The article says: "...perhaps because of his recent brushes with mortality, Jobs recently authorized Walter Isaacson to write 'iSteve: The Book of Jobs'"
Hm, perhaps Jobs could achieve some more immortality by donating the source code of OS X to the Free Software Foundation?
That would be cooler than a comic book about his life.
I have money right now and would definitely pay for watching movies but in my country there is absolutely no working legal movie streaming site with decent choices. It's completely ridiculous.
However, as a gamer falling into the middle age category as well I can understand your hatred for games to some extent. Although I'm still spending quite some time on gaming, I'm buying less and less games because games have become more and more stupid. I've been wondering for a long time why studios and producers don't make games that are more suitable for halfway mature people. With almost no exceptions the marketing and the content still seem to be devised for really stupid 14-15 year old boys living on the countryside in the US and being extreme patriots. Somehow I doubt this profile matches the profile of the people like me who actually buy games.
It has come to a point where you need to make considerable efforts to just being able tolerate the main story. Take for example BFBC 2, which I have played recently. The game mechanics was okay but the background story really felt like an insult. Even 15 year old boys are rarely stupid enough to appreciate such a plot.
Also, if there were an MMORPG or even just an online shooter were you can only get an account after having proved that you're above 30, I'd probably spent more than 0 hours a week online. Not that I have much time anyway...
Buy a $500 PC and slap a pirated copy of OS X onto it?
But seriously, while getting rid of general purpose hardware and controlling the developers is the wet dream of every company, a company that actually goes that route is doomed to fail. Estimated path of failure: Loose desktop market>remain popular device maker>fuck up something (Nokia)>become unpopular device maker>be overtaken by other companies (China)>get sold out or file bankruptcy
This reminds me of some time during the 90ies when companies were planning to sell dumb terminals and put all the applications as "applets" into the cloud (then it was still called a bunch of servers, though). Wasn't Java supposed to provide the platform for this? Anyway, the idea never worked.
They are immature idiots who happen to know how to use hacking tools (and I'm sure some of them are experts). It doesn't make them people to admire or emulate.
I admire them. Let's hope that guys like you will never have reasons to admire them. (If they do their job right, you will never admire them. Let's cross thumbs it stays that way.)
who look at the anthropological evidence of how human communities used to live in prehistory, and let that guide their conclusions on how contemporary sexuality got where it is. For example, the _Sex at Dawn_ authors would explain that men want to see cheating wife porn not because jealousy is hardwired and competition sexually excites them, but because we used to live for hundreds of thousands of years (maybe a million+ depending on where you put the dividing line for what's "human") in small communal groups where sex with multiple partners in succession or was the norm.
Let me guess, they invented a time machine and frequently travel back and forth to confirm their claims, and that is the reason why you are citing their claims as a good example of scientific methodology.
I thought by the Church-Turing thesis all Turing complete computers were equivalent. What difference does analog or digital make?
Not entirely true. First, Turing machines are sequential. There are many cases of parallel computation that cannot be expressed by a Turing machine or as term normalization in untyped lambda calculus. Take for example A parallel-OR B: it will return true when A returns true even if B never terminates. You cannot express this sequentially. Second, analog neural networks with "real" real numbers are "super-Turing" (aka hypercomputers), i.e. computational machines that can solve tasks that a Turing machine cannot solve. To be fair, though, there is not the slightest evidence that these kind of neural networks are possible; they violate a decent number of fundamental physical laws.
From a more practical point of view I agree with you. It's pretty hard to imagine a convincing argument for showing that the brain is parallel in an essential and irreducible way; because of the finite resource-boundedness of its computations it seems to me that any parallelism in it could be reduced to sequential computation. And neural networks with real numbers and other hypercomputers seem to be mere theoretical constructs.
AFAIK, RMS doesn't have much money. He's not very greedy, you know. BTW, it is completely usual in academia to buy an economy class ticket and pay for accommodation for keynote speakers.
However, the reaction of the Palestinians is quite asshole-like and very unusual and unprofessional. I hope that RMS will address this issue in his speech there.
Theoretical physics work? For the sake of physics, I hope not.
You rather seem to be referring to Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument, a valid probabilistic argument with highly doubtful premises. Bostrom is a self-promoting, populist philosopher who doesn't seem to have any particular clue about theoretical physics. He knows some basic probability theory, though. His work is fun reading but involves the usual philosophy sauce...valid yet unsound and usually question-begging arguments involving numerous undefined and unclear notions.:-)
and the first part of his book contained a proof that the human brain could do something a turing machine cannot.
How widely accepted is his proof?
