I agree with you that Franklin is more likely to be a hero of the blogger subculture, just as he is with the somewhat overlapping slashdot subculture.
However I believe you are not thinking clearly if you identify librarians with the establishment. Librarians are ordinary people and, as a group, I would guess they are more likely to be liberal than reactionary, politically - and thus also fans of Franklin insofar as their own education would have made them aware of his ideas, of course - rather less likely today than 40 years ago.
Librarians may have the means to impose the sort of filter you are talking about but they would hardly have the motive.
When I said "the establishment" I had a more conventional definition in mind, i.e. those with power and money. They not only have the means (and over a much wider sphere of influence than librarians, too) - they also have the motive. The very last thing they want is people being inspired by Franklin to take politics into their own hands and resume ownership of their government.
I managed this (bidirectional bubble sort with reducing endpoints) for my first programming exercise in my very first introductory programming class. I was just being a smartass, wanted mine to go faster than everybody else's.
I agree it sorts the men from the boys at that very elementary level, but detecting true programming talent does require a bit more than that. Especially these days when the pool is that much larger.
I don't think librarians are likely to be responsible for the decline of these books. It's rather more likely that the writings of Franklin and those like him are not so frequently requested now. They have fallen out of favour because the establishment no longer actively promotes those ideas in government communiques, in education, in the mainstream media. The establishment has recognized that Franklin's style of revolution, being of limited goals and therefore more accessible to ordinary folk, is much more dangerous to it than Marxism ever was.
I've seen a few examples of this type of bot around, but usually they just spout humorous gibberish. Yours sounds like it was actually useful (i.e, as interactive interface to a knowledge base). Did it ever get put to work "outside the lab"?
they weren't programmed to translate but they learned to do so anyway. If you spoke to them in English they might respond in French or German but the response would be correct. Were they really translating _from_ one language into _another_, or were they just encoding phrases in multiple languages as equivalent responses to a given stimulus, with that stimulus also perhaps being triggered by equivalent phrases in multiple languages?
Give me a break - the Chinese Room thought experiment is completely bogus; Searle's conclusion is nothing but a straw man.
He maintains that there is no identifiable component of the system where understanding can be found. But the understanding actually resides in the system as a whole, which is best understood as an abstract entity merely implemented using the physical hardware of a room, a series of translation lookups and a mechanism (in this case incidentally human) for doing the lookups and handling the I/O.
Searle's argument is sheer hypocrisy because the same argument could be used (just as fallaciously) to demonstrate that understanding can't possibly reside in the human brain, or any other complex computation device where symbolic representation resides in a higher level of abstraction than the physical implementation.
As to your comparison with tax software, this might be somewhat spurious as there is surely difference in degree. A linguistic system which encompasses a significant portion of human knowledge will encode much more semantic content than a tax software program. Orders of magnitude more. So your analogy is tantamount to comparing the intelligence of a human with the intelligence of a cockroach.
As for Dennett, I am down with that; Dennett pretty much rules. But AFAIK he has not provided any support for the Chinese Room argument, and if he did he would be wrong anyway.
To the ignorant moronic twats who moderated the parent down:
"flamebait" and "troll" are moderations applicable to a posting made with the sole intention of provoking ire. But the point made in the parent "The French are entitled to promote their own culture as much as anybody", which was made in response to racist remarks made by the GP, is self evident. It is neither flamebait nor trolling. The GP however, is either one or the other of those.
Moderators, you have used your moderation points to support your bigoted racist viewpoints. You are not supposed to do this. Maybe you should bear the following in mind: metamoderation will cost you your moderation rights long before my karma runs out.
I didnt say all Americans were lowbrow. Obviously. Just the ones mindlessly repeating establishment dogma.
And those lowbrow Americans are entitled to say whatever they want about the UN. Obviously. It's called freedom of speech. And by the same principle I'm just as entitled to call "bullshit" and expose them for the sheep they are.
As for your objection to the ITU:
Maybe it would be... if it could be kept free of political and corporate influence.
Hmm. The *current* governing body ICANN is hardly free from political and corporate influence. In fact its that very influence which is the foundation for most people's objection to it. At least the ITU is clean as things stand now, and being a technical body is more likely to remain so than any ad hoc body appointed by governments which are solely motivated by politics.
And as an American, I don't see any particular reason why we should cede control of the system to a foreign body that we have no particular reason to trust, and that may very well work against our interests in the future.
