Potential answer: It's a consequence of any sufficiently advanced virtual reality.
That is, any virtual reality system that simulates a reality in sufficient detail will necessarily have the potential of giving rise to this level of technology.
Anyway, I don't think the whole thing is particularly scientific, but it's interesting to speculate about.
No, he's arguing that the machine shouldn't be intentionally redesigned to enable Windows to run. All you Windows guys always boast about how well it supports hardware, so how is it OLPC's fault that their hardware design, intended to run a very custom Linux, doesn't support something completely different?
I, along with maybe several others here, simply feel that if Microsoft want Windows on the OLPC, Microsoft can make Windows run on the OLPC, not the OLPC redesign to Microsoft.
It's quite likely that management haven't been deliberately obtaining unlicensed software. From reading an article on this, the vast majority of cases are brought where the software is bought and paid for, just one of the little clauses in the license somewhere has caught them out.
If management are specifically choosing to pirate software, that's one thing (My opinions on most paid-for software are a little beside the point here - you want it, you pay for it if it's charged for). However, slight non-compliance is something entirely different.
I'd be fairly certain, mostly from the size of the download for the OS, that they're carrying most of the Gnome libs at least, and probably a bunch of the KDE stuff.
E is a lot lighter in general though, and nice for it. (typed from E16)
Please. The police are claiming that she refused to answer questions, etc. The police claim a lot of things, many of which prove false.
I thought that one of the fundamental principles of American justice was 'innocent until proven guilty'. Bearing that in mind, why don't you listen to what the person is saying - it was a piece of artwork which she had forgotten to take off, iirc.
And if the solution to terrorism, aiming to scare us, is to leave us so terrified of anything slightly out of the ordinary that police are saying that people were lucky not to get shot, it seems to me that we don't have much of a country left worth fighting for. Freedoms are crucial, and removing them to protect against those who want to remove them is self-defeating.
There's a large part wrong with this guy's thinking (not the poster, but the author of the article). For one example, take the look at package managers. The thinking of Ubuntu's planners seems very sensible to me here. They provide:
Add/Remove Applications: Simple, easy to use, limited in power. The popularity contest also makes sense - the more used a package is, the higher the chance that it is a good one. If, for instance, you're trying to pick a music player, popularity would show you that some are far more used than others, and therefore more likely to be useful to you/preferred by most users.
Synaptic: It may be less powerful than apt-get, but it's a lot easier to use. Simple search, simple categorization, easy to add and remove repositories. Good for more advanced needs or less common software.
Apt-get: Extremely powerful and flexible, but a command-line app. I have nothing against the command line, use it a lot in fact, but if you're aiming for easy to use for a new user, making them type it in and read a man page would lose you a lot of users, fast. Very useful for quick installations and the like, as well as more powerful work.
I use Debian myself, but I feel that many of his concerns are unfounded. For instance, I've been on Debian, and before that Ubuntu, for well over a year, and I still don't have the hang of everything apt-get can do. So I use synaptic, and apt-get when I need something quick.
As for the sudo, it's really useful to just type in 'sudo command', enter your password, and have it execute. Easier than su, password, enter command, exit root shell.
There's a large amount of other stuff wrong with his analysis, but I'll leave it there for now.
Very very true. Our minds are constantly 'slipping' between situations, trying out different views and perspectives on what's happening, associating the current events with stuff that we know. It seems random sometimes, but it isn't. And if we can work out how it works, how to program a computer to slip between levels and circumstances, then we've basically made it. One of the hardest things is going to be setting up a program that can take 'symbols', chunks of information that have some sort of meaning, and that can slip from one pattern to a related pattern. Once we have that, we'll be a giant step closer than we currently are.
But would you call something actually intelligent if it couldn't? You're confusing low-level computer hardware with high-level human software, and concluding that one is different from the other. If you looked at a brain on the most basic level, it's basically a hell of lot of very simple processors, all wired together. All these do is turn on or off, depending on how many of the ones they are connected to are turned on. That's it, everything else is built on top of that, and is basically software.
This is why you don't feel every single nerve input from anywhere, why you can even concentrate on what to say as opposed to pulling on the right muscles to say it. Any AI would have much the same thing - would think on a high level, and be self-aware on that level, but wouldn't necessarily be able to work on it's lower-level code. If an AI was going to program another AI, it would first teach itself to code. Similarly, if it wanted to add two and three, it wouldn't do (+ 2 3), it would do much the same as we do, groups of 'neurons' acting in concert to determine results.
You could never achieve 'intelligence' from something that has to micromanage itself on every level.