Not accepted at all. Penrose is just resorting to Gödel's theorems and closely related issues like the Halting Problem + a lot of hand-waving. The hand-waving comes from the fact that it is pretty hard (if not impossible) to come up with a concrete example of a problem that humans can solve that a computational device couldn't solve. It is not even clear what "solve" means in the context of the phrase "humans can solve" here.
To give credit to Penrose and Hameroff, their theory is one of the few theories about consciousness and the mind that is actually falsifiable, so with this regard it's better than most of the other accounts out there.
I've seen businesses that rely on email effectively halted due to joe-jobbing [...] That is as much due to misconfigured servers as spam,
Yet, if you configure the servers correctly such problems cannot occur. Am I supposed to pitty businesses that cannot configure correctly the technologies they rely on? As I said, the only victims of spammers seem to be idiots who would be victims of someone else otherwise...
Sorry, you're either trolling or more stupid than the "spam victims" you denigrated.
Clearly, you represent the voice of reason here, as indicated by posting anonymously and enriching your arguments with words like "fuckwit", "troll", and "stupid."
Thus spake the fuckwit that obviously has no experience with administering email servers? Yes, I've been trolled.
My intention was really not to troll. Look, it's clear that mail server admins, especially the whiny ones (hehehe), don't like spam. I didn't say I like spam either, I said it never was a serious problem and I still haven't seen any argument against this point of view.
Quite honestly, I have never met a 'victim' of spam in real life or on the Net, not a single time. I'm on the Net for more than 15 years now and nobody I have ever met had a genuine problem with his inbox or bandwidth because of spam. I don't deny that there occasionally are extreme cases but as far as I can see these are fairly rare. Moreover, the bandwidth argument someone else mentioned doesn't count at all, because the total amount of email traffic on the Net is fairly small in comparison to the total amount of other traffic, most notably porn streaming and bittorrent.
So at the risk of being modded a troll I continue to submit that spam is one of the smallest problems on the Net and has been vastly exaggerated, but anti-spam advocates have caused lawmakers to produce ridiculously severe and injust penalties for spammers in some countries (e.g. the US).
The real problem, on the other hand, is barely addressed at all: the extreme commercialization of the Internet that started in the 90ies with all its negative side effects. If there was a similar network where commercial entities/for profit sites would be strictly prohibited I'd be among the first to sign up.
I'm getting around 50 messages of spam daily and all of them are filtered out by my spam filter. Sometimes when I'm bored I even read the spam for entertainment. To cut a long story short, I have yet to meet a person for whom spam has ever been a real problem. Do you know any 'spam victim' personally? If so, what was the problem? The spam or that person's own stupidity? Sure people get ripped off by spammers, but if there was no spam at all these people would just loose their money and get ripped off legally, by buying stupid shit they don't need, by legal online poker, etc.
IMHO anti-spam propaganda has been invented by self-proclaimed internet vigilantes in the good old Usenet days and spam never really was a serious problem -- at least not as much of a problem as those caused by the fascist laws against spammers that have been invented in some countries. My 2 cents.
(I don't deny that viruses and trojans are a problem, though. But that's another matter.)
we must be careful not to assume that big business is any better than big government.
True, but not all big business is problematic. It's relatively easy to spot the evil ones. Here is a checklist:
[ ] The company is on the stock market.
[ ] The company is well-known for a non-open-source product that is not the real source of income for the company.
[ ] The company does not offer any innovative product at all but is nevertheless well-known or known to possess some important intellectual property.
[ ] The company is known for large patent lawsuits or has a huge number of software patents.
[ ] The company has in the past sued individual, non-business customers or has aggressively attempted to enforce their patents or copyright.
[ ] The company has a small website that doesn't contain much information but many references to companies or government institutions in the defense and security business.
[ ] The company has in the past intentionally violated an open source license at least once and tried to get away with it.
If there are one or more check marks in the list, the company is EVIL.
Do not use social networks or any other free services on the Net for anything you consider essential. If it's important to you, run your own server or pay for a service with a contract that gives you some warranty and customer protection. Don't transfer any valuable data to servers not paid, owned or controlled by you or you'll regret it some day.
Fly to Osama's house in Pakistan with 40 Navy Seals, kill one person that attempts to shoot at you, and then kill a bunch of other guys that are unarmed including Osama bin Laden (unarmed).
As a non-US citizen I find it pretty incredible that the same intelligence agency-like governmental institution DHS appears to be responsible both for finding and dealing with >3000-times terrorist mass murderers and with persecuting a bunch of file sharers. I mean, honestly, shouldn't the latter be a matter for the local police? Why would a freaking "Über"-intelligence agency like the DHS be allowed to deal with petty cases of copyright infringement?
