Slashdot Mirror

A quick trip to Google found me the CGI Morse Code Translator, which translates "server slashdotted" to:

(Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.)

slashdot sucks :)

dot dot dah dot dot dah dot dah dot dah dot dah dot dah dot dot

By far my favorite flying wing was the Northrop XP-79. You have to love a plane designed to bring down other planes by flying into them.

• Nautilus - being used as a control panel to set the desktop background
  
• EoG and Xbill
  
• The new terminal program, yelp (help system) and the sound recorder - You can see anti aliasing in the yelp window
  
  

• Nautilus - being used as a control panel to set the desktop background
  
• EoG and Xbill
  
• The new terminal program, yelp (help system) and the sound recorder - You can see anti aliasing in the yelp window
  
  

• Nautilus - being used as a control panel to set the desktop background
  
• EoG and Xbill
  
• The new terminal program, yelp (help system) and the sound recorder - You can see anti aliasing in the yelp window
  
  

I took another two screenshots:

EoG and xbill

The new terminal program, yelp (help system) and the sound recorder. You can see the anti aliasing support at work in the yelp window.

I took another two screenshots:

EoG and xbill

The new terminal program, yelp (help system) and the sound recorder. You can see the anti aliasing support at work in the yelp window.

Heres one. This isnt actually RC1 but I installed it a few days ago so it should be fairly close.

It is said that a Machine Could Generate its own Concepts.

But concepts aren't generated - the thought of a triangle isn't arbitrary (although its specific representation may be) - it is a REAL thing.

if this weren't so, there would be no grounds for any understanding at all between entities if all things were independently and arbitrarily contrived.

some people believe they manufacture their own concepts, but then where would the information for what we know about the world derive from? it would have to seep into us somehow from what a thing is into our understanding ABOUT it. this is the basis of the 'Symbol Grounding Problem'.

but that isn't necessary, because cognition (as a real process which we experience) completes the perception - the concept is that part of the given which isn't revealed to physical senses, but only to the pondering intellect.

thinking is an eyeball for concepts.

this machine builds up a database of what people have 'seen'.
its a 'concept logger'.

best regards,
john

]:->

--| IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER? |-----

the answer given by a Cognitive Scientist (John Searle) is:

'THE BRAIN, AS FAR AS ITS INTRINSIC OPERATIONS
ARE CONCERNED, DOES NO INFORMATION PROCESSING...

IN THE SENSE OF 'INFORMATION' USED IN
COGNITIVE SCIENCE IT IS SIMPLY FALSE TO SAY
THAT THE BRAIN IS AN INFORMATION PROCESSING
DEVICE.'

John Searle, Cognitive Scientist

SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT:

This brief argument has a simple logical structure
and I will lay it out:

1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.

2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.

3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.

4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"

5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.

6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.

7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.

8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". THE BRAIN, AS FAR AS ITS INTRINSIC OPERATIONS ARE CONCERNED, DOES NO INFORMATION PROCESSING. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.

John Searle, Cognitive Scientist, 'Is the Brain a Digital Computer'
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/P apers/Py104 / earle.comp.html

--

It is said that a Machine Could Generate its own Concepts.

But concepts aren't generated - the thought of a triangle isn't arbitrary (although its specific representation may be) - it is a REAL thing.

if this weren't so, there would be no grounds for any understanding at all between entities if all things were independently and arbitrarily contrived.

some people believe they manufacture their own concepts, but then where would the information for what we know about the world derive from? it would have to seep into us somehow from what a thing is into our understanding ABOUT it. this is the basis of the 'Symbol Grounding Problem'.

but that isn't necessary, because cognition (as a real process which we experience) completes the perception - the concept is that part of the given which isn't revealed to physical senses, but only to the pondering intellect.

thinking is an eyeball for concepts.

this machine builds up a database of what people have 'seen'.
its a 'concept logger'.

best regards,
john

]:->

--| IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER? |-----

the answer given by a Cognitive Scientist (John Searle) is:

'THE BRAIN, AS FAR AS ITS INTRINSIC OPERATIONS
ARE CONCERNED, DOES NO INFORMATION PROCESSING...

IN THE SENSE OF 'INFORMATION' USED IN
COGNITIVE SCIENCE IT IS SIMPLY FALSE TO SAY
THAT THE BRAIN IS AN INFORMATION PROCESSING
DEVICE.'

John Searle, Cognitive Scientist

SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT:

This brief argument has a simple logical structure
and I will lay it out:

1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.

2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.

3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.

4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"

5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.

6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.

7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.

