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If it's doing the same processes, following the same logic, making the same choices based on its same internal logic and memories, and producing the same output then how could it not be conscious? We already construct small systems that work on the same spiking neural network model that the brain uses. The system works without ghosts.
https://www.elen.ucl.ac.be/Pro...

What many people here are advocating is that there is some kind of magic ghost that rides on top your brain pulling switches and making everything work, but then what does the magic ghost think with?

MPTCP is way better than what Connectify is proposing... It is an open standard too...
http://mptcp.info.ucl.ac.be/
http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mptcp/charter/

Multipath TCP works in this use case and supports seamless handover. See http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/publications/exploring-mobilewifi-handover-multipath-tcp for a detailed explanation. See https://github.com/mptcp-nexus/android for the MPTCP port on the google nexus

The implementation includes a solution to overcome HOL-blocking by reinjecting the blocking data-segment on the lower-latency path.

Have a look at our scientific paper, which explains this mechanism: http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/publications/how-hard-can-it-be-designing-and-implementing-deployable-multipath-tcp

Oh, wow! Thanks.

That is, assuming the head-of-line is send on one path and that path involves a HOL-blocking, then it doesn't matter if the other paths have lower latencies, the entire original stream will be HOL-blocked

The implementation includes a solution to overcome HOL-blocking by reinjecting the blocking data-segment on the lower-latency path. Have a look at our scientific paper, which explains this mechanism: http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/publications/how-hard-can-it-be-designing-and-implementing-deployable-multipath-tcp

Douglas Hofstadter, pudding and pie,
Kissed the integers and made them cry.
But when the infinities came out to play,
Douglas Hofstadter ran away.

In this respect, aren't you just as scared of infinity as traditionally religious people? PS, more examples of this attitude are on the page The Glib Reductionists.

There is a big chance that will change in the future though. What do you think of Multi Path TCP ?

short demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWN0ctPi5cw

Longer presentation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02nBaaIoFWU

IETF WorkGroup:

http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mptcp/charter/

Linux kernel implementation:

http://mptcp.info.ucl.ac.be/

I mean this book:
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html

Eclipse? WTF?

Not sure if it even runs in Eclipse... It's pretty tied to Emacs though. I think the Browser is ok for seeing concepts, but I doubt I'd care to use it for serious programming though. I've been compiling what I code in oz with vi, and running it on the command line.

The documentation needs to be better though. I did buy http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html, but the online docs need some polishing and completing, especially section 12 of the tutorial since that's where much of the cool stuff would be.

Someday, if I ever get the energy/time/oz-expertise, I want to try implementing a network protocol using oz's determinacy driven execution and definite clause grammers. Wouldn't it be neat to (almost) paste in the specification for HTTP to implement a web browser/server with the same sort of simplicity as one can almost paste in the BNF for URIs from the RFC to implement a URI parser?

Not an Oz expert though... Oz is still on my list of 'things to do when I get around to it.'

Another annoying thing is that Oz only runs in 32 bit so far.

Thanks. I just found some equations that appear to reinforce what you said.

Since the oscillation frequency is proportional to the difference of the squared masses of the mass eigenstates, perhaps it's more accurate to say that neutrino flavor oscillation implies the existence of several mass eigenstates which aren't identical to flavor eigenstates. Since two mass eigenstates would need different eigenvalues in order to be distinguishable, this means at least one mass eigenvalue has to be nonzero. There's probably some sort of "superselection rule" which prevents particles from oscillating between massless and massive eigenstates, so both mass eigenstates have to be non-zero. Cool.

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi. This is especially recommended if you love SICP. http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html

If you are going to do that, then you should go with something like Oz and the CTM book, http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html.

I recommend learning at least two languages representing significantly different paradigms during a programmer's formative period. In this instance I consider C, C++, Java, C# and the lot to be in the same paradigm - procedural.

Haskell is a good language for exploring the functional paradigm. Smalltalk is good for object oriented. There are many good Prologs for learning logic relational programming. I recommend that a new programmer avoid multiparadigm languages until they have seriously explored programming in a more pure way in two or more paradigms.

I used to recommend SICP, now I recommend CTM.