While this probably wasn't what you were looking for, we have in fact built particle accelerators that have created black holes (albeit incredibly briefly). The specific story you were referring to was probably CERN's accelerator, which the media decided to sensationalize with the risk of black holes. And as for why we'd build a machine smarter than us, because we can. Can you imagine how much you could learn from something that is more intelligent than you, that can out think you? I'd talk to one just for the fun of it. It's scientific curiosity - can we do this?
There's something incredibly cool about what is essentially another intelligence, one (probably) without many of our preconceptions and buttonholed ideas of the universe. A fresh look at things by a mind smarter than we are. That's why I'd work on it, and why I've thought about the problem a bit before - the sheer scientific marvel of creating a new intelligent being from scratch, one non-biological, but instead silicon.
Intelligence is inextricably linked with creativity. I'd highly recommend Hofstadter's writings on the subject, in which he presents ideas of AI, not as a massive calculator, but as a collection of 'symbols', bashing into each other, with parts of the pattern modified by external state.
Think of a hyper-intelligent ant colony - any one ant can't really do much, but running about and interacting with the other nearby ants, they can organize themselves to achieve much harder tasks. Indeed, one of the sample dialogs in Godel, Escher, Bach is on that very subject.
Intelligence and creativity are high-level actions, you're still thinking of an AI as a massive collection of very fast low-level actions. That would be incredibly good at refining ideas, but a machine which can think would be different. It would run on a much higher level, making associations and fuzzy reasoning. You can't implement intelligence in formal rules, but you might be able to do it by specifying some formal rules by which certain objects interact, and then affecting a few of them based on 'external' state.
Read Metamagical Themas and Godel Escher Bach for some ideas of where I'm coming from (actually, read them anyway, they're both really good)
I realize that they are just copyrighting a translation (in fact, I know people who work in Bible translation). However, their permissions etc are much less restrictive than those of a typical book.
Tithes. I don't want to end up arguing an obscure theological point forever, but the Bible is very explicit on the fact that everything is forgiven if you believe in Jesus. Important part of this being/everything/. If you choose to do other things as a recognition of this gift, good for you, but the only requirement is belief. Public acts should be a manifestation of private beliefs - but without the beliefs, the acts are worthless.
As to what I choose to believe, if I do not believe and any religion is true, I've lost, while if one is, I win if I happened to be believing in that one, and lose otherwise. An extended version of Pascal's Wager, as it were. I also fail to see how acting as a better person due to this belief is a loss of dignity, but you may have other opinions.
As other people have mentioned, I didn't mean free as in price.
Finally, at someone a little higher up the tree. Open source code means that if there's a bug, people can patch it and get rid of the problem. The _only_ people who can do this for Opera are the developers. So if there is a bug, and nobody obviously finds it, it stays there. How many security bugs are/still/ being found in Windows XP after all these years?
Firefox (or Iceweasel in this case) might have more outstanding problems (most of which are probably very minor issues), but, and most importantly, any major bugs can be spotted and fixed by the community as fast as they make their way into the code base. To look at it another way, many of the security issues in Firefox have likely never been exploited, but are only known because people can read the source and find these problems. Can you say that you know where the problems in Opera are? No, because you (or other coders) can't check the source to find potential problems before they become an issue. The only way to find your bugs in Opera is by working out a way of exploiting them, which a potential buffer overflow (for example) in Firefox could be found by noticing something not being checked in the source. If it was a chicken coop, the Open model is fixing or marking potential problems, the Closed model is fixing them once a fox has been shown to be able to get in, which can be too late.
Tithes: Untrue. That may be a Jewish belief, but the key (in fact, only) factor in Christianity is believing in Jesus. Nothing more is required.
Copyright: From the NIV I just picked up to check:
The Holy Bible, New International Version(r). Copyright (c) 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society [Zondervan logo] The NIV Student Bible, Revised Copyright (c) 1986, 1992, 2002 by Zondervan All rights reserved.
Seems to me that they do maintain their copyrights. Incidentally, just lower down the page, it outlines what you're allowed to do. Roughly: without written permission, you may quote up to 500 verses, as long as they don't amount to a complete book or to over a quarter of the work they're in. If it's not going to be sold, you don't even have to stick the copyright notice on. For anything else, write to ask permission.
As to the last comment, it's entirely possible. Meh, if it's false, what have I lost by believing it?
In which case, could you say, before paying for the goods, "Please read this T-shirt and consent to it on behalf of the store" (referring to the T-shirt mentioned three posts up the line)? Surely that would create a direct action of consent to this contract on behalf of the store.
