"My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy'."
If I so desired, I could limit the login / password for my MySQL account to only allow row INSERTs and SELECTs, but no DELETEs or DROPs
This is a bit of a kludge, no?
Have a look at capability systems like EROS. Capabilities are like file descriptors in Unix: only processes holding the file descriptors may access the corresponding files, and there is a specific function (the open system call) to obtain file descriptors.
Now suppose that only the initial shell may open files and that all other processes receive the content of files by redirection (established by the shell). A compromised process cannot access just any file but only those files given to it.
Improving the redirection mechanism along the lines of Plan 9 or, similarly, MSH produces a very powerful and secure system.
If, therefore, a particular version of evolutionary theory assumes a complete, purely natural continuity between human beings and other animals, including the emergence of the human mind from mere matter apart from any more-than natural-(or supernatural) cause, that view must be false. A scientist who claims to explain everything about man in terms of evolution winds up explaining nothing, for there is no basis for thinking anything he says about man is true. He traps his theory-not to mention himself-in a naturalistic straightjacket. He must hold that he himself theorizes as he does simply because the whole universe and its physical, biochemical laws move the molecules around in his head that way, not because he's discovered some "truth" about the way things are.
This is complete bullshit. I am amazed how many times religious people sprinkle this kind of magic pixie dust to produce a holier-than-thou philosophy. The steps in the process are:
(1) identify something that we cannot possibly know one way or another (for example, the origin of the universe, or free will vs. determinism). (2) pronounce some spiritual hocus pocus to answer the problem. (3) ignore the fact that the spiritual answer suffers the same problem. (4) take tithes from the ignorant. (5) profit!
In this particular case, free will vs. determinism is not answered by postulating the existance of a soul because that "answer" suffers *exactly* the same problem: maybe thoughts move throught the soul in a deterministic way.
Much the same can be said for the cosmological (first cause) argument.
Now, it's my understanding that a sovereign country can control their borders in any way they see fit.
In general, this is not true: sovereign nations cannot just do as they see fit. In this particular case, taking my fingerprints without probable cause and without a specific warrant would seem to violate my rights, as expressed in the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Microsoft's monopoly came about mostly by their exclusive contracts with hardware vendors, agressive bundling, and buying up competitors.
Yes; the operating system market might support only one supplier (the natural monopoly) but this does not imply that Microsoft's monopoly is not coercive or that their crimes were not crimes at all. That you will die one day does not make it right for me to kill you.
The idea of applications seeking out each other, learning about their resources and interfaces, and hooking up and communicating, without any human intervention is fascinating.
It seems some people are desperate to do anything to avoid actual implementation (work?)
People are avoiding not just work but also the effort of learning anything substantial (and therefore difficult). It is easy to learn this sort of fluff; it is not quite so easy to learn some interestinglanguages designed to solve real problems.
In Lunix and other access control list operating systems the exploit path is well known: (1) remote exploit to an unprivileged account; (2) local exploit to a privileged account.
The operating systems referenced above have no privileged accounts so this exploit path is not possible and especially so in the case of EROS, a capability based system that has no accounts (in the Lunix sense) at all!
Last year someone asked me how my computer worked (he hadn't used Linux before) so I handed him the book. He didn't ask me another question after that -- I guess the book answered them all;)
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pity. I was hoping string theory would finally come in from the cold... ahh... you know what I mean ;-)
"My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy'."
David Attenborough
Longhorn is red-shifting... the release date must be receeding!
... by taking credit for the work of others with respect to the price/performance of the hardware?!?
If I so desired, I could limit the login / password for my MySQL account to only allow row INSERTs and SELECTs, but no DELETEs or DROPs
This is a bit of a kludge, no?
Have a look at capability systems like EROS. Capabilities are like file descriptors in Unix: only processes holding the file descriptors may access the corresponding files, and there is a specific function (the open system call) to obtain file descriptors.
Now suppose that only the initial shell may open files and that all other processes receive the content of files by redirection (established by the shell). A compromised process cannot access just any file but only those files given to it.
Improving the redirection mechanism along the lines of Plan 9 or, similarly, MSH produces a very powerful and secure system.
Unless we can convience the public that Bin Laden is camped out in his secret moonbase.
This shouldn't be difficult, considering the last few years of public gullibility.
From your link:
If, therefore, a particular version of evolutionary theory assumes a complete, purely natural continuity between human beings and other animals, including the emergence of the human mind from mere matter apart from any more-than natural-(or supernatural) cause, that view must be false. A scientist who claims to explain everything about man in terms of evolution winds up explaining nothing, for there is no basis for thinking anything he says about man is true. He traps his theory-not to mention himself-in a naturalistic straightjacket. He must hold that he himself theorizes as he does simply because the whole universe and its physical, biochemical laws move the molecules around in his head that way, not because he's discovered some "truth" about the way things are.
This is complete bullshit. I am amazed how many times religious people sprinkle this kind of magic pixie dust to produce a holier-than-thou philosophy. The steps in the process are:
(1) identify something that we cannot possibly know one way or another (for example, the origin of the universe, or free will vs. determinism).
(2) pronounce some spiritual hocus pocus to answer the problem.
(3) ignore the fact that the spiritual answer suffers the same problem.
(4) take tithes from the ignorant.
(5) profit!
In this particular case, free will vs. determinism is not answered by postulating the existance of a soul because that "answer" suffers *exactly* the same problem: maybe thoughts move throught the soul in a deterministic way.
Much the same can be said for the cosmological (first cause) argument.
In general, this is not true: sovereign nations cannot just do as they see fit. In this particular case, taking my fingerprints without probable cause and without a specific warrant would seem to violate my rights, as expressed in the Fourth Amendment:
When everything is open and free, you have communism.
When information is open and free, you have democracy.
It seems that the "shit" count per line is correlated with the proportion of the kernel written by Linus.
Microsoft's monopoly came about mostly by their exclusive contracts with hardware vendors, agressive bundling, and buying up competitors.
Yes; the operating system market might support only one supplier (the natural monopoly) but this does not imply that Microsoft's monopoly is not coercive or that their crimes were not crimes at all. That you will die one day does not make it right for me to kill you.
The idea of applications seeking out each other, learning about their resources and interfaces, and hooking up and communicating, without any human intervention is fascinating.
Is it not disturbing , rather?
It seems some people are desperate to do anything to avoid actual implementation (work?)
People are avoiding not just work but also the effort of learning anything substantial (and therefore difficult). It is easy to learn this sort of fluff; it is not quite so easy to learn some interesting languages designed to solve real problems.
- Plan 9
- Inferno
- EROS
In Lunix and other access control list operating systems the exploit path is well known: (1) remote exploit to an unprivileged account; (2) local exploit to a privileged account. The operating systems referenced above have no privileged accounts so this exploit path is not possible and especially so in the case of EROS, a capability based system that has no accounts (in the Lunix sense) at all!Last year someone asked me how my computer worked (he hadn't used Linux before) so I handed him the book. He didn't ask me another question after that -- I guess the book answered them all ;)