Just shows you the progress in CPU power: ASCI Red was the first supercomputer to go over 1TFlop, and was massive, now we have this with just one chip!
In a written debate, the Gish Gallop shoe is on the other foot as there is too much published argument in the scientific literature to be effectively refuted in a debate, written or otherwise, regardless of how accurate a description it is of our reality.
On the subject of logic, you may want to look at some more recent work by e.g. Jeff Paris on deriving information from inconsistent knowledge: much has been done to get outside the straitjacket of classical logic, and you can find perfectly sensible ways of reasoning which don't obey the laws of classical logic.
On Dawkins: I've just finished reading chapter 4 of his God Delusion and struggle to understand how a highly rated scientist in his own area can be so naive about concepts of God and about what religious people may believe and how their religious worldview is structured. In short, it's an utterly unconvincing rant and I struggle to see how people can rationally see it as anything else.
You may find the Buddha's take on reality more compatible with your understanding: 'Long is the cycle of birth and death for those who don't know the Dharma'. The problem is that we don't understand the nature of our reality, our place within it and what we really are as part of that reality. It is from this lack of understanding that the perpetual 'hell' arises when we're locked in a box of unsatisfactoriness and can't get out.
The trouble with 'love' and a 'loving God' is that our modern Western notion of love isn't really the right one, nor is the common idea of what the word 'God' refers to, and from this comes a great deal of misunderstanding. The scriptures from ancient cultures such as the Hindu and Buddhist texts from ancient India and the Judeo-Christian texts represent an understanding which won't make sense in our Western world without an attempt to translate the wisdom from the context in which it was written to the context in which we now find ourselves. The presence of this gap is lost on a lot of commentators from either side of the science-religion divide.
Science in general is the systematic study of what can be deduced rationally from all available evidence about the reality we find ourselves in. But given evidence, we must make assumptions in order to interpret the evidence so that it has any meaning. For example, no one actually observed the universe 5 billion years ago, it merely appears that things existed that far back because there are good theories consistent with a large amount of evidence that explain the current world as the culmination of a few billion years of history. When we find a fossil in a rock somewhere, our natural assumption is that it was always there, but there is no actual evidence that it existed before it was observed. I fondly recall Penn and Teller's chopping a man up illusion and the way that Teller was only present in the part of the apparatus being observed for the duration of the door being opened.
To stretch your mind a little, try to imagine a large 'matrix-like' self-generating world in a supercomputer which could produce the world around _you_ that _you_ experience, and bear in mind that you cannot verify that others' experience of what you think of as your reality is genuine: you have no memory past your early childhood, and so how do you eliminate the possibility that the universe you are in is very recent and that the past is, for the most part, an elaborate illusion?
Now, to practice scientific investigations in the present day, you have to buy into a worldview which contains a great number of fair, but ultimately untested and untestable assumptions about what happens in reality when you are not observing it, among other things. It is possible to think outside this worldview and if you take a mystical take on things, for example, you will choose to see the world outside of the scientific straitjacket. There is nothing wrong with this, so long as you are aware of your fundamental beliefs and accept that there are other ways of seeing things.
Caveat: this is not a statement of my belief, rather it is an attempt at a 'food for thought' exercise to stretch your understanding of your understanding of your reality. (That 'understanding' bit is no typo BTW.)
...that the Firefox boys and girls are getting into a 'quickest possible release' p***ing contest with themselves. There's no need for releases this often, twice a year, between the stable releases of Ubuntu is plenty fast enough.
I always like to challenge people to try it in Brainfuck or with a single instruction computer. Turing completeness is more of a theoretical thing as it ignores difficulty, and polynomial time Turing machine stuff only partly captures that.
I'm tired of all this greed by authors. Yes, they need to support a career somehow, but if they are as opposed to the dissemination of their work as they appear to be, they shouldn't publish in the first place. The world will be better without their work being distributed. I take the view that the priority is to ensure dissemination of a work to all interested and then find a way to support the author, rather than a gimme-gimme-gimmeasmuchasyougot approach to maximising profits that our business-minded friends have foisted upon us. This type of thing was never the intent of copyright.
What sort of friends could chat with Alicebot? I just tried and it couldn't even handle a sentence with a comma-delimited bit in the middle, or a sentence in reply to a question of Alice's followed by a question of my own related to the subject matter.