Afraid that it rips to MP3 by default. Of course, I don't use it, but I happen to know that the Mac a friend of mine has rips MP3 files that I can play over here easily enough.
I can't even hear any quality difference.
So maybe it's time to stop spreading fud about things.
No, but if you care about a character concept, you'll pick up skills which seem appropriate to that, such as Use Rope. Removing said skills simply pushes D&D yet farther towards pure combat.
That's why I mentioned that this shouldn't only hold for the GM. For everybody involved, if the rules are in the way of a good story, get rid of the rules.
I didn't notice where anyone said anything like that. Seems to me that all that was being advocated was ignoring the rules for the purpose of telling a good story, and that doesn't only have to hold for the GM. This seems to be a good idea to me, but that might be because I play Wushu.
It's a role-playing game. Seems to me that the idea is to play a role, not to roll some dice. If the second gets in the way of the first, discard it.
Da, I know what you mean. I would normally do so in fact, but in this case the function was grabbed from a text buffer of scraps, and wasn't likely to be revised again.
If it's something big or complicated I'll balance closing parens but for a quickie function, I'll just close braces until Emacs tells me I'm done, and leave it there.
And I've adopted the (somewhat unfriendly) style of putting all my closing braces at the end. It fits easily into 80 columns (about 55), and can be quickly parsed by eye/ The indentation is simply the emacs defaults.
In fact, the buffer of code snippets I snarfed that from has about 200 lines, and doesn't ever go over 80 columns, even though the editor window is set to display 97. There's a few comments that wrap lines, but with a moments thought they can be sensibly rearranged to occupy about 70 each.
And I never even used a machine without a GUI (well, except for my FreeBSD install, but that was by choice)
Slashdot Mirror
Potential answer: It's a consequence of any sufficiently advanced virtual reality.
That is, any virtual reality system that simulates a reality in sufficient detail will necessarily have the potential of giving rise to this level of technology.
Anyway, I don't think the whole thing is particularly scientific, but it's interesting to speculate about.
[citation needed]
No, he's arguing that the machine shouldn't be intentionally redesigned to enable Windows to run. All you Windows guys always boast about how well it supports hardware, so how is it OLPC's fault that their hardware design, intended to run a very custom Linux, doesn't support something completely different?
I, along with maybe several others here, simply feel that if Microsoft want Windows on the OLPC, Microsoft can make Windows run on the OLPC, not the OLPC redesign to Microsoft.
It's quite likely that management haven't been deliberately obtaining unlicensed software. From reading an article on this, the vast majority of cases are brought where the software is bought and paid for, just one of the little clauses in the license somewhere has caught them out.
If management are specifically choosing to pirate software, that's one thing (My opinions on most paid-for software are a little beside the point here - you want it, you pay for it if it's charged for). However, slight non-compliance is something entirely different.
And there would need to be a way to implement procedures as a part of the program. How about naming it lambda?
I'd be fairly certain, mostly from the size of the download for the OS, that they're carrying most of the Gnome libs at least, and probably a bunch of the KDE stuff.
E is a lot lighter in general though, and nice for it. (typed from E16)
I'd say that Enlightenment should be fine for such things. It tends to be fast and shiny, and doesn't use much processing power.
As for the rest of the device, I can't think of a way to beat it for $200. Heck, I might get one and put a real distro on it.
Afraid that isn't quite what the blue areas mean - those are spaces that weren't probed, from what I gather.
Please. The police are claiming that she refused to answer questions, etc. The police claim a lot of things, many of which prove false.
I thought that one of the fundamental principles of American justice was 'innocent until proven guilty'. Bearing that in mind, why don't you listen to what the person is saying - it was a piece of artwork which she had forgotten to take off, iirc.
And if the solution to terrorism, aiming to scare us, is to leave us so terrified of anything slightly out of the ordinary that police are saying that people were lucky not to get shot, it seems to me that we don't have much of a country left worth fighting for. Freedoms are crucial, and removing them to protect against those who want to remove them is self-defeating.
There's a large part wrong with this guy's thinking (not the poster, but the author of the article). For one example, take the look at package managers. The thinking of Ubuntu's planners seems very sensible to me here. They provide:
Add/Remove Applications: Simple, easy to use, limited in power. The popularity contest also makes sense - the more used a package is, the higher the chance that it is a good one. If, for instance, you're trying to pick a music player, popularity would show you that some are far more used than others, and therefore more likely to be useful to you/preferred by most users.
Synaptic: It may be less powerful than apt-get, but it's a lot easier to use. Simple search, simple categorization, easy to add and remove repositories. Good for more advanced needs or less common software.
