Recently, Google responded to a letter written by privacy experts that urged the company to strengthen it’s focus on creating secure web applications.
Alma Whitten responded on Googles behalf, saying that Google is trialing https encryption methods for implementation in Gmail and other google apps.
Hooray!
I suspect these trials efforts apply to Google Wave as well.
The renowned biologist Charles Darwin, in his book The Origin of species, pointed to three culprits that make evolution inevitable:
Variation
If you have variation within a species (Different sized beaks, different sized turtle shells, etc.)…
Selection
And if you have a struggle to survive (wonder why elephants aren’t wondering all over the planet?)…
Heredity
And if the traits and/or survival skills are passed down to new members of a species over a time…
Then…
The later generations of a species would be better adapted to the environment then their parents.
If you have these three behaviors, then you MUST get evolution, or as Philosopher Daniel Dennet put it:
“Design out of chaos, without the aide of mind.”
In this world there is a great deal of religious conflict between people of differing religious beliefs and between believers and nonbelievers. But these groups can all come together as one and express the same sentiment concerning their (lack of) belief in the Goddess N’da.
Our creed concerning the Goddess N’Da is as follows:
There is no rational basis to believe in the Goddess N’Da.
We claim that everyone, no matter what their other beliefs may be, can agree with this creed.
We will now outline some support for the above creed.
When we look at the usual pillars of faith, we can see little reason for belief in N’Da.
Based on this evidence, there appears to be no reasonable basis for anyone to believe in the Goddess N’Da. She is mentioned in no historic records, and appears to have had no followers at any time in the past. No miracles have been ascribed to her, no one is seen to pray to her, and no one has claimed to have performed any acts under her influence.
Some people might argue that new religions arise over time, new gods appear and old ones appear to lose followers and die. According to such an argument, the lack of any past support for the Goddess N’Da may only be a sign that the earth was not yet ready for any revelation at all about her existence. In such a worldview, other religions may be seen as preparing the way for her.
A skeptic might wonder “Why Now?” and “Why N’Da?”. Before anyone can reasonably believe in the Goddess N’Da, it seems sensible to wait until there is some more concrete basis for belief (e.g., sacred texts, known followers, miracles or other supernatural occurrences attributed to the Goddess N’Da, claimed consequences for nonbelief, rewards for belief).
Some people say that to believe without any evidence whatsoever is a test of faith, and on that basis belief in the Goddess N’da would appear to be an act of profound faith. But similar or greater faith would be required to believe that crows are really aliens or that cushions are imbued with the spirits of the dead. There appears to be no good reason to choose to believe in the Goddess N’da compared to any other supernatural force or entity.
Some people would claim that although external evidence is not required for faith, they have internal evidence to support their beliefs. They might say that one way to know the reality of the Goddess N’Da is simply to enter a contemplative state and seek revelation. For example, after you have read this paragraph and before reading the next one, close your eyes, relax, breathe slowly and deeply, focus, and take a few minutes to seek enlightenment about the Goddess N’Da. Ask her to reveal herself to you. This feeling of enlightenment can arrive as tingle that slowly builds across your body, a presence or eerie sensation, or simply a feeling of being loved. (Feel free to take a moment now and seek that sensation.)
_________________________________________________________________
Most people will feel something when they try the above exercise if they focus properly, given an appropriate open frame of mind, but we should not assume that they have actually felt the love of the Goddess N’Da. There are other, more rational, explanations, involving suggestion. No matter how profound the feeling appears to be (and for some people, the results can be dramatic), we can almost always explain those results as simply the result of suggestion.
Of course, one might ask why anyone would take the time to refute the existence of a nonexistent God with no known followers, and that doing so is clearly suspicious. “Why,” they might ask, “do they want us not to believe?”. A typical conspiracy explanation would be that followers of the Goddess N’Da have as a tenet of their faith the requirement that they only argue against the existence of the Goddess N’Da, in which case, vast numbers of people (including self-professed atheists!) could secretly be followers of the Goddess N’Da. Similarly, as Donald Rumsfeld said, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” so the fact that there are no public records of N’Da showing her power and no public sacred texts does not mean that these things do not exist.
