable FACT.
Everybody's number comes up eventually driving a car or simply crossing the street. Statistically the probability of my Mac's number coming up is 5 orders of magnitude less than for a Windows box. Life is full of chances. As far as computers are concerned, I'll take my chances with OSX rather than Windows.
....beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal.......
We call it SUPERnatural because these things are above and beyond what we can generally experience. We have only two ways of getting information. One is through our personal experience as brought to us by our senses. We have lots of evidence that these senses can be deceived. The other way we get information is by communication from someone else. When someone tells you something, you either have to BELIEVE or not. You may try various ways to corroborate the information. However, in the end you really have no PROOF, only some evidence you can either choose to accept or reject. All our law courts operate on evidence presented, either believed or rejected. There is no proof.
The carriers of information are part of our physical mass-energy dimensions and behave according to fairly well accepted rules. However information in and of itself is not physical and therefore obeys different rules. A thought, emotion, the codes stored in DNA or a computer program, the arrangement of symbols on a page, all are carried by and as far as we can tell, bound to physical matter-energy forms. That doesn't mean that these things HAVE to be thus bound. In the article the word UNKNOWN appeared a number of times.
You can BELIEVE that many call "supernatural" is irrational, but you can never KNOW that. You may have heard the saying: "Technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic".
Indeed, all this senseless killing and dying is real powerful evidence for the biblical teaching that man has rebelled against God and His government. Earth is a penal colony where all that rebelled and committed treason against the Almighty are incarcerated and quarantined. We are all condemned prisoners quarantined to this time-space dimension in order to prevent the contagion of rebellion and evil from spreading to other dimensions and their worlds. We are told in this book that we humans are not the only kind of creature thus confined. The Bible outlines a plan and offer, by which we treasonous criminals may be freed in order to once again enjoy unrestricted access to our Creator God in His dwelling place, the timeless dimensions of eternity. This offer is only available by faith in the work of Jesus, who claimed to be God come to earth, not just some prophet or guru or founder of one of the many religions on earth.
Man's incurable religiosity is evident in all cultures and races showing that man is still hardwired by the Creator God to yearn after Him. The stubborn, unceasing belief by most people on this planet in some form of existence after death cannot be explained by chance evolution, but it is a vestigial remnant and remembrance of an origin and destiny beyond our present existence in our mortal time-space prison.
......It's just that their market share has recently become high enough.....
That market share argument is such a tired old saw, repeated endlessly. Who cares WHY Macs are safer in practice. They may be no safer in theory. Who cares WHY nobody wants to burgle my house. The fact is that burglars are not interested in it and hackers are not interested in Macs.
It's not just that there are fewer Macs, but also that the vast majority of hackers have lot of experience in how to break into Windows boxes. There are lots of tools around to help even the less skilled hackers break into those. Hackers are lazy bastards, otherwise they would get honest jobs. Learning all about how Macs work and building hacking tools, in order to break into them is a lot of work. So even if there were an equal number of Macs and Windows systems, the learning hurdle would still have to be overcome.
How many botnets are there running on OSX? Is there even ONE, spewing spam all over the Internet? Post again when some Mac virus brings down a large company's network of Macs or when a large number of Macs get infected just by being connected to the Internet.
The bottom line: Owning a Mac is safer in PRACTICE than owning a Windows box. That is all that really matters, not some obscure researcher finding an even more obscure possible vulnerability.
That day will ONLY be here when millions, or at least thousands of Macs are infected and become part of the world wide network of 'bots sending spam and sending thousands of user's private data to the bot-herders.
.....The same place your computer's conciousness goes when you turn it off.....
But you can load the computer's "consciousness" into another, even totally different hardware and have it come "alive" again. I can "revive" my old DOS machine on a Power PC which has even an entirely different kind of "brain".
....There's nothing supernatural about such experiences......
What do you call "supernatural"? Something you don't understand? Much of our present technology would be considered supernatural by someone from the first century.
