Come again?

Wow. Now I know what these 'evolving' spam strategies are like. Pleased to meet you, you adaptive scum.

Well said - and the dice all seem to fall into configurations that are just as probable as any other configurations when you coarse-grain, but which are actually little 'miracles' when you look at them in detail. To be specific, the probability of the entropy changes that occur when 'God' plays dice are far beyond the possible. So Einstein was right, God isn't really playing dice, he *knows* where the dice is going.

As a further note, reducing entropy to a previously determined state is called erasure (of the information carried by the system). The heavens are doing some weird stuff with us, that's for sure!

Have a great night.

Now you're talking.

Welcome to the new world, where you and the machine are almost one. There is no way the prosecution can prove your intent, because everything you do to the machine can be replicated by intelligent software. The government has to both have complete disregard for your machine's privacy and your own privacy, possibly even your own mind, to give a meaningful verdict, hence my reference to Big Brother. The GP was right that the laws are therefore draconian and very stupid, in a free society.

In the case of physical harm, I understand that you have waived your privacy rights and the government can do what they want. But to have a file on your computer being possible grounds for your freedom and privacy to be confiscated.. that's just silly.

You are right about being nice. I just added the karma bit to motivate you in case you didn't think that way. I like Playing God on the internet, when I'm bored ;)

It would be funny if the GP was the insightful one and you were the arrogant nitpicker who doesn't get it, eh?

He is saying that your having a tool like nmap is possibly dangerous, because something like distribution of said tool (which is downright horrible of course, way to go UK) can get you in trouble. In the digital world, as you well know, free distribution can occur with a copy and paste command. So he is saying that by having the tool, you are a copy and paste command away from being in trouble with Big Brother, and he may be right. Also note that if you have malware or a badly configured filesharing program, you don't even need to copy paste to be a criminal.

Be nice. It's good karma.

The UN is there to give the illusion of universal order and support the notion of peaceful co-existence between all nations on the planet. Just because it's badly organized and involves stupid people doesn't mean it has a noble goal. I wouldn't want us to leave it.. as long as we are not expending too many resources on its projects.

This idea is so mind-numbingly silly for anyone who has been through a serious CS major that it blows my mind.

Have you never done an operating systems course? Have you never had to mess with the internals of an OS and write modules for it? Have you never had a proper hands-on security course where you need to have uniformity across machines for the various teams involved? People can argue that virtualization solves this, because you can run vmware on any laptop, for instance. But for some things you need to have direct access to hardware, particularly hardware that you can mess with.

Plus, you need a place to eat. Where would your mess hall be? A friggin cafeteria? Pffft.

Or at everyone's mercy ;)

Things like OpenBSD are the best for security not only because they are designed specifically with it in mind, but because the people working on it are of a limited, genuine species. With that said, it is probably better to be at 'everyone's mercy' than to be at the mercy of corporations who only want your money. It doesn't matter that the people inside them may want your admiration and recognition. It matters very little, at least. The corporations are who you deal with in the end. :(

Look, we don't hate you for what you write - it may well be true. It just has nothing to do with this story, OK? It really is offtopic. In fact I agree with a lot of what you wrote (and disagree with some twisted facts too) but I think the moderators are right modding you down to hell, and maybe banning your IP range. You are annoying people. Annoyed people don't listen. Find a forum to discuss this in a sane way and people might listen.

You are very correct, and this is the heart of the issue for the digital media arguments on copyrights, pricing and so on. It used to be that the tangible products carried the value, and many of us who understand technology and what it really is, therefore, are attached to the tangible product mode of thought. Information should be free, discs can be whatever the hell you want to charge me. Just don't charge me for the info. Charge me for the disc. I can back up the disk and reproduce it on almost free discs, and your charging me for YOUR disc would still be fair.

This is in the utopian universe. In our non-utopian universe, the market does not want to understand this.

VMWare's basic product has been made completely free (as in beer) last summer. You don't have to invest anything except time.

Unless you are referring to the slavery of being addicted to games now that we can freely play them, I don't think your Orwellian quote makes sense.

It was a conspiracy, okay? Aliens. And Jews. Jewish Communists, actually. They aboard the ship, saw warning from the submarine officer and pulled the brakes on the ship because he made a bad joke (and sounded a little Arab). And the CIA had the whole thing on tape and we will never know.

Your vigilance however is highly appreciated. Without people always on the guard like this, submarine cowboys will be spooning every other vessel in the water for craps and giggles.

yours truly,
the naive people

The universe seems mathematical if you use mathematics. If you wear blue glasses, the sun itself is blue.

But the sun is round, no matter what color glasses you wear.

You can choose another mathematical system than the one in use by most people today, define a new set of axioms, and as long as everything is *logical* (i.e., contained by logic) then you will be able to describe the universe, until you run into problems with mathematics itself (godel..etc).

What is so cool about the universe is that logic is universal - independent of us silly little creatures. It is 'out there'. Mathematics is the science of truth, and so it is quite possible to say the universe is as it is because it is the physical embodiment of that.. math necessitates physics. Nobody here is trying to claim that physics necessitates math, even though that is what the scientific method has been following for many a year now.

Your homepage just got slashdotted. It's time to upgrade your server, dude.