Ack! Was forgetting what I had loaded where. One version of 9.04 x64 had it at 0. Two Hardy servers did have it at 65536. Two x32 9.04 boxes also had it at 65536. Of these, only the one with it set at 0 started with an Ubuntu earlier than Hardy. So presumably it depends not on what you're running, but what you first installed.
Check older boxes independent of current OS version!
True, but Ubuntu 8.04 x64 Hardy Server LTS has that set to 0! This is on thoroughly-updated systems too (and a lot of servers will be running the LTS release, not 9.04).
Your nation's not secure if everyone's laughing at your leaders, especially if those laughing are thinking "With buffoons like that coordinating their defense, let's invade!"
That's why it's so important that our access to AP content must continue unrestricted. Where else can be get so many articles by so many writers who have no idea what they're talking about?
With blogs, we generally visit those where we already know the level of "idea what they're talking about" from past reading or reputation. But the AP is an outfit that slaps its trademark across writing of such uneven levels of "idea what they're talking about" that reading them becomes a constantly-entertaining puzzle for each article: "Can you spot everything that's wrong with this picture?"
On the one hand: Getting fired, when your job is in politics and people can identify you with your boss, for publicly saying something stupidly insulting ("O-dumb-a") about a major political figure (never mind which media) which people can trace back to your and your boss.
On the other hand: Making a likely factually-accurate statement in public about mold in your rental unit, and getting sued by the landlord.
If you're hired to work in politics, you know damn well you have to remain true to the politics you're working for even in your own time. You're getting paid for that, and you know it.
But the landlord's not paying the tenant! The tenant is paying the landlord, and it's part of the landlord's job to fix mold problems. So in both cases you have someone not doing their job. In the second case though, the person not doing the job is trying to legally punish the person paying him for bringing up the nonperformance in public.
>It is the hot new thing on Wall Street, The first algotrading I encountered was in the early 1990s at Deutsche, and they senior guys there told me of some of the mid80s stuff they'd done. Not new.
The article's not claiming that nobody used computers to trade before. It's claiming that nobody was using computers to wedge into minute time gaps and place false orders to gain data on the market that was never previously available - and still is not generally so - to profit. Those computers and networks in the early 90s weren't fast enough to enable this. You retired years ago, right? You have little idea how the game is played today? I was in tech on Wall Street in the early 90s. If your firm had its own T1 you were cutting edge. What you could do at that speed, even given today's software to do it, doesn't touch what's happening now.
>For most of Wall Street's history, stock trading was fairly straightforward: For an arts graduate the writer is terribly ignorant of history, as well as trading. For instance is he not aware of how the Kennedy family got rich as part of causing the crash of 1929 ?
Pray tell us. Conventional wisdom has it their interest in the bootlegging industry is at the base of their riches. That would make them slightly more respectable than the Bushes, who it's said made their stake in the opium trade.
I read that as "In a decade, as affordable as solar will be then," not "as affordable as solar is now." Most of the projections on solar have it coming into equivalence with natural gas before a decade's out. Coal may still be cheaper, if it's being burned in a grandfathered, totally polluting plant.
Some of use also prefer cheap, polluted women. Lord knows I do! But my utility gets none of its power from coal. The price is slightly lower than average for here in the Northeast US. Unemployment is lower than the rest of the region too. Obviously it's not killing the economy to source from power suppliers priced higher than the coal generators.
On the one hand, of course businesses who run more than one server have or will virtualize them. This will save some staff time, what with fewer boxes. It's trading hardware complexity for software complexity, but it's a good trade.
But then, do you want to host your virtualized servers on "the cloud"? Totally separate question. Yes, it's easier to move a virtualized server off to the cloud. But why do you want to? To save on hardware maintenance costs? Really? You've still got computers in your office, right? You're not just running dumb terminals on the cloud? So you've got somebody to maintain them. What's the extra overhead in having them watch two more boxes, those being your main virtual server host (redundant power, RAID, etc. - a real server), and a hot backup? Say your total staff is only 6, it's a choice between maintaining just their six workstations (and switches, printers...), or that + 2 servers. How often will those two servers be the proverbial straw to the camel's back? How are they more trouble or expense than all that's required to contract out to a cloud vendor?
That's presuming you've still got someone responsible for configuring your stuff within the virtualized servers. A lot of the cloud PR presumes that you can somehow dump that staff and just stick together a bunch of predefined, generic pieces. To the degree that works, what differentiates your business? How do you avoid always being slower and less capable than someone basing their business on a more customized solution? If your business is something anybody can set up with a few standard components on the cloud, and it's at all a viable business, you'll soon have so many competitors doing the same thing that the profit will be sucked out of it for all of you. Maybe you want to play in that space. Looks like a sucker's bet though.
it's theoretically possible with good enough imaging tools to make a 1:1 copy.
