Slashdot Mirror

Also very interesting, chart of the history of computer languages:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/lang/

And not as complicated, history of DOS and Windows:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/windows/

Also very interesting, chart of the history of computer languages:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/lang/

And not as complicated, history of DOS and Windows:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/windows/

Visual map of Windows History

I (Basile S.) do agree with the poster. I do not claim that closed source is better. We all know it is worse (all things being equal). What is needed is more than OpenSource: it is reflexive systems. See www.tunes.org for more. Informally and in brief, a reflexive system knows about itself and can enhance, reason, prove, and check itself (or parts of it). I am convinced that reflexive system are the next step. They will supersede open source systems. (Actually, complete open source systems -such as a fully open, source form, Linux distributions- are already reflexive in an ill and poorly defined way, and perhaps some old Smalltalk or Lisp machines also where reflexive) (Proof-carrying code, a la Peter Lee, are also somehow partly reflexive). The difficult part is doing a full reflexive system. This mostly means start from scratch. Regards

I know this isn't the response you're looking for, but if you want a really powerful symbolic math package that's released under the GPL, take a look at Erable (by Bernard Parisse), for the HP48G line of calculators. It can do lots of things (especially certain types of symbolic integration) that even Maple can't touch, and at a fraction of the speed!

And the fact that it only runs on saturn processors is easily outweighed by the small footprint: only 100k! You couldn't find anything sexier than this if you had Tux in a g-string.

This is one of the first things that I thought of when I read this article. There are alot of factors that have not been considered as far as the so-called 'metaphysical' goes. There is a rising sentiment not only in the social community, but in the scientific community, that there is more to humanity than just responsive thought. A noteable example of this is research that is being done at Princeton, with the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, or P.E.A.R.

We are getting to the point where we can almost empirically proove that the mind can alter something that otherwise should be random. That is just one area of research, there is much more. This page has many many links to similiar projects.

What are the consequences of simply replicating thought patterns in a machine? There is much to the brain that we do not understand, could it be that there is much with how it interfaces with what we have come to believe in as "reality."

What if, and this is highly speculatory, the reality as we know it, is highly controlled by our unconscious minds? What would happen to the stability of our reality if humanity were to inject itself into 'thought' machines? Can we even speculate? There could be alot of things that happen around us that we take for granted that are merely results of our unconscious will. If we injected ourselves into a machine, would that collapse?