It's not the having pointers, it's not being able to avoid them or detect them. I believe that ALL compiler languages have pointers, but many can isolate them, and detect user access to them.
Pointers are fine, and can allow you to do things that are clumsy without them. Not being able to tell the difference between a pointer and an integer is unacceptable. (Well, more to the point, not being able to write code where all the pointer manipulation is provably done via system routines is what's unacceptable. Which you actually can do in C/C++ if you don't use arrays or output parameters. But that's too limited.)
The problem with Object-Pascal is poor documentation. Also, it has poor unicode support.
Ada is less complex than C++ (calling it more complex used to be true before the STL). But it's default strings are fixed length, and different lengths of fixed length strings can't be compared. And it's difficult to flex in other ways. I like lots of things about it, but for my purposes it's too rigid in too many places.
Eiffel? That's hardly like Pascal at all. But there's only one version that's still doing much development, the documentation is poor. (They've got it, but access is on-line and slow.) I'm not real familiar with the current releases.
You left out D and Vala. Vala is either too undocumented or too undeveloped, I can't tell which. OTOH, D would be a good choice. It's a low level as you want, but it's also fairly high level if that's what you want. And it handles unicode well. It's problem is a lack easily used libraries (you need to link them in via their C API, and do various parameter translations).
Is that really true for all representations of Unicode, or isn't it just true for the 16-bit version. I thought the full version of unicode only used 23-bit values because that's all there was any reason for. But I thought that utf-8 and utf-32 (ucc4?) were without the BLP problem.
That's most of my answer, but they also need to do something about radioactive waste. Preferably recycling as power, but at least finding some useful purpose for it rather than just stockpiling it.
As I understand it AlphaGo operated via deep learning. That's not only an AI, that's a rather advanced AI. Deep Blue was an expert machine. Different technology.
Actually we could adopt the same approach if we gave up on switching speed and went instead for low power and parallel execution. But we'd need to redesign all our algorithms.
That said, even with low power switching electronics are less power efficient than the brain, just not so much so.
What they're talking about is a way of improving the speed of learning. Nothing else (that I know of). Also nothing less. This is quite important WRT the practicality of using current deep learning approaches, but it doesn't make the end state any more powerful (except that it can continue learning faster).
This doesn't address motivation, which I see as the current major stumbling block in front of General AI. This doesn't make the AI more human...except that humans learn continually.
What it does do is make AIs usable in a lot more cases.
Well, you can easily have learning without comprehension. You can learn to predict that a pattern will occur without knowing anything else about it. Comprehension is required if you are supposed to act in response to it in a "useful" way.
And that's not understanding. Understanding requires that you construct a model relating multiple streams of input, and comprehend what those streams mean for the model's reaction.
And THAT's not sufficient. (Google's robot has exhibited that kind of understanding.) Understanding, however, doesn't say anything about motivation. And I haven't seen any evidence that anyone is working on a reasonably complex motivational structure. (They could be, but I haven't seen evidence of it.)
The thing is, motivational structure is the most important thing to get right before you hook it into a reasonably powerful AI program.
OK, a typo for flea. But fea would be a reasonable spelling of the pronunciation of vieh (cow) which is probably what made the street in the first place.
Where does the Taurine come from? Just looking at it's name I expect it's from beef. And while that might work, I believe that cats will do quite well with the appropriate amino acid supplement. (They'll hate it, of course.) So with the correct synthetic supplements you could raise a cat on a vegan diet. If you could get them to eat it.
But needing that kind of supplement is what is meant by saying they are an obligate carnivore.
Sorry, shouldn't have left out eggs. All our ancestors have eaten eggs whenever they could get them. And whether the Egyptian lower classes were stunted depends on what century you look at. OTOH, the ones who weren't stunted may well have eaten fish.
Still, for a large number of centuries the majority of humanity lived on a mainly vegetarian diet. It may not have been optimal, but they generally survived it in sufficient health to reproduce. And the carnivorous Eskimo that I mentioned survived by eating uncooked fish guts...otherwise they would have gotten a vitamin C deficiency, something much worse then the dietary deficiencies of the Egyptian peasants.. (And of course they were only strictly carnivorous for part of the year. Late fall, winter, and early spring IIUC.)
