My bank has adopted a scheme of "choose your image from the following twenty", and they only allow three failures.
A scheme that would last until the Turing challenge was broken would be simply to ask the user to identify the thing, animal, or person in a given image.
Current laptops have an average of two years useful lifetime and are in general unrepairable outside the warranty period. They are also pretty much non-upgradeable, and they don't tolerate dust well. They've become pretty much disposable, commodity items. The stack of non-working laptops (mine and from friends) in my study reached a height seven not too long ago, broken screens, keyboards, gone disks and motherboards.
My desktops have had useful lives of a decade or more. My current web server is a $80, second-hand P3/300 running Ubuntu. I recently bought a desktop system to extend the lifetime of my ailing laptop, and with the 19" monitor, the choice of hardware (keyboards and mice matter), and the expandability and maintainability, it will probably become my main machine.
From Peopleware, Chapter 18, "The Wholesis Greater
than the Sum of the Parts":
A jelled team is a group of people so strongly
knit that the whole is grater than the sum of the parts. The production of
such a team is greater than that of the same people working in unjelled form.
Just as important, the enjoyment that people derive from their work is greater
than what you'd expect given the nature of the work itself. In some cases,
jelled teams working on assignments that others would declare downright dull
have a simply marvelous time.
Once a team begins
to jell, the probability of success goes up dramatically. The team can become
almost unstoppable, a juggernaut for success. Managing these jugernaut teams
is a real pleasure. You spend most of your time just getting obstacles out of
their way, clearing the path so that bystanders don't get trampled underfoot:
"Here they come, folks. Stand back and hold onto your hats." They don't need
to be motivated. They've got momentum.
Having an the change to rest when you're tired, something which 9-to-5vers don't have, certainly helps to increase the number of productive hours in a day.
Having a quiet, private place in which you can reach "flow" quickly also helps with productivity. The time-slicing of meetings sparsed accross the day does the opposite.
Read "Peopleware", by De Marco and Lister. The recipe has been known for decades.
I've done a 100 hour week followed by a 60 hour week to get over emergencies, but what happens right after is that you feel wasted and that your productivity drops to, say, 10 hours a week independently of how many hours you show up.
Long weeks on a project's startup can be good because the acceleration may produce a good amount of sinergy.
Long weeks over long periods of time are a sure symptom of an ill project.
Creative people, programmers included, need distraction and lots of sleep to be able to give their best.
In to consecutive articles,/. reported that a) governments have got more rights to invade people's privacy for whatever purpose, and that b) hackers hacking around, with no particular purpose, can be jailed for years.
All extremes are bad. There's a middle ground solution. But first, lets counter Selkers arguments.
** Independently of how many ways polititians have or may find to cheat on an election, the artifact used to count the votes and the counting itself _has_ to be auditable. Big period. **
The middle ground solution is a system just like the DRE's that prints one or more tickets that the voter reviews and then deposits in a box.
The ticket, which could be something like a parking lot ticket, would contain:
1) The election made in plain text. 2) The election coded in a barcode or magnetic strip.
The counting would still be done by the computer, but, in case of any doubt about results, an simple, independent audit could be done with just the help of a barcode reader.
Only a small, statistically calculated number of votes would need to be audited; just enough to be statistically certain that a full recount would not alter the result.
The software to do the ouditing could be and should be independently developed. The software would be so simple that it could be developed in a few days after the election.
and think he's wrong because he fails to realize that Zeno's paradox is not about the features of the underlying physical world, but about the ones of the mathematical models used to represent it.
Zeno's paradox has a purely mathematical solution for the same reason that it can be shown that 1=0.999... (BTW, That 1=0.999... could be used to argue that there _are_ instants of time in the physical world, using reasoning like the one in Lynds' paper).
The links bellow were discussed before in Slashdot. They talk about how different models (axiomatic theories) may produce very different mathematical systems:
Model theory: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ModelTheory. html
Set theories: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SetTheory. html
Finally, here's a quote from what a friend told me once while we where inifinitally arguing about 1=0.999...
> If you make even a slight change in the assumptions underlying a > mathematical theory at the outset, you end up with a different theory: > in a different mathematical world. Anything is possible in matehmatics > - if you have a sufficiently rich set of axioms defined over an > infinite field. That's why I told Chris, that we weren't talking about > the same thing. He was, perhaps intuitively, unwilling to accept the > assumptions (even > definitions) we were, equally intuitively, trying to impose. All in all, > whether 0.99... really equals 1.0 depends on a lot of very subtle and > elusive decisions that one must make to even render the comparison > meaningful.
Theories about Relativity and Quantum effects that we consider "scientific" today were once only someone's philosophycal divagations. Remember Einstein got the ideas first, and completed the math much later. Proofs of his ideas came years or decades after.
