Me too, but to them it comes off as arrogance. It's the "you don't know so shut up" attitude. Now you know why I never engage in these debates..simply pointless.
Theists think that the universe is a pretty freaking extraordinary occurrence, only possible through an extraordinary claim. A scientist's claim that everything just popped into existence, albeit as a tiny initial singularity, is far more unlikely to most people. This is why your logic here does not worry them too much.
I just don't get it. Why do people feel the need to express sentiments that are not useful in any way, do not provide grounds for further research by those who happen upon them, are clearly non acceptable by standards of civil behavior between human beings and in short are an invitation for vitriol? The latter is most important, because religion is one of those things that people actually live for (unlike many other causes that usually serve as short-term motivators) and so feelings here are pretty strong. We in the western world of today, when bored, always seem to value our freedom to insult a large number of diverse people in their face much more than the sensibility of respecting the very sensitive feelings of that large number of fellow human beings while communicating the "hatred" in a more sensible, logical form (e.g academic debate). Even if we disregard the special case here where the information was bound, by license agreement from a private company, to certain behavioral norms - it is not always wise to exercise all your rights in any context and at any time. Would you run naked in a European country that had no anti-nudity laws *if* you knew your future in-laws will be watching? You have a right to, and you might do it just to prove that very point, but it would be stupid. Don't be stupid. Relax. Be nice. This goes equally to both sides.
My friends work with the DoD and DoE, when you walk into the rooms where the servers are there are two big columns with public facing machines (and network circuitry) in one, while the real DoD servers are in another. They are not connected. Relax. Hacking into some stupid workstation that belongs to a politician's secretary is not a big problem given that microsoft has it's wonderful OS and software on all of them. Exploits go for 10 grand in some places..it's just a matter of finding the computer in question. Already you can see the IDS systems picked the intrusion up..they weren't even trying to hide themselves.
Meanwhile, it would be interesting to see how far a single mole operating the data centers could cause trouble by planting hardware. Almost everybody has a price you know, especially politicians.
I wouldn't care less if he did. Ring me up if he finds remote holes in cisco firmware and, instead of hacking the freaking bank of america he puts up an advisory. I would call that an ethically minded security expert, if I really had to use a label, and he would probably not have time to write reviews with the premise that he's a good guy.
Well, we could do a little better than wait for god and the angels to come and make assertions about the bible..if only the tampering with the original texts wasn't so blatantly obvious. Which version of the bible are you talking about? And how can writings that have been translated, fabricated, re-written, hidden, and largely lost be "free of error"? The bible(s) of today have very little in common with the ancient texts that were mostly burned by self-righteous popes early in biblical editorial history. And even THOSE were copied and inked in by people whose names we know very few of, and the whole process is just a non-scholarly and discretionary one. You literally have to trust in the unjustified judgment of a very limited number of people in a very murky historical setting that is not backed by other documentation..all in the name of "faith"..hence the valid historical analysis on the internet and elsewhere that show heavy skepticism of Jesus' existence.
But "divine trust" has it's merits: take the Quran for example. Now the effort in maintaining that was nowhere NEAR the amount of scholarly work put into maintaining the set of early muslim traditions of the prophet et al, where in contrast an entire science of narrative selection based on very fine consideration of the *people* involved, was used (and taught till this day). Funnily enough, Muslims consider the reliability of the Quran to be infinitely higher than any of the other texts, which are not considered divine in any way (as per the instructions of their prophet) and which are STILL usually not perfectly narrated, in that several very similar wordings are used for the same narration or "hadith". And if you know how to read Arabic, you quickly see why.. the hadith are the sayings and actions of men compiled by men, but the "divinely communicated" quran, despite being put on paper by humans, is very-difficult-to-tamper-with poetic prose. The quality of the latter in terms of linguistic expression is undeniably higher, and the text cannot be screwed around with without it starting to sound funny. If you disprove the authenticity of a few good hadith narrations, which are far higher in credibility than both new and old testaments, nobody is too upset about it. If you disprove a single verse in the entire quran, the religion collapses overnight.
