Now THERE's a bit of creative revisionist history.
I always thought Britain and France created Hitler by impoverishing Germany with war reparations.
But it was all the fault of the US, eh?
If only that war-monger Woodrow Wilson could have restrained his imperial desires. I guess all that isolationist talk was just a smokescreen because he was part of the Jewish Communist Banker's Conspiracy and he helped create the myth of the holocaust to embarass the innocent fascists?
Or was it due to the influence of the illuminati who secretly control the world through the WTO?
And I thought *our* conspiracy theorists were strange.
Your post is quite reasonable, you avoided obscenity and didn't make anything up. So to you, I apologize. Yes a lot of Europeans, and others, have worked on the internet. Nuts, DARPA borrowed the ISO seven-layer model to develop TCP/IP against. I suppose I should resist the urge to provoke tempermental posters, but it is just so much fun...arrogant I am not, but I would have to own up to b@stard..
If it wasn't for the arrogance of the US in meddling in European affairs, you'd all be marching around under a swastika, you're welcome. Oh , and did you ever get around to repaying that war debt? Didn't think so.
The US has carried Europe on it's back for 75 years. SO you're ready to standon your own now, Mazeltov. Can we finally safely withdraw our troops without you attacking each other again?
When you're done kicking the US in the shins for all the favors we've done you, maybe you can focus your tiny european mind on the original question in this parent post... are you for private companies in non US countries keeping control of the cc TLDs they've been running, or for giving control of those domains back to their respective non US governments?
Here's a hint. Your inability to run your own affairs is what has made you so dependent on the US for the last 75 years. Solve your own problems and you might get your self-respect back. ** Mod -10 pure troll **
It is fascinating to me that know-nothing dweebs like you can simply invent facts out of thin air and assert them as arguments.
Not that anyone as rude and ignorant as you deserves a response. But I was THERE. I knew Jon Postel at the IETF, and met with him several times on the governance of the.us TLD.
His death did to the internet what the passing of Linus Torvalds would do to Linux - took away the unifying voice of sweet reason.
But to a child like you, history begins in the 1990's, so unless someone makes the history of the internet into a video game, it's hopeless...
It has been my personal exprience that a new logo comes just before a company falls into serious decline. Like when the former giant International Harvester (remember the "Scout") became *wince* Travelstar, or when the mighty Burroughs transmuted into the wimpy Unisys. Of course the name doesn't always change, I worked at SGI when they paid a consultant a reported $10M to convert their logo from the gleaming silver cube to the lower case letters sgi half-falling off the bottom of the page. Prophetically this happened just before the bottom fell out of sgi, and they began 15% layoffs every quarter. Reinventing the corporate image is one of the things management types do to divert attention when a company is circling the edge of the toilet bowl...
For all the little kiddies out there who were still in diapers when the US Gov't did the research, defined the protocols, and funded the construction that BUILT the original internet, here's a clue. The US magnanimously shared its incredible invention witht the rest of the world for the good of mankind. When the internet grew, and the/etc/hosts files got too big to manage, the domain system was created. At that point, every country recognized by the UN was generously given a two-letter country code TLD. Some of those countries were too disorganized to manage their TLD, and allowed commercial companies to do it. Now the ICANN is givng those TLDs BACK to their RIGHTFULL OWNERS. Complaining about this is analagous to college students who have rented apartments in a house, now graduating and refusing to move out, claiming that they rightfully own the house where they were renting rooms. Quick, call the waaahhhmbulance! If you don't like it, go back to using your/etc/hosts file to resolve the IP address for j&rk0ff.k!dd!ep0rn.kz - no one can stop you. But, if I were you, I would save your silver bullets. I kinda suspect that you're gonna be really pissed when IPv6 comes along, and the DHS starts requiring you to register a permanent IP address with your name and SSN, and keeps track of all the sites you visit to see if you are a "terrorist".
Hmmm, I discern Buddhism, Scientology, and a little bit of the Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation.
If it's at all encouraging, I do meditate into an altered state of consciousness while I'm on the exercise bike in the gym. I don't know if your particular brand of transcendentalism allows Jesus to be an avatar. But I attempt to achieve oneness with His consciousness.
And every so often when I'm bored I try to lift a soda can with my extended aura. So far no levitation, but hope springs eternal.
I suspect that we are collecting points towards two different systems of enlightenment. If I pass away in a nursing home and wake up reincarnated instead of in Heaven, I'll send you an email from my new body.
OK, apologies for any fascist behavior, but you are still misrepresenting what I said.