Several problems with that:
- When you're at the quantum level, you can't image it without changing it. - Okay, so you've changed it. You're after general structure not the details of the instant? But what if the old AI guys were right, and the essence of being a mind is in the programming, not the hardware? Shuffling your image of the quantum-level stuff may mean you get a good image of the hardware, and miss getting a functional program for it entirely. - Where are you going to store your image? This is not trivial. The human brain is orders of magnitude more complex than any other physical system known. Is there enough storage capacity on the planet to store the complete image details for one moment's slice of one human brain? - Once you store something that complex, how in heck are you going to fabricate a duplicate? Over what span of time, with what tools, can you build to that spec?
Research projects like this are betting that with some drastic simplification you can build something roughly like a human brain, and that this roughest approximation will have useful parallels in operation. But the human brain isn't just electron firings. It's chemical cascades, electromagnetic fields, processing not just across synapses but within them, and quite possibly processing on the quantum level.
He's going to build something like that? In ten years? Really?
They create the illusion of security, while preventing different applications from working smoothly together in the *nix way. If you really must fracture your environment for security, it's smarter to use virtual machines, or chroot jails (both of which also can have vulnerabilities - there's no perfection this side of the Moon). If you don't know enough to lock down stuff in a single environment without AppArmour or SELinux, you're going to end up in trouble soon enough anyway, since there are still plenty of ways to expose vulnerabilities.
The basic philosophy is "Jack doesn't know enough to secure his web server, so we'll make sure when its compromised it will have limited access to other system components." But the end result is it makes the system even more complex, so the odds of Jack ever learning enough to lock it down become much worse.
The Silmarillion? And what do you propose to do with that?
As for turning people on to Tolkien, everyone I know who reads sci-fi/fantasy read those books back when we were kids, before any of the derivative stuff was out. The books are sufficient and wonderful in themselves. And they had no trouble finding deeply-appreciative readers on their own strength.
On the other hand, I'm sure the movies are fine. They were done at the right time, when cgi was finally good enough. Still, should I show my son the movies when he's old enough? Or should see that he reads the books first? Doesn't this stuff work better when its your own visions stimulated by the full force of Tolkien's linguistic art, rather than just duping your visions from Hollywood?
Other than Blade Runner, the Wizard of Oz and the first Star Wars, Hollywood has never shown me a movie equal to the visual potential of the best sci-fi/fantasy books. It might be best to keep them away from our fine literature all together. Let them hire original scriptwriters. Keep the value of literature for literature.
The correctness is assigned a number which aggregates over the course of all the blots and assigns a statistical analysis of the level of pathology of the patients psyche.
I've taken this "test," years ago. From that point of view it was an invitation to free association - whether you want to call that "projection" or not. You're saying that from the POV of the test giver my free associations were being scored on a scale of correctness, such that my response to each blot was reduced to a single number? Then you put the numbers together and are able to produce another number which purportedly rates the sickness of my mind?
Talk about sick minds! The narcissism of the practitioner who can bring himself to believe that free associations on abstract blots can be assigned a numerable degree of "correctness," and that he possesses the secret "scientific" means for doing that, is astonishing. And the implicit premise, that all correctly functioning minds perform the same, and so predictably will make the same "correct" free associations when presented with the same abstract blots... if we're truly wired that deterministicly, then we should also be able to discern the "correct" reaction to any particular Jackson Pollock painting. Just put a dozen people certified as mentally non-pathological by virtue of giving 100% correct ink-blot associations in front of the painting, and voila, they should all have the same, entirely healthy reaction to the Pollock too.
Anyone who sees it any other way must simply be sick!
Let's say you've been using PHP since about a month after Rasmus released it 15 years back, so you've got a whole lot of code that uses the ereg family of regex functions. So they've depricated them, and plan to yank them from PHP 6. Why? Is the overhead so terrible? Or do they really think that it will improve our lives if we have to go back through everything and translate eregs to pregs?
Then there's the change in MySQL password formats. Sure, if they include the latest MySQL libraries they have a different encryption level. But if PHP is smart enough to warn you about that when your MySQL install is still using the older passwords, then PHP should be smart enough to include both libraries and use whichever one is appropriate to the passwords encountered.