Why are you even interested? Anybody who calls himself an "ethical hacker" is probably too much of a douchebag to have anything insightful to say about a piece of high quality software.
You know, I have respect for Richard Stallman. And I find it amusing when people call him a hippie or whatnot. But this guy really wears outfits like that in public? I mean he looks like he fell out of the VW van used to sell crystals on the way to the next Greatful Dead concert. Dude, you just don't get it - it's part of the culture. How the hell do you go about convincing the world that all software should be free and that the economics driving the MSFT stock is plain BS..while wearing a suit? Neckties don't cut this sort of stuff man, you need to stand out. facial hair, long mane, second-hand arabic/north african robe with bad choice in colors. You've got to shake the crowd, show them you mean business. If RMS wore normal human attire and used deodorant I wouldn't listen to a word he said - we all know that crap anyway. It's all about the spirit. Us and them. The cavemen and the borg. We live underground and draw solid computing standards up on cave walls and spread the source code and flowers to the world, while they ruin human civilization with sad, DRM'd, broken software. We die in shabby robes, they die drowned in lies. We prevail, information prevails.
But what I don't understand is why he refuses shampoo, pretty harmless I would've thunk. Oh well.
You are marked as off-topic, but I think the CIA and GWB know very well most details of the corrupt nature of America's political guests. Lavish welcomes for a guy who robs his country of billions are not a Good Thing(TM).
That's only 9 months of manufacturing, it took over a billion years of R&D to flesh out the design. Is this supposed to make me feel less or more confident in seeing Duke Nukem Forever in my lifetime?
but freedom ain't an "on/off" kind of thing, it's a "more/less" kind of thing. Yep, that much is true, but little big brothers that march across your screen are pretty much an on/off thing. American freedoms deteriorated largely due to a set of "emergency" type laws set by one administration, and some of them are most likely going to be revised or even removed in the next year or so because that's how free countries work - people discuss touchy things on media and politicians try to get elected by mixing truth with lies concerning how these things are going to happen. With china and most totalitarian states, you can't really give people the advice you've given Americans, because..well, because there is usually no way for anything to change, and discussions are cut short by that cute little character that pops up to warn you of the dangers of betraying the state.
Totalitarian regimes may at times have to accommodate the natural advance in the educational/idealogical status of their populations, but you can't really say that about any of the communist (or ex-soviet) states right now. If you were browsing this on myspace somehow from china, you would probably have a big red button to report me. Not kidding either - search slashdot for the story. And Americans let future politicians know their anger by parading in the streets and speaking on television and saying whacky things in the press and voicing their views all over the place. In Soviet Russia, politicians send messages to future demonstrators by publicly beating the current ones in the street with sticks. Freedom can be very black and white, I tell you.
In addition to that, they have hit the sweetest spots on both desktop and laptop markets with their high-end intel based hardware. I am no fanboy, used windows (games, dev) linux and BSD (most everything else) in the past, now I bought the second macbook pro model and I am blown away by the quality of the hardware. My god.. a REAL wireless card that actually supports passive monitoring? And a mid-to-high range nvidia 8600GT with enough speed and RAM to run anything graphical AND support Direct X 10 on Vista, which you can boot up natively like a charm with apple software? I tell you, it's a good laptop, and considering it has the absolute top of the line intel has to offer in terms of mobile processors, plus 2 gigs of main mem, plus all the normal fun stuff, it's worth the 2.5 thou. This is many times better than the crappy plastic dell, alienware and even Asus (which I hugely respect for quality engineering) will sell you. It's not just that the hardware is better, the bootcamp deal gives people al the motivation they need if they have the money. Yes, I'm still pretty sure I'm not a fanboy:)
Could it be that you are the exception to that rule? For most hacks, no. For work that goes into academic papers (I am a theorist, theory of computing..etc), yes. Also, whether or not it (proof) is put into practice is entirely irrelevant. As for your example, that was too simple. Try some spagetti code with induction and savor the aromas of confusion:)
Or else a zillion years from now, alien archaeologists on Mars will find an AOL CD blown as ejecta from the crater that wiped out a technologically advanced race on the 3rd planet. I can't believe you used "AOL CD" and "technologically advanced race" in the same sentence.
