Rational people have every reason to believe the sun will rise and set on schedule tomorrow. Christians and Jews can't be so sure.
Yeah right, because Christians and Jews by definition are not rational. They would never dream of taking the Bible as anything other that GOD'S LITERAL WORD.
It's not like someone could believe in God and not be stupid is it?
After all no believer would think it's a mashup, would they? I mean no other ancient texts are partially historical, partly allegorical and contain deep symbolic themes - so the bible's probably not any different.
...but the 10-year-old girl in Jurassic Park (who's been of legal drinking age for almost 3 years!) was shown using a real app called FSN that was indeed contemporary with the SGI gear of 1993
That wasn't really my complaint in that scene. Ok, so it's remotely possible that a 10 year old in 1993 knows Unix. Maybe. My disbelief can be certainly suspended that far. What I don't see is anyone (Including 10 year old girls) being able to successfully navigate and utilize a complex custom system such as would, oh, control an entire island's infrastructure in a few minutes.
I have also had to "black box" systems in the past that i had no knowledge of. Maybe I'm not the crazy genius that 10-yr old was (no, i'm a sane genius:)), but it took me more than 45 seconds... Hell, sometimes I have enough trouble finding a doc our file directory structures and I supposedly know what's where! Knowing the OS in a GUI system isn't half the battle when it controls a nuclear power plant (for example) it's knowing what all the radio buttons, sliders and text boxes are for and then what to do with them... That's what had me disgusted at that scene -on that level is was simply infeasable to the point of impossibility.
Yeah, but outright lies are for amateurs . The pros merely frame their viewpoints in memetic infections with psycho-linguistic technologies. Word choice is obvious enough. There are scales out there that determine the emotional content of well prepared speeches, or the amount the speaker is appealing to non-rational emotional or physical analogies.
Speaking of the opponent as squeezing one to death, or cutting off ones oxygen or being contained or not having enough space all server to band the group together, as that has been our primary means of defense. We are social animals.
Tone and delivery, body language, etc. all deliver their own messages to our eagerly awaiting senses, which are trying busily to put all the pieces together and hand (more) coherent stories up the chains.
I don't really get your strenuous objections. If you are going to object to having strings tied to code, I guess you only use public domain stuff? I mean, anything that has a license has some strings...
While almost never having seen "BG", you really can't compare production values for the two series. The pure tech advancement in tv production alone skews towards whichever came out later... in this case BG.
While I can't comment on the acting quality of BG, after season 1, B5 had some great acting and character development. Your comment did make me want to catch a few shows of BG now, however...:)
Fish school through autonomous intaraction with the state of their observable surroundings. Most times, the local heuristic on movement is not very linear, and the swarm folds on itself, moves randomly, changes volume and surface topology.
When this type of intelligence is directeted toward some more concrete goal, such as getting away from a predator (for fish), it turns out that the average path can be near optimal if the proper heuristics can be chosen.
I admit that I haven't used 8 but I tried 7 when it came out after a five year hiatus motivated by disgust at the absolutely horrible accuracy of speech recognition systems at the time.
I am on another hiatus. I found Dragon 7 unusable for work or home use. For one thing, it was slooow. Admittedly, I only had a dual Xeon 2.0 Ghz with a couple gigs of RAM to play with - but still. For another, even after scanning my hundreds of megs of sent mail and documents and multiple hours of training it still couldn't figure out what I was saying a quarter of the time.
I found that I was spending more time trying to get it to work properly and fixing errors than I would have spent just typing the documents. That's unworkable. I can't attribute the results to not spending enough time with the software, either, as I banged my head against it for a month before going back to the keyboard. It's a shame, as I would much rather create at least the rough draft verbally.
Perhaps you should get out more. Memes, which are exactly the word I would want to use instead of this 'virus' stuff are possibly just as dificult to deal with as real viruses but that doens't mean they are impossible to combat.
As you said, clever people have utilized memes for their own ends.
So, too, can you. Think of retroviruses. We utilize them now, to combat bodily illnesses. You can utilize a meme as an intellectual retrovirus.
When you say that a mind is 'damaged beyond repair' through the action of memes, you are wrong. Unless you are writing of physical damage, the mind has an incredibly plastic ability to adapt.
Perhaps the frontal assault of a logic error will not force the meme to mutate, but that doesn't mean that they don't, or can't.