Well, if lambda calculus, pi calculus, the Actor model, and so on have nothing do with software patents, then I'd really like to know what prevents someone from translating those "names" into something else entirely, which be done automatically, and thereby easily nullify any software patent. That would be great.
You see, the real problem with software patents is that there is no working definition of the sameness of algorithms, recipes, programs, or however you call it, that is both working in practice, theoretically sound, and in the meantime captures the fairly idiotic 'intuitions' of patent lawyers, lawmakers and the patent offices. And if there were such a definition, it would be clear to everyone that these patents do indeed patent pure mathematics. All of this and especially the lack of a theoretical foundations wouldn't be so bad if the patent offices would have higher requirements, would e.g. always require some concrete source code, and actually do their work and check for prior art.
But as it is these patents are simply not justifiable by any rational means, the vast majority of them is just ridiculous and an intellectual insult to anyone with rudimentary knowledge of computability theory. Turing and Church would surely throw their guts out of their graves if they knew any of this patent bullshit.
a software patent might be valid if it contains "a mathematical formula [and] implements or applies the formula in a structure or process which, when considered as a whole, is performing a function which the patent laws were designed to protect"
I wonder if they ever heard anything about the Curry-Howard isomorphism? And what do they mean by "a structure or process"? A formula of the untyped lambda-calculus? A formula of the untyped lambda-calculus plus the conversion rules? A formula of the pi-calculus? An implementation of this formula on a physical machine? How do they determine when two computable functions are equivalent? LOL, by the functions having the same graph? (Hopefully not...)
How do they know when two algorithms are identical when not even theoretical computer scientists can agree on a definition that is useful in practice and theoretically well-defined at the same time?
In other words, are patent lawyers and lawmakers really that retarded?
I don't think this is really needed. I for my part have no problems detecting sarcasm.
Now an algorithm that can detect when someone "has been whoooshed", as they say here in their juvenile jargon, that might be useful for automatizing the "whoosh" replies on/.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says: "...perhaps because of his recent brushes with mortality, Jobs recently authorized Walter Isaacson to write 'iSteve: The Book of Jobs'"
Hm, perhaps Jobs could achieve some more immortality by donating the source code of OS X to the Free Software Foundation?
That would be cooler than a comic book about his life.
Mod parent up,please!
I have money right now and would definitely pay for watching movies but in my country there is absolutely no working legal movie streaming site with decent choices. It's completely ridiculous.
Because we all know that child molesting and copyright infringement is basically the same thing, don't we Mr. Analogy-Guy?
Shouldn't there be Nazis, too?
I like both.
However, as a gamer falling into the middle age category as well I can understand your hatred for games to some extent. Although I'm still spending quite some time on gaming, I'm buying less and less games because games have become more and more stupid. I've been wondering for a long time why studios and producers don't make games that are more suitable for halfway mature people. With almost no exceptions the marketing and the content still seem to be devised for really stupid 14-15 year old boys living on the countryside in the US and being extreme patriots. Somehow I doubt this profile matches the profile of the people like me who actually buy games.
It has come to a point where you need to make considerable efforts to just being able tolerate the main story. Take for example BFBC 2, which I have played recently. The game mechanics was okay but the background story really felt like an insult. Even 15 year old boys are rarely stupid enough to appreciate such a plot.
Also, if there were an MMORPG or even just an online shooter were you can only get an account after having proved that you're above 30, I'd probably spent more than 0 hours a week online. Not that I have much time anyway...
What if Apple gave you the following choice:
Buy a $500 PC and slap a pirated copy of OS X onto it?
But seriously, while getting rid of general purpose hardware and controlling the developers is the wet dream of every company, a company that actually goes that route is doomed to fail. Estimated path of failure: Loose desktop market>remain popular device maker>fuck up something (Nokia)>become unpopular device maker>be overtaken by other companies (China)>get sold out or file bankruptcy
This reminds me of some time during the 90ies when companies were planning to sell dumb terminals and put all the applications as "applets" into the cloud (then it was still called a bunch of servers, though). Wasn't Java supposed to provide the platform for this? Anyway, the idea never worked.
That's the first positive news I've heard from Putin Medvedev---ever.
They are immature idiots who happen to know how to use hacking tools (and I'm sure some of them are experts). It doesn't make them people to admire or emulate.
I admire them. Let's hope that guys like you will never have reasons to admire them. (If they do their job right, you will never admire them. Let's cross thumbs it stays that way.)