Belief in what? Gravitation as per current general-relativity taught in universities to physics grad students, or the simple fact that objects seem to fall towards earth as observed by human beings?
If you are talking about general relativity, it's status as a theory is very highly regarded and has withstood many tests (hence it's promotion beyond other hypotheses) but it contains various serious problems and difficult situations that are unsolvable with the current understanding of it. In fact, the system of equations are self-referential in places i believe, and Kurt Godel showed Einstein some tricks with self-referential mathematical systems that provenly yield demonstrable contradictions, and Einstein therefore reconsidered and finally doubted his theory as a result. And a few years from now we may consider solutions that simultaneously solve the dark matter/energy issues as well, so yeah, it is "just" a theory.
With evolution we can similarly either talk about whether it happened (this is pretty much indisputable) or how/why - a much more difficult question. It is difficult because it involves probabilistic events that are extremely difficult to simulate exactly, so people will be arguing about the possibility of all the successful combination of germline mutations happening on this planet being utterly random, for a long time to come. I , like many, am interested in that argument, particularly if people develop discrete computational power that can actually simulate a fast-forwarded small earth on all scales (planetary to nano). But our interest is overshadowed by disgust at the behavior of participants in these conversations (not you, just the typical others).
Love the math, dump the fleshy feelings, mathematics is the only [possible] truth.
Your goto can provide minimalist, computationally efficient and indeed pretty code, but it can also cause disasters. When writing big applications with hundreds of developers, it is difficult to coordinate/enforce proper usage of goto (which is really just a JMP instruction in the end) as you have done here, and avoid disastrous spaghetti code that jumps back and forth into snippets, making it a nightmare to trace, mathematically prove, or maintain.
You may think that things like break + a boolean flag might be less efficient, but with "break" your program counter always ends up right outside the iterative loop scope, whereas a goto JESUS_CHRIST_BAD_SHITE_HAPPENING is not always necessarily placed correctly and is arguably less meaningful/understandable. Standards are nice things - try to standardize good goto usage and you end up with something a lot like a break + check + break scenario to get out of nested statements.
[The author of this post understands the negligible effects of loss of heat solely through radiation in extremely short time periods, but encourages the reader to take a break and try to laugh].
Slashdot Mirror
Me too, but to them it comes off as arrogance. It's the "you don't know so shut up" attitude. Now you know why I never engage in these debates..simply pointless.
Theists think that the universe is a pretty freaking extraordinary occurrence, only possible through an extraordinary claim. A scientist's claim that everything just popped into existence, albeit as a tiny initial singularity, is far more unlikely to most people. This is why your logic here does not worry them too much.
I just don't get it. Why do people feel the need to express sentiments that are not useful in any way, do not provide grounds for further research by those who happen upon them, are clearly non acceptable by standards of civil behavior between human beings and in short are an invitation for vitriol? The latter is most important, because religion is one of those things that people actually live for (unlike many other causes that usually serve as short-term motivators) and so feelings here are pretty strong. We in the western world of today, when bored, always seem to value our freedom to insult a large number of diverse people in their face much more than the sensibility of respecting the very sensitive feelings of that large number of fellow human beings while communicating the "hatred" in a more sensible, logical form (e.g academic debate). Even if we disregard the special case here where the information was bound, by license agreement from a private company, to certain behavioral norms - it is not always wise to exercise all your rights in any context and at any time. Would you run naked in a European country that had no anti-nudity laws *if* you knew your future in-laws will be watching? You have a right to, and you might do it just to prove that very point, but it would be stupid. Don't be stupid. Relax. Be nice. This goes equally to both sides.
