Listening to people's phone conversations is very easy to achieve. Eavesdropping on cell phone calls is even easier (with the right equipment). As to intercepting e-mail (and telnet sessions, as most people do not use ssh), it is entirely trivial. Even encryption gives only relative protection against someone really determined to find out about you.
I do not think privacy exists in any real sense. The most one can hope to have is privacy by obscurity, as long as nobody considers you important enough to seriously start digging.
It seems that even that will be undermined as more daily activities move online. and automated data collection techniques are developed. That's why I think that a set of laws restricting usage of the internet for data collection will be necessary.
How can you really own anything? Do you own atoms and molecules of a knife you use to butter your toast? (But don't threaten anyone with it!)
I think ownership is nothing but an agreement with the system about certain uses of certain things. That is precisely the sense, in which intellectual property does not differ from other kinds of property.
Thank you, John Locke. For a long time this idea -- the "social contract" solely as a bulwark against random disorder -- has commanded a high philosophical respect, and rightly so. But remember that it evolved in a time when those in power ruled arbitrarily and by fiat. As such, eliminating disorder would be the first, necessary step in human progress.
Thank you sir. I am flattered. However let me point out the choice of words: law is introduced to maintain order and stability, but it serves and evolves to serve many other purposes as well.
When you talk about justice, you have to be careful as to the the precise meaning of the word. Is it, for example, just that billionaires fly in private jets while people are starving? Communists argue that redistribution of wealth is the correct way to proceed. Can there be no justice in a system that does not respect the right for private property (or free speech)? Personally I think that property rights are necessary for the functioning of the democratic society, but are by no means a "natural right". So if intellectual property (no quotes here) functions well, encourages innovation and is acceptable to most people, I am all for it.
I think the argument you are making is that information is inherently different from physical objects as it can be copied indefinitely. I agree that this changes the idea of ownership - but that is exactly the poin, ownership is tranformed into something different - copyright. Whether it is good or bad - I do not know, is ownership good or bad? Neither or both depending on your point of view, I guess.
Natural rights exist. I'm not talking about mother nature (trees and rocks? please) but the state that people exist in when there are no laws other than physical ones like gravity. But you have to remember that the existance of a right doesn't necessarily preclude other people from infringing on it. The best strategy so far imho appears to be to restrict the exercise of your rights just enough to preserve as many others intact as possible. It's more an art than a science though.
But let's consider your thesis. If there are no natural rights, then Alice, who is alone in the woods is incapable of saying whatever she wants? This is clearly untrue. Thus freedom of speech is a natural right. Unfortunately it does not carry with it a defense against those who would infringe on that right - Bob threatening Alice with bodily harm if she speaks her mind. And that is where laws are introduced.
No other laws but physical laws? How does your Alice, stranded with Bob on a desert island, have a natural right to speak her mind but does not have a natural right to murder Bob with an axe? Do you imply that one's natural rights have to respect natural rights of other people? But then, what is natural about them? Why don't animals have a right to be free (or to live for that matter)? There is nothing in nature that proscribes one's rights, they are by definition a societal constraint imposed to make people happier and more productive.
As to the law, it is not introduced to let Alice speak her mind (in fact most cultures do not allow free speech), the law is introduced to bring order and stability to the society.
This is basically correct - property is a set of rights. However, these rights are pretty self evident because of the nature of the universe.
I would be vary cautious claiming anything about "the nature of the universe". The universe tends to be a lot more complicated than we think.
For something to be owned it must satisfy three requirements:
1) The owner must be able to use and enjoy it in any way 2) The owner must be able to regulate how, when and if others use it 3) The owner must be able to dispose of it in any way
Let me give a few examples. Suppose you own a bottle of liquor, you may not drink it in your car ot give it to people under 21. Violation of (1),(2),(3). Suppose you own a plot of land. Local regulations probably will not let you build a skyscraper there. Violation of (1) and (3). Suppose you have a dog. You may not torture the animal. Violation of (3). (Also if you own a dog, can you own a person?)
Notice that land ownership is a strange concept - in what sense do you own land? Do you own everything beneath the surface as well? How far? Land is already an abstract concept very different from, say, a saw or a hammer.
