Are you afraid that someone will steal this sensitive data by passively scanning the chip, or an even more effective low-tech method, by looking at you? The only data on the chip will be an encrypted copy of your photograph.
Furthermore, the fact that it's of your photograph is merely an additional confirmation that the passport is valid; the encryption is the major portion. It's essentially the same as digitally signing the document.
It makes sure that those people who immigrate illegally are the best and the brightest, or those who have the most backing, or the richest of the poor. It improves the quality of successful illegal immigrants--and reduces their number somewhat, since the price for a fake passport rises.
We see a certain amount of matter in the system. We see the gravitational effects of much more than that. So we have a premise that we see everything with an appreciable mass; that is disproven by our observation of gravitational effects that differ significantly from that which we predicted via the observable matter.
So, our options are to believe that some matter is disproportionately heavy than its appearance would suggest, or to believe that there's matter that we aren't seeing.
What of it? The flash memory was removed well before anything happened; it's a case of malfunctioning equipment. And it was required in order for the car to run, then I can replace it or make a pacifier (probably a ROM encoded with the contents of the flash chip I removed).
So, just nudge the flash chip that the computer records to. It's got old data on it, perhaps; I could remove it entirely (and replace it if the car won't function otherwise), or I could leave the data on there after driving carefully for an appropriate distance.
Okay, someone just stole your laptop. They haven't connected it to the Internet. Do you WANT the program to pop up and say "Hey, I couldn't connect to the Internet and phone home"?
But a logfile, you say. Why do you need to know how often the script has failed due to external reasons? Does it help at all? Maybe for debugging, but it's fifteen lines. You should be able to debug that in less than an hour. So a logfile would be useless, a waste of a few kilobytes.
As for the endless loop, this is a process that should run continuously. How would you write a cron daemon without an endless loop? The script, even with the endless loop, barely touches the processor, and takes hardly any bandwidth.
And modding up spyware authors? Hardly. It only reports an IP address, and that only to the owner of the device, who installed the program. By definition, I can't spy on myself; by extension, having my computer report its IP address periodically is not spying.
This stage of the trial is meant to see if the vaccine is safe for human consumption--that is, it didn't kill any lab animals; regardless of its positive effects, we need to know if it's going to be dangerous. Then we can concern ourselves with the positive effects.
It's a frikkin vaccine. If it works, they WILL have HIV antibodies soon after the vaccine is administered.
Another way to test is to take a blood sample and try infecting it with HIV. If you can infect the sample, then the vaccine failed. Since there are common tests, it should be a simple matter.
What's so scary? If you get an error, it's most likely with the OS, not that script, and it'll most likely be cleared up by the next time the script activates. And if not, the script just sleeps for another day.
The script is simple. It doesn't contain errors, which is easy to verify in fifteen lines. It isn't providing any user-accessible services, and it depends on an external service (an internet connection) over which it has no control.
All in all, it seems like a logical way to handle things.
X-SAMPA is an extension of SAMPA, not a version of SAMPA using Extended ASCII. SAMPA was a series of phonetic alphabet tables, each one being language-specific; it also used basic ASCII.
CXS, which is the version of X-SAMPA that I use, uses only some printing characters, excluding the following characters: #$%*(){}[]/; Since there are about 115 major sounds representable with CXS, plus about thirty different features one can use on various subsets of those sounds and then stress and tone, we use multiple characters for certain sounds in a non-ambiguous way--reserving several control characters for supersegmental use or to indicate that the previous character is part of a polygraph (single sound represented with multiple characters representing it). For instance, the symbol \ denotes a non-systematic modification of the sound, and ` means that the sound is retroflex (pronounced with the tongue tip curled backward).
grEjt, nAU D&t wi h&v D@ Aj pi Ej, mEjbi wi kUd gEt &n Ek'stEnd@d spitS @'sEsmn=t 'mET@dz f@'nE4Ik '&lf@"bEt D&ts 'r`I4n= 'soUli wIT &ski 'ker@ktr=z!
Great, now that we have the IPA, maybe we could get an Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet that's written solely with ASCII characters!
Well, you can't support all five hundred distributions of Linux, or even all twenty or fifty mainstream distributions. You pick one for whatever reason--probably because they include proprietary drivers and have a professional appearance and good reputation. Then you support them and let other distributions port your driver packages.
While you could certainly use autopackage and such to prepare support for most distributions, you'd have to test each one. If the community will do the testing and preparation for you, you get two benefits:
- You don't spend money on QA people on a few dozen different platforms, only on five or six (Win2k, WinXP home/pro, Vista, SLED).
