If you ever meet a true genius, you will know him by this mark; he will have utterly stupid ideas about the future of "network computers". I don't know why this is true, but it is.
You can try to tell a Larry Ellison or an Alan Cox that people don't *need* a car any more powerful than a Yugo, but they *want* an SUV. You can pointedly ask how someone's going to edit their digital photographs via "Java over the web". You can ask why they're so keen on analogies to the game console market (a notorious graveyard of ambitions). But nothing seems to work.
I think that this isn't the whole story. No lawyer worth his salt would have come up with this. My guess is that the story submitter has just finished writing a piece of code that is not only plagiarised from an Open Source project, but in which the non-plagiarised bits are so badly written as to be unmaintainable. Now he's trying to pretend that he did it that way on purpose.
. I play black/death metal myself, which will _never_ see major distribution in the US... so it looks like releasing my own damn CD will be illegal by the time it's done
If this act is intended to make black metal illegal, count me in.
it's getting to the point where I may not even be able to legally give my own music away for free
The point at which you couldn't give away that kind of crap was reached a long time ago.
I have to say that as far as I can see, Malda's comments that "if we don't do this, we won't be around in a year" seem to be in direct contradiction to the public statements made by VA Software about the profitability and cash burn of their businesses (particularly, about whether SourceForge Enterprise Edition is profitable, but also relating to the ongoing cash burn and cash pile). I'd appreciate some straight answers from somebody on either side.
Furthermore, I'd point out that this article contains forward-looking statements about the performance of VA Software's business, and as such really ought to have a "safe harbor" disclaimer attached to it.
Yes folks, "Open Source" appears to mean that I'm doing the job of the VA press office for them, for nothing.
Streetlawyer disclaimer: This post is of a general and journalistic nature and should not be construed as a recommendation to take any course of action with respect to investment in marketable securities.
But by attacking the book and the author so shrilly, the environmental community risks its own hard-won credibility. It acts just as Lomborg accuses it, like lobbyists with an axe to grind, not cold-eyed, empirically-minded scientists.
But... but... why doesn't Lomborg risk his credibility for attacking the environmentalists so shrilly? Could it be that there's one rule of debate if you're saying things that appeal to the people who own the media which decide who has "credibility" and one rule if you're saying things they don't like?
You certainly can't tell me that Lomborg is unfailingly polite in his attacks on environmentalists because he's not.
That's why he got a pie in the face by the way; not for authoring a "rival study", but because he had basically accused this guy of saying things he knew to be untrue in order to get government grants. If you accuse people of what amounts to fraud in public, you have to expect some comebacks, and you shouldn't pretend that people are only attacking you back because they can't handle your message.
In any case, this article is mis-sectioned. What kind of a "book review" spends about two thirds of its length ranting on unrelated political issues related to other peoples' views about the book and half that much tlaking about the book itself?
Second, your extraction engine ought to be looking at a realtime EDGAR provider, not SEC EDGAR. VA filed their Q4 numbers yesterday, and you are still picking up the Q3 numbers. Since the difference between these two is.... the entire VA Linux Systems business; the divestiture of everything except OSDN and Sourceforge, this is a pretty significant source of error. The loss these days is $9.7m/quarter, with cash burn of $6.9m.
I'd probably say that the best idea would be for some group to go and dedictate a year or so to making the be-all-end-all of interfaces.
Yeh, designing the be-all, end-all interface would only take about a year for a group of hobbyists, wouldn't it? Because basically, all that UI-design stuff is just art fag stuff which is no problem for "hackers" who are "often highly creative artistically" ([c] Eric Raymond). Those psychologists, ergonomists and designers can't be contributing anything interesting, because they don't have computer science degrees. Hell, "psychology" even sounds like it might be a liberal art! All that's needed is for some "engineers" to set up a mailing list and swap ideas and soon we'll have something much better than the Mac. I mean, c'mon people, this isn't exactly kernel hacking.
