The Linux version of TrueCrypt doesn't do hidden volumes, so that point is moot, at least for the time being. It also doesn't do whole disk encryption.
If your text editor can read the file on the disk, so can any other program on the computer.
This is not true for any halfway decent cryptosystem, but the general point still stands (and if anything, this article proves most users wouldn't be able to tell a decent cryptosystem from a bullshit one anyway). Too many people just think cryptography automatically translates to security, so they can just ignore common attack vectors. The false sense of security it gives them can leave them as (or more) vulnerable as (than) users who've never even heard of cryptography (still a majority, unfortunately). Educating users is important.
Since when is science the only ontology which matters?
Since science is the only one with reproducible results, as per the other reply.
s/approximate/incomplete/
No, I did mean approximate in this context. I do believe it's also true that scientific knowledge will always be incomplete, and complete scientific knowledge isn't possible even in principle, but that's a direct result of the fact it's always approximate, as there strictly speaking is no way to prove anything.
Since Science requires that all hypotheses must be falsifiable to be valid, doesn't this invalidate your idea that science necessitates a sort of atheism?
Science also has the concept of the burden of proof and the principle of parsimony, so no, it doesn't.
Atoms are a difference case altogether, as there were some plausible hypotheses that seemed to necessitate something like them (that is, there was a genuine scientific controversy there), and they didn't really require overturning significant parts of what was known about the universe in the way a designer does.
No, it'd be like postulating that anyone believing in quantum theory in, say, the 1600s would have been nuts to do so, which is true. There was no reason to believe they existed at the time, so belief in their existence would have been unscientific. It's perfectly scientific to posit the non-existence of a designer, as there is no evidence. The fact that you can't be absolutely certain that it's true is a reflection of the fact that our scientific knowledge is always an approximation at best.
The fact that something might be wrong does not make it unscientific; in fact, every single scientific hypothesis might be wrong. That's just the nature of things. It's not possible to know anything for sure. This emphatically does not mean that all hypotheses are equally valid or likely, though.
Things like the principle of parsimony deal with the question of a designer quite adequately. Since there's no need whatsoever for one, and the existence of one would raise a fuckton of questions without answering any (and in most incarnations require massive changes to the laws of physics), it's pretty safe to say there almost certainly just isn't one. So you *can* scientifically postulate one way or the other. You can't prove it beyond *all* doubt (as you can't prove a negative, and if you get into epistemology, you can't really prove a positive either), but you can certainly prove it beyond all *reasonable* doubt.
That's a beautifully convoluted straw man you have there.
Nobody's saying evolution necessarily implies a lack of a designer. In the case of the evolution of life, we're saying a designer is not necessary at all to explain what we're seeing, and in fact introducing a designer creates a whole host of new problems that need answering without adding any value.
If you want to imply a designer, the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence. Until someone can point to something that couldn't have arisen without intervention from a designer (irreducible complexity in a real sense, I suppose; the examples the ID movement has brought on have all been debunked, though), invoking one is just bad science.
Evolutionary principles have already been applied to a lot of fields, including aerodynamics. Actually, aerodynamics is probably one of the most famous applications. It takes far, far fewer generations to get very good results than people's intuition suggests.
I see no reason why it should be impossible to recover much of the encrypted data and then just decrypt that. The whole disk isn't some giant encrypted blob that requires the entire dataset to decrypt; all you need is either one or two encrypted blocks, depending on the block cipher mode, and a block is typically not that big (128 bits for AES, which I think is TrueCrypt's default cipher).
It becomes impossible to tell the difference between scrambled data (or empty sectors) and real data, if there are any recovery techniques that rely on that, but on the whole, it shouldn't be more difficult to recover data in principle. Though you do need the encryption key.
Are you under the impression money spent in Iraq doesn't come out of the same budget as the money spent on this experiment? Because they both do, and the American taxpayer is hypothetically paying for both, so it's a very relevant comparison.
The guy constructed a falsifiable hypothesis and made testable predictions based on it, and you're claiming it's not scientific? I suggest you look up what the scientific method actually is.
You don't necessarily need a superpower enforcer for rules to make sense, you just need parties that understand why the rules were made in the first place. That's why the Geneva conventions worked quite well in keeping war relatively civil, for instance. Of course, ignorant morons who think with their penises can often ruin things for everyone involved, including their own side.
Nice story. If you can back it up with facts (solid references), it'll even be interesting.
Is Google down? Alternatively, you could also walk into a library and get a copy of Silent Spring. Carson documents numerous of cases like this in the US alone.
More than a million people die every year from Malaria.
