Is there an asking price? Or is this just "Best Offer"? The article doesn't mention anything about it.
I actually think it would be cool for the employees to buy most of the shares themselves. Mr. Reiser would get some money for his defense from the sale of his shares, but maybe he could retain some percentage as an income stream from the dividends (or sell some to a trusted friend). That way he wouldn't be totally ousted from his company.
I'm assuming that Namesys is incorporated, which I'm sure is a safe assumption.
A Dell should have come with MS Office It did -- a "free trial". As for patches, sure -- and there were 50 more.
As she doesn't sound like a developer, I can't imagine why you felt it was necessary to install Postgres. Because she wanted this for a simple database app to keep client info. Instead of having her keep each client's records in a separate document or *eek* using spreadsheet "databases", I set her up with postgres and a simple front-end to get her started. She doesn't need to use it if she doesn't like it, but it's there to try out.
I too feel some things are not explained, to be specific, science has provided some nice details on how our brains work, but no full explanation of why we are conscious.
The Bible explains this as the "Breath of God" -- that added bit that chemistry couldn't provide. I've heard people make a differentiation between "Spirit" and "Soul", but honestly, I never understood that, and have always considered them one and the same with consciousness, or "Me". Again, I assume that thought patterns can be explained by millions of electrical impulses filtered through some sort of Bayesian-esque statistical models, but that still doesn't preclude the possibility of something "behind" them (i.e. a lower-level cause). The real thoughts could be happening in our spirits/souls, and they are impressed on the brain via some mechanism, and are manifested in the impulses we can see with EEGs.
An example: I can explain the actions of a robot by analyzing the electrical impulses across the circuit boards. "When power crosses bus A, the arm moves counterclockwise...", or by watching the cause and effect of certain branches on the CPU, but that doesn't give me the program, or - more importantly - the programm*er*. It just gives me a cause and effect that is a couple levels removed from the original logic. Once running, the program is self contained, and makes no reference to the programmer, and really only *hints* at the presence of a program at all. Really, the actions of the robot could be completely random, but fortuitously, the actions are useful for building BMWs. It's via the observer's logic and intuition that a program is inferred.
If all I have is the robot running in a factory making BMWs, I can either assume some sort of AI, or that someone is directing this thing's motion -- either directly, or according to a predetermined program. Assuming someone on the opposite end -- either currently or in the past -- I still can't tell you anything about them except what I can infer through the robot's construction and actions. Was the programmer male or female? How old? Still alive? Was there more than one? How many?
Certainly, for something like a robot, we wouldn't assume that the robot happened by accident, so a programmer or operator is a foregone conclusion. Likewise, with our bodies, wonderful machines themselves, we can observe nerve impulses in the cortexes, see muscles work, etc, but is this operating itself? Are these things the *cause*? Or are they the *effect* of other actions we can't see directly, and must infer -- like the operator moving a joystick that causes activity in the CPU (our brains -- sciences first observable point) that causes x,y, and z? Like all analogies, this breaks in a lot of places, but I hope it illustrates my reasoning.
The first reproducable precursor of life, theoretically, only had to happen once.
Sure. From what I hear about the conditions on early earth, though, the reality is that this thing probably would have had to a) form an incredible number of times, or b) reproduce hella quick.
Your linked article notes that the probability of randomly forming a simple peptide is 1 chance in 4.29 x 10^40, which is "still orgulously, gobsmackingly unlikely" unless done in a massive number of parallel trials, which was likely the case, so (a) it is. I had always envisioned these chemicals being present in much small quantities/concentrations than your link states, so I'm willing to change my mind in favor of better information.
Others have written better about this than I can...
This is then cranked up by adding on the probabilities of generating 400 or so similar enzymes until a figure is reached that is so huge that merely contemplating it causes your brain to dribble out your ears.
That was pretty much my direction, yes.:) I need to thank you for the linked article. It explained a lot of things I either hadn't understood, or hadn't been aware of at al
Someone with mod points tries to make a point by modding me overrated twice. Hope it makes you feel good.
Heh - me too. My original post is somewhat Insightful, somewhat Informative, but overwhelmingly Overrated.:-) These things happen. People don't like what someone's saying, so they feel the need to censor it. I think I'll change my sig to "Fight the tyranny of the moderating elite! Browse at -1!"...or something silly like that.
Thanks for your well-reasoned response. I so expect to get trolled on these discussions! You made a lot of good points, and this is really a discussion that could take days.
I get the impression that you are trying to get some middle path between science and your belief in God. You got the right impression, but sort of misread my motivation. I'm not just trying to find a compromise or fill in the blanks; I really do think there's more to life than meets the eye. Like I said, it's difficult for the scientific mind to consider the possibility of a being that is outside the normal cause and effect of the universe. At first glance, Occam's Razor implies that this is just too much of a leap, and that there must be a more simple explanation. Try as I might, though, I can't bring myself to believe that. Spontaneous biogenesis caused by random cosmic chemicals that all happened to be in the right place at the right time, for me, is as much a leap of faith as creation. The odds against such a thing happening seem to me to be insurmountable. Given that, I actually read Occam's Razor the other way: something I don't know about must have caused it on purpose.
I'm never quite sure how to express this, so I guess I'll just hope you catch my drift. Science is using hindsight to try to determine how a set of highly improbable events took place a long time ago, and in what order. I think we'd all agree that we're all extremely lucky that things worked out in such a way that life happened and was sustainable -- not that we'd have ever known otherwise. I guess how I tend to reconcile the religious view with the scientific history is best summed up by "God is in the probabilities". In other words, I see the universe as being a set of rules that God has defined and decided to work with. If you've done that, you can't just go sticking your hands in there and shove things around -- it upsets the balance of things. Rather, you give it a bit of a nudge in just the right places to make things go the way you want them to.