Thus if one uses your definition, we own very few things, perhaps even none at all.
Note also that copyrights and patents aren't natural rights, and that no one in the world is entitled to them, or even that they're necessarily a good idea. The world got along pretty well for thousands of years without any notion of copyright or patents.
I would argue there is no such thing as a "natural right" or entitlement. All rights and entitlements are rules that have been developed by humankind over thousands of years. Rocks, trees and animals do not have rights. While information ownership might be different from ownership of physical objects (but perhaps not so different from land ownership (btw most land used to be the property of the local ruler or king)), the property rights for information fall within a certain pattern of development. As law and society reached a certain stage, copyright became necessary to encourage innovation and to ensure stability.
The distiction between ownership and copyright is purely a matter of terms. Copyright is the idea of ownership taken to a new domain.
--- (*) Intellectual "property" is to property as fool's "gold" is to gold... It can't be "stolen", although one's rights vis-a-vis it can be infringed. Current usage is a deliberate obfuscation to play on the connotations of "theft".
What about land? Can your land be stolen from you, or is it that your right to use the land is infringed upon? What is property, but a right to use certain objects in a particular way.
In that sense intellectual property is not all that different from any other kind of property.
In a sensational turn of events the International Olympic Committee yesterday unveiled its plans to send an unmanned expedition to Saturn. During a press conference Huan Antonio Samaranch, President of the International Olympic Committee, was quoted as saying:
We are delighted to have this opportunity to forever link in the mind of the public the famous rings of Saturn with the Olympic rings. Our scientists are currently working on the problem of making Saturn's rings intertwine in the Olympic pattern in a way that would be visible on Earth through an ordinary binocular. I think this is one of the most exciting projects the International Olympic Committe has ever embarked on.
The expedition is currently palnned for early 2004. Both NASA and the European Space Agency expressed their interest in participating in the project.
Re:x86 is popular to hate, but not that bad really
on
Is The x86 Obsolete?
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· Score: 1
The sacrifice of sanity on the altar of backward compatibility is disgraceful and foolish.
Do you relly think so?
It seems to me it would be insane to abandon backward compatibility for the sake of increased efficiency. Not only would it be insane, but to give up on hundreds of millions lines of code just to have your system run slightly faster would be a commercial suicide.
A transition to non-x86 architecture will happen eventually, of course, but it is likely to take many years as the software base will have to be established first.
Soon it will become possible to improve vision, to sharpen hearing, to allow people to live longer , it all might happen within 50 years. But enhancing capabilities of the human mind would be the ultimate and most worrying application of technology.
At what point will we cease to be human and become something different? The world may very well change in a fundamental way well within our (extra-long?) lifespan.
It is a little surprising Microsoft chooses to fight so hard for a lost cause. Clearly some remedy will be imposed sooner or later. If they are to plead guilty to some of the alleged wrongdoings, they might get away with a much lighter punishment. Makes one wonder about their intelligence.
Also Bill Gates's performance during the depositions was pretty dismal. Either his lawers did not brief him properly, or he was too selfconfident to get briefed.
Most people have a misconception as to the practical importance of P=NP. It seems almost certain that even if P=NP, the polynomials you obtain will be of very high degree. From the point of view of practical computations there is no difference between time that is proportional to (say) x^20 and exponential time. Both make computations unfeasible.
It is not surprising that rational coefficients should be sufficient. However (potentially) unlimited precision is still needed. Roughly speaking binary expansion serves as a tape and we only need finitely many bits at any given time. I am more curious about noise tolerance. It is hard to imagine how that can be possibly true. Or does performance deteriorate for longer inputs? Could you give me a pointer to the paper you were referring to? Thanks a lot.
Well, while it is technically true that any computer is a finite state machine, you do not have to envision a Turing machine as actually having an infinite tape. The important thing is that the tape cannot be extended indefinitely, and that is true of modern computers (i.e. you can add disks,etc not indefinitely of course, but nearly so). Finite state machines neural nets have this limitation built into their structure. There is no obvious way to grow an NN.