DDT was never banned for use in combatting malaria. It was, however, banned for personal use in a lot of places, in part because of the serious threat to the environment and public health, but even more because mosquito populations were already developing a resistance, and this was a trend that needed to be slowed down or stopped. You can't kill too many mosquitos with DDT if they're immune to it.
If anything, the DDT ban saved millions by making sure DDT resistance never became too big a problem.
DDT was never that sort of threat - sure, it screws up fish and birds when it bio-accumulates but that's pretty much it.
Birds are the primary predator for most insects (and fish feed on mosquito larvae), and insect populations recover from DDT sprayings much more quickly than birds or fish. And since they can now breed with impunity, as they don't have to worry about predators anymore, those insects will be a much bigger threat to the human population than they were before, and just spraying more DDT doesn't work, since at that point it starts to affect other wildlife (including humans), and the insects build up resistance quickly.
Is this really so hard to understand? There are plenty of examples of this in history.
Also, banning DDT didn't cause "millions of people" to die, no matter how popular that meme is with the anti-environmentalist crowd. Just repeating something over and over again doesn't make it true.
Thank you for this demonstration that Young Earthers are, in fact, still as batshit insane as they've always been.
You'll find more observable evidence that the planets and other "bits" were set in motion at a particular point
By all means, show us this marvellous evidence.
chaotic explosion
Mischaracterisation of the Big Bang.
rocks to become spherical planets, perfectly revolving and orbiting as is needed for the universe to exist as a balanced, functioning universe
Lack of understanding of how gravity works.
which also subsequently allowed for conditions on planet earth to be such as to support life.
Fine-tuned universe fallacy.
Apparently you dogmatically follow the doctrine of the theory of evolution set before you by worldly, deceptive scientists (...) brainwashed
Conspiracy-theorist-like paranoia, mischaracterisation of science. It's particularly ironic that you try to cast science as just another religion (dogma, doctrine, &c.), with the implication that this is disparaging, while also believing your own religion to be absolute truth.
As far as creation scientists can ascertain, is that the fossils exist due to a world wide flood.
Except that we know what stuff buried by flooding looks like, and we know how old fossils are, and none of the evidence is consistent with rapid burial by flooding.
Coincedentally, there just happens to be a world wide flood written about in the Bible. Interestingly, it is supported by indigenous cultural groups all over the world. The majority, if not all, have stories passed down through their ancestors of a massive flood.
And if we ignore facts, all kinds of things are true!
You may want to jump on you tube and watch a few presentations from Kent Hovind. He has answers to alot of these questions and false claims.
At least then you can consider this issue by looking at both sides of the debate, rather then blindly following writings of misleading men.
I don't believe in evolution (and the fact that the universe is billions of years old) just because some guy told me. I've examined the evidence and found it to be rock-solid. I've also examined creationist claims against it, and every single one I've come across has turned out to be total bullshit. If you have new "evidence" against evolution and against the universe being billions of years old, by all means lay it out so we can judge it. I'm not holding my breath, though.
In general, they don't. Young Earthers aren't really known for their tendency to read science journals. When they are confronted with it somehow, they either ignore it or pull out some variety of Last Thursdayism: the universe was created with all of the bits already in motion, and the light from distant stars already underway, and the fossils neatly buried. Rationalisations as to the reasons for this range from "test of faith" to "giving us something to look at in the night sky".
Remember: evidence against scientific hypotheses mean the science is wrong, but evidence against the Bible means the evidence is wrong.
When the power goes out, your A/C goes out entirely. This is just about adjusting it a few degrees to prevent that. If the A/C is all you're worrying about, you should be cheering for this idea.
There isn't even the slightest hint that evolution is wrong, and not a single plausible alternative hypothesis. If you want to introduce doubt over it to high school kids, you should also teach Gödel's incompleteness theorems in the same year you teach addition and subtraction (simple arithmetic is just a theory!), except that Gödel's theorems actually make sense. Yes, all knowledge is necessarily subject to change, but that's not something these kids should be worrying about in high school, for the same reason they're not expected to worry over whether or not they're just brains in vats dreaming they're people. This discussion over epistemology can happen during a philosophy of science class in college, but not in high school, where all it will do is create unreasonable doubt.
The dinosaur extinction event isn't nearly on the same level as evolution, in terms of certainty. There is a very real possibility there were other factors involved in the extinction of the dinosaurs; there is essentially no chance whatsoever that evolution happened because someone's imaginary friend wanted to create us.
Once we have a phenomenon that can't be explained by evolution and an alternative explanation that's both plausible and robust, then we can talk. Before that, all you're effectively doing is pandering to the "my grampappy ain't no monkey" crowd.