The idea that personality or "mind" being in and of itself not physical is not that far fetched. We do this "resurrection" thing all the time with computers. A computer can be "resurrected" from a proper backup into an entirely new, better hardware. The software of an old, limited DOS computer can be easily loaded into a modern system, one with even a foreign processor, and perform far better than it ever did originally. Nothing material, that is anything having mass, is transferred from a backup into the new computer.
Is it therefore so unscientific, to concede the likelihood that our humanity, mind, soul, the "real you" is more than just the physical hardware of the body and brain? Can your "soul" be backed up somewhere and after your body hardware stops working, be re-loaded in newer, better hardware with capabilities far beyond the hardware you are running in today?
There is evidence from the article and others about near death experiences, that the physical dimensions we normally experience is not all there is. To us, the mechanics of death and resurrection are largely mysteries. We do however have some fleeting glimpses that strongly indicate that what we call "supernatural" is only given that label by us humans because we do not understand the technology of death and resurrection.
How is it possible to walk on water? I BELIEVE that Jesus did. Did He arise from death, after three days, without refrigeration or other modern medical technology? I believe He did and many have died for that belief. He claimed to be God. If THAT is true, don't you think He might know how to do stuff we deem "impossible"? We call such things "miracles" and brand those who believe such things as real and true "religious nuts" or worse.
Even our present body "hardware" is determined by the software codes stored in the DNA. The chemical elements in your body and mine are identical. It is in the patterns of their arrangements as coded by the immaterial data stored in the DNA where we are different.
.....Leadership and project development in hobbies and non-profit work, standardized test scores, work experience, and essays are far better ways of determining ability than grades......
First, I am sorry about the insult.
My daughter did have top grades and was the valedictorian of her class. However she also had many of the other qualities you mentioned. She earned a good portion of her undergrad expenses by the work-study program, but still had to get some loans. She won the county spelling contest as a junior, beating out her older sister by one word. Teachers and others who were in attendance at the school district headquarters, even now still tell us us that this was the most memorable spelling bee they ever attended. Most/. readers probably have at least some college, yet judging from some of the atrocious spelling and grammar here on/., it appears many are not all that good in handling "The King's English" any more.
She attended Duke graduate school on a full scholarship, after demonstrating outstanding scholarship and leadership as an undergraduate. In college, grades do reflect hard work and true understanding of the material. In public school, attendance is compulsory and educators have a vested interested to pass non-learners out of the classroom and school as soon as allowed, but they have to deal with them until then. The breakdown of the family unit is the largest contributor, by far, to the destruction of motivation to want to learn.
Whenever there is a limited resource, such as scholarships, an education or a well paid job, someone has to make choices based on certain criteria. I'm sure there will always be disagreement as to what those should be. All of the ones you mention are usually taken into account by good admissions officers. However, lets be honest, money does talk in this world, especially in the US. As a practicality, money can and does make up for a lack in some of the criteria you rightly held high. This world is not and never has been entirely "fair". There is also considerable disagreement about what constitutes fairness.
(....if you've had an expulsion or done significant prison time!......)
In college or job applications or even in getting insurance, past behavior is and must be taken into account. If there are a number otherwise qualified applicants for a single opening, the one whose record is blemished gets eliminated from consideration. Learning to do what you are told is very important in most jobs. Your boss pays you to do what he/she wants done and often how to do it, not when and how you decide. If you are asked to do something unethical or illegal, YOU alone have to decide whether you are willing to put your job on the line by disobeying and not do wrong.
Is a college education a privilege or a right? The founding fathers of the US recognized that there are certain "inalienable rights" for all and wrote these into the constitution. The right to an education or a job is not listed. Those privileges have to be earned.
There are many very important jobs that need to be done in our society which do not require a college degree and which generally do not have much prestige and/or pay. In a big city, such as NY, the striking of all the garbage collectors has a much greater effect on life there than when all the doctors or lawyers walk off their jobs. Unfortunately, but realistically, money is generally considered to be the number one sign of "success" in our society.
.........but why should tuition be a barrier for anyone in a society as wealthy as ours?.......
