Re:Here's the Wu-Name script, hack and enjoy.
on
Humpday Quickies
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· Score: 2
Quite the nice script (feel free to take any minor improvements from my other post).
There really are only 81 names that can possibly be output as the script is written, though. Your first step is to boil down the numberized name: x=boildown(n) is the same as x=(n%9==0)?9:n%9. This means that no matter what the first or second name, each is reduced to a number 1-9. The set and setsum operations depend only on these two numbers (a one to one mapping), giving you a maximum of 81 distinct cases.
To get more, you have to introduce a few more variables. For example, use a second unrelated hash function on the names and use these new numbers in the set operations, keeping the original two to choose which names to pick out of the lists.
If i get a chance to make the modifications, i'll email them to you.
As other people have guessed, it's a hash function, so many regular names correspond to one wu-name. It's even pretty easy to discover an equivalent function with a little experimentation.
---------
#!/usr/bin/perl
open X, "/tmp/names.txt"; @names=(); while(X>){ next unless/^(\d)\s*(\d)\s*(.*)$/; $names[$1][$2]=$3; }
Why is this even here? Most/.ers run linux don't they.
Several reasons. For one, it's "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Hard as it may be to believe, some/.ers actually do use windoze. Others use *BSD, or other operating systems. Maybe Linux is the majority, maybe not (still almost certainly the major minority then).
Even for those of us who don't use Windows, we all know people who do. Coworkers, friends, family, lusers on our systems. If we know about this potential problem with windows, perhaps we can help them avoid falling for it, or at least be quicker on cleaning up afterwards...
i'd guess that most of us are the curious sort, who'll learn something interesting (New email worm? How's it work, what does it affect, and what could be done to stop it?) even if it has no practical application in our lives. Why else do we so love nanotech, quantum computing, good fiction, and all the other things posted on/.?
When you set the cookie, the cookie would be attached to www.mywebhost.com, so it wouldn't ever be seen by www.mybannersite.com. You could share a cookie between www.mysite.com and banners.mysite.com by filling in the proper fields, but not more widely than that. And no, you can't share co.uk, the furthest you can go with country-name TLDs is mysite.co.uk. Of course, all these restrictions are subject to bugs in the browser.
i agree with Cliff on this one, i think the time for Open Source was coming anyway. If Linux hadn't been free, certainly the timeline would've been different. But i believe *BSD, or the GNU HURD, or something else would've come along eventually and brought about the Open Source movement.
And if Linux wasn't open source, almost no one would ever had heard of it. Linus and maybe a few of his friends would be the only ones using it, if even they didn't get bored and give up on it.
Open Source is definately more than just being able to see the source code. It's also the right to make changes and distribute them to anyone, a sort of assurance that even if the original author vanishes off the face of the planet that the software can still be developed and supported, a support system that's not dependant on one central company to fix every bug single-handedly and then distribute as they see fit ($80 for a 6-month-late fix, for example), and a sense of community among the hackers (not definition 8) who do work on Open Source projects. Especially this sense of community is why most of us don't see many companies truely grokking Open Source.
Yeah, what the kid did is wrong. But they don't need a "transmission of false information" law to get him, what about good old libel statutes?
"Use of false information", what exactly does this mean? Uh oh, i put a short fiction on the net. Blatantly false! Too bad M$ doesn't have a Rhode Island branch, or we could go after their Linux Myths page for all those falsities. Some people consider the Bible and other religious texts false, does this law outlaw them as well? At least we don't have to worry about RI websites trying to convince us that 2+2=5, since that's mathematically false. Students will love this if teacher gives an online true-false quiz. And what of indeterminate statements? "Vi is better than Emacs!" isn't objectively true or false, it depends on the particular application and the attitude of the individual.
Yes, i'm using some rather unlikely examples here; the purpose is to get you to think about the possibilities without being distracted by the defamation of the teacher's character. What exactly is the point of the law? If the falshood is actually damaging, can't it be brought up under libel/slander, truth in advertising, or other more clearly defined laws? And if the falshood isn't damaging, is there a point at all?