There's a huge codebase out there that's using PHP against MySQL, and using PHP's original ereg regex syntax instead of the Perl-wannabe stuff. What are they thinking, when they set out to break this? When 5.3 rolls out through the distros a whole lot of MySQL backends will fail on the password thing. And when 6.0 rolls out millions of regexs will suddenly be failing. Needlessly.
I'm working with a highly-educated coder, who takes 5 times as long to do a project because he believes everything they taught him. His code's no better though. And he's terrible at reading others' code, if it wasn't written according to the immutable principles his superior education endowed him with. It's sort of sad. Really. He could have been so much better if he'd learned on his own, by taking other people's real-world code and tearing it down to see how it worked, like the rest of us. Academic coding principles are no substitute for real literacy. And literacy means you're not dependent on the accent to understand the language.
Hey, I moved from NY because apartment prices were going too far up. But you can get very nice apartments - say two good bedrooms in a fashionable part of Brownstone Brooklyn, in the $2000-$3000 a month range. Granted, 15 years back those same apartments were $800-$1200. Still, it's more like $30,000 a year for a very nice NY apartment, including in some of the better parts of Manhattan these days.
That's still steep. But you can eat out better and cheaper in Brooklyn and Manhattan than about anywhere else in the country. And there's no need to own a car. It's all a matter of where your priorities are.
The Chinese government obviously understands their people better than we do. No other government anywhere, at any time in human history, has directly controlled so many people as the current Chinese government. Success counts for something. Obviously in some basic ways they're brilliant at being a government.
So let's grant for argument that they're telling the truth: That pornography is among the most dire current threats to the continuity of their control of their population. We need to get funding from our own government to build a massive distributed porn collection, that in times of crisis can be forwarded by every available channel and modality to China. Thus can we destroy them!
Valid stuff, but beside the point of the argument. Camara evidently claims that copyright law specifies that a valid filing can only be made by someone with creative claim to the work. The artist herself/himself/themselves obviously have such claim. A corporate employee or subcontractor, creating under corporate direction on corporate time, is doing "work for hire," in which case the corporation itself has creative claim to the work.
But the usual case when a musician signs to a label is that the musician has written and performed the music not as a hired hand of the corporation, but in their own capacity as an artist. Camara's argument is that this cannot, according to the laws and precedents covering "work for hire," count as such. Copyright law, he's claiming, makes no provision for a person or corporation to file copyright on work which is not theirs, specifically by the fact of their being the creators, or their having hired people to create the work under their direction. There are distinct legal tests of "work for hire," and the usual situation between musicians and recording labels doesn't meet them. Nor can something not initially done as work for hire be afterward converted to that status.
If I go to an advertising agency and contract with them to write me an advertising jingle to spec, that's work for hire, and I can copyright it as mine. But if I merely arrange to sell copies of a recording of music that was written and performed not by any hired hand of mine, this may not, under the law as written, actually qualify me to file valid copyright on the work under my name. The copyright office doesn't assign copyrights, merely recognizes the claim (unlike the patent office). Claims can be made and filed without turning out, if challenged, to be valid (not unlike the patent office).
This doesn't mean a musician couldn't first file the copyright for themselves, then turn around and sell the copyright to a corporation. But that's not the way it has been done. Again this all turns on the legal definition of "work for hire," and whether under US copyright law creative work which does not meet that definition can be validly copyrighted by anyone except the actual creators. The language of contracts signed in the course of the music business may have very little to do with it. It's entirely possible to sign a contract with language which will not be upheld in law or court.
She's "obviously guilty" only if file-sharing is not fair use. And she's "obviously guilty" only if the RIAA truly owns those copyrights. If the copyrights were, in effect, extorted from the artists, falsely filed, then the RIAA is representing an industry who's claim of ownership is fraudulent.
This does not, by the way, under current US law, cheat the artists. You by default own copyright in your creative work, even without filing. Clearing the bogus recording industry copyrights off the federal register would, under our law, enable the true artists to file copyrights to their work in their own names. This would then open the opportunity for the true artists to recovery money properly owed them, from whoever has been commercially distributing their music - whether record companies or commercial online enterprises.
That would be a great boon for musicians. If file sharing is not fair use, but the copyrights properly belong to the creative artists rather than the recording companies, then it would be up to the artists to form a cooperative to claim money from file sharers. However, in this case it may well turn out that (1) file sharers are more willing to pay directly to the artists they love, and (2) artists are more willing to be generous to the fans who love them.
This ends up good all the way around. The file sharers, in defending themselves from the RIAA, can make the greatest gift back to the artists themselves - the true ownership of their own works.