You are a fountain of ignorance, at least concerning your diatribe against Duke. Instead of being wealthy and pay tuition, you can also simply be smart and hard working. My daughter just graduated from Duke, from which she had gotten a full scholarship. Without that, there would have been no way she could have afforded to study there. Many Colleges and Universities give scholarships to exceptional young people who do NOT come from wealthy homes. Most likely, someone like you wouldn't get such a scholarship, especially in view of your ignorant rant.
......All one has to do is check for the specified hardware. Look for the hardware emulated by VMWare and if you find it, turn off certain "functionality"......
If that were done, then the real hardware in other systems would also be detected. That means if the VM emulated really popular hardware, the detector would give many false indications for the real hardware the potential malware would otherwise infect..
........A simple check of the video card driver or something else similar will show that it is indeed a virtual machine.......
Not if the VM is emulates the actual HARDWARE accurately. Ultimately, if the emulation software is written to behave EXACTLY the same way the hardware it is emulating, there can be no SURE way any software running under that emulator can determine whether it is running on real hardware or not. Modern microprocessors are combinations of hardware and software also. The software part is called microcode, intimately associated with the actual gates and switches that make up the elements of every computer.
It may not always be very efficient to emulate all hardware functions. Any software running on such an accurately emulated machine might be able to tell from the slower timings for certain operations, that it was running on a machine too slow for the kind of hardware the emulator is supposedly telling the software which is running such detection routines. However the software could not be SURE whether is wasn't running on real hardware on which the speed was deliberately throttled.
VM makers of course are interested in efficiency. Making an undetectable VM accurately mimicking hardware probably would sacrifice too much efficiency.
..... If they really wanted to add real security they'd hand out RSA key fobs to everyone......
Does that mean the use is restricted to the users own computers or any others that has the correct interface and software which is able to send the key-fob data to the bank's server at the correct time?
A password will work with *any* computer, but a piece of hardware, whether key-fob or biometric scanner will only work with a computer that has the correct software installed on it. That software would have to be standardized and work with every OS and all hardware that can at present access the bank's systems wit a password. All security, computer or physical, ultimately based on something you know, or something you have or both.
In the US at least is the 5th Amendment still part of the constitution? If you tell the court that giving out the password is like testifying against yourself, does the 5th still protect the accused? Did it ever really work that way?
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...I think that is a very plausible theory that takes care of my problem very nicely...
:-) !!
So then, where did the rocks from space get their life forms? Of course, the earth is supported on the back of a big turtle. And then its turtles all the way down
...Life as we know it ......
At the molecular level life is far more complex than Mr. Darwin ever dreamed. As far as we can tell, the properties of the elements are pretty much the same throughout the universe. Of these elements, carbon is the only one that has just the right binding energies to allow complex molecules (proteins, DNA, fats) to hold together reasonably well, yet not be attached too strongly to each other and other elements. The building blocks of life have to be of such nature to allow them to be assembled and taken apart without an undue expenditure of energy. Photosynthesis is just one example of the arrow parameters needed for living chemistry.
Therefore, as far as PHYSICAL life, based on atoms and molecules goes, no, there is no other possibility outside of the life as we know it.
....This leads me to conclude that all life must have come form one ancestor ........
You can get a lot of exercise jumping to conclusions. Computers use binary codes. Therefore all computers came from a common ancestor computer. Cars have 4 wheels and so do horse drawn carriages. Does that mean that cars descended from carriages. I suppose in a sense they did, but designers of both really used proven principles of design.
How about all life, computers cars an carriages all have a designer. Could that POSSIBLY also explain the commonality?
.......believers take for granted something that the large amount of evidence points away from...........
But if there IS some evidence that agrees with the ID idea, then it either has to be explained away or the minority who accepts the evidence gets shouted down and/or ridiculed. Of course we KNOW that the majority is ALWAYS right.
.....it's easy to prove that the earth is more than a few thousand years old.......
Proving anything is very hard. Proving origins and things that took place supposedly millions of years ago is impossible. The best anyone can do is to present certain evidence. All evidence is based on certain assumptions (beliefs) which cannot be proved.