So on the one hand you have a very well-established theory with assloads of evidence from various fields to back it up, and on the other you have random shots in the dark and what amounts to paranoid fantasy, none of it backed up by any evidence whatsoever, and you want to waste precious time in science class teaching both of these to kids because "anything's possible"?
Seems to me you're a good demonstration of the fact science education in this country sucks. Do you also want to teach Last Thursdayism? I think it would benefit the kids more if instead of wasting their time like this, they were taught *more actual science*.
Do you honestly think that if education were run like a free market, the schools that would thrive would be the ones that provided the highest quality of education? If so, what the hell are you smoking?
Education is too important to play these sorts of games with. Yes, the American public school system is mostly a joke, but adding cut-throat competitiveness isn't going to do anything to fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
The Linux version of TrueCrypt doesn't do hidden volumes, so that point is moot, at least for the time being. It also doesn't do whole disk encryption.
This is not true for any halfway decent cryptosystem, but the general point still stands (and if anything, this article proves most users wouldn't be able to tell a decent cryptosystem from a bullshit one anyway).
Too many people just think cryptography automatically translates to security, so they can just ignore common attack vectors. The false sense of security it gives them can leave them as (or more) vulnerable as (than) users who've never even heard of cryptography (still a majority, unfortunately). Educating users is important.
Since science is the only one with reproducible results, as per the other reply.
No, I did mean approximate in this context. I do believe it's also true that scientific knowledge will always be incomplete, and complete scientific knowledge isn't possible even in principle, but that's a direct result of the fact it's always approximate, as there strictly speaking is no way to prove anything.
Science also has the concept of the burden of proof and the principle of parsimony, so no, it doesn't.
Atoms are a difference case altogether, as there were some plausible hypotheses that seemed to necessitate something like them (that is, there was a genuine scientific controversy there), and they didn't really require overturning significant parts of what was known about the universe in the way a designer does.
No, it'd be like postulating that anyone believing in quantum theory in, say, the 1600s would have been nuts to do so, which is true. There was no reason to believe they existed at the time, so belief in their existence would have been unscientific. It's perfectly scientific to posit the non-existence of a designer, as there is no evidence.
The fact that you can't be absolutely certain that it's true is a reflection of the fact that our scientific knowledge is always an approximation at best.
The fact that something might be wrong does not make it unscientific; in fact, every single scientific hypothesis might be wrong. That's just the nature of things. It's not possible to know anything for sure.
This emphatically does not mean that all hypotheses are equally valid or likely, though.
Things like the principle of parsimony deal with the question of a designer quite adequately. Since there's no need whatsoever for one, and the existence of one would raise a fuckton of questions without answering any (and in most incarnations require massive changes to the laws of physics), it's pretty safe to say there almost certainly just isn't one.
So you *can* scientifically postulate one way or the other. You can't prove it beyond *all* doubt (as you can't prove a negative, and if you get into epistemology, you can't really prove a positive either), but you can certainly prove it beyond all *reasonable* doubt.
That's a beautifully convoluted straw man you have there.
Nobody's saying evolution necessarily implies a lack of a designer.
In the case of the evolution of life, we're saying a designer is not necessary at all to explain what we're seeing, and in fact introducing a designer creates a whole host of new problems that need answering without adding any value.
If you want to imply a designer, the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence. Until someone can point to something that couldn't have arisen without intervention from a designer (irreducible complexity in a real sense, I suppose; the examples the ID movement has brought on have all been debunked, though), invoking one is just bad science.
Evolutionary principles have already been applied to a lot of fields, including aerodynamics. Actually, aerodynamics is probably one of the most famous applications.
It takes far, far fewer generations to get very good results than people's intuition suggests.
I see no reason why it should be impossible to recover much of the encrypted data and then just decrypt that. The whole disk isn't some giant encrypted blob that requires the entire dataset to decrypt; all you need is either one or two encrypted blocks, depending on the block cipher mode, and a block is typically not that big (128 bits for AES, which I think is TrueCrypt's default cipher).
It becomes impossible to tell the difference between scrambled data (or empty sectors) and real data, if there are any recovery techniques that rely on that, but on the whole, it shouldn't be more difficult to recover data in principle. Though you do need the encryption key.
Because if it's not perfectly totalitarian, it must not be censorship, right?
Are you under the impression money spent in Iraq doesn't come out of the same budget as the money spent on this experiment? Because they both do, and the American taxpayer is hypothetically paying for both, so it's a very relevant comparison.
The guy constructed a falsifiable hypothesis and made testable predictions based on it, and you're claiming it's not scientific? I suggest you look up what the scientific method actually is.
You're right about the order of precedence, but that's infix notation, not reverse Polish. Reverse Polish is postfix.