- When a package is broken for $RAND_DISTR, people complain to the maintainers of that distribution, not to Lenovo.
Re:I already have the games I've saved for my...
on
Gaming When We're 64
·
· Score: 1
Summary: Evolution is about speciation and does not involve the Great Chain of Being; complexity is only an issue when it affects survivability or fertility. Most of your issues are with uniformitarianism, which is quite obviously not the way the world works, as you pointed out. If I know that, so do geologists; they have planned their theories accordingly. (Unless...are you Marilyn vos Savant?)
---
"As to the geologic layers, we do get stratification, but what we don't get is a more simple to a more complex layering of fossils."
Okay, so you have a point against a worldwide flood creating most existing layers of rock. You also have a point against evolution as a means of climbing the Great Chain of Being.
Evolution, in this context, is genetic change resulting in speciation. It doesn't require increasing complexity after the origin of life. And at this point, we have all the complexity that is reasonable exemplified in living creatures. We have large ranges of complexity, and I'm sure that there is value in simplicity as well as in complexity--that is, complexity is not a trait with a significant effect on survivability. So there is no reason for creatures to become more or less complex over time as a general trend.
"I believe that the fossils that are found are the remains of living plants and animals."
Including Archaeopteryx, the Irish elk, dinosaurs, giant sloths, plesiosaurs, Eohippus, trilobites, the Burgess shale fauna...? Where did we get these mass extinctions? Either God's been winnowing his creation, or he didn't set it up in equilibrium (which seems unlike an omniscient, omnipotent creator).
Given the large number of extinct species, one wonders why God even bothered with much more than those extant today.
"...there are examples of polystrate trees that would have (according to the old earth ideals) spanned millions of years."
Unless multiple rock layers were inserted within a short period--like with a volcano (pyroclastic flow, lava, then settling ash) or multiple instances of flooding or mud slides. You are correct in saying that a uniformitarian system of rock formation would not account for polystrate fossils. However, uniformitarian views are insufficient to explain the evidence within a naturalist or a creationist framework; and given the dynamic and unpredictable events that we observe, uniformitarian views are clearly flawed.
"Now is it not possible that the atmosphere was slightly different at that time given this fact and that maybe modern dating methods don't work properly prior to the flood?"
Yes, that's quite possible. Do you have a reason to believe that it was so? Do you have a mechanism that would make it so? Does that mechanism have any effect on other aspects of the earth that we can measure in order to test the theory?
"However, all of this fits properly into the belief of creation by a superior being and a young earth."
The only evidence you gave was the polystratic trees. A worldwide flood would result in extremely strong currents that would rip the trees out of place (due to tidal forces, if the inundation or recession were gentle enough). There are polystratic tree fossils with intact roots. So we know that at least some such fossils are not due to a worldwide flood; there is no need to recourse to one for the remainder unless there is a compelling reason.
Still, evolution is mostly regarded as a fact (things evolve), whereas the method and the manner are regarded as subjects of debate (such as Lamarckism, mutations and natural selection, and so forth).
Evolution is by far the best explanation of the diversity of life on earth. It's falsifiable, it accords with and explains the evidence, but the algorithm is nondeterministic so we can't make predictions. The best we could hope for, really.
It's possible to explain the current state of living species without evolution, and even part of the history.
Losing the ability to interbreed, though, is not strictly a loss of genetic information. It could be a loss or a gain. It could be neither--good luck getting a shih tzu to breed with a Bernese mountain dog.
Intelligent Design is not testable and makes no predictions, but other parts of the idea mentioned do. If the worldwide flood story were accurate, for instance, we'd have a relatively short period of existence followed by a catastrophic flood and then the present state, more or less. We'd expect a fossil record that supported that--a lot of layers of very similar fossils all together in the same areas. But we don't get that; instead, we get different types of fossils at different rock layers. That [stratigraphy] is one of the larger pieces of evidence against the flood theory.
Of course, God could have planted the paleontological evidence to test our faith. That argument is perhaps valid but without merit; it boils down to Last Thursdayism (a theory that states the world was created last Thursday, but designed to appear older), which is untestable and unfruitful. The simplest and best conclusion to make is that the world is as it is; and since we get different distributions of fossils at different rock layers, they were laid down at different periods, meaning there was no worldwide flood to create them all.