To assert that some object is N number of years old there has to be some sort of evidence of a reliable clock that has been ticking uniformly for all that time and there has to be some evidence that associates the clock with that object.
Scientists must assume (believe) that the ticks of certain clocks (radioactivity, tree rings, ice cores, deposition of minerals, magnetization etc.) are 1) equally spaced over time and 2) can be tied to time as defined by the motion of the earth around the sun (years). There is no way anyone can KNOW whether these uniformitarian assumptions (beliefs) are true. There is evidence for some rather catastrophic sudden events in the past.
There may be other "clocks", but one of the ones I mentioned, which is often cited in global warming debates is the ice core analysis, such as in the ice that now covers most of Greenland. There are clearly layers of ice. The assumption (belief) is that these are deposited at the rate of one layer annually. So they count the layers and based on the annual assumption, the bottom of the ice is hundreds of thousands years or even millions of years old.
Some aircraft that had crash landed there in WW2 were discovered after 42 years under 263 feet of ice, compressed into several distinct layers per foot. This shows that these layers are NOT annual cycles, but simply periods of warmer and colder weather. Thus this evidence shows that the assumption about the annual nature of these layers is wrong. Therefore, these layers cannot be equated to years.
Scientists have determined that roughly 400 million tons of minerals are deposited yearly into the world's oceans. Today's mineral content (mostly NaCl) is less than 4%. At today's rate, IF it were really true that the earth is over a billion years old the water of the sea should be totally saturated with minerals. At the present rate, the salt content corresponds to around only 4000 years worth of accumulation. This corresponds to about the time of the biblical flood. This is evidence that the earth is not billions of years old, but still doesn't PROVE it, since we have no way of knowing whether the rate of mineral addition has always been constant. There also could have been a mechanism to remove minerals from the water, although so far nobody has come forward with a plausible mechanism.
There is no PROOF anyone can show that the earth is billions of years old, but there is evidence for both a very young earth and universe.
.....It's fine, they just forgot that this single origin's name is Adam........
The would have to be at least two. The woman's name was Eve. They got the single origin right, but missed the place. The Garden of Eden was somewhere in what we call Iraq today.
....Quantom and decay-based randomness is believed to be truly random.....
What about the "random" noise in any resistor or the so called noise diodes? Is thermal noise not truly random because it arises from the supposedly random vibrations at the atomic level? Would a random number generator based on this not also be "truly" random?
....it is the hardware STATE....
Exactly how does a state of a computer differ from a thought, a state of mind or an emotional state? Software is distinct from hardware. It has nothing to do with magic. There is no other source for software besides a mind. That is why we call software, music compositions, literature etc. INTELLECTUAL property and have a whole separate body of law devoted to it.
Just as software is an entity that runs in some hardware, so too your mind runs in the hardware (wetware?) we call brain. Software and hardware are distinct and so are mind and brain. The hardware expresses the software. One has mass and is subject to gravity and the other is not. Mass and energy are subject to the laws of inertia and gravity.
You can arrange the bits on a disk either at random or with information. There will be no difference in weight. The same holds true for ink on paper. You can scramble up all the letters of a novel randomly and its weight will not change from the former ordered pattern. Information does not reside in the chemistry of ink on paper nor in the physics of bits of magnetism on the disk. It is ONLY their arrangement that carries the message. The same is true of DNA. It is the sequence of codes that carry the data. The DNA is like the disk drive or paper, it is only the carrier.
..... I suspect that means they were professionals (engineers? physicians? educators?) with good educations in Europe......
Your suspicions are not correct. I am an engineer. My father was a chef and baker and got a job at a bakery and my mother was a nurse, but had to take a job as a cleaning woman at minimum wage. My wife's parents managed to save enough money for a down payment and borrow the rest from a friend. Paying off that loan meant doing without even the smallest extras and a very hard and dangerous job for her dad at a local lumber mill.