The plains Indians had a mixed diet, with a large number of vegetables as well as meat, so they aren't a good contrasting example.
It's quite appropriate to characterize humans as omnivores, but it's not appropriate to talk about them as having omnivorous needs, unless you want to note that unlike most animals they can't synthesize vitamin C. So you could reasonably talk about their vegetarian needs. That said, being a healthy vegetarian takes a lot of thought and planning. It's much more natural for us to be omnivores. But some traditional societies have put that kind of thought and experimentation into their diet, and have healthy vegetarian diets. I'm not aware of any group besides the Eskimos that developed a healthy purely carnivorous diet. (And I'm saying Eskimo, because that's how I heard it put when I learned it. I don't know whether the group was Inuit or what, but they lived in northern Alaska.)
At one point that was a reasonable position. Unfortunately operating systems now execute lots of things they shouldn't automatically. I've heard of jpg viruses.
Sometimes history gets in the way of sense. Around where I live there are at least three intermittent streets, and not too far away there's a street called "street of the fea" (in Spanish) because it jumps around so much. It goes jumping around for about 30 miles, but there's no one connected section that's very long. It must be over 100 years old with that name in that many different places, and it must have been quite jumpy even then. And I've no idea when it was originally created or why, but I'm guessing that it was important enough that when there were land slides, people just found a way to keep traveling...but not important enough that anybody ever straightened it out.
You can ask, but it can be surprising the things that will be deleted (blacked out) in the report you get. Lots of things that are or were public knowledge. A friend of mine got back his file with the title of a book he had written blacked out.
Sorry, be we don't have the dietary needs of an omnivore, though the part about dentition is accurate. Most of our body is mainly adapted to eating fruit and bugs...and occasional meat, as in very rarely.
Even dogs aren't truly adapted as carnivores, for that look at the cats. And people are still largely adapted to a vegetarian diet. OTOH, our jaw muscles have shrunk, our tooth enamel has thinned, and various other changes have meant that we can only live on a small group of vegetables. The reduced gut means that we can no longer live on tree leaves, but instead must eat things like lettuce.
What really makes meat eating dominant in humans is a combination of improved weaponry and cooking. Neither of those directly show up in our bodies. And, in fact, our gall bile isn't that appropriate for a largely carnivorous diet, though our shrunken appendix is. It's a mix, but not a smooth one. In some ways we are adapted to be vegetarians (and note that even a horse likes a bite of meat now and then), in others as carnivores, in others as frutivores (or whatever the word should be). And just about everything has omnivorous tendencies. Even rabbits. But outside or our dentition you can't really say that people have omnivorous needs. Traditionally Eskimos lived a large part of the year on a purely carnivorous diet, and lower class Old Kingdom Egyptians just about never ate meat. Also many people in India. We've got many omnivorous tendencies, but that's a lot different.
Not so. Back in the days of the Mac II and MSWind95 there were virus scanners that were quite useful. Of course, the free ones were as good as the commercial ones...
Linux/Unix/Mac prevent some classes of attack, but not ones where the executable is started by the browser and the user has write permission.
Seriously, an earlier report said this malware depended on running javascript, and that can be done on nearly any machine. The only exceptions I can think of are some users who either turn off javascript execution or use an ad blocker and some servers that don't have an browser installed.
You are mixing two categories of things. Some are unequivocally stupid, but done anyway. Like demands to access sites using flash or more than basic javascript. (I'm dubious about ANY site that uses javascript, including this one.) Especially is it uses javascript to invoke sites not a part of the host domain. Others, like demanding passwords be changed frequently and to something non-memorable are stupid, and lead to their own category of security hazards.
Sorry, but NO!!! There exist, or used to exist, hackers who didn't deserve any blame. The "cookie monster" hack, e.g., was a warning and didn't do any harm. The implementers of that were hackers who didn't secerve any blame. I don't quite remember the context, but the Morris Worm was, IIRC, an edge case. IIRC he didn't intend any harm, but he made a programming mistake that let the worm get out of control. Sorry, blame is deserved, though not in huge amounts.