8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". THE BRAIN, AS FAR AS ITS INTRINSIC OPERATIONS ARE CONCERNED, DOES NO INFORMATION PROCESSING. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.

John Searle, Cognitive Scientist, 'Is the Brain a Digital Computer'
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/P apers/Py104 / earle.comp.html

--

The Bell X-1 in no way was a copy of the M52. It merely copied a large amount of the technology. Unlike the M52, it used primitive rockets rather than an advanced afterburning turbojet; it used a low-tech straight wing rather than the notched-ogive of the M52, which caused severe vibration to the Bell design; and the pilot had little chance of escape whereas the M52 had a jettisonable capsule, like the F-111. On the other hand, the ".50 calibre bullet" shape of the fuselage, and the all-moving tail, were "inspired" by data from the Miles design.

My father was an aerodynamicist working on the Miles M52. Here's the story as I got it from him:

There was an agreement that there should be co-operation between the US and UK on supersonic aircraft research. So the US delegation came over to Miles Aircraft (then working on the "black" M-52 project), and took away lots of data, especially from the wind-tunnel (more advanced than anything else in the world at the time). They also took data about the M-52's all-moving tail, the so-called "all-flying tail". When it came time for the Brits to visit the US, they were told "No can do, our work is Top Secret". Because their new Bell project had suddenly acquired *gasp* an all-flying tail as it turned out. As late as the 90s many Bell corp engineers were still under the impression that this was an All-American Invention.

But the real stinger was when the M-52 got cancelled. All of the calculations, blueprints, test data, special instruments and the analogue computer my Father had invented specifically for stress calculations on supersonic wings, all got bundled into Tea-Chests and sent to Bell Corporation in the USA. OTOH the UK Government got a large loan to help rebuild bomb-damage taken (for the most part) before the US entered WW2.

Links? Ok, try the M52 exhibit at the Museum of Berkshire Aviation. Or the Miles Aircraft history page. A plan view and video is available here.

Shortly before he died, my father met General "Chuck" Jaeger. He was glad to know that his work was put to good use.

The UK Channel 4 made a great documentary about the M52, including some footage of the rocket-powered model that hit Mach 1.5 in tests in the late 40's, after the project had been cancelled.

many proponents of Human-Computer Interaction take the view
that 'machines will become more intelligent', and this stems
from a view that regards the human brain as a computer.

my question is -- what do you have to say in relation to Searle's
Chinese Room and the Turing Test? Do you have any insight beyond
where Searle and Eccles have already gone? on the opinion that
the 'Brain is a Computer'?

>> Synopsis of Some Existing Research on the Problem:

according to Nobel Prize Neurophysiologist JOHN ECCLES in his
book 'Understanding the Human Brain' - the brain is not to be
understood as a computer; rather it works more like a TRANSCIEVER
for Conscious Experience.

this is confirmed by a second Scientist, JOHN SEARLE, who refuted
the 'Turing Test' in two articles: 'IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER?',
and 'MINDS BRAINS AND PROGRAMMES' * thoroughly, disputes the
view that the Human Brain is an instantiation of a digital computer
programme.

* MINDS BRAINS AND PROGRAMMES (THE CHINESE ROOM):
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.sear le2.html

IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER?
http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py 104/searle.comp.html

there you have direct testimony from the Scientific Establishment
that directly contradicts the view that 'The Human Brain is a Computer'.

many proponents of Human-Computer Interaction take the view
that 'machines will become more intelligent', and this stems
from a view that regards the human brain as a computer.

my question is -- what do you have to say in relation to Searle's
Chinese Room and the Turing Test? Do you have any insight beyond
where Searle and Eccles have already gone? on the opinion that
the 'Brain is a Computer'?

>> Synopsis of Some Existing Research on the Problem:

according to Nobel Prize Neurophysiologist JOHN ECCLES in his
book 'Understanding the Human Brain' - the brain is not to be
understood as a computer; rather it works more like a TRANSCIEVER
for Conscious Experience.

this is confirmed by a second Scientist, JOHN SEARLE, who refuted
the 'Turing Test' in two articles: 'IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER?',
and 'MINDS BRAINS AND PROGRAMMES' * thoroughly, disputes the
view that the Human Brain is an instantiation of a digital computer
programme.

* MINDS BRAINS AND PROGRAMMES (THE CHINESE ROOM):
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.sear le2.html

IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER?
http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py 104/searle.comp.html

there you have direct testimony from the Scientific Establishment
that directly contradicts the view that 'The Human Brain is a Computer'.

Lazy web developers do a good job writing non-standard code and not testing it in any browser but IE.