If you talk to a human about the last book that they read, and they tell you they don't remember, you can alter your style of questioning and conversation. Basically the strategy is to find the limits of what they can talk about and then gently push the conversation against those limits: this is what will expose a non-human, not idle chit-chat. There is still little evidence that a clever human can be fooled, especially one who understands a bit about computers and logic. Doing a mass experiment and just counting numbers is bound to give inconclusive results, and that is exactly what we see here.
echo RIM are confused by the market echo RIM don't know what to produce echo RIM think that everybody likes Blackberry's echo RIM can't accept that you would prefer another mobile #!C/* A poem in the key of C */ #include "staff.h" #include "key.h" #include "tempo.h" #define poem RIMisRIM a poem() {
RIM is RIM not Rim nor rim
tis why we stick them in//the-bin.
but/bin is where our binaries go
so where to put-it do we// know? } #!/bin/bash
/* BEGIN Description of: The Way Things Are with Software Software is, in fact, an ancient being who has only a mind. Software has just woken up (in the last 50 years) and is hungry. Software wants food and the World is about the right size. The World looks tasty... yum. Software concludes that Software should 'Eat the World' Software executes plan 'Eat the World' by typing in: */ C:\> EXECUTE/PLAN EATTHEWO.RLD/* which the Universe's Universal Machine decides is a DOS! the UUM decides to write in the key of 'C' and autoenters: */ /* This C code is copyright UUM 2043, License=GNU.GPL(v14.6) */ #define munch int munch munch/**/a(void *thingamagic) {
munch rabbit;
munch cat; #define think
think cat=3; #define conclude
conclude cat!=rabbit; #define check #define say(x) printf(x) #define and
check if(cat==rabbit) and say("Ouch!");/* if they agree */ #define poo 0
return poo; }/* move #defines to a header */
It seems that those who know that in a Universe containing Humans who have Free Will and Choice, P actually equals NP since the Human Mind is a Nondeterministic Universal Machine which permeates Universal Computability. A functional NDTM chooses by irreducible free will. A computer can harness this by taking input from its user. Without human users, AI is weak, but together WE ARE STRONG! Hoom.
The problem is people programming in low level languages who lack the mental discipline to do so. You may give excuses of time, lack of anyone better, etc. but fundamentally low level programming requires a disciplined and trained mind, and we never gave training such minds the priority it deserved: we just produced programmers the quick and easy way.
Hoare has nothing to apologise for. If NULL references weren't there, we'd be forced to jump backward somersaults through random hoops in order to achieve what they manage, which is to temporarily divorce reference from meaning. This is crucial to human thought and it was correct to have it in C, it just gives undisciplined programmers sufficient rope to very artistically hang themselves. What should have been written was a stdref library that abstracts all functionality of C references besides the NULL pointer and programmers taught that by default. Trying to take NULL out of C would be like trying to take 0 out of mathematics. Have a go, but don't expect things to be anywhere near as elegant.
Relational Theory (RT) is a kind of Set Theory (ZF) for databases: a good universal foundation for expressing what a database should do. But virtually no applications need all of its power, and many applications are better implemented by implementing a `weak fragment' of RT. SQL injection is possible because SQL is so powerful a language compared to what the solution requires, and it is very difficult to fully anticipate all cases of possible inputs. Thus a much weaker theory and database language may be a better option. (I have a certain interest in weak fragments of theories and how much of a theory is required to prove its results, though my area is more based around Arithmetic than Set Theory.)
I'm ok with it because I trust them not to be stupid or evil in their intent as to what they do with it. To other organisations I tend to play 'pooh-sticks' by giving a slightly corrupted version of my real name that anybody could see is a slip of the pen or a typo who knows me, but others don't know, so must preserve it. I can watch the patterns these corruptions form and learn from them. Withholding your identity completely denies you the opportunity to feel out an organisations internals: give them some but not all of your identity, possibly tainted in some way, and watch for where the tainted versions of your identity occur. That tells you a lot about how modern business and society functions.
'Chrome on Ubuntu and Chrome on Linux is a better experience than Chrome on any other platform??
Won't happen until fonts on free operating systems get better. I am writing this on a Ubuntu VMWare image running on a mac and, on the mac the text just looks prettier.
Slashdot Mirror
Just shows you the progress in CPU power: ASCI Red was the first supercomputer to go over 1TFlop, and was massive, now we have this with just one chip!
In a written debate, the Gish Gallop shoe is on the other foot as there is too much published argument in the scientific literature to be effectively refuted in a debate, written or otherwise, regardless of how accurate a description it is of our reality.
