Re:Random Rant on the purpose of Science
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
As such, the general public may be a spectator to the dialogue of science but does not participate, as the 'general public' isn't publishing and therefore isn't part of the economy.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's also worth mentioning that "scientists" and the "general public" are not mutually exclusive sets.
Scientists themselves are also part of the public, and can be just as guilty of misunderstanding when it comes to subjects that are not directly in their sub-field of science. It's everyone's responsibility to educate themselves on those subjects in which they have strong opinions.
This reminds me of when I was in university and the professor was teaching that it's up to the general public to make the moral decisions on how to make use of computers; that it's not for us computer scientists to do that. That never rang true with me, because I'm just as much a member of the public as anyone else.
I've always felt that if I have beliefs, it's my democratic duty to make them heard. The fact that I'm a computer scientist doesn't exclude me from this responsibility, regardless of the field in which the opinion is held.
Sorry, I got into a bit of a rant myself. It was a general rant, not a rant against you, or anything.
Why should it? Being that Windows will let
any user do anything... why shouldn't lindows?
My initial reaction was the same as yours.
But then, I thought... What if Lindows takes
off like a runaway train? What if other software
companies actually start making programs
specifically for Lindows? Finally, what if
Lindows never removes the must-be-root "feature?"
How long will it be before someone writes a
program that relies on the fact that
you're running as root? How long before the
fabled Linux (a.k.a. Lindows) stability goes to
hell and a handbasket? Okay, it might still be
better than Windows, but when a program depends
the fact that it's root... that's scary.
I sincerely hope that they remove this
restriction for the actual release (that this is
only in the beta release), and run the shell as a
regular user.
If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias.
Huh? Given the following results of flipping a coin, what is the probability that the next flip will be a H:
HHHHHHHHHHH
50%.
No, no, I think you're solving the wrong question.
The situation is that there are either 10 agents or 100 agents - no middle ground. Why this should be assumed, I don't know... Nevertheless, the question, based on this assumption, is this: How probable is it that there are only 10 agents given that a random selection from them (yourself) has resulted in the ninth instance?
I'm no probability expert myself, but I do know that this question is not the same as the one you answered. See, if there were a hundred agents, the odds you would have ended up being ten or less was only 10%. If there were only ten, obviously, the odds were a 100%. And, uh, I can't really figure more than that, with my limited expertise.
I'm still unclear on the applicability of this to the real world, though. (Which is not to say that I think it's invalid... I just don't have time to think about it).:-P
First they would have to try and FIND the source code (doubtful if it still existed), then if they managed to do that, reassign some people...
I think maybe the person at the company misunderstood you. The minimum effort required to make certain people happy would be to "release" (loaded word) Star Command to the public domain. This would just involve drafting a letter in legalese saying "where Star Command is concerned, knock yourselves out!" Then, people could (legally) make copies of it, distribute it, reverse-engineer it...
I suspect that there may be marketing types who worry that software "released" by the company is a reflection of the company (not entirely unreasonable), so if people are disappointed with the product for any reason, then that is bad PR. The only way to mitigate this (in the minds of marketing) is to provide some level of support. I think they just need to be assured that the market for these obsolete s/w packages is so small that it's nothing to worry about.
with the sky-high initial public stock offerings of Linux distributor Red Hat and server manufacturer VA Linux Systems
I don't really see that as any kind of link with "internet hysteria," which is what I considered to be the "dot-com" madness.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that for most people, "dot-com" combined both Linux and internet (well, ALL things high-tech, really), although there's technically very little to associate the two.
The only link I can think of is that Linux is popular for use in web servers. A rather tenuous link, IMHO.
Seems like there are many people who associate the Linux madness with the dot-com madness just because they happened at about the same time. The article says:
Nevertheless, much of what got Linux talked about was directly related to Internet hysteria...
I just hope they realize that the success of "Shrek" had nothing to do with the fact that it was CGI, and that merely using CGI will not necessarily guarantee them the success of "Shrek."
This would only be of interest to a select few
Vim-geeks, but what the hey. (I've been using Vim
since v1.2, and I want to have a chance to boast.