Show me a non-lazy (un-lazy?) web developer and I'll promptly file a bug at Surfstation.

Mate's site - To be honest it's pretty butt-ugly anyway, and I'm not sure what he means when he says it isn't rendering right, but here the link. If you Slashdot him I'll pay.

Google for "tiny linux distributions". (Although most of them are rather limited in functionality, too.) There's also ELKS, for systems even more limited than a 4MB 386!

Here is a paper (by the same author) on the simulation of the evolution of communication based on kin structure under the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Here is a paper (by the same author) on the simulation of the evolution of communication based on kin structure under the Prisoner's Dilemma.

If you look at the University of Southampton Mathematics Preprint page, you'll see that this is
the sixth revision of this preprint. Versions of this argument have previously been shot down by other experts.
There's no evidence this one has been accepted by any other expert.

You can read about the Nestle can here.

spam is a serious waste of energy. We're filtering roughly 3000 messages per week. It's unfortunate that you've ended up on those lists. It seems any successful hosting company will end up being fingered as a spammer at some point. In the case of the companies I've worked for, we've been innocent. One, a mainstream hosting company, was stuck on a blackhole list, which we never managed to get removed from. One customers ISP used that blackhole list, and he was very upset that he couldn't have his domains Email forwarded from us.

There are better solutions than using the "blackhole" lists to block someone, like yourself. Recently, we've stared using MailScanner, which uses SpamAssassin for spam identification by pattern recognition, blackhole lists, and Razor for spam identification through cataloging. MailScanner and SpamAssassin are very nice in that they don't just "black hole" you, they simply tag the message as possible spam. That's what any responsible ISP should do, rather than blocking all transactions based on a 3rd parties list. We get the occasional Email sent through a mail server which would have been black holed, and it is a legitimate Email which should be delivered.

Running a mail server, it's not my job to block mail based on where it came from. I can provide the service to my users by adding flags for potential unsolicited bulk messages, but it's up to them to decide if they did or didn't want it. You never know, they might have been interested in going to a hardcord teenage beastality site. Who am I to say that's wrong. :)

Like this? :)

Or you can use Brainfuck.NET :)

(I didn't make this, but I find it highly amusing. Yes, Brainfuck is an actual language, and this is an actual package that makes it compile to .NET.)

Can I use BrainFuck.Net to write webservices?
No. Well, probably not.

Does BrainFuck.Net use the controversial Microsoft Passport system for authentication?
No. The Brainfuck language has only 8 commands, and none of them are related to authenticating remote network users.

I want to encourage other developers to look at targeting existing compilers and interpreters to the CLI: JavaScript, Basic, Perl, Python, C++, and maybe even get gcc core to generate CIL bytecodes.

It's always seemed funny to me how the technologists take this field, which is tied irrevocably to philosophy, and ignore everything the philosophers say about it. For example, has there ever been a good refutation of Searle's Chinese Room argument?

oh no, there's quite a bit of foundational inquiry going on in the field. but there is also a growing awareness that the analytic tools we've inherited from our logicist and mathematician forefathers are really rather inadequate in reasoning about human behavior.

intelligence, as it turns out, isn't really very amenable to analysis from the traditional analytic stance. this is where the many paradoxes of logical representation come into play (the frame problem, the symbol grounding problem, searlean chinese room (which is a very subtle process/result argument veiled behind a rather crude part/whole paradox), and so on). these problems often stem directly from the philosophical tools used to talk about intelligence - and most spectacularly, from the analytic assumptions about the mind and the world.

it turns out to be much easier to analyze intelligent action using an existential stance. there is an increasing push within ai to draw from the hermeneutic analysis of heidegger and merlau-ponty in order to analyze intelligence not in terms of abstract information processing, but in terms of properties of existence in particular contexts. this approach is especially strong in the subfields of computer vision, robotics, and game ai - these are the areas that actually have to deal with humans in human environments, and coping in the everyday world turns out to be surprisingly harder than most abstract cogitation.

i will not repeat the argumentation here - see: hubert dreyfus, what computers still can't do (a bit dated by today's standards, but begun the critique of the analytic tradition in ai), philip agre, computation and human experience, and brian cantwell smith, on the origin of objects. they're wonderful expositions of where ai is headed philosophically.

but from this vantage point of view, the problems such as the chinese room argument appear completely defanged - like medieval angels-on-a-pinhead arguments stemming from an ill-suited theory of the world. :)

neural nets simulations are just that - simulations. it isnt' likely that they will ever be anything more. in the words of a somewhat renknown cognitive scientist on the matter: SEARLE - IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER Summary of the Argument. This brief argument has a simple logical structure and I will lay it out: 1.On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation. 2.But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics. 3.This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative. 4.It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?" 5.Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms. 6.But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus. 7.The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question. 8.We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.\**

here's the summary from the link.

