I disagree that this is a knee-jerk response to Candyman. The timing is all wrong: news of Candyman is only breaking today (19 March 2002), and the original version of the law was submitted on 29 May, 2001. (Follow think link in the original story to "the law itself".)
Furthermore, it's clear here who's to decide what's what. The Salon story states that "the onus [is] on the state attorney general's office to notify ISPs of what should be blocked." So the state AG office is the one who is going to have to pour over all those god-awful pictures of kids dressed up like bunnies and flowers and whatnot.
It's definitely a reactionary bill, though, and I do not expect the law to survive a Supreme Court challenge. (At least, I pray that it won't, as a PA resident.)
What the fuck? When I tuned in to this thread, the parent to this post was marked 4: Insightful, because the author liked the name and thought it looked pretty.
Don't get me wrong: those are two of the same reasons I use Google. But seriously, think of better uses for your mod points, people.
Netscape has no such motivations so their extensions act in a more benign fashion: giving more power to the users and developers instead of locking them into a separate purchase.
As has been remarked elswhere: the vast majority of active development on Mozilla is done by employees which draw paychecks cut (ultimately) by AOL-TW. This isn't an accident: AOL would love to have a platform with which to compete against Microsoft, and Netscape is just a piece of it.
I do, however, remember five years ago when Netscape was bragging about how they would be able to reduce Windows to, essentially, a platform on which you'd run Netscape, which would be the be-all end-all. Sun (via Java) and Netscape were looking to make Windows irrelevant as a platform: there was nothing altruistic about their motives then, although I'm sure that more than a few developers had the "we're going to revolutionize the world" mindset.
In any case, your distinction is disingenuous, to say the least: when Microsoft adds features to their product, it's "embrace and extend" Orwellian-Borg tactics, but when Netscape does it, it's because they're nice folks who just want us to be happy developers. Rather than mudslinging, lets just reward the guys who get the standards right by using their product.
... hopefully we'll start to see more sites that don't purely rely on Microsoft's interpretation of the html standards and actually try to reach the widest possible audience by making standards compliant web sites.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but it's important that Netscape get its share of the blame for the lack of standards-based sites. Sure, part of the reason that you see so many "IE-based" sites out there is because Microsoft bundled the damn thing with Windows, but the Netscape 4.x series was pretty much an unmitigated disaster for standards compliance. When there's only one widely used browser with decent standards compliance anyway, using the non-standard features of that browser doesn't seem like such a bad thing anymore.
(Note - the linked article mentions the WaSP's annoyance with Netscape. I didn't really agree 100% with WaSP's opinion on the subject back then, but it's indicative of how bad the situation was.)
Obligatory response
on
To The Pain
·
· Score: 4, Funny
"Yeah, but I didn't know you were going to be giving me electric shocks... just what are you trying to prove here, anyway?"
A good use case would be a major bennie, but I think you're coming at it from the wrong end. PGP isn't just used to encrypt/decrypt messages. The canonical four tasks:
Tamper Detection (Dude. Did someone mess with this message?)
Authentication (Hey - who really wrote this?)
Nonrepudiation (Fess up. I know you wrote this.)
Rather than looking for situations where PGP prevented someone from intercepting a communictation - often very difficult to know ever happened - I'd be looking for case studies in which someone tried to tamper with a message and was foiled because of the PGP signature, or tried to forge a message... you get the idea.
ALWAYS pop up external links into a new window. It pisses the HELL out of me when I click on a link IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ARTICLE and end up LEAVING the site and have to hit back, then select to open the link in a new window. (I end up doing this once on at least every site just in finding out if it opens things up in new windows or not).
A guy goes into a doctor's office and prods himself in the shoulder gently with his finger. "Doc," he says, "it hurts when I do this." Then he pokes himself in the knee, "And this." Finally, he pokes himself in the belly, "And this."
The doctor says, "You're Polish, aren't you?"
Patient says, "How'd you know?"
Doctor: "You have a broken finger."
Look - you already know how to open a link in a new window. Do it. I've heard a lot of people complain about a lot of things about web design, but never this.
