Posts by seattleniceguy

49

Creationist Answer Please

by skyman in

yesterday there was a post that made me think.

i have a question for you.

i think creationist are ruled by emotion and not by provable facts.

seattleniceguy

Ezekiel,

For example: try to prove to me that we are not "inside the Matrix." You can't! Is that a reason to believe that the movies are non-fiction?

That is a very good example of an unfalsifiable claim. It's much better than the one I currently use because it's concise and most people are aware of the general framework. Up until now, I've had to demonstrate an unfalsifiable claim with some example about someone who believes the universe exists only in his mind, or somesuch, but it always comes off seeming a bit vague. This is a very good example. Thanks!

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47

Anyone pronouncing the wicked one righteous.........

by defd in

and anyone pronouncing the righteous one wicked-even both of them are something detestble to jehovah, says proverbs 17:15. amid a world that is becoming entrenched in its opposition to god, it would be wise for us to look at our own attitude and values.

periodically, we should examine ourselves to make sure we are not gradually drifting away from jehovahs thinking and standards.

we might for example ask ourselves: have i become more tolerant of practices that god condemns?

seattleniceguy

Amid a world that is becoming entrenched in its opposition to God

Gimme a break. The WT view of the world is so incredibly skewed!

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22

Fun with GUIDs * Geek Topic Advisory *

by Elsewhere in

jw
friends

recently i worked on a db file storage system that saved files under guid id's.

i became curious what the odds were of the db accidentally generating a duplicate guid for two different files, so i did the math.. here is what i found:.

number of possible 128bit guids:.

seattleniceguy

Pole

As for the "even" distribution I guess we need to be aware that there are many different "even" distributions of the probability function. So define evenness ;-)

I just meant that your random number generator would obviously suffer if it tended to clump in certain areas, since a person running a brute force attack, for example, could focus in the areas where the numbers were more likely to be.

What is a Gaussian distribution, by the way?

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14

New MSN search

by seattleniceguy in

jw
friends

now, anyone who knows me knows that i am a major fan of google.

google is great, google is changing the world, yadda yadda yadda.. but for once, i really have to give it up for the boys at microsoft.

their new search engine has some very cool features.. go to http://search.msn.com.

seattleniceguy

the_classicist

Just another way for MS to spy on us. First they check for illegal software and whatever else they feel like with their Windows Genuine Advantage. Now they can tell what things we surf on the internet.

Uh...you might want to simmer down and read up on these things. What you wrote is almost entirely nonsensical.

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22

Fun with GUIDs * Geek Topic Advisory *

by Elsewhere in

jw
friends

recently i worked on a db file storage system that saved files under guid id's.

i became curious what the odds were of the db accidentally generating a duplicate guid for two different files, so i did the math.. here is what i found:.

number of possible 128bit guids:.

seattleniceguy

I've heard that GUIDs are pseudo-random. So are all "random" numbers generated by compilers. Anyone know why?

As Elsewhere points out, the compiler does not generate random numbers, as it would be a very bad design to literalize your "random" number in the compiled code! :-)

As to the question of why random numbers are merely pseudo-random, it's because a computer is a deterministic machine and has no way of creating anything by chance. The best we can hope for are numbers that are a) unpredictable and b) fairly evenly distributed through a the problem space (that is, if we are generating numbers between 0 and 1, hopefully there is no "clumping" but the numbers are scattered evenly throughout the space).

I was unaware that the sin function is used, but that makes sense since it is a cyclical function that will always produce a number between given bounds (-1 and 1 in this case) no matter what the input, and the results are hard to predict, yet evenly distributed. Cool!

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22

Fun with GUIDs * Geek Topic Advisory *

by Elsewhere in

jw
friends

recently i worked on a db file storage system that saved files under guid id's.

i became curious what the odds were of the db accidentally generating a duplicate guid for two different files, so i did the math.. here is what i found:.

number of possible 128bit guids:.

seattleniceguy

Hmm...interesting. It's weird that they took the MAC address out altogether, though. They could have hashed it and still achieved the same effect of guaranteeing uniqueness. Then again, the hash results would have been too long, I suppose. Thanks for the info!