A large proportion of the internet, surprisingly, is outside the US and doesn't "belong" to the US. What if every nation took the same narrow self-interested view as you are doing and refused to co-operate? What would become of the internet then? The internet is an international venture and needs an international governing body. This is elementary.
simply transferring control of the Internet to the ITU "just because" would be foolish.
Nobody is proposing to replace ICANN with the ITU "just because". The proposal has merit precisely because the ITU have shown themselves over a period of decades to be a responsible body who *have* remained free from corporate and government influence and who are therefore better qualified to be entrusted with stewardship of this public system.
I don't agree with all the UN-bashing going on here...it's just lowbrow americans repeating what they've been told to believe. But I'm with you on this one: the ITU is the right body to regulate the internet. It's composed of engineers.
Three words...
on
Whereables?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Heads-Up Display.
If you have to stop surfing to cross the road, it's not a proper wearable.
I doubt it. ATI must have been pretty rabid about copyright protection technology since forever. I may be wrong but I'm almost certain ATI were unique in implementing Macrovision in hardware on their graphics cards. There are plenty "underground" software tools on the net to eliminate macrovision on competing vendor's hardware but ATI cards are pretty much impossible to find circumvention tools for.
You have to separate the truckloads of "stuff with carbon in it" into piles of cow/pig/turkey bones, human bits from hospitals, raw sewage, chickenshit, pigshit
He knows that. What are the chances he could have made two such egregious errors in the same sig? One of the errors has been genuine "aarrrgh" material for Trekkers going back 40 years. The other is an impossible error, because you could not possibly know the quotation so accurately without knowing the correct attribution. Can you say "telegraph"? He's doing it on purpose. It's an entire troll in a sig.
TiVo as content aggregator?
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
TiVo can't sell content unless they have distribution rights. But that won't happen unless the media corporations divest themselves of their distribution businesses. AFAIK no government of any major developed country has so far had the balls even to ask the media corps to play fair in the marketplace, so I can't see this sort of unbundling happening soon.
You miss the point - there's nothing wrong with your concept, or even the implementation. It's just that in this particular use case you have given as example, that of classical music, the actual content you need to access (in order to give meaning to all the words) isn't going to be available for browsing because of copyright restrictions. If it were this would be a complete knowledge system. Without it, it's just another search engine.
I heard you the first time all right. I just disagree with what you are saying.
It's people like you who let world war 2 happen. Pacifists...
Balderdash - I'm well acquainted with the bully mentality, I'm no pacifist, and will readily fight to defend my immediate interests against unwanted invaders. However I don't go looking for war in order to take things that are not rightly mine to take, or to control things that are not rightly mine to control, or to pre-empt what others *might* do. It's called morality, ethics, the difference between right and wrong. I can already see that you do not have any interest in these concepts, don't bother to remind me.
The US only wants peace and economic domination of the world.
You are completely wrong about the importance of historical context. In the first place, the world today is much too small for this kind of crap and the US has heavily overstepped the mark in pursuit of its self interest. Their current policy is only increasing resentment and hatred, and they can't possibly pacify the entire Middle East. If they get too heavy handed, they will only alienate even more people around the world. Secondly, in the past rebels had access to only limited tools with which to prosecute their revolt. But today there are devastating tools like airliners, explosive devices, home made bioweapons and possibly even knocked-off nukes from poor ex-Soviet states.
It would be naive to assume that we could prevent these from falling into the wrong hands forever. And terrorism, by its decentralized nature, can never be eradicated by military force alone. Under these conditions, eventually tragedies like the WTC attack must be repeated, it's inevitable.
By the way, in referring to "tribal entities" you implied that war can be blamed on emergent social group behaviour driven by the evolutionary psychology of H sapiens. I don't know how it works in the developing world, but I really don't think this is true of modern nation states. These days the impulse to war is concocted by soulless men sitting around long tables calculating risks and gains. The people are told what to do and "follow along" just as Goebbels described in the 1930's. The tribal behaviour is still there, and we're all responsible for our own selves in that regard once the shouting starts, but at a population level it is switched on and off by our leaders as required via propaganda, PR, "spin doctoring" or whatever you want to call it.
It is not the tribal impulse which *creates* war. In fact it probably hasn't been that way ever since the emergence of nation states under the Feudal system a thousand years ago.
Overt racists are often associated with thuggish behaviour, which you seem to enjoy also. That is, when you are safely out of reach. I doubt you'd have the balls to say these things to my face.
twat wanker
Just listen to yourself. You really are an offensive waste of space.
