It seems to me that if you want to pit man versus machine you should pick something that is easy for a man to do.
Seems to me that if you want to have some contest, you pick something that they're both about equally good at. So we don't let people run against cars, and we don't let machines recognize faces against humans.
When Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, it was a huge surprise, he played weakly. Kramnik drew Deep Fritz 3-3 last year. Kasparov is the favorite again in this match, and leads 1-0. It's balanced.
What makes it more fun is that computers and people approach the game in a totally different way, but the best computers are almost as good as the best humans. This is the right time to be having these contests.
I believe there's a distro out there that runs without any of the FSF tools (gcc etc).
As far as I know, Linux doesn't even compile without GNU binutils, GCC, GNU make and probably some others.
When I installed a "linux from scratch" system a few years ago, the number of GNU packages to install an as-basic-as-possible Linux system was on the order of 50 out of 60.
It would be an interesting intellectual exercise to make a distro without GNU tools - but otherwise it would just be stupid, even on many commercial Unix versions people install GNU tools because they're better.
You can put your own code under whatever license you want. RMS has personally written a shitload of code and released it under the GPL. No Linux distro runs without FSF code. If you don't want it, don't use it. If you don't like his speech, ignore it.
He may be a zealot, but he puts a lot of code where his mouth is.
When I was 7 or so and my small home town went from 4 digits to 5 digits by adding a 5 in front of every number, I asked my school teacher the same question. She didn't understand my question.
Later on, it turned out that by the time all the 5xxxx numbers were actually used up, they started introducing 6xxxx numbers. (I could figure out that would be possible, but she kept insisting every new number would have a 5 as welll...)
Anyway, I hope NYC isn't expecting to reach 10 billion phones soon? (no, I didn't read the article)
IMHO, your loss. In general, you are better off in a criminal trial in the US than in most of the world,
I don't think so. Settlements of trials are too common. Say, you're not guilty. AG offers you to confess and you'll get only three years. You deny, since you're not guilty. Now, you are considered a nuisance, may be found guilty after all, and then your refusal is often actually taken into account when considering your punishment. Trial settlements are just blackmail in the US.
I guess I may just be underestimating the abilities of 4 year olds, but I tell you, when this generation leave school and get jobs tech support will be a thing of the past...
There will be a point where you won't be able to / won't want to keep up with all the new stuff, and just stick to the old stuff that you know. Then, that 4 year old who has grown up to be a 24 year old, has to give you tech support for whatever cyberspace/brainlink/Windows2023 we use then, and it'll be just as boring to him as it is to you now...
US copyrights may last significantly longer than European ones,
Alas, no. EU copyright lasts until 70 years after the author's death. Later, the US had the Sonny Bono act to put theirs in line with the EU copyright. In both cases, this was applied retroactively.
Note: I meant the *surface* of the balloon. The sphere has no center. And you can draw two points on the balloon, and watch them move apart as the balloon expands, even though they do not move on the surface.
There is no epicenter of the Big Bang. It's everywhere. Space itself was created with the Big Bang, remember.
Imagine the universe as a balloon that starts out incredibly tiny, and is then blown up to full size. What's the epicenter of the balloon? It doesn't have one, it's everywhere.
This is also why it's possible that two galaxies can seem to move at higher than c relative to each other - they do not actually move that fast, rather the space between them can expand to make it seem that way.
All the blackhats will voluntarily label their packets as blackhat attacks so firewalls can drop them.
You don't understand. In the near future, with Palladium-enabled TCP/IP, networking will need a webcam which will register the colour of hat you're wearing, and there won't be anything you can do about it.
Maybe the banning of encryption at your workplace has more to do with the "what if the only person with our critical data gets hit by a bus?" kind of scenario.
That problem is overhyped. A friend who works at a local software company got hit by a bus recently and he only broke an arm.
This girl I was interested in spent easily 12-18 hours/day playing muds.
So did I. But our computer rooms weren't open longer. I'm so happy I didn't study at the Uni of Warwick in the UK, where they were open 24/7. I knew a guy there who slept in his car for a year. Many people didn't leave the labs for days (can sleep on three or four chairs). Etc.
One of the worst of them eventually married some American woman, and last I heard, was working for Microsoft.
These "people" are pathetic. They are simply people with zero self-esteem, zero drive, and who are intrinsically lazy.
