Which, of course, have already been addressed by the respective companies. Only unpatched systems would be affected.
Are you certain? I believe Flash might still have issues, unless Adobe has figured out something to contradict their earlier statement that "...unfortunately, there is no easy solution. This issue is very difficult to solve without also breaking existing, legitimate content elsewhere on the web." Still, that report was a month ago, so maybe the situation has changed since then. I couldn't find anything to confirm or deny that current versions of Flash are still vulnerable -- does anyone else know?
As I said elsewhere in this thread, I believe there is an particularly toasty corner of Hell reserved for those who abuse religion for personal gain, whether that is a Scientologist enslaving an 8 year old child, a Catholic priest molesting an alter boy or an Islamic fundamentalist flying an airplane into a building. All of these things are evil, and there is no excuse for any of it.
I merely pointed out that it is wrong and prejudiced to judge all religions by the things that evil people have done in the name of religion.
In science, we observe, hypothesize, test, repeat in a process of continually improving understanding. If multiple people can achieve the same results on the basis of this process, then it is good and reliable.
However, if I observe, hypothesize, test and repeat in the process of determining whether or not a particular faith is valid, and refine my faith on the basis of that process -- which is the same process as that used in science -- then, even if other people have the same experiences I do, then it is "illogical" and "unsubstantiated"? That sounds rather like dogmatism to me.
Go way, way, way back up the thread to this post and you will see what I launched down this chain of reasoning. Most people I talk to are making assumptions without even realizing they are doing so. syousef claims that he doesn't ever do anything on faith. I say that he does, but doesn't realize it. He is accepting on faith that the observations that are the basic foundation of science are accurate. The truth, however, is that we cannot ever *know* that what we are observing is real (Hume discusses this in his philosophy).
In everyday living, I agree with you -- it doesn't really matter, and since I have no better basis for understanding than what I observe, I will act as if my observations are correct. The point, however, is that ultimately, at some point, we all choose what we are going to believe -- our senses, faith, nothing at all...but it ultimately all boils down to, "this makes sense to me, so I am going to act upon this belief." In my case, I have chosen to believe that there is more to "reality" than what my physical senses perceive (which is also based upon my personal experiences, and not something I can "prove" to anyone else, unless they are willing to experiment the same way I did).
You (and the moderator who rated my earlier post "Troll") completely missed my point. How, exactly, is "my personal observation and experience" as well as the testimonies of boatloads of people throughout history "idle speculation"?
We use science because it seems to work -- I observe things with my senses, and because I don't have anything better to base my judgments upon, I assume that what I perceive is real. Based on those observations, I hypothesize about how the things I perceive work. From those hypotheses, I design tests to see if the model of reality that I have built in my mind is consistent. From those tests, I either accept that my understanding is adequate or I formulate a new hypothesis and rinse, lather, repeat.
This is exactly what I did between the ages of 15 and 34. I decided that the religion I was brought up with was dead, and I wanted no part of it. So I began searching for the truth. In my search, I hypothesized, tested, and observed the results. As a result of that search, I experienced some things that suggest to me that there is a God. However, YMMV. If you disagree with me, then that is your right, and I bear you no ill will. I do, however, get annoyed at pseudo-intellectuals who aren't even willing to consider that they could be mistaken, and therefore consider that anyone who disagrees with them is either a nutjob, a wacko or is doing things out of an ulterior motive.
lol, I actually have to agree with your main point. I had a math teacher in junior high school who essentially said, "All of our perceptions of reality are just models. They are quite useful in as much as they can help predict and describe the world around us. But don't ever make the mistake of thinking that what is and what you believe are exactly the same."
But in the meantime, you are relying on an unproven assertion that your senses are not merely the products of an overly active imagination...i.e., faith. You can't know that everything in your experience is real; it could all have been a dream, and you have really been in a coma from birth. As I said earlier, go read some of Renee Descartes' philosophy (although I misspelled his name earlier; my bad). It might bring you a little more skepticism towards the assumptions you don't even realize you are making.
Hmmmm...in that "formal document" you refer to, I seem to remember reading something along the lines of, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" which is a pretty good argument against killing someone. I also read something in that same "formal document" that states, IIRC, "Thou shalt not kill.". As for the laws that were given to the Israelites that end in, "...that person shall be put to death...", I believe they every one of those rules had a provision to offer a sacrifice to remove that guilt. I admit I haven't (yet) read the entire Bible cover to cover, but I have been through a fair amount of it and quite honestly, I can't recall a single example where anyone ever was actually put to death (rather than offering a sacrifice and making atonement) for any of those things...at least until the Pharisees began killing the Christian "heretics" in the New Testament, but then again, that wasn't Christians killing people, either.
