I get to think about the cool games on my computer when benching a good old-fashined barbell. Used to be that I had to think about something low-tech...
Jesus, is this really necessary? "Hey guys, run Unix really... can I still be cool on Slashdot?" Grow a spine.
Are you black enough to marvel at your distinctness in the field of white sheep, bandejo?
I hate windows -- I am a UNIX sysadmin. A number of people who know me will read this story as well, OK?.. I just want to set the record straight; it has nothing to do with being "cool" on Slashdot (somewhat of an oxymoron in and of itself).
Slashdot should post stories on the nightly builds as well.
RC2 is a security upgrade -- previous releases had some sort of hole. This was in fact why I updated -- fired up Mozilla, and there is a big warning plastered on the homepage...
In fact, I cannot select items in a whole bunch of panels -- like in the Preferences dialog, I cannot select anything in the left panel that actually contains preference groups and items. This is fucked up.
Oh yeah, and this is under Windows (yes, yes, I use UNIX at work -- my home computer is a game machine mostly).
I foresee a downgrade for me in the near future...
P.S. Wow, my previous post was a first -- and on-topic, too! Utter kewlness.
I just upgraded, and now I cannot select any mailboxes in the Messenger mailbox panel! I can click on it, and the whole mailbox panel gets focus, btu I cannot select any individual mailbox. ARRRGH!
What matters is not how many bugs there have been, but the total window of vulnerability per bug -- the time elapsed from bug's discovery to bug'a closing. One really bad bug that remained open for a year is much worse than 10 bugs each remaining open for a week, you see.
Get ready to bend over, folks -- the brave new world is coming! Now that US companies can sue Canadian gov't because Canadian environmental laws deprive them of their profits, and French gov't can sue US web content provider, there's not very far left to go.
This is exactly the kind of bullshit the better elements of Seattle and Montreal protests were against...
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Re:Bring back the 48-star nation
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 1
America helped in a *small* way? What's that, European revisionist history trying to make up for the actual pathetic performance y'all gave against a *single* nation in dire economic straits? Tell me another.
Ok, I will tell you another. German advance was stopped in 1942 in Stalingrad battle, and reversed in 1943 after the battle of Kursk. USSR (not Russia) had more resources -- Germany's only realistic hope of victory was in blitz-krieg, and that failed.
US didn't enter the European front until 1944, by which time Germnany's defeat was inevitable. the purpose of the US military participation was not to help defeat Germany, but to prevent USSR from taking over entire Europe.
US did help economically, but that's little compared to the contribution of USSR, that being most of the war materials, manpower, and equipment. US contribution was minuscule compared to what USSR put into it.
*Americans* won that war. With the help of Russians.
Ah yes, the infamous American highscool education in action. <shakes his head>
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Re:Bring back the 48-star nation
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 1
You worthless communist pieces of shit would have LOST without lend-lease, the same way that Small Britain would have lost.
it is possible. Not very likely, but possible, that USSR would have lost without lend-lease. So what?
In any causal event, multiple factors have to be present for the result to occur; however, one has to distinguish between the degrees of contributions from each factor, and also between the degrees of relevance of the said contributions.
It's very likely that without the support from the Spanish crown, Columbus would not have discovered America (whether he actually "discovered" it and what that event meant, is a separate topic). He also would not have discovered it if any of his parents didn't meet any other of his parents, because then he wouldn't have been born. Does that mean that you grant the credit for the outcome to all of the abovementioned entities?
Yes, America helped -- in a small way -- in the WWII war effort. The contribution from many other countries was far, far more significant, both in absolute and in relative terms. To give US credit for winning WWII is like to give Columbus's grandparents credit for discovering America, or like to give the Geneva patent office credit for discovering relativity, or like to give Mendel's abbey credit for discovery of mendelian genetics.
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Re:America: the country without a past...
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 1
America isn't about it's history or culture, it is about is founding principles. What makes America unique is not the IDENTITY of the people who founded it, but there priciples as embodied in our constitution.