In the borderline of physics there is metaphysics. The only way to advance science is to make explorations into the latter, and that, by definition, can only be done, by phylosophyzing.
Way back when the first days of the PC, companies like Borland made their day by selling their software at competitive prices (I think that Turbo Pascal was $30 or so), and completely ignoring the copyright violators, which were usually university students or other forms of non-clients.
A non-client is someone who won't buy the software license, ever, no matter the need or want. It's the likes of a student who cannot pay a, say, JBuilder Enterprise license, nevermind the honesty or the desired involved.
I think that the trick is in groking who a non-client is. The software seller is better off if the non-client market is saturated with its software. If it is, reputation and availability of know-how will drive up the sales with actual, prospectual clients.
You don't have to refactor your code in one swoop. You can do it gradually, like when you open up a piece of code to add functionality. Then, you can make changes that make the code cleaner, and make it better suited to support the new features. As long as you write tests for the existing and new functionality first, there should be few surprizes.
I recommend Martin Fowler's book on "Refactoring". The classification and analysis of typical code transformations makes it much easier to think about ways to improve code without braking it.
Given enough RAM, finding a string in a set of strings is a function of the length of the string (or better), and not of the number of strings in the set. For IP addresses, it can be done in constant time.
By "intelectual property rights", the veri first principle that the WIPO supports, the a domain name should stay with its original registrant until a different deal is made. You won't be seeing a Chorinthians Pizza opening retaurants in California if there's already a local place with the same name. Why should it be different for domain names?
The comments I've read so far leave out important factors, some of which may be the most determinant in a switch away from gasoline.
Two examples:
- Economic: The developed world would benefit from depending less on a product owned by third world monopolies.
- Politic: Dependance on oil limits the politic power the developed world has over some undeveloped nations.
- Economic: A good part of cost of the Gulf War could be considered an indirect tax on gasoline. All things considered, gasoline is not so cheap. Keeping the oil market more or less stable is very expensive.
- Economic: Oil companies are transforming themselves into Energy companies (look at recent advertisements by Shell). Their infrastructure may now be suited for commercialization of gasoline only, but alternative fuels may provide better margins on a much more stable market in the long term (think ten years). A search I did a few months ago on The Economist, the NYT, London Times, etc., revealed the the budgets for researhc on fuel alternatives were already in the multi-billion range.
- Environmental/Political: Environmentalists are gaining increased following. They've also acheived political representation in places. Environmental concerns alone might well be the trigger for large scale deployment of alternatives to gasoline. Some US states already have laws requiring a certain percentage of cars be non pollutant in a few years.
- Environmental: The weather is getting crazy, costing lifes and millions and all, and there's a strong movent towards blaming pollution for it all. The pollitical presure from the peanut galleries may become important (like in plain people plain choosing to spend more to get the less pollutant option).
We are somwhat more than just a vehicle for our genes, obeying hard-wired genetic imperatives.
Robert Pirsing (of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" fame) dicusses that within the framework of his "Value Metaphysics" in the book "Lila". He mentions that the "essense" of the legal document, the poem, or the song stored in a computer's hard disk (of this discussion, even) can't be groked by focusing on the low-level, physical caracteristics of the media. Likewise, if you conclude that a Turing machine is all-mighty, you're still left clueless about the infinite amount/kind of programs that can be written for it, or about their effect. The effects are emergent, and you can study them only after they emerge. That means that even if you can explain how consciousness is supported by quantum effects, it's likely that trying to explain how conciousness emerges from quantum effects is a dead-end.
BTW, by the definitions of human consciousness given so far, one should conclude that Society is also conscious...
None of the many worlds theory, the transactional model or the pilot wave model require the observer which is elevated to such a pedestal in the Copenhagen Interpretation.
A world in which the observer isn't is one of which we can know nothing about. It's also an uninteresitng world, in that it can be subject to just about any "laws" or "effects". That is what quantum systems are in indeterminate states until they are observed means: we can't determine anything about systems we can't observe.
The relevant world is the one we're in. We are part of the world, so our effect on it must be accounted for in any sensible theory. Observation produces a quantum effect, so the observer is a required part of any explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
My bank has adopted a scheme of "choose your image from the following twenty", and they only allow three failures.
A scheme that would last until the Turing challenge was broken would be simply to ask the user to identify the thing, animal, or person in a given image.
How about some statistics over the number of potential attacks prevented by making people take of their shoes and lift their feet in the air?
The current airport security policies in the US are not only inefficient ineffective, but also humiliating.
A prize for stating the obvious is simply stupid.