In order to enter the Tiscali Music Club you must have the following on your PC:
* Internet Explorer 5.0 (or better) - Click here to download the latest version
* Windows Media Player 7.0 (or better) - Click here to download the latest version
* Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP
That means that when a merchant receives payment, he is SURE that he has received REAL VALUE and not something that can be revoked.
And that is why I an leery or the E-Gold payment system for anything other that services already received, or goods already received.
In fact, E-Gold has on it's own website a "Fraud Alert" Step 8 of which is: The victim makes the e-gold spend and never hears from the escrow service again.
It seems like a system that you can only utilize with people and businesses you already trust implicitly, since there is no recourse if you give your money to someone.
So this shows with our current understanding of physics what some possible theoretical limits of computers are.
Now, suppose that current string theory is somewhat correct. It is certainly theoretically possible that we could manipulate atoms at the string level - perhaps string vibrational states. Throw in a possible 6 extra dimensions, accessable from every point in our 4d space-time continuum...
And that is just the current semi-fringe paradigm.
I personally think that Reality is even much stranger than that, but perhaps that is neither here nor there.
If I were going to try and crack a system with that kind of security through this method, I would make certain they would give me the right pin by keeping the employee around until they system was compromised.
They mean smart as in the Outlook Web Access Client which doesn't work probably in any browser other than MSIE and uses (as always) their non-standard DHTML object model?
I call BS -- I use Outlook Web Access with Firebird from home with absolutely no problems. It works differently than it does if you use IE, but it still works.
Well, it doesn't work properly with in my case. I have had some problems with Web Access in Mozilla - this is not just bashing, it is true in some cases.
I think another way of looking at it would be to consider keys. your landlord can't stop you from lending your key to someone else, but I'd think that making copies of it and distributing it to all of your friends would create a bit of a stir, as would selling your key: and the key is also one of your "rivalrous assets".
I don't think this analogy is quite right. Instead, I think another way of looking at it if you want to use keys is: Let's say you bought a house (the bullshit about not owning the jig is just that). Could you make keys for all your friends if you wanted? I think so...
A logical extention of your idea, to my mind, is that we shouldn't have doctors, because "the body is (rather should be) capable of taking care of itself."
Microchips would simply be another tool for those cases where the body *cannot* take care of itself properly without outside help.
I'm sorry to say that I must disagree with most of the points Daniel Lyons raised in your article about Linux and the GPL, and I am disappointed that the article was so extremely biased.
The GPL is a license, based solidly on the copyright of the intellectual property it protects.
Just as Microsoft, SCO, Cisco, et al, use licenses and lawyers to control their intellectual property, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) uses a license and a lawyer to control the intellectual property rights assigned to them.
The terms of the licenses may be different, but that is hardly the point. If you use a product that is licensed under the GPL, you are obliged to abide by its license agreement.
The reason Linksys was able to ship a solid product - a "smash hit" as Daniel called it - garnering over $5M in sales, was due to the foundation Linksys built on.
In this case, that foundation was Linux.
Linksys could have developed their own code base for the router, but made a business decision to use the intellectual property of others, to offset the millions that would have been spent in R&D, testing, etc., to develop their own code.
Yes, businesses have to weigh whether using a GPL'd product as the base of their own product is worthwhile. If you don't think that it would work for you, don't use the product. It's really that simple.
Linksys obviously thought it was worth it.
To pretend horror over an entity (albeit not a Fortune 500 company) actually defending their intellectual property rights is disingenuous if copyright is to mean anything.
Calling the FSF "hit men", saying they "acted in secret" (even though it has been widely discussed in the technical and legal forums where it is of interest), calling this the "dark side of the free software movement" is more than preposterous - it is propaganda. Saying that the FSF "snoop out violators and bust them" is nothing more than saying they defend their intellectual property, although in much more derogatory language.
Pretending there is some kind of conspiracy, insinuating the FSF receives kickbacks, suggesting subtly that the FSF and GPL are out to take over the world, communist style, hearkens back to the McCarthy era, and I think should be left there.
I an forced to wonder at the dichotomy of Daniel's positions.
Are intellectual property rights only valid if held by large corporations, or do individuals, and groups of individuals also have the right to their own intellectual property?
He seems to thing it is proper for SCO to sue IBM over UNIX code in Linux, but not for the FSF to sue anyone over GPL'd code in their products.
Are individuals or smaller entities to be constrained from defending their intellectual property rights?