Like most conspiracy theories, this theory cannot easily be refuted, but Occam’s Razor suggests that given multiple explanations, we should prefer the simplest one. Thus, rather than suppose that there are lots of people who believe in the Goddess N’Da but do not admit it, which is somewhat paranoid, it is simpler to suppose that most people do not believe in the Goddess N’Da.
In the creed, it merely states that there is no rational basis to believe in the Goddess N’Da. Some people might be willing to go further and explicitly state that the Goddess N’Da does not exist (gnostic viewpoint). Our suggested creed is more inclusive since it is accessible to agnostics who might be skeptical about the Goddess N’Da, but who, nevertheless, cannot completely rule out the possibility of her existence.
One last unresolved question that remains is one we raised in the conspiracy section: If there is no Goddess N’Da, why talk about her at all? We might also note that the entire tone of this document is careful to avoid making an outright statement on the existence of the Goddess N’Da, which allows the possibility that its author(s) actually (secretly) believe.
In this case, Occam’s Razor would still lead us to prefer the explanation that this page is an elaborate joke or thought experiment written by one individual than that the Goddess N’Da is the one true god who demands that most patience and faith, whose love is received in private contemplation, and whose existence must never be acknowledged except to oneself.
Reposted from: http://nda.jottit.com/
I often hear the argument that the universe is too “ordered” or too “perfect” for it’s creation to have been an “accidental” or a “random” event. This argument makes absolutely no sense to me.
First of all. Our concept of “order” comes from observing reality. What would a “disorderly” universe look like? Perhaps it would a universe where asteroids impact astral bodies hundreds of times per hour, forever and ever and ever, or maybe it would be a universe where 99.9% of the astral bodies formed by its creation would kill any and all carbon-based lifeforms instantly. Or maybe it would be a universe with voids all over it that consist of absolute nothingness, or infinitely dense holes in the fabric of space that absorb anything they can reach. Or maybe it would be a universe where entire moons are composed of rivers of methane flowing over frozen water. Maybe it would be a universe where most planetary orbits are unstable, or where less than 3% of gaseous bodies in space form a star. Or maybe it would a universe where many galaxies come dangerously close to a supernova, or where our own galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. Or a disorderly universe might be one that expands for trillions upon trillions of years until the temperature of the universe is so low that it cannot sustain life or motion at all.
Too bad all of the above mentioned phenomena are part of the universe we live in. To call this universe, and Earth, and humans “too perfect” to have been an accident, is just a ridiculously egotistical claim. This universe is obviously not designed for human life, nor was Earth specifically designed to host human life, It would be more accurate to say that the Earth’s conditions gave way to the evolution of species, and one of those species happened to be humans. Even our survival has been threatened in the past by nature, and still to this day, Earth is not a friendly environment, what with the tsunamis that kill 200 thousand people, earth quakes that destroy entire ecosystems, and volcanic eruptions that wipe out entire cultures. Also consider that it took 3.5 billion years before multi-cellular life appeared on the planet, and that humans aren’t adapted for 2/3 of the Earth surface. Also the Ratio of extinct life to surviving life, it’s 99:1, that is, 99% of known species that have occupied the Earth, are now extinct. What life there is today, is but 1% of life that could have been.
A “disorderly” universe cannot exist. The intelligent life of any universe would derive from their observations, an order (not, the order) that lets them inquire about it.
More on the egotism of the “fine-tuning” argument
To think that Humans are physiologically or communicatively perfect as a species is also a terribly ignorant and egotistical claim. Consider that a crocidile can eat a meal a month and be perfectly fit, whereas, because of our warm-blooded nature, humans have to eat constantly. The human eye has a narrow view of the elecromagnetic spectrum. (did you know dolphins use echolocation to see? A dolphin can see through solid objects). We age to death, contracting cancer, alzheimers, and deteriorating senses along the way. Consider that close to 40% of birth defects are genetic (perfect?! lol!), and around 60 percent are unknown causes. There are some cases where a fetus developes with it’s heart outside of it’s body, or is missing a pelvis, or their eyes are attached to each other or their head is missing. Also consider that humans eat, drink and breath through the same hole in our body, garuanteeing that some percent of people will choke in their life time. My favorite “design” flaw is that humans dispose of waste through the same holes that we use for reproduction, an “Entertainment center in the middle of a sewage complex”, as Neil deGrasse Tyson put it.
