That's all well and good until you start making important choices based on that ignorance. I don't care if you're happy if it means you're going to be making bad choices that impact me. If you wish to remain ignorant to feel better about yourself that's fine, but in so doing you should be required to forfeit the right to make decisions about anyone else.
His point was that you need an external sentient being for something to have purpose, therefor implying there's a purpose to X implies that there's an external sentient being to provide that purpose. In the case of the "purpose of humanity" or the "purpose of the universe" it's therefor implied that some sentient being created humanity or the universe respectively. To use your example of the hammer, it has no purpose in and of itself, a hammer as you so rightly pointed out is just a collection of electrons, protons, and neutrons, it's the human holding the hammer that assigns it its purpose. If you don't believe in a god or greater sentient being (specifically one responsible for creation of humanity and/or the universe) then by definition you cannot believe that humanity and/or the universe has some greater purpose.
They weren't so much invented as evolved. It started with some people essentially getting together and going "Hey, wouldn't it be great if everyone got along. We should make some rules on how people can treat each other better.", and pretty soon it snowballed to the point where bureaucracy started to take hold. Once they achieved a certain level of size they started snapping up other smaller religions, superstitions, and the occasional nutball and incorporating them into themselves. Things were added, removed, and modified over time, sometimes by individuals, other times by committees. Eventually you arrive at the various amalgams of stories, beliefs, superstitions, and rules that are recognized as the mainstream religions.
Most of this is in reference to the western religions not the eastern and alternative religions. Most of the eastern religions tend more towards world outlooks or philosophy than they do rules and stories and evolved primarily out of the ideas of various philosophers over time in combination with early superstitions. The alternative religions tend towards an attempt at reviving earlier superstitions combined with modern mysticism and pop-culture, often drawing inspiration from poorly researched Egyptian beliefs, or cherry picked portions of eastern philosophy.
... I'm convinced that if the world's religions had never been a benefit to society, they wouldn't exist...
They used to provide benefit to society, but what benefit it used to provide is largely obsolete, unnecessary, or no longer exists in modern society. Religion, or more specifically churches, used to provide a common meeting place in a community, help foster a sense of community in a dispersed group of people lacking effective communications systems, encourage literacy, provide answers to questions with no known explanations, and function as a common location to both give and receive charity. All of these functions are now handled better by other means, such as modern communications infrastructure, and public school systems.
No longer providing the benefit it used to, what we're left with is primarily the negative aspects of organized religion, those including bigotry, superstition, racism, mob mentality, and corruption at the upper levels.
It's because it's not really "software", it's more like a von neuman machine, it self modifies over its lifetime. Simply put, our DNA encodes a rudimentary brain with various stimulus-response pairs. Some of these may seem complex, such as a cat stalking and pouncing, but they're really just several complimentary and interlocking stimulus response pairs that combine in a favorable fashion. This can be demonstrated by the way in which cats will follow any fast moving object that crosses their vision, regardless of whether it's "food" or not. Once they engage the higher order learned responses and evaluate whether what they're following is food or not they may lose interest, but the behavior to track the item is pre-wired.
Imagine if you will, a plan for a machine that assembles a copy of itself based on a plan. Now further imagine that while the machine is running it can swap out and modify pieces of itself, but those modifications don't change the plan it has. This is essentially the relationship between the brain and DNA. The DNA encodes the starting condition of the brain, but once it reaches that starting condition it then proceeds to self modify itself. Those modifications do not get passed on through the DNA, but the initial starting condition does. Mutations to that starting condition, lets say a fear response to darkness, might confer a survival advantage and are likely to be passed on to further generations.
Depending on the color of the faceplate and the hand, you might be able to mask off everything you don't care about (say everything but a small area around the center of the dial), run it through a hi/low filter to map the faceplate to white and the hand to black, and then just calculate the angle of the hand by searching the edge of the image for black pixels. So long as the cam is fixed and you know the coordinates of the pivot point it should be trivially easy to determine the angle of the hand based on the point at which it crosses the edge of the detection area. Once you've got the angle it should be trivially easy to map that back to a set of values.