Now, the 'no additive evolution' theory can simply be falsified by the existence of complex structures today that did not exist in antiquity. Proving that a structure did not exist in antiquity is, however, impossible. On the other hand, 'genetic information' is an arbitrary term, a *human* term, so unless you provide a rigid definition, I can't argue theory or probability.
Remember the stories over the past few days about that patch for a vulnerability that could cause another Blaster-scale virus? About how a lot more zombies would be added to botnets?
Maybe the reason you've seen more spam is because there are more senders, and it's taking time to catch up with the load. More senders means more possible diversity, after all.
Consumers were expected to move to Fedora, which replaced the free version of Redhat. RHEL continued its five-year support arrangement, so for enterprise customers, there was no change.
What's the big deal? If yours is a small business, you can get basic support for $350. Larger, $2500 gets you a full contract. That's hardly taxing to a company that also has the option of running an unsupported RHEL, or an alternative of choosing another support company.
Moreover, you can't trademark Web Browser or Web Site Viewer--they're descriptive.
GNOME Meeting can take its trademark from GNOME, but none of its own. If it splits and becomes dissociated from GNOME, then it needs its own name. Plus people like leaving their mark on a project, especially the name.
My university does just that. It didn't work that well; in the semester or so while I had a Windows machine, there were periods in which I received virus notifications on an hourly basis, and I've been cleaning spyware out of that computer ever since.
Now, of course, I don't use Windows, and consequently have no viruses. (It helps that my computer is in storage, too.)
You have a point. However, who asks OEMs for Linux? Regular users?
Once vendors have to choose a Linux to support (or at least offer), they might choose something like Freespire, and some have. More likely they'll choose something backed by a larger company such as Novell. And at that point, the OEMs might work an advantage by offering proprietary technologies. Or the corporations in question might; at that point, no OS vendor would risk the potentially huge leap in market share offered just because it would cost a bit to license those technologies.
So by the time it's an issue, others will have addressed it. And if you're a grandmother who isn't used to computers at all, will you choose Windows, like everyone else, or a Linux that your geek grandson tells you not to use?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you afraid that someone will steal this sensitive data by passively scanning the chip, or an even more effective low-tech method, by looking at you? The only data on the chip will be an encrypted copy of your photograph.
Furthermore, the fact that it's of your photograph is merely an additional confirmation that the passport is valid; the encryption is the major portion. It's essentially the same as digitally signing the document.
It makes sure that those people who immigrate illegally are the best and the brightest, or those who have the most backing, or the richest of the poor. It improves the quality of successful illegal immigrants--and reduces their number somewhat, since the price for a fake passport rises.
We see a certain amount of matter in the system. We see the gravitational effects of much more than that. So we have a premise that we see everything with an appreciable mass; that is disproven by our observation of gravitational effects that differ significantly from that which we predicted via the observable matter.
So, our options are to believe that some matter is disproportionately heavy than its appearance would suggest, or to believe that there's matter that we aren't seeing.
What of it? The flash memory was removed well before anything happened; it's a case of malfunctioning equipment. And it was required in order for the car to run, then I can replace it or make a pacifier (probably a ROM encoded with the contents of the flash chip I removed).
The answer to surveillance is more surveillance!
I love it!
So, just nudge the flash chip that the computer records to. It's got old data on it, perhaps; I could remove it entirely (and replace it if the car won't function otherwise), or I could leave the data on there after driving carefully for an appropriate distance.
Okay, someone just stole your laptop. They haven't connected it to the Internet. Do you WANT the program to pop up and say "Hey, I couldn't connect to the Internet and phone home"?
But a logfile, you say. Why do you need to know how often the script has failed due to external reasons? Does it help at all? Maybe for debugging, but it's fifteen lines. You should be able to debug that in less than an hour. So a logfile would be useless, a waste of a few kilobytes.
As for the endless loop, this is a process that should run continuously. How would you write a cron daemon without an endless loop? The script, even with the endless loop, barely touches the processor, and takes hardly any bandwidth.
And modding up spyware authors? Hardly. It only reports an IP address, and that only to the owner of the device, who installed the program. By definition, I can't spy on myself; by extension, having my computer report its IP address periodically is not spying.
Herpes increases your risk of getting cervical cancer.
Well, okay, maybe not YOUR risk, but still.
Vaccines need not be 100% effective to be useful.
This stage of the trial is meant to see if the vaccine is safe for human consumption--that is, it didn't kill any lab animals; regardless of its positive effects, we need to know if it's going to be dangerous. Then we can concern ourselves with the positive effects.