I can remember when I played MUD 15 hours a day, fanatically, to protect my position on the toplist and my position in the guild. I thought I was very important, and with that devotion, drive and laziness were not the problem at all. I wouldn't wake up at 7.30 to be at the uni computer rooms at 8.00 then (note: all of this is years ago). Self-esteem, perhaps. The other two are horse-shit.
In my opinion there are three big factors that make online roleplaying addictive:
Competition. When your friends make 200k xp/hour, and so do the guys around your #14 place on the toplist, you want to get at least that as well.
Responsibility. Once you're one of the higher players in a guild, you're important for the rest. My MUD had unique weapons in it, and there would be a reboot every few days, at unpredictable times. The good players had to be online when the reboot happened, or this reboot would suck for us.
Escapism. After a while, your real life will slowly become a mess. You panic. In the meantime, you also think your online problems matter. And you get that endorphin rush the author also mentioned. So you decide to play another hour, and the trouble gets worse.
And for some people, social contacts I suppose. But I was thinking of xp/hour, and finding exploits (always a fun race between players and coders).
In short, the human brain wasn't built to make a difference between real life and virtual life. And the importance people want to have in RL is sometimes easier to get online.
Myself, I totally wasted about three years on MUDs, 1993-1995. And I only consider myself cured from all the psychological after effects of that life since about a year. I still haven't finished my CS study, but it's finally going fast, I'll finish that thesis soon. Still, years down the drain.
And from what I hear of these MMORPGs, they must be more addictive. I will stay the fuck away from every online game.
So this article reads familiar. Author knew someone who wasted years, cut himself off completely (so did I - apart from MUD playing friends). She didn't believe she could be sucked in, tried the game, and was also trapped.
So these games are exactly like heroin, addiction-wise. If you haven't played a MMORPG yet, don't start.
That said, LPC is still a cool programming language:-)
This feels a bit impolite, I'm not American so perhaps I shouldn't mix in these discussions, but whatever:).
I think it should be like this: you are allowed to put money into campaigns if you are allowed to vote. Otherwise, the election is none of your business. Corporations are not allowed to vote.
Of course, corporations will then give money to individuals, who can give it to campaigns, etc. Outlaw that too.
Then, you get the problem that rich citizens will have more influence than poor citizens. That isn't right, they are equal, one isn't better than the other. So put a low cap on the allowed contributions (I believe that is already in place, though it could be lower).
If you like thinking about these sort of questions (what's the consequence of running a mind on a computer - what happens if we compute all its subjective instants on another computer in a worldwide cluster, etc) then you should read Permutation City by Greg Egan, which takes this discussion to extremes, with rather deep consequences.
Obviously the book is fiction, speculation, but still rather good - every time you finally wrap your brain around a new idea, you go "wow" as you get it, the next paragraph takes this new idea to its extremities:-)
No an AI will not be considered alive until it can successfully judge a turing test
I never understand requirements like this; you're putting the mark way higher than you do for humans, or other life forms.
People (who knew nothing about AI) have been fooled in Turing tests by the likes of Eliza. And you're saying those people aren't even alive?
If you assume all adult humans are intelligent and alive, you can't make a test for intelligence that excludes some adult humans.
Note that the Turing test is a sufficient, but not necessary test for intelligence, as proposed by Turing. That means that he would consider a computer that passed it certainly intelligent, but it does not mean that "an AI will not be considered alive until it can pass a Turing test" - it may be considered intelligent for other reasons.
I've read around a bit now, I've even installed their client (wasn't currently doing any other distributed stuff, so why not), but I still don't understand the math well. I understand you can prove a number k is not a Sierpinski number by finding an n so that k*2^n+1 is prime. The lowest known Sierpinski number is 78557. There are now only 14 lower numbers left for which there's no fitting n found yet, and they're searching for them.
Now what I don't understand is how Sierpinski-ness can be proven, how they know there's not some huge n that makes 78557*2^n+1 prime after all; and I can't find the info. There's a class of numbers that are Sierpinski by construction (apparently) but they are much higher than this one. I guess there's no quick easy answer, I just have to read the literature, and I'm not going to... There are too many contrived number properties out there, and too much other stuff to do:)
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that if you want to pit man versus machine you should pick something that is easy for a man to do.
Seems to me that if you want to have some contest, you pick something that they're both about equally good at. So we don't let people run against cars, and we don't let machines recognize faces against humans.
When Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, it was a huge surprise, he played weakly. Kramnik drew Deep Fritz 3-3 last year. Kasparov is the favorite again in this match, and leads 1-0. It's balanced.