That's because you are. You're attempting to apply logic and reason to the inherently illogical and unreasonable. Likewise he's attempting to convince you using logically flawed arguments that he adheres to not out of any careful study or reasoning, but because he was indoctrinated not to question those arguments. He willfully denies any arguments that are counter to his world outlook because to do otherwise would violate a large portion of his world view, something that everyone avoids, and many people are incapable of admitting.
I have friends who tell me they can see signs of the Creator in all manner of living things.
Oddly, I find myself unable to perceive these subtleties (they just look like camouflage markings and so forth to me.) They look at me sadly when I say, "Sorry, I'm just not getting it."
You know what they say, "Ignorance is Bliss". They're just sad that you're not as blissful as them.
They're stored in DNA, but they aren't "memory". Think of it as a bit like a base install. When we first form we have a simple pre-wired brain, that portion is encoded in our DNA, and it's these pre-wired synapses which are responsible for these basic instincts. During a persons lifetime some of these pre-wired synapses may be modified, enhanced, or even removed, but those changes will not be passed on as they aren't encoded in the DNA. How these pre-wired synapses came about is the same as how all genetic features came about, they were a mutation that conferred a advantage. The mammal that was born with the basic wiring to run from predators is more prone to survival than the one who has to learn that the hard way. These relatively simple low level instincts are simple to pre-wire as everything they interact with is already encoded. More advanced responses can not be encoded in DNA (at least not easily) because they rely on synapses structures that must be formed through learning, and are individualistic. Instincts can only work with what's already formed at birth, so things like recognizing a name, or the solution to a particular problem are impossible to code, without first encoding knowledge of that name or problem, which is highly unlikely to occur as doing so confers no evolutionary advantage.
She is small-minded BECAUSE she is from a small town. Welcome to America (or at least the part that doesn't live in a city).
The really scary ones are the ones that don't live in small towns anymore, but who grew up in them. Sadly I've got some relatives that are like that. The things I hear them say absolutely amaze me. Before I was forced to spend more time around them I thought racism was all but dead in the U.S. and that militant creationists were a small minority, but now I'm not so sure. It both scares and saddens me to see such a large swath of the U.S. population proudly walking away from progress and trying to drag the rest of us with them. If things continue in this fashion it's not going to be long before I'm forced to find another country to live in, although things aren't looking great elsewhere either. In particular England and Australia aren't looking like bastions of progress at the moment, and Canada seems to be treading water.
For us that spend a little less time in the Windows world care to enlighten us on what sysprep is? I'm familiar with a few of the less used Windows applications, but I've never heard of sysprep before.
That was a relevant fact five or more years ago. Today, the world has caught up with the Slashdot crowd.
Sad, but true.
_
And yet, somehow getting linked on slashdot can still kill servers. Admittedly most commercial servers of at least moderate size can take the load, but there's still plenty of smaller companies and private servers that tend to fall flat when slashdot comes calling. Also those that make the mistake of streaming video are particularly vulnerable even among the medium sized companies.
I know for a fact they have a vi keys plugin for Eclipse, and I'd assume they have an emacs one as well. You might be able to save some time by getting one of those plugins and eliminating a second application.
Not sure that Kennedy knew how the rockets worked, but he got people to the moon just the same.
No, he asked the people that knew how the rockets worked to try and get people to the moon. He didn't have anything to do with making the decisions on how it was done, just on whether it should be done or not. He told NASA "Do it", then NASA (the guys who know how the rockets work), went about making the decisions on exactly how and when it would be done. If you are "in charge" of something, you damn well better have at least a minimal understanding of how it works under the hood (this by the way is the mistake that Ted "series of tubes" Stevens made).