I can't imagine Daniel so shrilly protesting if Forbes (for example) talked with some company that was using their copyrighted articles, maybe even threatened to take them to court over it.
I do agree with one point in Daniel's article. I, for one, would welcome a full blown challenge of the GPL in court.
It is a pity that no one has yet challenged this in court, but perhaps that is because the GPL is solidly based on copyright, and the challenger would likely loose.
I see no real distinction between a man taught how to play chess by a master and a computer taught by a programmer.
Ok then, what about this modification of the statement:
"when a computer learns chess from a master, as opposed to being programmed to play chess, with lookup tables, predictive branching specialized to chess, etc., then we have something to look at."
Did you read the part where he said that the salespeople loose sales because Office is bundled with a Dell, and people don't want to spend another $400?
I would assume they would be excited because they could make a percentage of those sales they would otherwise loose.
I like the benchmarks that utilize real world applications to do real world things, such as file compression, mp3 ripping, compilation, etc.
These tell me how the system will perform in tasks that I am likely to do quite frequently.
If I can compress a 100 meg file in 1:00 on one system but:30 on another system, it may be worthwile for me do upgrade, if I do that much compression.
If compilation of mozilla (for example) takes 3:00:00 on one system, but 1:00:00 on another, it may make me much happier to utilize the newer system (and increase my productivity).
These types of benchmarks are not a black art, and *do* bear some relation to reality.
They can certainly be impartial, and in this case perception is reality is more than just a marketing slogan.
The way I see it, he compares numbers from Apple, which have been boosted to the max by Apple, to numbers from Dell, which have been boosted to the max by Dell.
Or are you saying that Apple did not perform any optimizations on their tests of the G5, and that is the reason Dell's numbers are so much higher that the G5's numbers?
Slashdot Mirror
Rational people have every reason to believe the sun will rise and set on schedule tomorrow. Christians and Jews can't be so sure.
Yeah right, because Christians and Jews by definition are not rational. They would never dream of taking the Bible as anything other that GOD'S LITERAL WORD.
It's not like someone could believe in God and not be stupid is it?
After all no believer would think it's a mashup, would they? I mean no other ancient texts are partially historical, partly allegorical and contain deep symbolic themes - so the bible's probably not any different.
Optionally, the above may be considered sarcasm.
...but the 10-year-old girl in Jurassic Park (who's been of legal drinking age for almost 3 years!) was shown using a real app called FSN that was indeed contemporary with the SGI gear of 1993
:)), but it took me more than 45 seconds... Hell, sometimes I have enough trouble finding a doc our file directory structures and I supposedly know what's where! Knowing the OS in a GUI system isn't half the battle when it controls a nuclear power plant (for example) it's knowing what all the radio buttons, sliders and text boxes are for and then what to do with them... That's what had me disgusted at that scene -on that level is was simply infeasable to the point of impossibility.
That wasn't really my complaint in that scene. Ok, so it's remotely possible that a 10 year old in 1993 knows Unix. Maybe. My disbelief can be certainly suspended that far. What I don't see is anyone (Including 10 year old girls) being able to successfully navigate and utilize a complex custom system such as would, oh, control an entire island's infrastructure in a few minutes.
I have also had to "black box" systems in the past that i had no knowledge of. Maybe I'm not the crazy genius that 10-yr old was (no, i'm a sane genius
Yeah, but outright lies are for amateurs . The pros merely frame their viewpoints in memetic infections with psycho-linguistic technologies. Word choice is obvious enough. There are scales out there that determine the emotional content of well prepared speeches, or the amount the speaker is appealing to non-rational emotional or physical analogies.
g ramming for the most applicable aspects of this if you are interested...
Speaking of the opponent as squeezing one to death, or cutting off ones oxygen or being contained or not having enough space all server to band the group together, as that has been our primary means of defense. We are social animals.
Tone and delivery, body language, etc. all deliver their own messages to our eagerly awaiting senses, which are trying busily to put all the pieces together and hand (more) coherent stories up the chains.
Read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_pro
Ok, so basically whoever can hire the best hackers will win the elections where these machines are used. Unless the winner happens to be bugs bunny.
see mirror
I don't really get your strenuous objections. If you are going to object to having strings tied to code, I guess you only use public domain stuff? I mean, anything that has a license has some strings...
You don't dabble in blue sky... yet say linux is rady for the desktop. heh.