It is really a question of storage. NNs can only store so much without an external storage system. That's why I think the idea of an NN coupled with a memory is interesting (maybe that's what the brain does?). Of course you can say a very large neural network it is _almost_ a Turing machine. But as the size grows NNs become more and more unwieldy.
I believe the work on Truing equivalency (actually they are not, they are strictly more powerful if I remember correctly) was done by Siegelman and others. I think i saw it in the Neural Computations journal. However it is all very technical and probably not accessible to a non-mathematician. For a simple example on how to implement a counter using a two-neuron NN see a paper by Elman from 1995 (i think). I forgot the journal, but it should not be difficult to find it on the internet. The problem is very clear: the conter uses binary expansion of a real number in a clever way. Thu further you cound, the more digits you need.
You are mistaken. M-P neural nets are not Turing equivalent. What M&P proved was that any binary function can be computed by a neural network or, to put it in a different way, that a finite state machine is representable by a neural net. The difference between a finite state machine and a Turing machine is that the latter has an infinitely long tape to store data, while the storage capacity of the former is limited by the number of states.
So the answer to your first question is no, you cannot transform a TM into an NN. You are right, however, that essentially what they did (I have to be careful here, I have never read the original paper) was to construct a neural net for AND, OR, etc and show how to connect them.
I have to say that in a purely theoretical sense neural networks with continuous (say sigmoid) activation function (not M-P!) have been shown to be at least Turing equivalent (and in fact more powerful). However to encode a TM into an NN you have to use infinite precision real numbers and any such encoding is inherently unstable. The basic problem is that NN has limited capacity to store information. So you have to use decimal (or binary) expansions of the states, which are real numbers to store the data for you in an artificial fashion.
So the final answer is that you cannot build a TM out of pure NNs. However (and I believe there was work on it) you can hope that a suitable combination of memory storage and a neural net can be Turing equivalent in a practical sense.
And who is to say that our brain is Turing equivalent!
As someone said, if you torture the facts long enough they will confess to anything. These experiments are more about about the interaction of experimenters intentions and the scientific method (subjugation of the latter by the former) than anything else. Has anyone independently verified these results? Look at some of the references they give (http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publist.html):
33.Wishing for Good Weather: A Natural Experiment in Group Consciousness. J. Scientific Exploration, 11, No. 1, pp. 47-58, 1997.*
41.Toward a Philosophy of Science in Women's Health Research. J. Scientific Exploration, 10, No. 4, pp. 535-545, 1996.
38.FieldREG Measurements in Egypt: Resonant Consciousness at Sacred Sites. Tech. Note 97002, July 1997 (36 pages). [Human/Machine]
If that is science, I better start learning spiritualism so I can talk to the spirits of the dead.
A transcedental number is a number such that it is not a root for any polynomial with integral coefficients. For example \sqrt{2} is irrational but not transcendental as it is a root of x^2 - 2 = 0.
It turns out that mots of real numbers are transcendental, even though except for pi and e we do not see many around. More precisely the set of transcendental numbers is uncountable while the set of non-transcendental (algebraic) numbers is countable.
Yes, in 19th century it already became very hard to be an expert in several areas.
I have seen a graph of the number of scientific publications somewhere. The growth has been superexponential for the last 200 years or so. Of course it cannot go on forever.
It was not a phenomenon specific to the 15th or 17th century. There were a lot of people like that in 19th century as well. One example is Gauss - mathematician, physicist, astronomer, etc. However the 20th (and presumably 21th) century is different. The reason for increasing specialization is that the body of knowledge has grown so much, that it is nearly impossible for a person to master even one subject entirely, let alone all science. Specialization is a perhaps unfortunate but certainly unavoidable byproduct of rapid development of science and technology.
Yes, as a matter of fact I did notice the links. It is rather amusing to have the bit about dunking biscuits sitting next to a major breakthrough in math. But the one about the stock marked is even worse - either the implications of the model are trivial or the journalist entirely missed the point. Don't know which... I like BBC a lot and it makes me upset to see them make fools of themselves. A lof of other well-respected news sources are just as bad when it comes to science. In NY times for example one writer wrote (talking about the mirror symmetryin physics) that the reflection in the mirror has left and right, and up and down switched...
but these things do actually have real world applications (crypto, natch) and not just for the NSA.