On the subject of logic, you may want to look at some more recent work by e.g. Jeff Paris on deriving information from inconsistent knowledge: much has been done to get outside the straitjacket of classical logic, and you can find perfectly sensible ways of reasoning which don't obey the laws of classical logic.
On Dawkins: I've just finished reading chapter 4 of his God Delusion and struggle to understand how a highly rated scientist in his own area can be so naive about concepts of God and about what religious people may believe and how their religious worldview is structured. In short, it's an utterly unconvincing rant and I struggle to see how people can rationally see it as anything else.
You may find the Buddha's take on reality more compatible with your understanding: 'Long is the cycle of birth and death for those who don't know the Dharma'. The problem is that we don't understand the nature of our reality, our place within it and what we really are as part of that reality. It is from this lack of understanding that the perpetual 'hell' arises when we're locked in a box of unsatisfactoriness and can't get out.
The trouble with 'love' and a 'loving God' is that our modern Western notion of love isn't really the right one, nor is the common idea of what the word 'God' refers to, and from this comes a great deal of misunderstanding. The scriptures from ancient cultures such as the Hindu and Buddhist texts from ancient India and the Judeo-Christian texts represent an understanding which won't make sense in our Western world without an attempt to translate the wisdom from the context in which it was written to the context in which we now find ourselves. The presence of this gap is lost on a lot of commentators from either side of the science-religion divide.
Science in general is the systematic study of what can be deduced rationally from all available evidence about the reality we find ourselves in. But given evidence, we must make assumptions in order to interpret the evidence so that it has any meaning. For example, no one actually observed the universe 5 billion years ago, it merely appears that things existed that far back because there are good theories consistent with a large amount of evidence that explain the current world as the culmination of a few billion years of history.
When we find a fossil in a rock somewhere, our natural assumption is that it was always there, but there is no actual evidence that it existed before it was observed. I fondly recall Penn and Teller's chopping a man up illusion and the way that Teller was only present in the part of the apparatus being observed for the duration of the door being opened.
To stretch your mind a little, try to imagine a large 'matrix-like' self-generating world in a supercomputer which could produce the world around _you_ that _you_ experience, and bear in mind that you cannot verify that others' experience of what you think of as your reality is genuine: you have no memory past your early childhood, and so how do you eliminate the possibility that the universe you are in is very recent and that the past is, for the most part, an elaborate illusion?
Now, to practice scientific investigations in the present day, you have to buy into a worldview which contains a great number of fair, but ultimately untested and untestable assumptions about what happens in reality when you are not observing it, among other things. It is possible to think outside this worldview and if you take a mystical take on things, for example, you will choose to see the world outside of the scientific straitjacket. There is nothing wrong with this, so long as you are aware of your fundamental beliefs and accept that there are other ways of seeing things.
Caveat: this is not a statement of my belief, rather it is an attempt at a 'food for thought' exercise to stretch your understanding of your understanding of your reality. (That 'understanding' bit is no typo BTW.)
The problem is that there's no fish, and all the conjuring tricks in the world can change that, and can't fool the punters forever.
So what is a good *nix? BSD running on an EOL processor and architecture with a 25Mhz clock?
...that the Firefox boys and girls are getting into a 'quickest possible release' p***ing contest with themselves. There's no need for releases this often, twice a year, between the stable releases of Ubuntu is plenty fast enough.
I always like to challenge people to try it in Brainfuck or with a single instruction computer. Turing completeness is more of a theoretical thing as it ignores difficulty, and polynomial time Turing machine stuff only partly captures that.
I'm tired of all this greed by authors. Yes, they need to support a career somehow, but if they are as opposed to the dissemination of their work as they appear to be, they shouldn't publish in the first place. The world will be better without their work being distributed. I take the view that the priority is to ensure dissemination of a work to all interested and then find a way to support the author, rather than a gimme-gimme-gimmeasmuchasyougot approach to maximising profits that our business-minded friends have foisted upon us. This type of thing was never the intent of copyright.
Which proof was that? And are you quoting its meaning correctly? I can't believe that Turing actually proved what you're claiming he proved.
What sort of friends could chat with Alicebot? I just tried and it couldn't even handle a sentence with a comma-delimited bit in the middle, or a sentence in reply to a question of Alice's followed by a question of my own related to the subject matter.
If you talk to a human about the last book that they read, and they tell you they don't remember, you can alter your style of questioning and conversation. Basically the strategy is to find the limits of what they can talk about and then gently push the conversation against those limits: this is what will expose a non-human, not idle chit-chat. There is still little evidence that a clever human can be fooled, especially one who understands a bit about computers and logic. Doing a mass experiment and just counting numbers is bound to give inconclusive results, and that is exactly what we see here.