SEARLE - IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER

SEARLE - IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER?
Summary of the Argument.

This brief argument has a simple logical structure and I will lay it
out:

1.On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined
syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.

2.But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though
symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are
not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not
intrinsic to physics.

3.This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the
physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned
or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols
are observer relative.

4.It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else
was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a
computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The
point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false.
Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a
clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I
am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer.
The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the
questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of
symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"

5.Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better
than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases
we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both
syntactical and semantic terms.

6.But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties
different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality
of the homunculus.

7.The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the
homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational
models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive
decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.

8.We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is
doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic
operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a
specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes
cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically,
there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause
consciousness. But that is the end of the story.\**

of course, if you're going to talk about AI,
you might want to ask a cognitive scientist:

Searle > Is the Brain a Computer? and Searle > Minds Brains, and the Chineese Room

regards,
storm's nest

of course, if you're going to talk about AI,
you might want to ask a cognitive scientist:

Searle > Is the Brain a Computer? and Searle > Minds Brains, and the Chineese Room

regards,
storm's nest

Significantly, the singularity theorems demonstrate that GR is not a self-consistent theory, and contains the seeds of its own destruction.

The natural question which remained was : does stellar collapse of massive stars produce such trapped spheres, and hence black holes? Or is there a "proper graveyard" of stable, dead stars once a star ends its lifetime as a supernova?

The answer astrophysicists have provided is : no, there is no stellar graveyard, above a certain mass. The only possible outcome is a neutron star. Why? Because during collapse, electrons and protons fuse together to form neutrons (and neutrinos), leaving behind only neutrons. Neutrons are fermions and dislike sitting together. They exert a pressure amongst themselves, which allows a certain class of stable stellar remnants known as neutron stars to exist. However, as Chandrasekhar first demonstrated for white dwarfs, fermionic matter has a natural maximum mass -- for neutron stars, this limit is certainly no more than a few times the mass of the sun, regardless of how much the nuclear matter resists gravity.

Now, along come Mazur and Motolla (whose paper, incidentally, has been submitted, though not accepted, by Physical Review Letters) who claim that that just prior to the formation of a black hole, the matter forms a stable kind of Bose-Einstein condensate, and that something weird happens at the surface which sends the accreting matter around in a "u-turn". This all sounds extremely far-fetched to me, though I haven't read their paper in detail. However, I can make two comments :

1) They have yet to show how actual stellar collapse proceeds to their proposed gravitar, and not instead to neutron star or black hole. ("Robert Wald of Chicago University adds that Mottola and Mazur have put forward no arguments about how gravastars could form in the devastating collapse of a massive star.")

2) If indeed there is no horizon, and accreting matter gets turned around in a "u-turn", that should manifest itself as extremely powerful outflows. We already know of such jets and winds from black hole/accretion disk models, and from observation, so it should be possible to formulate a comparison between the gravitar prediction and black hole models. It seems quite likely that firm constraints on the gravitar model could be placed by examining the known observations.

Bob

On a further note, it seems someone is already working on something similar.

If we're going to use an algorithm encumbered by patents, we might as well use MPEG-4.

However if your CODEC is not covered by any patents, then please consider releasing it under a BSD or GPL license.

For information on why software patents are bad for free software, please visit The League for Programming Freedom

Actually, Linux can run on your 8088.

ELKS (The Embeddable Linux Kernel Subsystem) is what you ae looking for.
Find it here.
Unfortunately, my 8088 box is flaky (controller is dodgy and the hdd is covered in bad sectors, not to mention the corroded ISA contacts) so I never got ELKS going.

I know I'm responding seriously to a post rated 'funny' but now you know you can defeat those terrorists.
--Duane

Finally I have an excuse why my site has no hits. Still at least the sysadmin doesn't complain about me using all the bandwidth.

I still don't see what's so boring about my life . . .

TheHouse

The BT Zeus project is an open source agent framework that includes lots of nice stuff (visual development / visualisation / intellegent agents etc.) See www.btexact.com/projects/agents/zeus/ for more info. I feel obliged to mention SoFAR an academic focusing on DIM (Distributed Information Managment) Agents (or at least they where last time I was there).