Remember, some newspapers still think that HTML is a programming language..
Granted, HTML doesn't contain case or iteration constructs that define true programming languages, but godamn, you can still use it to get things done.
HTML isn't a programming language, it's a markup language. By your definition, any document that contains information on position, size, font, and color for its content is a programming language.
You're right, HTML does get the job done. But can you use HTML to do anything besides define the static appearance of a document and how it relates to other documents? No, that's not its job, that's the job of a programming language. (Remember, JavaScript != HTML)
Regarding the parallel thread calling your post a troll, i'd have to agree. But i won't waste time arguing about it, since anything i say will not serve to change your mind.
Lossy compression is more or less the reason most efforts to translate languages will have rather poor results. First, we take the UNL as analogous to the uncompressed version of the data (i'll use image analogies). Every natural language then represents a lossily compressed version of the data, with various aspects eliminated as unimportant to the particular user group that speaks it (one language uses 600dpi but eliminates color, one reduces the depth to only 72 dpi but uses 24-bit color, and so on). The problem comes in when you try to go from one form of compression to another, each of which eliminates different aspects of the data (you end up with a greyscale 72dpi version, which is considered poor quality to both patries). While the image analogies i've given are a bit extreme, language actually is that bad in some cases.
Add to this typos and word choice errors (transmission noise?), slang, jargon, and all the other ways we distort language. How can any reliable translation be made?
Disclaimer time: i am not any sort of language lawyer, so if my post contains inaccuracies don't flame, just correct.
Those guys who label the generations haven't even settled on a name for us yet. But, of course, there's more than one generation reading/..
If you were born before 1961, you're a "baby boomer". That's the only one that's decided, more or less.
If you were born sometime between '61 and '77 or '81 (Yep, they haven't even decided on the year for that yet) you're "new lost", "baby buster", "x", "y", "13"... (no decided name either).
And if you were born after that, you're "millennial" or some other name that hasn't been proposed yet. Cutoff'll probably be somewhere between last year and 2002.
And, if you're one of the x/y/13/whatever generation, you're screwed. But then, you already know that anyway, considering the way society has treated us... Maybe we should be called the Screwed Generation.
You'll notice that people in those menial jobs are typically [...] in their teens or twenties. That's because anyone with any ambition can acquire enough skills that, even if they can't live well, they can get a job that allows them to live comfortably.
Not necessarily. Excepting the fast-growing computer industry, there aren't that many good jobs (i.e. not pizza delivery, temp worker, factory, etc) available to young people these days. Union rules work against their hiring, and get them fired first for lack of 'seniority'. Federal discrimination laws protect older employees from being fired for lacking energy (which comes with age), but say nothing about firing young people because they have less experience (which also comes with age). Even starting their own buisnesses is a bit risky, with all the laws on the books that serve to protect the establishment at the expense of start-ups.
Young people have been traditionally screwed since they began entering the workforce 20 years ago. Remember the recession during Bush's presidency? Eliminate workers under 30 years old from the statistics and it completely vanishes.
Speaking of predictions for the future, just today i read some predictions for this generation. Here's the summary: screwed while young, screwed in the job market, and to be screwed in middle age and retirement. Great time to be young, huh?
The worst part of computer science education below college is that the teachers do not know how to program at all. I don't know how to remedy this, I wish I did. Even an independent study in computer science would be better than what is offered now.
It's all about money. Most schools don't have enough to hire even a part-time CS teacher, so at best they have to rely on some Math teacher that has a minor interest in computing. Combine that with the fact that buisnesses tend to pay several times better than schools, and almost no one with a real CS background is interested in teaching.
It's the same thing with Theatre in many schools, an English teacher ends up heading the program because there's not enough money to hire someone to specialize. Although the situation isn't quite as bad, since there's more teachers with a theater interest and background than teachers with a CS interest and background. And it's easier to accomodate both beginning and advanced students in theater than CS. ("I still don't understand binary/octal/hexidecimal!" for the 10th time. Teacher has to explain. I take a nap. For the whole week.)
