Ambulance chasing at its best?
Or so that guy thinks.
Wait a sec, how did he knew that it was THIS bug and NOT a "bug" placed in their alleged meeting's venue?
Posts by Waseem Alkurdi
1240 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2018
Texas lawyer suing Apple over FaceTime bug claims it was used to snoop on a meeting
The D in SystemD stands for Danger, Will Robinson! Defanged exploit code for security holes now out in the wild
Thursday 31st January 2019 15:20 GMT
Re: The D stands for Deficiency in education
the very idea should someone have banned from ever logging in on an Unix system.
That Poettering guy seems (at least to me) to be much like the Boss:
"Well years ago when I was a Unix Admin..."
I only just manage to suppress the cry that he wouldn't even qualify as a unix admin's ARSEHOLE, as he continues..
"..I used to just use strings to see if anything nefarious was going on" the Boss finishes, letting us in on a technical secret bound to take us to the top of our chosen field.
"Strings?"
- BOFH 2000 Episode 34
Apple: You can't sue us for slowing down your iPhones because you, er, invited us into, uh, your home... we can explain
Tuesday 29th January 2019 12:40 GMT
Re: Interesting argument
Or, alternatively, the court should pronounce summary judgement against them, impose a fine well into the billions, ensure that the proceeds are distributed to iPhone owners worldwide, and rule that there is absolutely no leave to appeal. Something like this is what these tech giants and their lawyers need to teach them a lesson.
And I dream that Linux conquers the world and that all data-slurp CEOs are tried and found guilty of grand treason, arson (of the CPUs they overheated with their ads), and some sabotage charge or another.
Dream, my mate.
PSA: Disable FaceTime. Miscreants can snoop on your iPhone, Mac mic before you pick up call
Q. What do you call an IT admin for 20-plus young children? A. A teacher
'Numpty new boy' lets the boss take fall for mailbox obliteration
Tuesday 29th January 2019 11:21 GMT
Re: Novell NetWare and roaming profiles
I've never seen ‘roaming profiles’ working even when they did work, minutes waiting for the profile to be copied down to the client and minutes waiting for the client to be copied back to the server usually because some process is keeping NTUSER.DAT locked.
THIS.
Data hackers are like toilet ninjas. This is not a clean crime, you know
Whats(goes)App must come down... World in shock as Zuck decides to intertwine Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp
Ever feel like all your prayers go unheard? The Catholic Church has an app for that
Thursday 24th January 2019 00:07 GMT
@Voyna i Mor
This means that the god requires information capacity greater than all the information in the universe, as well as the ability to circumvent light speed, special and general relativity, and the Uncertainty Principle.
All of these being principles and laws that we know to exist inside our universe. Do they exist outside (if there was an outside per se)? We don't know presently.
Now, what created this god?
Probably everybody's favorite axiom.
Suppose we find machinery on the Moon that wasn't left by any country from Earth beyond any shadow of doubt. A logical conclusion would be that they were put in place by extra-terrestrial intelligence, aka aliens.
Do we have to know who created the aliens to know that they are the best explanation? Who are the aliens, who created them, and what color is their skin are all irrelevant to making the conclusion that it's aliens who did this.
So if the universe had a creator, presumably the creator of the universe had a creator and so ad infinitum (avoiding Oxford pronunciation please.)
The infinite regression sword cuts both ways. Heard of the domino analogy?
A domino topples another, toppling the next one, until the last domino falls.
But without a first domino falling (the first creator creating), there wouldn't be a domino cascade.
Therefore, the creation cascade can't go on forever.
The scientific viewpoint is that a creator god has about the same status as Russell's Teapot but is even less open to experiment.
Presently, yep. It's not open to direct scientific observation.
But that's the whole point of creation. To find out whether God exists or not. Pointless or not, like it or not.
The leaders of god-based religions short circuit the process by asserting that e.g. it's blasphemous to ask the questions. Their entire schtick is based on refusal to think.
I totally agree. Laws are made to be broken, and there's frankly no such thing as a prohibited thought. Whether we like it or not, we're eventually crossing over the line and thinking about "prohibited stuff".
and his mission in life was to get them to do social work, benefit their community, and stop bashing Catholics
That's it? That's his whole point of living?