Current laptops have an average of two years useful lifetime and are in general unrepairable outside the warranty period. They are also pretty much non-upgradeable, and they don't tolerate dust well. They've become pretty much disposable, commodity items. The stack of non-working laptops (mine and from friends) in my study reached a height seven not too long ago, broken screens, keyboards, gone disks and motherboards.
My desktops have had useful lives of a decade or more. My current web server is a $80, second-hand P3/300 running Ubuntu. I recently bought a desktop system to extend the lifetime of my ailing laptop, and with the 19" monitor, the choice of hardware (keyboards and mice matter), and the expandability and maintainability, it will probably become my main machine.
Wikipedia has its own version of the blind slave pianist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Tom
From Peopleware, Chapter 18, "The Wholesis Greater than the Sum of the Parts":
Having an the change to rest when you're tired, something which 9-to-5vers don't have, certainly helps to increase the number of productive hours in a day.
Having a quiet, private place in which you can reach "flow" quickly also helps with productivity. The time-slicing of meetings sparsed accross the day does the opposite.
Read "Peopleware", by De Marco and Lister. The recipe has been known for decades.
Juanco
I've done a 100 hour week followed by a 60 hour week to get over emergencies, but what happens right after is that you feel wasted and that your productivity drops to, say, 10 hours a week independently of how many hours you show up.
Long weeks on a project's startup can be good because the acceleration may produce a good amount of sinergy.
Long weeks over long periods of time are a sure symptom of an ill project.
Creative people, programmers included, need distraction and lots of sleep to be able to give their best.
Juanco
You are your own manager.
Full time work has its advantages, as does contract work. None of them are stable.
Just make sure that the deal you sign is good for you. Take everything, from commuting, to workspace, to environment into consideration.
If in doubt, turn to Gerry Weingberg's "Secrets of Consulting", and "More Secrets of Consulting".
--
Juanco
In to consecutive articles, /. reported that a) governments have got more rights to invade people's privacy for whatever purpose, and that b) hackers hacking around, with no particular purpose, can be jailed for years.
Absurd!
The malloc code is present in the Kernigan and Ritchie's book about the C language.
I don't have my copy at hand, but it is a very old book.
All extremes are bad. There's a middle ground solution. But first, lets counter Selkers arguments.
** Independently of how many ways polititians have or may find to cheat on an election, the artifact used to count the votes and the counting itself _has_ to be auditable. Big period. **
The middle ground solution is a system just like the DRE's that prints one or more tickets that the voter reviews and then deposits in a box.
The ticket, which could be something like a parking lot ticket, would contain:
1) The election made in plain text.
2) The election coded in a barcode or magnetic strip.
The counting would still be done by the computer, but, in case of any doubt about results, an simple, independent audit could be done with just the help of a barcode reader.
Only a small, statistically calculated number of votes would need to be audited; just enough to be statistically certain that a full recount would not alter the result.
The software to do the ouditing could be and should be independently developed. The software would be so simple that it could be developed in a few days after the election.
Juanco
I just read this version of Lynds' theories:
7 /
. html
. html
s onal/anw/Research/ Hack/
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/0000119
and think he's wrong because he fails to realize that Zeno's paradox is not about the features of the underlying physical world, but about the ones of the mathematical models used to represent it.
Zeno's paradox has a purely mathematical solution for the same reason that it can be shown that 1=0.999... (BTW, That 1=0.999... could be used to argue that there _are_ instants of time in the physical world, using reasoning like the one in Lynds' paper).
The links bellow were discussed before in Slashdot. They talk about how different models (axiomatic theories) may produce very different mathematical systems:
Model theory:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ModelTheory
Set theories:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SetTheory
Hackenstrings:
http://www.maths.nott.ac.uk/per
Finally, here's a quote from what a friend told me once while we where inifinitally arguing about 1=0.999...
> If you make even a slight change in the assumptions underlying a
> mathematical theory at the outset, you end up with a different theory:
> in a different mathematical world. Anything is possible in matehmatics
> - if you have a sufficiently rich set of axioms defined over an
> infinite field. That's why I told Chris, that we weren't talking about
> the same thing. He was, perhaps intuitively, unwilling to accept the
> assumptions (even
> definitions) we were, equally intuitively, trying to impose. All in all,
> whether 0.99... really equals 1.0 depends on a lot of very subtle and
> elusive decisions that one must make to even render the comparison
> meaningful.
Theories about Relativity and Quantum effects that we consider "scientific" today were once only someone's philosophycal divagations. Remember Einstein got the ideas first, and completed the math much later. Proofs of his ideas came years or decades after.
In the borderline of physics there is metaphysics. The only way to advance science is to make explorations into the latter, and that, by definition, can only be done, by phylosophyzing.