Apt-get: Extremely powerful and flexible, but a command-line app. I have nothing against the command line, use it a lot in fact, but if you're aiming for easy to use for a new user, making them type it in and read a man page would lose you a lot of users, fast. Very useful for quick installations and the like, as well as more powerful work.
I use Debian myself, but I feel that many of his concerns are unfounded. For instance, I've been on Debian, and before that Ubuntu, for well over a year, and I still don't have the hang of everything apt-get can do. So I use synaptic, and apt-get when I need something quick.
As for the sudo, it's really useful to just type in 'sudo command', enter your password, and have it execute. Easier than su, password, enter command, exit root shell.
There's a large amount of other stuff wrong with his analysis, but I'll leave it there for now.
Very very true. Our minds are constantly 'slipping' between situations, trying out different views and perspectives on what's happening, associating the current events with stuff that we know. It seems random sometimes, but it isn't. And if we can work out how it works, how to program a computer to slip between levels and circumstances, then we've basically made it. One of the hardest things is going to be setting up a program that can take 'symbols', chunks of information that have some sort of meaning, and that can slip from one pattern to a related pattern. Once we have that, we'll be a giant step closer than we currently are.
But would you call something actually intelligent if it couldn't? You're confusing low-level computer hardware with high-level human software, and concluding that one is different from the other. If you looked at a brain on the most basic level, it's basically a hell of lot of very simple processors, all wired together. All these do is turn on or off, depending on how many of the ones they are connected to are turned on. That's it, everything else is built on top of that, and is basically software.
This is why you don't feel every single nerve input from anywhere, why you can even concentrate on what to say as opposed to pulling on the right muscles to say it. Any AI would have much the same thing - would think on a high level, and be self-aware on that level, but wouldn't necessarily be able to work on it's lower-level code. If an AI was going to program another AI, it would first teach itself to code. Similarly, if it wanted to add two and three, it wouldn't do (+ 2 3), it would do much the same as we do, groups of 'neurons' acting in concert to determine results.
You could never achieve 'intelligence' from something that has to micromanage itself on every level.
While this probably wasn't what you were looking for, we have in fact built particle accelerators that have created black holes (albeit incredibly briefly). The specific story you were referring to was probably CERN's accelerator, which the media decided to sensationalize with the risk of black holes. And as for why we'd build a machine smarter than us, because we can. Can you imagine how much you could learn from something that is more intelligent than you, that can out think you? I'd talk to one just for the fun of it. It's scientific curiosity - can we do this?
There's something incredibly cool about what is essentially another intelligence, one (probably) without many of our preconceptions and buttonholed ideas of the universe. A fresh look at things by a mind smarter than we are. That's why I'd work on it, and why I've thought about the problem a bit before - the sheer scientific marvel of creating a new intelligent being from scratch, one non-biological, but instead silicon.
Intelligence is inextricably linked with creativity. I'd highly recommend Hofstadter's writings on the subject, in which he presents ideas of AI, not as a massive calculator, but as a collection of 'symbols', bashing into each other, with parts of the pattern modified by external state.
Think of a hyper-intelligent ant colony - any one ant can't really do much, but running about and interacting with the other nearby ants, they can organize themselves to achieve much harder tasks. Indeed, one of the sample dialogs in Godel, Escher, Bach is on that very subject.
Intelligence and creativity are high-level actions, you're still thinking of an AI as a massive collection of very fast low-level actions. That would be incredibly good at refining ideas, but a machine which can think would be different. It would run on a much higher level, making associations and fuzzy reasoning. You can't implement intelligence in formal rules, but you might be able to do it by specifying some formal rules by which certain objects interact, and then affecting a few of them based on 'external' state.
Read Metamagical Themas and Godel Escher Bach for some ideas of where I'm coming from (actually, read them anyway, they're both really good)
I realize that they are just copyrighting a translation (in fact, I know people who work in Bible translation). However, their permissions etc are much less restrictive than those of a typical book.
/everything/. If you choose to do other things as a recognition of this gift, good for you, but the only requirement is belief. Public acts should be a manifestation of private beliefs - but without the beliefs, the acts are worthless.
Tithes. I don't want to end up arguing an obscure theological point forever, but the Bible is very explicit on the fact that everything is forgiven if you believe in Jesus. Important part of this being
As to what I choose to believe, if I do not believe and any religion is true, I've lost, while if one is, I win if I happened to be believing in that one, and lose otherwise. An extended version of Pascal's Wager, as it were. I also fail to see how acting as a better person due to this belief is a loss of dignity, but you may have other opinions.