If there's no God, then why even bother? Let them fight ... aren't we all dying?
How many of the well educated clergy of the respectable churches think that I wouldn't venture to speculate; but I think it is a significant number.
You just did what you said you don't want to do.
Thursday 24th January 2019 00:06 GMT
@Bernard M. Orwell
I agree with you on this. My problem is that religion asserts that it does know and that its understanding is irrefutable. I believe that we don't know, cannot really know, suspect that there is no god and have no evidence to support the idea. Logic, reason and observation support the idea that there is not. On balance, the evidence is against.
Glad to hear that you do!
I do agree with you as well about the problem that religion asserts that its understanding is irrefutable. I don't feel that to be right, which is why I embarked on my own, personal journey to know why we are here (or who turned that TV called life on).
However, the fact that we don't really know whether there is or is not a god doesn't mean that there's no way we can know.
This is what some people really mean when they say that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
We don't know a cure for HIV/AIDS. Does that mean that there cannot be a cure?
Logic, reason, and observation ... Not one of these can be done without a subject sitting behind the verb.
Your personal logic, reasoning, and observation supported the idea that there is not. You balanced the facts and answered "nay". But are you 100%, absolutely, totally sure you went through everything, every single piece of evidence?
Our best tool is science, and science says that it doesn't really know currently if there is a God or not. Not surprising.
This is the whole point of life. To determine if God exists or not, and act accordingly. It's the biggest gamble there is. We really want to know why we exist. We exist, so we must have been created, by someone or something. Practical science doesn't say anything beyond "we don't know what happened before t=10^-39 (or something like that) of the universe's age. We weren't there, then we just became there. Theoretical physics has all this string theory, multiverse, M-theory mumbo jumbo which does nothing in terms of explanation, apart from pushing back the boundary so we can't say that "yay, the Big Bang was the moment of creation!".
On balance, the evidence is against.
That's what you think. But beware, if you lose, you're losing a lot, whether we like it or not.
Wednesday 23rd January 2019 23:29 GMT
Re: No point
The first paragraph is completely true.
The second one though ...
Sort of difficult to reconcile that to individual responsibility for sinful/non-sinful behaviour that gets punished/rewarded, given that as far as god is concerned the moment of creation and that of judgement (and resulting penalty) are one and the same.
Your conclusion is entirely, entirely arbitrary. Does the fact that God transcends time have to imply that time doesn't flow for God?
The way you thought of it is interesting, but not necessarily true.
Let's give in for the sake of argument. Okay, the moment of creation and the moment of judgement and penalty are the same. How does the "punished" experience their punishment if time doesn't "flow" for the "punished"?
Wednesday 23rd January 2019 23:16 GMT
Re: No point
You started it. You established your argument with a statement of premise that something was a given absolute truth; that god is omnipotent.
(I'm answering with Abrahamic faith in mind)
Read this in my post?
This means that we have it that God exists and with attributes according to the least common denominator between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. That is, an unseen, omnipotent/omniscient/omnibenevolent creator who maintains his creation.
This is the basic problem of theologists; they proceed from an unproved assertion of one kind or another
So to please you, theologians (that's the word) have to prove God, prove his attributes, prove everything in faith every single time they ask an atheist for directions to the nearest supermarket?
It's done to concentrate on one thing and one thing only (also known as keeping on topic). Many topics, branching into many more, and the point of the discussion is lost.
You approached this debate with a statement of fact (as far as you were concerned) and offered no evidence and I assume you know what they say about extraordinary claims.
Because my point of concern here wasn't the question of whether God is omnipotent, but the answer to the paradox in relation to Abrahamic faiths, which is why I put this small "disclaimer" that you failed to notice.
If you are going to found your dissertation on a statement, then that statement must also be proven accurate or you are proceeding from a fallacy. I could, for instance, using your method, refute all your arguments by saying "Thor, and the other Norse gods are real, therefore your younger religion is baseless". It'd be equallty false, of course.
Let's take another example, one of physics perhaps.
