I meant access to envelop both reads and writes (a usage which is standard in some circles) because I couldn't remember whether it was reads or writes or both which affected lifetime. Thanks for the clarifications and good points though!:-)
It's like I need a way to string them all together in a coherent manner. Not to mention the whole concept of keeping my blogging personality different from my twitter personality different from my Facebook profile. Or maybe I want to link them all and have any one of them actually reflect me?
That's exactly what this guy seems to be doing. He's got his own domain somewhere and some software that let's him post to all of the networks at once.
When I was in college, I managed to send an 'hello everyone' email to the entire student body (>12,000 students) by using the same distribution address that the university used to send an official mail to everyone. I probably got a couple hundred responses or so--60% were friendly, 30% confused and the remaining 10% essentially 'f you'.
Needless to say, after that incident, the school abandoned the address in favor of one-off's that could not be re-used.
Algorithms have no soul only because no one has managed to solve 'hard AI' yet. I think that self-modifying, adaptive, dynamic algorithms will be much more interesting. That's one of the reasons I like the functional languages which treat code as data and vice versa.
Well, it seems to me that the 'interesting' information is already there. It just takes a sophisticated algorithm for transforming it into 'interesting' sounds. There's a 'musical grammar' of sorts which you must make the data fit into. There are programs which generate music from thin air, so I'd think that you could start with something like that and use the image data to gently nudge it in different directions. This way the sounds wouldn't be so overwhelming (and would actually sound like music as well as vary from image to image). There would definitely need to be some advanced AI for what I'm talking about.
The inverse of this would be the visualizations which WMP, WinAmp, et al do for music. I'm just talking about doing the reverse as well.
Well, it may not be so trivial but it isn't something beyond the capabilities of most computer scientists/engineers. And, presumably, the police will hire professionals to create their toolkit (as was the case with the FBI and carnivore, etc).
No, my idea was listening to images and seeing sounds (i.e., starting with one and interpreting as the other). I just had not thought of much iteration or recursion between the two. Also, mine wouldn't require the spectrographs per we but would rather work with any image structure.
I had the same idea between undergrad and grad schools (and I'm not joking). In fact, I thought about doing my thesis on the topic. My idea wasn't so much about being able to edit the images, though that would be the next logical step after visualization.
But, my point was that if we use Latin to send commands to computers, then doctors will inadvertently send commands to theirs because they are already speaking Latin in the professional setting. Granted, the types of words they currently use (anatomy, etc) would probably not overlap with the imperatives.
Firstly, the claims are not extraordinary--just look at the number of patches coming out of Microsoft and the ubiquitousness of botnets and spyware. Secondly, I'm not a black hat.
If you really want to know, I'd seek out some of those unsavory types on IRC and maybe they will befriend you. And, I'm sure for the right amount of money they would be willing to sell an exploit to you.
Umm... if you don't know *exactly* how to hack into a Windoze box, you haven't been paying attention for the last decade. There are several classes of design flaws which each present an almost limitless supply of opportunities for exploitation.
The point though is-- no matter which you classify it as, it's the truth that really matters and not the classification.
And that's exactly where you go wrong - science doesn't give Truth, and everything that's true isn't science. Our entire argument isn't about whether or not various ideas are correct, but merely if they are science.
It depends on who you mean by 'our'. If you mean the majority of scientists who further such theories as 'abiogenesis' and 'multiple universe hypothesis', then no. Are you saying that they advance such theories knowing full well that they are incorrect only because these theories are the only ones which can fit that definition of 'science'? Or, rather do they advance such theories because they believe they are true? I would claim it is the former (based on Occam's razor) and you seem to also concur on this point. The status of 'most obvious' is only able to be granted to these theories *after* the playing field is skewed. Once you level the playing field, then you may be onto something. What explanatory powers do imaginations which have very little basis in reality wield? If it is not 'truth' which science is after, what is it, deception?
The point though is-- no matter which you classify it as, it's the truth that really matters and not the classification.
And that's exactly where you go wrong - science doesn't give Truth, and everything that's true isn't science. Our entire argument isn't about whether or not various ideas are correct, but merely if they are science.
Didn't you read the preceding sentences? If I had simply left that sentence out, would it have affected your take on this? I was not speaking in the context of 'science' at that point, but rather person-to-person. If you really want to ignore that sentence, then please consider the veracity of the other statements I've made--they stand alone (even in the context of materialism).
Well, the problem with 'methodological naturalism' as promoted (and if I'm not mistaken, initiated) by Darwin is that it too quickly dismisses design as a potential explanation.
You are mistaken - methodological naturalism [wikipedia.org] predates the precursors of science, natural philosophy and natural history, that were around in Darwin's day.