I would gladly pay $1, maybe $2 a day for a combination of stories from the Washington Post, NYT, LA Times, my local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and on occasion some random others that I learned about from some blogger.
Yeah, some sort of NewsPass might work, if you could really allow free reading of news by it. There are three local papers my town is in the footprint of. I scan a few articles from two of them each morning. Then I go to news.google, which is adjusted to my prefs, and read another half-dozen stories which could be hosted anywhere. Then to nytimes.com for the editorials and a few more stories, if the day's tasks aren't too pressing. Later in the day, on break I'll read the blogs, and a few more stories at essentially random newspaper sites linked from there.
I'd be perfectly happy if I were paying $15 a month (the price of a subscription to a good newspaper back when there were more good, fat newspapers around), and that were distributed proportionally over the hosts of the stories I read. But I would not be happy if for $15 a month I could only get, say, one local paper and nytimes.com, and then had to pay more for each other story I read elsewhere. Ten years ago one of the local papers would have been enough - they had more of their own reporters, and carried a lot more NY Times copy along with more national AP coverage than presently. But now that both print and web versions of the Times, USA Today and whatever are around, the local papers are decidedly local. The equivalent product to what the good newspapers used to be needs to allow me to read anything, anywhere, without stopping to register or log in. And it should be for not more that 50 cents a day. If they can put in on newsprint for 75 cents, including the costs of delivery, they can certainly make a profit on 50 cents, where all they need is a web server to distribute it.
"colour me cynical" - no friend, but that makes us color you unAmerican. Seriously though, Bush's people wouldn't even allow themselves to nod in the direction of any action that would recognize climate change as a threat.
Also, on the "plutocrats united" thing... know Plutocrats much? I've known a few. They're far from united. They can be played off against each other. Most of them are no smarter than the guys who've run Wall Street into the ditch. And they're just as divided in their strategies as any group of/. geeks taking sides on coding methods. So do both parties enjoy plutocratic embraces? Sure. But it's largely different groups of plutocrats, and quite often their bread is buttered on different sides.
What is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness?
The evolutionary advantage is quite clear. Consciousness allows you the capacity to plan.
In the scenario he develops as an example, there's nothing at all to show why consciously planning should have any advantage over an unconscious computation of prospects and action plans mapped to incoming sensory data. He in no sense answers the question of why evolution couldn't have provided precisely the capacity he attributes to consciousness without any consciousness involved.
Neural Darwinism is a fascinating hypothesis, and almost certainly right in its domain of explaining individual brain development. But his hand waving about the evolutionary worth of consciously planning, experiencing, whatever as compared to unconsciously doing the same stuff is the worst sort of bullshit, steering students away from engaging with the really hard questions.
My claim is I can in principle write a computer program for a robot that would be as effective as any lion in both catching prey and avoiding becoming prey itself, without in any way being conscious. It might be a very complex program, and take many years to write - but we're talking on the scale of evolution here, so that's not a good objection to the project. Planning != consciousness. Sensory input != consciousness. Planning + sensory input != consciousness.
That we happen to consciously plan and integrate those plans with sensory input in no way shows that our consciousness is essential to those activities. That we can build robots that plan and accept input, without being in the slightest conscious, is obvious. That evolution couldn't have done what we can do isn't obvious.
It's a very good puzzle that shouldn't be short-circuited with a bullshit answer.
Daydreaming is basically shutting off (or at least ignoring) the bulk of the sensory inputs into your brain, and letting your imagination run the show for a period of time.
Is that how it is for you? For me, daydreaming happens most strongly when I open my sensory inputs, as on the fine spring days we've been having here this past week. It's when the inspiration of the world joins with the directions of my thought, rather than the two pulling in different directions. More often most of the sensory input gets suppressed because it's "distraction," not pertinent to the task assigned by my "executive network" as these academic clowns like to call it in this paper - which is really a pretty good paper, in that they're recognizing that the most powerful thought goes with nature (at least our inner nature - the "default network") rather than against it.
That can also explain why American culture was at its strongest when much of our nation was at the frontier - directly facing nature. The daydream inducing nature of being nature facing may have played as large a role as the discipline inducing nature of taming a wilderness. In civilization you can do quite a bit with no imagination at all. On a frontier, lack of imagination is often the prelude to failure and death. And that imagination had better be damn well keyed to the specifics of the current environment - to a very vital mindfulness.
And King Lear is just a play; the Bible is just a book; the Taj Mahal is just a building; the Mona Lisa is just a painting... everything is just what it is. Or is it?
And identity, is that pieced together from parts, or is it some sort of holographic interference field where all of our experiences - even TV shows - meld together into one large, partless whole of which the ego or persona can only be at best a small and shallow representation?