It seems to me that CS work below college level is truely independant study, since it's completely independant of school.
"Drug Abuse Resistance Education", it supposedly was going to keep kids from doing drugs when they got older. But i heard a study a while back that DARE kids were actually more likely than non-DARE kids to do drugs as teenagers!
IIRC, it was because the kids thought they could handle experimenting since they had the class...
Like some others, I had the option of BASIC, no more.
I never even had the option of BASIC. In grade school, LOGO was the only language offered. In high school i didn't bother with the class [yes, singular], IIRC it was programming "mac hypercard" or something like that.
Besides, i taught myself BASIC at age 10, some basic 8086 assembler a few years later, C after i got on the 'net and someone gave me an old Borland DOS compiler... Spent my time in math class programming games into my TI-85.
The schools say they don't have the money to spend on more than one or two computer classes, and they have to target those classes to the majority of [semi-computer-illiterate] students. "How to use Windows 95 and M$ Office" and such.
Your point, as i see it, is that they're targeting crachers and not hackers, so the claim that they're targeting us and all the rest who fueled the computer boom if false.
However, look at the terminology they're using. "Hacking is bad." "Kids shouldn't hack." Etc. So all these kids are brainwashed into thinking that hacking (our definition as well as cracking, since the DOJ makes no distinction) is bad. Then micros~1 starts an ad campaign saying Linux, FreeBSD, and any other Open Source OS is a hacker OS--technically true, but not when the incorrect meaning of hacker is inferred. So all these kids think hacker==bad, Open Source==hackers, so Open Source==bad and by M$ products.
Yes, that is a little extreme of a prediction. Most predictions are inherently extreme, those that aren't tend to be widely ignored.
As a side note, will Mitnick the Gerbil stop script kiddies any more than McGruff the Dog stops crime? Far too many kids do drugs, hurt and steal even with McGruff's messages...
Better yet, will the embryos behind the counter at Radio Shack be able to tell me what a TRS-80 even is?
I took my old TRS-80 model I to the Radio Shack in the nearest largish city about 8 years ago, because that was the closest one that had anyone who knew anything about TRS-80s. Unfortunately, the guy only knew about the CoCo...
Maybe i should try again with a bigger city. Maybe they can get the 'e' key to work again (:
Or maybe they can tell me what that red button added to the keyboard was for. All i ever discovered about it was that it set bit 4 in the last keyboard byte (the one with the shift keys, IIRC).
This thing is just another pro-buisness censorship proposal (censorship-enabler==censorship IMO) loaded with buzzwords. Take this quote for example:
Internet filtering: ensuring youth protection and freedom of speech
Isn't freedom of speech the right to communicate without being filtered? So how does filtering ensure it? And as for youth protection, the "protect the children" argument has been hashed and rehashed and shot down so often...
For the moment i'm going to ignore their value judgements ("harmful to children" and all that), since you either agree with me or i won't be able to change your mind. Let's look instead at their "layer cake" proposal for filtering the web [section 4]
Their bottom level is PICS. Basically, this means you put meta tags in your page rating your content in whichever categories the particular PICS-rating-system author chooses. Most of the time, the authors try to claim their categories are value-neutral. At least someone this time was intelligent enough to realize that's completely impossible when rating on topics that are by necessity subjective to the individual rating the webpage.
They do claim, instead, that they chose words designed to "lead to convergent practices". Apparently they don't understand us, that some people will purposefully apply their terms divergently to defeat their system; protesting, avoiding blockage, making the site look like the nastiest porn palace ever to get more traffic, etc. And no matter what the vocabulary, it is still impossible to have everyone, everywhere in the world agree on the dividing lines between categories, leading to more divergence. To help PHBs and consultants obfuscate meaning, they propose the term 'intersubjectively convergent' with only definition by context. (More buzzwords, too. 'inter-' and 'convergent')
Their first 'layer' then is individual content rating. But they say that unrated sites should face no penalties, and should not be blocked without the "end-user's" consent. So the deciding factor is whether you can live without their 'incentives' for rated sites and the visitors who will block the vast unrated body of content. Especially depending on the size that this could add to the pages (how many K of META tags does their vocabulary take up?), this could turn out to be a good tradeoff for nonrating. Combine that with the divergence above, and layer 1 falls pretty flat.