We know a young man of hispanic descent, born in LA, who was in prison until a little over a year ago, yet now has a good job with a road construction company. It is not an easy job for him, but we know he is a hard worker. It still is possible to get out of an economic hole by hard work.
Although there are some employers that needlessly require college for some entry level jobs, it is still possible to get good jobs as a high school graduate. Some employers are willing to train motivated young people. I talked to the owner of a farm machinery dealer about two weeks ago, at a wedding, who spoke very highly of the young groom he recently employed and will train as a mechanic. People who have a good attitude and high integrity level still are able to make it in our society.
.....additional path to knowledge.......
Reasoning doesn't add knowledge, but only manipulates your existing knowledge into other conclusions and results. Btw. Mutations also do not generate any new information, but result in a loss of data.
(....But if I told you that I know that this is going to happen, because my neighbor's cat had a dream about it (I know about the dream because I'm a pet psychic, you see), you'd say I was nuts....)
Not necessarily. My belief or disbelief would depend in a large measure by your track record of truthfulness and success at prophecy. If you had a 100% track record at correctly foretelling events that came true in the past, I would be inclined to believe you about the future. There are some amazing predictions in the Bible that have come true and some of them are coming true in our time, before our eyes. In ancient Israel, prophets who were NOT 100% accurate were executed. A prophet who said such and such would happen before a certain time or after a certain event had better be right. Ask miss Cleo or anyone else claiming prophetic powers why they have not yet won the lottery or gotten rich in the stock market.
(....know that they are irrational.....)
The only one who can KNOW what is rational or irrational is someone who knows EVERYTHING, ie. is omniscient. You and I can only believe. Belief in resurrection, for example seems irrational only because we don't have even the slightest knowledge of the technology and mechanisms behind it. The operation of wireless communication devices would likely seem irrational and magical to a person living in ancient Rome.
(.....Surely you don't think the story of Jesus is the only resurrection....)
Of course not. In the Bible we can read of a number of instances where people came back from death. We were discussing the very concept of resurrections and an existence beyond our present physical time-space dimensions.
(....but believing in them without extraordinary evidence is still irrational....)
Belief of evidence depends mostly on two things. The nature of the evidence is one. What exactly do you mean by "extraordinary"? Wireless communication or other modern technology would be considered extraordinary by a first century person, but we who understand somewhat at least, the principles behind these, consider them ordinary every day things. To God resurrection technology is quite ordinary.
The other is the credibility of the witnesses. Dr. Simon Greenleaf, one of the founders of the Harvard Law School, wrote THE book on the rules of evidence, as it relates to courts of law. Every law student must still study it today. You might want to read another little treatise about evidence he wrote called "Testimony of the Evangelists". His original goal was to try to discredit the Gospels and especially the Resurrection.
(.....How does a newborn baby commit "treason" against anyone?.....)
Not as a newborn, but as soon as he/she puts self above others. My guess is that you have never raised kids. Who teaches a little one to tell untruth as soon as they can talk or to take things that are not theirs? Jesus was the only human who could ever successfully challenge friend and foe alike: "Which of you can prove any wrong against me?" If you can truthfully issue such a challenge and receive no reply, from man or from God, then you will be ushered into the presence of the Almighty, standing on your own merit. For the rest of us there is grace, received by admitting guilt and then being forgiven. I have never even lived one day, without having transgressed some aspect of God's commands. If you are honest, you probably haven't either. One of the 10 commandments (not options) is "Thou shalt not covet....". Have you ever wanted something someone else had and were envious? If so, you are guilty and have violated Gods perfection.
Phrases beginning with "Truly I say to you...." is recorded over 50 times as utterances of Jesus. You can choose to classify these as repeated lies, foolish i
.....are likely white, well-educated, and not scrabbling just to pay the rent.........
Indeed true, but that was NOT the case for my parents. The came to the US after WW2, with not much more than the clothes on their backs and in debt. Their education was not recognized at all in the US and none of us knew English. By hard work they were able to provide for their children. As a kid, to contribute to the family I delivered about 150 newspapers every day after school. I often walked to school, rather than spend the nickel transit bus fare, saving me all of 50 cents each week.