Surely they can answer these questions in the next Star Trek installment.
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Reviews: Star Trek
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I am seeing it in 50 minutes.
Oh good! There's a compressed version?! I'm so worried about it dragging after seeing the trailer. Do they just run everything at 2X with the voices shifted back down to normal pitch? Or do they cut the sappy parts and the pans of "space"?
Slashdot Mirror
Ack! Was forgetting what I had loaded where. One version of 9.04 x64 had it at 0. Two Hardy servers did have it at 65536. Two x32 9.04 boxes also had it at 65536. Of these, only the one with it set at 0 started with an Ubuntu earlier than Hardy. So presumably it depends not on what you're running, but what you first installed.
Check older boxes independent of current OS version!
True, but Ubuntu 8.04 x64 Hardy Server LTS has that set to 0! This is on thoroughly-updated systems too (and a lot of servers will be running the LTS release, not 9.04).
Since updating Wordpress is just a matter of pushing a button on the administrative screen, even being lazy is little reason not to go ahead.
Your nation's not secure if everyone's laughing at your leaders, especially if those laughing are thinking "With buffoons like that coordinating their defense, let's invade!"
Consider yourself warned, Iceland.
That's why it's so important that our access to AP content must continue unrestricted. Where else can be get so many articles by so many writers who have no idea what they're talking about?
With blogs, we generally visit those where we already know the level of "idea what they're talking about" from past reading or reputation. But the AP is an outfit that slaps its trademark across writing of such uneven levels of "idea what they're talking about" that reading them becomes a constantly-entertaining puzzle for each article: "Can you spot everything that's wrong with this picture?"
Really.
On the one hand: Getting fired, when your job is in politics and people can identify you with your boss, for publicly saying something stupidly insulting ("O-dumb-a") about a major political figure (never mind which media) which people can trace back to your and your boss.
On the other hand: Making a likely factually-accurate statement in public about mold in your rental unit, and getting sued by the landlord.
If you're hired to work in politics, you know damn well you have to remain true to the politics you're working for even in your own time. You're getting paid for that, and you know it.
But the landlord's not paying the tenant! The tenant is paying the landlord, and it's part of the landlord's job to fix mold problems. So in both cases you have someone not doing their job. In the second case though, the person not doing the job is trying to legally punish the person paying him for bringing up the nonperformance in public.
What's similar here?
The article's not claiming that nobody used computers to trade before. It's claiming that nobody was using computers to wedge into minute time gaps and place false orders to gain data on the market that was never previously available - and still is not generally so - to profit. Those computers and networks in the early 90s weren't fast enough to enable this. You retired years ago, right? You have little idea how the game is played today? I was in tech on Wall Street in the early 90s. If your firm had its own T1 you were cutting edge. What you could do at that speed, even given today's software to do it, doesn't touch what's happening now.
Pray tell us. Conventional wisdom has it their interest in the bootlegging industry is at the base of their riches. That would make them slightly more respectable than the Bushes, who it's said made their stake in the opium trade.
I read that as "In a decade, as affordable as solar will be then," not "as affordable as solar is now." Most of the projections on solar have it coming into equivalence with natural gas before a decade's out. Coal may still be cheaper, if it's being burned in a grandfathered, totally polluting plant.
Some of use also prefer cheap, polluted women. Lord knows I do! But my utility gets none of its power from coal. The price is slightly lower than average for here in the Northeast US. Unemployment is lower than the rest of the region too. Obviously it's not killing the economy to source from power suppliers priced higher than the coal generators.
On the one hand, of course businesses who run more than one server have or will virtualize them. This will save some staff time, what with fewer boxes. It's trading hardware complexity for software complexity, but it's a good trade.
But then, do you want to host your virtualized servers on "the cloud"? Totally separate question. Yes, it's easier to move a virtualized server off to the cloud. But why do you want to? To save on hardware maintenance costs? Really? You've still got computers in your office, right? You're not just running dumb terminals on the cloud? So you've got somebody to maintain them. What's the extra overhead in having them watch two more boxes, those being your main virtual server host (redundant power, RAID, etc. - a real server), and a hot backup? Say your total staff is only 6, it's a choice between maintaining just their six workstations (and switches, printers ...), or that + 2 servers. How often will those two servers be the proverbial straw to the camel's back? How are they more trouble or expense than all that's required to contract out to a cloud vendor?