• Maybe then legitimate sites like xxx.soton.ac.uk can return to the regular web

My company's gifted IS department blocked xxx.soton.ac.uk. I phoned them up to get it unblocked, and the techie on the end of the phone asked me repeatedly if this was a sex site. God damn. I mean God damn. How dumb do you have to be to not just type it into a browser and see, and how dumb would I have to be to phone IS, give my name, and as for a "sex site" to be unblocked.

Er, sorry, this turned into more of an anti-IS rant. I had a point when I started, but it escapes me. ;-)

What Oliphant means by "spatial structure" is that interaction, including mating, occurs only with individuals who were born near each other. This is a realistic first-order approximation of the structure of evolutionary history in most species -- allowing for Saussurean Communication as well as C to become stable within inbreeding groups.

PRIMORDIAL HYPOCRISY AND MIGRATION

Given the presence of Saussurean communication evolved in the presence of kin, the potential arises for successful mutations that combine D with signals that impute kinship thereby eliciting C from the recipients.

This is the primordial origin of the H strategy, and the C thereby elicited is first-order extended phenotypic cooperation.

However, given Oliphant's assumption of spatial structure, H quickly dies out as Saussurean communication and C are selected out of its environment and H individuals are interacting with other H individuals so frequently that the payoff for D sinks below the average payoffs of neighboring inbreeding groups not exhibiting H.

H, therefore, becomes stable only with ongoing migration to unexploited inbreeding groups.

Migratory behavior makes H persist.

Migration and H can therefore be considered codependent evolutionary strategies.

SYCOPHANT HYPOCRISY AND XENOPHOBIC TIT-FOR-TAT

Once migratory behavior has arisen (giving persistence to H) the complexity introduced by the iterated PD becomes necessary to explain global demographic stability. Global demographic stability can persist (even if Saussauran communication is globally sacrificed as a defensive measure against H signals) only if repeat encounters allow a TFT strategy to emerge based on recognition of individuals who have previously exhibited D behavior. Moreover, if the TFT must be xenophobic -- that is, the TFT must presume an unknown immigrant to be H and therefore initially exhibit D toward any unknown immigrant. The H immigrant must, therefore, evolve toward initial sycophantry: in the initial encounter, the immigrant H must unconditionally exhibit C despite the expectation of a non-reciprocal exploitative initial response.

This initial investment for H can pay off only if sufficient C is elicited in the host population to provide enough exploitable individuals to make up for the cost of initial sycophantry . Stable Saussarian communication in the host inbreeding group is crucial for this condition to be met -- otherwise all individuals of the host inbreeding group will D in their first interaction with the H immigrant, causing the H strategy to fail in that environment. Therefore, reputational Saussurean communication, elicited by initial sycophantry, is crucial to the persistence of H in the presence of xenophobic TFT.

The C elicited by reputational Saussurean communication in response to sycophantic H is second-order extended phenotypic cooperation.

Such second-order extended phenotypics is the origin of biologically pathogenic memes as weapons in genetic arms races and are, in the most primitive form, "recommendation" memes.

The existence of such second-order extended phenotypics means it is inevitable that the H individuals will evolve to emit false recommendation signals for themselves and "defamation" signals for members of the host population. Since it takes longer to receive TFT responses to a defamation (or false recommendation) signal than it does to actually exploit (or be exploited), the defamation signals will target individuals that are reacting to exploitation or are passing on warning memes from those who have been exploited. Defamation memes targeting the members of the host population that react to exploitation is a third-order extended phenotype, attacking the host population's TFT response and generating the equivalent of an extended phenotypic auto-immune deficiency within the host population.

Having stabilized enough of the nonkin inbreeding group in C- exhibiting TFT, H individuals will then exhibit D toward nonkin to recoup the costs of initial sycophantry and then continue to D so as to reap the primary benefits of the H strategy. Mass emigration ensues as the exploitable population diminishes to the point that the costs imposed by D-responses from the host population's TFT strategy (enhanced by reputational Sassurean communication which is also inhibited by second and third order extended phenotypes as described above) exceed the benefits of further exploitation.

HYPOCRITICAL PROMOTION OF GLOBAL MIGRATIONS

To this stage of evolution, only H populations are migrating, and the exploited populations are homogeneous inbreeding groups. As the genetic arms race continues, and the H strategy advances beyond the sycophant adaptations to extended phenotypic promotion of C and inhibition of TFT, there comes a point where it is advantageous to H individuals to promote random migrations in non-H populations.