The distinction is between warnings and damage. And, or course, intention...which doesn't change the culpability, but may change the deserved amount of blame.
Malicious hackers are going to exist, but they deserve to be blamed for the damage they do. Even unintentional damage, though in that case proving that it was unintentional would be quite a feat.
And guess what? There *IS* no perfect security. NONE! Even instantaneous writes to a WORM aren't perfect security, and are ghastly expensive to run and store, much less to retrieve from. And all storage media have a certain risk of failure.
That said, I agree that most computer systems don't pay sufficient attention to system security. But there's always a trade off, you invest your time and effort where it seems worthwhile to you. And nobody can predict things perfectly. Computer people tend to be aware of computer security, but don't pay enough attention to the service degradation that enhanced security can sometimes cause. And often make silly choices, or choices that don't consider all the effects. Like requiring passwords to be changed every week to something impossible to memorize, and not expecting post-it notes to appear on monitors.
No. When Gnome 3 first came out a lot of the features that had been removed were made available as add-ons. It was announced that in a future versions those add-ons would be obsoleted. I don't remember the name used, so I'm assuming without much certainty that the extensions being referred to are the same items.
FWIW, it is my practice to generally avoid such non-standard extensions/add-ons/tool-kits as I usually find that at some point they stop working for some reason. In the case of FireFox the only option I use is an ad-blocker, and that only because it's otherwise such a hassle to manage javascript, and so many sites have decided to depend on it. The ad-blocker gives me a finer grained control over which javascript I will allow. (Flash I avoid by not installing it.) If a window manager is dependent for external tools to be usable, then it is not suitable. The external tools WILL break. Either because the update cycles become unaligned or because the API breaks them (sometimes by accident, sometimes intentionally).
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It's not the having pointers, it's not being able to avoid them or detect them. I believe that ALL compiler languages have pointers, but many can isolate them, and detect user access to them.
Pointers are fine, and can allow you to do things that are clumsy without them. Not being able to tell the difference between a pointer and an integer is unacceptable. (Well, more to the point, not being able to write code where all the pointer manipulation is provably done via system routines is what's unacceptable. Which you actually can do in C/C++ if you don't use arrays or output parameters. But that's too limited.)
The problem with Object-Pascal is poor documentation. Also, it has poor unicode support.
Ada is less complex than C++ (calling it more complex used to be true before the STL). But it's default strings are fixed length, and different lengths of fixed length strings can't be compared. And it's difficult to flex in other ways. I like lots of things about it, but for my purposes it's too rigid in too many places.
Eiffel? That's hardly like Pascal at all. But there's only one version that's still doing much development, the documentation is poor. (They've got it, but access is on-line and slow.) I'm not real familiar with the current releases.
You left out D and Vala. Vala is either too undocumented or too undeveloped, I can't tell which.
OTOH, D would be a good choice. It's a low level as you want, but it's also fairly high level if that's what you want. And it handles unicode well. It's problem is a lack easily used libraries (you need to link them in via their C API, and do various parameter translations).
Either you're a troll, or you have no idea about Microsoft audits. You could ask Ernie Ball.
I'm personally surprised that anyone will still do business with them, but I guess that there are a lot of short-sighted managers.
He's assuming that only the poor ones will be stopped. Or possibly that only the poor ones will be walking.
Is that really true for all representations of Unicode, or isn't it just true for the 16-bit version. I thought the full version of unicode only used 23-bit values because that's all there was any reason for. But I thought that utf-8 and utf-32 (ucc4?) were without the BLP problem.
That's most of my answer, but they also need to do something about radioactive waste. Preferably recycling as power, but at least finding some useful purpose for it rather than just stockpiling it.
As I understand it AlphaGo operated via deep learning. That's not only an AI, that's a rather advanced AI. Deep Blue was an expert machine. Different technology.
Actually we could adopt the same approach if we gave up on switching speed and went instead for low power and parallel execution. But we'd need to redesign all our algorithms.
That said, even with low power switching electronics are less power efficient than the brain, just not so much so.
