I don't really understand what's wrong with this blog author, this "Patrick" fellow. Diaspora is git-release of a pre-alpha. It's essentially proof-of-concept which was released so we can have a look at it and contribute. The author's "if this is OSS, we're screwed" assertion apparently ignores the fact that Chromium, Mozilla, Linux, and dozens of other open source projects work perfectly fine. Additionally, the "their code is unprofessional" accusation is simply wrong-headed. It was never intended to be "professional", so there's no way for it to be "unprofessional". It's a foundation released to the public that other people can build on.
As for all this worry about zero-day holes...every piece of software has them. If you think that these kids aren't professional because they can't make a perfect, idealized, secure pre-alpha, then you're riding the slopes of a Nirvana fallacy. The entire reason it was open-sourced was to allow researchers the opportunity to improve the code INSTEAD of going public in order to gain visits to their arrogant blog posts and acting like there's some huge problem not covered by the disclaimer. OOPS SORRY IS THAT TOO CLOSE TO HOME, PATRICK? I have never seen more arrogant douchebaggery in a security blog post. This "these are errors that shouldn't be present in any code!" bullshit is a result of Patrick and his circlejerk buds building the project up in their own heads, then being disappointed when the pre-alpha wasn't a facebook-killer.
Yes it has errors. But the very fact that it's 1) open source, and 2) being debugged even by douches such as Patrick, means that the whole "OSS Diaspora" concept ACTUALLY WORKS IN PRACTICE.
Wouldn't this only work if you used a classical space-time model, or at least normalized to our local frame of reference? If we account for relativistic effects, wouldn't an external observer probably not see the same degree of accuracy from our clocks as we perceive? And the "most accurate" claim doesn't address other possible phenomena, such as isotopic decay in natural circumstances.
The only reason I had been trusting Google was that it had made such a big show of putting up a fight against Department of Justice subpoenas during the Bush administration. If it is confirmed that they quietly caved, then I most definitely will not be purchasing any device running a Google cloud operating system like Chrome OS. And out of sheer, ineffectual spite, I will be be blocking all Google-owned ads.
I became agnostic just a little while back. Despite this, if I could go back to believing in some sort of higher entity/afterlife, I would. It's comforting, and I don't begrudge people that sort of comfort. The only thing I begrudge is the manipulation factor that accompanies religion, but that doesn't seem to be 100% across the board. I have a feeling that we're seeing a temporary increase in fundamentalism, but that too shall soon pass.
That said, I have looked at some reports of NDEs, and I've read that even very young children have had very mature visions while clinically dead, which makes me wonder if there are still some variables which we aren't accounting for. Also unexplained is the characteristic "hovering" associated with NDEs, where clinically dead or comatose individuals report details of medical procedures from impossible angles.
I looked at the documentation of this "Church Programming language". Scheme and most other Lisp derivatives have been around longer and can do more. This is neither news nor a revolutionary discovery.
I'm a child of the late 80s and 90s, and I grew up watching Star Trek DS9 and later spending my teenage years watching the newer BSG series. So out of curiosity, I went back and watched the old BSG...
There's a reason they did a rebooted series and not something based off the old one. Because the old one is a piece of crap. It was morally simplistic, hokey, ripping too much off Star Wars, too Mormon (Larson is a Mormon), and requiring too great a suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy.
So if all sufficiently complicated computing devices are equivalent, then can this be true?
"once a machine can achieve a human level of intelligence â" it can also exceed it."
I would say that the answer is no, because I can't spontaneously decide to become smarter than I am now. More knowledgeable? Sure. More intelligent? No. Hofstadter in particular has some good arguments against machines spontaneously getting smarter.
The concept of a future characterized by high bandwidth and sentient machines is possible. But the concept of some runaway singularity is asinine. Because of the differences between Moore's law and communication bandwidth, machines will always have a communication bottleneck similar to and perhaps proportional to ours. We don't have the ability to naturally and spontaneously link up into a superhuman, and machines don't either. Could machines take over? Sure. Could they spontaneously achieve runaway emergent super-sentience and turn into skynet? No.