Please direct me to another complaint that my sig implies racism is OK on slashdot.
Or, if you are unable, stop presuming to speak for some constituency that doesn't exist.
Ok here you go.
The "constituency" exists, and I am not the only one who has questioned your sig. I'm not even the only one in this thread. There are bound to be others who didn't bother to say anything.
You twat.
Now, did I say anything to provoke such invective? I think not.
Dear me, you really do have some personality problems don't you. Do you speak to people like that in real life? I suggest you try it and see what happens.
I had presumed that your sig was a clumsy swipe at racists, but now I have got to know you a little better I'm not so sure, maybe it's actually a genuine statement of your beliefs. It would fit.
1) whether the future is likely to be more peaceful and involve more multi-lateral international co-operation.
2) whether an aggressive warlike foreign policy should be judged on the same basis as in the past or if nations' behaviour today should be held to different standards.
You have in my view a very pessimistic view of both. And in the end it is just people with your views that we are fighting against and whom we must defeat if we are to achieve the peace we want.
It is people who share your views who are responsible for all the wars and all the millions of deaths that follow. You may never pick up a wepon yourself, but in espousing war as a justifiable instrument of foreign policy it is you who are responsible for those deaths all the same, because it is you who provides the justification and the excuse. I hope you will find the time to reflect on that.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you that Franklin is more likely to be a hero of the blogger subculture, just as he is with the somewhat overlapping slashdot subculture.
However I believe you are not thinking clearly if you identify librarians with the establishment. Librarians are ordinary people and, as a group, I would guess they are more likely to be liberal than reactionary, politically - and thus also fans of Franklin insofar as their own education would have made them aware of his ideas, of course - rather less likely today than 40 years ago.
Librarians may have the means to impose the sort of filter you are talking about but they would hardly have the motive.
When I said "the establishment" I had a more conventional definition in mind, i.e. those with power and money. They not only have the means (and over a much wider sphere of influence than librarians, too) - they also have the motive. The very last thing they want is people being inspired by Franklin to take politics into their own hands and resume ownership of their government.
I managed this (bidirectional bubble sort with reducing endpoints) for my first programming exercise in my very first introductory programming class. I was just being a smartass, wanted mine to go faster than everybody else's.
I agree it sorts the men from the boys at that very elementary level, but detecting true programming talent does require a bit more than that. Especially these days when the pool is that much larger.
I don't think librarians are likely to be responsible for the decline of these books. It's rather more likely that the writings of Franklin and those like him are not so frequently requested now. They have fallen out of favour because the establishment no longer actively promotes those ideas in government communiques, in education, in the mainstream media. The establishment has recognized that Franklin's style of revolution, being of limited goals and therefore more accessible to ordinary folk, is much more dangerous to it than Marxism ever was.
I've seen a few examples of this type of bot around, but usually they just spout humorous gibberish. Yours sounds like it was actually useful (i.e, as interactive interface to a knowledge base). Did it ever get put to work "outside the lab"?
they weren't programmed to translate but they learned to do so anyway. If you spoke to them in English they might respond in French or German but the response would be correct.
Were they really translating _from_ one language into _another_, or were they just encoding phrases in multiple languages as equivalent responses to a given stimulus, with that stimulus also perhaps being triggered by equivalent phrases in multiple languages?
But then again, is there any difference?
Give me a break - the Chinese Room thought experiment is completely bogus; Searle's conclusion is nothing but a straw man.
He maintains that there is no identifiable component of the system where understanding can be found. But the understanding actually resides in the system as a whole, which is best understood as an abstract entity merely implemented using the physical hardware of a room, a series of translation lookups and a mechanism (in this case incidentally human) for doing the lookups and handling the I/O.
Searle's argument is sheer hypocrisy because the same argument could be used (just as fallaciously) to demonstrate that understanding can't possibly reside in the human brain, or any other complex computation device where symbolic representation resides in a higher level of abstraction than the physical implementation.
As to your comparison with tax software, this might be somewhat spurious as there is surely difference in degree. A linguistic system which encompasses a significant portion of human knowledge will encode much more semantic content than a tax software program. Orders of magnitude more. So your analogy is tantamount to comparing the intelligence of a human with the intelligence of a cockroach.
As for Dennett, I am down with that; Dennett pretty much rules. But AFAIK he has not provided any support for the Chinese Room argument, and if he did he would be wrong anyway.
Wow. I bow to your superior geekitude!