A vase was broken and my son was standing next to it with his slingshot. I don't have to prove Newton's laws of gravity to make the assumption that my son must've shot at it!
This is because my concern here isn't the laws of gravity being true, but that the vase was broken. The laws of gravity, whether accurate or not, are taken to be true a priori, not because they are, but because they aren't my concern.
The onus is on you to provide evidence for the existence of your particular deity (as opposed to the remaining 178 recognised gods), not on me to prove that you are incorrect.
Good that you raised this point.
Put their names aside for a while.
Let me tell you about this fruit. It's round, sweet-sour, has peels, and we make the most common type of juice from it.
You call it an orange, being a speaker of English.
A Spanish speaker might call it una naranja, and the French call it une orange.
Does it make the orange any different?
Here, fruit = supernatural entity, and orange = a supernatural entity that created the universe.
Similarly, an entity which created the universe is called a god. The descriptions might differ, as do for example computers in their shape, but they are essentially the same computer.
The difference between religions is not in the presence of a God, whether multiplied by a thousand, or whatever attributes. It's in the attributes given to God and the way people worship God.
Arab Christians and Jews call God "Allah", and Muslims in English-speaking countries refer to Allah as God.
The attributes of God in Christianity differ from those in Islam and Judaism (God having a concrete image, that of an old man, incarnation as Jesus, et cetera). According to your logic, that's three different "gods". Nope.
Make that 178 gods one.
Although, I'm happy to continue pointing out how theological (a contradiction in terms if there ever was) argument are always irrational because they proceed from false premise and assumption.
Answered above, but TL;DR:
Some premises are taken as is to keep most discussions on track. That doesn't necessarily mean that all religious arguments are irrational.
It's like saying that the Pythagorean theorem is wrong because its proof doesn't prove every single postulate in geometry.
Wednesday 23rd January 2019 23:08 GMT
Re: Yo Waseem
@adnim
Ah empathy ... nice metaphysical concept you've got there ...
You gotta love it, the way atheists and other "strictly material world, no metaphysical BS!" folk start conjuring up all kinds of metaphysical constructs to justify a failure in their reasoning.
Starting solely from material premises, please prove that "empathy" is a thing.
Read this again:
If the universe began from nothing/from something that doesn't care, and we're animals that made their way up the evolutionary ladder
Also add to this: And our fate is a death followed by nothing.
The only law that exists in the jungle is "eat or be eaten".
The basic tenet of evolution is "survival of the fittest". The strongest, the fastest, the most merciless would survive (the lion is called "king of the jungle" for a reason).
Don't give me any of this metaphysical article-of-faith shit about helping my species or anything. What drives an individual animal to even consider their species, if their own basic needs are fulfilled? What purely material reason is there behind species caring about mutual survival?
A man jumps inside a burning building to save a child from a fiery death. What makes him risk dying (and in one of the worst ways imaginable) to save a child from such a death? Whether the child dies or survives doesn't provide a direct reward (it's the child who suffers, not the man in question).
It's an irrational act, if we only consider reason alone. We don't, so empathy exists. Prove (no metaphysics) that it's a thing. Give me a chemical reaction, an evolutionary pathway, whose product is empathy. Our friend a few posts above (@Bernard M. Shaw) proposed the social contract. What do you propose?
You might give me this stuff about conscience blaming him for the fatality. Conscience? Another fine metaphysical concept, outside of evolution.
Wednesday 23rd January 2019 22:57 GMT
That's an interesting concept, kinda like the tree falling in the forest, and it sparks two thoughts in me. First, are you suggesting that someone religious who committed such a crime would not escape judgement?
Of course not. They would be judged equally, whether by society or by law. Law pays back society's debt, but people (mostly) don't forgive a criminal who has served his time in prison, because of the damage he had done to the victim (even if he pays it back by prison time).
I assume you think they will be punished in some after-life, which clearly means that they are still a threat in "this world" until such a time as they face that judgement.
I tried to be as Abrahamic-religion-neutral as possible in my former posts, but I think that I'll need to break that now.