My friends work with the DoD and DoE, when you walk into the rooms where the servers are there are two big columns with public facing machines (and network circuitry) in one, while the real DoD servers are in another. They are not connected. Relax. Hacking into some stupid workstation that belongs to a politician's secretary is not a big problem given that microsoft has it's wonderful OS and software on all of them. Exploits go for 10 grand in some places..it's just a matter of finding the computer in question. Already you can see the IDS systems picked the intrusion up..they weren't even trying to hide themselves.
Meanwhile, it would be interesting to see how far a single mole operating the data centers could cause trouble by planting hardware. Almost everybody has a price you know, especially politicians.
I wouldn't care less if he did. Ring me up if he finds remote holes in cisco firmware and, instead of hacking the freaking bank of america he puts up an advisory. I would call that an ethically minded security expert, if I really had to use a label, and he would probably not have time to write reviews with the premise that he's a good guy.
Well, we could do a little better than wait for god and the angels to come and make assertions about the bible..if only the tampering with the original texts wasn't so blatantly obvious. Which version of the bible are you talking about? And how can writings that have been translated, fabricated, re-written, hidden, and largely lost be "free of error"? The bible(s) of today have very little in common with the ancient texts that were mostly burned by self-righteous popes early in biblical editorial history. And even THOSE were copied and inked in by people whose names we know very few of, and the whole process is just a non-scholarly and discretionary one. You literally have to trust in the unjustified judgment of a very limited number of people in a very murky historical setting that is not backed by other documentation..all in the name of "faith"..hence the valid historical analysis on the internet and elsewhere that show heavy skepticism of Jesus' existence.
But "divine trust" has it's merits: take the Quran for example. Now the effort in maintaining that was nowhere NEAR the amount of scholarly work put into maintaining the set of early muslim traditions of the prophet et al, where in contrast an entire science of narrative selection based on very fine consideration of the *people* involved, was used (and taught till this day). Funnily enough, Muslims consider the reliability of the Quran to be infinitely higher than any of the other texts, which are not considered divine in any way (as per the instructions of their prophet) and which are STILL usually not perfectly narrated, in that several very similar wordings are used for the same narration or "hadith". And if you know how to read Arabic, you quickly see why.. the hadith are the sayings and actions of men compiled by men, but the "divinely communicated" quran, despite being put on paper by humans, is very-difficult-to-tamper-with poetic prose. The quality of the latter in terms of linguistic expression is undeniably higher, and the text cannot be screwed around with without it starting to sound funny. If you disprove the authenticity of a few good hadith narrations, which are far higher in credibility than both new and old testaments, nobody is too upset about it. If you disprove a single verse in the entire quran, the religion collapses overnight.
Why are you even interested? Anybody who calls himself an "ethical hacker" is probably too much of a douchebag to have anything insightful to say about a piece of high quality software.
But what I don't understand is why he refuses shampoo, pretty harmless I would've thunk. Oh well.
You are marked as off-topic, but I think the CIA and GWB know very well most details of the corrupt nature of America's political guests. Lavish welcomes for a guy who robs his country of billions are not a Good Thing(TM).
No no, he's just saying we're all pretty much fucked.
This went wooosh on me. Please explain reference.
Heh, the word "he" in the above sentence is misleading, it had to have been a female lawyer.
Totalitarian regimes may at times have to accommodate the natural advance in the educational/idealogical status of their populations, but you can't really say that about any of the communist (or ex-soviet) states right now. If you were browsing this on myspace somehow from china, you would probably have a big red button to report me. Not kidding either - search slashdot for the story. And Americans let future politicians know their anger by parading in the streets and speaking on television and saying whacky things in the press and voicing their views all over the place. In Soviet Russia, politicians send messages to future demonstrators by publicly beating the current ones in the street with sticks. Freedom can be very black and white, I tell you.