Also important is to (1) enjoy the programming you are doing and (2) work on programs which do interesting things and get you feedback from others.

"Can we secure government funding to deconstruct the choice of A and B, at the expense of 92.3% of the rest of the alphabet?"

In 'The Gallic Wars' by Julius Caesar, book 6 chapter 14, there is a description of Gallic religious practices. The druids would not permit their texts to be written down, they had to be memorized. One reason being that as soon as a text was written it would pass into a sort of 'public domain' where non-druids could read it.

This sounds like something that should be in place today. Make all religious texts public domain, no exceptions. Religions are not for profit (well in theory) and they are tax-exempt, so they have no reason to have copyright. And they use copyright law to harass and bully their detractors. So take that power away from them.

Oh, Your religion wants hide something? Fine, memorize it.

apt-get is not perfect. In fact, you may call "a hack." I don't think there's any real "theory" behind it. apt-get may even remove a user's kernel package, as one of the 600 traces in this study reveals:

OPIUM: Optimal Package Install/Uninstall Manager

http://pho.ucsd.edu/rjhala/papers/opium.html

Also worth reading are:

Search heuristics and optimisations to solve package
installability problems by constraint programming

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/report_ingi2800_C.pdf[pdf]

Maintaining large software distributions:
new challenges from the FOSS era

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/bibrefs/EDOS-FRCSS06.html

where they mention "Theorem 1 (Package installability is an NP-complete problem). Checking whether a single package
P can be installed, given a repository R, is NP-complete." (result is to be published elsewhere, though).

The essential paradigm of Japanese Sage Darby refers creating partially situated flavor identities out of actual or potential social cheese culture reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus re-normalizing the phenomenology of fromage space and requiring the naturalization of the inter-subjective cognitive flavor strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts and aromas, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor of the cheese.

Yep that's a fair point, although with something like GLBP you could load balance with a single default route.

I'd assume the reason for using failover is the backup link costs less due to it not having much traffic running over it.

It must be reasonably common, I found this article today on how to make this failover work with BGP using AS-prepending and it claims 6.5% of BGP routes were prepended (e.g. weighted so they'd favour a different path) in 2001.

But how do we know that the tools we believe give us these things, are actually working correctly?

A capability design is actually quite simple. To get it right is not hard at all, relatively speaking. Most of the languages I mentioned already have a capability core, and they went out of their way to bypass it. Securing those languages means removing features, not adding them.

Of course, reasoning about complex systems assembled from myriad low-level objects can be quite complex. Security experts usually try to tackle complex systems using high level policies and then verifying that the model enforces the policy. SCOLLAR is such a verification tool for capability systems.

Then comes the task of verifying the implementation is faithful to the model. Ultimately, verification is a problem in any field. How do mathematicians guarantee their proofs are correct? They check it, they mechanize it in an automated theorem prover, etc. How do we prove the theorem prover is correct, or the reviewers didn't make a mistake? Other people triple-check, audit the code, prove the code correct using another theorem prover, and so on.

The benefits of capabilities here are two-fold: 1) POLA implies partitioned subsystems, which means modularity and locality, which facilitates auditing (which is almost intractable for any existing system since they require global knowledge instead of just local knowledge), and 2) they actually have a verifiable security model with which we can reason about high-level policies. If you check the security literature, access-control list systems are known to be unverifiable and so we can't reason about their security properties with sufficient confidence.

Regarding root-kits, certainly any vulnerabilities are exploitable, but by the very nature of POLA the damage of any one exploit is isolated to a particular subsystem, akin to puncturing the skin at best; exploits in current systems are total penetrations, a veritable knife to their hearts.

Most Linux fanboys are a buch of hypocrites. They would diss Linspire, but then go right ahead and install proprietary Flash and RealPlayer, and use a Windows codecs when available.

Lispire is the thing to give your papa, or granny. Power-users, shut up. Most of you aren't compiling stuff with MLTon anyway. So shut up. Even most of you don't need Debian or FreeBSD. It's just that fixing stuff that's breaking in Leenox distros feels like you're doing Real Work (TM). (Gee, look, I got Debian to install my package without removing the kernel!)