In both Judaism and Islam, there's a system of "religious law" to keep society in harmony, not present (AFAIK) in Christianity (technically, it's the laws of the Old Testament or something? I'm not sure). This means that both religious violation and social violation are "punished", so their threat in "this world", to use your word, is neutralized.
Secondly, no, I don't think they are moral because they didn't get caught.
Great! We agree on that one, right? :-)
If caught later, they would still be accountable to that society. I think this is just a "mortal" failing, if you will allow me that word.
They are accountable to society, true. But still, their crime harmed the victim, not society. Their punishment may pay their debt to society, but not to the victim. Many people do not forgive imprisoned murderers and rapists, even if they were their own sons and daughters, and of course, their hate is totally justified. They [the criminal] are dirty, even if their debt to society is repaid.
Wait a sec.
Why? Why do people tend to think about people whom they harmed? Why do people have such "conscience" if the world is nothing but an illusion, and we all die, to nothing after that?
It's not unheard of that a prisoner committed suicide in prison, leaving behind notes showing their guilt. Why? According to the social contract, they are paying their debt to society. They should be fine. But still, they suffered pain on the inside.
Society is not perfect and sometimes justice and the social contract doesn't get it right. I'd argue that Religion (as an alternative to the social contract) is no less fallible. Finally, would you argue that religious people are always moral and would not commit the same crime? Thin ice, I think you'll find.
Again, we agreed that society is not perfect. But in light of the above, is society everything?
Religion prevents crime in that it both justifies the existence of conscience and adds another layer of protection (fear of God), should conscience fail. If both failed, how could a person be still considered truly religious?
That brings us to our conclusion:
Religious people have for long committed crimes. Many even exploit religion itself to commit a crime (from simple things like embezzlement of religious funds, to rapes of worshippers and members of clergy, to all the killing that ISIS, KKK, and religious-extremist settlers in Israel do)
But let's take these folks and analyze their actions. Could their crimes have been done with the criminal giving two damns about the victim? And could their crimes be done while in fear of God? [Except if the misunderstanding of religion is genuine and is in real ignorance, in which case it doesn't apply, but a crime is still a crime, and there's punishment in the afterlife if a person is genuinely religious and genuinely misunderstanding]
TL;DR:
Crimes are a result of primarily a failure of conscience and secondarily a failure of social contract and/or fear of God and/or both with religious law.
We both agree that society is not everything, and there is still something else apart from the law and social misregard.
If we believe that the universe is from nothing and to nothing, and we are in essence animals, then it's not a problem to do any crime.
We don't think that this is true because of conscience.
Yes, it does. Remember how I said that the social contract is strengthened by the greater whole? If you allow the greater whole to suffer then the contract is weakened. I save someone from the fire in the trust that they would save me too, should I be in that same situation.
So you're saying that the trust in the fact that I'm going to be saved is what's driving me to risk my life to save somebody. The social contract.
Good. Take this hypothetical situation.
You are in a spaceship with a fellow astronaut. You lost contact with Earth (Terra, as the sci-fi books love to call it). The fellow astronaut got paralyzed because they touched a bare AC electrical wire while trying to fix the comms gear. They are now too helpless to save you if you fall into trouble from now on. Then the wire catches their spacesuit, causing it to go up in a blaze. You can save them, and the spacesuit fire is self-limiting, so you personally won't be in any risk if you don't save them.
Are you not going to save them simply because they are no longer able to save you?. Think deep.
Let's go back to a jungle, where we originated, according to traditional atheist thought. The only laws that apply are "eat or be eaten" and "survival of the fittest", according to the well-known scenario of Darwinist evolution.
For what reason do I ignore my own survival and rescue a child from a snake's fangs? If I intervene, I could be eaten. I lose the game. Based on reason alone, it's irrational and straight madness to intervene.
The fact that I might be saved if I fall in the same situation offers little consolation if any to a person seeing death in front of their eyes.
Let me reflect that back to you. If someone was suffering in a fire, or from an illness or an injustice, how does the deist justify intervening? Surely that suffering is gods will and thus infallible? What motivates them to save someone from a burning building? Why should they risk their life? Surely, if you die, its gods will and you go to "a better place"? Since when did mortal man get to gainsay that?