PS: I hope you're not a Brit!
In addition to that, they have hit the sweetest spots on both desktop and laptop markets with their high-end intel based hardware. I am no fanboy, used windows (games, dev) linux and BSD (most everything else) in the past, now I bought the second macbook pro model and I am blown away by the quality of the hardware. My god.. a REAL wireless card that actually supports passive monitoring? And a mid-to-high range nvidia 8600GT with enough speed and RAM to run anything graphical AND support Direct X 10 on Vista, which you can boot up natively like a charm with apple software? I tell you, it's a good laptop, and considering it has the absolute top of the line intel has to offer in terms of mobile processors, plus 2 gigs of main mem, plus all the normal fun stuff, it's worth the 2.5 thou. This is many times better than the crappy plastic dell, alienware and even Asus (which I hugely respect for quality engineering) will sell you. It's not just that the hardware is better, the bootcamp deal gives people al the motivation they need if they have the money. Yes, I'm still pretty sure I'm not a fanboy :)
But if it's in a box, what good is it? Why not use a 4 screen simulated hologram? The coolness factor reduces to zero if it is contained.
And you could initiate mating festivals by playing pr0n. Pr0n from the heavens! You know you like it..
In other words... it's in your list of the 5 best OSS projects.
(sorry) Mod parent up! In security related topics nitpicking is encouraged. No apology needed.
PS: Can we have the list please? They are always interesting and provide good flamewar material.
Belief in what? Gravitation as per current general-relativity taught in universities to physics grad students, or the simple fact that objects seem to fall towards earth as observed by human beings?
If you are talking about general relativity, it's status as a theory is very highly regarded and has withstood many tests (hence it's promotion beyond other hypotheses) but it contains various serious problems and difficult situations that are unsolvable with the current understanding of it. In fact, the system of equations are self-referential in places i believe, and Kurt Godel showed Einstein some tricks with self-referential mathematical systems that provenly yield demonstrable contradictions, and Einstein therefore reconsidered and finally doubted his theory as a result. And a few years from now we may consider solutions that simultaneously solve the dark matter/energy issues as well, so yeah, it is "just" a theory.
With evolution we can similarly either talk about whether it happened (this is pretty much indisputable) or how/why - a much more difficult question. It is difficult because it involves probabilistic events that are extremely difficult to simulate exactly, so people will be arguing about the possibility of all the successful combination of germline mutations happening on this planet being utterly random, for a long time to come. I , like many, am interested in that argument, particularly if people develop discrete computational power that can actually simulate a fast-forwarded small earth on all scales (planetary to nano). But our interest is overshadowed by disgust at the behavior of participants in these conversations (not you, just the typical others).
Love the math, dump the fleshy feelings, mathematics is the only [possible] truth.
Your goto can provide minimalist, computationally efficient and indeed pretty code, but it can also cause disasters. When writing big applications with hundreds of developers, it is difficult to coordinate/enforce proper usage of goto (which is really just a JMP instruction in the end) as you have done here, and avoid disastrous spaghetti code that jumps back and forth into snippets, making it a nightmare to trace, mathematically prove, or maintain.
You may think that things like break + a boolean flag might be less efficient, but with "break" your program counter always ends up right outside the iterative loop scope, whereas a goto JESUS_CHRIST_BAD_SHITE_HAPPENING is not always necessarily placed correctly and is arguably less meaningful/understandable. Standards are nice things - try to standardize good goto usage and you end up with something a lot like a break + check + break scenario to get out of nested statements.
..hear your frozen dick fall off.
[The author of this post understands the negligible effects of loss of heat solely through radiation in extremely short time periods, but encourages the reader to take a break and try to laugh].
Save rather than slaughter? I find your disregard for our alien overlords' lives utterly disgusting!
*picks up phone and calls PETA. Or something.*
I'm sorry, should have written nucleus/nucleoid. Are you happy now, or does the additional membrane of the nucleus change the whole argument?