Nah, put him in charge of Homeland Security... then in 6 months when he dissolves it as "redundant and ineffectual" transfer him to the NSA working on crypto and shoring up our technology infrastructure. Could also put him in charge of the TSA for a bit to help streamline that down to something sane like it used to be and eliminate all the security theater.
If you RTFA it is something you can disable (at least according to the D-Link rep, I don't actually own one of these). It sounds like he's ticked off because it was slipped in with the firmware upgrade, enabled by default, and if you're not technically inclined you'd probably not realize what was causing the hijacking. It is a scummy thing to do, but hardly illegal, and it's being made out to be a lot worse than it actually is. Had it been disabled by default, or perhaps included instructions on the site it directs you to on how to disable it then it wouldn't be an issue.
I am a little curious that someone would make all of that information so readily available.
Like many/.ers say, If it is on the net, it is vulnerable. Or something like that.
Almost but not quite.
The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts.
There's also a variation with the lead-lined room/armed guards part replaced with buried at the bottom of the marianas trench.
If you're blindly executing something you don't understand because someone you know nothing about posted it on the internet with absolutely no explanation of what it does, you really do deserve the consequences. If you've got half a brain cell you'll also learn from the experience and the world will be a better place for it (one person slightly less ignorant).
How about this. I've got to upload a file to another server via VPN, but the lame VPN client I need to use is Windows only (and even worse it mucks with your routing table to redirect ALL traffic through the VPN connection and kicks you off if you try to fix it). So, I've got a copy of XP running inside of VirtualBox, that I then installed PuTTY in. To do the upload I've got a batch file that basically reads:
Then I just SSH in and work with the file as necessary. Not a GUI in sight (barring the double click on the desktop icon necessary to kick the whole thing off).
So much easier for me to use than perl. I presume the modern unix user prefers perl.
Depends. I use grep for simple command line based output searching, E.G. "locate foo.o | grep lib/bar". For scripting, or more complex logic I use perl.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all well and good until you start making important choices based on that ignorance. I don't care if you're happy if it means you're going to be making bad choices that impact me. If you wish to remain ignorant to feel better about yourself that's fine, but in so doing you should be required to forfeit the right to make decisions about anyone else.
His point was that you need an external sentient being for something to have purpose, therefor implying there's a purpose to X implies that there's an external sentient being to provide that purpose. In the case of the "purpose of humanity" or the "purpose of the universe" it's therefor implied that some sentient being created humanity or the universe respectively. To use your example of the hammer, it has no purpose in and of itself, a hammer as you so rightly pointed out is just a collection of electrons, protons, and neutrons, it's the human holding the hammer that assigns it its purpose. If you don't believe in a god or greater sentient being (specifically one responsible for creation of humanity and/or the universe) then by definition you cannot believe that humanity and/or the universe has some greater purpose.
They weren't so much invented as evolved. It started with some people essentially getting together and going "Hey, wouldn't it be great if everyone got along. We should make some rules on how people can treat each other better.", and pretty soon it snowballed to the point where bureaucracy started to take hold. Once they achieved a certain level of size they started snapping up other smaller religions, superstitions, and the occasional nutball and incorporating them into themselves. Things were added, removed, and modified over time, sometimes by individuals, other times by committees. Eventually you arrive at the various amalgams of stories, beliefs, superstitions, and rules that are recognized as the mainstream religions.
Most of this is in reference to the western religions not the eastern and alternative religions. Most of the eastern religions tend more towards world outlooks or philosophy than they do rules and stories and evolved primarily out of the ideas of various philosophers over time in combination with early superstitions. The alternative religions tend towards an attempt at reviving earlier superstitions combined with modern mysticism and pop-culture, often drawing inspiration from poorly researched Egyptian beliefs, or cherry picked portions of eastern philosophy.
... I'm convinced that if the world's religions had never been a benefit to society, they wouldn't exist...