I don't think so. Yes, one could make a case for Constitution being an important part of american cultural identity (although one could probably make an even stronger case for coca-cola and Hollywood). However, this sort of identity is artificial, and comparing it to the real thing -- organic cultural identity that arises over centuries -- is like comparing Esperanto to some natural language.
Such artificial constructs usually don't take root, and to be honest, I doubt that a true organic american cultural identity, should it ever emerge, will be based on Constitution to any significant extent.
Don't take me wrong, I think US Constitution to be a great thing, and I regard its de-facto deterioration as a terrible loss; but cultural identity is not usually based around formal principles, just as most people aren't defined by the principles they hold.
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Re:Bring back the 48-star nation
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 1
Such a shame we saved the world so many times
You've got to be kidding! You are probably one of those people who think US won WWII, huh?..
--
America: the country without a past...
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 3
...or at least wiothout a significant past for the majority of population, amerindians excluded.
I was born in Ukraine. The thing that struck me most about USA when I moved here, is the lack of history. A couple of centuries is all there is -- the country feels to me to be almost rootless, just sprawling on the surface, without a deep connection to history. There is very little here-ness in USA, a distinct lack of historical and cultural sense of emplacement. This to me seems to be an almost tangible hole in the cultural farbic of USA, a rather nagging sense of absence.
It's a strange feeling. Where americans do feel as if they possess an american identity (as opposed to the old-world national identity), it tends to appear almost artificial -- such people seem to be working very hard on figuring out what being an American is, culturally, instead of just being one.
Oh well... give it a few more centuries, perhaps a few more wars and revolutions, and this will change.
MAPS is a private entity, and usage of their services is entirely optional. Yes, they wield a lot of influence -- so what? Suing them to prevent inclusion into the RBL database is like suing an influential magazine to prevent them from giving your product a bad review, simply because such bad review may disrupt your business. While we are at it, why not sue a competitor for trying to disrupt your business?.. Fucking corporate maggots...
I hope Yesmail gets slapped with a huge 'frivolous lawsuit' charge, the assholes.
Totalitarian states hardly need to be able to read people's e-mails in order to kill them. There really is not much that we can do about them -- on the other hand, we can do something about the budding BigBrotherly tendencies in the occidental world. Sure, any would-be Big Brothers don't really care about reading my e-mail; however, establishing a new set of social mores -- mores that emphasize freedom and privacy -- will make such surveilance harder to enact on anyone, not just people like me. it's not as good as preventing totalitarian mass murder or even saving sleeping children from stray bullets, but it most certainly is still important.
My point was that lack of survival imperative will make the 'malignant machines take over the world' scenario extremely unlikely -- there is no reason for machines to want to take over the world, and the hard-coded (non-evolvable) motivation set will in fact ensure the contrary. One could argue (as you did) that the very fact of evolution would favor such outcome, that the machines will not have to want to take over the world, but will simply do so by virtue of having evolved that way -- but like I said, we are the ones controlling the very nature of their 'DNA' (and their fitness criteria), so we can decide not only what can evolve, but even what evolutionary paths are possible by the very design of the system.
Just as there is no way in hell a biological DNA-based evolution can lead to species that can survive inside a star, we may stack the game in such a way that certain evolutionary outcomes -- such as machines taking over the world -- are impossible on a fundamental level.
In all of this brouhaha, a crucial point gets lost. machines are not gods, and are subject to fundamental limitations just as we are. The nature of our genetic code -- DNA -- limits our evolution (its speed and some othe rfactirs). More importantly, we have evolved as we are -- with greed for power, survival imperative, etc. -- over milions and millions of years.
What does this mean for computers and nanotech? two things.
Machines will still be limited by the nature of their hardware -- and we are the ones designing the hardware. The perception seems to be that machines will be able to achieve every nasty goal we can think of -- but I seriously doubt this is the case.
Machines will not have built-in survival imperative, unless we chose to put it in. It's really not that hard to hardcode the 'motivation set' in (a set that would contain neither the survival imperative nor any similar motives), and allow machines to evolve everything but their motivations.