I agree. For example Hamming codes (error correction, not crypto) are useful for telecommunications and folks who do that use some fairly high powered algebraic geometry over finite fields (I am not an expert in that, but i know some people who are doing that stuff).
It is rather unfortunate that the BBC correspondent has very little idea about the subject he is writing about. The bit about "front-line mathematicians" is horrific. It is true that the subject is too esoteric to be accessible to non-mathemticians, but that is no excuse for a poorly written article.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not think privacy exists in any real sense. The most one can hope to have is privacy by obscurity, as long as nobody considers you important enough to seriously start digging.
It seems that even that will be undermined as more daily activities move online. and automated data collection techniques are developed. That's why I think that a set of laws restricting usage of the internet for data collection will be necessary.
It is a (somewhat) more intellectual version of beating up people in the street.
I think ownership is nothing but an agreement with the system about certain uses of certain things. That is precisely the sense, in which intellectual property does not differ from other kinds of property.
When you talk about justice, you have to be careful as to the the precise meaning of the word. Is it, for example, just that billionaires fly in private jets while people are starving? Communists argue that redistribution of wealth is the correct way to proceed. Can there be no justice in a system that does not respect the right for private property (or free speech)? Personally I think that property rights are necessary for the functioning of the democratic society, but are by no means a "natural right". So if intellectual property (no quotes here) functions well, encourages innovation and is acceptable to most people, I am all for it.
As to the law, it is not introduced to let Alice speak her mind (in fact most cultures do not allow free speech), the law is introduced to bring order and stability to the society.
Notice that land ownership is a strange concept - in what sense do you own land? Do you own everything beneath the surface as well? How far? Land is already an abstract concept very different from, say, a saw or a hammer.
Thus if one uses your definition, we own very few things, perhaps even none at all.
I would argue there is no such thing as a "natural right" or entitlement. All rights and entitlements are rules that have been developed by humankind over thousands of years. Rocks, trees and animals do not have rights. While information ownership might be different from ownership of physical objects (but perhaps not so different from land ownership (btw most land used to be the property of the local ruler or king)), the property rights for information fall within a certain pattern of development. As law and society reached a certain stage, copyright became necessary to encourage innovation and to ensure stability.The distiction between ownership and copyright is purely a matter of terms. Copyright is the idea of ownership taken to a new domain.
In that sense intellectual property is not all that different from any other kind of property.
We are delighted to have this opportunity to forever link in the mind of the public the famous rings of Saturn with the Olympic rings. Our scientists are currently working on the problem of making Saturn's rings intertwine in the Olympic pattern in a way that would be visible on Earth through an ordinary binocular. I think this is one of the most exciting projects the International Olympic Committe has ever embarked on.
The expedition is currently palnned for early 2004. Both NASA and the European Space Agency expressed their interest in participating in the project.
Do you relly think so?
It seems to me it would be insane to abandon backward compatibility for the sake of increased efficiency. Not only would it be insane, but to give up on hundreds of millions lines of code just to have your system run slightly faster would be a commercial suicide.
A transition to non-x86 architecture will happen eventually, of course, but it is likely to take many years as the software base will have to be established first.
At what point will we cease to be human and become something different? The world may very well change in a fundamental way well within our (extra-long?) lifespan.
Also Bill Gates's performance during the depositions was pretty dismal. Either his lawers did not brief him properly, or he was too selfconfident to get briefed.
Most people have a misconception as to the practical importance of P=NP. It seems almost certain that even if P=NP, the polynomials you obtain will be of very high degree. From the point of view of practical computations there is no difference between time that is proportional to (say) x^20 and exponential time. Both make computations unfeasible.
Gee, you don't say. People have only been trying to prove most of them for less than 200 years, they cannot be all that hard.
It is not surprising that rational coefficients should be sufficient. However (potentially) unlimited precision is still needed. Roughly speaking binary expansion serves as a tape and we only need finitely many bits at any given time. I am more curious about noise tolerance. It is hard to imagine how that can be possibly true. Or does performance deteriorate for longer inputs? Could you give me a pointer to the paper you were referring to? Thanks a lot.