The same is true for my wife, whose parents came to Canada at that time. Both of her parents also worked very hard and instilled this work ethic in their children also. She and her brothers had to help run their family farm. Farmers get up early and so did they, working hard, before the school bus came and again after it delivered them home, after school.
We both have taught our children to stay out of or at least minimize debt and to never use a credit card for anything other than a book keeping convenience. The daughter I wrote about has taken this to heart and practices these admonitions. The other one has been less diligent in this regard and has gotten herself into a credit pit out of which she only recently climbed out.
Neither the US nor Canada had any kind of governmental welfare system in place back then. Handouts, including rent subsidies, food stamps etc. tend to discourage hard work. The advertising and credit industries encourage people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, in order to impress others they don't even like. It's not only the money a person earns, that counts, but even more so, the money one keeps through frugal habits.
.....have the same potential .......
They key word here is "potential" which to me means theoretical. In practical terms, Mac OSX is much safer than and Windows box. That was the point of my post. So far at least all threats against the Mac were academic vulnerabilities, touted by various security companies, in order for them to scare Mac users into wasting oodles of money on their garbage software which 90% of the time reduces the functionality and usefulness of the systems it infests. Until I read a headline that says something along the line: "Thousands of Macs infected by xxxx virus or worm", I'll tell my clients; "Yes, any computer can be infected, especially if you cooperate by giving permission for such infections, but for now, and the foreseeable future, in practical terms, you'll be MUCH safer with a Mac." That is an unarguable FACT.
.....when your number is up......
Everybody's number comes up eventually driving a car or simply crossing the street. Statistically the probability of my Mac's number coming up is 5 orders of magnitude less than for a Windows box. Life is full of chances. As far as computers are concerned, I'll take my chances with OSX rather than Windows.
....beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal.......
We call it SUPERnatural because these things are above and beyond what we can generally experience. We have only two ways of getting information. One is through our personal experience as brought to us by our senses. We have lots of evidence that these senses can be deceived. The other way we get information is by communication from someone else. When someone tells you something, you either have to BELIEVE or not. You may try various ways to corroborate the information. However, in the end you really have no PROOF, only some evidence you can either choose to accept or reject. All our law courts operate on evidence presented, either believed or rejected. There is no proof.
The carriers of information are part of our physical mass-energy dimensions and behave according to fairly well accepted rules. However information in and of itself is not physical and therefore obeys different rules. A thought, emotion, the codes stored in DNA or a computer program, the arrangement of symbols on a page, all are carried by and as far as we can tell, bound to physical matter-energy forms. That doesn't mean that these things HAVE to be thus bound. In the article the word UNKNOWN appeared a number of times.
You can BELIEVE that many call "supernatural" is irrational, but you can never KNOW that. You may have heard the saying: "Technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic".
Indeed, all this senseless killing and dying is real powerful evidence for the biblical teaching that man has rebelled against God and His government. Earth is a penal colony where all that rebelled and committed treason against the Almighty are incarcerated and quarantined. We are all condemned prisoners quarantined to this time-space dimension in order to prevent the contagion of rebellion and evil from spreading to other dimensions and their worlds. We are told in this book that we humans are not the only kind of creature thus confined. The Bible outlines a plan and offer, by which we treasonous criminals may be freed in order to once again enjoy unrestricted access to our Creator God in His dwelling place, the timeless dimensions of eternity. This offer is only available by faith in the work of Jesus, who claimed to be God come to earth, not just some prophet or guru or founder of one of the many religions on earth.
Man's incurable religiosity is evident in all cultures and races showing that man is still hardwired by the Creator God to yearn after Him. The stubborn, unceasing belief by most people on this planet in some form of existence after death cannot be explained by chance evolution, but it is a vestigial remnant and remembrance of an origin and destiny beyond our present existence in our mortal time-space prison.
......It's just that their market share has recently become high enough.....