What makes it more fun is that computers and people approach the game in a totally different way, but the best computers are almost as good as the best humans. This is the right time to be having these contests.
I believe there's a distro out there that runs without any of the FSF tools (gcc etc).
As far as I know, Linux doesn't even compile without GNU binutils, GCC, GNU make and probably some others.
When I installed a "linux from scratch" system a few years ago, the number of GNU packages to install an as-basic-as-possible Linux system was on the order of 50 out of 60.
It would be an interesting intellectual exercise to make a distro without GNU tools - but otherwise it would just be stupid, even on many commercial Unix versions people install GNU tools because they're better.
You can put your own code under whatever license you want. RMS has personally written a shitload of code and released it under the GPL. No Linux distro runs without FSF code. If you don't want it, don't use it. If you don't like his speech, ignore it.
He may be a zealot, but he puts a lot of code where his mouth is.
So 10-digit == 11-digit dialing, basically, no?
When I was 7 or so and my small home town went from 4 digits to 5 digits by adding a 5 in front of every number, I asked my school teacher the same question. She didn't understand my question.
Later on, it turned out that by the time all the 5xxxx numbers were actually used up, they started introducing 6xxxx numbers. (I could figure out that would be possible, but she kept insisting every new number would have a 5 as welll...)
Anyway, I hope NYC isn't expecting to reach 10 billion phones soon? (no, I didn't read the article)
How does it work in legal systems in general?
Nonsensical question. That's like asking what 'house' translates to, in languages in general. There is no standard legal system.
IMHO, your loss. In general, you are better off in a criminal trial in the US than in most of the world,
I don't think so. Settlements of trials are too common. Say, you're not guilty. AG offers you to confess and you'll get only three years. You deny, since you're not guilty. Now, you are considered a nuisance, may be found guilty after all, and then your refusal is often actually taken into account when considering your punishment. Trial settlements are just blackmail in the US.
I guess I may just be underestimating the abilities of 4 year olds, but I tell you, when this generation leave school and get jobs tech support will be a thing of the past...
There will be a point where you won't be able to / won't want to keep up with all the new stuff, and just stick to the old stuff that you know. Then, that 4 year old who has grown up to be a 24 year old, has to give you tech support for whatever cyberspace/brainlink/Windows2023 we use then, and it'll be just as boring to him as it is to you now...
*GROWL*. Two typos, one in the actual link and on in the text.
http://www.iusmentis.com/copyright/crashcourse/dur ation/
US copyrights may last significantly longer than European ones,
Alas, no. EU copyright lasts until 70 years after the author's death. Later, the US had the Sonny Bono act to put theirs in line with the EU copyright. In both cases, this was applied retroactively.
See e.g. http://www.iusmenties.com/copyright/crashcourse/du ration/
The post you were replying to was just spreading FUD, as far as I can see.
Corporations are made up of people.
They're owned by people. They should have about the same rights as cars, or just a bit more to protect their employees.
Note: I meant the *surface* of the balloon. The sphere has no center. And you can draw two points on the balloon, and watch them move apart as the balloon expands, even though they do not move on the surface.
There is no epicenter of the Big Bang. It's everywhere. Space itself was created with the Big Bang, remember.
Imagine the universe as a balloon that starts out incredibly tiny, and is then blown up to full size. What's the epicenter of the balloon? It doesn't have one, it's everywhere.
This is also why it's possible that two galaxies can seem to move at higher than c relative to each other - they do not actually move that fast, rather the space between them can expand to make it seem that way.
Read the first amendment sometime, why don't you!
Yeah, but Nike isn't a citizen of the US, it's only a corporation. Corporations shouldn't have rights.
All the blackhats will voluntarily label their packets as blackhat attacks so firewalls can drop them.
You don't understand. In the near future, with Palladium-enabled TCP/IP, networking will need a webcam which will register the colour of hat you're wearing, and there won't be anything you can do about it.
Maybe the banning of encryption at your workplace has more to do with the "what if the only person with our critical data gets hit by a bus?" kind of scenario.
That problem is overhyped. A friend who works at a local software company got hit by a bus recently and he only broke an arm.
(yes the mammalian eye actually runs its connections in front of its light sensors)
Thanks for reminding me! I had a teacher once who used that as argument against Creationism, i.e. our physiology is not a perfect design.
He compared it to beautifully hand crafting a Persian style rug and then putting it on the floor upside down.