The real work is being done by folks like the authors of _Sex at Dawn_:
http://www.sexatdawn.com/
who look at the anthropological evidence of how human communities used to live in prehistory, and let that guide their conclusions on how contemporary sexuality got where it is. For example, the _Sex at Dawn_ authors would explain that men want to see cheating wife porn not because jealousy is hardwired and competition sexually excites them, but because we used to live for hundreds of thousands of years (maybe a million+ depending on where you put the dividing line for what's "human") in small communal groups where sex with multiple partners in succession or was the norm.
Let me guess, they invented a time machine and frequently travel back and forth to confirm their claims, and that is the reason why you are citing their claims as a good example of scientific methodology.
I thought by the Church-Turing thesis all Turing complete computers were equivalent. What difference does analog or digital make?
Not entirely true. First, Turing machines are sequential. There are many cases of parallel computation that cannot be expressed by a Turing machine or as term normalization in untyped lambda calculus. Take for example A parallel-OR B: it will return true when A returns true even if B never terminates. You cannot express this sequentially. Second, analog neural networks with "real" real numbers are "super-Turing" (aka hypercomputers), i.e. computational machines that can solve tasks that a Turing machine cannot solve. To be fair, though, there is not the slightest evidence that these kind of neural networks are possible; they violate a decent number of fundamental physical laws.
From a more practical point of view I agree with you. It's pretty hard to imagine a convincing argument for showing that the brain is parallel in an essential and irreducible way; because of the finite resource-boundedness of its computations it seems to me that any parallelism in it could be reduced to sequential computation. And neural networks with real numbers and other hypercomputers seem to be mere theoretical constructs.
AFAIK, RMS doesn't have much money. He's not very greedy, you know. BTW, it is completely usual in academia to buy an economy class ticket and pay for accommodation for keynote speakers.
However, the reaction of the Palestinians is quite asshole-like and very unusual and unprofessional. I hope that RMS will address this issue in his speech there.
Theoretical physics work? For the sake of physics, I hope not.
You rather seem to be referring to Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument, a valid probabilistic argument with highly doubtful premises. Bostrom is a self-promoting, populist philosopher who doesn't seem to have any particular clue about theoretical physics. He knows some basic probability theory, though. His work is fun reading but involves the usual philosophy sauce...valid yet unsound and usually question-begging arguments involving numerous undefined and unclear notions. :-)
and the first part of his book contained a proof that the human brain could do something a turing machine cannot.
How widely accepted is his proof?
Not accepted at all. Penrose is just resorting to Gödel's theorems and closely related issues like the Halting Problem + a lot of hand-waving. The hand-waving comes from the fact that it is pretty hard (if not impossible) to come up with a concrete example of a problem that humans can solve that a computational device couldn't solve. It is not even clear what "solve" means in the context of the phrase "humans can solve" here.
To give credit to Penrose and Hameroff, their theory is one of the few theories about consciousness and the mind that is actually falsifiable, so with this regard it's better than most of the other accounts out there.
I've seen businesses that rely on email effectively halted due to joe-jobbing [...] That is as much due to misconfigured servers as spam,
Yet, if you configure the servers correctly such problems cannot occur. Am I supposed to pitty businesses that cannot configure correctly the technologies they rely on? As I said, the only victims of spammers seem to be idiots who would be victims of someone else otherwise...
Sorry, you're either trolling or more stupid than the "spam victims" you denigrated.
Clearly, you represent the voice of reason here, as indicated by posting anonymously and enriching your arguments with words like "fuckwit", "troll", and "stupid."
Thus spake the fuckwit that obviously has no experience with administering email servers? Yes, I've been trolled.
My intention was really not to troll. Look, it's clear that mail server admins, especially the whiny ones (hehehe), don't like spam. I didn't say I like spam either, I said it never was a serious problem and I still haven't seen any argument against this point of view.
Quite honestly, I have never met a 'victim' of spam in real life or on the Net, not a single time. I'm on the Net for more than 15 years now and nobody I have ever met had a genuine problem with his inbox or bandwidth because of spam. I don't deny that there occasionally are extreme cases but as far as I can see these are fairly rare. Moreover, the bandwidth argument someone else mentioned doesn't count at all, because the total amount of email traffic on the Net is fairly small in comparison to the total amount of other traffic, most notably porn streaming and bittorrent.
So at the risk of being modded a troll I continue to submit that spam is one of the smallest problems on the Net and has been vastly exaggerated, but anti-spam advocates have caused lawmakers to produce ridiculously severe and injust penalties for spammers in some countries (e.g. the US).
The real problem, on the other hand, is barely addressed at all: the extreme commercialization of the Internet that started in the 90ies with all its negative side effects. If there was a similar network where commercial entities/for profit sites would be strictly prohibited I'd be among the first to sign up.