Way back when the first days of the PC, companies like Borland made their day by selling their software at competitive prices (I think that Turbo Pascal was $30 or so), and completely ignoring the copyright violators, which were usually university students or other forms of non-clients.
A non-client is someone who won't buy the software license, ever, no matter the need or want. It's the likes of a student who cannot pay a, say, JBuilder Enterprise license, nevermind the honesty or the desired involved.
I think that the trick is in groking who a non-client is. The software seller is better off if the non-client market is saturated with its software. If it is, reputation and availability of know-how will drive up the sales with actual, prospectual clients.
Perl is trying to do too much with regular expressions. Why not just take the thing one notch up and allow for LL(kN) grammars?
That's the approach ANTLR (htp://www.antlr.org) uses for its lexical analizers.
Too complex? Just look at the examples in Wall's article and decide by yourselves.
Juanco
--
I can agree to that.
I have two projects at SF that are successful in terms of user base, yet contributions have always been lacking.
Now, SF doesn't like my ISP's way of handling its e-mail server, so I've been able to read the lists but not post for several weeks now.
Guess what? It now seems that someone who is not me will get down to fix/improve the thing.
--
Juanco
This is a bit late, but...
You don't have to refactor your code in one swoop. You can do it gradually, like when you open up a piece of code to add functionality. Then, you can make changes that make the code cleaner, and make it better suited to support the new features. As long as you write tests for the existing and new functionality first, there should be few surprizes.
I recommend Martin Fowler's book on "Refactoring". The classification and analysis of typical code transformations makes it much easier to think about ways to improve code without braking it.
The number of requests is not increased by having more routes to independent IPs.
Constant time. All of them.
Given enough RAM, finding a string in a set of strings is a function of the length of the string (or better), and not of the number of strings in the set. For IP addresses, it can be done in constant time.
For how to do it, see any algorithms 101 book.
By "intelectual property rights", the veri first principle that the WIPO supports, the a domain name should stay with its original registrant until a different deal is made. You won't be seeing a Chorinthians Pizza opening retaurants in California if there's already a local place with the same name. Why should it be different for domain names?
The comments I've read so far leave out important factors, some of which may be the most determinant in a switch away from gasoline.
Two examples:
- Economic: The developed world would benefit from depending less on a product owned by third world monopolies.
- Politic: Dependance on oil limits the politic power the developed world has over some undeveloped nations.
- Economic: A good part of cost of the Gulf War could be considered an indirect tax on gasoline. All things considered, gasoline is not so cheap. Keeping the oil market more or less stable is very expensive.
- Economic: Oil companies are transforming themselves into Energy companies (look at recent advertisements by Shell). Their infrastructure may now be suited for commercialization of gasoline only, but alternative fuels may provide better margins on a much more stable market in the long term (think ten years). A search I did a few months ago on The Economist, the NYT, London Times, etc., revealed the the budgets for researhc on fuel alternatives were already in the multi-billion range.
- Environmental/Political: Environmentalists are gaining increased following. They've also acheived political representation in places. Environmental concerns alone might well be the trigger for large scale deployment of alternatives to gasoline. Some US states already have laws requiring a certain percentage of cars be non pollutant in a few years.
- Environmental: The weather is getting crazy, costing lifes and millions and all, and there's a strong movent towards blaming pollution for it all. The pollitical presure from the peanut galleries may become important (like in plain people plain choosing to spend more to get the less pollutant option).
Robert Pirsing (of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" fame) dicusses that within the framework of his "Value Metaphysics" in the book "Lila". He mentions that the "essense" of the legal document, the poem, or the song stored in a computer's hard disk (of this discussion, even) can't be groked by focusing on the low-level, physical caracteristics of the media. Likewise, if you conclude that a Turing machine is all-mighty, you're still left clueless about the infinite amount/kind of programs that can be written for it, or about their effect. The effects are emergent, and you can study them only after they emerge. That means that even if you can explain how consciousness is supported by quantum effects, it's likely that trying to explain how conciousness emerges from quantum effects is a dead-end.
BTW, by the definitions of human consciousness given so far, one should conclude that Society is also conscious...
None of the many worlds theory, the transactional model or the pilot wave model require the observer which is elevated to such a pedestal in the Copenhagen Interpretation.
A world in which the observer isn't is one of which we can know nothing about. It's also an uninteresitng world, in that it can be subject to just about any "laws" or "effects". That is what quantum systems are in indeterminate states until they are observed means: we can't determine anything about systems we can't observe.
The relevant world is the one we're in. We are part of the world, so our effect on it must be accounted for in any sensible theory. Observation produces a quantum effect, so the observer is a required part of any explanation.