I think a major thing to be learned from the Bible is that God tends to work over time and circumstance. It took thousands of years to develop the bloodline for Jesus. It took thousands of years to set the right characters on the stage at the right time -- characters who came from all over the world and wound up playing a central part in the Salvation story. Science looks at the same set of events and calls it coincidence, or that current events are merely a product of history. What it can't see is the hand that guided that history, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The only way to see it is to look at events that were "happy coincidence" and wonder if that's really all it was. There's certainly no way to prove it, except that the happy coincidences add up, and it makes you wonder.
On a side note, you talk about religion being a sort of psychological safety net when everything is going wrong. In that, I think you're mostly correct, though a little too cynical. With all of the Christian bashing that goes on here, I think people lose sight of the fact that most Christians are kind-hearted people who genuinely care about others and want to help. The context of religion connects people into a social general-purpose support group, whose members try to help others when they're having trouble. I've heard that there's been a rise in depression in developed countries, and sometimes I can't help but wonder if it's because people no longer take part in this support system. It used to be that people would talk to trusted friends at church or the pastor. Since religion's been getting such a bad rap, though, I wonder at the falling numbers in one area and the climbing numbers in another.
Anyway, it's 4:15am where I am. I'm only awake because our baby decided I should be, so I hope this post is at least semi-coherent.
However-- evolution theory says NOTHING about the start. Exactly!
Evolution doesn't say anything about biogenesis, and really, I've never heard a half-decent scientific hypothesis to deal with it, either. It's all conjecture.
Natural selection happens, yes. Anyone with eyes can see it. But what was first? Where did it come from? How did it start? Nobody knows.
The Big Bang happened, yes. But what was before that? Where did the particles come from? Nobody knows.
That's the stuff of religion. Natural selection does nothing to disprove the creation; indeed, it has nothing to do with creation -- just with generational life processes. Oddly enough, the genesis story does coincide with the likely order that nature evolved. That it says 7 days instead of 10 eons or whatever is really just a red herring.
The real issue where religion and science meet is that science can only describe what it can observe and predict. The thought that something outside our observation, even outside our universe as we understand it, got the whole ball rolling and still influences it is incompatible with scientific theory because it's non-falsifiable (and also "non-provable"). That this something has a mind and free will also makes it unpredictable.
So we come to an impasse. Or do we? Maybe the creation story in Genesis exists to give us the basic idea of the creation, and to make us curious about it, or to satisfy our natural curiosity with a story that even a child can understand. Maybe science exists to fill in the blanks, to write the real story of the creation.
I personally don't think that the Biblical version and the Scientific version will end up very far apart after all. We just need to get past the hyperbole and the confusion of "biogenesis" with "evolution".
Not everyone wants to pay interest, smartass, and not everyone has equity to do so.
So what happened to always be prohibitively expensive now? Make up your mind. Either it is an absolute, or it is not.
Some want to pay as they go, as they can afford, for things that are not 100% necessity. I think those people are called "responsible".
If you have the equity then by definition you can afford it. Possessing poor home-ec skills does not make someone responsible, not by a long-shot. Actually, that AC wasn't me, but I do tend to agree with him/her. I know precisely what a home improvement loan is, but I tend to be debt-averse unless there's a real payoff that makes the interest and risk worthwhile. In other words, I consider debt to be high-risk in a risk-reward analysis. The reward must be pretty high for me to go into any significant debt.
A couple bucks off my electric bill just doesn't cut it, nor does the insignificant rise in home resale value. I'd rather use the home-improvement loan to finance that addition I've been wanting, which would improve my enjoyment of my home AND increase the resale value by as much or more than the amount of the loan.
The AC is correct: Carefully evaluating risk-reward ratios and opportunity costs is exactly the definition of "financial responsibility".
Also, maybe I'm using my own definition of prohibitively expensive. What I mean is that, in terms of how long I would need to save up, and the opportunity cost of using that money on solar panels as opposed to a new car, other home improvements, or payoff of other debt, monolithic solar panel systems will always be prohibitively expensive to me unless I can reasonably buy them using my disposable income saved over a relatively short term.
"Prohibitively expensive" is always subjective to the person being prohibited, their resources, and their priorities. What's prohibitive to me isn't to Donald Trump, I'm sure you'd agree.
Yeah - what you said, PLUS the ability to buy pieces at a time. The systems need to be very modular, so I can buy them as I have the resources. I'll probably never go out and buy $X,000 of solar panels in one shot, but I could probably afford a few hundred dollars' worth every few months. If you make it so you need to buy the whole system at once, and replace the whole thing at once should it die, it will always be prohibitively expensive.
The nice thing about the incremental purchase approach is that they probably won't all die at once, either. If the system is designed to be fault tolerant, it's much easier for me to replace one small subunit than to replace the whole kit-n-kaboodle.
Until you need change for an item which comes to 11.97 after sales tax. You'll be tired of being ripped off two or three cents every transaction.
No I won't:
Figure 3c per transaction. Average maybe three transactions a day. 9c per day, or about $2.70/month.
Or $32.85 per year.
That's a dinner out for two at a cheap restaurant once per year. Not really a noticeable amount, even if every single thing I buy with cash ends up losing money by rounding and it's never in my favor.