Humour me.:-)
This morning, I checked on the progress of a
nightly script I have, downloading the Debian tree
over a modem. I wanted to see how much more I had
left to go. The difficulty in this stemmed from
the fact that not all directories were being
downloaded, and not all files in those directories
were being downloaded, either.
But with Vim, I was able to grab the
ls-lR.gz file, and massage it to produce
a du-like table of directories and sizes
from which I was able to assess how much remainded
of my download.
First, I removed most of the extraneous
information; my region of interest was a
subdirectory called pool, so I did some
searching (/) and deleted everything
before and after this subdirectory.
Then, among these directories, there was only a
subset targeted for downloading. I pulled that
list from a separate file, into the top of the
buffer (:r).
Then came some cool magic. First, in
preparation, I replaced all the slashes in the
directory list with backslash-slash
(ggV}:g/\//s//\\\//g). With that done, I
put the cursor at the beginning of the first
directory name, and started recording a macro
(qa). I yanked the directory name with
the escaped slashes (y$), searched for
the other occurance of that string in this file
(/^<Ctrl-r>"$<CR>), yanked
the block of text that followed (V}y),
returned to the point where I was before the
search (''), and pasted the block of text
after the directory name (p). Finally, I
cursored down (}j), to position the
cursor at the beginning of the next directory
name, and finished off the macro (q).
Then I could invoke my macro with @a,
and continue to re-invoke it with @@.
Just holding down @ had the effect of
slowly working through the list of directories,
and inserting the list of files within each
directory after it. Very cool to watch.
I then removed the rest of the file, since it
didn't interest me (dG).
Then (without exiting Vim, mind) I used
grep to filter out certain files from my
list (ggVG!grep -v <pattern>).
Now I wanted to reduce the listings of files to
a size summary for each directory. I made another
macro that used the visual commands
(<Ctrl-v>) to eliminate all but the
file size column. Used the column-insert
(<Ctrl-v>I) to add a "+" before all
the numbers except the first. Packed them all
together onto one line (V}J) and added
the numbers together by invoking bc on it
(V!bc<CR>). Cursor down to the
next directory entry, and finished off the macro.
Again, I held @, and this time, it
worked its way through the file listing,
condensing each group of files to a single number:
the total occupied space in that directory.
A bit of tweaking, and I had a nice neat table
containing directory names and sizes.
Admittedly, it's taken me almost ten years to
reach this level of proficiency, but I wouldn't
trade it for anything. (Not even Emacs!:-)
With computers moving further and further into the daily lives of common (that is, non-CS) people, I suspect we're fighting against a horde of people who already believe that a megabyte is 10^6 bytes.
I agree with some of the others here that "mebibyte" is a very clumsy word.
But I'm wondering, what's with the attachment to the whole base-2 system anyway? I mean, I'm a CSist, and *I* don't know how many bytes are in a gibibyte. I have to run to my calculator.
I'm probably speaking too late to be heard, anyway, but I say ditch the whole base-2 thing and start saying 42.9 gigabytes instead of 40 gigabytes. If you want the exact amount, read the documentation, where (one hopes) the size will be expressed precisely in bytes.
I would like to think that of all the groups of people in the world, computer scientists would have the cool rationality to be able to let go of a misguided standard.
But I guess that, so long as there are those who feel that it measures their penis size, they won't be able to let it go.
...can we assume that all life in the
universe is carbon-based and needs water to
live?
Your point is perfectly valid, but I think, for
the purposes of narrowing the search, we must
start with what we know - what we observe around
us right now.
I used to hold the belief that life could
possibly form in all manner of environments...
Until it occurred to me that, right here in our
own solar system, there are all manner of
environments right under our noses. And so far as
we can see (which is not that much, admittedly),
there is no life on any other planet than Earth.
In fact, even within the narrow range of
environments on Earth, we can observe a gigantic
difference in the quantity and diversity of life
between, say, a tropical rainforest and an arctic
desert.
Much as I would like to believe that life can
spring up in all kinds of envrionments, the
evidence we've seen so far doesn't seem to support
it. In my (very uneducated) opinion, it really
does look like the warm and wet climate is best
for life.