I'm getting around 50 messages of spam daily and all of them are filtered out by my spam filter. Sometimes when I'm bored I even read the spam for entertainment. To cut a long story short, I have yet to meet a person for whom spam has ever been a real problem. Do you know any 'spam victim' personally? If so, what was the problem? The spam or that person's own stupidity? Sure people get ripped off by spammers, but if there was no spam at all these people would just loose their money and get ripped off legally, by buying stupid shit they don't need, by legal online poker, etc.
IMHO anti-spam propaganda has been invented by self-proclaimed internet vigilantes in the good old Usenet days and spam never really was a serious problem -- at least not as much of a problem as those caused by the fascist laws against spammers that have been invented in some countries. My 2 cents.
(I don't deny that viruses and trojans are a problem, though. But that's another matter.)
Fuck Facebook(tm)
we must be careful not to assume that big business is any better than big government.
True, but not all big business is problematic. It's relatively easy to spot the evil ones. Here is a checklist:
[ ] The company is on the stock market.
[ ] The company is well-known for a non-open-source product that is not the real source of income for the company.
[ ] The company does not offer any innovative product at all but is nevertheless well-known or known to possess some important intellectual property.
[ ] The company is known for large patent lawsuits or has a huge number of software patents.
[ ] The company has in the past sued individual, non-business customers or has aggressively attempted to enforce their patents or copyright.
[ ] The company has a small website that doesn't contain much information but many references to companies or government institutions in the defense and security business.
[ ] The company has in the past intentionally violated an open source license at least once and tried to get away with it.
If there are one or more check marks in the list, the company is EVIL.
Exactly. And here is the solution:
Do not use social networks or any other free services on the Net for anything you consider essential. If it's important to you, run your own server or pay for a service with a contract that gives you some warranty and customer protection. Don't transfer any valuable data to servers not paid, owned or controlled by you or you'll regret it some day.
Fly to Osama's house in Pakistan with 40 Navy Seals, kill one person that attempts to shoot at you, and then kill a bunch of other guys that are unarmed including Osama bin Laden (unarmed).
Yeah, sounds like a really thrilling mission.
As a non-US citizen I find it pretty incredible that the same intelligence agency-like governmental institution DHS appears to be responsible both for finding and dealing with >3000-times terrorist mass murderers and with persecuting a bunch of file sharers. I mean, honestly, shouldn't the latter be a matter for the local police? Why would a freaking "Über"-intelligence agency like the DHS be allowed to deal with petty cases of copyright infringement?
WTF has happened to the US?
Well, if lambda calculus, pi calculus, the Actor model, and so on have nothing do with software patents, then I'd really like to know what prevents someone from translating those "names" into something else entirely, which be done automatically, and thereby easily nullify any software patent. That would be great.
You see, the real problem with software patents is that there is no working definition of the sameness of algorithms, recipes, programs, or however you call it, that is both working in practice, theoretically sound, and in the meantime captures the fairly idiotic 'intuitions' of patent lawyers, lawmakers and the patent offices. And if there were such a definition, it would be clear to everyone that these patents do indeed patent pure mathematics. All of this and especially the lack of a theoretical foundations wouldn't be so bad if the patent offices would have higher requirements, would e.g. always require some concrete source code, and actually do their work and check for prior art.
But as it is these patents are simply not justifiable by any rational means, the vast majority of them is just ridiculous and an intellectual insult to anyone with rudimentary knowledge of computability theory. Turing and Church would surely throw their guts out of their graves if they knew any of this patent bullshit.
a software patent might be valid if it contains "a mathematical formula [and] implements or applies the formula in a structure or process which, when considered as a whole, is performing a function which the patent laws were designed to protect"
I wonder if they ever heard anything about the Curry-Howard isomorphism? And what do they mean by "a structure or process"? A formula of the untyped lambda-calculus? A formula of the untyped lambda-calculus plus the conversion rules? A formula of the pi-calculus? An implementation of this formula on a physical machine? How do they determine when two computable functions are equivalent? LOL, by the functions having the same graph? (Hopefully not...)
How do they know when two algorithms are identical when not even theoretical computer scientists can agree on a definition that is useful in practice and theoretically well-defined at the same time?
In other words, are patent lawyers and lawmakers really that retarded?
I don't think this is really needed. I for my part have no problems detecting sarcasm.
Now an algorithm that can detect when someone "has been whoooshed", as they say here in their juvenile jargon, that might be useful for automatizing the "whoosh" replies on /.
Crap you're right. Not my day. Everyone flame me to death if you wish...