You don't necessarily need a superpower enforcer for rules to make sense, you just need parties that understand why the rules were made in the first place. That's why the Geneva conventions worked quite well in keeping war relatively civil, for instance.
Of course, ignorant morons who think with their penises can often ruin things for everyone involved, including their own side.
Is Google down? Alternatively, you could also walk into a library and get a copy of Silent Spring. Carson documents numerous of cases like this in the US alone.
DDT was never banned for use in combatting malaria. It was, however, banned for personal use in a lot of places, in part because of the serious threat to the environment and public health, but even more because mosquito populations were already developing a resistance, and this was a trend that needed to be slowed down or stopped. You can't kill too many mosquitos with DDT if they're immune to it.
If anything, the DDT ban saved millions by making sure DDT resistance never became too big a problem.
Birds are the primary predator for most insects (and fish feed on mosquito larvae), and insect populations recover from DDT sprayings much more quickly than birds or fish. And since they can now breed with impunity, as they don't have to worry about predators anymore, those insects will be a much bigger threat to the human population than they were before, and just spraying more DDT doesn't work, since at that point it starts to affect other wildlife (including humans), and the insects build up resistance quickly.
Is this really so hard to understand? There are plenty of examples of this in history.
Also, banning DDT didn't cause "millions of people" to die, no matter how popular that meme is with the anti-environmentalist crowd. Just repeating something over and over again doesn't make it true.
If the capacity to engage in self-preservation implies self-awareness, most bacteria are self-aware.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager#Criticisms
It's particularly ironic that you try to cast science as just another religion (dogma, doctrine, &c.), with the implication that this is disparaging, while also believing your own religion to be absolute truth. Except that we know what stuff buried by flooding looks like, and we know how old fossils are, and none of the evidence is consistent with rapid burial by flooding. And if we ignore facts, all kinds of things are true! http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
(That's really the only reply that deserves.)
I don't believe in evolution (and the fact that the universe is billions of years old) just because some guy told me. I've examined the evidence and found it to be rock-solid. I've also examined creationist claims against it, and every single one I've come across has turned out to be total bullshit.If you have new "evidence" against evolution and against the universe being billions of years old, by all means lay it out so we can judge it. I'm not holding my breath, though.
In general, they don't. Young Earthers aren't really known for their tendency to read science journals.
When they are confronted with it somehow, they either ignore it or pull out some variety of Last Thursdayism: the universe was created with all of the bits already in motion, and the light from distant stars already underway, and the fossils neatly buried. Rationalisations as to the reasons for this range from "test of faith" to "giving us something to look at in the night sky".
Remember: evidence against scientific hypotheses mean the science is wrong, but evidence against the Bible means the evidence is wrong.
Downsampling is a form of lossy compression.
When the power goes out, your A/C goes out entirely. This is just about adjusting it a few degrees to prevent that.
If the A/C is all you're worrying about, you should be cheering for this idea.
There isn't even the slightest hint that evolution is wrong, and not a single plausible alternative hypothesis. If you want to introduce doubt over it to high school kids, you should also teach Gödel's incompleteness theorems in the same year you teach addition and subtraction (simple arithmetic is just a theory!), except that Gödel's theorems actually make sense.
Yes, all knowledge is necessarily subject to change, but that's not something these kids should be worrying about in high school, for the same reason they're not expected to worry over whether or not they're just brains in vats dreaming they're people.
This discussion over epistemology can happen during a philosophy of science class in college, but not in high school, where all it will do is create unreasonable doubt.
The dinosaur extinction event isn't nearly on the same level as evolution, in terms of certainty. There is a very real possibility there were other factors involved in the extinction of the dinosaurs; there is essentially no chance whatsoever that evolution happened because someone's imaginary friend wanted to create us.
Once we have a phenomenon that can't be explained by evolution and an alternative explanation that's both plausible and robust, then we can talk. Before that, all you're effectively doing is pandering to the "my grampappy ain't no monkey" crowd.
So on the one hand you have a very well-established theory with assloads of evidence from various fields to back it up, and on the other you have random shots in the dark and what amounts to paranoid fantasy, none of it backed up by any evidence whatsoever, and you want to waste precious time in science class teaching both of these to kids because "anything's possible"?
Seems to me you're a good demonstration of the fact science education in this country sucks. Do you also want to teach Last Thursdayism?
I think it would benefit the kids more if instead of wasting their time like this, they were taught *more actual science*.
Do you honestly think that if education were run like a free market, the schools that would thrive would be the ones that provided the highest quality of education? If so, what the hell are you smoking?
Education is too important to play these sorts of games with. Yes, the American public school system is mostly a joke, but adding cut-throat competitiveness isn't going to do anything to fix it.