Well, let me rephrase. Darwin established "an emerging positivistic 'episteme' in which the mere mention of unverifiable 'acts of diving will' or 'the plan of creation' would increasingly serve to disqualify theories from consideration as science qua science". If Darwin did not initiate this trend, then he certainly greatly advanced it (given his popularity). The redefinition of science that Darwin advanced was really that of 'positivism' (which was not the only 'scientific' game in town at the time--and, I argue, should not be currently).
I believe it lies at equal depth as 'descent' for serving as an explanation... ... and, for the reasons I've already given, nearly everyone who's in a good position to make that determination not only disagrees with you, but does so without reservation.
Not so. There are many well qualified scientists and philosophers of science on the other side of this debate. The only ones who do not accept this have either not done the background reading or refuse to accept it because it does not mesh with their philosophical leanings.
As far as I can tell, all of your misapprehensions seem to stem from the same error: you don't know what science is, because you've gotten you science education from people that want to change what the word "science" means.
That's also not so. I have a formal 'science' education as advanced by secular society and I also have read the ideas advanced by the other side of the debate.
Actually, it's called Shazam and it keeps more metadata than Pandora. Pandora only classifies music by certain qualities, but Shazam can identify the exact song being played (by keeping a digital fingerprint of the *entire* song instead of just classifying it).
Excellent point. This industry is way too married to specific technologies. When I am disqualified for such reasons, I usually take consolation in the fact that people who think that way are no fun to work with anyway.
Emitting less of them is also geoengineering, but at least we have a pretty good idea of what that would do, because we know what the planet was like before we started adding those gases in the first place.
Not precisely. Other parameters have continued to change along with the CO2 increase. And, do we know all of the repercussions of the CO2 release and that they will be innocuous after a CO2 reduction? What you are suggesting is like uninstalling a program from a computer system. It is *not* the same as doing a rollback to the exact image of the system before the software install.
Why is this not getting through to you? I'm referring to philosophy of *science* (i.e., the business of defining exactly what science is).
It's true that it's difficult (and perhaps impossible) to draw a bright, unambiguous line between science and non-science, but that doesn't mean that some things aren't clearly on one side or the other. There may be a gray area in English where "ginormous" might or might not be a real word, but where the words "friend" and "hte" fall isn't in dispute.
Fair enough. I suppose we just differ on how far into the 'grey area' ID lies. I believe it lies at equal depth as 'descent' for serving as an explanation of 'origins' (and Meyer's reasoning for why is quite sound in my opinion). You'd have to read his reasoning before it would be expedient for us to continue much further.
The practice of forensic science accurately (and to the criterion of 'beyond a reasonable doubt') identifies the activity of intelligent agents in the committal of crimes in the past.
Forensic science doesn't detect intelligent agents - it simply tries to works out what happened on a physical level. We assume that people are intelligent and do things deliberately, but the leap from "his index finger pulled the trigger" to "he wanted to kill the other guy" isn't part of the science.
Well, one of the first [most basic] questions a homicide investigator must answer is: 'Did a crime occur here?'. He must rule out: accident and necessity before reaching 'design' as a conclusion. I would submit that the reasoning process he goes through is based on material evidence and thus that his deliberations themselves should be included as part of [forensic] science (but if you insist, then I suppose you could call such deliberations 'philosophy' or 'logic'). The point though is-- no matter which you classify it as, it's the truth that really matters and not the classification.
They rather object to neo-Darwinism (which is essentially the marriage of Darwin's theory of natural descent, abiogenesis, & the philosophy of materialism).
If you're trying to have science without materialism, meaning allowing non-physical explanations, you're trying to change the definition of science, period.
Well, the problem with 'methodological naturalism' as promoted (and if I'm not mistaken, initiated) by Darwin is that it too quickly dismisses design as a potential explanation. Maybe at the time, design was too often invoked (via 'God of the gaps') but modern science since Darwin has swung entirely to the other extreme and now it is never invoked. And, I'm not suggesting that a non-physical explanation is required here--remember, panspermia is an entirely possible scenario (and which Dawkins' admittance of started this thread!).
Sure, there are aspects to the SETI program which are not directly related to detecting intelligence...
That wasn't my point. If you just hooked up a computer to a bunch of radio telescopes and had it run a pattern detector, it will go nuts with "stars come in groups" and "things far away are red-shifted", none of which implies intelligence. And even if you told it to ignore known patterns, when it comes across a pulsar it will go off again, and for a bit you'll think you've found alien navigational beacons, but they're just an unusual type of star.
I'm not sure I follow. False positives do not imply that true ones do not exist (or that the process of searching is futile). In that hypothetical example, I would propose that better AI is called for!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I meant access to envelop both reads and writes (a usage which is standard in some circles) because I couldn't remember whether it was reads or writes or both which affected lifetime. Thanks for the clarifications and good points though! :-)
NTFS' design dictates many more accesses than FAT. Yet another advantage of FAT32 if you care about longevity at all.