That market share argument is such a tired old saw, repeated endlessly. Who cares WHY Macs are safer in practice. They may be no safer in theory. Who cares WHY nobody wants to burgle my house. The fact is that burglars are not interested in it and hackers are not interested in Macs.
It's not just that there are fewer Macs, but also that the vast majority of hackers have lot of experience in how to break into Windows boxes. There are lots of tools around to help even the less skilled hackers break into those. Hackers are lazy bastards, otherwise they would get honest jobs. Learning all about how Macs work and building hacking tools, in order to break into them is a lot of work. So even if there were an equal number of Macs and Windows systems, the learning hurdle would still have to be overcome.
How many botnets are there running on OSX? Is there even ONE, spewing spam all over the Internet? Post again when some Mac virus brings down a large company's network of Macs or when a large number of Macs get infected just by being connected to the Internet.
The bottom line: Owning a Mac is safer in PRACTICE than owning a Windows box. That is all that really matters, not some obscure researcher finding an even more obscure possible vulnerability.
....then it's just as bad as windows......
That day will ONLY be here when millions, or at least thousands of Macs are infected and become part of the world wide network of 'bots sending spam and sending thousands of user's private data to the bot-herders.
......a product free of defects......??????
Is there or has there EVER been such thing, especially in software?
.....The same place your computer's conciousness goes when you turn it off.....
But you can load the computer's "consciousness" into another, even totally different hardware and have it come "alive" again. I can "revive" my old DOS machine on a Power PC which has even an entirely different kind of "brain".
....There's nothing supernatural about such experiences......
What do you call "supernatural"? Something you don't understand? Much of our present technology would be considered supernatural by someone from the first century.
The idea that personality or "mind" being in and of itself not physical is not that far fetched. We do this "resurrection" thing all the time with computers. A computer can be "resurrected" from a proper backup into an entirely new, better hardware. The software of an old, limited DOS computer can be easily loaded into a modern system, one with even a foreign processor, and perform far better than it ever did originally. Nothing material, that is anything having mass, is transferred from a backup into the new computer.
Is it therefore so unscientific, to concede the likelihood that our humanity, mind, soul, the "real you" is more than just the physical hardware of the body and brain? Can your "soul" be backed up somewhere and after your body hardware stops working, be re-loaded in newer, better hardware with capabilities far beyond the hardware you are running in today?
There is evidence from the article and others about near death experiences, that the physical dimensions we normally experience is not all there is. To us, the mechanics of death and resurrection are largely mysteries. We do however have some fleeting glimpses that strongly indicate that what we call "supernatural" is only given that label by us humans because we do not understand the technology of death and resurrection.
How is it possible to walk on water? I BELIEVE that Jesus did. Did He arise from death, after three days, without refrigeration or other modern medical technology? I believe He did and many have died for that belief. He claimed to be God. If THAT is true, don't you think He might know how to do stuff we deem "impossible"? We call such things "miracles" and brand those who believe such things as real and true "religious nuts" or worse.
Even our present body "hardware" is determined by the software codes stored in the DNA. The chemical elements in your body and mine are identical. It is in the patterns of their arrangements as coded by the immaterial data stored in the DNA where we are different.
.....Leadership and project development in hobbies and non-profit work, standardized test scores, work experience, and essays are far better ways of determining ability than grades......
/. readers probably have at least some college, yet judging from some of the atrocious spelling and grammar here on /., it appears many are not all that good in handling "The King's English" any more.
First, I am sorry about the insult.
My daughter did have top grades and was the valedictorian of her class. However she also had many of the other qualities you mentioned. She earned a good portion of her undergrad expenses by the work-study program, but still had to get some loans. She won the county spelling contest as a junior, beating out her older sister by one word. Teachers and others who were in attendance at the school district headquarters, even now still tell us us that this was the most memorable spelling bee they ever attended. Most
She attended Duke graduate school on a full scholarship, after demonstrating outstanding scholarship and leadership as an undergraduate. In college, grades do reflect hard work and true understanding of the material. In public school, attendance is compulsory and educators have a vested interested to pass non-learners out of the classroom and school as soon as allowed, but they have to deal with them until then. The breakdown of the family unit is the largest contributor, by far, to the destruction of motivation to want to learn.