Re-read what I wrote. I said that nobody installs an OS with the express single purpose of doing memory management. What would the point be? It's like buying a car just so you could play with the gearshift, but not to actually drive it anywhere.
You're correct, of course, in that it's a required function of an OS to manage memory (which I mentioned in my previous post), so if that's the distinction that's bothering you, let me try another example:
Although Mac OSX's new Aqua interface has plenty of detractors, nobody has criticized Apple for requiring the installation of a GUI with the OS. An OS doesn't require a GUI (cf any command-line-interface OS), and the only people who buy a Mac specifically for the purpose of moving windows around in Aqua are wankers who bought iMacs to go with the furniture.
I could define IE to include the entire Windows operating system as part of it. I do not consider that a valid definition, as there are very few computers with Windows installed for the express single purpose of using IE.
However, I think that the way you formulated your statement is pretty weak: for example, every computer I have has some sort of memory management scheme in the operating system, and yet none of them were installed with the "express single purpose" of doing memory management. You can argue that you can't have a computer without managing its memory, but MS would argue that you can't have its operating system without the functionality in IE. The shared libraries issue, on the ohter hand, makes much more sense.
Just as a counterexample: I met a girl (not my first girlfriend) on a MUSH back in '93. We met "in the flesh" in '94. In '97, we were married, and we'll celebrate our 5 year anniversary in August.
I managed to play the game through to the end. Spoiler ahead.
If you'll remember, a good chunk of the game was spent looking for a crystalline substance called Endurium, which was necessary to fuel your ship. Nobody really knew what it was, except that the Ancients sure seemed to leave a lot of it lying around their ruins.
Eventually, it was possible to locate the Ancient's homeworld, which had Endurium all over the place. Eventually, you find out the reason there seems to be so much of it: the Ancients never really disappeared. They were still there - in fact, they were Endurium. The whole time they were blowing up star systems across the galaxy, because people like you kept snatching them up and burning them for fuel.
Starflight was a fun game, but I will remember it most for the utter mindfuck of that ending. Yowza.
Slashdot is mostly a common carrier and can not be blamed for the comunications they facilitate.
(IANAL) Enh. I'm not so sure about that. My understanding of common carrier status is that once you start editing material, you can't claim to be a common carrier. Since/. editors have copped to downmodding posts and have been accused of deleting comments (a bear pit I know little about and don't intend to fall into), I suspect that their chances of claiming common carrier status are very poor
Status as a newspaper, on the other hand, I could buy into.
Re:an old Dennett lie
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
You're right: Searle doesn't claim that only brains can produce minds. But Aldern (remember him? we're reply to his post.) said thusly:
Another of Searle's arguments is pretty damning as well; those that pursue strong AI are, in fact, favoring a form of dualism. For them the mind is completely separate from the brain, an idea that has been pretty much discarded by the thinking public. Why is it, when computers are concerned, that the mind is no longer a product of a brain?
If that isn't fair to attribute to Searle, then it's certainly not fair to attribute to AI supporters.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Dennett, although I found The Intentional Stance interesting, ages ago when I read it. It bothers me that arguments like this one constantly devolve into "You're the dualist!" "No, you're the dualist!"
Incidentally, I just read the "Backtracking" article mentioned earlier in this thread. It is now the funniest refutation, with Hofstadter's in second place.
This is the "Systems Reply", considered and refuted by Searle in the original Chinese Room paper
...badly.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
Note: this will likely make no sense to you if you've never read Searle. A summary of the Chinese room argument can be found here.
There are plenty of decent refutations of Searle's argument. Douglas Hofstadter's is the funniest, if only because he's so hostile about it (I don't have a reference handy, but the phrase "matched in its power to annoy only by..." floats out at me).
Searle's arguement is actually pretty bad, in my opinion, and I'm only an armchair philosopher. His refutation of "the system argument" (that the combination of book, paper, and guy reading book understands Chinese) amounts basically to two points: nothing within that system understands Chinese, and systems don't understand things. But systems do understand things: I am a system of various parts, but my relevant parts (medulla oblongata, eyes, hippocampus, whatever) don't understand things. I understaxnd things: I am more than the sum of my parts.