That's presuming you've still got someone responsible for configuring your stuff within the virtualized servers. A lot of the cloud PR presumes that you can somehow dump that staff and just stick together a bunch of predefined, generic pieces. To the degree that works, what differentiates your business? How do you avoid always being slower and less capable than someone basing their business on a more customized solution? If your business is something anybody can set up with a few standard components on the cloud, and it's at all a viable business, you'll soon have so many competitors doing the same thing that the profit will be sucked out of it for all of you. Maybe you want to play in that space. Looks like a sucker's bet though.
Several problems with that:
- When you're at the quantum level, you can't image it without changing it.
- Okay, so you've changed it. You're after general structure not the details of the instant? But what if the old AI guys were right, and the essence of being a mind is in the programming, not the hardware? Shuffling your image of the quantum-level stuff may mean you get a good image of the hardware, and miss getting a functional program for it entirely.
- Where are you going to store your image? This is not trivial. The human brain is orders of magnitude more complex than any other physical system known. Is there enough storage capacity on the planet to store the complete image details for one moment's slice of one human brain?
- Once you store something that complex, how in heck are you going to fabricate a duplicate? Over what span of time, with what tools, can you build to that spec?
Research projects like this are betting that with some drastic simplification you can build something roughly like a human brain, and that this roughest approximation will have useful parallels in operation. But the human brain isn't just electron firings. It's chemical cascades, electromagnetic fields, processing not just across synapses but within them, and quite possibly processing on the quantum level.
He's going to build something like that? In ten years? Really?
They create the illusion of security, while preventing different applications from working smoothly together in the *nix way. If you really must fracture your environment for security, it's smarter to use virtual machines, or chroot jails (both of which also can have vulnerabilities - there's no perfection this side of the Moon). If you don't know enough to lock down stuff in a single environment without AppArmour or SELinux, you're going to end up in trouble soon enough anyway, since there are still plenty of ways to expose vulnerabilities.
The basic philosophy is "Jack doesn't know enough to secure his web server, so we'll make sure when its compromised it will have limited access to other system components." But the end result is it makes the system even more complex, so the odds of Jack ever learning enough to lock it down become much worse.
The Silmarillion? And what do you propose to do with that?
As for turning people on to Tolkien, everyone I know who reads sci-fi/fantasy read those books back when we were kids, before any of the derivative stuff was out. The books are sufficient and wonderful in themselves. And they had no trouble finding deeply-appreciative readers on their own strength.
On the other hand, I'm sure the movies are fine. They were done at the right time, when cgi was finally good enough. Still, should I show my son the movies when he's old enough? Or should see that he reads the books first? Doesn't this stuff work better when its your own visions stimulated by the full force of Tolkien's linguistic art, rather than just duping your visions from Hollywood?
Other than Blade Runner, the Wizard of Oz and the first Star Wars, Hollywood has never shown me a movie equal to the visual potential of the best sci-fi/fantasy books. It might be best to keep them away from our fine literature all together. Let them hire original scriptwriters. Keep the value of literature for literature.
I've taken this "test," years ago. From that point of view it was an invitation to free association - whether you want to call that "projection" or not. You're saying that from the POV of the test giver my free associations were being scored on a scale of correctness, such that my response to each blot was reduced to a single number? Then you put the numbers together and are able to produce another number which purportedly rates the sickness of my mind?
Talk about sick minds! The narcissism of the practitioner who can bring himself to believe that free associations on abstract blots can be assigned a numerable degree of "correctness," and that he possesses the secret "scientific" means for doing that, is astonishing. And the implicit premise, that all correctly functioning minds perform the same, and so predictably will make the same "correct" free associations when presented with the same abstract blots ... if we're truly wired that deterministicly, then we should also be able to discern the "correct" reaction to any particular Jackson Pollock painting. Just put a dozen people certified as mentally non-pathological by virtue of giving 100% correct ink-blot associations in front of the painting, and voila, they should all have the same, entirely healthy reaction to the Pollock too.
Anyone who sees it any other way must simply be sick!
Let's say you've been using PHP since about a month after Rasmus released it 15 years back, so you've got a whole lot of code that uses the ereg family of regex functions. So they've depricated them, and plan to yank them from PHP 6. Why? Is the overhead so terrible? Or do they really think that it will improve our lives if we have to go back through everything and translate eregs to pregs?
Then there's the change in MySQL password formats. Sure, if they include the latest MySQL libraries they have a different encryption level. But if PHP is smart enough to warn you about that when your MySQL install is still using the older passwords, then PHP should be smart enough to include both libraries and use whichever one is appropriate to the passwords encountered.