And all that assuming you're using cash for all of those transactions. I personally use a debit card almost always, and expect that to be the norm in the relatively near future. Computers deal with pennies just fine, and the electrons are cheaper than zinc!:-)
And Windows doesn't take LOTS of time to get working? Ever tried setting up IIS with LDAP and wikis? Spent hours trying to find out why files on the network were being mysteriously and only very occasionally corrupted? (Thanks, DLink and your buggy network card drivers for Windows.) Have that fresh Windows installation get pwned in less than a minute because you didn't know it must be patched before it touches the Internet? Maybe you really believe MacIntoshes "just work"? They're pretty good, but they aren't perfect either.
OSS gets a LOT of flak it shouldn't. Double standards. When a device doesn't work with Windows, that's the device's fault. When a device doesn't work with Linux, that's Linux's fault. But you know, if those device drivers are OSS, you at least have another option. Lot of talented people out there will be able to work on the drivers.
Indeed. My sister-in-law just bought a Dell, and I spent *hours* installing patches (about 50 for a fresh SP2 install), removing all of the "free trials" and "buy me" nags, installing windows versions of open source stuff (Postgres, Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird), and setting her up to run as a limited user instead of administrator.
On the average Windows box, you then repeat this process ever 6 months because it got fricked up somehow. Nah -- it's as much trouble or more than linux, *AND* it costs me money to boot. Insult to injury. No thanks.
At least with Continental's E-ticket, there's a bar code on the printout. They scan that and check it against your passport before allowing you on the plane. So not only do you need to have the printout, which could be easily faked, you have to have a barcode number that associates with a record in their database which matches your passport, which is a hell of a lot harder. You'd have to have a fake passport as well. Not impossible, but certainly less trivial.
"As an aside, my 6-year-old is a whiz with XUbuntu on his Dell 700MHz machine."
So Linux has caught up to the Mac circa 1984? I kid, but I couldn't help but think of the Mac commercial with the little girl operating a Mac...or was it a Lisa?
Hmmm Heh - I don't know. I was like 4 years old then.:)
My main point was that people can learn and get used to whatever they're given. Most modern OSes are pretty good that way. The main problem is that many adults are technophobes, or, more likely, change-ophobes. They don't like anything "different". Kids aren't like that.
As my wife shows, adults who aren't afraid (or who couldn't care less) can also switch with minimal effort.
I work in the real world, and I use Linux all day.
I bought my wife a Toshiba, which came with WinXP (despite my protestations). I thought I'd just let her use XP (non-administrator) until it got too messed up, then reformat using Linux. To my surprise, she complained the first day. She hated all of the preinstalled software asking her to buy this and that. She didn't even know what McAfee was, let alone want to deal with the SUBSCRIBE NOW!! popups.
I told her I could fix it, and put Ubuntu Edgy (pre-release, even!) on there. She's perfectly happy with it now. I asked her if she likes it better or worse than the other (XP), and she replied that it was exactly the same, but without the annoying popups.
As an aside, my 6-year-old is a whiz with XUbuntu on his Dell 700MHz machine.
I think we Linux geeks have "failure to launch" syndrome. We worry about every little detail and think that everyone's going to hate our product, find it buggy/insufficient/unfamiliar, yadda yadda. The fact of the matter is that your average person probably won't notice much of a difference in most cases, and will usually just cope with the ones they do, just like they've always done with Windows.
Windows isn't better or bug free. It's just a different set of annoyances and insufficiencies that people have learned to ignore and work around. If people are going to learn to ignore bugs, maybe they can ignore ones that will be fixed quicker. If they're going to work around inadequacies, maybe they can work around ones that they have the potential to implement themselves, given the aptitude.
Education is a great stage to get kids acquainted with Linux. By the time these kids are teens and adults, Linux will have progressed immensely, and they probably WILL be using Linux on corporate desktops. You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally, Marty!
The unfortunate thing is that, whenever the current US government gets into managing things, they seem to go wherever the money is. Lobbyists have too much influence, and they're good at what they do, so whoever is paying the most for lobbyists is likely to come out on top. Therefore, government intervention tends to take the form of things like the DMCA instead of meaningful anti-trust actions. I know people are still going for all it's worth to try to assign charges of corruption to the US government, Bush, Republicans, and/or the US population in general, but pointed qualifiers such as "the current US government" are unnecessarily restrictive. Your statement holds true for all governments, everywhere, always. To claim otherwise is disingenuous and only exposes your blinders.
Man has several minutes to evacuate the building as the fire is in another unit. Man casually grabs RAID server because off-site backups are a week old. (We really have no idea if there were off-site backups or not).
It's easy to imagine the panic scenario where the guy is risking his life for some dumb data, but the article doesn't really make it sound like that at all. From TFA:
We had less than 4 minutes to evacuate the building. Everyone grabbed their desktops and exited as quickly as they could. Grabbed their DESKTOPS?? Doesn't exactly sound as if their asses were a-flame, at any rate.
Well, obviously there's a liberal bias to science. How exactly would you have conservative science? It wouldn't really be science if we just stuck to tradition and never tried anything new.
Or were you saying that people in Academia are more likely to be Democrats and thus you have an irrational belief that their science is wrong and biased? Nothing "obvious" about it. Conservatism and liberalism should both be left out of it. If they're not, you've got the scientific method backwards.
The point of science is to find out how something, in FACT, works. It is NOT to figure out how to prove your '-ism'. If you're starting with any political opinion at all and working to justify it, you've already done it wrong.
Sadly, your statement describes the vibes I get about anything I hear even remotely related to "Global Warming" or "Climate Change". It has the distinct feeling of a conclusion searching for a justification.
This whole discussion would be much more interesting if politics weren't involved.
I believe the crux of the argument is that, if something as well understood as an El Nino escaped prediction a year in advance, how can we make policy and sacrifice based on models that clearly don't take enough into account?