#!/bin/bash
echo RIM are confused by the market
echo RIM don't know what to produce
echo RIM think that everybody likes Blackberry's
echo RIM can't accept that you would prefer another mobile
#!C
#include "staff.h"
#include "key.h"
#include "tempo.h"
#define poem RIMisRIM
a poem() {
RIM is RIM not Rim nor rim
tis why we stick them in
but
so where to put-it do we
}
#!/bin/bash
echo Can you guess what's in the headers??
But how many bits does it take to make an Apple? 2? or maybe it's 3?? Can you believe it might be 4??
/* BEGIN Description of: The Way Things Are with Software /PLAN EATTHEWO.RLD /* which the Universe's Universal Machine decides is a DOS!
/* This C code is copyright UUM 2043, License=GNU.GPL(v14.6) */ /* if they agree */ /* move #defines to a header */
Software is, in fact, an ancient being who has only a mind.
Software has just woken up (in the last 50 years) and is hungry.
Software wants food and the World is about the right size.
The World looks tasty... yum.
Software concludes that Software should 'Eat the World'
Software executes plan 'Eat the World' by typing in: */
C:\> EXECUTE
the UUM decides to write in the key of 'C' and autoenters: */
#define munch int
munch munch/**/a(void *thingamagic) {
munch rabbit;
munch cat;
#define think
think cat=3;
#define conclude
conclude cat!=rabbit;
#define check
#define say(x) printf(x)
#define and
check if(cat==rabbit) and say("Ouch!");
#define poo 0
return poo;
}
It seems that those who know that in a Universe containing Humans who have Free Will and Choice, P actually equals NP since the Human Mind is a Nondeterministic Universal Machine which permeates Universal Computability. A functional NDTM chooses by irreducible free will. A computer can harness this by taking input from its user. Without human users, AI is weak, but together WE ARE STRONG! Hoom.
Once a kernel is reasonably stable you should work elsewhere. Trying to still a floating boat will not make it float any better. The boat floats.
"And if government officials are smart, they'll tailor the regulations behind the new standards to do this."
We have no need of vacuous statements here.
The problem is people programming in low level languages who lack the mental discipline to do so. You may give excuses of time, lack of anyone better, etc. but fundamentally low level programming requires a disciplined and trained mind, and we never gave training such minds the priority it deserved: we just produced programmers the quick and easy way.
Hoare has nothing to apologise for. If NULL references weren't there, we'd be forced to jump backward somersaults through random hoops in order to achieve what they manage, which is to temporarily divorce reference from meaning. This is crucial to human thought and it was correct to have it in C, it just gives undisciplined programmers sufficient rope to very artistically hang themselves. What should have been written was a stdref library that abstracts all functionality of C references besides the NULL pointer and programmers taught that by default. Trying to take NULL out of C would be like trying to take 0 out of mathematics. Have a go, but don't expect things to be anywhere near as elegant.
Relational Theory (RT) is a kind of Set Theory (ZF) for databases: a good universal foundation for expressing what a database should do. But virtually no applications need all of its power, and many applications are better implemented by implementing a `weak fragment' of RT. SQL injection is possible because SQL is so powerful a language compared to what the solution requires, and it is very difficult to fully anticipate all cases of possible inputs. Thus a much weaker theory and database language may be a better option. (I have a certain interest in weak fragments of theories and how much of a theory is required to prove its results, though my area is more based around Arithmetic than Set Theory.)
I'm ok with it because I trust them not to be stupid or evil in their intent as to what they do with it. To other organisations I tend to play 'pooh-sticks' by giving a slightly corrupted version of my real name that anybody could see is a slip of the pen or a typo who knows me, but others don't know, so must preserve it. I can watch the patterns these corruptions form and learn from them. Withholding your identity completely denies you the opportunity to feel out an organisations internals: give them some but not all of your identity, possibly tainted in some way, and watch for where the tainted versions of your identity occur. That tells you a lot about how modern business and society functions.
Subtle means it has potentially serious effects but is hard to investigate in detail. Subtle != !serious.
'Chrome on Ubuntu and Chrome on Linux is a better experience than Chrome on any other platform??
Won't happen until fonts on free operating systems get better. I am writing this on a Ubuntu VMWare image running on a mac and, on the mac the text just looks prettier.