It's a frikkin vaccine. If it works, they WILL have HIV antibodies soon after the vaccine is administered.
Another way to test is to take a blood sample and try infecting it with HIV. If you can infect the sample, then the vaccine failed. Since there are common tests, it should be a simple matter.
What's so scary? If you get an error, it's most likely with the OS, not that script, and it'll most likely be cleared up by the next time the script activates. And if not, the script just sleeps for another day.
The script is simple. It doesn't contain errors, which is easy to verify in fifteen lines. It isn't providing any user-accessible services, and it depends on an external service (an internet connection) over which it has no control.
All in all, it seems like a logical way to handle things.
X-SAMPA is an extension of SAMPA, not a version of SAMPA using Extended ASCII. SAMPA was a series of phonetic alphabet tables, each one being language-specific; it also used basic ASCII.
CXS, which is the version of X-SAMPA that I use, uses only some printing characters, excluding the following characters: #$%*(){}[]/;
Since there are about 115 major sounds representable with CXS, plus about thirty different features one can use on various subsets of those sounds and then stress and tone, we use multiple characters for certain sounds in a non-ambiguous way--reserving several control characters for supersegmental use or to indicate that the previous character is part of a polygraph (single sound represented with multiple characters representing it). For instance, the symbol \ denotes a non-systematic modification of the sound, and ` means that the sound is retroflex (pronounced with the tongue tip curled backward).
grEjt, nAU D&t wi h&v D@ Aj pi Ej, mEjbi wi kUd gEt &n Ek'stEnd@d spitS @'sEsmn=t 'mET@dz f@'nE4Ik '&lf@"bEt D&ts 'r`I4n= 'soUli wIT &ski 'ker@ktr=z!
.)
Great, now that we have the IPA, maybe we could get an Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet that's written solely with ASCII characters!
(In point of fact, I used CXS, a simplification of X-SAMPA: http://www.theiling.de/ipa/
What we really need is an International Phonetic Alphabet.
Well, you can't support all five hundred distributions of Linux, or even all twenty or fifty mainstream distributions. You pick one for whatever reason--probably because they include proprietary drivers and have a professional appearance and good reputation. Then you support them and let other distributions port your driver packages.
While you could certainly use autopackage and such to prepare support for most distributions, you'd have to test each one. If the community will do the testing and preparation for you, you get two benefits:
- You don't spend money on QA people on a few dozen different platforms, only on five or six (Win2k, WinXP home/pro, Vista, SLED).
- When a package is broken for $RAND_DISTR, people complain to the maintainers of that distribution, not to Lenovo.
A computer that can still play it.
Summary:
Evolution is about speciation and does not involve the Great Chain of Being; complexity is only an issue when it affects survivability or fertility.
Most of your issues are with uniformitarianism, which is quite obviously not the way the world works, as you pointed out. If I know that, so do geologists; they have planned their theories accordingly. (Unless...are you Marilyn vos Savant?)
---
"As to the geologic layers, we do get stratification, but what we don't get is a more simple to a more complex layering of fossils."
Okay, so you have a point against a worldwide flood creating most existing layers of rock. You also have a point against evolution as a means of climbing the Great Chain of Being.
Evolution, in this context, is genetic change resulting in speciation. It doesn't require increasing complexity after the origin of life. And at this point, we have all the complexity that is reasonable exemplified in living creatures. We have large ranges of complexity, and I'm sure that there is value in simplicity as well as in complexity--that is, complexity is not a trait with a significant effect on survivability. So there is no reason for creatures to become more or less complex over time as a general trend.
"I believe that the fossils that are found are the remains of living plants and animals."
Including Archaeopteryx, the Irish elk, dinosaurs, giant sloths, plesiosaurs, Eohippus, trilobites, the Burgess shale fauna...? Where did we get these mass extinctions? Either God's been winnowing his creation, or he didn't set it up in equilibrium (which seems unlike an omniscient, omnipotent creator).
Given the large number of extinct species, one wonders why God even bothered with much more than those extant today.
"...there are examples of polystrate trees that would have (according to the old earth ideals) spanned millions of years."
Unless multiple rock layers were inserted within a short period--like with a volcano (pyroclastic flow, lava, then settling ash) or multiple instances of flooding or mud slides. You are correct in saying that a uniformitarian system of rock formation would not account for polystrate fossils. However, uniformitarian views are insufficient to explain the evidence within a naturalist or a creationist framework; and given the dynamic and unpredictable events that we observe, uniformitarian views are clearly flawed.