Layer 2 has third parties putting together "filters" that block based on the PICS ratings. They make it sound that anyone can create and distribute these, but probably most people are going to stick with the M$, Netscape, or ISP default in their browsers, with probably at most a dozen fourth party ones used by the majority of people. Yes, there will be a lot available out there, but people who still have a blinking 12:00 on their VCR aren't likely to look beyond the major brand names. And if there's a category that their competitors fall into, wonder if corporations will block them?
Layer 3 is basically SurfWatch or CyberSitter, the same old concerns with spider-generated blocklists and such. Seeing this layer, i would be very unsurprised to find censorware makers on the guest list for this private little party...
My overall impression reading this 'recommendation' is one of overwhelming deja vu. The same arguements, the same proposals, just in a new package and with a few new people on the bandwagon.
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You may feel this is a load of generalizations and possibly unwarranted conclusions. It probably is. My goal wasn't to present an airtight courtroom case, but to provide some food for thought and further discussion. Don't reply to me, reply to the points i put forward.
I guess it seems to me that if technology is to free us from need (which I belive it can) shouldn't those of us who create it allow do so in a way that dosn't create more need, and dosn't create absolute dependence [emphasis mine]
That's impossible. If technology frees us from need, and doesn't replace it with more need, then we will certainly become dependant on the absence of need.
That is, if we survive at all. i have the feeling that if technology freed us from all need, we would die because of lack of any usefulness or atrophy to the point of Eloi. Or else someone would realize the need to destroy the technology before lack of need destroyed us. Intelligence is a response to need, without need intelligence becomes a liability.
I don't think WE have enough intelligence to create such sentience.
Think of the process of programming for a completely new computer. You first have to code everything in machine code, because there's not even an assembler available [pretend cross-compilers and cross-assemblers don't exist in this context]. So what's one of the first things you write? A crappy assembler, which you use to write a better assembler, which you use to write better assemblers. Once the assembler is good enough, you write compilers for higher level languages, and use these compilers to write better compilers, and so on.
The situation here could be similar. Even though WE may not have the intelligence to come up with an untra-intelligent AI on our own, who's to say we won't use 'dumb' AI to help us design better AI (since it can sit there and do number-crunching 365 days a year, no bathroom breaks), and use that to generate even smarter AI, and then smarter AI... The difference with AI is that at some point the AI can improve itself without our help, as long as the power keeps flowing...
--------------------------
Paranoid thought for the day: What if we really are the result of some Gods' AI experiments, and they're watching to see if we're going to destroy ourselves or not? The physical "laws" of the universe are just restrictions and parameters of the the software that's being used to run us.
In order to really block spammers, RBLs have to take a shotgun blast technique. i'm virtually certain Hotmail and the like are blocked since spammers use them for throwaway accounts. i have friends on those free email providers, and if my ISP suddenly started blocking their mails i'd be up in arms to get them to STOP.
As for DULs, a good portion of my mail would be blocked by a DUL. Why should i have to use an ISP relay when Linux can run exim and deliver mail itself?
Yes spammers are a problem, but you have to be careful when you block them that you don't hit normal people as well.
Slashdot Mirror
There really are only 81 names that can possibly be output as the script is written, though. Your first step is to boil down the numberized name: x=boildown(n) is the same as x=(n%9==0)?9:n%9. This means that no matter what the first or second name, each is reduced to a number 1-9. The set and setsum operations depend only on these two numbers (a one to one mapping), giving you a maximum of 81 distinct cases.