Yes, individuals -- and even rather large groups of individuals -- have abused faith for personal gain. I personally believe there is an especially toasty corner of Hell reserved for such as those.
However, even the most jaded, cynical atheist cannot deny that organized religions have also done some amazing things for the societies in which they existed. Read about Sisters of Providence and Providence Hospital. Or perhaps the Brother Francis shelter in Anchorage Alaska. How about Catholic Social Services? The church where I am a youth pastor spent the last four weeks feeding the homeless at another church downtown. YMMV, but I have seen religion lift people out of some very, very dark places and empower others to do things they never would have been brave enough to try otherwise.
With all due respect, saying that "all organized religion should be treated with utter contempt" is every bit as ignorant and superficial as claiming that someone cannot drive because their plumbing is different than mine or that someone has no value because they have a significantly better tan than I do. Prejudice is prejudice, period.
At some point, everything depends on faith. In empirical science, we accept that the observations of our senses is real (at least at some level), even though we have no "proof" that anything outside our thoughts is really real (remember DeCartes?). In geometry, you start with postulates -- things that we believe to be true, but for which we have not yet derived proofs.
So, it's somewhat disingenuous to knock religion because "it requires you to believe in things that cannot be proven."
For what it is worth, my faith is based upon my personal observation and experience, not just stories I have read...much like my belief that my wife, my daughter, my parents, my siblings, etc. are real and actually exist. You may not have any more personal knowledge of my relatives than you have for God, but you will readily believe I have relatives based upon my recounting of experiences I have had with them, yet doubt any experience I claim I -- or any of millions of other people throughout history -- may have had with God. Curious.
Kudos to you. GP was being a butt, and you gave him a well-deserved smackdown:)
In addition, I AM in IT and your personal backup solution sounds better, in some respects, than mine because although I can revert to yesterday's or the day before's data, I am hosed if there is a fire in my house. Your backup solution stores data off-site in a fireproof safe; my backup server is sitting next to my other servers. In a flood or a fire, I have lost all my data; you have not. I have considered various off-site storage solutions, but ultimately determined that it simply wasn't worth the cost. You pulled it off. Good job!
What do you consider "full-featured"? I have a server at home with a hard drive large enough to back up all of the data and configs on my other machines at home. Each night, a Cron job starts a backup script that uses NFS and Samba (as appropriate) to back up my machines to the backup server.
The only real differences between what I do at work and at home is 1) the number of backups I keep (2 at home, 365 at work), 2) my home backups are compressed while the work network is not and 3) because the home network is compressed, I have to do full backups every night while I use rsync to back up at work...but that's only because I can't afford a server with 24 TB of disk space at home <grin>
It's even worse, in my case. I've got a desktop and a laptop at home. I've got a desktop and three laptops at work. It is almost a statistical certainty that the document I need will not be on the machine I am using at any given point in time*.
*I partially remedied this problem by setting up a shared folder on our corporate Samba server to which I save all my documents. Each night, all of my machines rsync that folder into a local repository. If this folder happened to exist on a public-facing web server so that I could access it from home as well as from work, it would be a perfect solution for my dilemma. Of course, then I would have only invented my own personal cloud...
if you can't get a wiki going then you sure as hell don't know enough to be relying on the cloud.
That's a pretty arrogant point of view, don't you think? Yes, I can easily build a web server and a wiki because I spend 40+ hours a week building networks and servers. My wife, on the other hand, spends 40+ hours a week creating and editing the documents that keep her two businesses running. She has neither the time nor the training to build, configure and properly secure either a web server or the applications that run on it. However, she is an incredibly intelligent woman. If she doesn't know enough to "rely on the cloud", then the only people who do are people like you and me who don't need the cloud because we can build it ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that North America != USA, right?
Yeah, I forgot the tag at the end ;)
Just a minor quibble, but 300 pixels are not worth an infinite number of pictures. They are actually only worth 300! (or 306 057 512 216 440 636 035 370 461 297 268 629 388 588 804 173 576 999 416 776 741 259 476 533 176 716 867 465 515 291 422 477 573 349 939 147 888 701 726 368 864 263 907 759 003 154 226 842 927 906 974 559 841 225 476 930 271 954 604 008 012 215 776 252 176 854 255 965 356 903 506 788 725 264 321 896 264 299 365 204 576 448 830 388 909 753 943 489 625 436 053 225 980 776 521 270 822 437 639 449 120 128 678 675 368 305 712 293 681 943 649 956 460 498 166 450 227 716 500 185 176 546 469 340 112 226 034 729 724 066 333 258 583 506 870 150 169 794 168 850 353 752 137 554 910 289 126 407 157 154 830 282 284 937 952 636 580 145 235 233 156 936 482 233 436 799 254 594 095 276 820 608 062 232 812 387 383 880 817 049 600 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000) pictures.