Will some people find a way to design machines that 'want' to survive, perhaps even with explicitly nefarious purpose? Probably; however, the rest of the world will be so stacked against them that I doubt they will actually be able to survive.
Either way, I think this particular worry is blows WAAAY out of proportion by people who implicitly take our nature as the sole known type of intelligent agent (with all of out evolutionary qualities) to be indicative of any type of intelligence we may design.
I am tired of ill-considered apocalyptic dreams.
--
Re:Other books on the Subject
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
Penrose's arguments have been shot to hell from the get-go, for a variety of reasons; this is one of them. He is a mathematician and physicist, but he seems to have little understanding either of epistemic or of philosophy-of-mind-related questions involved. There really is no need to invoke quantum mechanics to explain how we are able to prove theorems deemed undecidable by Gödel's theorems.
--
Re:Other books on the Subject
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
Oh boy, they are really coming out of the woodwork now...
Gödel's incompleteness theorems (yes, there is more than one) say nothing about decidability of truth about the world around us; they apply to a very specific group of theoremic spaces, and believe me, physical reality is not one of those. It's really bad karma (ahem...) to abuse perfectly good mathematics in such an egregious manner. Really.
--
Re:Selling philosophy disguised as science...
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
Aaaargh! My irony-meter just overloaded and melted! Dude, western philosophy (you know, the real stuff -- Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Carnap, Popper, etc.) is what science meshes well with, and is symbiotic with; the link with eastern philosophies is tenuous at best. Moreover, western religions have very little -- nothing, in fact -- to do with modern western philosophy. You should really learn more about philosophy before spewing forth such crap.
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Re:Selling philosophy disguised as science...
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
I think you are being unduly critical opf philosophy; much of philosophy is very rational ('falsifiability' -- a notion originated by a philosopher, BTW -- does not apply to philosophy much, as it only applies to empirical theories). Anyway, the point is that 'philosophy' (yes, in quotes) of the sort Davies is pushing, is what gives philosophy (without quotes) a bad name; to discount all of philosophy philosophy as worthless (as you are implicitly doing) is naive and myopic.
Slashdot Mirror
I get to think about the cool games on my computer when benching a good old-fashined barbell. Used to be that I had to think about something low-tech...
Aye, that did the trick. That's what I get for not reading release notes...
Thanks.
I hate windows -- I am a UNIX sysadmin. A number of people who know me will read this story as well, OK?.. I just want to set the record straight; it has nothing to do with being "cool" on Slashdot (somewhat of an oxymoron in and of itself).
In fact, I cannot select items in a whole bunch of panels -- like in the Preferences dialog, I cannot select anything in the left panel that actually contains preference groups and items. This is fucked up.
Oh yeah, and this is under Windows (yes, yes, I use UNIX at work -- my home computer is a game machine mostly).
I foresee a downgrade for me in the near future...
P.S. Wow, my previous post was a first -- and on-topic, too! Utter kewlness.
I just upgraded, and now I cannot select any mailboxes in the Messenger mailbox panel! I can click on it, and the whole mailbox panel gets focus, btu I cannot select any individual mailbox. ARRRGH!
What matters is not how many bugs there have been, but the total window of vulnerability per bug -- the time elapsed from bug's discovery to bug'a closing. One really bad bug that remained open for a year is much worse than 10 bugs each remaining open for a week, you see.
They are a heckuva lot better than the Low Density Lipoproteins...
JHDL, now -- let me guess: Just-right Height Density Lipoproteins? Sure sounds good to me...
;)
It's making hacks.mit.edu server disappear...
--
This is exactly the kind of bullshit the better elements of Seattle and Montreal protests were against...
--
US didn't enter the European front until 1944, by which time Germnany's defeat was inevitable. the purpose of the US military participation was not to help defeat Germany, but to prevent USSR from taking over entire Europe.
US did help economically, but that's little compared to the contribution of USSR, that being most of the war materials, manpower, and equipment. US contribution was minuscule compared to what USSR put into it.