What I claimed was that if there was a God who was ive-or-more-dimensional, it would resolve a classic paradox. The comment that a five-dimensional universe needed a five-or-more dimensional God was meant as axiomatic, not as an implied conclusion.
The fact that the information in a higher-dimensional space can be recorded in a lower dimensional space (analogous to my playing a three-dimensional computer game on a two-dimensional screen - which is all stored in one-dimensional computer memory) is cool and fascinating, but orthogonal to my original assertion.
But still, sorry for getting snippy.
Thank you, I always thought that "Occam's razor" was of arabic origin. It really is from Sir William of Occam (or Ockham).
Secretly, I have a somewhat tenuous hope that the "parallel worlds" model will lead to a way to defeat gravity.
This is a little hard to follow, if you read my rambling about a static 5 dimensional universe, with no particles or waves or forces, then one way to look at the "force" of gravity is as a probability problem. In examining all of the parallel paths into the future from this instant in time, more paths lead more probably towards a massive of object than away from it. To deomnstrate that there is a "real" fifth dimension that we experience as probability, it would be necessary to create an experiment that manipulated probability over time in such a way as to produce tangible results, like defeating gravity - but without using conventional "forces" like magnetism.
Now all I have to do is "boil the ocean", as they say.
You aren't ominiscient till you advance to avatar, which implies giving up your physical body. If you want to skip that step, and claim to be omniscient while still part of this corporeal reality, a test is appropriate.(C'mon, now, that's only fair)
It is said that knowledge is power, and as an omniscient, you possess infinite knowledge. Ergo you must be in control of infinite power. I will therefore accept your claim of omniscience when you can lift my Ford Tempo, which is stuck in the mud in my back yard back onto the road using only the "Force".
And no excuses like "My doubt is clouding your focus". Yoda did it for Luke when he wanted to be his mentor.
If that is too facetious, then try this. Disassociate from your physical body, and travel to my cubicle in spirit (It's in suburban Maryland, near DC). I just taped a yellow piece of note paper with several words and groups of numbers on it to a post in my cubicle wall. Read them and send them back in this forum, and I'll accept your omniscience.
Close. They, I think, assert the properties that we observe in particles are stored as standing waves in little strings attached to "branes". The "branes" of string theory would be analogous to my frames of reference. But, I would see the information as being contained in the way you define a set of point-intersections. There would be no standing waves. The only thing that would ever "change" would be the contents of the set that makes up ones frame of reference. Call it "set theory" instead of "string theory".
What I explained was that a 5-dimensional view explains away an apparent paradox, one that is often raised in discussions over the existence of God.
The response was inappropriate in two ways.
1) It implied that I asserted some proof of God's existence. Removing a paradox is not a claim of proof.
2) It then stretched the point into a fallacious straw-man argument. Implying not only that I was asserting evidence of God's existence, but that since I believe in God, I must perforce be a creationist who is pressing for the adoption of "intelligent design".
These inappropriate implications were not inadvertent, but intended as an ad-hominem attack. i.e. no mere creationist is capable of a valid post.
My response, while it was certainly flame-bait, was not inappropriate to the provocation.
If it makes you feel any better, Einstein thought that as we entered a black hole, time would change places with one of our other dimensions. The act of accelerating an object is the act of rotating the direction that that object uses as its time axis with respect to other bodies. The reason for the Lorenz contraction (things get shorter as they accelerate towards the speed of light) is that the spatial dimensions of that object are rotated with respect to me, making it appear shorter in the directionof travel. Time isn't one special dimension, it's just one that is perpendicular to the three others for any given observer.
The idea is not original. It has several names, most broadly it is known as the "parallel universe" theory.
It has been used as the premise in many SF stories, like the "Amber" series, or Keith Laumer's excellent "Worlds of the Imperium" or even the recently revamped "Chronicles of Narnia".
I have been toying with a particular interpretation myself(warning: this is very goofy and poorly developed). What if EVERYTHING we know about physics is WRONG. What if there are NO particles, NO waves, NO energy, at all. What if the Universe is a completely frozen static five-dimensional manifold. Our conciousness creates a three-dimnesional snapshot of that five-dimensional manifold wherever it goes, because our conciousness is itself made up of proceses that can only exist when constrained to a three-dimensional snapshot. When our conciousness moves forward in the fourth dimension we experience time. Time seems to move at a constant rate only because the amount of change that happens due to travelling a certain distance in time stays about the same. When we see a photon emitted, for example, we may simply be seeing the intersection of our 3-dimensional frame with a four dimensional cone. The result is a sphere that expands as we move forward in time, which we percieve as a wave. When that "wave" is constrained to intersect with other waves, it "collapses" into discrete points or particles. So what we percieve to be particles are really a set of point intersections of multiple manifolds. What we percieve as "forces" are the underlying shapes of those manifolds, which affect the possible position of the point intersections as we move forward in time. What we call an exchange of energy (one particle bumps into another and imparts its momentum to the second one) is really us following an intersection with one manifold till it lines up with another and then starting to follow the second intersection.