The reason for this is that non-H populations, being dependent on spatial structure (kin selection) for the primary stability of C within their populations, as described above, become dependent on the extended phenotypic promotion of C provided by H individuals. The H individuals thereby remove the ability of non-H populations to sustain C within themselves in the absence of H extended phenotypic influence. This has the effect of extending time during which H populations can reap the benefits of their strategy subsequent to losses due to initial sycophantry. The tolerance of non-H populations for being exploited by H individuals dramatically increases since they are under the threat of other nonkin populations whose ability to invoke TFT to stabilize C with nonkin has been suppressed by the general suppression of their TFT phenotypes by the extended phenotypes of the H population.

CONCLUSION

Thus we can see that in addition to the theory that heterogenous populations make hypocrite populations less visible to an otherwise homogeneous population that may be preparing to expell them in a tit- for-tat reaction subsequent to hypocritical exploitation, there is an selective pressure for evolutionarily advanced hypocrite populations to promote immigration to homogeneous host populations subsequent to or in conjunction with defection against those populations: to create dependence on the presence of the hypocrite population, and its evolved (extended phenotypic) ability to elicit cooperative behavior in non-kin, thereby extending the time during which the pay off subsequent to initial defection may be reaped beyond the recovery of losses due to initial sycophantry.

What Oliphant means by "spatial structure" is that interaction, including mating, occurs only with individuals who were born near each other. This is a realistic first-order approximation of the structure of evolutionary history in most species -- allowing for Saussurean Communication as well as C to become stable within inbreeding groups.

PRIMORDIAL HYPOCRISY AND MIGRATION

Given the presence of Saussurean communication evolved in the presence of kin, the potential arises for successful mutations that combine D with signals that impute kinship thereby eliciting C from the recipients.

This is the primordial origin of the H strategy, and the C thereby elicited is first-order extended phenotypic cooperation.

However, given Oliphant's assumption of spatial structure, H quickly dies out as Saussurean communication and C are selected out of its environment and H individuals are interacting with other H individuals so frequently that the payoff for D sinks below the average payoffs of neighboring inbreeding groups not exhibiting H.

H, therefore, becomes stable only with ongoing migration to unexploited inbreeding groups.

Migratory behavior makes H persist.

Migration and H can therefore be considered codependent evolutionary strategies.

SYCOPHANT HYPOCRISY AND XENOPHOBIC TIT-FOR-TAT

Once migratory behavior has arisen (giving persistence to H) the complexity introduced by the iterated PD becomes necessary to explain global demographic stability. Global demographic stability can persist (even if Saussauran communication is globally sacrificed as a defensive measure against H signals) only if repeat encounters allow a TFT strategy to emerge based on recognition of individuals who have previously exhibited D behavior. Moreover, if the TFT must be xenophobic -- that is, the TFT must presume an unknown immigrant to be H and therefore initially exhibit D toward any unknown immigrant. The H immigrant must, therefore, evolve toward initial sycophantry: in the initial encounter, the immigrant H must unconditionally exhibit C despite the expectation of a non-reciprocal exploitative initial response.

This initial investment for H can pay off only if sufficient C is elicited in the host population to provide enough exploitable individuals to make up for the cost of initial sycophantry . Stable Saussarian communication in the host inbreeding group is crucial for this condition to be met -- otherwise all individuals of the host inbreeding group will D in their first interaction with the H immigrant, causing the H strategy to fail in that environment. Therefore, reputational Saussurean communication, elicited by initial sycophantry, is crucial to the persistence of H in the presence of xenophobic TFT.

The C elicited by reputational Saussurean communication in response to sycophantic H is second-order extended phenotypic cooperation.

Such second-order extended phenotypics is the origin of biologically pathogenic memes as weapons in genetic arms races and are, in the most primitive form, "recommendation" memes.

The existence of such second-order extended phenotypics means it is inevitable that the H individuals will evolve to emit false recommendation signals for themselves and "defamation" signals for members of the host population. Since it takes longer to receive TFT responses to a defamation (or false recommendation) signal than it does to actually exploit (or be exploited), the defamation signals will target individuals that are reacting to exploitation or are passing on warning memes from those who have been exploited. Defamation memes targeting the members of the host population that react to exploitation is a third-order extended phenotype, attacking the host population's TFT response and generating the equivalent of an extended phenotypic auto-immune deficiency within the host population.

Having stabilized enough of the nonkin inbreeding group in C- exhibiting TFT, H individuals will then exhibit D toward nonkin to recoup the costs of initial sycophantry and then continue to D so as to reap the primary benefits of the H strategy. Mass emigration ensues as the exploitable population diminishes to the point that the costs imposed by D-responses from the host population's TFT strategy (enhanced by reputational Sassurean communication which is also inhibited by second and third order extended phenotypes as described above) exceed the benefits of further exploitation.