To get more, you have to introduce a few more variables. For example, use a second unrelated hash function on the names and use these new numbers in the set operations, keeping the original two to choose which names to pick out of the lists.
If i get a chance to make the modifications, i'll email them to you.
-----
---------
#!/usr/bin/perl
/^(\d)\s*(\d)\s*(.*)$/;
//, $fn){ //, $ln){
open X, "/tmp/names.txt";
@names=();
while(X>){
next unless
$names[$1][$2]=$3;
}
print "First name: ";
$fn=>;
print "Last name: ";
$ln=>;
$fn=~tr/A-Z/a-z/;
$fn=~tr/a-z//cd;
$ln=~tr/A-Z/a-z/;
$ln=~tr/a-z//cd;
$f=0;
for $i (split
$f+=ord($i)-96;
}
$l=0;
for $i (split
$l+=ord($i)-96;
}
print "\n", $names[$l%9][$f%9], "\n";
---------
Find the list of wu-names yourself, it's easy enough to do. There are 81, of course.
Hopefully they don't change the hash function, which would invalidate all this.
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Several reasons. For one, it's "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Hard as it may be to believe, some /.ers actually do use windoze. Others use *BSD, or other operating systems. Maybe Linux is the majority, maybe not (still almost certainly the major minority then).
Even for those of us who don't use Windows, we all know people who do. Coworkers, friends, family, lusers on our systems. If we know about this potential problem with windows, perhaps we can help them avoid falling for it, or at least be quicker on cleaning up afterwards...
i'd guess that most of us are the curious sort, who'll learn something interesting (New email worm? How's it work, what does it affect, and what could be done to stop it?) even if it has no practical application in our lives. Why else do we so love nanotech, quantum computing, good fiction, and all the other things posted on /.?
And finally, don't neglect the gloat factor ;)
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And if Linux wasn't open source, almost no one would ever had heard of it. Linus and maybe a few of his friends would be the only ones using it, if even they didn't get bored and give up on it.
Open Source is definately more than just being able to see the source code. It's also the right to make changes and distribute them to anyone, a sort of assurance that even if the original author vanishes off the face of the planet that the software can still be developed and supported, a support system that's not dependant on one central company to fix every bug single-handedly and then distribute as they see fit ($80 for a 6-month-late fix, for example), and a sense of community among the hackers (not definition 8) who do work on Open Source projects. Especially this sense of community is why most of us don't see many companies truely grokking Open Source.
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"Use of false information", what exactly does this mean? Uh oh, i put a short fiction on the net. Blatantly false! Too bad M$ doesn't have a Rhode Island branch, or we could go after their Linux Myths page for all those falsities. Some people consider the Bible and other religious texts false, does this law outlaw them as well? At least we don't have to worry about RI websites trying to convince us that 2+2=5, since that's mathematically false. Students will love this if teacher gives an online true-false quiz. And what of indeterminate statements? "Vi is better than Emacs!" isn't objectively true or false, it depends on the particular application and the attitude of the individual.
Yes, i'm using some rather unlikely examples here; the purpose is to get you to think about the possibilities without being distracted by the defamation of the teacher's character. What exactly is the point of the law? If the falshood is actually damaging, can't it be brought up under libel/slander, truth in advertising, or other more clearly defined laws? And if the falshood isn't damaging, is there a point at all?
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Granted, HTML doesn't contain case or iteration constructs that define true programming languages, but godamn, you can still use it to get things done.
HTML isn't a programming language, it's a markup language. By your definition, any document that contains information on position, size, font, and color for its content is a programming language.
You're right, HTML does get the job done. But can you use HTML to do anything besides define the static appearance of a document and how it relates to other documents? No, that's not its job, that's the job of a programming language. (Remember, JavaScript != HTML)
Regarding the parallel thread calling your post a troll, i'd have to agree. But i won't waste time arguing about it, since anything i say will not serve to change your mind.
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Add to this typos and word choice errors (transmission noise?), slang, jargon, and all the other ways we distort language. How can any reliable translation be made?