There's a huge codebase out there that's using PHP against MySQL, and using PHP's original ereg regex syntax instead of the Perl-wannabe stuff. What are they thinking, when they set out to break this? When 5.3 rolls out through the distros a whole lot of MySQL backends will fail on the password thing. And when 6.0 rolls out millions of regexs will suddenly be failing. Needlessly.
I'm working with a highly-educated coder, who takes 5 times as long to do a project because he believes everything they taught him. His code's no better though. And he's terrible at reading others' code, if it wasn't written according to the immutable principles his superior education endowed him with. It's sort of sad. Really. He could have been so much better if he'd learned on his own, by taking other people's real-world code and tearing it down to see how it worked, like the rest of us. Academic coding principles are no substitute for real literacy. And literacy means you're not dependent on the accent to understand the language.
Hey, I moved from NY because apartment prices were going too far up. But you can get very nice apartments - say two good bedrooms in a fashionable part of Brownstone Brooklyn, in the $2000-$3000 a month range. Granted, 15 years back those same apartments were $800-$1200. Still, it's more like $30,000 a year for a very nice NY apartment, including in some of the better parts of Manhattan these days.
That's still steep. But you can eat out better and cheaper in Brooklyn and Manhattan than about anywhere else in the country. And there's no need to own a car. It's all a matter of where your priorities are.
The Chinese government obviously understands their people better than we do. No other government anywhere, at any time in human history, has directly controlled so many people as the current Chinese government. Success counts for something. Obviously in some basic ways they're brilliant at being a government.
So let's grant for argument that they're telling the truth: That pornography is among the most dire current threats to the continuity of their control of their population. We need to get funding from our own government to build a massive distributed porn collection, that in times of crisis can be forwarded by every available channel and modality to China. Thus can we destroy them!
Valid stuff, but beside the point of the argument. Camara evidently claims that copyright law specifies that a valid filing can only be made by someone with creative claim to the work. The artist herself/himself/themselves obviously have such claim. A corporate employee or subcontractor, creating under corporate direction on corporate time, is doing "work for hire," in which case the corporation itself has creative claim to the work.
But the usual case when a musician signs to a label is that the musician has written and performed the music not as a hired hand of the corporation, but in their own capacity as an artist. Camara's argument is that this cannot, according to the laws and precedents covering "work for hire," count as such. Copyright law, he's claiming, makes no provision for a person or corporation to file copyright on work which is not theirs, specifically by the fact of their being the creators, or their having hired people to create the work under their direction. There are distinct legal tests of "work for hire," and the usual situation between musicians and recording labels doesn't meet them. Nor can something not initially done as work for hire be afterward converted to that status.
If I go to an advertising agency and contract with them to write me an advertising jingle to spec, that's work for hire, and I can copyright it as mine. But if I merely arrange to sell copies of a recording of music that was written and performed not by any hired hand of mine, this may not, under the law as written, actually qualify me to file valid copyright on the work under my name. The copyright office doesn't assign copyrights, merely recognizes the claim (unlike the patent office). Claims can be made and filed without turning out, if challenged, to be valid (not unlike the patent office).
This doesn't mean a musician couldn't first file the copyright for themselves, then turn around and sell the copyright to a corporation. But that's not the way it has been done. Again this all turns on the legal definition of "work for hire," and whether under US copyright law creative work which does not meet that definition can be validly copyrighted by anyone except the actual creators. The language of contracts signed in the course of the music business may have very little to do with it. It's entirely possible to sign a contract with language which will not be upheld in law or court.
She's "obviously guilty" only if file-sharing is not fair use. And she's "obviously guilty" only if the RIAA truly owns those copyrights. If the copyrights were, in effect, extorted from the artists, falsely filed, then the RIAA is representing an industry who's claim of ownership is fraudulent.
This does not, by the way, under current US law, cheat the artists. You by default own copyright in your creative work, even without filing. Clearing the bogus recording industry copyrights off the federal register would, under our law, enable the true artists to file copyrights to their work in their own names. This would then open the opportunity for the true artists to recovery money properly owed them, from whoever has been commercially distributing their music - whether record companies or commercial online enterprises.
That would be a great boon for musicians. If file sharing is not fair use, but the copyrights properly belong to the creative artists rather than the recording companies, then it would be up to the artists to form a cooperative to claim money from file sharers. However, in this case it may well turn out that (1) file sharers are more willing to pay directly to the artists they love, and (2) artists are more willing to be generous to the fans who love them.
This ends up good all the way around. The file sharers, in defending themselves from the RIAA, can make the greatest gift back to the artists themselves - the true ownership of their own works.