Whenever there is a limited resource, such as scholarships, an education or a well paid job, someone has to make choices based on certain criteria. I'm sure there will always be disagreement as to what those should be. All of the ones you mention are usually taken into account by good admissions officers. However, lets be honest, money does talk in this world, especially in the US. As a practicality, money can and does make up for a lack in some of the criteria you rightly held high. This world is not and never has been entirely "fair". There is also considerable disagreement about what constitutes fairness.
(....if you've had an expulsion or done significant prison time!......)
In college or job applications or even in getting insurance, past behavior is and must be taken into account. If there are a number otherwise qualified applicants for a single opening, the one whose record is blemished gets eliminated from consideration. Learning to do what you are told is very important in most jobs. Your boss pays you to do what he/she wants done and often how to do it, not when and how you decide. If you are asked to do something unethical or illegal, YOU alone have to decide whether you are willing to put your job on the line by disobeying and not do wrong.
Is a college education a privilege or a right? The founding fathers of the US recognized that there are certain "inalienable rights" for all and wrote these into the constitution. The right to an education or a job is not listed. Those privileges have to be earned.
There are many very important jobs that need to be done in our society which do not require a college degree and which generally do not have much prestige and/or pay. In a big city, such as NY, the striking of all the garbage collectors has a much greater effect on life there than when all the doctors or lawyers walk off their jobs. Unfortunately, but realistically, money is generally considered to be the number one sign of "success" in our society.
.........but why should tuition be a barrier for anyone in a society as wealthy as ours?.......
You are a fountain of ignorance, at least concerning your diatribe against Duke. Instead of being wealthy and pay tuition, you can also simply be smart and hard working. My daughter just graduated from Duke, from which she had gotten a full scholarship. Without that, there would have been no way she could have afforded to study there. Many Colleges and Universities give scholarships to exceptional young people who do NOT come from wealthy homes. Most likely, someone like you wouldn't get such a scholarship, especially in view of your ignorant rant.
......All one has to do is check for the specified hardware. Look for the hardware emulated by VMWare and if you find it, turn off certain "functionality"......
If that were done, then the real hardware in other systems would also be detected. That means if the VM emulated really popular hardware, the detector would give many false indications for the real hardware the potential malware would otherwise infect..
........A simple check of the video card driver or something else similar will show that it is indeed a virtual machine.......
Not if the VM is emulates the actual HARDWARE accurately. Ultimately, if the emulation software is written to behave EXACTLY the same way the hardware it is emulating, there can be no SURE way any software running under that emulator can determine whether it is running on real hardware or not. Modern microprocessors are combinations of hardware and software also. The software part is called microcode, intimately associated with the actual gates and switches that make up the elements of every computer.
It may not always be very efficient to emulate all hardware functions. Any software running on such an accurately emulated machine might be able to tell from the slower timings for certain operations, that it was running on a machine too slow for the kind of hardware the emulator is supposedly telling the software which is running such detection routines. However the software could not be SURE whether is wasn't running on real hardware on which the speed was deliberately throttled.
VM makers of course are interested in efficiency. Making an undetectable VM accurately mimicking hardware probably would sacrifice too much efficiency.
..... If they really wanted to add real security they'd hand out RSA key fobs to everyone......
Does that mean the use is restricted to the users own computers or any others that has the correct interface and software which is able to send the key-fob data to the bank's server at the correct time?
A password will work with *any* computer, but a piece of hardware, whether key-fob or biometric scanner will only work with a computer that has the correct software installed on it. That software would have to be standardized and work with every OS and all hardware that can at present access the bank's systems wit a password. All security, computer or physical, ultimately based on something you know, or something you have or both.
......If there is a court order......
In the US at least is the 5th Amendment still part of the constitution? If you tell the court that giving out the password is like testifying against yourself, does the 5th still protect the accused? Did it ever really work that way?