I think you probably have it mixed up - Linux will be ready for the desktop *when* there is a good degree of cross-spectrum adoption.
While almost never having seen "BG", you really can't compare production values for the two series. The pure tech advancement in tv production alone skews towards whichever came out later... in this case BG.
:)
While I can't comment on the acting quality of BG, after season 1, B5 had some great acting and character development. Your comment did make me want to catch a few shows of BG now, however...
Fish school through autonomous intaraction with the state of their observable surroundings. Most times, the local heuristic on movement is not very linear, and the swarm folds on itself, moves randomly, changes volume and surface topology.
When this type of intelligence is directeted toward some more concrete goal, such as getting away from a predator (for fish), it turns out that the average path can be near optimal if the proper heuristics can be chosen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence
I admit that I haven't used 8 but I tried 7 when it came out after a five year hiatus motivated by disgust at the absolutely horrible accuracy of speech recognition systems at the time.
I am on another hiatus. I found Dragon 7 unusable for work or home use. For one thing, it was slooow. Admittedly, I only had a dual Xeon 2.0 Ghz with a couple gigs of RAM to play with - but still. For another, even after scanning my hundreds of megs of sent mail and documents and multiple hours of training it still couldn't figure out what I was saying a quarter of the time.
I found that I was spending more time trying to get it to work properly and fixing errors than I would have spent just typing the documents. That's unworkable. I can't attribute the results to not spending enough time with the software, either, as I banged my head against it for a month before going back to the keyboard. It's a shame, as I would much rather create at least the rough draft verbally.
Let me know when onboard audio has those features and I'll jump on it...
Perhaps you should get out more. Memes, which are exactly the word I would want to use instead of this 'virus' stuff are possibly just as dificult to deal with as real viruses but that doens't mean they are impossible to combat.
As you said, clever people have utilized memes for their own ends.
So, too, can you. Think of retroviruses. We utilize them now, to combat bodily illnesses. You can utilize a meme as an intellectual retrovirus.
When you say that a mind is 'damaged beyond repair' through the action of memes, you are wrong. Unless you are writing of physical damage, the mind has an incredibly plastic ability to adapt.
Perhaps the frontal assault of a logic error will not force the meme to mutate, but that doesn't mean that they don't, or can't.
P.S. All thoughts are parasites.
yr. obt. svt,
jvk
Tiscali Music Club: System Check
In order to enter the Tiscali Music Club you must have the following on your PC:
* Internet Explorer 5.0 (or better) - Click here to download the latest version
* Windows Media Player 7.0 (or better) - Click here to download the latest version
* Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP
That means that when a merchant receives payment, he is SURE that he has received REAL VALUE and not something that can be revoked.
And that is why I an leery or the E-Gold payment system for anything other that services already received, or goods already received.
In fact, E-Gold has on it's own website a "Fraud Alert" Step 8 of which is:
The victim makes the e-gold spend and never hears from the escrow service again.
It seems like a system that you can only utilize with people and businesses you already trust implicitly, since there is no recourse if you give your money to someone.
Ok,
So this shows with our current understanding of physics what some possible theoretical limits of computers are.
Now, suppose that current string theory is somewhat correct. It is certainly theoretically possible that we could manipulate atoms at the string level - perhaps string vibrational states. Throw in a possible 6 extra dimensions, accessable from every point in our 4d space-time continuum...
And that is just the current semi-fringe paradigm.
I personally think that Reality is even much stranger than that, but perhaps that is neither here nor there.
If I were going to try and crack a system with that kind of security through this method, I would make certain they would give me the right pin by keeping the employee around until they system was compromised.
They mean smart as in the Outlook Web Access Client which doesn't work probably in any browser other than MSIE and uses (as always) their non-standard DHTML object model?
I call BS -- I use Outlook Web Access with Firebird from home with absolutely no problems. It works differently than it does if you use IE, but it still works.
Well, it doesn't work properly with in my case. I have had some problems with Web Access in Mozilla - this is not just bashing, it is true in some cases.
I think another way of looking at it would be to consider keys. your landlord can't stop you from lending your key to someone else, but I'd think that making copies of it and distributing it to all of your friends would create a bit of a stir, as would selling your key: and the key is also one of your "rivalrous assets".
I don't think this analogy is quite right. Instead, I think another way of looking at it if you want to use keys is: Let's say you bought a house (the bullshit about not owning the jig is just that). Could you make keys for all your friends if you wanted? I think so...