HYPOCRITICAL PROMOTION OF GLOBAL MIGRATIONS

To this stage of evolution, only H populations are migrating, and the exploited populations are homogeneous inbreeding groups. As the genetic arms race continues, and the H strategy advances beyond the sycophant adaptations to extended phenotypic promotion of C and inhibition of TFT, there comes a point where it is advantageous to H individuals to promote random migrations in non-H populations.

The reason for this is that non-H populations, being dependent on spatial structure (kin selection) for the primary stability of C within their populations, as described above, become dependent on the extended phenotypic promotion of C provided by H individuals. The H individuals thereby remove the ability of non-H populations to sustain C within themselves in the absence of H extended phenotypic influence. This has the effect of extending time during which H populations can reap the benefits of their strategy subsequent to losses due to initial sycophantry. The tolerance of non-H populations for being exploited by H individuals dramatically increases since they are under the threat of other nonkin populations whose ability to invoke TFT to stabilize C with nonkin has been suppressed by the general suppression of their TFT phenotypes by the extended phenotypes of the H population.

CONCLUSION

Thus we can see that in addition to the theory that heterogenous populations make hypocrite populations less visible to an otherwise homogeneous population that may be preparing to expell them in a tit- for-tat reaction subsequent to hypocritical exploitation, there is an selective pressure for evolutionarily advanced hypocrite populations to promote immigration to homogeneous host populations subsequent to or in conjunction with defection against those populations: to create dependence on the presence of the hypocrite population, and its evolved (extended phenotypic) ability to elicit cooperative behavior in non-kin, thereby extending the time during which the pay off subsequent to initial defection may be reaped beyond the recovery of losses due to initial sycophantry.

My real reason for posting this is not so much the linux ref, but rather the sense of satisfaction one can get from using so called obsolete hardware and software to accomplish real work.

ELKS and DOS 5.0 both run on my old Toshiba T1100 plus. Why bother? This machine originally retailed for $2500 U.S., I picked it up for $10 CAN. At some point in time when the buck was worth more, people paid a considerable amount for this hardware. Has that value disappeared? I don't think so. I can still run word processing software (WP5) and play games (Ancient Art of War, ZZT, and Rogue). The machine still does what it was designed for. Do you really need a massive OS and hardware to write a letter or bash a few bats? No.

Some will question this thinking. Why play Rogue or use WP5 when you can play Quake (or whatever the trendy fps is right now) or use MS office / Star Office. Even though we have Civilization and Free Civ some people still sit down around a Risk or Diplomacy board. Even though we can send email across the world in a few seconds, there is still something satifying about getting a real letter.

&lt Ducking the obvious anthrax posts. Email virii have probably caused more economic damage, and no, the loss of life is NOT funny in the least &gt

Finally, New may have more features, more functionality and in fact be "better" than Old, that does not make Old bad.

jet engine developed by the Germans
Ahem. Jet Engine. I think you'll find this was invented by Sir Frank Whittle in the early 30's. Just that the Air Ministry wouldn't back it. Had it been put into development sooner the Battle of Britain may have been a lot shorter, and the war...
We also invented RADAR, and used it to detect the incoming bombers so squadrons could be scrambled in time to get to the right height.

Well, first off, cut out the full duplex operation. Send voice only out to the field, and use the extra bandwidth for more frames. The reporter on the other end rarely needs to see what's happening in the home office, while the whole world would appreciate a clearer picture.

They're using H.263 compression algorithms... some dismal figures (it was made to be used at 10 fps, for instance!) Here's a nice page detailing the standard and some comparisons to MPEGs...

Here's a great page comparing H.263 to MPEG-4... Hmmm... Jurassic Park encoded in High Quality MPEG-4 beat the 64 Kbit/s rate of H.263 by nearly %20... the video phones are, according to the article, 112Kbit/s... Anyone have any clue about using MPEG-4 to do this? Sounds to me like it'd be a much better compression algorithm...

"Rocket Jets"? No, they did have a rocket powered plane, I have a book with the specs on it, but I don't have it with me at the moment. From what I recall, it was not a very useful aircraft as the rocket could only burn for about 10 minutes (not sure on the exact number).

I don't know about the 90% death rate, are you sure you're not confusing it with the Messerschmitt Bf 109? It was a traditional prop plane, but very high preformance and, thus, difficult to fly. The narrow wheel base and high landing speeds made it difficult to land, and the torque from the engine would sometimes cause pilots to lose control on takeoff. Also, the pilot could lose control in dives because the control surfaces were not big enough for the high speeds and the controls would become sluggish. The accident death rate was no where near 90%, but it was higher than other similar aircraft.