Sure. If I were an atheist, then the rational thing to do is not to save them/intervene. I wouldn't risk dying to save somebody else so that they would live. If my conscience asks any question, I'd tell it to shut the **** up, because that's simply emotional and not rational.
Let's not fool ourselves and claim that nobody is like that. This is the model of a true, rational nonreligious person.
However, I'm not, so I'd jump in immediately. It's my conscience knocking on the door, and conscience is a gift from God so that we don't follow reason blindly and think selfishly as a result. It [conscience] cannot be explained by materialism. If I totally failed to save them, then I'd console myself by saying that suffering is God's will and (because I failed to save them) it's infallible, and there's nothing I could have done to save them.
What motivates me is feeling for the other, something that's in total opposition to the laws of the jungle from which we are supposed to have come from.
If I die, then I wouldn't have died in vain. In Islam, I'd be considered a martyr, and I'd qualify for heaven instantly. In Christianity, it's quite similar. However, if there isn't a God, then my death would have been for nothing, and my irrational act would be merely a stupid waste of my life. This isn't how we people think, which is why a material view of life doesn't explain everything.
Wednesday 23rd January 2019 20:40 GMT
Re: @Toni - No point
An abusive parent builds the environment the abused child lives in. This should be allowed because the parent constructed the environment? If god is the father and we are his children then does it follow that the children should endure all the rules, right or wrong, and have no right to question or refute the rules of the environment? An unjust law cannot be morally obeyed without question, surely?
Strawman argument here. "God = father" is mainly a "mainstream" Christian idea, not necessarily shared by all sects of Christianity, nor by Jews or Muslims, and (AFAIK) some Christians hold the meaning of "children" to be literary, not literal. As a result, your analogy and subsequent refutation of it is actually criticism of the literal understanding of "God's children" in the Bible, not of the issue at hand.
We're not children. We're creation. There's a fine difference here.
"An unjust law cannot be morally obeyed without question, surely?"
You're not omnipotent/omniscient/omni-whatever-enough to determine if the law is really unjust or unfair. Suppose it was unfair as you suppose. Unfair according to whom?
This response is laughable. Aethists [sic] do not accept the presence of god(s) at all, so we do not need a god to not believe in. I don't believe in invisible pink unicorns either, so does that mean they must therefore exist? I think you need to chew that one over a little more. God, if such a being exists (and I do not preclude the idea, I just don't believe there is any more evidence for such than any other unfounded belief) then if I were to ask that being "who made you" what answer would I get? If its anything other than "my creator" then, by definition, the answerer does not believe in a Creator themselves, making them at least agnostic.
Define atheism.
It's the belief that God doesn't exist. The notion of God, whether existing or not, is there. Some evidence is there. A discussion is there, that it warranted the creation of a term to describe this position.
Regardless of whether God exists or not, the idea of God is there.
I was mistaken when I asserted that a God *has* to be there for atheism to mean anything. I'm correcting myself: only the *idea* of God has to exist for atheism to mean anything.
Moving on:
I don't believe in invisible pink unicorns either, so does that mean they must therefore exist?
The notion of them exists now, that you thought of it.
if I were to ask that being "who made you" what answer would I get? If its anything other than "my creator" then, by definition, the answerer does not believe in a Creator themselves, making them at least agnostic.
Okay, I *somewhat* agree.
Wednesday 23rd January 2019 20:25 GMT
Re: No point
And all those fossils were planted there to test our faith. Heck, God even faked the ratio of lead isotopes to make it look as if the uranium had been decaying for billions of years.
This doesn't have anything to do with what I have said, but anyhow.
I'm not a young-earth creationist, nor I believe in the Biblical account of creation. But although that claim is illogical, it's still a possibility. Remote possibility, but still there.
Teleology has no place in the modern world.
What has a place in the modern world is following the evidence where it leads, regardless of any implications for one's atheist (or religious) views.
If evidence pointed to teleology, then teleology it is, no matter what it means to an atheist (or a believer).