I don't quite get what you are saying.
A logical extention of your idea, to my mind, is that we shouldn't have doctors, because "the body is (rather should be) capable of taking care of itself."
Microchips would simply be another tool for those cases where the body *cannot* take care of itself properly without outside help.
I'm sorry to say that I must disagree with most of the points Daniel Lyons raised in your article about Linux and the GPL, and I am disappointed that the article was so extremely biased.
The GPL is a license, based solidly on the copyright of the intellectual property it protects.
Just as Microsoft, SCO, Cisco, et al, use licenses and lawyers to control their intellectual property, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) uses a license and a lawyer to control the intellectual property rights assigned to them.
The terms of the licenses may be different, but that is hardly the point. If you use a product that is licensed under the GPL, you are obliged to abide by its license agreement.
The reason Linksys was able to ship a solid product - a "smash hit" as Daniel called it - garnering over $5M in sales, was due to the foundation Linksys built on.
In this case, that foundation was Linux.
Linksys could have developed their own code base for the router, but made a business decision to use the intellectual property of others, to offset the millions that would have been spent in R&D, testing, etc., to develop their own code.
Yes, businesses have to weigh whether using a GPL'd product as the base of their own product is worthwhile. If you don't think that it would work for you, don't use the product. It's really that simple.
Linksys obviously thought it was worth it.
To pretend horror over an entity (albeit not a Fortune 500 company) actually defending their intellectual property rights is disingenuous if copyright is to mean anything.
Calling the FSF "hit men", saying they "acted in secret" (even though it has been widely discussed in the technical and legal forums where it is of interest), calling this the "dark side of the free software movement" is more than preposterous - it is propaganda. Saying that the FSF "snoop out violators and bust them" is nothing more than saying they defend their intellectual property, although in much more derogatory language.
Pretending there is some kind of conspiracy, insinuating the FSF receives kickbacks, suggesting subtly that the FSF and GPL are out to take over the world, communist style, hearkens back to the McCarthy era, and I think should be left there.
I an forced to wonder at the dichotomy of Daniel's positions.
Are intellectual property rights only valid if held by large corporations, or do individuals, and groups of individuals also have the right to their own intellectual property?
He seems to thing it is proper for SCO to sue IBM over UNIX code in Linux, but not for the FSF to sue anyone over GPL'd code in their products.
Are individuals or smaller entities to be constrained from defending their intellectual property rights?
I can't imagine Daniel so shrilly protesting if Forbes (for example) talked with some company that was using their copyrighted articles, maybe even threatened to take them to court over it.
I do agree with one point in Daniel's article. I, for one, would welcome a full blown challenge of the GPL in court.
It is a pity that no one has yet challenged this in court, but perhaps that is because the GPL is solidly based on copyright, and the challenger would likely loose.
I see no real distinction between a man taught how to play chess by a master and a computer taught by a programmer.
Ok then, what about this modification of the statement:
"when a computer learns chess from a master, as opposed to being programmed to play chess, with lookup tables, predictive branching specialized to chess, etc., then we have something to look at."
Perhaps "signifies" ?
That would at least make sense, though you'd have to look at the code to make sure...
Did you read the part where he said that the salespeople loose sales because Office is bundled with a Dell, and people don't want to spend another $400?
I would assume they would be excited because they could make a percentage of those sales they would otherwise loose.
I really don't know.
:30 on another system, it may be worthwile for me do upgrade, if I do that much compression.
I like the benchmarks that utilize real world applications to do real world things, such as file compression, mp3 ripping, compilation, etc.
These tell me how the system will perform in tasks that I am likely to do quite frequently.
If I can compress a 100 meg file in 1:00 on one system but
If compilation of mozilla (for example) takes 3:00:00 on one system, but 1:00:00 on another, it may make me much happier to utilize the newer system (and increase my productivity).
These types of benchmarks are not a black art, and *do* bear some relation to reality.
They can certainly be impartial, and in this case perception is reality is more than just a marketing slogan.
The way I see it, he compares numbers from Apple, which have been boosted to the max by Apple, to numbers from Dell, which have been boosted to the max by Dell.
Or are you saying that Apple did not perform any optimizations on their tests of the G5, and that is the reason Dell's numbers are so much higher that the G5's numbers?
Somehow, I find that hard to believe.