That means the interest rates are controlled centrally for the good of europe (i.e., probably by the Bundesbank;
They're controlled by the European Central Bank. For a lot of tasks, the old national banks (including the Bundesbank) are obsolete.
As far as I know any molecule with carbon (C) and hydrate (H2O) groups is a carbohydrate. It's a rather large family.
This girl I was interested in spent easily 12-18 hours/day playing muds.
So did I. But our computer rooms weren't open longer. I'm so happy I didn't study at the Uni of Warwick in the UK, where they were open 24/7. I knew a guy there who slept in his car for a year. Many people didn't leave the labs for days (can sleep on three or four chairs). Etc.
One of the worst of them eventually married some American woman, and last I heard, was working for Microsoft.
So let that be a warning!
(hi guys, I'm sure some of you will read this :-))
These "people" are pathetic. They are simply people with zero self-esteem, zero drive, and who are intrinsically lazy.
I can remember when I played MUD 15 hours a day, fanatically, to protect my position on the toplist and my position in the guild. I thought I was very important, and with that devotion, drive and laziness were not the problem at all. I wouldn't wake up at 7.30 to be at the uni computer rooms at 8.00 then (note: all of this is years ago). Self-esteem, perhaps. The other two are horse-shit.
In my opinion there are three big factors that make online roleplaying addictive:
And for some people, social contacts I suppose. But I was thinking of xp/hour, and finding exploits (always a fun race between players and coders).
In short, the human brain wasn't built to make a difference between real life and virtual life. And the importance people want to have in RL is sometimes easier to get online.
Myself, I totally wasted about three years on MUDs, 1993-1995. And I only consider myself cured from all the psychological after effects of that life since about a year. I still haven't finished my CS study, but it's finally going fast, I'll finish that thesis soon. Still, years down the drain.
And from what I hear of these MMORPGs, they must be more addictive. I will stay the fuck away from every online game.
So this article reads familiar. Author knew someone who wasted years, cut himself off completely (so did I - apart from MUD playing friends). She didn't believe she could be sucked in, tried the game, and was also trapped.
So these games are exactly like heroin, addiction-wise. If you haven't played a MMORPG yet, don't start.
That said, LPC is still a cool programming language :-)
This feels a bit impolite, I'm not American so perhaps I shouldn't mix in these discussions, but whatever :).
I think it should be like this: you are allowed to put money into campaigns if you are allowed to vote. Otherwise, the election is none of your business. Corporations are not allowed to vote.
Of course, corporations will then give money to individuals, who can give it to campaigns, etc. Outlaw that too.
Then, you get the problem that rich citizens will have more influence than poor citizens. That isn't right, they are equal, one isn't better than the other. So put a low cap on the allowed contributions (I believe that is already in place, though it could be lower).
If you like thinking about these sort of questions (what's the consequence of running a mind on a computer - what happens if we compute all its subjective instants on another computer in a worldwide cluster, etc) then you should read Permutation City by Greg Egan, which takes this discussion to extremes, with rather deep consequences.
Obviously the book is fiction, speculation, but still rather good - every time you finally wrap your brain around a new idea, you go "wow" as you get it, the next paragraph takes this new idea to its extremities :-)
No an AI will not be considered alive until it can successfully judge a turing test
I never understand requirements like this; you're putting the mark way higher than you do for humans, or other life forms.
People (who knew nothing about AI) have been fooled in Turing tests by the likes of Eliza. And you're saying those people aren't even alive?
If you assume all adult humans are intelligent and alive, you can't make a test for intelligence that excludes some adult humans.
Note that the Turing test is a sufficient, but not necessary test for intelligence, as proposed by Turing. That means that he would consider a computer that passed it certainly intelligent, but it does not mean that "an AI will not be considered alive until it can pass a Turing test" - it may be considered intelligent for other reasons.
I've read around a bit now, I've even installed their client (wasn't currently doing any other distributed stuff, so why not), but I still don't understand the math well. I understand you can prove a number k is not a Sierpinski number by finding an n so that k*2^n+1 is prime. The lowest known Sierpinski number is 78557. There are now only 14 lower numbers left for which there's no fitting n found yet, and they're searching for them.
Now what I don't understand is how Sierpinski-ness can be proven, how they know there's not some huge n that makes 78557*2^n+1 prime after all; and I can't find the info. There's a class of numbers that are Sierpinski by construction (apparently) but they are much higher than this one. I guess there's no quick easy answer, I just have to read the literature, and I'm not going to... There are too many contrived number properties out there, and too much other stuff to do :)