The planet has been around for millenia, survived catastrophic events, and has somehow remained habitable since it was first habitable. There are mechanisms in place that we don't know about, or don't know *enough* about, that may or may not kick in in the event of significant warming.
Alarmists continually fail to see their predictions realized. It's the equivalent of the religious guys on the corner with their bells and their signs proclaiming that The End is Nigh!... but somehow it never really is, somehow we just continue on, and somehow things always turn out okay. After hearing that the Sky Is Falling for so many years, people tend to discount it when it stubbornly remains overhead.
All I'm saying is that the alarmists among us are doing grave harm to a science that may have an important point to make. That's what alarmists do. If you want to be taken seriously, develop your models to be able to *consistently* and *accurately* predict the weather and climate for a single decade. THEN ask people to look at your extrapolations, backing them up with a proven track record.
People don't want to hear excuses why the model failed. It just points to an inadequate or flawed model that people will instinctually disregard.
The US can still go 'angry kid kicking your sand castle' and decide to blow us all back into the Stone Age if a war becomes too tough to win.Even not talking nukes, that can still happen. Understand that the US military is having so much trouble because of Public Relations concerns. If they just said "f*ck it, let's kick some", then I assure you that "some" would certainly be "kicked".
Someone else said this too: People don't really know war. The last people who saw a no-holds-barred ass-kicking war are our grandparents or great-grandparents. Todays wars are mere skirmishes compared to the bloody wars of old. I think that shows real progress on humanity's part, to be sure, but don't mistake that for real, all-out war. Japan and Germany can tell you what that would be like.
Consider that wars throughout history were fought by *destroying as much property and killing as many people as possible -- civilian or soldier, man, woman, or child*. Compare that to today's wars, where civilian casualties are an actual consideration to be minimized, and a major part of the cost of a war goes to rebuilding what we destroyed.
The US military is fighting and losing in the battlefield of public opinion. Insurgents are simply the weapon used against them in that arena. Should public opinion cease to be a concern, I assure you that things would be very different.
Does that include the 550 million Chinese people who are available for military service as well? Although I don't know the size of the total armed forces (including reserves and National Guard) of the USA, the total US population is only about 300 million people whereas the population of China is almost twice that. Their standing army is about 3.5 million strong. Source: CIA Factbook
Chinese Manpower fit for military service: males age 18-49: 281,240,272 females age 18-49: 269,025,517 (2005 est.)
Sure. Russia had lots of soldiers too, but they were basically sent into a firing squad with broken rifles and no food nor ammunition. Throwing essentially unarmed people at a battlefront to commit suicide doesn't win wars. Have you considered the massive expense and logistical problems with equipping and supplying 281,240,272 men?
There aren't many around, probably due to issues just like this. I do know that Bank of America uses them in some locations in New Jersey.
A personal experience: I was using a Fleet ATM with a touch screen, and wanted to withdraw $40 via "Fast Cash" (press the amount, no confirmation). By simply passing my hand too close to the $100 at least two inches above the screen, the machine registered the $100 selection and spit that amount out. I hadn't even touched the screen.
Touch screens are error prone, though they've gotten a lot better. Why in the hell they're using them for national elections, I'll never know, but due to my own experience with them, I'm not calling conspiracy just yet.
I am not a lawyer, so maybe someone who is can answer my question:
Given that:
The *IAA are pressing criminal charges.
Drive encryption keys are ideally only known to the user who owns the data.
Purden of proof is on the plaintiff.
The fifth amendment is still in full effect, so far as I know.
...then when charged by *IAA or anyone else over the contents of the drive, why can't the defendant just plead the fifth as regards the encryption keys? Technically, you *can* give them the contents of the drive, but it's complete garbage without a piece of Constitutionally-protected information from the defendant.
Without the contents of the drive, the burden of proof gets a lot harder for the plaintiffs, who must then prove that the MAC wasn't spoofed, etc, etc. This wouldn't necessarily break their case against you, but it would sure make them work for their money -- a lot harder than they would have otherwise. They may even decide it's not worth pursuing and go for lower-hanging fruit instead.
Where am I wrong in my reasoning here? Do civil suits not allow use of the 5th amendment protections? I know most of these suits are civil suits, but I also know that some people are being charged as criminals (e.g. that bittorrent admin that just went to jail).
As an aside to those who assume a backdoor key: Doing linux filesystem encryption on top of this encryption would help mitigate this as well. That way they need to get *two* keys out of you in order to prove anything, and Seagate's hypothetical skeleton key doesn't help much.
It also might be nice to have that filesystem key stored on a USB key or something that's relatively hardy, but easily destroyed, making it impossible to recover it even if compelled to do so.
He went in a non-violent criminal. Let's see how he comes out.
Seriously, we really need to re-evaluate as a society what we actually put people in jail for. I understand that #1 and #2 are applicable in this case. It's just that #5 above is an unfortunate part of the reality of prison. When you put lots of bad people together, they learn from each other.
As someone else mentioned, he's also been put in physical danger by being in proximity to violent criminals and possibly the guards themselves. For a first offense, it seems that 1 year of house arrest and only approved computer usage would have cured this guy. Just make his life a pain in the ass for a while. If he does it again, then yeah, send him to prison for a few months.
The idea is to only punish as much is necessary. Anything more is gratuitous. Sort of like Occam's Razor for the judiciary.
This is undoubtedly something he did because he thought he was like Google -- providing a search and point kind of service without actually downloading or uploading the illegal material himself. Now that he's been disabused of that notion, I'd say that there's a good chance he'd never do it again -- especially if he knows that the next step is FPMITA prison. It's tough to be the first guy EVER prosecuted for something when you see others making billions per year doing essentially the same thing.