Just put "Linux" in people's mouth. Me, I'm happy they pronounce any word ending in *nix. Later we explain - "actually, that was just a Unix-like OS. Here, take PC-BSD. Give it a try."

Like Douglas Hofstadter and John Searle, Raymond Kurzweil and his buddies are just a bit too glib in jumping over infinities in their breathless thought experiments.

Parent post brought to you by: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure
Chip Morningstar, Electric Communities

If you want to teach paradigms (which seems to be your intent) you probably should teach OZ/Mozart OZ in the classroom , which is a multi-paradigm language designed for education. Further it has a standard text which walks you through all the major paradigms over the course of about a year. That way you are only teaching syntax once, setting up one environment.....

Fair enough. A subset, then. Postmodernism also translates things into abstractions that have as little relation to reality as possible, then does critical analyses that pretend to be meaningful but aren't. =)

Perhaps I'm not being entirely fair. Even so... well, here's a fun look at it from a Software Engineering perspective.

There was nearly no over-arching Myth, but many of the episodes had mythic elements, some altogether too literally. (Remember when our intrepid crew encountered the actual, factual Greek God Apollo?)

But you miss the main point, which is thanks to the magic of Deconstruction, you can read anything you want into anything you want. So of course Star Trek has embedded myth, any embedded myth you want. It also contains deep wisdom about how post-feminist transgendered dialogs can be resolved in a quasi-imperialist milieu steeped in the rhetoric of oppressive patriarchial systemic dynamics in a quantum mechanical universe, if you look hard enough.

Isn't literary criticism fun?

I'm out of mod points, but this is insightful. The R programming language is GPL'ed and works on lin/win/osx (packages for major distros). It is an interpreted language (except for a few internal commands), and so the source code for the several different 3D plotters is included with the program. Some you might have to install yourself, but this can be done by the install.packages command.

You might want to have a quick look at output from different 3D commands (persp, scatterplot3d and wireframe).

The introductory documentation might be a bit confusing - especially since it's often written for and by statisticians, but there's a mailinglist with a huge googleable archive and I've often found that "google:r-project search term" will get me what I need.

Publishers using (La)TeX include Elsevier, Addison-Wesley, Bartlett Press, Springer Verlag, Prentice Hall, and the American Mathematical Society. And this was in 1992.
Many of them even provide their own style packages (noticed that all Springer's books look alike?); see http://www.tug.org/interest.html#publishers.

I got several concurrent threads that write the same variable!

Here's your problem. Shared state/variables is the anathema of good concurrent programming.

Here's a good place to start if you want to learn a better way...

http://www2.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/bookcc.html

The poster is a French-speaking person. Programmation is the French word for "programming".
Notice also: take a deep *breathe*.

But I agree... multi-threaded programming can drive people crazy. Message passing-based programming is less prone to nastiness than shared-state concurrency. (Languages like Erlang come to mind).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_programmin g_language
http://www2.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/bookcc.html

You can also do Erlang-style message passing in Python using Candygram
http://candygram.sourceforge.net/

Kotaku also has a nice deconstruction of the piece on journalism grounds.

I expected to follow that link and get some incomprehensible humanities mush that tries to prove the original article means the exact opposite of what it says, because the subtext of the patriarchal influence that the interloquitor experiences is Hagelian in its existentialism... or some bullshit like that.

No, it's pretty much a straight-up rebuttal. How banal in its bourgoise-logic encased cogitation. How pedestrian!

hehe. true! Reminds me of the magritte painting. http://www.topo.ucl.ac.be/images/magritte.trahison .gif

Funny thing, but part of the problem of deconstructionism is that it's almost impossible to distinguish between incidences of it that exhibit "extreme insight" and those that are merely "blithely reading what you want into it regardless of the author's intentions"... or just "furiously intellectually masturbating".

I can (hell, we used to do it for fun with our English Literature undergrad friends) construct deconstructionist arguments that shows that half the kids shows on TV as anarcho-capitalist propaganda pieces, or tracts of leftie-pinko-liberal-communist ideology... often in the same program, and often using the same quotes and events.