Bill Gates must love hopelessly overambitious, ill-thought-out "conquer the desktop" efforts like these.
These outlets will compete with the quasi-monopolies held by the journal industry and provide information to researchers whose institutions can't afford to subscribe to large numbers of overpriced periodicals
translates to
These outlets will compete with the quasi-monopolies held by the journal industry and provide publication credits to researchers whose articles aren't good enough to be published in normal periodicals
It's like he said. When it comes to journalistic integrity on slashdot, "you get what you pay for".
In fact the only people who don't get what they paid for are the poor fuckers who coughed up $320 a share for a company that sed to be called VA Linux
half-understood Dennett.
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
Most of the papers I have read on the Chinese Room argument argue against Searle
You do surprise me. So you've read half the literature and formed a conclusion without troubling yourself with the other side of the argument. Here's an argumentum ad hominem to add to your collection; you're a prick.
e.g., Dennett's point that it's not actually an argument, but an 'intuition pump'
You've in fact read Dennett's paper so shallowly that you think this is a critique; in fact Dennett never means it as such and admits that he uses the "intuition pump" (called by the rest of us a "thought experiment") all the time.
I say this as a cognitive scientist who *likes* philosophy, by the way.
OOOOHHH! whoopee dooo! check out the big brain on Brad! I'm sure that the philosophers are suitably honoured to have drawn the approval of an ACTUAL COGNITIVE SCIENTIST!
My take on Searle: The Chinese Room illustrates (for those who have forgotten) that in the traditional approach to computational formalisms, syntax and semantics are separate. You can't get semantics from syntax.
This is the entire point that Searle is trying to make, you fool. And he says so, in that article you haven't read. You can't get semantics from syntax. Or to put it another way; a full syntactic description of a Chinese speaker does not necessarily have semantic content. Or to put it another way; the blessed box doesn't speak Chinese.
You might profitably read Searle's later papers on the subject where he points out that even this is conceding too much to the Dennettites. The Chinese box doesn't even have *syntax*; all it has are marks on paper. These have a causal role in the system, but this causal system is only syntactic if interpreted as such. Or in other words, a computer is a box turning switches on and off; these switches are only '1' and '0' in the context of an interpretation. Which has to be provided by something which is not itself merely a CHinese Box.
SInce you have conceded my entire point, I have to regard this discussion as over.
Let's hear your response to it then. Bearing in mind that over 100 papers were published in refereed journals on this very issue, I'm guessing that you must be pretty impressive to be able to dismiss Searle so entirely
What they don't believe is that brains are magically endowed by God to be the only things capable of producing a mind
Nor does Searle believe this, and Dennett lost a lot of respect in my eyes for continuing to claim that he does. Searle is completely agnostic about what sort of thing could produce a mind; he just asserts that nothing produces a mind by virtue of its status as a Turing Machine
It is totally obvious to me, anyways, that the man is not required to know Chinese any more than my Pentium III is required to know LISP -- the man is the one component of a system which, as a whole, evidently does understand Chinese
This is called the "Systems Reply" and is anticipated and refuted in the original Chinese Room paper ("Minds, Brains and Programs"). It is always a touchstone of geek arrogance that they believe themselves to have come up with a new and definitive refutation of Searle, and it's always this one.
I think it went along the lines of each individual "unit" in our brain has no understanding either, and the man in the chinese room is just like a few neurones in the brain. However, the whole does 'understand'.
This is the "Systems Reply", considered and refuted by Searle in the original Chinese Room paper.
Let me get this straight: In Shanghai or Calcutta, a vicious variation of the common cold is contained completely from the rest of the world, and if it ever leaks out 99% of us are doomed because we have weakened resistances?
I suppose it's just dumb luck that none of the thousands of europeans and americans who visit these places every year, haven't caught this deadly flu yet?
Where do you think flu epidemics come from? For extra credit, how many people do you think flu epidemics kill?
For extra extra credit, have you ever heard of something called AIDS?