I have a 40 gig partition sitting on my disk which I mount via the cryptoloop kernel module (available by default - nothing special required). I use this as a simple secure data store, and the directories I think are sensitive I put in there via symlink. The CPU (Core Duo 1.83Ghz) doesn't even break a sweat. I have a small shell script that's run by/etc/gdm/Default/Init (if I remember correctly) that pops up a zenity dialog asking for my disk password (which must be at least 25 characters in length) before it asks for my regular username/password. After that dialog, the filesystem is mounted, and I can forget that I'm encrypting anything.
Obviously,/home is based there (via symlink). I've also created a 'secure' postgres tablespace, which houses my books and records development database snapshots. Very likely I should also be putting various */tmp directories there, as well, and any suggestions would be appreciated. I hadn't even thought of swap, but with 2G of RAM, I barely ever touch swap anyway. I'll be thinking about how to do this as well, though. I don't suspect it'd be much different than mounting the existing datastore -- just an extra swapon command for the loopback device.
I am a small corporation, and very likely the only theft of my laptop would be the typical smash-n-grab thief. I don't consider him the type who would spend the time breaking my encryption, and so I consider this measure to be sufficient to safeguard my information.
I've thought several times about starting a "secure laptop project", where we'd try to release scripts/RPM/deb for various distros (I use Ubuntu) to lock them down right. Really, though, the distros should detect that they're installing on a laptop and prompt for this type of thing at setup. It'd be a lot easier to do this at setup than after the filesystems have been populated -- more consistent and complete as well.
Anyway, my first cup of coffee hasn't kicked in yet, so please forgive me if this isn't totally coherent.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there an asking price? Or is this just "Best Offer"? The article doesn't mention anything about it.
I actually think it would be cool for the employees to buy most of the shares themselves. Mr. Reiser would get some money for his defense from the sale of his shares, but maybe he could retain some percentage as an income stream from the dividends (or sell some to a trusted friend). That way he wouldn't be totally ousted from his company.
I'm assuming that Namesys is incorporated, which I'm sure is a safe assumption.
Just a thought.
I too feel some things are not explained, to be specific, science has provided some nice details on how our brains work, but no full explanation of why we are conscious.
The Bible explains this as the "Breath of God" -- that added bit that chemistry couldn't provide. I've heard people make a differentiation between "Spirit" and "Soul", but honestly, I never understood that, and have always considered them one and the same with consciousness, or "Me". Again, I assume that thought patterns can be explained by millions of electrical impulses filtered through some sort of Bayesian-esque statistical models, but that still doesn't preclude the possibility of something "behind" them (i.e. a lower-level cause). The real thoughts could be happening in our spirits/souls, and they are impressed on the brain via some mechanism, and are manifested in the impulses we can see with EEGs.
An example: I can explain the actions of a robot by analyzing the electrical impulses across the circuit boards. "When power crosses bus A, the arm moves counterclockwise...", or by watching the cause and effect of certain branches on the CPU, but that doesn't give me the program, or - more importantly - the programm*er*. It just gives me a cause and effect that is a couple levels removed from the original logic. Once running, the program is self contained, and makes no reference to the programmer, and really only *hints* at the presence of a program at all. Really, the actions of the robot could be completely random, but fortuitously, the actions are useful for building BMWs. It's via the observer's logic and intuition that a program is inferred.
If all I have is the robot running in a factory making BMWs, I can either assume some sort of AI, or that someone is directing this thing's motion -- either directly, or according to a predetermined program. Assuming someone on the opposite end -- either currently or in the past -- I still can't tell you anything about them except what I can infer through the robot's construction and actions. Was the programmer male or female? How old? Still alive? Was there more than one? How many?
Certainly, for something like a robot, we wouldn't assume that the robot happened by accident, so a programmer or operator is a foregone conclusion. Likewise, with our bodies, wonderful machines themselves, we can observe nerve impulses in the cortexes, see muscles work, etc, but is this operating itself? Are these things the *cause*? Or are they the *effect* of other actions we can't see directly, and must infer -- like the operator moving a joystick that causes activity in the CPU (our brains -- sciences first observable point) that causes x,y, and z? Like all analogies, this breaks in a lot of places, but I hope it illustrates my reasoning.
The first reproducable precursor of life, theoretically, only had to happen once.
Sure. From what I hear about the conditions on early earth, though, the reality is that this thing probably would have had to a) form an incredible number of times, or b) reproduce hella quick.
Your linked article notes that the probability of randomly forming a simple peptide is 1 chance in 4.29 x 10^40, which is "still orgulously, gobsmackingly unlikely" unless done in a massive number of parallel trials, which was likely the case, so (a) it is. I had always envisioned these chemicals being present in much small quantities/concentrations than your link states, so I'm willing to change my mind in favor of better information.
Others have written better about this than I can...
This is then cranked up by adding on the probabilities of generating 400 or so similar enzymes until a figure is reached that is so huge that merely contemplating it causes your brain to dribble out your ears.
That was pretty much my direction, yes. :) I need to thank you for the linked article. It explained a lot of things I either hadn't understood, or hadn't been aware of at al
Heh - me too. My original post is somewhat Insightful, somewhat Informative, but overwhelmingly Overrated.