It's also very, very (really, I can't stress this enough) important to remember that

Postmodern != Good

Postmodern != Entertaining

Postmodern != Coherent

Just because something's "postmodern", it doesn't mean it's "worthy", interesting or any good at all. However, many lit-crit writers seem to make this mysterious assumption.

This essay also uses a common postmodern lit-crit trick of setting up flawed axioms[1], frantically hand-waving to make sure nobody notices the basic problem, then (gasp!) proceeding to show how your flawed, biased axioms inevitably lead to your conclusion.

Finally, when assessing any kind of field as logically flimsy and frequently intellectually self-pollenating as lit-crit, it's important to remember the differences between fields like it and the hard sciences and engineering:

In science, you get points for being Right - producing theories that stand the test of time, and map 1:1 to reality. In Lit-Crit, you get points for being Clever - your position doesn't have to have any kind of basis in reality at all, as long as it's well-argued and persuasive. In fact, there's some evidence that interpretations that do actually map to reality are looked down on, since arguing in favour of those doesn't require much Cleverness.

Oh yes, and you should really read "How to Deconstruct Almost anything". I once gave it to a English Lit undergrad girlfriend, and while she didn't like the implications one bit, she really couldn't fault a single argument.

Footnotes:

[1] Examples of flawed (or at least questionable) axioms that underpin the entire article:

The force makes everything in the universe happen - Less some waffle about destiny or "prophesy", there's no evidence that I can remember that the Force makes everything happen according to some predefined plan. This would completely negate free will, which undermines Anakin's entire fall from grace.

The light side of the force is all about feeling and passivity, the dark side is all about conscious control and order - Right, which is why (for example) Obi-Wan is always telling Anakin to reign in his emotions and be more calm and ordered, and the
emperor is trying to get him to lose control and give in to his anger. Both individuals argue for both things, just in different contexts.

"we are led to understand in Sith that it was Palpatine himself who set the entire plot in motion by manipulating the Force toward Anakin's virgin birth." - Now, maybe I haven't watched it enough, but I don't recall this implication anywhere, and it's a pretty important one, which changes the whole epic story. Did I miss something here?

1. Capability Myths Demolished
2. Darpa security review of CapDesk
3. SCOLL: A Language for Safe, Capability-based Collaboration
4. SCOLL and SCOLLAR : Safe Collaboration based on Partial Trust

1. Capability Myths Demolished
2. Darpa security review of CapDesk
3. SCOLL: A Language for Safe, Capability-based Collaboration
4. SCOLL and SCOLLAR : Safe Collaboration based on Partial Trust

I suppose LaTeX support is nice for the math geeks, though you would think that they are already using a program with support for it if they need it.

I am a math geek, and unsurprisingly I do indeed use LaTeX. I am quite happy to see the TeX style math support in AbiWord though: not for me, but for others. As a math geek I read a lot of math, and seeing the ugly, badly rendered, hard to read, amateurish garbage produced by some word processors pains me. I'm realistic though. There are a lot of people who only need a little math and aren't going to learn how to write documents in LaTeX just for that. To have someting like AbiWords new equation editing is a good thing: it doesn't render quite as well as LaTeX, but it is streets ahead MS Word and nicer than OO.o currently manages: it's actually somewhat readable.

Personally I would prefer people use this OO.o macro which allows embedding of rendered LaTeX in an editable way, but to be fair you still need to know a little LaTeX to really be ale to use it (unlike AbiWord's offering).

Jedidiah.

You're seriously suggesting typing maths as a reason to use OpenOffice.org? <boggle> Have you ever used a serious maths typing tool like TeX?

Apple's Keynote does a pretty good job but isn't anywhere near as feature-filled as powerpoint.

Oh joy, Powerpoint has more features then Keynote. It doesn't have the features I need or want, so for me PowerPoint is just so much crap. I'm willing to trade lots of PowerPoint's cutesy features like transitions and half assed drawing tools and tacky animations to get the features I need. What do I need? Rendering of mathematical formula that isn't complete crap. In practice that means I use LaTeX, and do any drawing in a decent drawing program (like say inkscape), and output PDF presentations. If I hadn't already invested effort in learning LaTeX I'd be using OpenOffice with this little add on which allows for beautifully rendered math easily integrated in.