They used to provide benefit to society, but what benefit it used to provide is largely obsolete, unnecessary, or no longer exists in modern society. Religion, or more specifically churches, used to provide a common meeting place in a community, help foster a sense of community in a dispersed group of people lacking effective communications systems, encourage literacy, provide answers to questions with no known explanations, and function as a common location to both give and receive charity. All of these functions are now handled better by other means, such as modern communications infrastructure, and public school systems.
No longer providing the benefit it used to, what we're left with is primarily the negative aspects of organized religion, those including bigotry, superstition, racism, mob mentality, and corruption at the upper levels.
It's because it's not really "software", it's more like a von neuman machine, it self modifies over its lifetime. Simply put, our DNA encodes a rudimentary brain with various stimulus-response pairs. Some of these may seem complex, such as a cat stalking and pouncing, but they're really just several complimentary and interlocking stimulus response pairs that combine in a favorable fashion. This can be demonstrated by the way in which cats will follow any fast moving object that crosses their vision, regardless of whether it's "food" or not. Once they engage the higher order learned responses and evaluate whether what they're following is food or not they may lose interest, but the behavior to track the item is pre-wired.
Imagine if you will, a plan for a machine that assembles a copy of itself based on a plan. Now further imagine that while the machine is running it can swap out and modify pieces of itself, but those modifications don't change the plan it has. This is essentially the relationship between the brain and DNA. The DNA encodes the starting condition of the brain, but once it reaches that starting condition it then proceeds to self modify itself. Those modifications do not get passed on through the DNA, but the initial starting condition does. Mutations to that starting condition, lets say a fear response to darkness, might confer a survival advantage and are likely to be passed on to further generations.
Depending on the color of the faceplate and the hand, you might be able to mask off everything you don't care about (say everything but a small area around the center of the dial), run it through a hi/low filter to map the faceplate to white and the hand to black, and then just calculate the angle of the hand by searching the edge of the image for black pixels. So long as the cam is fixed and you know the coordinates of the pivot point it should be trivially easy to determine the angle of the hand based on the point at which it crosses the edge of the detection area. Once you've got the angle it should be trivially easy to map that back to a set of values.
It's like we're talking past each other.
That's because you are. You're attempting to apply logic and reason to the inherently illogical and unreasonable. Likewise he's attempting to convince you using logically flawed arguments that he adheres to not out of any careful study or reasoning, but because he was indoctrinated not to question those arguments. He willfully denies any arguments that are counter to his world outlook because to do otherwise would violate a large portion of his world view, something that everyone avoids, and many people are incapable of admitting.
I have friends who tell me they can see signs of the Creator in all manner of living things. Oddly, I find myself unable to perceive these subtleties (they just look like camouflage markings and so forth to me.) They look at me sadly when I say, "Sorry, I'm just not getting it."
You know what they say, "Ignorance is Bliss". They're just sad that you're not as blissful as them.
They're stored in DNA, but they aren't "memory". Think of it as a bit like a base install. When we first form we have a simple pre-wired brain, that portion is encoded in our DNA, and it's these pre-wired synapses which are responsible for these basic instincts. During a persons lifetime some of these pre-wired synapses may be modified, enhanced, or even removed, but those changes will not be passed on as they aren't encoded in the DNA. How these pre-wired synapses came about is the same as how all genetic features came about, they were a mutation that conferred a advantage. The mammal that was born with the basic wiring to run from predators is more prone to survival than the one who has to learn that the hard way. These relatively simple low level instincts are simple to pre-wire as everything they interact with is already encoded. More advanced responses can not be encoded in DNA (at least not easily) because they rely on synapses structures that must be formed through learning, and are individualistic. Instincts can only work with what's already formed at birth, so things like recognizing a name, or the solution to a particular problem are impossible to code, without first encoding knowledge of that name or problem, which is highly unlikely to occur as doing so confers no evolutionary advantage.
She is small-minded BECAUSE she is from a small town. Welcome to America (or at least the part that doesn't live in a city).