I'm never quite sure how to express this, so I guess I'll just hope you catch my drift. Science is using hindsight to try to determine how a set of highly improbable events took place a long time ago, and in what order. I think we'd all agree that we're all extremely lucky that things worked out in such a way that life happened and was sustainable -- not that we'd have ever known otherwise. I guess how I tend to reconcile the religious view with the scientific history is best summed up by "God is in the probabilities". In other words, I see the universe as being a set of rules that God has defined and decided to work with. If you've done that, you can't just go sticking your hands in there and shove things around -- it upsets the balance of things. Rather, you give it a bit of a nudge in just the right places to make things go the way you want them to.
I think a major thing to be learned from the Bible is that God tends to work over time and circumstance. It took thousands of years to develop the bloodline for Jesus. It took thousands of years to set the right characters on the stage at the right time -- characters who came from all over the world and wound up playing a central part in the Salvation story. Science looks at the same set of events and calls it coincidence, or that current events are merely a product of history. What it can't see is the hand that guided that history, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The only way to see it is to look at events that were "happy coincidence" and wonder if that's really all it was. There's certainly no way to prove it, except that the happy coincidences add up, and it makes you wonder.
On a side note, you talk about religion being a sort of psychological safety net when everything is going wrong. In that, I think you're mostly correct, though a little too cynical. With all of the Christian bashing that goes on here, I think people lose sight of the fact that most Christians are kind-hearted people who genuinely care about others and want to help. The context of religion connects people into a social general-purpose support group, whose members try to help others when they're having trouble. I've heard that there's been a rise in depression in developed countries, and sometimes I can't help but wonder if it's because people no longer take part in this support system. It used to be that people would talk to trusted friends at church or the pastor. Since religion's been getting such a bad rap, though, I wonder at the falling numbers in one area and the climbing numbers in another.
Anyway, it's 4:15am where I am. I'm only awake because our baby decided I should be, so I hope this post is at least semi-coherent.
Take care.
Evolution doesn't say anything about biogenesis, and really, I've never heard a half-decent scientific hypothesis to deal with it, either. It's all conjecture.
Natural selection happens, yes. Anyone with eyes can see it. But what was first? Where did it come from? How did it start? Nobody knows.
The Big Bang happened, yes. But what was before that? Where did the particles come from? Nobody knows.
That's the stuff of religion. Natural selection does nothing to disprove the creation; indeed, it has nothing to do with creation -- just with generational life processes. Oddly enough, the genesis story does coincide with the likely order that nature evolved. That it says 7 days instead of 10 eons or whatever is really just a red herring.
The real issue where religion and science meet is that science can only describe what it can observe and predict. The thought that something outside our observation, even outside our universe as we understand it, got the whole ball rolling and still influences it is incompatible with scientific theory because it's non-falsifiable (and also "non-provable"). That this something has a mind and free will also makes it unpredictable.
So we come to an impasse. Or do we? Maybe the creation story in Genesis exists to give us the basic idea of the creation, and to make us curious about it, or to satisfy our natural curiosity with a story that even a child can understand. Maybe science exists to fill in the blanks, to write the real story of the creation.
I personally don't think that the Biblical version and the Scientific version will end up very far apart after all. We just need to get past the hyperbole and the confusion of "biogenesis" with "evolution".
So what happened to always be prohibitively expensive now? Make up your mind. Either it is an absolute, or it is not.
Some want to pay as they go, as they can afford, for things that are not 100% necessity. I think those people are called "responsible".
If you have the equity then by definition you can afford it. Possessing poor home-ec skills does not make someone responsible, not by a long-shot. Actually, that AC wasn't me, but I do tend to agree with him/her. I know precisely what a home improvement loan is, but I tend to be debt-averse unless there's a real payoff that makes the interest and risk worthwhile. In other words, I consider debt to be high-risk in a risk-reward analysis. The reward must be pretty high for me to go into any significant debt.
A couple bucks off my electric bill just doesn't cut it, nor does the insignificant rise in home resale value. I'd rather use the home-improvement loan to finance that addition I've been wanting, which would improve my enjoyment of my home AND increase the resale value by as much or more than the amount of the loan.
The AC is correct: Carefully evaluating risk-reward ratios and opportunity costs is exactly the definition of "financial responsibility".
Also, maybe I'm using my own definition of prohibitively expensive. What I mean is that, in terms of how long I would need to save up, and the opportunity cost of using that money on solar panels as opposed to a new car, other home improvements, or payoff of other debt, monolithic solar panel systems will always be prohibitively expensive to me unless I can reasonably buy them using my disposable income saved over a relatively short term.
"Prohibitively expensive" is always subjective to the person being prohibited, their resources, and their priorities. What's prohibitive to me isn't to Donald Trump, I'm sure you'd agree.
Yeah - what you said, PLUS the ability to buy pieces at a time. The systems need to be very modular, so I can buy them as I have the resources. I'll probably never go out and buy $X,000 of solar panels in one shot, but I could probably afford a few hundred dollars' worth every few months. If you make it so you need to buy the whole system at once, and replace the whole thing at once should it die, it will always be prohibitively expensive.
The nice thing about the incremental purchase approach is that they probably won't all die at once, either. If the system is designed to be fault tolerant, it's much easier for me to replace one small subunit than to replace the whole kit-n-kaboodle.
-Walrus
No I won't:
Figure 3c per transaction. Average maybe three transactions a day. 9c per day, or about $2.70/month.
Or $32.85 per year.
That's a dinner out for two at a cheap restaurant once per year. Not really a noticeable amount, even if every single thing I buy with cash ends up losing money by rounding and it's never in my favor.