Which, of course, have already been addressed by the respective companies. Only unpatched systems would be affected.
Are you certain? I believe Flash might still have issues, unless Adobe has figured out something to contradict their earlier statement that "...unfortunately, there is no easy solution. This issue is very difficult to solve without also breaking existing, legitimate content elsewhere on the web." Still, that report was a month ago, so maybe the situation has changed since then. I couldn't find anything to confirm or deny that current versions of Flash are still vulnerable -- does anyone else know?
My Internet didn't come with packaging. I used torrent to get it.
Bravo! Well done, sir! :D
My PIII with 512 mb of pc-100 ram...
Rich snob. My DNS server is a 486/66.
Speaking of which, when have you bought a game at the store, and found it pre-infected with malware?
Okay, technically, it's not a game, but how about this? Otherwise, I pretty much agree with you.
No, no, no. I can't get it unless it's a pizza analogy. Where, oh where, is PizzaAnalogyGuy when you need him?
Not at all.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, I believe there is an particularly toasty corner of Hell reserved for those who abuse religion for personal gain, whether that is a Scientologist enslaving an 8 year old child, a Catholic priest molesting an alter boy or an Islamic fundamentalist flying an airplane into a building. All of these things are evil, and there is no excuse for any of it.
I merely pointed out that it is wrong and prejudiced to judge all religions by the things that evil people have done in the name of religion.
Let me see if I understand you correctly.
In science, we observe, hypothesize, test, repeat in a process of continually improving understanding. If multiple people can achieve the same results on the basis of this process, then it is good and reliable.
However, if I observe, hypothesize, test and repeat in the process of determining whether or not a particular faith is valid, and refine my faith on the basis of that process -- which is the same process as that used in science -- then, even if other people have the same experiences I do, then it is "illogical" and "unsubstantiated"? That sounds rather like dogmatism to me.
Go way, way, way back up the thread to this post and you will see what I launched down this chain of reasoning. Most people I talk to are making assumptions without even realizing they are doing so. syousef claims that he doesn't ever do anything on faith. I say that he does, but doesn't realize it. He is accepting on faith that the observations that are the basic foundation of science are accurate. The truth, however, is that we cannot ever *know* that what we are observing is real (Hume discusses this in his philosophy).
In everyday living, I agree with you -- it doesn't really matter, and since I have no better basis for understanding than what I observe, I will act as if my observations are correct. The point, however, is that ultimately, at some point, we all choose what we are going to believe -- our senses, faith, nothing at all...but it ultimately all boils down to, "this makes sense to me, so I am going to act upon this belief." In my case, I have chosen to believe that there is more to "reality" than what my physical senses perceive (which is also based upon my personal experiences, and not something I can "prove" to anyone else, unless they are willing to experiment the same way I did).
You (and the moderator who rated my earlier post "Troll") completely missed my point. How, exactly, is "my personal observation and experience" as well as the testimonies of boatloads of people throughout history "idle speculation"?
We use science because it seems to work -- I observe things with my senses, and because I don't have anything better to base my judgments upon, I assume that what I perceive is real. Based on those observations, I hypothesize about how the things I perceive work. From those hypotheses, I design tests to see if the model of reality that I have built in my mind is consistent. From those tests, I either accept that my understanding is adequate or I formulate a new hypothesis and rinse, lather, repeat.
This is exactly what I did between the ages of 15 and 34. I decided that the religion I was brought up with was dead, and I wanted no part of it. So I began searching for the truth. In my search, I hypothesized, tested, and observed the results. As a result of that search, I experienced some things that suggest to me that there is a God. However, YMMV. If you disagree with me, then that is your right, and I bear you no ill will. I do, however, get annoyed at pseudo-intellectuals who aren't even willing to consider that they could be mistaken, and therefore consider that anyone who disagrees with them is either a nutjob, a wacko or is doing things out of an ulterior motive.
We all have to believe in something, I guess :)
lol, I actually have to agree with your main point. I had a math teacher in junior high school who essentially said, "All of our perceptions of reality are just models. They are quite useful in as much as they can help predict and describe the world around us. But don't ever make the mistake of thinking that what is and what you believe are exactly the same."
But in the meantime, you are relying on an unproven assertion that your senses are not merely the products of an overly active imagination...i.e., faith. You can't know that everything in your experience is real; it could all have been a dream, and you have really been in a coma from birth. As I said earlier, go read some of Renee Descartes' philosophy (although I misspelled his name earlier; my bad). It might bring you a little more skepticism towards the assumptions you don't even realize you are making.