The really scary ones are the ones that don't live in small towns anymore, but who grew up in them. Sadly I've got some relatives that are like that. The things I hear them say absolutely amaze me. Before I was forced to spend more time around them I thought racism was all but dead in the U.S. and that militant creationists were a small minority, but now I'm not so sure. It both scares and saddens me to see such a large swath of the U.S. population proudly walking away from progress and trying to drag the rest of us with them. If things continue in this fashion it's not going to be long before I'm forced to find another country to live in, although things aren't looking great elsewhere either. In particular England and Australia aren't looking like bastions of progress at the moment, and Canada seems to be treading water.
For us that spend a little less time in the Windows world care to enlighten us on what sysprep is? I'm familiar with a few of the less used Windows applications, but I've never heard of sysprep before.
That was a relevant fact five or more years ago. Today, the world has caught up with the Slashdot crowd.
Sad, but true.
_
And yet, somehow getting linked on slashdot can still kill servers. Admittedly most commercial servers of at least moderate size can take the load, but there's still plenty of smaller companies and private servers that tend to fall flat when slashdot comes calling. Also those that make the mistake of streaming video are particularly vulnerable even among the medium sized companies.
There's an emacs keybinding, but as far as I can tell, it just handles navigation within a file and basic editing commands: cut, copy, and paste.
That's unfortunate, the vi plugin is a nearly complete emulation.
Win-R format /Q c:
I know for a fact they have a vi keys plugin for Eclipse, and I'd assume they have an emacs one as well. You might be able to save some time by getting one of those plugins and eliminating a second application.
DAMMIT, EMACS.
Not sure that Kennedy knew how the rockets worked, but he got people to the moon just the same.
No, he asked the people that knew how the rockets worked to try and get people to the moon. He didn't have anything to do with making the decisions on how it was done, just on whether it should be done or not. He told NASA "Do it", then NASA (the guys who know how the rockets work), went about making the decisions on exactly how and when it would be done. If you are "in charge" of something, you damn well better have at least a minimal understanding of how it works under the hood (this by the way is the mistake that Ted "series of tubes" Stevens made).
Bruce Schneier perhaps?
Nah, put him in charge of Homeland Security... then in 6 months when he dissolves it as "redundant and ineffectual" transfer him to the NSA working on crypto and shoring up our technology infrastructure. Could also put him in charge of the TSA for a bit to help streamline that down to something sane like it used to be and eliminate all the security theater.
LOL, that's awesome.
If you RTFA it is something you can disable (at least according to the D-Link rep, I don't actually own one of these). It sounds like he's ticked off because it was slipped in with the firmware upgrade, enabled by default, and if you're not technically inclined you'd probably not realize what was causing the hijacking. It is a scummy thing to do, but hardly illegal, and it's being made out to be a lot worse than it actually is. Had it been disabled by default, or perhaps included instructions on the site it directs you to on how to disable it then it wouldn't be an issue.
I am a little curious that someone would make all of that information so readily available. Like many /.ers say, If it is on the net, it is vulnerable. Or something like that.
Almost but not quite.
The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts.
There's also a variation with the lead-lined room/armed guards part replaced with buried at the bottom of the marianas trench.
I still contend to this day that it's impossible for any mere mortal to know all of the possible commands in vi.
As a corollary I contend that it's impossible for any mere mortal to actually use all of the functions in emacs.
What, you did have a recent backup right?
If you're blindly executing something you don't understand because someone you know nothing about posted it on the internet with absolutely no explanation of what it does, you really do deserve the consequences. If you've got half a brain cell you'll also learn from the experience and the world will be a better place for it (one person slightly less ignorant).
pscp -pw password C:\local\path\file.zip user@host:/remote/path/file.zip
putty -load "server" -pw password
Then I just SSH in and work with the file as necessary. Not a GUI in sight (barring the double click on the desktop icon necessary to kick the whole thing off).
So much easier for me to use than perl. I presume the modern unix user prefers perl.
Depends. I use grep for simple command line based output searching, E.G. "locate foo.o | grep lib/bar". For scripting, or more complex logic I use perl.