And all that assuming you're using cash for all of those transactions. I personally use a debit card almost always, and expect that to be the norm in the relatively near future. Computers deal with pennies just fine, and the electrons are cheaper than zinc!And Windows doesn't take LOTS of time to get working? Ever tried setting up IIS with LDAP and wikis? Spent hours trying to find out why files on the network were being mysteriously and only very occasionally corrupted? (Thanks, DLink and your buggy network card drivers for Windows.) Have that fresh Windows installation get pwned in less than a minute because you didn't know it must be patched before it touches the Internet? Maybe you really believe MacIntoshes "just work"? They're pretty good, but they aren't perfect either.
OSS gets a LOT of flak it shouldn't. Double standards. When a device doesn't work with Windows, that's the device's fault. When a device doesn't work with Linux, that's Linux's fault. But you know, if those device drivers are OSS, you at least have another option. Lot of talented people out there will be able to work on the drivers.
Indeed. My sister-in-law just bought a Dell, and I spent *hours* installing patches (about 50 for a fresh SP2 install), removing all of the "free trials" and "buy me" nags, installing windows versions of open source stuff (Postgres, Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird), and setting her up to run as a limited user instead of administrator.On the average Windows box, you then repeat this process ever 6 months because it got fricked up somehow. Nah -- it's as much trouble or more than linux, *AND* it costs me money to boot. Insult to injury. No thanks.
At least with Continental's E-ticket, there's a bar code on the printout. They scan that and check it against your passport before allowing you on the plane. So not only do you need to have the printout, which could be easily faked, you have to have a barcode number that associates with a record in their database which matches your passport, which is a hell of a lot harder. You'd have to have a fake passport as well. Not impossible, but certainly less trivial.
So Linux has caught up to the Mac circa 1984?
I kid, but I couldn't help but think of the Mac commercial with the little girl operating a Mac...or was it a Lisa?
Hmmm Heh - I don't know. I was like 4 years old then.
My main point was that people can learn and get used to whatever they're given. Most modern OSes are pretty good that way. The main problem is that many adults are technophobes, or, more likely, change-ophobes. They don't like anything "different". Kids aren't like that.
As my wife shows, adults who aren't afraid (or who couldn't care less) can also switch with minimal effort.
I work in the real world, and I use Linux all day.
I bought my wife a Toshiba, which came with WinXP (despite my protestations). I thought I'd just let her use XP (non-administrator) until it got too messed up, then reformat using Linux. To my surprise, she complained the first day. She hated all of the preinstalled software asking her to buy this and that. She didn't even know what McAfee was, let alone want to deal with the SUBSCRIBE NOW!! popups.
I told her I could fix it, and put Ubuntu Edgy (pre-release, even!) on there. She's perfectly happy with it now. I asked her if she likes it better or worse than the other (XP), and she replied that it was exactly the same, but without the annoying popups.
As an aside, my 6-year-old is a whiz with XUbuntu on his Dell 700MHz machine.
I think we Linux geeks have "failure to launch" syndrome. We worry about every little detail and think that everyone's going to hate our product, find it buggy/insufficient/unfamiliar, yadda yadda. The fact of the matter is that your average person probably won't notice much of a difference in most cases, and will usually just cope with the ones they do, just like they've always done with Windows.
Windows isn't better or bug free. It's just a different set of annoyances and insufficiencies that people have learned to ignore and work around. If people are going to learn to ignore bugs, maybe they can ignore ones that will be fixed quicker. If they're going to work around inadequacies, maybe they can work around ones that they have the potential to implement themselves, given the aptitude.
Education is a great stage to get kids acquainted with Linux. By the time these kids are teens and adults, Linux will have progressed immensely, and they probably WILL be using Linux on corporate desktops. You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally, Marty!
It's easy to imagine the panic scenario where the guy is risking his life for some dumb data, but the article doesn't really make it sound like that at all. From TFA: We had less than 4 minutes to evacuate the building. Everyone grabbed their desktops and exited as quickly as they could. Grabbed their DESKTOPS?? Doesn't exactly sound as if their asses were a-flame, at any rate.
Or were you saying that people in Academia are more likely to be Democrats and thus you have an irrational belief that their science is wrong and biased? Nothing "obvious" about it. Conservatism and liberalism should both be left out of it. If they're not, you've got the scientific method backwards.
The point of science is to find out how something, in FACT, works. It is NOT to figure out how to prove your '-ism'. If you're starting with any political opinion at all and working to justify it, you've already done it wrong.
Sadly, your statement describes the vibes I get about anything I hear even remotely related to "Global Warming" or "Climate Change". It has the distinct feeling of a conclusion searching for a justification.
This whole discussion would be much more interesting if politics weren't involved.
-Walrus
I believe the crux of the argument is that, if something as well understood as an El Nino escaped prediction a year in advance, how can we make policy and sacrifice based on models that clearly don't take enough into account?
... but somehow it never really is, somehow we just continue on, and somehow things always turn out okay. After hearing that the Sky Is Falling for so many years, people tend to discount it when it stubbornly remains overhead.
The planet has been around for millenia, survived catastrophic events, and has somehow remained habitable since it was first habitable. There are mechanisms in place that we don't know about, or don't know *enough* about, that may or may not kick in in the event of significant warming.
Alarmists continually fail to see their predictions realized. It's the equivalent of the religious guys on the corner with their bells and their signs proclaiming that The End is Nigh!
All I'm saying is that the alarmists among us are doing grave harm to a science that may have an important point to make. That's what alarmists do. If you want to be taken seriously, develop your models to be able to *consistently* and *accurately* predict the weather and climate for a single decade. THEN ask people to look at your extrapolations, backing them up with a proven track record.
People don't want to hear excuses why the model failed. It just points to an inadequate or flawed model that people will instinctually disregard.