Many people have jumped on their soapboxes,
proclaiming (yet again) that free software is
not a business model. Yes, yes. You're all
preaching to the choir.
I has the same impulse, but on second
thought, I realized that economics can
be applied to free software, and from a certain
point of view, there is a business
model there.
A Google search reveals all sorts of stuff
on the web out there, none of which I've read,
so what follows is an off-the-cuff personal
opinion. Take it for what it's worth. (Not
much.)
The product of free
software is the algorithms, the code, the
documentation; so-called intellectual property.
The currency is a reputation
among other coders, and the use of other free
software products.
I'm bursting with things to say, but I have
to get back to work (in the other
business model), so I'll just say this:
In the free software world, quality counts
more than in the business world. How fast is
the algorithm? How flexible is the program?
How well-written is the code? These are the
things that geeks generally consider to be the
"success" of a piece of software, and they are
near-impossible to measure. The payment that
programmers get for their work is equally (if
not more) difficult to measure.
So I think there are economics happening.
There are (implicit) business plans, (unspoken)
mission statements, and (so-called) companies
producing products for (a certain kind of)
profit, for whom insufficient return will
certainly lead to bankruptcy (of sorts).
So, a (financial) economic slowdown doesn't
necessarily apply to free software, not because
economics (in general) doesn't apply to free
software, but because the goods being bartered
are totally different, and not being tracked.
A final thought strikes me as I write this:
free software is a new kind of underground
market, and it's very large, so it seems only a
matter of time before governments start asking
for a piece of the action.
Then, we might have to come up with new ways
of accounting for those intangible things that
free software is about: the quality of code,
the programmer's reputation... I don't know if
that's even possible. As you can see, I'm
thinking out loud here.
When everyone is scouring the internet for
hidden messages, a better form of steganography
would avoid using the internet at all.
Granted, I suspect it's just the media that's
obsessed by the internet, so any intelligence
organization worth its salt would be doing a
thorough monitoring of all possible communications
channels.
It's like the article says: Using a code
word in a telephone conversation or a radio
broadcast would provide a far easier way to
communicate in secret.
Have you ever read Turing's paper? He
addresses most of the objections people bring up
again and again.
Urp. Guilty as charged. I won't spout off too
much more, before getting a clue.
However, it still
seems to me that the Turing test
attempts to answer the question of whether a
machine is intelligent, without attacking the
question of what intelligence is in the first
place. Turing no doubt addressed this issue,
too; I'll find out what he said.
What I look forward to in the next few decades
is a real solidification of the definition of
intelligence. Up to now, the question was in the
domain of philosophy and psychology, but now
computer science is jumping into the fray, and
injecting a good measure of hard science into the
discussion.
I'm not one of those hard science snobs, who
looks down their noses at philosophers and
psychologists, but I am nevertheless interested in
what will emerge from the clash between these
three disciplines.
I could fool experts right now with a simple
cassette tape, a LOT of taped 18-month-old
comments and a quick hand with a playback
button.
You're absolutely right, that cannot possibly
be construed as evidence that you possess any kind
of intelligence at all.
Okay, I'm sorry. I'm really, really
sorry. That was excessively harsh. I didn't mean
to attack you personally. Unfortunately, I just
could not resist!
In fairness, you have a valid point. Your
example is a variant of the "Chinese room"
argument that was once put forward by John Searle.
He compared a computer to a person in a closed
room into which questions, in Chinese, are being
passed. The person in the room, who knows no
Chinese, follows a book of very complex
instructions in order to formulate a response.
Searle claims that despite the fact that the
responses that come out of the "Chinese Room" make
perfect sense to the Chinese speaker who passed in
his question, the person within the room has no
notion of the meaning of his response, let alone
the question.
Searle makes the point that the computer is a
very complex machine that blindly follows a set of
fixed instructions, and so, cannot possess real
understanding. Whether you agree with his
argument is, I think, still a matter of
philosophical position.
Personally, I don't agree. I think that the
the entire room - the person, plus the book of
instructions - would possess an
understanding of Chinese that transcends the sum
of its parts.
Anyways,
sorry again for my harshness. You just left
yourself open in too inviting a way!