Many people assume that Earth was designed for humans and that the universe is orderly. You can identify a big ego by asking this question:
Doesn’t the universe make you feel small?
Of course, an egotistical response would be to say that it does make you feel small. That means that you had a preconceived notion that you and your species were some how special.
“There are people who say ‘this makes me feel small because I need to see the immensity of the cosmos’ and I say ‘no, you’re not thinking about it the right way’…When I look up in the universe, I feel large [as opposed to small]…I know the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos, and it’s our fifteen pounds of brain matter that figured this out!…”
Chance
One could say that the chances of Earth being where it is are low. That’s irrelevant. The fact is, the universe rolled a dice and the result formed us where we are. It could have had a different result, one that didn’t form us, or Earth, but then, what would that question matter?
Consider the other 5 recipes that didn’t get to exist, do you think they’re complaining?
or rather, that’s what I’ve observed.
A good argument is based on a sound premise(s) and a proposition that reflects the premise presented.
I conclude X based on reasons A, B, and C.
If you want to argue a point, you need to make sure that reasons A, B, and C:
1. are logically sound
2. provide reasonable support for proposition X
If you’re premises strongly support your proposition, then you have a good argument. Logic plays a huge role in successful argumentation, but many times, people forget to consider the strength of their premises before arriving at a conclusion, or sometimes, they don’t even consider a premise when arriving at a conclusion (i.e. insults/quarrels).
I would venture to say that the reason there is such tension between opposing views on issues such as abortion rights, illegal immigration, religion, Constitutional interpretation, or gun ownership, is because of a lack of reason and/or logic in the arguments. I’m not saying that the middle ground in the soundest option in any of these issues, but rather, I’m saying that people tend to become “sticky” with their opinions, even in the face of sufficient evidence that disproves their position. People apply emotional bias to their positions on many issues, and so they don’t research, or they don’t acknowledge that opposing views might not be entirely incorrect.
Some people are so entrenched in their beliefs that nearly every premise they make is logically flawed.
But everyone has argued without reason or logic, we are all very guilty of having fallacious premises and propositions.
Abortion is murder…
Obama is a socialist…
God created the universe…
My religion is the right one…
The Illuminati exist…
The September 11th attacks were an inside job…
Only stupid people support the Iranian “revolution”…
God cured X disease…
Free software is socialistic…
a stolen copy represents a lost sale…
Video games cause real-world violence…
Terrorism is a great threat…
and many more. These are propositions, some are impractical, some are viable, some are unprovable, and many of them are weak.
A word of advice: Don’t try to defend a moot point (Stupid people supporting “revolution”, for instance) and don’t try to prove something that is inherently unprovable (religion for instance). Your argument will inevitably be weak, defeated, or serve only to inflame opposing opinions.
But If you hold a position on a viable issue, make sure the premises for your opinion are strong, and maintain an open mind when confronted with opposing views. Make sure you have a strong counter-argument before you begin pointing out the flaws in the opposition. If you aren’t careful, you may end up resorted to ad hominem or fallacious appeals to emotion, or authority, or fear, or beliefs.
A person is not stupid simply because they believe in something that you don’t.
A belief is not stupid simply because you don’t like the person who believes in it.
Information flowing out of Iran has slowed to a trickle because of the the governments intense control over the Internet. The government has banned usage of social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube, and is monitoring traffic to ensure suppression. But many Iranians are getting around those blocks by browsing over an encrypted network call The Onion Router (Tor). The problem is, Tor relies on bandwidth from it’s users, and since it’s use is not as widespread as regular Internet traffic, users experience very slow transfer speeds when using the Internet. The more Tor relays (bandwidth donators) there are, the faster the Tor network becomes, so you can help Iran’s Internet users browse safely by becoming a Tor Relay, click on the link above the “Featured Topic” section to download a flyer about Tor relays that contains links to all the information you need to help out.