Likewise, I had my first child at 40. I could have started at eighteen at had dozens of "I can count to twenty 'cause I ain't go no shoes!" kids, but I preferred to raise one that will be more likely to someday explain the zeta function [wolfram.com].
With any luck, random genetic drift will ensure that your child doesn't turn out to be a self-satisfied, smug cunt.
No, you changed the story, without giving any indication that you had done so. That's not an "update". The difference is that by doing it this way, you make all the comments below pointing out your error look like they were wrong. Bad Editor. No Cookie.
Which do you think will be solved faster: this problem, or the problem of rolling out encrypted CDs which are unrippable and require a hardware key? For bonus points, do you think attempts to massively pirate (and this is what we're talking about; there is no possible way in which broadcasting to the public is a "fair use") copyrighted material will speed up or slow down the introduction of hardware protection?
ok, seriously, this could be the perfect tool for spies. just imagine. there are two spies say in a military base. no way to exchange information openly. they would just need to walk along each other for a short moment and their watches exchange the information they gathered.
Slashdot Mirror
UKians shouldn't be too smug; this product has been available in Japan (where foul sweet milky coffee is more popular) for donkeys' years
And antitrust law is there to protect competition, not any individual competitor
You can try to tell a Larry Ellison or an Alan Cox that people don't *need* a car any more powerful than a Yugo, but they *want* an SUV. You can pointedly ask how someone's going to edit their digital photographs via "Java over the web". You can ask why they're so keen on analogies to the game console market (a notorious graveyard of ambitions). But nothing seems to work.
I think it's called "intellectual arrogance".
Bloody hell! Now what's going to happen to the mission?!
HTH
If this act is intended to make black metal illegal, count me in.
it's getting to the point where I may not even be able to legally give my own music away for free
The point at which you couldn't give away that kind of crap was reached a long time ago.
Furthermore, I'd point out that this article contains forward-looking statements about the performance of VA Software's business, and as such really ought to have a "safe harbor" disclaimer attached to it.
Yes folks, "Open Source" appears to mean that I'm doing the job of the VA press office for them, for nothing.
Streetlawyer disclaimer: This post is of a general and journalistic nature and should not be construed as a recommendation to take any course of action with respect to investment in marketable securities.
But ... but ... why doesn't Lomborg risk his credibility for attacking the environmentalists so shrilly? Could it be that there's one rule of debate if you're saying things that appeal to the people who own the media which decide who has "credibility" and one rule if you're saying things they don't like?
You certainly can't tell me that Lomborg is unfailingly polite in his attacks on environmentalists because he's not.
That's why he got a pie in the face by the way; not for authoring a "rival study", but because he had basically accused this guy of saying things he knew to be untrue in order to get government grants. If you accuse people of what amounts to fraud in public, you have to expect some comebacks, and you shouldn't pretend that people are only attacking you back because they can't handle your message.
In any case, this article is mis-sectioned. What kind of a "book review" spends about two thirds of its length ranting on unrelated political issues related to other peoples' views about the book and half that much tlaking about the book itself?
Second, your extraction engine ought to be looking at a realtime EDGAR provider, not SEC EDGAR. VA filed their Q4 numbers yesterday, and you are still picking up the Q3 numbers. Since the difference between these two is .... the entire VA Linux Systems business; the divestiture of everything except OSDN and Sourceforge, this is a pretty significant source of error. The loss these days is $9.7m/quarter, with cash burn of $6.9m.
Commerce is not a degree. Commerce is what people do instead of a degree.
Yeh, designing the be-all, end-all interface would only take about a year for a group of hobbyists, wouldn't it? Because basically, all that UI-design stuff is just art fag stuff which is no problem for "hackers" who are "often highly creative artistically" ([c] Eric Raymond). Those psychologists, ergonomists and designers can't be contributing anything interesting, because they don't have computer science degrees. Hell, "psychology" even sounds like it might be a liberal art! All that's needed is for some "engineers" to set up a mailing list and swap ideas and soon we'll have something much better than the Mac. I mean, c'mon people, this isn't exactly kernel hacking.