The fact that the Turing Test is probably still
the only widely recognized test for artificial
intelligence says more about our pathetic
understanding of the nature of intelligence than
the validity and usefulness of the test.
After all, as any con-artist and magician will
tell you, it's really not that hard to fool
people. Also, remember that on some occasions,
some human beings will actually fail the
Turing test! That must be so
humiliating...
I freely admit I don't have anything better to
offer, but I just wanted to point out that the
Turing test is a pretty awful measurement, when
you think about it.
If you hate poorly defined software
projects... can you imagine being handed the
Turing test as a feature spec?
Was it just me, or did the article make it
seem like anyone that would use steganography
would be a criminal?
The article didn't say this at all. In fact,
the types of criminal activity that were
mentioned were "political and corporate espionage
or illegal pornography."
Talking on the phone is not criminal, but
wiretaps are used all the time in fighting
organized crime.
Just an observation... the article doesn't
say outright that developers in China are
violating the GPL.
The strongest language comes from Mark White
as "in a sense [this is] going against the ideals
and benefits of what made Linux useful to them in the first place."
I get the feeling that there is no actual
violation taking place, just a disregard for the
spirit of the GPL, in which case the only course
of action is moral suasion (which is exactly
what this article is doing).
The University of Utah, as do most
universities, has a code of conduct. If he
violated it, then they have no obligation to
support his speech by lending him their servers,
bandwidth, domain name, etc.
I generally agree. However, the issue is
different: flikx was hosting a site that
allowed others to speak freely.
That the university can claim ownership of the
site's design is debatable, but likely to fall in
favour of the University.
It seems to me that the central issue is
whether flikx had the authority to give others
permission to speak freely on what is
essentially a University-owned web site.
I don't see any easy way out of that argument,
although I do not think it warrants criminal
charges.
1. The messy jumble of cash, keys, and
credit cards will be distilled into a single smart
card that can be carried in a pocket.
Implication: A robber will gain full and
total access to every aspect of your life, ruining
it in one fell swoop, and police/government forces
in many nations will destroy their opponents just
as easily. And this will happen,
because human's have both good and evil
impulses.
Isn't this a good argument for why smart cards
won't happen?
I'm not really sure, myself. I just have my
doubts.
Slashdot Mirror
As such, the general public may be a spectator to the dialogue of science but does not participate, as the 'general public' isn't publishing and therefore isn't part of the economy.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's also worth mentioning that "scientists" and the "general public" are not mutually exclusive sets.
Scientists themselves are also part of the public, and can be just as guilty of misunderstanding when it comes to subjects that are not directly in their sub-field of science. It's everyone's responsibility to educate themselves on those subjects in which they have strong opinions.
This reminds me of when I was in university and the professor was teaching that it's up to the general public to make the moral decisions on how to make use of computers; that it's not for us computer scientists to do that. That never rang true with me, because I'm just as much a member of the public as anyone else.
I've always felt that if I have beliefs, it's my democratic duty to make them heard. The fact that I'm a computer scientist doesn't exclude me from this responsibility, regardless of the field in which the opinion is held.
Sorry, I got into a bit of a rant myself. It was a general rant, not a rant against you, or anything.
Why should it? Being that Windows will let any user do anything... why shouldn't lindows?
My initial reaction was the same as yours.
But then, I thought... What if Lindows takes off like a runaway train? What if other software companies actually start making programs specifically for Lindows? Finally, what if Lindows never removes the must-be-root "feature?"
How long will it be before someone writes a program that relies on the fact that you're running as root? How long before the fabled Linux (a.k.a. Lindows) stability goes to hell and a handbasket? Okay, it might still be better than Windows, but when a program depends the fact that it's root... that's scary.
I sincerely hope that they remove this restriction for the actual release (that this is only in the beta release), and run the shell as a regular user.
:-)
Huh? Given the following results of flipping a coin, what is the probability that the next flip will be a H:
HHHHHHHHHHH
50%.
No, no, I think you're solving the wrong question.
The situation is that there are either 10 agents or 100 agents - no middle ground. Why this should be assumed, I don't know... Nevertheless, the question, based on this assumption, is this: How probable is it that there are only 10 agents given that a random selection from them (yourself) has resulted in the ninth instance?