It's ironic that Searle can accuse AI researchers as pursuing a dualist argument. Most everyone I know favoring strong AI believe wholeheartedly that, as you say, mind is a product of brain. What they don't believe is that brains are magically endowed by God to be the only things capable of producing a mind. (Note: they don't attribute this capability to rocks and stuff.) Searle goes on and on about how AI, no matter how close to human behavior it may come, will never be truly intelligent because it will not posess "intentionality" - it can tell you that 2+2=4, but it can't really understand it, can't really mean it, but he never goes on to say why. ("Why can't it understand stuff?" "Because it doesn't have intentionality." "What's that?" "The ability to understand stuff.") If that's not a dualist view, I don't know what is.
Bottom line, where I'm concerned: we still don't understand what it really means to think, to be intelligent. Searle's argument is essentially that just as a computer simulation of a rainstorm won't get you wet, a computer simulation of intelligence won't be smart. But that doesn't make sense: rainstorms involve water, while intelligence... what? What can you say about an intelligent entity that isn't based on its external characteristics? It's a fascinating question, but Searle ignores it in favor of "intentionality," something which isn't observable (except to its owner) in any way. He takes the really tough, interesting question, and slips in straw-man to knock down. And that's just, as Hofstadter said, annoying
For optimal performance we did not compress the pictures, loading times might be longer for some and click the picture to enlarge.
Translation: we wanted to tell all our friends we'd been Slashdotted, so we made sure to include an assload of moderate-to-high resolution pics right in the page. We did, however, mess with the aspect ratio of some of the pics to make people think they were looking at super-long TVs displaying female dwarf powerlifters.
To say that file extensions are 'good idea in general' is a questionable statement, to say the least.
Let me clarify that a bit - I meant to say, "a good idea for use as a naming scheme, although probably not a terrific way to mandate application/document relationships." Windows essentially mandated that naming scheme: the scheme itself isn't a bad idea, except when you become convince that it's the be-all, end-all.
And while I appreciate wanting to use the header information of a document, you still but up against the "having to open assloads of files simultaneously" problem I mentioned before, not to mention breaking already-agreed upon file formats. You could store file-type information in an external database, or as part of the filesystem, but then you're back in Mac-land: again, there are worse things, but I don't hear anyone here shouting that this is the right idea either.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree that this is a knee-jerk response to Candyman. The timing is all wrong: news of Candyman is only breaking today (19 March 2002), and the original version of the law was submitted on 29 May, 2001. (Follow think link in the original story to "the law itself".)
Furthermore, it's clear here who's to decide what's what. The Salon story states that "the onus [is] on the state attorney general's office to notify ISPs of what should be blocked." So the state AG office is the one who is going to have to pour over all those god-awful pictures of kids dressed up like bunnies and flowers and whatnot.
It's definitely a reactionary bill, though, and I do not expect the law to survive a Supreme Court challenge. (At least, I pray that it won't, as a PA resident.)
(Warning: moderation bitching follows.)
What the fuck? When I tuned in to this thread, the parent to this post was marked 4: Insightful, because the author liked the name and thought it looked pretty.
Don't get me wrong: those are two of the same reasons I use Google. But seriously, think of better uses for your mod points, people.
As has been remarked elswhere: the vast majority of active development on Mozilla is done by employees which draw paychecks cut (ultimately) by AOL-TW. This isn't an accident: AOL would love to have a platform with which to compete against Microsoft, and Netscape is just a piece of it.
I do, however, remember five years ago when Netscape was bragging about how they would be able to reduce Windows to, essentially, a platform on which you'd run Netscape, which would be the be-all end-all. Sun (via Java) and Netscape were looking to make Windows irrelevant as a platform: there was nothing altruistic about their motives then, although I'm sure that more than a few developers had the "we're going to revolutionize the world" mindset.
In any case, your distinction is disingenuous, to say the least: when Microsoft adds features to their product, it's "embrace and extend" Orwellian-Borg tactics, but when Netscape does it, it's because they're nice folks who just want us to be happy developers. Rather than mudslinging, lets just reward the guys who get the standards right by using their product.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but it's important that Netscape get its share of the blame for the lack of standards-based sites. Sure, part of the reason that you see so many "IE-based" sites out there is because Microsoft bundled the damn thing with Windows, but the Netscape 4.x series was pretty much an unmitigated disaster for standards compliance. When there's only one widely used browser with decent standards compliance anyway, using the non-standard features of that browser doesn't seem like such a bad thing anymore.