Well, while it is technically true that any computer is a finite state machine, you do not have to envision a Turing machine as actually having an infinite tape. The important thing is that the tape cannot be extended indefinitely, and that is true of modern computers (i.e. you can add disks,etc not indefinitely of course, but nearly so). Finite state machines neural nets have this limitation built into their structure. There is no obvious way to grow an NN.
I believe the work on Truing equivalency (actually they are not, they are strictly more powerful if I remember correctly) was done by Siegelman and others. I think i saw it in the Neural Computations journal. However it is all very technical and probably not accessible to a non-mathematician. For a simple example on how to implement a counter using a two-neuron NN see a paper by Elman from 1995 (i think). I forgot the journal, but it should not be difficult to find it on the internet. The problem is very clear: the conter uses binary expansion of a real number in a clever way. Thu further you cound, the more digits you need.
So the answer to your first question is no, you cannot transform a TM into an NN. You are right, however, that essentially what they did (I have to be careful here, I have never read the original paper) was to construct a neural net for AND, OR, etc and show how to connect them.
I have to say that in a purely theoretical sense neural networks with continuous (say sigmoid) activation function (not M-P!) have been shown to be at least Turing equivalent (and in fact more powerful). However to encode a TM into an NN you have to use infinite precision real numbers and any such encoding is inherently unstable. The basic problem is that NN has limited capacity to store information. So you have to use decimal (or binary) expansions of the states, which are real numbers to store the data for you in an artificial fashion.
So the final answer is that you cannot build a TM out of pure NNs. However (and I believe there was work on it) you can hope that a suitable combination of memory storage and a neural net can be Turing equivalent in a practical sense.
And who is to say that our brain is Turing equivalent!
33.Wishing for Good Weather: A Natural Experiment in Group Consciousness. J. Scientific Exploration, 11, No. 1, pp. 47-58, 1997.*
41.Toward a Philosophy of Science in Women's Health Research. J. Scientific Exploration, 10, No. 4, pp. 535-545, 1996.
38.FieldREG Measurements in Egypt: Resonant Consciousness at Sacred Sites. Tech. Note 97002, July 1997 (36 pages). [Human/Machine]
If that is science, I better start learning spiritualism so I can talk to the spirits of the dead.
It turns out that mots of real numbers are transcendental, even though except for pi and e we do not see many around. More precisely the set of transcendental numbers is uncountable while the set of non-transcendental (algebraic) numbers is countable.
I have seen a graph of the number of scientific publications somewhere. The growth has been superexponential for the last 200 years or so. Of course it cannot go on forever.
It was not a phenomenon specific to the 15th or 17th century. There were a lot of people like that in 19th century as well. One example is Gauss - mathematician, physicist, astronomer, etc. However the 20th (and presumably 21th) century is different. The reason for increasing specialization is that the body of knowledge has grown so much, that it is nearly impossible for a person to master even one subject entirely, let alone all science. Specialization is a perhaps unfortunate but certainly unavoidable byproduct of rapid development of science and technology.
Yes, as a matter of fact I did notice the links. It is rather amusing to have the bit about dunking biscuits sitting next to a major breakthrough in math. But the one about the stock marked is even worse - either the implications of the model are trivial or the journalist entirely missed the point. Don't know which... I like BBC a lot and it makes me upset to see them make fools of themselves. A lof of other well-respected news sources are just as bad when it comes to science. In NY times for example one writer wrote (talking about the mirror symmetryin physics) that the reflection in the mirror has left and right, and up and down switched...
but these things do actually have real world applications (crypto, natch) and not just for the NSA.
I agree. For example Hamming codes (error correction, not crypto) are useful for telecommunications and folks who do that use some fairly high powered algebraic geometry over finite fields (I am not an expert in that, but i know some people who are doing that stuff).
It is rather unfortunate that the BBC correspondent has very little idea about the subject he is writing about. The bit about "front-line mathematicians" is horrific. It is true that the subject is too esoteric to be accessible to non-mathemticians, but that is no excuse for a poorly written article.