The US can still go 'angry kid kicking your sand castle' and decide to blow us all back into the Stone Age if a war becomes too tough to win.Even not talking nukes, that can still happen. Understand that the US military is having so much trouble because of Public Relations concerns. If they just said "f*ck it, let's kick some", then I assure you that "some" would certainly be "kicked".
Someone else said this too: People don't really know war. The last people who saw a no-holds-barred ass-kicking war are our grandparents or great-grandparents. Todays wars are mere skirmishes compared to the bloody wars of old. I think that shows real progress on humanity's part, to be sure, but don't mistake that for real, all-out war. Japan and Germany can tell you what that would be like.
Consider that wars throughout history were fought by *destroying as much property and killing as many people as possible -- civilian or soldier, man, woman, or child*. Compare that to today's wars, where civilian casualties are an actual consideration to be minimized, and a major part of the cost of a war goes to rebuilding what we destroyed.
The US military is fighting and losing in the battlefield of public opinion. Insurgents are simply the weapon used against them in that arena. Should public opinion cease to be a concern, I assure you that things would be very different.
Source: CIA Factbook
Sure. Russia had lots of soldiers too, but they were basically sent into a firing squad with broken rifles and no food nor ammunition. Throwing essentially unarmed people at a battlefront to commit suicide doesn't win wars. Have you considered the massive expense and logistical problems with equipping and supplying 281,240,272 men?
8-12 hours?! Sounds like someone put an internet in your tubes! Back the truck up!
Linus, King of the Gurus
There aren't many around, probably due to issues just like this. I do know that Bank of America uses them in some locations in New Jersey.
A personal experience: I was using a Fleet ATM with a touch screen, and wanted to withdraw $40 via "Fast Cash" (press the amount, no confirmation). By simply passing my hand too close to the $100 at least two inches above the screen, the machine registered the $100 selection and spit that amount out. I hadn't even touched the screen.
Touch screens are error prone, though they've gotten a lot better. Why in the hell they're using them for national elections, I'll never know, but due to my own experience with them, I'm not calling conspiracy just yet.
Given that:
Without the contents of the drive, the burden of proof gets a lot harder for the plaintiffs, who must then prove that the MAC wasn't spoofed, etc, etc. This wouldn't necessarily break their case against you, but it would sure make them work for their money -- a lot harder than they would have otherwise. They may even decide it's not worth pursuing and go for lower-hanging fruit instead.
Where am I wrong in my reasoning here? Do civil suits not allow use of the 5th amendment protections? I know most of these suits are civil suits, but I also know that some people are being charged as criminals (e.g. that bittorrent admin that just went to jail).
As an aside to those who assume a backdoor key: Doing linux filesystem encryption on top of this encryption would help mitigate this as well. That way they need to get *two* keys out of you in order to prove anything, and Seagate's hypothetical skeleton key doesn't help much.
It also might be nice to have that filesystem key stored on a USB key or something that's relatively hardy, but easily destroyed, making it impossible to recover it even if compelled to do so.
5. Learn how to be a better criminal
He went in a non-violent criminal. Let's see how he comes out.
Seriously, we really need to re-evaluate as a society what we actually put people in jail for. I understand that #1 and #2 are applicable in this case. It's just that #5 above is an unfortunate part of the reality of prison. When you put lots of bad people together, they learn from each other.
As someone else mentioned, he's also been put in physical danger by being in proximity to violent criminals and possibly the guards themselves. For a first offense, it seems that 1 year of house arrest and only approved computer usage would have cured this guy. Just make his life a pain in the ass for a while. If he does it again, then yeah, send him to prison for a few months.
The idea is to only punish as much is necessary. Anything more is gratuitous. Sort of like Occam's Razor for the judiciary.
This is undoubtedly something he did because he thought he was like Google -- providing a search and point kind of service without actually downloading or uploading the illegal material himself. Now that he's been disabused of that notion, I'd say that there's a good chance he'd never do it again -- especially if he knows that the next step is FPMITA prison. It's tough to be the first guy EVER prosecuted for something when you see others making billions per year doing essentially the same thing.
I have a 40 gig partition sitting on my disk which I mount via the cryptoloop kernel module (available by default - nothing special required). I use this as a simple secure data store, and the directories I think are sensitive I put in there via symlink. The CPU (Core Duo 1.83Ghz) doesn't even break a sweat. I have a small shell script that's run by /etc/gdm/Default/Init (if I remember correctly) that pops up a zenity dialog asking for my disk password (which must be at least 25 characters in length) before it asks for my regular username/password. After that dialog, the filesystem is mounted, and I can forget that I'm encrypting anything.
/home is based there (via symlink). I've also created a 'secure' postgres tablespace, which houses my books and records development database snapshots. Very likely I should also be putting various */tmp directories there, as well, and any suggestions would be appreciated. I hadn't even thought of swap, but with 2G of RAM, I barely ever touch swap anyway. I'll be thinking about how to do this as well, though. I don't suspect it'd be much different than mounting the existing datastore -- just an extra swapon command for the loopback device.
Obviously,
I am a small corporation, and very likely the only theft of my laptop would be the typical smash-n-grab thief. I don't consider him the type who would spend the time breaking my encryption, and so I consider this measure to be sufficient to safeguard my information.
I've thought several times about starting a "secure laptop project", where we'd try to release scripts/RPM/deb for various distros (I use Ubuntu) to lock them down right. Really, though, the distros should detect that they're installing on a laptop and prompt for this type of thing at setup. It'd be a lot easier to do this at setup than after the filesystems have been populated -- more consistent and complete as well.
Anyway, my first cup of coffee hasn't kicked in yet, so please forgive me if this isn't totally coherent.