One implication of this is that we each carry our own universe around with us. Communication is only possible between observers that are close enough to share common lines of intrsection in their respective world views so that they can exchange "particles".
Hows that for a whacked theory???
What does "intelligent design" have to do with the freewill vs. omniscience paradox? How do you get from Quantum uncertainty to creationism? I missed the turn there.
The point was that a higher-dimensional intelligence could be aware of every possible outcome in our future without causing predestination.
This knee-jerk off-topic anti-religious mindset is one big reason why the public is losing faith in science and turning to fundamentalist religion for answers.
Since turnabout is fair play, let me observe that scientists (as documented here on/. recently) have become notorious liars, and can no longer be trusted as honest brokers of philosophical debate.
And since everyone, including scientists, has lost their integrity in the eyes of the public, most common decent people flee to the comforting blanket of family-friendly traditional values. While the lunatic fringe embraces pseudo-scientific not-yet-theories like evolution to "prove" there is no god as a precursor to justifying smoking a lot of dope and having b#tt-sex with their buddies.
If you want to end the surge of public opinion towards conservative causes, stop whoring the sciences and using them as philosophical sturmtruppen for left-wing political ideology.
Sorry - Multiple parallel universe, but expressed in lay terms, however clumsily ( granted it may require more than 5 dimensions). Hidden variable is intruiging, but not as comforting.
This article, in it's attempt to maximize the "weirdness factor", ignored what I find to be the most palatable explanation of quantum uncertainty. That is that the universe is five-dimensional. What makes everything seem so wierd is that we are not neutral observers. Our conciousness is created by phenomena that only exist when confined to a three-dimensional snapshot of that universe. We percieve the fourth dimension as time, because it allows our three dimensional snapshot to change as we move in the fourth dimension. We perceive the fifth dimension as probability because it allows multiple possible paths into the future. When an experiment, like determining the spin of one electron out of a pair of emitted electrons shows a particular outcome, the spin of the other particle is not magically changed. Instead we are simply determining which of two possible paths into the future our three-dimensional snapshot of reality happens to have taken. When we compare our results to a distant test of the spin of the other electron, we are not experiencing super-luminal communications, we are simply limited from seeing any other spin for that electron because of our limited three-dimensional conciousmess which can encompass only one state for that particle, which has to be compatible with the state discovered for its fellow electron.
The real surprise here is how very limited our intelligence is, and how little of the true universe we are able to percieve. It is a terrible conceit to believe that we are a neutral observer capable of impartially observering the universe. We literally create our reality by observering it because our reality is a tiny three-dimensional slice of all possible realities. The universe isn't weird, we are just hopelessly myopic.
This interpretation has the benefit of proving Einstein right. God does not play dice with the universe. Since it is commonly accepted that God would transcend the Universe, his conciousness would be at least five-dimensional. He would be simoultaneously aware of all possible paths into the future. When we pick one, we experience a true free-will choice, but the transcendent observer knows which path we will pick - without affeting the nature of the choice iteself. As a side benefit, free will and omniscience are reconciled, and one of the major arguments against the existence of God crumbles into dust.
We aren't programs in the Matrix, we are ants in an ant farm - trapped in a tiny little slice of reality.
"We dropped nukes on Japan in WWII for two reasons: to see them work in action and, more importantly, to show the USSR that we can and would use them."
You say that like its a BAD thing. C'mon, what decent post-apocalyptic movie *doesn't* start with a nuclear war. People are evil, the earth is over-run with them. Nukes kill people, ergo nukes are good.
As long as they are dropped *somewhere else*;-)
I suggest you listen to "Chitlins, whiskey and skirt" by the group "The Gone Jackals"
First of all, the US Government is, at least in the US, going to be one of the early adopters of IPv6. AT&T, MCI, and Sprint have yet to announce plans for IPv6 availability. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has already manadated adoption of IPv6 for Federal agencies, and they have already done network inventories and are developing transition plans.
I have yet to read a single comment on this thread by anyone who has even the foggiest of clues what is going on.
Gee whizz, you managed to activate the IPv6 stack on your Linux box at home. Wow, what an accomplishment!
Compared to your home network, converting a typical agency with over 100,000 PCs, 5,000 servers, and 500 routers all located in over 200 field offices is like building a space shuttle compared to building a rubber-band powered balsa airplane.