I'm no probability expert myself, but I do know that this question is not the same as the one you answered. See, if there were a hundred agents, the odds you would have ended up being ten or less was only 10%. If there were only ten, obviously, the odds were a 100%. And, uh, I can't really figure more than that, with my limited expertise.
I'm still unclear on the applicability of this to the real world, though. (Which is not to say that I think it's invalid... I just don't have time to think about it). :-P
First they would have to try and FIND the source code (doubtful if it still existed), then if they managed to do that, reassign some people...
I think maybe the person at the company misunderstood you. The minimum effort required to make certain people happy would be to "release" (loaded word) Star Command to the public domain. This would just involve drafting a letter in legalese saying "where Star Command is concerned, knock yourselves out!" Then, people could (legally) make copies of it, distribute it, reverse-engineer it...
I suspect that there may be marketing types who worry that software "released" by the company is a reflection of the company (not entirely unreasonable), so if people are disappointed with the product for any reason, then that is bad PR. The only way to mitigate this (in the minds of marketing) is to provide some level of support. I think they just need to be assured that the market for these obsolete s/w packages is so small that it's nothing to worry about.
with the sky-high initial public stock offerings of Linux distributor Red Hat and server manufacturer VA Linux Systems
I don't really see that as any kind of link with "internet hysteria," which is what I considered to be the "dot-com" madness.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that for most people, "dot-com" combined both Linux and internet (well, ALL things high-tech, really), although there's technically very little to associate the two.
The only link I can think of is that Linux is popular for use in web servers. A rather tenuous link, IMHO.
Seems like there are many people who associate the Linux madness with the dot-com madness just because they happened at about the same time. The article says:
Nevertheless, much of what got Linux talked about was directly related to Internet hysteria...
...without explaining what that relation is.
You need to learn about :map and tail recursion.
I'm not sure I follow. Care to elaborate?
Unfortunately, there's a principle in movies called MOTSS ("more of the same stuff"... or for the cynical, "more of the same sh*t").
And even more unfortunately, sometimes that principle actually works, really REALLY well.
*sigh*
I just hope they realize that the success of "Shrek" had nothing to do with the fact that it was CGI, and that merely using CGI will not necessarily guarantee them the success of "Shrek."
But... then, I wouldn't have anything to boast about!
Oh... God...
That's just SO pathetic.
This would only be of interest to a select few Vim-geeks, but what the hey. (I've been using Vim since v1.2, and I want to have a chance to boast. Humour me. :-)
This morning, I checked on the progress of a nightly script I have, downloading the Debian tree over a modem. I wanted to see how much more I had left to go. The difficulty in this stemmed from the fact that not all directories were being downloaded, and not all files in those directories were being downloaded, either.
But with Vim, I was able to grab the ls-lR.gz file, and massage it to produce a du-like table of directories and sizes from which I was able to assess how much remainded of my download.
First, I removed most of the extraneous information; my region of interest was a subdirectory called pool, so I did some searching (/) and deleted everything before and after this subdirectory.
Then, among these directories, there was only a subset targeted for downloading. I pulled that list from a separate file, into the top of the buffer (:r).
Then came some cool magic. First, in preparation, I replaced all the slashes in the directory list with backslash-slash (ggV}:g/\//s//\\\//g). With that done, I put the cursor at the beginning of the first directory name, and started recording a macro (qa). I yanked the directory name with the escaped slashes (y$), searched for the other occurance of that string in this file (/^<Ctrl-r>"$<CR>), yanked the block of text that followed (V}y), returned to the point where I was before the search (''), and pasted the block of text after the directory name (p). Finally, I cursored down (}j), to position the cursor at the beginning of the next directory name, and finished off the macro (q).
Then I could invoke my macro with @a, and continue to re-invoke it with @@. Just holding down @ had the effect of slowly working through the list of directories, and inserting the list of files within each directory after it. Very cool to watch.
I then removed the rest of the file, since it didn't interest me (dG).
Then (without exiting Vim, mind) I used grep to filter out certain files from my list (ggVG!grep -v <pattern>).