Disclaimer time: i am not any sort of language lawyer, so if my post contains inaccuracies don't flame, just correct.
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And, if you're one of the x/y/13/whatever generation, you're screwed. But then, you already know that anyway, considering the way society has treated us... Maybe we should be called the Screwed Generation.
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Not necessarily. Excepting the fast-growing computer industry, there aren't that many good jobs (i.e. not pizza delivery, temp worker, factory, etc) available to young people these days. Union rules work against their hiring, and get them fired first for lack of 'seniority'. Federal discrimination laws protect older employees from being fired for lacking energy (which comes with age), but say nothing about firing young people because they have less experience (which also comes with age). Even starting their own buisnesses is a bit risky, with all the laws on the books that serve to protect the establishment at the expense of start-ups.
Young people have been traditionally screwed since they began entering the workforce 20 years ago. Remember the recession during Bush's presidency? Eliminate workers under 30 years old from the statistics and it completely vanishes.
Speaking of predictions for the future, just today i read some predictions for this generation. Here's the summary: screwed while young, screwed in the job market, and to be screwed in middle age and retirement. Great time to be young, huh?
-----
It's all about money. Most schools don't have enough to hire even a part-time CS teacher, so at best they have to rely on some Math teacher that has a minor interest in computing. Combine that with the fact that buisnesses tend to pay several times better than schools, and almost no one with a real CS background is interested in teaching.
It's the same thing with Theatre in many schools, an English teacher ends up heading the program because there's not enough money to hire someone to specialize. Although the situation isn't quite as bad, since there's more teachers with a theater interest and background than teachers with a CS interest and background. And it's easier to accomodate both beginning and advanced students in theater than CS. ("I still don't understand binary/octal/hexidecimal!" for the 10th time. Teacher has to explain. I take a nap. For the whole week.)
It seems to me that CS work below college level is truely independant study, since it's completely independant of school.
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IIRC, it was because the kids thought they could handle experimenting since they had the class...
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I never even had the option of BASIC. In grade school, LOGO was the only language offered. In high school i didn't bother with the class [yes, singular], IIRC it was programming "mac hypercard" or something like that.
Besides, i taught myself BASIC at age 10, some basic 8086 assembler a few years later, C after i got on the 'net and someone gave me an old Borland DOS compiler... Spent my time in math class programming games into my TI-85.
The schools say they don't have the money to spend on more than one or two computer classes, and they have to target those classes to the majority of [semi-computer-illiterate] students. "How to use Windows 95 and M$ Office" and such.
-----
However, look at the terminology they're using. "Hacking is bad." "Kids shouldn't hack." Etc. So all these kids are brainwashed into thinking that hacking (our definition as well as cracking, since the DOJ makes no distinction) is bad. Then micros~1 starts an ad campaign saying Linux, FreeBSD, and any other Open Source OS is a hacker OS--technically true, but not when the incorrect meaning of hacker is inferred. So all these kids think hacker==bad, Open Source==hackers, so Open Source==bad and by M$ products.
Yes, that is a little extreme of a prediction. Most predictions are inherently extreme, those that aren't tend to be widely ignored.
As a side note, will Mitnick the Gerbil stop script kiddies any more than McGruff the Dog stops crime? Far too many kids do drugs, hurt and steal even with McGruff's messages...
-----
I took my old TRS-80 model I to the Radio Shack in the nearest largish city about 8 years ago, because that was the closest one that had anyone who knew anything about TRS-80s. Unfortunately, the guy only knew about the CoCo...
Maybe i should try again with a bigger city. Maybe they can get the 'e' key to work again (:
Or maybe they can tell me what that red button added to the keyboard was for. All i ever discovered about it was that it set bit 4 in the last keyboard byte (the one with the shift keys, IIRC).