It's like I need a way to string them all together in a coherent manner. Not to mention the whole concept of keeping my blogging personality different from my twitter personality different from my Facebook profile. Or maybe I want to link them all and have any one of them actually reflect me?
That's exactly what this guy seems to be doing. He's got his own domain somewhere and some software that let's him post to all of the networks at once.
Only if you view wine as superior, which no decent person would.
When I was in college, I managed to send an 'hello everyone' email to the entire student body (>12,000 students) by using the same distribution address that the university used to send an official mail to everyone. I probably got a couple hundred responses or so--60% were friendly, 30% confused and the remaining 10% essentially 'f you'.
Needless to say, after that incident, the school abandoned the address in favor of one-off's that could not be re-used.
You're going to get modded into oblivion for that!
The vast majority of women choose to have sex with men for cash, goods and/or services.
You are including *married* women in that statement, right? If you weren't, I was going to add it!
Algorithms have no soul only because no one has managed to solve 'hard AI' yet. I think that self-modifying, adaptive, dynamic algorithms will be much more interesting. That's one of the reasons I like the functional languages which treat code as data and vice versa.
Well, it seems to me that the 'interesting' information is already there. It just takes a sophisticated algorithm for transforming it into 'interesting' sounds. There's a 'musical grammar' of sorts which you must make the data fit into. There are programs which generate music from thin air, so I'd think that you could start with something like that and use the image data to gently nudge it in different directions. This way the sounds wouldn't be so overwhelming (and would actually sound like music as well as vary from image to image). There would definitely need to be some advanced AI for what I'm talking about.
The inverse of this would be the visualizations which WMP, WinAmp, et al do for music. I'm just talking about doing the reverse as well.
Well, it may not be so trivial but it isn't something beyond the capabilities of most computer scientists/engineers. And, presumably, the police will hire professionals to create their toolkit (as was the case with the FBI and carnivore, etc).
No, my idea was listening to images and seeing sounds (i.e., starting with one and interpreting as the other). I just had not thought of much iteration or recursion between the two. Also, mine wouldn't require the spectrographs per we but would rather work with any image structure.
I had the same idea between undergrad and grad schools (and I'm not joking). In fact, I thought about doing my thesis on the topic. My idea wasn't so much about being able to edit the images, though that would be the next logical step after visualization.
That was not Gerzel's suggestion--his was simply to use Latin to avoid having to have such klunky 'activation marks' (and I like that idea better).
But, my point was that if we use Latin to send commands to computers, then doctors will inadvertently send commands to theirs because they are already speaking Latin in the professional setting. Granted, the types of words they currently use (anatomy, etc) would probably not overlap with the imperatives.
But then, how would doctors use it?
Firstly, the claims are not extraordinary--just look at the number of patches coming out of Microsoft and the ubiquitousness of botnets and spyware. Secondly, I'm not a black hat.
If you really want to know, I'd seek out some of those unsavory types on IRC and maybe they will befriend you. And, I'm sure for the right amount of money they would be willing to sell an exploit to you.
There are lots of ways-- do some research.
Umm... if you don't know *exactly* how to hack into a Windoze box, you haven't been paying attention for the last decade. There are several classes of design flaws which each present an almost limitless supply of opportunities for exploitation.
How? Easy--the masses use an unsecure OS--windows.
The point though is-- no matter which you classify it as, it's the truth that really matters and not the classification. And that's exactly where you go wrong - science doesn't give Truth, and everything that's true isn't science. Our entire argument isn't about whether or not various ideas are correct, but merely if they are science.
It depends on who you mean by 'our'. If you mean the majority of scientists who further such theories as 'abiogenesis' and 'multiple universe hypothesis', then no. Are you saying that they advance such theories knowing full well that they are incorrect only because these theories are the only ones which can fit that definition of 'science'? Or, rather do they advance such theories because they believe they are true? I would claim it is the former (based on Occam's razor) and you seem to also concur on this point. The status of 'most obvious' is only able to be granted to these theories *after* the playing field is skewed. Once you level the playing field, then you may be onto something. What explanatory powers do imaginations which have very little basis in reality wield? If it is not 'truth' which science is after, what is it, deception?
The point though is-- no matter which you classify it as, it's the truth that really matters and not the classification. And that's exactly where you go wrong - science doesn't give Truth, and everything that's true isn't science. Our entire argument isn't about whether or not various ideas are correct, but merely if they are science.
Didn't you read the preceding sentences? If I had simply left that sentence out, would it have affected your take on this? I was not speaking in the context of 'science' at that point, but rather person-to-person. If you really want to ignore that sentence, then please consider the veracity of the other statements I've made--they stand alone (even in the context of materialism).