The Messerschmitt 262 was the famous German jet during the war. Here's a link to a page about it.

When people started looking to break the sound barrier, the British tried to do it with jets, but the Americans wisely decided that a supersonic jet would have too many complications, and decided to use a rocket powered aircraft to do it. The Bell X-1, flew by Chuck Yeager, was a rocket powered aircraft, but it landed as a glider, and appearently wasn't that difficult to land.

I didn't realize that 1800 to 2000 C was relatively cool .

I'm just not sure where to find the alternatives...starting with gcc.

Greets!

The reason that 3D isn't popular or practical - paper. Our current metaphor for information derives from Xerox Parc, a PAPER company. A faithful emulation of an office desk is NOT the best way to represent the complex infoverse we live in.

And the current web is not the best way to represent it either. Go back to hypertextual research before the web - look at Guide, look at Microcosm, before the brain damage of HTML and Mosaic set in.

Even better, go and look at Xanadu and ZigZag - representing information and the relationships between individual pieces of it is a complex task, perhaps made harder by our current metaphors. See ANYTHING by Ted Nelson, such as his technical briefing at the latest Hypertext conference.Read Vannevar Bush's "As we may think"

I would argue that we don't need 3D browsers, but MULTIDIMENSIONAL infoviewers, that can let us define the relationships and properties that we are interested at any moment, AND LET US CHANGE THEM easily and intuitively - I still remember the only good part of Johnny Mnemonic - zooming around cyberspace - also, to a lesser degree Lawnmower Man.

This is the way forward, and we need to learn from the games industry - Look at Homeworld, Q3D, even Elite - these are the kind of intuitive navigational and representational metaphors we ned to adopt to allow people to create, browse, populate and interact with their information.

Let us be imaginative, and move forwards to a representation of information as something we can use, rather than something we write down.

Links:
Microcosm:(Home) http://www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
(Review)http://www.man.ac.uk/MVC/SIMA/mcosm/toc.ht ml
Guide: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0142.html
HyperText Conference: http://www.ht01.org/
GZigZag - http://gzigzag.sf.net
Xanadu: http://www.udanax.com
http://www.xanadu.com
As We May Think: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/comput er/bushf.htm
The electronic labyrinth - a good intro to hypertext, slanted toward literature http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html

Being the "surprising type" with a vocabulary of 200 words probably indicates that the program is not particularly good. The range of possible behaviors is pretty small for such a system. As the vocabulary and complexity of possible utterances increases, it is likely that the "surprising" aspect of Hal is going to move into "bizarre" territory.

As Chomsky pointed out, relying strictly on positive and negative feedback is not enough to develop language...

Firstly the eprints.org author/institution self-archiving software: eprints.org
It's been designed "to be as flexible and adaptable as possible so that universities can adopt and configure it with minimal effort for all disciplines".
An exapmple of its use is at the: Cognitive Sciences eprint Archive

It's also got other noble principles behind it:"The generic version of eprints is fully interoperable with all other OAI-Compliant Open Archives. This means that it no longer matters where papers are archived; the papers in all registered OAI-compliant Archives can be harvested using the OAI protocol into one global "virtual archive" by Open Archives Service Providers".
See the Open Archives Initiative for more info.

Oh, and our department's publication database isn't bad either.

Firstly the eprints.org author/institution self-archiving software: eprints.org
It's been designed "to be as flexible and adaptable as possible so that universities can adopt and configure it with minimal effort for all disciplines".
An exapmple of its use is at the: Cognitive Sciences eprint Archive

It's also got other noble principles behind it:"The generic version of eprints is fully interoperable with all other OAI-Compliant Open Archives. This means that it no longer matters where papers are archived; the papers in all registered OAI-compliant Archives can be harvested using the OAI protocol into one global "virtual archive" by Open Archives Service Providers".
See the Open Archives Initiative for more info.

Oh, and our department's publication database isn't bad either.

I am running ELKS on an 8088 laptop. Can't run much as of yet but it does carry a major coolness factor.

I thought XTs came with a hard drive? I have a XT clone that I do intend to get Elks running on someday.

A much fairer contest is the pseudoknot benchmark. The idea is to take one real-world task (not a partial task like matrix multiplication), and get experienced programmers to write a program to solve the problem in whatever is the most natural way for some language. The results are then benchmarked on equivalent hardware.

Of course it's not representative of all programs. Pseudoknot is a floating point-intensive search problem, which is not the sort of thing that I do most of the time. Still, it's a better example than a self-confessed beginner trying out toy problems.