(Note - the linked article mentions the WaSP's annoyance with Netscape. I didn't really agree 100% with WaSP's opinion on the subject back then, but it's indicative of how bad the situation was.)
"Back off, man. I'm a scientist."
A good use case would be a major bennie, but I think you're coming at it from the wrong end. PGP isn't just used to encrypt/decrypt messages. The canonical four tasks:
Rather than looking for situations where PGP prevented someone from intercepting a communictation - often very difficult to know ever happened - I'd be looking for case studies in which someone tried to tamper with a message and was foiled because of the PGP signature, or tried to forge a message... you get the idea.
"When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail."
OS's are tools. I don't know of anyone who only owns one tool. I have a whole kit.
A guy goes into a doctor's office and prods himself in the shoulder gently with his finger. "Doc," he says, "it hurts when I do this." Then he pokes himself in the knee, "And this." Finally, he pokes himself in the belly, "And this."
The doctor says, "You're Polish, aren't you?"
Patient says, "How'd you know?"
Doctor: "You have a broken finger."
Look - you already know how to open a link in a new window. Do it. I've heard a lot of people complain about a lot of things about web design, but never this.
Re-read what I wrote. I said that nobody installs an OS with the express single purpose of doing memory management. What would the point be? It's like buying a car just so you could play with the gearshift, but not to actually drive it anywhere.
You're correct, of course, in that it's a required function of an OS to manage memory (which I mentioned in my previous post), so if that's the distinction that's bothering you, let me try another example:
Although Mac OSX's new Aqua interface has plenty of detractors, nobody has criticized Apple for requiring the installation of a GUI with the OS. An OS doesn't require a GUI (cf any command-line-interface OS), and the only people who buy a Mac specifically for the purpose of moving windows around in Aqua are wankers who bought iMacs to go with the furniture.
Please mod up parent - this is essentially the core of the debate. In fact, Steve Ballmer went on record as saying that "We should have the right to integrate a ham sandwich into Windows if we so choose."
However, I think that the way you formulated your statement is pretty weak: for example, every computer I have has some sort of memory management scheme in the operating system, and yet none of them were installed with the "express single purpose" of doing memory management. You can argue that you can't have a computer without managing its memory, but MS would argue that you can't have its operating system without the functionality in IE. The shared libraries issue, on the ohter hand, makes much more sense.
What does it matter where he lives?
(I think you mean "tenet", although I don't understand how a fundamental mental derangement could be a "tenet" of power, either.)
Just as a counterexample: I met a girl (not my first girlfriend) on a MUSH back in '93. We met "in the flesh" in '94. In '97, we were married, and we'll celebrate our 5 year anniversary in August.
Oh: and we both play regularly on Dragonsfire MOO.
(SPOILER WARNING)
I managed to play the game through to the end. Spoiler ahead.
If you'll remember, a good chunk of the game was spent looking for a crystalline substance called Endurium, which was necessary to fuel your ship. Nobody really knew what it was, except that the Ancients sure seemed to leave a lot of it lying around their ruins.
Eventually, it was possible to locate the Ancient's homeworld, which had Endurium all over the place. Eventually, you find out the reason there seems to be so much of it: the Ancients never really disappeared. They were still there - in fact, they were Endurium. The whole time they were blowing up star systems across the galaxy, because people like you kept snatching them up and burning them for fuel.
Starflight was a fun game, but I will remember it most for the utter mindfuck of that ending. Yowza.
Yes: they've released a joint announcement that the official role-playing game of both organizaitons will be Ars Magica.
(In other words, no.)
(IANAL) Enh. I'm not so sure about that. My understanding of common carrier status is that once you start editing material, you can't claim to be a common carrier. Since /. editors have copped to downmodding posts and have been accused of deleting comments (a bear pit I know little about and don't intend to fall into), I suspect that their chances of claiming common carrier status are very poor
Status as a newspaper, on the other hand, I could buy into.