What they're talking about is a way of improving the speed of learning. Nothing else (that I know of). Also nothing less. This is quite important WRT the practicality of using current deep learning approaches, but it doesn't make the end state any more powerful (except that it can continue learning faster).
This doesn't address motivation, which I see as the current major stumbling block in front of General AI. This doesn't make the AI more human...except that humans learn continually.
What it does do is make AIs usable in a lot more cases.
Well, you can easily have learning without comprehension. You can learn to predict that a pattern will occur without knowing anything else about it. Comprehension is required if you are supposed to act in response to it in a "useful" way.
And that's not understanding. Understanding requires that you construct a model relating multiple streams of input, and comprehend what those streams mean for the model's reaction.
And THAT's not sufficient. (Google's robot has exhibited that kind of understanding.) Understanding, however, doesn't say anything about motivation. And I haven't seen any evidence that anyone is working on a reasonably complex motivational structure. (They could be, but I haven't seen evidence of it.)
The thing is, motivational structure is the most important thing to get right before you hook it into a reasonably powerful AI program.
OK, a typo for flea. But fea would be a reasonable spelling of the pronunciation of vieh (cow) which is probably what made the street in the first place.
Where does the Taurine come from? Just looking at it's name I expect it's from beef. And while that might work, I believe that cats will do quite well with the appropriate amino acid supplement. (They'll hate it, of course.) So with the correct synthetic supplements you could raise a cat on a vegan diet. If you could get them to eat it.
But needing that kind of supplement is what is meant by saying they are an obligate carnivore.
Sorry, shouldn't have left out eggs. All our ancestors have eaten eggs whenever they could get them. And whether the Egyptian lower classes were stunted depends on what century you look at. OTOH, the ones who weren't stunted may well have eaten fish.
Still, for a large number of centuries the majority of humanity lived on a mainly vegetarian diet. It may not have been optimal, but they generally survived it in sufficient health to reproduce. And the carnivorous Eskimo that I mentioned survived by eating uncooked fish guts...otherwise they would have gotten a vitamin C deficiency, something much worse then the dietary deficiencies of the Egyptian peasants.. (And of course they were only strictly carnivorous for part of the year. Late fall, winter, and early spring IIUC.)
The plains Indians had a mixed diet, with a large number of vegetables as well as meat, so they aren't a good contrasting example.
It's quite appropriate to characterize humans as omnivores, but it's not appropriate to talk about them as having omnivorous needs, unless you want to note that unlike most animals they can't synthesize vitamin C. So you could reasonably talk about their vegetarian needs. That said, being a healthy vegetarian takes a lot of thought and planning. It's much more natural for us to be omnivores. But some traditional societies have put that kind of thought and experimentation into their diet, and have healthy vegetarian diets. I'm not aware of any group besides the Eskimos that developed a healthy purely carnivorous diet. (And I'm saying Eskimo, because that's how I heard it put when I learned it. I don't know whether the group was Inuit or what, but they lived in northern Alaska.)
At one point that was a reasonable position. Unfortunately operating systems now execute lots of things they shouldn't automatically. I've heard of jpg viruses.
Sometimes history gets in the way of sense. Around where I live there are at least three intermittent streets, and not too far away there's a street called "street of the fea" (in Spanish) because it jumps around so much. It goes jumping around for about 30 miles, but there's no one connected section that's very long. It must be over 100 years old with that name in that many different places, and it must have been quite jumpy even then. And I've no idea when it was originally created or why, but I'm guessing that it was important enough that when there were land slides, people just found a way to keep traveling...but not important enough that anybody ever straightened it out.
Don't bet on it. At least where I live zip codes don't follow city boundaries.
You mean as in "Fire Maidens From Planet X"? That's one of the candidates for worst movie ever.
You can ask, but it can be surprising the things that will be deleted (blacked out) in the report you get. Lots of things that are or were public knowledge. A friend of mine got back his file with the title of a book he had written blacked out.
Sorry, be we don't have the dietary needs of an omnivore, though the part about dentition is accurate. Most of our body is mainly adapted to eating fruit and bugs...and occasional meat, as in very rarely.