Yeah, some sort of NewsPass might work, if you could really allow free reading of news by it. There are three local papers my town is in the footprint of. I scan a few articles from two of them each morning. Then I go to news.google, which is adjusted to my prefs, and read another half-dozen stories which could be hosted anywhere. Then to nytimes.com for the editorials and a few more stories, if the day's tasks aren't too pressing. Later in the day, on break I'll read the blogs, and a few more stories at essentially random newspaper sites linked from there.
I'd be perfectly happy if I were paying $15 a month (the price of a subscription to a good newspaper back when there were more good, fat newspapers around), and that were distributed proportionally over the hosts of the stories I read. But I would not be happy if for $15 a month I could only get, say, one local paper and nytimes.com, and then had to pay more for each other story I read elsewhere. Ten years ago one of the local papers would have been enough - they had more of their own reporters, and carried a lot more NY Times copy along with more national AP coverage than presently. But now that both print and web versions of the Times, USA Today and whatever are around, the local papers are decidedly local. The equivalent product to what the good newspapers used to be needs to allow me to read anything, anywhere, without stopping to register or log in. And it should be for not more that 50 cents a day. If they can put in on newsprint for 75 cents, including the costs of delivery, they can certainly make a profit on 50 cents, where all they need is a web server to distribute it.
"colour me cynical" - no friend, but that makes us color you unAmerican. Seriously though, Bush's people wouldn't even allow themselves to nod in the direction of any action that would recognize climate change as a threat.
Also, on the "plutocrats united" thing ... know Plutocrats much? I've known a few. They're far from united. They can be played off against each other. Most of them are no smarter than the guys who've run Wall Street into the ditch. And they're just as divided in their strategies as any group of /. geeks taking sides on coding methods. So do both parties enjoy plutocratic embraces? Sure. But it's largely different groups of plutocrats, and quite often their bread is buttered on different sides.
In the scenario he develops as an example, there's nothing at all to show why consciously planning should have any advantage over an unconscious computation of prospects and action plans mapped to incoming sensory data. He in no sense answers the question of why evolution couldn't have provided precisely the capacity he attributes to consciousness without any consciousness involved.
Neural Darwinism is a fascinating hypothesis, and almost certainly right in its domain of explaining individual brain development. But his hand waving about the evolutionary worth of consciously planning, experiencing, whatever as compared to unconsciously doing the same stuff is the worst sort of bullshit, steering students away from engaging with the really hard questions.
My claim is I can in principle write a computer program for a robot that would be as effective as any lion in both catching prey and avoiding becoming prey itself, without in any way being conscious. It might be a very complex program, and take many years to write - but we're talking on the scale of evolution here, so that's not a good objection to the project. Planning != consciousness. Sensory input != consciousness. Planning + sensory input != consciousness.
That we happen to consciously plan and integrate those plans with sensory input in no way shows that our consciousness is essential to those activities. That we can build robots that plan and accept input, without being in the slightest conscious, is obvious. That evolution couldn't have done what we can do isn't obvious.
It's a very good puzzle that shouldn't be short-circuited with a bullshit answer.
Is that how it is for you? For me, daydreaming happens most strongly when I open my sensory inputs, as on the fine spring days we've been having here this past week. It's when the inspiration of the world joins with the directions of my thought, rather than the two pulling in different directions. More often most of the sensory input gets suppressed because it's "distraction," not pertinent to the task assigned by my "executive network" as these academic clowns like to call it in this paper - which is really a pretty good paper, in that they're recognizing that the most powerful thought goes with nature (at least our inner nature - the "default network") rather than against it.
That can also explain why American culture was at its strongest when much of our nation was at the frontier - directly facing nature. The daydream inducing nature of being nature facing may have played as large a role as the discipline inducing nature of taming a wilderness. In civilization you can do quite a bit with no imagination at all. On a frontier, lack of imagination is often the prelude to failure and death. And that imagination had better be damn well keyed to the specifics of the current environment - to a very vital mindfulness.
And King Lear is just a play; the Bible is just a book; the Taj Mahal is just a building; the Mona Lisa is just a painting ... everything is just what it is. Or is it?
And identity, is that pieced together from parts, or is it some sort of holographic interference field where all of our experiences - even TV shows - meld together into one large, partless whole of which the ego or persona can only be at best a small and shallow representation?
Surely they can answer these questions in the next Star Trek installment.
Oh good! There's a compressed version?! I'm so worried about it dragging after seeing the trailer. Do they just run everything at 2X with the voices shifted back down to normal pitch? Or do they cut the sappy parts and the pans of "space"?