People always pipe up with "but it doesn't do X" whenever alternatives to MS Office are presented... well it's my turn. Word and PowerPoint are complete and utter crap at doing anything that requires any semblance of mathematics. That's pretty fundamental really. When the hell are they going to get around to doing anything about it? MS Office is ueless to me in the meantime.

Jedidiah.

What a mouthful huh?

We have secure, distributed programming languages, and we have multi-paradigm, distributed programming languages.

Next stop: secure, multi-paradigm, distributed programming [1],[2].

[1] The Oz-E project
[2] SCOLL: A Language for Safe Capability Based Collaboration

What a mouthful huh?

We have secure, distributed programming languages, and we have multi-paradigm, distributed programming languages.

Next stop: secure, multi-paradigm, distributed programming [1],[2].

[1] The Oz-E project
[2] SCOLL: A Language for Safe Capability Based Collaboration

I remember quite a few compatibility systems that came along over the years, and Orange Micro was the one name that stuck in my head. I never bought one, never used one, but their ads used to festoon the pages of mac magazines. Here's the first relevant result from Google, a posting to Applenews Belgium about the Cyrix-based 200mhz OrangePC 620 arriving. Furthing digginsg shows that the company's website appears defunct, going to a default hosting page.

The OO.o equation editor owes a lot to LaTeX - if you know LaTeX you can pretty much just use the OO.o equation editor by just typing the LaTeX with the backslashes left off.

Having said that, the output is quite simply not the least bit comparable. LaTeX equations are beautiful, and OO.o equations are just barely tolerable (at best).

If you must use OO.o for document preparation, but want pretty looking equations try this which allows you to insert proper LaTeX equation output into OO.o docs with ease (as well as making them conveniently easily editable).

Jedidiah.

you must only be familiar with shared-state concurrency. because if you weren't, you wouldn't spread this FUD framed from the perspective that threads are the only way to manage concurrency (parallelism) in software.

the means to do "thoughtless" concurrency has been available for going on 40 years now. look up (http://www.c2.com/) carl hewitt's actors paradigm (predecessor to alan kay, both as student-teacher relationship and actors-OOP) as well as read the successor to SICP, Concepts, Models, and Techniques of Computer Programming (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/book.html).

now, understand instead: MESSAGE-PASSING CONCURRENCY. this is the "thoughtless" solution to programming on the Cell chip, CMT, and all these other new buzzwords for concurrent processing of information with multiple cores. (though, i don't think Oz, or MOZart, are the pragmatic languages to do this with; simply because i don't believe in multiple-paradigm languages -- perhaps i'm just really bitter against C++.)

CMT, meet CTM

However, I wonder why scientist types only seem to research on blindness caused by degeneration or other failing parts. What about those of us who have damaged optic nerves?

There's been research with directly stimulating either the visual cortex or optic nerves, but it hasn't been as successful yet. Hopefully more progress will be made over time. Some links:

http://cortivis.umh.es/overview.htm

http://www.md.ucl.ac.be/gren/mivipresult.html

Or CTM.

Plugin for making Latex Equations in OpenOffice:
http://www.fyma.ucl.ac.be/wiki/~piroux/OOo+macro

The GP post is probably talking about specific type of eye movement called saccades, which are used to keep the fovea centered on objects of interest.

If you have to use OpenOffice, but want real equations in documents and presentations, there's always this. It's quite a nice little plugin for OpenOffice that uses TeX to render math to an image file, which it then inserts into the document. The TeX commands used to render the image are inserted into image attributes in the header so that you can go back and edit equations as well. Simple and ingenious, and ought to become standard for OpenOffice. As nice as their equation editor is, it's rendering is ugly as sin compared to TeX.

Jedidiah.

- GTK runs on Linux. There is a porting of the old GTK1.2 for Windows. A Porting for Mac OS X is under development (AFAIK)

There is also a windows port of GTK 2.x. For example developer packages are available here, an installer for Glade is avaiable from here and an installer for the Python bindings for GTK for Windows is available here.