If that isn't fair to attribute to Searle, then it's certainly not fair to attribute to AI supporters.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Dennett, although I found The Intentional Stance interesting, ages ago when I read it. It bothers me that arguments like this one constantly devolve into "You're the dualist!" "No, you're the dualist!"
Incidentally, I just read the "Backtracking" article mentioned earlier in this thread. It is now the funniest refutation, with Hofstadter's in second place.
...badly.
Note: this will likely make no sense to you if you've never read Searle. A summary of the Chinese room argument can be found here.
There are plenty of decent refutations of Searle's argument. Douglas Hofstadter's is the funniest, if only because he's so hostile about it (I don't have a reference handy, but the phrase "matched in its power to annoy only by..." floats out at me).
Searle's arguement is actually pretty bad, in my opinion, and I'm only an armchair philosopher. His refutation of "the system argument" (that the combination of book, paper, and guy reading book understands Chinese) amounts basically to two points: nothing within that system understands Chinese, and systems don't understand things. But systems do understand things: I am a system of various parts, but my relevant parts (medulla oblongata, eyes, hippocampus, whatever) don't understand things. I understaxnd things: I am more than the sum of my parts.
It's ironic that Searle can accuse AI researchers as pursuing a dualist argument. Most everyone I know favoring strong AI believe wholeheartedly that, as you say, mind is a product of brain. What they don't believe is that brains are magically endowed by God to be the only things capable of producing a mind. (Note: they don't attribute this capability to rocks and stuff.) Searle goes on and on about how AI, no matter how close to human behavior it may come, will never be truly intelligent because it will not posess "intentionality" - it can tell you that 2+2=4, but it can't really understand it, can't really mean it, but he never goes on to say why. ("Why can't it understand stuff?" "Because it doesn't have intentionality." "What's that?" "The ability to understand stuff.") If that's not a dualist view, I don't know what is.
Bottom line, where I'm concerned: we still don't understand what it really means to think, to be intelligent. Searle's argument is essentially that just as a computer simulation of a rainstorm won't get you wet, a computer simulation of intelligence won't be smart. But that doesn't make sense: rainstorms involve water, while intelligence... what? What can you say about an intelligent entity that isn't based on its external characteristics? It's a fascinating question, but Searle ignores it in favor of "intentionality," something which isn't observable (except to its owner) in any way. He takes the really tough, interesting question, and slips in straw-man to knock down. And that's just, as Hofstadter said, annoying
Exactly what I was going to say. DRAM has the "no moving parts thing" on its side, which is a pretty powerful bennie, if you ask me.
Uh, the emphasis there was on the "anyone," methinks. As opposed to, "people who already have Debian installed."
...between Gates and Jobs, I refer you to Robert Cringely's terrific article released upon the creation of the new iMac: "The Best Revenge: Why the New iMacs Will Be Successful No Matter What They Look Like." While largely non-technical, it's much more interesting a read than Katz's post, which seems to go pretty wide of the mark, in my view.
/. .
Sorry I don't remember where I caught the original link. Could have even been here on
...not to mention adding an assload of EM interference inside the housing. Probably not a good thing, either for the IC, or for the sound quality.
I found the following quote pretty amusing:
Translation: we wanted to tell all our friends we'd been Slashdotted, so we made sure to include an assload of moderate-to-high resolution pics right in the page. We did, however, mess with the aspect ratio of some of the pics to make people think they were looking at super-long TVs displaying female dwarf powerlifters.
Er - yeah. Maybe. Stop burdening me with details like accuracy, okay?
Let me clarify that a bit - I meant to say, "a good idea for use as a naming scheme, although probably not a terrific way to mandate application/document relationships." Windows essentially mandated that naming scheme: the scheme itself isn't a bad idea, except when you become convince that it's the be-all, end-all.
And while I appreciate wanting to use the header information of a document, you still but up against the "having to open assloads of files simultaneously" problem I mentioned before, not to mention breaking already-agreed upon file formats. You could store file-type information in an external database, or as part of the filesystem, but then you're back in Mac-land: again, there are worse things, but I don't hear anyone here shouting that this is the right idea either.