To the ignorant moronic twats who moderated the parent down:
"flamebait" and "troll" are moderations applicable to a posting made with the sole intention of provoking ire. But the point made in the parent "The French are entitled to promote their own culture as much as anybody", which was made in response to racist remarks made by the GP, is self evident. It is neither flamebait nor trolling. The GP however, is either one or the other of those.
Moderators, you have used your moderation points to support your bigoted racist viewpoints. You are not supposed to do this. Maybe you should bear the following in mind: metamoderation will cost you your moderation rights long before my karma runs out.
And those lowbrow Americans are entitled to say whatever they want about the UN. Obviously. It's called freedom of speech. And by the same principle I'm just as entitled to call "bullshit" and expose them for the sheep they are.
As for your objection to the ITU:
Hmm. The *current* governing body ICANN is hardly free from political and corporate influence. In fact its that very influence which is the foundation for most people's objection to it. At least the ITU is clean as things stand now, and being a technical body is more likely to remain so than any ad hoc body appointed by governments which are solely motivated by politics. A large proportion of the internet, surprisingly, is outside the US and doesn't "belong" to the US. What if every nation took the same narrow self-interested view as you are doing and refused to co-operate? What would become of the internet then? The internet is an international venture and needs an international governing body. This is elementary. Nobody is proposing to replace ICANN with the ITU "just because". The proposal has merit precisely because the ITU have shown themselves over a period of decades to be a responsible body who *have* remained free from corporate and government influence and who are therefore better qualified to be entrusted with stewardship of this public system.I don't agree with all the UN-bashing going on here...it's just lowbrow americans repeating what they've been told to believe. But I'm with you on this one: the ITU is the right body to regulate the internet. It's composed of engineers.
Heads-Up Display.
If you have to stop surfing to cross the road, it's not a proper wearable.
It's easy to talk big like that when you're anonymous. Ooh, we're all so frightened of you. It's not called "anonymous COWARD" for nothing.
I doubt it. ATI must have been pretty rabid about copyright protection technology since forever. I may be wrong but I'm almost certain ATI were unique in implementing Macrovision in hardware on their graphics cards. There are plenty "underground" software tools on the net to eliminate macrovision on competing vendor's hardware but ATI cards are pretty much impossible to find circumvention tools for.
flamebait? huh???
What, does the CEO of BskyB get mod points?
ferchrissakes and I thought *I* was sad for googling the stardate.
I hope to jeezus you didn't quote that lot from memory!
I am put in mind of a certain SNL sketch with William Shatner and Dana Carvey...you know the one...
The French are entitled to promote their own culture as much as anybody. You're such an ignorant bigot. Drop dead and do us all a favour.
Talk about the worst job in the world!
He knows that. What are the chances he could have made two such egregious errors in the same sig? One of the errors has been genuine "aarrrgh" material for Trekkers going back 40 years. The other is an impossible error, because you could not possibly know the quotation so accurately without knowing the correct attribution. Can you say "telegraph"? He's doing it on purpose. It's an entire troll in a sig.
TiVo can't sell content unless they have distribution rights. But that won't happen unless the media corporations divest themselves of their distribution businesses. AFAIK no government of any major developed country has so far had the balls even to ask the media corps to play fair in the marketplace, so I can't see this sort of unbundling happening soon.
You miss the point - there's nothing wrong with your concept, or even the implementation. It's just that in this particular use case you have given as example, that of classical music, the actual content you need to access (in order to give meaning to all the words) isn't going to be available for browsing because of copyright restrictions. If it were this would be a complete knowledge system. Without it, it's just another search engine.
Overt racists are often associated with thuggish behaviour, which you seem to enjoy also. That is, when you are safely out of reach. I doubt you'd have the balls to say these things to my face.
twat
wanker
Just listen to yourself. You really are an offensive waste of space.
It's quite clear to me - and also the others who are complaining - exactly where the arrogance lies. Stop trolling.
So in the end we only disagree about two things:
1) whether the future is likely to be more peaceful and involve more multi-lateral international co-operation.
2) whether an aggressive warlike foreign policy should be judged on the same basis as in the past or if nations' behaviour today should be held to different standards.
You have in my view a very pessimistic view of both. And in the end it is just people with your views that we are fighting against and whom we must defeat if we are to achieve the peace we want.
It is people who share your views who are responsible for all the wars and all the millions of deaths that follow. You may never pick up a wepon yourself, but in espousing war as a justifiable instrument of foreign policy it is you who are responsible for those deaths all the same, because it is you who provides the justification and the excuse. I hope you will find the time to reflect on that.