Here's a few trivial problems to chew on-
How does my firewall stop viruses, when the virus can use a level-3 encrypted channel to talk to its author?
What's the procedure for differentiating between vulnerable and necessary ports in Longhorn and Vista once you do away with NAT and your PCs become visible to everyone in the world. No BS, I want port numbers and specific vulnerabilities I have to check for, along with the security product that will detect and block illegitimate access attempts while allowing the proper access to make real websites, java,.net and oracle work.
How many addresses should I allocate to each facility, server, and PC, and what DHCP software do I use to assign and manage them? And how to I stop neighbor-discovery spoofing?
Should my voice-over-ip network be deployed in the initial deployment? Will that disrupt vital voice services? What about multi-cast video-over-ip? Is it cost effective? How do I deploy it to PCs, but control the usage so that it doesn't suck up all my network bandwidth and create an accidental DOS for my web servers?
Are those questions too easy? I've got a list a mile long that I have to solve before we convert.
So how about a nice big cup of shut-the-f#ck-up for all the useless little kiddie network engineers out there. Your constructive criticism is as ignorant as it is unwelcome.
A year or two ago, I orchestrated an enterprise upgrade from Win 9x desktops with Banyan servers to WinXP with Win2K servers. You would not believe how scared and panicky the users got. During the physical migration, users were given 4 hours of training on the changes from Win9X to WinXP. Then immediately went back to their desk to a newly converted workstation. It hardly helped at all. The shape of the MS Office icons changed, we got dozens of calls from users who said we had "taken away" MS Office. One department had their shared drive change from the P to the Q drive letter. Even after telling them verbally three times in class, and following it up with email, we still got dozens of calls from users who said their documents had been "deleted". We even got calls from people complaining that their spyware was missing! And some of them were PhD's.
Humans in general are dumb, easily panicked sheep. They fear and loathe change as if it were physically painful. They don't like Windows - in fact it is one of the favorite topics of water-cooler derision. But they would rather run their nuts through a clothes-wringer than have their toolbar move to the top of their screen.
Linux enthusiasts are generally highly intelligent malcontents. People who desire frequent chaotic change because it soothes the agony of their ADHD induced boredom. They love having to follow up the latest installation of Fedaro by trying to figure out where to download a multi-media player from because *someone* got pissy with the old player's authors and left it out of the distro. Tweaking/etc/initab to customize the services running at a particular run level is a diverting amusement rather than an odious burden.
And Linux enthusiasts suffer from a terrible conceit, believeing that the rest of the world "wants" to be like them, but just doesn't know how. So if they can make the Linux desktop look 75% the same as windows, then they can lure the sheep in for a closer look. The implicit assumption being that once a sheep gets a good look at the "freedom" offered by vi and shell scripting, they'll have an epiphany and never want to go back to a point-and-click GUI.
Here's a clue for all the cult-of-linux followers out there. Most people HATE change. Flexibility is spelled c-o-n-f-u-s-i-o-n. Powerful tools are d-a-n-g-e-r-o-u-s. Configuration options are a t-a-r-p-i-t.
Memorize this commandment: EASE OF USE is ***all*** that matters!
Until conversion to Linux represents LESS change for the average user to deal with than an upgrade to the next version of Windows, 90+ percent of the population won't touch it.
Or, you could go for an even lower common denominator, and develop XXX-windows with built-in pr0n. After all, it was x-rated content that created the market for VCRs and cable TV;-)
Why is it that people who are trying to make pathetically weak arguments stick, always resort to personal insults, as if that was going to make what they say any more valid.
Well, in the spirit of quid pro quo (look it up, its latin):
I've been working in network security longer than you've been out of diapers, assuming you are out of diapers.
WPA , like all of the feeble attempts at wireless security, was cracked before it even got widely deployed. For the curious,here's just one of many examples one can find with a simple google search- www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=369221
Like I said before, when you think wireless, think of hoola-hoops. Wireless will be a fad for about a year, then in five years we'll all be sitting around asking "What ever happened to wireless?"
The wireless wave has crested and is now rolling back into the sea of oblivion.
Like I said before, when you think wireless, think of hoola-hoops. Wireless will be a fad for about a year or two, then in five years we'll all be sitting around asking "What ever happened to wireless?"
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'm busted...
