Well, it is the day before.  The day of, actually.  As I write this it is 1:55 p.m. and I am about to go join Susan at Jason Ormes’s house. I took the big step and installed Redhat 6.1 yesterday.  It was a disappointment though.  I can’t believe it let me down.  It is not running right, taking like 5 minutes to boot and giving me incredible delays when I try to boot up.  I don’t know what the problem is but I am not to impressed by the ‘end all be all’ OS that won’t even run right on a textbook machine that runs ‘inferior’ windows just fine.  But I am not giving up on it.   I am going to master it as soon as I get this problem figured out.  Going to get a book on it.  That’s it for now.  Gotta go.

I am going to be all over Windows 2K when it comes out, and from this point on I am going to take extreme notice of anything networking oriented at work.  I am going to configure my home computer with WIN 2K and help to do all the computers at work with it too.  I am going to become the Networking guru of doom.  I am also going to learn Java.  That is going to be a big thing too.

A new friend and I had an extraordinarily productive and meaningful discussion about religion last night. This is noteworthy because he is a devout Mormon while I am an atheist.

What impressed me most was the fact that everything was handled from the foundation of science and logic (he’s a PhD candidate in Computer Science). The debate was civil and moved briskly in a productive direction.

When asked how he could possibly reconcile the Mormon narrative with a logical review of the evidence he gave me the best answer I’ve ever heard. Here it is.

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My belief in God is not based on willful delusion, but on empirical (i.e. experiential) evidence. In fact, my acceptance of the religious principles I adhere to are logically built on this evidence. The issue is what you are willing to accept as valid evidence.

As a trained scientific researcher (in the field of information systems), I have strong respect for the scientific method and consider it to be the best means available have for acquiring knowledge. In using the scientific method, scientists make epistemological decisions to only accept as evidence those predictions of phenomena that are measurable, testable, objective, reproducible, and so on.

However, not all phenomena are measurable, etc. However, the fact that a certain phenomenon cannot be assessed using the scientific method does not mean that it isn’t real. It simply means it is beyond the scope of what science can validate. To claim otherwise would be an obvious fallacy.

Many human experiences fall into this category. Most personal experiences are not objective or testable. In my case, my acceptance of the existence of God is based on several instances in my life in which I have experienced or “felt” a communication from God. None of these experiences are verifiable using the scientific method, yet they were as real as anything else I have experienced in my life.

Simply put, I have made a decision to accept these experiences as evidence of the existence of God. In other words, I have broadened my epistemological criteria to accept as valid these profound and highly individualistic experiences.

The willingness to accept spiritual experiences as evidence is a great divider of theists and atheists. Knowledge gained through spiritual experiences is obviously not scientific, but millions if not billions of people have accepted such knowledge as the basis for their belief. Such acceptance is not unfounded or thoughtless, but rests on experiences that these people consider very real.

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So in other words, he agrees, as a scientist, that evidence is the only thing we can trust. All he has done is expand his own personal criteria for evidence to include the spiritual experiences that he has had. This doesn’t solve anything tangible, but at least it advances the debate to the realm of discussing those experiences and whether or not they should be included.

Most importantly, we’re speaking logically — Mormon to atheist — which I think is refreshing.

So how should this debate proceed? What’s the next step? How does one respond to this from either side?

Within the context of this thread I’ve been having a conversation with a friend about whether atheism and agnosticism is a belief. First off, let’s synchronize.

If one were to claim that nowhere, anywhere in the universe, is there anything that could be construed as a god, that would be a belief. So, yes, I would agree that that form of strong atheism is a belief.

What most atheists and agnostics believe, however, is that we don’t know what happened before the big bang, and that we become atheists only when faced with specific claims by those who do believe.

So with that in mind, here’s my latest response in this ongoing discussion on whether or not my contention that Christianity is NOT true is equal to someone’s contention that it is true. I include it here because I think I succeeded in capturing the argument better than my previous attempts.

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First, I didn’t say anything about there being no external influence. But it’s a leap to give that influence a sentience, a personality, and talk about what it thinks and wants and loves and hates, and what it did when.

…all based on a book written by men, just like a million other books written by men about other such Gods that you don’t believe in.

Second, if someone doesn’t have enough information about what happened pre big bang, which nobody does, and refuses to come to any conclusions about it, that’s not strange behavior. It’s logical and humble.

I’m saying I don’t have any idea what caused the big bang, and you’re calling that crazy. I say it’s 1000 times as crazy to sit on a speck of dust in a vast universe and tell me that you KNOW not only who created the universe, but also what they think, what they like, don’t like, etc.

Think about it for a second. Seriously.

So again, my stance is that your answer is not correct, and your answer is ASTOUNDINGLY SPECIFIC and personalized.

So if someone says I believe that there is a person in Guam right now standing on a couch, touching their nose, holding a newspaper, wearing a yellow shirt, with their shoes untied, who served in Vietnam, and got married on a Friday…

If I tell you that I don’t believe that, then do I have a BELIEF? No. A belief, in this context, is an active thing. It’s something you branch out on based on evidence, personal or otherwise. YOU are the one branching out here, not me. I’m simply NOT believing in your claim about this person in Guam.

It is YOUR responsibility to show EVERYONE ELSE why YOU believe this person is standing on a couch in Guam doing all these things. Why? Because it’s both HIGHLY SPECIFIC and HIGHLY UNLIKELY.

So don’t call me a non-couch-stander-believer-person. It makes no sense. Using that system I’m also a non-frogs-flier-believer and a non-moon-cheese-believer. But we don’t assign ourselves those labels because that would be silly. And assigning a label to someone who doesn’t believe in ONE SPECIFIC GOD out of all the thousands that have been created over time is just as silly.

And please don’t come with, “But mine is SPECIAL!” Of course yours is special (wink wink). Do you think that’s a unique response? Everyone thinks THEIR god is the right one. Except for atheists and agnostics. We don’t think ours is right because we’re not pretentious enough to claim we have that kind of information.

I’ve been studying web security again recently and decided to do a POC of CSRF (Sea Surf) (Cross Site Request Forgery). It’s been done/covered many times before but is worth discussing given how few know about the issue.

The link below is a page on my website that logs you out of dslreports.com (my favorite security forum) without you doing anything but viewing the page. It works by my having an image on the page that points to the logout URL, which your browser automatically loads upon visiting the page.

The problem? If you’ve been to DSLR recently it sends your cookie along with the request to logout. So YOU did it, not me. What else can someone make you do using your own credentials?

So here’s the link. Don’t click it unless you don’t mind me logging you out of DSLR. (Or, more accurately, me making you log yourself out of DSLR. :) )

[ CSRF POC: CSRF is Wicked ]

Life has simply never been better, and it is only getting better- which makes the first part of the sentence true.  My confidence In myself and my thoughts of invincibility have returned to some degree due to my being in school and getting the things that I wanted from the VA.  Then to top it off I have this job thing.  Even though I have not yet gotten it I am feeling powerful for having the mere chance to get something like that with my qualifications.  I am on a total high which is sustained by the fact that things are going to get better exponentially, soon.  Things are falling into place.  And the cool part is that they are doing so due to my actions alone.  I have facilitated my success thus far and I am going to continue to do so.  It is like I have seen the ability to fail and simply not accepted it.  I am winning, playing my way.  Nothing is comparable to this.

More later.

Well, this was, without a doubt, the best summer (and best overall period) of my life. The extreme problems alluded to in my previous entry continued until I got in school…

(snip)