Even dogs aren't truly adapted as carnivores, for that look at the cats. And people are still largely adapted to a vegetarian diet. OTOH, our jaw muscles have shrunk, our tooth enamel has thinned, and various other changes have meant that we can only live on a small group of vegetables. The reduced gut means that we can no longer live on tree leaves, but instead must eat things like lettuce.
What really makes meat eating dominant in humans is a combination of improved weaponry and cooking. Neither of those directly show up in our bodies. And, in fact, our gall bile isn't that appropriate for a largely carnivorous diet, though our shrunken appendix is. It's a mix, but not a smooth one. In some ways we are adapted to be vegetarians (and note that even a horse likes a bite of meat now and then), in others as carnivores, in others as frutivores (or whatever the word should be). And just about everything has omnivorous tendencies. Even rabbits. But outside or our dentition you can't really say that people have omnivorous needs. Traditionally Eskimos lived a large part of the year on a purely carnivorous diet, and lower class Old Kingdom Egyptians just about never ate meat. Also many people in India. We've got many omnivorous tendencies, but that's a lot different.
Microsoft upgrades?
Not so. Back in the days of the Mac II and MSWind95 there were virus scanners that were quite useful. Of course, the free ones were as good as the commercial ones...
Linux/Unix/Mac prevent some classes of attack, but not ones where the executable is started by the browser and the user has write permission.
Seriously, an earlier report said this malware depended on running javascript, and that can be done on nearly any machine. The only exceptions I can think of are some users who either turn off javascript execution or use an ad blocker and some servers that don't have an browser installed.
You are mixing two categories of things. Some are unequivocally stupid, but done anyway. Like demands to access sites using flash or more than basic javascript. (I'm dubious about ANY site that uses javascript, including this one.) Especially is it uses javascript to invoke sites not a part of the host domain. Others, like demanding passwords be changed frequently and to something non-memorable are stupid, and lead to their own category of security hazards.
Sorry, but NO!!!
There exist, or used to exist, hackers who didn't deserve any blame. The "cookie monster" hack, e.g., was a warning and didn't do any harm. The implementers of that were hackers who didn't secerve any blame. I don't quite remember the context, but the Morris Worm was, IIRC, an edge case. IIRC he didn't intend any harm, but he made a programming mistake that let the worm get out of control. Sorry, blame is deserved, though not in huge amounts.
The distinction is between warnings and damage. And, or course, intention...which doesn't change the culpability, but may change the deserved amount of blame.
Malicious hackers are going to exist, but they deserve to be blamed for the damage they do. Even unintentional damage, though in that case proving that it was unintentional would be quite a feat.
And guess what? There *IS* no perfect security. NONE! Even instantaneous writes to a WORM aren't perfect security, and are ghastly expensive to run and store, much less to retrieve from. And all storage media have a certain risk of failure.
That said, I agree that most computer systems don't pay sufficient attention to system security. But there's always a trade off, you invest your time and effort where it seems worthwhile to you. And nobody can predict things perfectly. Computer people tend to be aware of computer security, but don't pay enough attention to the service degradation that enhanced security can sometimes cause. And often make silly choices, or choices that don't consider all the effects. Like requiring passwords to be changed every week to something impossible to memorize, and not expecting post-it notes to appear on monitors.
No. When Gnome 3 first came out a lot of the features that had been removed were made available as add-ons. It was announced that in a future versions those add-ons would be obsoleted. I don't remember the name used, so I'm assuming without much certainty that the extensions being referred to are the same items.
FWIW, it is my practice to generally avoid such non-standard extensions/add-ons/tool-kits as I usually find that at some point they stop working for some reason. In the case of FireFox the only option I use is an ad-blocker, and that only because it's otherwise such a hassle to manage javascript, and so many sites have decided to depend on it. The ad-blocker gives me a finer grained control over which javascript I will allow. (Flash I avoid by not installing it.)
If a window manager is dependent for external tools to be usable, then it is not suitable. The external tools WILL break. Either because the update cycles become unaligned or because the API breaks them (sometimes by accident, sometimes intentionally).