Now THERE's a bit of creative revisionist history. I always thought Britain and France created Hitler by impoverishing Germany with war reparations. But it was all the fault of the US, eh? If only that war-monger Woodrow Wilson could have restrained his imperial desires. I guess all that isolationist talk was just a smokescreen because he was part of the Jewish Communist Banker's Conspiracy and he helped create the myth of the holocaust to embarass the innocent fascists? Or was it due to the influence of the illuminati who secretly control the world through the WTO? And I thought *our* conspiracy theorists were strange.
OK, my fault for generalizing, clearly Deutschland's .de is very different than, say Tonga's .to
Sorry, your post was so childish I assumed you were 13 years old...
Your post is quite reasonable, you avoided obscenity and didn't make anything up. So to you, I apologize. Yes a lot of Europeans, and others, have worked on the internet. Nuts, DARPA borrowed the ISO seven-layer model to develop TCP/IP against. I suppose I should resist the urge to provoke tempermental posters, but it is just so much fun...arrogant I am not, but I would have to own up to b@stard..
If it wasn't for the arrogance of the US in meddling in European affairs, you'd all be marching around under a swastika, you're welcome.
Oh , and did you ever get around to repaying that war debt? Didn't think so.
The US has carried Europe on it's back for 75 years. SO you're ready to standon your own now, Mazeltov. Can we finally safely withdraw our troops without you attacking each other again?
When you're done kicking the US in the shins for all the favors we've done you, maybe you can focus your tiny european mind on the original question in this parent post... are you for private companies in non US countries keeping control of the cc TLDs they've been running, or for giving control of those domains back to their respective non US governments?
Here's a hint. Your inability to run your own affairs is what has made you so dependent on the US for the last 75 years. Solve your own problems and you might get your self-respect back. ** Mod -10 pure troll **
It is fascinating to me that know-nothing dweebs like you can simply invent facts out of thin air and assert them as arguments.
.us TLD.
Not that anyone as rude and ignorant as you deserves a response. But I was THERE. I knew Jon Postel at the IETF, and met with him several times on the governance of the
His death did to the internet what the passing of Linus Torvalds would do to Linux - took away the unifying voice of sweet reason.
But to a child like you, history begins in the 1990's, so unless someone makes the history of the internet into a video game, it's hopeless...
It has been my personal exprience that a new logo comes just before a company falls into serious decline. Like when the former giant International Harvester (remember the "Scout") became *wince* Travelstar, or when the mighty Burroughs transmuted into the wimpy Unisys. Of course the name doesn't always change, I worked at SGI when they paid a consultant a reported $10M to convert their logo from the gleaming silver cube to the lower case letters sgi half-falling off the bottom of the page. Prophetically this happened just before the bottom fell out of sgi, and they began 15% layoffs every quarter.
Reinventing the corporate image is one of the things management types do to divert attention when a company is circling the edge of the toilet bowl...
For all the little kiddies out there who were still in diapers when the US Gov't did the research, defined the protocols, and funded the construction that BUILT the original internet, here's a clue. The US magnanimously shared its incredible invention witht the rest of the world for the good of mankind. /etc/hosts files got too big to manage, the domain system was created. At that point, every country recognized by the UN was generously given a two-letter country code TLD. Some of those countries were too disorganized to manage their TLD, and allowed commercial companies to do it. Now the ICANN is givng those TLDs BACK to their RIGHTFULL OWNERS. Complaining about this is analagous to college students who have rented apartments in a house, now graduating and refusing to move out, claiming that they rightfully own the house where they were renting rooms. Quick, call the waaahhhmbulance! /etc/hosts file to resolve the IP address for j&rk0ff.k!dd!ep0rn.kz - no one can stop you.
When the internet grew, and the
If you don't like it, go back to using your
But, if I were you, I would save your silver bullets. I kinda suspect that you're gonna be really pissed when IPv6 comes along, and the DHS starts requiring you to register a permanent IP address with your name and SSN, and keeps track of all the sites you visit to see if you are a "terrorist".
Hmmm, I discern Buddhism, Scientology, and a little bit of the Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation. If it's at all encouraging, I do meditate into an altered state of consciousness while I'm on the exercise bike in the gym. I don't know if your particular brand of transcendentalism allows Jesus to be an avatar. But I attempt to achieve oneness with His consciousness. And every so often when I'm bored I try to lift a soda can with my extended aura. So far no levitation, but hope springs eternal. I suspect that we are collecting points towards two different systems of enlightenment. If I pass away in a nursing home and wake up reincarnated instead of in Heaven, I'll send you an email from my new body.