-----
For the moment i'm going to ignore their value judgements ("harmful to children" and all that), since you either agree with me or i won't be able to change your mind. Let's look instead at their "layer cake" proposal for filtering the web [section 4]
Their bottom level is PICS. Basically, this means you put meta tags in your page rating your content in whichever categories the particular PICS-rating-system author chooses. Most of the time, the authors try to claim their categories are value-neutral. At least someone this time was intelligent enough to realize that's completely impossible when rating on topics that are by necessity subjective to the individual rating the webpage.
They do claim, instead, that they chose words designed to "lead to convergent practices". Apparently they don't understand us, that some people will purposefully apply their terms divergently to defeat their system; protesting, avoiding blockage, making the site look like the nastiest porn palace ever to get more traffic, etc. And no matter what the vocabulary, it is still impossible to have everyone, everywhere in the world agree on the dividing lines between categories, leading to more divergence. To help PHBs and consultants obfuscate meaning, they propose the term 'intersubjectively convergent' with only definition by context. (More buzzwords, too. 'inter-' and 'convergent')
Their first 'layer' then is individual content rating. But they say that unrated sites should face no penalties, and should not be blocked without the "end-user's" consent. So the deciding factor is whether you can live without their 'incentives' for rated sites and the visitors who will block the vast unrated body of content. Especially depending on the size that this could add to the pages (how many K of META tags does their vocabulary take up?), this could turn out to be a good tradeoff for nonrating. Combine that with the divergence above, and layer 1 falls pretty flat.
Layer 2 has third parties putting together "filters" that block based on the PICS ratings. They make it sound that anyone can create and distribute these, but probably most people are going to stick with the M$, Netscape, or ISP default in their browsers, with probably at most a dozen fourth party ones used by the majority of people. Yes, there will be a lot available out there, but people who still have a blinking 12:00 on their VCR aren't likely to look beyond the major brand names. And if there's a category that their competitors fall into, wonder if corporations will block them?
Layer 3 is basically SurfWatch or CyberSitter, the same old concerns with spider-generated blocklists and such. Seeing this layer, i would be very unsurprised to find censorware makers on the guest list for this private little party...
My overall impression reading this 'recommendation' is one of overwhelming deja vu. The same arguements, the same proposals, just in a new package and with a few new people on the bandwagon.
-----------
You may feel this is a load of generalizations and possibly unwarranted conclusions. It probably is. My goal wasn't to present an airtight courtroom case, but to provide some food for thought and further discussion. Don't reply to me, reply to the points i put forward.
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[emphasis mine]
That's impossible. If technology frees us from need, and doesn't replace it with more need, then we will certainly become dependant on the absence of need.
That is, if we survive at all. i have the feeling that if technology freed us from all need, we would die because of lack of any usefulness or atrophy to the point of Eloi. Or else someone would realize the need to destroy the technology before lack of need destroyed us. Intelligence is a response to need, without need intelligence becomes a liability.
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This way, Erwin will have something to choose (:
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void *self;
self=
}
-----
Think of the process of programming for a completely new computer. You first have to code everything in machine code, because there's not even an assembler available [pretend cross-compilers and cross-assemblers don't exist in this context]. So what's one of the first things you write? A crappy assembler, which you use to write a better assembler, which you use to write better assemblers. Once the assembler is good enough, you write compilers for higher level languages, and use these compilers to write better compilers, and so on.
The situation here could be similar. Even though WE may not have the intelligence to come up with an untra-intelligent AI on our own, who's to say we won't use 'dumb' AI to help us design better AI (since it can sit there and do number-crunching 365 days a year, no bathroom breaks), and use that to generate even smarter AI, and then smarter AI... The difference with AI is that at some point the AI can improve itself without our help, as long as the power keeps flowing...
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Paranoid thought for the day: What if we really are the result of some Gods' AI experiments, and they're watching to see if we're going to destroy ourselves or not? The physical "laws" of the universe are just restrictions and parameters of the the software that's being used to run us.
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As for DULs, a good portion of my mail would be blocked by a DUL. Why should i have to use an ISP relay when Linux can run exim and deliver mail itself?
Yes spammers are a problem, but you have to be careful when you block them that you don't hit normal people as well.
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