Tuesday 22nd January 2019 12:55 GMT
Re: @Toni - No point
Except that we don't really know what those rules are, since many different people at many different times have provided a different rulebook. In those circumstances, the best we can do is try and work out what the rules are through trial and error.
Good. That's why one looks through the different religions for the reason behind this. God *may* have intended this on purpose to test people (or may not). But let's face it, that's the reality we live in. We have to assess the different choices and figure out for ourselves.
Unfortunately none of the experiments so far has shed any light on what consequences await in the afterlife, or indeed if there is an afterlife, based on any rules for human behaviour.
The question of the existence of the afterlife is bound to that of God's existence. Both are metaphysical, beyond material experimentation so far.
Fortunately the experiments HAVE shed a lot of light into how stuff behaves, which allows some interesting results
That's experimental, physical, material science. Today, it says nothing about God. Why do we take that to mean that it never will?
And for now that will do just fine
How about later? "Later" is determined by "now".
Tuesday 22nd January 2019 12:35 GMT
And yet there remain religions and vigilantes who “convict” based on their belief of guilt without there being proof.
Aka red herring. Doesn't make you less guilty of convicting, judging people (as "idiots") based on belief:
And I don't just mean the Catholic ones, every single idiot that believes in deities. Don't care what else you've achieved, until you bring me PROOF a deity exists I'll continue to consider you an idiot..
There are secular vigilantes too, and there's the League of Militant Atheists. Religion doesn't really have to do with this. Weird but true.
Antagonising? Perhaps. Maybe if people thought for themselves they’d come to the same conclusion that deities don’t exist.
Your statement assumes a priori that deities don't exist, beyond doubt, then argues that people should think my way because I believe, hell, my way IS right and all others are WRONG, WRONG!!!!!!
Frankly, some disbelievers are really worse in their militant disbelief than any religious zealots.
The best science can say is that it doesn't know whether God (as in: creator of the universe) exists or not. The rest is based on philosophy and word games.
Tuesday 22nd January 2019 12:26 GMT
If one individual breaks the contract, then the greater number that abide by it can take collective action to reinforce it.
Remember that I said that nobody, neither society nor law enforcement, saw the murderer or rapist in question. They (the criminal) have escaped both social prejudice and law. Does this make their action moral?
I don't do bad things to you, on the understanding that you won't do those bad things to me.
Doesn't justify people risking their lives to save others. How does this justify the oft-cited heroic act of a man jumping inside a burning, collapsing building to save a child from the fire?
Tuesday 22nd January 2019 12:15 GMT
Re: @Toni - No point
Yes, or you get cast into the pit of fire for all eternity, for you are either with god or against god
Doesn't matter. If God created this universe, then we play by God's rules. It's His universe, after all.
I therefore conclude that god is dysfunctional and probably sociopathic.
Your conclusion doesn't matter. It's your own opinion and you're entitled to one. The fact that a colorblind person perceives a particular wavelength to be a different color doesn't change the color's wavelength.
I also conclude that god is an atheist, as he doesn't believe someone divinely created him.
To be an atheist, there has to be another 'deity' above God, whether that deity is real or supposed by us, for Him to disbelieve in. That deity must also have entities which believe in "it?" to mark God as an atheist.
Tuesday 22nd January 2019 10:10 GMT
Re: No point
@Bernard M. Orwell
Er....circular reasoning much? God is omnipotent because god is omnipotent. That's a "given" is it?
We're wandering to a totally different debate: the omnipotence of God as opposed to the problem of evil being discussed here.
No. I don't think so.
If this is the only objection left, and otherwise the problem is solved, then we could simply "end" this debate and move on to the next one, so yep, I'm done with this, unless you provide other arguments.
Tens to be disappointed as Windows 10 Mobile death date set: Doomed phone OS won't see 2020
Western Digital deploys heatsink on remodelled M.2 to tempt gamers
Tuesday 22nd January 2019 10:17 GMT
Re: Overheating
Incidentally if someone can make use if it [sic]
Take it to somebody with good electrician training. They might be able to identify the failure and repair it. Possibly. (You can't break it more, but you might succeed).
manufacturer refused to honor the warranty.
Care to name and shame?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