OK, apologies for any fascist behavior, but you are still misrepresenting what I said. What I claimed was that if there was a God who was ive-or-more-dimensional, it would resolve a classic paradox. The comment that a five-dimensional universe needed a five-or-more dimensional God was meant as axiomatic, not as an implied conclusion. The fact that the information in a higher-dimensional space can be recorded in a lower dimensional space (analogous to my playing a three-dimensional computer game on a two-dimensional screen - which is all stored in one-dimensional computer memory) is cool and fascinating, but orthogonal to my original assertion. But still, sorry for getting snippy.
Thank you, I always thought that "Occam's razor" was of arabic origin. It really is from Sir William of Occam (or Ockham). Secretly, I have a somewhat tenuous hope that the "parallel worlds" model will lead to a way to defeat gravity. This is a little hard to follow, if you read my rambling about a static 5 dimensional universe, with no particles or waves or forces, then one way to look at the "force" of gravity is as a probability problem. In examining all of the parallel paths into the future from this instant in time, more paths lead more probably towards a massive of object than away from it. To deomnstrate that there is a "real" fifth dimension that we experience as probability, it would be necessary to create an experiment that manipulated probability over time in such a way as to produce tangible results, like defeating gravity - but without using conventional "forces" like magnetism. Now all I have to do is "boil the ocean", as they say.
You aren't ominiscient till you advance to avatar, which implies giving up your physical body. If you want to skip that step, and claim to be omniscient while still part of this corporeal reality, a test is appropriate.(C'mon, now, that's only fair) It is said that knowledge is power, and as an omniscient, you possess infinite knowledge. Ergo you must be in control of infinite power. I will therefore accept your claim of omniscience when you can lift my Ford Tempo, which is stuck in the mud in my back yard back onto the road using only the "Force". And no excuses like "My doubt is clouding your focus". Yoda did it for Luke when he wanted to be his mentor. If that is too facetious, then try this. Disassociate from your physical body, and travel to my cubicle in spirit (It's in suburban Maryland, near DC). I just taped a yellow piece of note paper with several words and groups of numbers on it to a post in my cubicle wall. Read them and send them back in this forum, and I'll accept your omniscience.
Close. They, I think, assert the properties that we observe in particles are stored as standing waves in little strings attached to "branes". The "branes" of string theory would be analogous to my frames of reference. But, I would see the information as being contained in the way you define a set of point-intersections. There would be no standing waves. The only thing that would ever "change" would be the contents of the set that makes up ones frame of reference. Call it "set theory" instead of "string theory".
What I explained was that a 5-dimensional view explains away an apparent paradox, one that is often raised in discussions over the existence of God. The response was inappropriate in two ways. 1) It implied that I asserted some proof of God's existence. Removing a paradox is not a claim of proof. 2) It then stretched the point into a fallacious straw-man argument. Implying not only that I was asserting evidence of God's existence, but that since I believe in God, I must perforce be a creationist who is pressing for the adoption of "intelligent design". These inappropriate implications were not inadvertent, but intended as an ad-hominem attack. i.e. no mere creationist is capable of a valid post. My response, while it was certainly flame-bait, was not inappropriate to the provocation.
If it makes you feel any better, Einstein thought that as we entered a black hole, time would change places with one of our other dimensions. The act of accelerating an object is the act of rotating the direction that that object uses as its time axis with respect to other bodies. The reason for the Lorenz contraction (things get shorter as they accelerate towards the speed of light) is that the spatial dimensions of that object are rotated with respect to me, making it appear shorter in the directionof travel. Time isn't one special dimension, it's just one that is perpendicular to the three others for any given observer.
The idea is not original. It has several names, most broadly it is known as the "parallel universe" theory. It has been used as the premise in many SF stories, like the "Amber" series, or Keith Laumer's excellent "Worlds of the Imperium" or even the recently revamped "Chronicles of Narnia". I have been toying with a particular interpretation myself(warning: this is very goofy and poorly developed). What if EVERYTHING we know about physics is WRONG. What if there are NO particles, NO waves, NO energy, at all. What if the Universe is a completely frozen static five-dimensional manifold. Our conciousness creates a three-dimnesional snapshot of that five-dimensional manifold wherever it goes, because our conciousness is itself made up of proceses that can only exist when constrained to a three-dimensional snapshot. When our conciousness moves forward in the fourth dimension we experience time. Time seems to move at a constant rate only because the amount of change that happens due to travelling a certain distance in time stays about the same. When we see a photon emitted, for example, we may simply be seeing the intersection of our 3-dimensional frame with a four dimensional cone. The result is a sphere that expands as we move forward in time, which we percieve as a wave. When that "wave" is constrained to intersect with other waves, it "collapses" into discrete points or particles. So what we percieve to be particles are really a set of point intersections of multiple manifolds. What we percieve as "forces" are the underlying shapes of those manifolds, which affect the possible position of the point intersections as we move forward in time. What we call an exchange of energy (one particle bumps into another and imparts its momentum to the second one) is really us following an intersection with one manifold till it lines up with another and then starting to follow the second intersection. One implication of this is that we each carry our own universe around with us. Communication is only possible between observers that are close enough to share common lines of intrsection in their respective world views so that they can exchange "particles". Hows that for a whacked theory???