Okay, so I was wrong on the tabs thing. Ah well.
/still/ being found in Windows XP after all these years?
As other people have mentioned, I didn't mean free as in price.
Finally, at someone a little higher up the tree. Open source code means that if there's a bug, people can patch it and get rid of the problem. The _only_ people who can do this for Opera are the developers. So if there is a bug, and nobody obviously finds it, it stays there. How many security bugs are
Firefox (or Iceweasel in this case) might have more outstanding problems (most of which are probably very minor issues), but, and most importantly, any major bugs can be spotted and fixed by the community as fast as they make their way into the code base. To look at it another way, many of the security issues in Firefox have likely never been exploited, but are only known because people can read the source and find these problems. Can you say that you know where the problems in Opera are? No, because you (or other coders) can't check the source to find potential problems before they become an issue. The only way to find your bugs in Opera is by working out a way of exploiting them, which a potential buffer overflow (for example) in Firefox could be found by noticing something not being checked in the source. If it was a chicken coop, the Open model is fixing or marking potential problems, the Closed model is fixing them once a fox has been shown to be able to get in, which can be too late.
Make sense?
Hm, so much stupidity, where do I start?
Tithes: Untrue. That may be a Jewish belief, but the key (in fact, only) factor in Christianity is believing in Jesus. Nothing more is required.
Copyright: From the NIV I just picked up to check:
The Holy Bible, New International Version(r).
Copyright (c) 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society
[Zondervan logo]
The NIV Student Bible, Revised
Copyright (c) 1986, 1992, 2002 by Zondervan
All rights reserved.
Seems to me that they do maintain their copyrights. Incidentally, just lower down the page, it outlines what you're allowed to do. Roughly: without written permission, you may quote up to 500 verses, as long as they don't amount to a complete book or to over a quarter of the work they're in. If it's not going to be sold, you don't even have to stick the copyright notice on. For anything else, write to ask permission.
As to the last comment, it's entirely possible. Meh, if it's false, what have I lost by believing it?
In which case, could you say, before paying for the goods, "Please read this T-shirt and consent to it on behalf of the store" (referring to the T-shirt mentioned three posts up the line)? Surely that would create a direct action of consent to this contract on behalf of the store.
I'm not a lawyer either.
How well does Opera handle 60 tabs open simultaneously? w3m does that no problem.
Furthermore, I seem to recall webkit being the first browser to pass Acid2, but don't quote me on that.
Finally, of course, Opera is non-free.
Afraid that it rips to MP3 by default. Of course, I don't use it, but I happen to know that the Mac a friend of mine has rips MP3 files that I can play over here easily enough.
I can't even hear any quality difference.
So maybe it's time to stop spreading fud about things.
No, but if you care about a character concept, you'll pick up skills which seem appropriate to that, such as Use Rope. Removing said skills simply pushes D&D yet farther towards pure combat.
That's why I mentioned that this shouldn't only hold for the GM. For everybody involved, if the rules are in the way of a good story, get rid of the rules.
Like I said, I prefer Wushu.
I didn't notice where anyone said anything like that. Seems to me that all that was being advocated was ignoring the rules for the purpose of telling a good story, and that doesn't only have to hold for the GM. This seems to be a good idea to me, but that might be because I play Wushu.
It's a role-playing game. Seems to me that the idea is to play a role, not to roll some dice. If the second gets in the way of the first, discard it.
Da, I know what you mean. I would normally do so in fact, but in this case the function was grabbed from a text buffer of scraps, and wasn't likely to be revised again.
:p
;)
If it's something big or complicated I'll balance closing parens but for a quickie function, I'll just close braces until Emacs tells me I'm done, and leave it there.
> Making me feel old.
Happy to help
For an example of actual lisp (well, scheme), a simple function to pull the
largest element out of a list:
(define (greatest x)
(cond
((null? x) ())
((null? (cdr x)) (car x))
((> (car x) (greatest (cdr x)) (car x))
(else (greatest (cdr x))))))
And I've adopted the (somewhat unfriendly) style of putting all my closing
braces at the end. It fits easily into 80 columns (about 55), and can be
quickly parsed by eye/ The indentation is simply the emacs defaults.
In fact, the buffer of code snippets I snarfed that from has about 200 lines,
and doesn't ever go over 80 columns, even though the editor window is set to
display 97. There's a few comments that wrap lines, but with a moments
thought they can be sensibly rearranged to occupy about 70 each.
And I never even used a machine without a GUI (well, except for my FreeBSD
install, but that was by choice)