Bill Gates must love hopelessly overambitious, ill-thought-out "conquer the desktop" efforts like these.
translates to
These outlets will compete with the quasi-monopolies held by the journal industry and provide publication credits to researchers whose articles aren't good enough to be published in normal periodicals
In fact the only people who don't get what they paid for are the poor fuckers who coughed up $320 a share for a company that sed to be called VA Linux
You do surprise me. So you've read half the literature and formed a conclusion without troubling yourself with the other side of the argument. Here's an argumentum ad hominem to add to your collection; you're a prick.
e.g., Dennett's point that it's not actually an argument, but an 'intuition pump'
You've in fact read Dennett's paper so shallowly that you think this is a critique; in fact Dennett never means it as such and admits that he uses the "intuition pump" (called by the rest of us a "thought experiment") all the time.
I say this as a cognitive scientist who *likes* philosophy, by the way.
OOOOHHH! whoopee dooo! check out the big brain on Brad! I'm sure that the philosophers are suitably honoured to have drawn the approval of an ACTUAL COGNITIVE SCIENTIST!
My take on Searle: The Chinese Room illustrates (for those who have forgotten) that in the traditional approach to computational formalisms, syntax and semantics are separate. You can't get semantics from syntax.
This is the entire point that Searle is trying to make, you fool. And he says so, in that article you haven't read. You can't get semantics from syntax. Or to put it another way; a full syntactic description of a Chinese speaker does not necessarily have semantic content. Or to put it another way; the blessed box doesn't speak Chinese.
You might profitably read Searle's later papers on the subject where he points out that even this is conceding too much to the Dennettites. The Chinese box doesn't even have *syntax*; all it has are marks on paper. These have a causal role in the system, but this causal system is only syntactic if interpreted as such. Or in other words, a computer is a box turning switches on and off; these switches are only '1' and '0' in the context of an interpretation. Which has to be provided by something which is not itself merely a CHinese Box.
SInce you have conceded my entire point, I have to regard this discussion as over.
Let's hear your response to it then. Bearing in mind that over 100 papers were published in refereed journals on this very issue, I'm guessing that you must be pretty impressive to be able to dismiss Searle so entirely
Nor does Searle believe this, and Dennett lost a lot of respect in my eyes for continuing to claim that he does. Searle is completely agnostic about what sort of thing could produce a mind; he just asserts that nothing produces a mind by virtue of its status as a Turing Machine
This is called the "Systems Reply" and is anticipated and refuted in the original Chinese Room paper ("Minds, Brains and Programs"). It is always a touchstone of geek arrogance that they believe themselves to have come up with a new and definitive refutation of Searle, and it's always this one.
This is the "Systems Reply", considered and refuted by Searle in the original Chinese Room paper.
I suppose it's just dumb luck that none of the thousands of europeans and americans who visit these places every year, haven't caught this deadly flu yet?
Where do you think flu epidemics come from? For extra credit, how many people do you think flu epidemics kill?
For extra extra credit, have you ever heard of something called AIDS?
With any luck, random genetic drift will ensure that your child doesn't turn out to be a self-satisfied, smug cunt.
No, you changed the story, without giving any indication that you had done so. That's not an "update". The difference is that by doing it this way, you make all the comments below pointing out your error look like they were wrong. Bad Editor. No Cookie.
Perfect slashdot thinking. If you're going to build a massive Faraday cage, why not just spend the money on buying the fucking CDs in the first place?
Your second two bullets should be combined; GHWB was in charge of the CIA while it was on its drugs&terrorism binge.
Which do you think will be solved faster: this problem, or the problem of rolling out encrypted CDs which are unrippable and require a hardware key? For bonus points, do you think attempts to massively pirate (and this is what we're talking about; there is no possible way in which broadcasting to the public is a "fair use") copyrighted material will speed up or slow down the introduction of hardware protection?
Via a radio transmission. Real secure, 007.