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I don't really understand what's wrong with this blog author, this "Patrick" fellow. Diaspora is git-release of a pre-alpha. It's essentially proof-of-concept which was released so we can have a look at it and contribute. The author's "if this is OSS, we're screwed" assertion apparently ignores the fact that Chromium, Mozilla, Linux, and dozens of other open source projects work perfectly fine. Additionally, the "their code is unprofessional" accusation is simply wrong-headed. It was never intended to be "professional", so there's no way for it to be "unprofessional". It's a foundation released to the public that other people can build on.
As for all this worry about zero-day holes...every piece of software has them. If you think that these kids aren't professional because they can't make a perfect, idealized, secure pre-alpha, then you're riding the slopes of a Nirvana fallacy. The entire reason it was open-sourced was to allow researchers the opportunity to improve the code INSTEAD of going public in order to gain visits to their arrogant blog posts and acting like there's some huge problem not covered by the disclaimer. OOPS SORRY IS THAT TOO CLOSE TO HOME, PATRICK? I have never seen more arrogant douchebaggery in a security blog post. This "these are errors that shouldn't be present in any code!" bullshit is a result of Patrick and his circlejerk buds building the project up in their own heads, then being disappointed when the pre-alpha wasn't a facebook-killer.
Yes it has errors. But the very fact that it's 1) open source, and 2) being debugged even by douches such as Patrick, means that the whole "OSS Diaspora" concept ACTUALLY WORKS IN PRACTICE.
Actually, Wikileaks has explicitly denied possession of the quarter-million US embassy cables from the State Department.
Wouldn't this only work if you used a classical space-time model, or at least normalized to our local frame of reference? If we account for relativistic effects, wouldn't an external observer probably not see the same degree of accuracy from our clocks as we perceive? And the "most accurate" claim doesn't address other possible phenomena, such as isotopic decay in natural circumstances.
The only reason I had been trusting Google was that it had made such a big show of putting up a fight against Department of Justice subpoenas during the Bush administration. If it is confirmed that they quietly caved, then I most definitely will not be purchasing any device running a Google cloud operating system like Chrome OS. And out of sheer, ineffectual spite, I will be be blocking all Google-owned ads.
I became agnostic just a little while back. Despite this, if I could go back to believing in some sort of higher entity/afterlife, I would. It's comforting, and I don't begrudge people that sort of comfort. The only thing I begrudge is the manipulation factor that accompanies religion, but that doesn't seem to be 100% across the board. I have a feeling that we're seeing a temporary increase in fundamentalism, but that too shall soon pass. That said, I have looked at some reports of NDEs, and I've read that even very young children have had very mature visions while clinically dead, which makes me wonder if there are still some variables which we aren't accounting for. Also unexplained is the characteristic "hovering" associated with NDEs, where clinically dead or comatose individuals report details of medical procedures from impossible angles.
I looked at the documentation of this "Church Programming language". Scheme and most other Lisp derivatives have been around longer and can do more. This is neither news nor a revolutionary discovery.
I'm a child of the late 80s and 90s, and I grew up watching Star Trek DS9 and later spending my teenage years watching the newer BSG series. So out of curiosity, I went back and watched the old BSG... There's a reason they did a rebooted series and not something based off the old one. Because the old one is a piece of crap. It was morally simplistic, hokey, ripping too much off Star Wars, too Mormon (Larson is a Mormon), and requiring too great a suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy.
So if all sufficiently complicated computing devices are equivalent, then can this be true? "once a machine can achieve a human level of intelligence â" it can also exceed it." I would say that the answer is no, because I can't spontaneously decide to become smarter than I am now. More knowledgeable? Sure. More intelligent? No. Hofstadter in particular has some good arguments against machines spontaneously getting smarter. The concept of a future characterized by high bandwidth and sentient machines is possible. But the concept of some runaway singularity is asinine. Because of the differences between Moore's law and communication bandwidth, machines will always have a communication bottleneck similar to and perhaps proportional to ours. We don't have the ability to naturally and spontaneously link up into a superhuman, and machines don't either. Could machines take over? Sure. Could they spontaneously achieve runaway emergent super-sentience and turn into skynet? No.