"Now is it not possible that the atmosphere was slightly different at that time given this fact and that maybe modern dating methods don't work properly prior to the flood?"
Yes, that's quite possible. Do you have a reason to believe that it was so? Do you have a mechanism that would make it so? Does that mechanism have any effect on other aspects of the earth that we can measure in order to test the theory?
"However, all of this fits properly into the belief of creation by a superior being and a young earth."
The only evidence you gave was the polystratic trees. A worldwide flood would result in extremely strong currents that would rip the trees out of place (due to tidal forces, if the inundation or recession were gentle enough). There are polystratic tree fossils with intact roots. So we know that at least some such fossils are not due to a worldwide flood; there is no need to recourse to one for the remainder unless there is a compelling reason.
So, what is the evidence that the earth is young?
Still, evolution is mostly regarded as a fact (things evolve), whereas the method and the manner are regarded as subjects of debate (such as Lamarckism, mutations and natural selection, and so forth).
Evolution is by far the best explanation of the diversity of life on earth. It's falsifiable, it accords with and explains the evidence, but the algorithm is nondeterministic so we can't make predictions. The best we could hope for, really.
It's possible to explain the current state of living species without evolution, and even part of the history.
Losing the ability to interbreed, though, is not strictly a loss of genetic information. It could be a loss or a gain. It could be neither--good luck getting a shih tzu to breed with a Bernese mountain dog.
Intelligent Design is not testable and makes no predictions, but other parts of the idea mentioned do. If the worldwide flood story were accurate, for instance, we'd have a relatively short period of existence followed by a catastrophic flood and then the present state, more or less. We'd expect a fossil record that supported that--a lot of layers of very similar fossils all together in the same areas. But we don't get that; instead, we get different types of fossils at different rock layers. That [stratigraphy] is one of the larger pieces of evidence against the flood theory.
Of course, God could have planted the paleontological evidence to test our faith. That argument is perhaps valid but without merit; it boils down to Last Thursdayism (a theory that states the world was created last Thursday, but designed to appear older), which is untestable and unfruitful. The simplest and best conclusion to make is that the world is as it is; and since we get different distributions of fossils at different rock layers, they were laid down at different periods, meaning there was no worldwide flood to create them all.
Now, the 'no additive evolution' theory can simply be falsified by the existence of complex structures today that did not exist in antiquity. Proving that a structure did not exist in antiquity is, however, impossible. On the other hand, 'genetic information' is an arbitrary term, a *human* term, so unless you provide a rigid definition, I can't argue theory or probability.
Remember the stories over the past few days about that patch for a vulnerability that could cause another Blaster-scale virus? About how a lot more zombies would be added to botnets?
Maybe the reason you've seen more spam is because there are more senders, and it's taking time to catch up with the load. More senders means more possible diversity, after all.
Consumers were expected to move to Fedora, which replaced the free version of Redhat. RHEL continued its five-year support arrangement, so for enterprise customers, there was no change.
What's the big deal? If yours is a small business, you can get basic support for $350. Larger, $2500 gets you a full contract. That's hardly taxing to a company that also has the option of running an unsupported RHEL, or an alternative of choosing another support company.
Moreover, you can't trademark Web Browser or Web Site Viewer--they're descriptive.
GNOME Meeting can take its trademark from GNOME, but none of its own. If it splits and becomes dissociated from GNOME, then it needs its own name. Plus people like leaving their mark on a project, especially the name.
My university does just that. It didn't work that well; in the semester or so while I had a Windows machine, there were periods in which I received virus notifications on an hourly basis, and I've been cleaning spyware out of that computer ever since.
Now, of course, I don't use Windows, and consequently have no viruses. (It helps that my computer is in storage, too.)
You have a point. However, who asks OEMs for Linux? Regular users?
Once vendors have to choose a Linux to support (or at least offer), they might choose something like Freespire, and some have. More likely they'll choose something backed by a larger company such as Novell. And at that point, the OEMs might work an advantage by offering proprietary technologies. Or the corporations in question might; at that point, no OS vendor would risk the potentially huge leap in market share offered just because it would cost a bit to license those technologies.
So by the time it's an issue, others will have addressed it. And if you're a grandmother who isn't used to computers at all, will you choose Windows, like everyone else, or a Linux that your geek grandson tells you not to use?
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=scroo gle.org&sherlock=yes&opensearch=yes&submitform=Sea rch
Firefox search engine plugin for Scroogle.