Well, the problem with 'methodological naturalism' as promoted (and if I'm not mistaken, initiated) by Darwin is that it too quickly dismisses design as a potential explanation. You are mistaken - methodological naturalism [wikipedia.org] predates the precursors of science, natural philosophy and natural history, that were around in Darwin's day.
Well, let me rephrase. Darwin established "an emerging positivistic 'episteme' in which the mere mention of unverifiable 'acts of diving will' or 'the plan of creation' would increasingly serve to disqualify theories from consideration as science qua science". If Darwin did not initiate this trend, then he certainly greatly advanced it (given his popularity). The redefinition of science that Darwin advanced was really that of 'positivism' (which was not the only 'scientific' game in town at the time--and, I argue, should not be currently).
I believe it lies at equal depth as 'descent' for serving as an explanation ... ... and, for the reasons I've already given, nearly everyone who's in a good position to make that determination not only disagrees with you, but does so without reservation.
Not so. There are many well qualified scientists and philosophers of science on the other side of this debate. The only ones who do not accept this have either not done the background reading or refuse to accept it because it does not mesh with their philosophical leanings.
As far as I can tell, all of your misapprehensions seem to stem from the same error: you don't know what science is, because you've gotten you science education from people that want to change what the word "science" means.
That's also not so. I have a formal 'science' education as advanced by secular society and I also have read the ideas advanced by the other side of the debate.
Actually, it's called Shazam and it keeps more metadata than Pandora. Pandora only classifies music by certain qualities, but Shazam can identify the exact song being played (by keeping a digital fingerprint of the *entire* song instead of just classifying it).
Excellent point. This industry is way too married to specific technologies. When I am disqualified for such reasons, I usually take consolation in the fact that people who think that way are no fun to work with anyway.
Emitting less of them is also geoengineering, but at least we have a pretty good idea of what that would do, because we know what the planet was like before we started adding those gases in the first place.
Not precisely. Other parameters have continued to change along with the CO2 increase. And, do we know all of the repercussions of the CO2 release and that they will be innocuous after a CO2 reduction? What you are suggesting is like uninstalling a program from a computer system. It is *not* the same as doing a rollback to the exact image of the system before the software install.
Why is this not getting through to you? I'm referring to philosophy of *science* (i.e., the business of defining exactly what science is). It's true that it's difficult (and perhaps impossible) to draw a bright, unambiguous line between science and non-science, but that doesn't mean that some things aren't clearly on one side or the other. There may be a gray area in English where "ginormous" might or might not be a real word, but where the words "friend" and "hte" fall isn't in dispute.
Fair enough. I suppose we just differ on how far into the 'grey area' ID lies. I believe it lies at equal depth as 'descent' for serving as an explanation of 'origins' (and Meyer's reasoning for why is quite sound in my opinion). You'd have to read his reasoning before it would be expedient for us to continue much further.
The practice of forensic science accurately (and to the criterion of 'beyond a reasonable doubt') identifies the activity of intelligent agents in the committal of crimes in the past. Forensic science doesn't detect intelligent agents - it simply tries to works out what happened on a physical level. We assume that people are intelligent and do things deliberately, but the leap from "his index finger pulled the trigger" to "he wanted to kill the other guy" isn't part of the science.
Well, one of the first [most basic] questions a homicide investigator must answer is: 'Did a crime occur here?'. He must rule out: accident and necessity before reaching 'design' as a conclusion. I would submit that the reasoning process he goes through is based on material evidence and thus that his deliberations themselves should be included as part of [forensic] science (but if you insist, then I suppose you could call such deliberations 'philosophy' or 'logic'). The point though is-- no matter which you classify it as, it's the truth that really matters and not the classification.
They rather object to neo-Darwinism (which is essentially the marriage of Darwin's theory of natural descent, abiogenesis, & the philosophy of materialism). If you're trying to have science without materialism, meaning allowing non-physical explanations, you're trying to change the definition of science, period.
Well, the problem with 'methodological naturalism' as promoted (and if I'm not mistaken, initiated) by Darwin is that it too quickly dismisses design as a potential explanation. Maybe at the time, design was too often invoked (via 'God of the gaps') but modern science since Darwin has swung entirely to the other extreme and now it is never invoked. And, I'm not suggesting that a non-physical explanation is required here--remember, panspermia is an entirely possible scenario (and which Dawkins' admittance of started this thread!).
Sure, there are aspects to the SETI program which are not directly related to detecting intelligence ...
That wasn't my point. If you just hooked up a computer to a bunch of radio telescopes and had it run a pattern detector, it will go nuts with "stars come in groups" and "things far away are red-shifted", none of which implies intelligence. And even if you told it to ignore known patterns, when it comes across a pulsar it will go off again, and for a bit you'll think you've found alien navigational beacons, but they're just an unusual type of star.
I'm not sure I follow. False positives do not imply that true ones do not exist (or that the process of searching is futile). In that hypothetical example, I would propose that better AI is called for! :-)