Not to commit heresy, but one would expect those universes to end up being the same as the "branes" of string theory, n'est-ce pas?
What does "intelligent design" have to do with the freewill vs. omniscience paradox? How do you get from Quantum uncertainty to creationism? I missed the turn there. The point was that a higher-dimensional intelligence could be aware of every possible outcome in our future without causing predestination. This knee-jerk off-topic anti-religious mindset is one big reason why the public is losing faith in science and turning to fundamentalist religion for answers. Since turnabout is fair play, let me observe that scientists (as documented here on /. recently) have become notorious liars, and can no longer be trusted as honest brokers of philosophical debate.
And since everyone, including scientists, has lost their integrity in the eyes of the public, most common decent people flee to the comforting blanket of family-friendly traditional values. While the lunatic fringe embraces pseudo-scientific not-yet-theories like evolution to "prove" there is no god as a precursor to justifying smoking a lot of dope and having b#tt-sex with their buddies.
If you want to end the surge of public opinion towards conservative causes, stop whoring the sciences and using them as philosophical sturmtruppen for left-wing political ideology.
Sorry - Multiple parallel universe, but expressed in lay terms, however clumsily ( granted it may require more than 5 dimensions). Hidden variable is intruiging, but not as comforting.
This article, in it's attempt to maximize the "weirdness factor", ignored what I find to be the most palatable explanation of quantum uncertainty. That is that the universe is five-dimensional. What makes everything seem so wierd is that we are not neutral observers. Our conciousness is created by phenomena that only exist when confined to a three-dimensional snapshot of that universe. We percieve the fourth dimension as time, because it allows our three dimensional snapshot to change as we move in the fourth dimension. We perceive the fifth dimension as probability because it allows multiple possible paths into the future. When an experiment, like determining the spin of one electron out of a pair of emitted electrons shows a particular outcome, the spin of the other particle is not magically changed. Instead we are simply determining which of two possible paths into the future our three-dimensional snapshot of reality happens to have taken. When we compare our results to a distant test of the spin of the other electron, we are not experiencing super-luminal communications, we are simply limited from seeing any other spin for that electron because of our limited three-dimensional conciousmess which can encompass only one state for that particle, which has to be compatible with the state discovered for its fellow electron.
The real surprise here is how very limited our intelligence is, and how little of the true universe we are able to percieve. It is a terrible conceit to believe that we are a neutral observer capable of impartially observering the universe. We literally create our reality by observering it because our reality is a tiny three-dimensional slice of all possible realities. The universe isn't weird, we are just hopelessly myopic.
This interpretation has the benefit of proving Einstein right. God does not play dice with the universe. Since it is commonly accepted that God would transcend the Universe, his conciousness would be at least five-dimensional. He would be simoultaneously aware of all possible paths into the future. When we pick one, we experience a true free-will choice, but the transcendent observer knows which path we will pick - without affeting the nature of the choice iteself. As a side benefit, free will and omniscience are reconciled, and one of the major arguments against the existence of God crumbles into dust.
We aren't programs in the Matrix, we are ants in an ant farm - trapped in a tiny little slice of reality.
"We dropped nukes on Japan in WWII for two reasons: to see them work in action and, more importantly, to show the USSR that we can and would use them."
;-)
You say that like its a BAD thing. C'mon, what decent post-apocalyptic movie *doesn't* start with a nuclear war. People are evil, the earth is over-run with them. Nukes kill people, ergo nukes are good.
As long as they are dropped *somewhere else*
I suggest you listen to "Chitlins, whiskey and skirt" by the group "The Gone Jackals"
First of all, the US Government is, at least in the US, going to be one of the early adopters of IPv6. AT&T, MCI, and Sprint have yet to announce plans for IPv6 availability. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has already manadated adoption of IPv6 for Federal agencies, and they have already done network inventories and are developing transition plans. I have yet to read a single comment on this thread by anyone who has even the foggiest of clues what is going on. Gee whizz, you managed to activate the IPv6 stack on your Linux box at home. Wow, what an accomplishment! Compared to your home network, converting a typical agency with over 100,000 PCs, 5,000 servers, and 500 routers all located in over 200 field offices is like building a space shuttle compared to building a rubber-band powered balsa airplane. Here's a few trivial problems to chew on- How does my firewall stop viruses, when the virus can use a level-3 encrypted channel to talk to its author? What's the procedure for differentiating between vulnerable and necessary ports in Longhorn and Vista once you do away with NAT and your PCs become visible to everyone in the world. No BS, I want port numbers and specific vulnerabilities I have to check for, along with the security product that will detect and block illegitimate access attempts while allowing the proper access to make real websites, java, .net and oracle work.