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14

New MSN search

by seattleniceguy in

jw
friends

now, anyone who knows me knows that i am a major fan of google.

google is great, google is changing the world, yadda yadda yadda.. but for once, i really have to give it up for the boys at microsoft.

their new search engine has some very cool features.. go to http://search.msn.com.

seattleniceguy

Okay. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I am a major fan of Google. Google is great, Google is changing the world, yadda yadda yadda.

But for once, I really have to give it up for the boys at Microsoft. Their new search engine has some very cool features.

Go to http://search.msn.com

You can ask natural language questions that have straightforward factual answers, and get a definitive anwser from Encarta. For example, try:

What is the longest river in the world?
What is the population of Turkey?
Who was the third US President?
When was Einstein born?

It can't figure out everything, but it does a remarkable job. But that's not it. Try giving it math problems:

What is 4 + 9? (easy stuff, right)
What is 4 + 9 * 3? (it understands order of operations!)
What is the square root of 13?
What is tan 45? (trig functions!)

Search engines that refer you to web pages are great. But there's something exciting about having definite answers from an encyclopedic source right there on the results page. Way to go, MS!

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22

Fun with GUIDs * Geek Topic Advisory *

by Elsewhere in

jw
friends

recently i worked on a db file storage system that saved files under guid id's.

i became curious what the odds were of the db accidentally generating a duplicate guid for two different files, so i did the math.. here is what i found:.

number of possible 128bit guids:.

seattleniceguy

Elsewhere, from what I understand, GUIDs are not actually random. They are based on several unique properties of your hardware, such as your MAC address, which automatically uniquifies the GUID to your particular box, so we can rule out duplicates by any other system in the universe. Then, the time at the moment of GUID generation plays a role, so we can rule out duplicates by your box at any other moment in time. And finally, I think it is uniquified further by a random element, which uniquifies the GUID within the smallest unit of time granularity for the system clock.

But it's funny that you posted this because I was just thinking about posting a question on the same topic. Because GUIDs are not random, I wonder if it would be possible to predict other GUIDs created by the same box within a particular time frame. That is, if we know GUID A was produced on a particular box on a particular date, is it possible to predict a namespace of other GUIDs that that box would produce?

Because the namespace is so large, I tend to think that it is not feasible. Does anyone else know anything about this?

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23

My turn then.. H-H-Hello?

by Wax:on in

jw
friends

well seems like i should introduce myself istead of reading everybody elses posts!

i've just started trawling through all the backlog of varied posts and think there are some very interesting characters and views.

(those aposta fests are unbelievable man!

seattleniceguy

Welcome, wax on!

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15

Awake! proves existence of God and disproves evolution

by IronGland in

jw
friends

wickedness does not in itself prove that god does not exist.

to illustrate: a man may design a knife to be used to carve meat.

a customer may purchase the knife and use it, not to carve meat, but to commit murder.

seattleniceguy

I know this has already been capably discussed above me, but I just had to pipe in on the WT's absurd handling of evolution here:

For most people, the only alternative to belief in God is belief in evolution.

This is their first logical error. They set up a dichotomy: belief in God or evolution. Notice that they base this dichotomy on what "most people" believe, as if this has any bearing on reality. Here are the problems with this sentence:

In the first place, it doesn't matter what most people believe. Indeed, the WT itself teaches that most people are wrong about almost everything, so appealing to the popular view is nonsensical.
Even if the only two possible explanations for life as we know it are God and evolution, it is not a dichotomy. Both could be true, for example. Evolution does not have to be an "alternative to belief in God."
It is possible that neither God nor evolution is true. Even if we were to disprove evolution, belief in God would not be proven.

Evolutionists teach "survival of the fittest"—that humans and animals compete within their kinds for survival.

As already touched upon, this is an extraordinary simplification. Life competes within an environment for available resources. This competition is sometimes between species, and sometimes between members of the same species.

The fittest live; the weakest die. That is the natural order of things, they say.

The proposition that the fittest survive while the weakest die is self-evident. Anyone who studies biology for more than a moment will see that it is, in fact, the natural order of things. Why does WT treat this fact with such disdain?

But if it is "natural" for the weak to die in order to make room for the strong, how can we explain the fact that, like the Swedish man, some strong humans are moved at the sight of the suffering of their fellowman?

Already treated well by the posters above me. Many animals, such as humans, live in groups in which helping others in the group aids the survivability of everyone in the group. This does not present a problem for evolution.

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