P.S. - please distribute the flyer whenever and where ever you can.
Thanks to user “Cogs” at the WhyWeProtest forums for making the original flyer.
Check out the link below to see more!
The game world
The ME universe is huge, detailed, and most interestingly, it’s a plausible universe. Earth is overcrowded and humans are only a recent addition to the collection of alien species. The level of detail that went into this
game is comparable only to the Knights of the Old Republic universe. The biggest problem I had with the game world were the conversations. They all seemed very simplistic. Every time I talked to an alien, it felt like I was stuck in one of those awkwardly boring conversations you have with a new coworker or the lab partner you’ve never met before. It was just a very 2D experience. It was the lack of emotion in their voices, coupled with the static camera and the lack of body language from my characters as well as the npc.
The gameplay
There isn’t much to say about gameplay outside of combat, because there isn’t much to it. Most of the time spent on the colonies and at the citadel consisted of fetch quests, and finding stuff. But the combat is where the game shines the most. Each weapon feels very satisfying when you use it, the grenades are fun to use because there is no arc on the throw, and you can decide when to detonate it. The Biotic powers are excellently done, and drastically improve your odds of survival in combat. Combat does have a few drawbacks. Your AI sqaud seems to be afraid of the trigger. They don’t fire their weapons very much at all, and they’ll let an enemy run right pass them, they won’t fire on them or punch them. The combat is far from tactical, and that’s a let down for me. Commanding your squad is almost pointless because if you send them into the fray, they’ll just let the enemy mow them down. If squad tactics were anything like a Brother in Arms game or Freedom Fighters, it would work better. If the AI actually did what you told them, then the pause mode (spacebar) would be extremely nice, no issues otherwise.
I’ve read about some of the PC versions (my review) improvements over the Xbox 360 version, and I’m really glad I didn’t get the 360 version. From Gamespot:
“The inventory system is much easier to manage with a mouse and keyboard, and long lists of items won’t reset to the top every time you sell something near the bottom. The Mako vehicle sequences are easier to manage thanks to the implementation of dedicated forward and reverse buttons in place of the 360 version’s viewpoint-dependent controls. A new hacking and decrypting minigame, in place of the old button-matching one, is both more interesting and more suited to the game: You must move a small arrow through concentric circles to reach the core while avoiding stationary and rotating barriers. It’s generally easy to accomplish once you get the hang of it, but the time limit and tricky perspective shifting help keep it entertaining. Keyboard hotkeys allow quick access to the map and squad upgrade screens, and the quicksave button is a great way to ensure you won’t have to do too much backtracking. They aren’t big changes, but the aggregate benefit is definitely noticeable.”
Fatal Flaw
For me anyway, it seems like Bioware’s formula is fatally flawed. Mass Effect wants to tell a grand story while incorporating fun, progressive gameplay, but the two goals don’t feel like they fit together in Mass Effect, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, giving the player dialogue options doesn’t help the immersiveness of the story. In my opinion it
dehumanizes Shepard, by making him quite literally a puppet for the player. And one might argue that dialogue options are an attempt to make the player feel like they are the character, but there is no getting around the fact that players know that to be false. It’s programmed into a gamers head, that if the game is third person, then they are controlling a character, rather than being a character. The game may have turned out better if there were no dialogue options. One could argue that dialogue options leave no room for character development either.
Secondly, when the character is solely responsible for stopping the Geth, Sarin, and a species of ancient cybernetic beings from destroying all life in the galaxy, a distracting sidequest better be really really important. But in Mass Effect, most of the side quests are completely irrelevant to the main quest, and that fact severely damages the story. No, I don’t want to scan 21 keepers when there is a traiterous alien trying to destroy all life in the galaxy. It seems like the main quest just waits for the player in Mass Effect.
My experience as a DM has taught me this lesson. If you want a main quest, then focus solely on the main quest, ensure that all the side quests progress the plot of the main quest, and ensure that the players ignore distracting quests (by not creating them). If you want an expansive game, then don’t have a main quest.