Now I wanted to reduce the listings of files to a size summary for each directory. I made another macro that used the visual commands (<Ctrl-v>) to eliminate all but the file size column. Used the column-insert (<Ctrl-v>I) to add a "+" before all the numbers except the first. Packed them all together onto one line (V}J) and added the numbers together by invoking bc on it (V!bc<CR>). Cursor down to the next directory entry, and finished off the macro.
Again, I held @, and this time, it worked its way through the file listing, condensing each group of files to a single number: the total occupied space in that directory.
A bit of tweaking, and I had a nice neat table containing directory names and sizes.
Admittedly, it's taken me almost ten years to reach this level of proficiency, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. (Not even Emacs! :-)
With computers moving further and further into the daily lives of common (that is, non-CS) people, I suspect we're fighting against a horde of people who already believe that a megabyte is 10^6 bytes.
I agree with some of the others here that "mebibyte" is a very clumsy word.
But I'm wondering, what's with the attachment to the whole base-2 system anyway? I mean, I'm a CSist, and *I* don't know how many bytes are in a gibibyte. I have to run to my calculator.
I'm probably speaking too late to be heard, anyway, but I say ditch the whole base-2 thing and start saying 42.9 gigabytes instead of 40 gigabytes. If you want the exact amount, read the documentation, where (one hopes) the size will be expressed precisely in bytes.
I would like to think that of all the groups of people in the world, computer scientists would have the cool rationality to be able to let go of a misguided standard.
But I guess that, so long as there are those who feel that it measures their penis size, they won't be able to let it go.
Your point is perfectly valid, but I think, for the purposes of narrowing the search, we must start with what we know - what we observe around us right now.
I used to hold the belief that life could possibly form in all manner of environments...
Until it occurred to me that, right here in our own solar system, there are all manner of environments right under our noses. And so far as we can see (which is not that much, admittedly), there is no life on any other planet than Earth.
In fact, even within the narrow range of environments on Earth, we can observe a gigantic difference in the quantity and diversity of life between, say, a tropical rainforest and an arctic desert.
Much as I would like to believe that life can spring up in all kinds of envrionments, the evidence we've seen so far doesn't seem to support it. In my (very uneducated) opinion, it really does look like the warm and wet climate is best for life.
Many people have jumped on their soapboxes, proclaiming (yet again) that free software is not a business model. Yes, yes. You're all preaching to the choir.
I has the same impulse, but on second thought, I realized that economics can be applied to free software, and from a certain point of view, there is a business model there.
A Google search reveals all sorts of stuff on the web out there, none of which I've read, so what follows is an off-the-cuff personal opinion. Take it for what it's worth. (Not much.)
The product of free software is the algorithms, the code, the documentation; so-called intellectual property. The currency is a reputation among other coders, and the use of other free software products.
I'm bursting with things to say, but I have to get back to work (in the other business model), so I'll just say this:
In the free software world, quality counts more than in the business world. How fast is the algorithm? How flexible is the program? How well-written is the code? These are the things that geeks generally consider to be the "success" of a piece of software, and they are near-impossible to measure. The payment that programmers get for their work is equally (if not more) difficult to measure.
So I think there are economics happening. There are (implicit) business plans, (unspoken) mission statements, and (so-called) companies producing products for (a certain kind of) profit, for whom insufficient return will certainly lead to bankruptcy (of sorts).
So, a (financial) economic slowdown doesn't necessarily apply to free software, not because economics (in general) doesn't apply to free software, but because the goods being bartered are totally different, and not being tracked.
A final thought strikes me as I write this: free software is a new kind of underground market, and it's very large, so it seems only a matter of time before governments start asking for a piece of the action.
Then, we might have to come up with new ways of accounting for those intangible things that free software is about: the quality of code, the programmer's reputation... I don't know if that's even possible. As you can see, I'm thinking out loud here.
Urk! Gotta run!
All I want is some sharks with lasers implanted in their heads; is that too much to ask??
-- Dr. Evil
When everyone is scouring the internet for hidden messages, a better form of steganography would avoid using the internet at all.
Granted, I suspect it's just the media that's obsessed by the internet, so any intelligence organization worth its salt would be doing a thorough monitoring of all possible communications channels.