How many addresses should I allocate to each facility, server, and PC, and what DHCP software do I use to assign and manage them? And how to I stop neighbor-discovery spoofing?
Should my voice-over-ip network be deployed in the initial deployment? Will that disrupt vital voice services? What about multi-cast video-over-ip? Is it cost effective? How do I deploy it to PCs, but control the usage so that it doesn't suck up all my network bandwidth and create an accidental DOS for my web servers?
Are those questions too easy? I've got a list a mile long that I have to solve before we convert.
So how about a nice big cup of shut-the-f#ck-up for all the useless little kiddie network engineers out there. Your constructive criticism is as ignorant as it is unwelcome.
A year or two ago, I orchestrated an enterprise upgrade from Win 9x desktops with Banyan servers to WinXP with Win2K servers.
/etc/initab to customize the services running at a particular run level is a diverting amusement rather than an odious burden.
;-)
You would not believe how scared and panicky the users got. During the physical migration, users were given 4 hours of training on the changes from Win9X to WinXP. Then immediately went back to their desk to a newly converted workstation. It hardly helped at all. The shape of the MS Office icons changed, we got dozens of calls from users who said we had "taken away" MS Office. One department had their shared drive change from the P to the Q drive letter. Even after telling them verbally three times in class, and following it up with email, we still got dozens of calls from users who said their documents had been "deleted". We even got calls from people complaining that their spyware was missing! And some of them were PhD's.
Humans in general are dumb, easily panicked sheep. They fear and loathe change as if it were physically painful. They don't like Windows - in fact it is one of the favorite topics of water-cooler derision. But they would rather run their nuts through a clothes-wringer than have their toolbar move to the top of their screen.
Linux enthusiasts are generally highly intelligent malcontents. People who desire frequent chaotic change because it soothes the agony of their ADHD induced boredom. They love having to follow up the latest installation of Fedaro by trying to figure out where to download a multi-media player from because *someone* got pissy with the old player's authors and left it out of the distro. Tweaking
And Linux enthusiasts suffer from a terrible conceit, believeing that the rest of the world "wants" to be like them, but just doesn't know how. So if they can make the Linux desktop look 75% the same as windows, then they can lure the sheep in for a closer look. The implicit assumption being that once a sheep gets a good look at the "freedom" offered by vi and shell scripting, they'll have an epiphany and never want to go back to a point-and-click GUI.
Here's a clue for all the cult-of-linux followers out there. Most people HATE change. Flexibility is spelled c-o-n-f-u-s-i-o-n. Powerful tools are d-a-n-g-e-r-o-u-s. Configuration options are a t-a-r-p-i-t.
Memorize this commandment:
EASE OF USE is ***all*** that matters!
Until conversion to Linux represents LESS change for the average user to deal with than an upgrade to the next version of Windows, 90+ percent of the population won't touch it.
Or, you could go for an even lower common denominator, and develop XXX-windows with built-in pr0n. After all, it was x-rated content that created the market for VCRs and cable TV
Why is it that people who are trying to make pathetically weak arguments stick, always resort to personal insults, as if that was going to make what they say any more valid.
0 0307/ai_n95189934 0928023130.html_ wireless_wonder_goes_titsup/
Well, in the spirit of quid pro quo (look it up, its latin):
I've been working in network security longer than you've been out of diapers, assuming you are out of diapers.
WPA , like all of the feeble attempts at wireless security, was cracked before it even got widely deployed. For the curious,here's just one of many examples one can find with a simple google search-
www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=369221
Like I said before, when you think wireless, think of hoola-hoops. Wireless will be a fad for about a year, then in five years we'll all be sitting around asking "What ever happened to wireless?"
Walmart has cancelled theor wireless plans
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zd4168/is_2
Intel is cancelling intetgrated wireless support plans for desktop chipsets
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipsets/display/200
The Starbucks wireless provider went belly up
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/10/11/starbucks
The wireless wave has crested and is now rolling back into the sea of oblivion.
Like I said before, when you think wireless, think of hoola-hoops. Wireless will be a fad for about a year or two, then in five years we'll all be sitting around asking "What ever happened to wireless?"