Ah yes, the infamous American highscool education in action. <shakes his head>--
In any causal event, multiple factors have to be present for the result to occur; however, one has to distinguish between the degrees of contributions from each factor, and also between the degrees of relevance of the said contributions.
It's very likely that without the support from the Spanish crown, Columbus would not have discovered America (whether he actually "discovered" it and what that event meant, is a separate topic). He also would not have discovered it if any of his parents didn't meet any other of his parents, because then he wouldn't have been born. Does that mean that you grant the credit for the outcome to all of the abovementioned entities?
Yes, America helped -- in a small way -- in the WWII war effort. The contribution from many other countries was far, far more significant, both in absolute and in relative terms. To give US credit for winning WWII is like to give Columbus's grandparents credit for discovering America, or like to give the Geneva patent office credit for discovering relativity, or like to give Mendel's abbey credit for discovery of mendelian genetics.
--
I don't think so. Yes, one could make a case for Constitution being an important part of american cultural identity (although one could probably make an even stronger case for coca-cola and Hollywood). However, this sort of identity is artificial, and comparing it to the real thing -- organic cultural identity that arises over centuries -- is like comparing Esperanto to some natural language.
Such artificial constructs usually don't take root, and to be honest, I doubt that a true organic american cultural identity, should it ever emerge, will be based on Constitution to any significant extent.
Don't take me wrong, I think US Constitution to be a great thing, and I regard its de-facto deterioration as a terrible loss; but cultural identity is not usually based around formal principles, just as most people aren't defined by the principles they hold.
--
--
...or at least wiothout a significant past for the majority of population, amerindians excluded.
I was born in Ukraine. The thing that struck me most about USA when I moved here, is the lack of history. A couple of centuries is all there is -- the country feels to me to be almost rootless, just sprawling on the surface, without a deep connection to history. There is very little here-ness in USA, a distinct lack of historical and cultural sense of emplacement. This to me seems to be an almost tangible hole in the cultural farbic of USA, a rather nagging sense of absence.
It's a strange feeling. Where americans do feel as if they possess an american identity (as opposed to the old-world national identity), it tends to appear almost artificial -- such people seem to be working very hard on figuring out what being an American is, culturally, instead of just being one.
Oh well... give it a few more centuries, perhaps a few more wars and revolutions, and this will change.
--
--
I hope Yesmail gets slapped with a huge 'frivolous lawsuit' charge, the assholes.
--
--
Just as there is no way in hell a biological DNA-based evolution can lead to species that can survive inside a star, we may stack the game in such a way that certain evolutionary outcomes -- such as machines taking over the world -- are impossible on a fundamental level.
--
In all of this brouhaha, a crucial point gets lost. machines are not gods, and are subject to fundamental limitations just as we are. The nature of our genetic code -- DNA -- limits our evolution (its speed and some othe rfactirs). More importantly, we have evolved as we are -- with greed for power, survival imperative, etc. -- over milions and millions of years.
What does this mean for computers and nanotech? two things.
Will some people find a way to design machines that 'want' to survive, perhaps even with explicitly nefarious purpose? Probably; however, the rest of the world will be so stacked against them that I doubt they will actually be able to survive.
Either way, I think this particular worry is blows WAAAY out of proportion by people who implicitly take our nature as the sole known type of intelligent agent (with all of out evolutionary qualities) to be indicative of any type of intelligence we may design.
I am tired of ill-considered apocalyptic dreams.
--
Penrose's arguments have been shot to hell from the get-go, for a variety of reasons; this is one of them. He is a mathematician and physicist, but he seems to have little understanding either of epistemic or of philosophy-of-mind-related questions involved. There really is no need to invoke quantum mechanics to explain how we are able to prove theorems deemed undecidable by Gödel's theorems.
--
Oh boy, they are really coming out of the woodwork now...
Gödel's incompleteness theorems (yes, there is more than one) say nothing about decidability of truth about the world around us; they apply to a very specific group of theoremic spaces, and believe me, physical reality is not one of those. It's really bad karma (ahem...) to abuse perfectly good mathematics in such an egregious manner. Really.
--
--
--