Overall, I give Mass Effect an 8/10
Ad hominem - “argument against the man”
Basically, ad hominem is the logical fallacy in which a persons claims are dismissed as false or incorrect because there is something objectionable about the person making the claims.
an example of a simple, and all-too-common ad hominem argument:
“Athiesm is bad.”
“Stalin was an athiest.”
“Therefore, Stalin is bad.”
Now, isn’t that a ridiculously unfair judgement? The example above illustrates a humans natural inclination toward bias. Bob might hold the belief that athiesm is bad, but if he applies that bias toward another persons claims, he is commiting a logical fallacy. It’s inaccurate to claim that a person is bad if they are athiest.
I hate jews with a fiery passion. Iran is a nice place to live.
Of course, I don’t hate jews, but if I did, and if you knew that I did, and if you found that objectionable, how would you interpret my claim that Iran is a nice place to live?
An ad hominem argument might be that Iran is not a nice place to live, because a Jew-hater claimed that. To take that further, one might assume that my claim is indicative of sympathy for Mamoud Ahmaddinejad.
This fallacy exists all over the place. But lets not assume that ad hominem should be completely avoided in all cases. Certainly, in intellectual discourse, it needs to be avoided, but in legal discourse, it’s useful. When a criminal suspect makes a claim, the reliability of that claim is automatically disputed (guilty until proven innocent? kind of) , and legal experts need to work to examine the claim and find evidence of it before judging it’s accuracy.
Next time a political debate happens, keep this fallacy in mind. Watch Bill Orielly’s or Keith Olbermann’s show, with this fallacy in mind. Find issues of high contention (abortion, scientology, athiesm vs. creationism, terrorism) and examine the popular arguments on both sides. You’ll probably want to face-palm after an in depth look.
I’ve noticed, in extreme cases, people will literally begin to associate a persons thirst for knowledge as an elitist trait. Or people will assume that if anyone doubts a certain claim or desires to be reasonable with a certain claim, they are stupid, or lost, or sinful, or wrong.
Some more information on ad hominem:
root vs. user
You’ve no doubt heard the rumors that Linux (or Mac OS) doesn’t get viruses. You’ve probably come across the rumor that Linux is more secure because of the way it’s built.
Those rumors are true, for the most part. But, specifically why are they true?
One of the biggest reasons Linux doesn’t get viruses is because of the way user accounts are set up. When you create an account in almost any Linux distro, you’re created a user account, which has limited privilages. It is the root user that can alter the Operating Systems guts.
In a server environment (an office or school), the only person who has access to the root account is the System Administrator. In a Home environment, since you personally installed the Linux OS onto your computer, you get to choose a password for accessing the root account, but the default is still the user account.
So, as a user, you have basic privilages, and you have access to only certain files in the Operating system. The privilages of a user account are almost always sufficient for the average computer user. The root account allows access to all files, including the important files that the OS uses, and you can perform certain functions like partitioning hard disks, installing software, or adjusting firewall settings.
This seperation of privilages makes Linux a tough environment for viruses to reproduce in, given that the default user account’s file access privilages are limited to non-critical files. Attacking the root account is extremely difficult, particularly if you have a good password, and a little bit of encryption; a firewall like SELinux also helps to identify “illegal” tasks, like when an application tries to run in root without telling the user.
“But open-source code is more insecure because all the source is free for the virus makers to exploit!”
If you haven’t heard that argument, I’d be surprised. Well, let’s set the record straight.
The argument that open-source is less secure because it’s open, is self-defeating. In fact, open source is more secure, because it’s open. How can you hide a virus inside an application if all the code is open for anyone to see? Because it’s open source, a virus would be spotted before the app is even close to public release, and when it is released, thousands upon thousands of developers will examine the code before deploying the app for their own purposes.
The root account/user account separation, along with the open-source nature of Linux is what makes it virus free. That’s not saying a virus can’t happen, but Linux is part of an ecosystem that is extremely unfriendly to a virus.
Some might add that another reason Linux is virus free is because of it’s small market share, but I really don’t think that has anything to do with. Linux could have 100% market share, and as long as every part of the OS is open-source, viruses will not get far.