Hmmmm...in that "formal document" you refer to, I seem to remember reading something along the lines of, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" which is a pretty good argument against killing someone. I also read something in that same "formal document" that states, IIRC, "Thou shalt not kill.". As for the laws that were given to the Israelites that end in, "...that person shall be put to death...", I believe they every one of those rules had a provision to offer a sacrifice to remove that guilt. I admit I haven't (yet) read the entire Bible cover to cover, but I have been through a fair amount of it and quite honestly, I can't recall a single example where anyone ever was actually put to death (rather than offering a sacrifice and making atonement) for any of those things...at least until the Pharisees began killing the Christian "heretics" in the New Testament, but then again, that wasn't Christians killing people, either.
Baby...bathwater?
Yes, individuals -- and even rather large groups of individuals -- have abused faith for personal gain. I personally believe there is an especially toasty corner of Hell reserved for such as those.
However, even the most jaded, cynical atheist cannot deny that organized religions have also done some amazing things for the societies in which they existed. Read about Sisters of Providence and Providence Hospital. Or perhaps the Brother Francis shelter in Anchorage Alaska. How about Catholic Social Services? The church where I am a youth pastor spent the last four weeks feeding the homeless at another church downtown. YMMV, but I have seen religion lift people out of some very, very dark places and empower others to do things they never would have been brave enough to try otherwise.
With all due respect, saying that "all organized religion should be treated with utter contempt" is every bit as ignorant and superficial as claiming that someone cannot drive because their plumbing is different than mine or that someone has no value because they have a significantly better tan than I do. Prejudice is prejudice, period.
At some point, everything depends on faith. In empirical science, we accept that the observations of our senses is real (at least at some level), even though we have no "proof" that anything outside our thoughts is really real (remember DeCartes?). In geometry, you start with postulates -- things that we believe to be true, but for which we have not yet derived proofs.
So, it's somewhat disingenuous to knock religion because "it requires you to believe in things that cannot be proven."
For what it is worth, my faith is based upon my personal observation and experience, not just stories I have read...much like my belief that my wife, my daughter, my parents, my siblings, etc. are real and actually exist. You may not have any more personal knowledge of my relatives than you have for God, but you will readily believe I have relatives based upon my recounting of experiences I have had with them, yet doubt any experience I claim I -- or any of millions of other people throughout history -- may have had with God. Curious.
...and I really don't want to be a toad :)
tuber == root? Is that what the "toor" entry in my /etc/passwd file means? It's just a 1337 spelling for "tuber"?
Kudos to you. GP was being a butt, and you gave him a well-deserved smackdown :)
In addition, I AM in IT and your personal backup solution sounds better, in some respects, than mine because although I can revert to yesterday's or the day before's data, I am hosed if there is a fire in my house. Your backup solution stores data off-site in a fireproof safe; my backup server is sitting next to my other servers. In a flood or a fire, I have lost all my data; you have not. I have considered various off-site storage solutions, but ultimately determined that it simply wasn't worth the cost. You pulled it off. Good job!
What do you consider "full-featured"? I have a server at home with a hard drive large enough to back up all of the data and configs on my other machines at home. Each night, a Cron job starts a backup script that uses NFS and Samba (as appropriate) to back up my machines to the backup server.
The only real differences between what I do at work and at home is 1) the number of backups I keep (2 at home, 365 at work), 2) my home backups are compressed while the work network is not and 3) because the home network is compressed, I have to do full backups every night while I use rsync to back up at work...but that's only because I can't afford a server with 24 TB of disk space at home <grin>
It's even worse, in my case. I've got a desktop and a laptop at home. I've got a desktop and three laptops at work. It is almost a statistical certainty that the document I need will not be on the machine I am using at any given point in time*.
*I partially remedied this problem by setting up a shared folder on our corporate Samba server to which I save all my documents. Each night, all of my machines rsync that folder into a local repository. If this folder happened to exist on a public-facing web server so that I could access it from home as well as from work, it would be a perfect solution for my dilemma. Of course, then I would have only invented my own personal cloud...
if you can't get a wiki going then you sure as hell don't know enough to be relying on the cloud.
That's a pretty arrogant point of view, don't you think? Yes, I can easily build a web server and a wiki because I spend 40+ hours a week building networks and servers. My wife, on the other hand, spends 40+ hours a week creating and editing the documents that keep her two businesses running. She has neither the time nor the training to build, configure and properly secure either a web server or the applications that run on it. However, she is an incredibly intelligent woman. If she doesn't know enough to "rely on the cloud", then the only people who do are people like you and me who don't need the cloud because we can build it ourselves.