It's like the article says: Using a code word in a telephone conversation or a radio broadcast would provide a far easier way to communicate in secret.
Have you ever read Turing's paper? He addresses most of the objections people bring up again and again.
Urp. Guilty as charged. I won't spout off too much more, before getting a clue.
However, it still seems to me that the Turing test attempts to answer the question of whether a machine is intelligent, without attacking the question of what intelligence is in the first place. Turing no doubt addressed this issue, too; I'll find out what he said.
What I look forward to in the next few decades is a real solidification of the definition of intelligence. Up to now, the question was in the domain of philosophy and psychology, but now computer science is jumping into the fray, and injecting a good measure of hard science into the discussion.
I'm not one of those hard science snobs, who looks down their noses at philosophers and psychologists, but I am nevertheless interested in what will emerge from the clash between these three disciplines.
I could fool experts right now with a simple cassette tape, a LOT of taped 18-month-old comments and a quick hand with a playback button.
You're absolutely right, that cannot possibly be construed as evidence that you possess any kind of intelligence at all.
Okay, I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry. That was excessively harsh. I didn't mean to attack you personally. Unfortunately, I just could not resist!
In fairness, you have a valid point. Your example is a variant of the "Chinese room" argument that was once put forward by John Searle.
He compared a computer to a person in a closed room into which questions, in Chinese, are being passed. The person in the room, who knows no Chinese, follows a book of very complex instructions in order to formulate a response.
Searle claims that despite the fact that the responses that come out of the "Chinese Room" make perfect sense to the Chinese speaker who passed in his question, the person within the room has no notion of the meaning of his response, let alone the question.
Searle makes the point that the computer is a very complex machine that blindly follows a set of fixed instructions, and so, cannot possess real understanding. Whether you agree with his argument is, I think, still a matter of philosophical position.
Personally, I don't agree. I think that the the entire room - the person, plus the book of instructions - would possess an understanding of Chinese that transcends the sum of its parts.
Anyways, sorry again for my harshness. You just left yourself open in too inviting a way!
The fact that the Turing Test is probably still the only widely recognized test for artificial intelligence says more about our pathetic understanding of the nature of intelligence than the validity and usefulness of the test.
After all, as any con-artist and magician will tell you, it's really not that hard to fool people. Also, remember that on some occasions, some human beings will actually fail the Turing test! That must be so humiliating...
I freely admit I don't have anything better to offer, but I just wanted to point out that the Turing test is a pretty awful measurement, when you think about it.
If you hate poorly defined software projects... can you imagine being handed the Turing test as a feature spec?
Was it just me, or did the article make it seem like anyone that would use steganography would be a criminal?
The article didn't say this at all. In fact, the types of criminal activity that were mentioned were "political and corporate espionage or illegal pornography."
Talking on the phone is not criminal, but wiretaps are used all the time in fighting organized crime.
Just an observation... the article doesn't say outright that developers in China are violating the GPL.
The strongest language comes from Mark White as "in a sense [this is] going against the ideals and benefits of what made Linux useful to them in the first place."
I get the feeling that there is no actual violation taking place, just a disregard for the spirit of the GPL, in which case the only course of action is moral suasion (which is exactly what this article is doing).
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
The University of Utah, as do most universities, has a code of conduct. If he violated it, then they have no obligation to support his speech by lending him their servers, bandwidth, domain name, etc.
I generally agree. However, the issue is different: flikx was hosting a site that allowed others to speak freely.
That the university can claim ownership of the site's design is debatable, but likely to fall in favour of the University.
It seems to me that the central issue is whether flikx had the authority to give others permission to speak freely on what is essentially a University-owned web site.
I don't see any easy way out of that argument, although I do not think it warrants criminal charges.
--
Isn't this a good argument for why smart cards won't happen?
I'm not really sure, myself. I just have my doubts.
--
Of course, since Canada is considering a Mars mission, they will neatly sidestep the U.S. embargo, as they have done before.
And without support for the vaunted missile shield, the U.S. won't even be able to shoot down the Martian samples as they come back to Earth!
P.S. Yes, this is a big fat joke.
--