That was the Trieste, designed and built by the Frenchmen Auguste and Jacques Piccard. The US Navy bought it from them. To my knowledge, since that great achievement, nobody has ever gone deeper (or even as deep), so it's not exactly a good example of "not hard".
No, _your_ argument is astute. Basically you're saying that people who support freedom of speech (fine, let's throw in music copying), also have to support child molestation and nazism. What kind of ridiculous argument is that?
The problem with FreeNet is that it is morally vacuous and philosophically corrupt. On the one hand it claims that its functionality is, or should be, covered under freedom of speech. But on the other hand it makes every effort to make it impossible to determine whether speech is in fact involved, and what the nature of the speech is: both of which are critical to establishing whether a particular expression can be protected under freedom of speech. So effectively it argues for absolute freedom of communication without any personal responsibility. This is tantamount to eradicating the rule of law: but it is exactly the rule of law that is supposed to uphold the freedom of speech!
Global communication is killing language specialization.
No, not at all. Instant global communication might just as well contribute to increasing balkanization because it spreads new words and speech patterns so much faster than in the old days.
Language diversity is a function of population isolation.
Yes, but the notion that "the Internet" will blend us all into a homogenous global population is rubbish. Isolation is not always involuntary. More often than not, people actively seek out ways to isolate themselves from the broader population. This is how a group identity is created. It is exactly this mechanism that allows a forum such as Slashdot to thrive.
As the world begins talking to one another, it turns out there's only one language they all speak.
Um, I don't think you've developed a proper appreciation of how big the world really is. Yes, English is widely used as a lingua franca. But that doesn't mean that the speech patterns of Jamaicans, East Londoners and Indians all over the world are converging. If anything, they're getting more idiosyncratic with the passage of time.
Microsoft is receiving the same kind of security review that makes OpenSource products so strong in the first place.
Where is the proof of this alleged strength?
All of the biggest exploits/worms on Windows can be explained by a combination of popularity and user unawareness. The fact that the source code is not available for public auditing might be a factor in mitigating these exploits, but from all available data, it seems to be a minor factor at best.
How does the "open source is more secure" theory explain the excellent security record of closed source systems such as HPUX, AIX and Solaris when compared to (say) Linux? How does it account for the fact that shell.sourceforge.net, debian.org and savannah.gnu.org have all been hacked recently, whereas microsoft.com has never been known to be hacked?
Sorry, I don't buy it. The position that open source leads to more secure software is simply untenable.
To my considerable surprise, many people seem to think that a free software/open source solution will be or will have to be cheaper than the proprietary solutions. That's a misconception.
Free software doesn't compete with proprietary software on cost, reliability, performance or features. It's not even really appropriate to use the word compete, since the metric of success is so different for free software than for proprietary products. A proprietary product succeeds when it makes money. But when does free software succeed? When it attracts a lot of users, maybe. But what does that accomplish?
Well, it liberates users. The goal of proprietary software is to make money. The goal of free software is to liberate users. Not to make cheaper software, or even better software (although we try), but to make users more free. Any other motive just does not survive contact with reality. Nobody starts their project with the idea of making a cheaper widget. Most people start their project with the idea of making a better widget, but this seems to be a very elusive and highly subjective quality. The truth is we don't know how to make "better" software any more than the proprietary people do.
The benefit of free software is not that it's cheaper or better, since these are after the fact rationalizations at best and misleading fantasies at worst. The benefit is that it frees users from mindlessly protectionist policy, draconian restrictions on use and distribution, and a whole universe of demeaning do-not-trust-the-customer attitudes.
This freedom might be more expensive than the alternative, or it might be less expensive in the long run, or it might lead to better software, or not: these are issues that are infinitely malleable in the hands of a skilled advocate. But it all derives from the motive of freedom -- not the mere availability of source code.
I love linux as much as the next guy, but the duty of this agency is to provide the cheapest solution to server their constinuents.
Their duty is to act in the best interest of their constituents. Saving money is obviously part of that, but not the only or even the most important part. They're not a business. Linux affords them a level of freedom that proprietary solutions can't, and this is arguably a good thing for the constituents, even if it is more expensive.
Business realities, not propoganda, should dictate migration to linux.
That is just a different kind of propaganda, namely that everything should yield to market forces. Money talks, but it doesn't always have the last word.
What this experiment will have to do is prove that Linux can do it for less money and be more efficient than proprietary solutions such as Windows.
Not really, not in the limited sense you seem to be suggesting anyway. What Linux gets them is freedom from one-size-fits-all solutions, freedom from restrictive license agreements, and freedom from vendor lock-in. It's not easy putting a price tag on these freedoms, since it takes years for them to translate into tangible benefits. It might very well turn out to be more expensive than a proprietary solution and less efficient. But cost isn't the only consideration. Even if cooking yourself is more expensive and less efficient than eating at McDonalds every day, it is still a good idea to cook your own food.
For my money, I would have bet on OS X providing a better system from these perspectives.
Maybe. But OS X still isn't free. Plus, Apple sucks in Europe. It is difficult to find stuff, very expensive, and the service is lousy.
I don't see what all the fuss is about. Most of these guys are just pranksters. I see some people here frothing at the mouth about how these guys should be locked into the slammer for months, even years. What a vicious and repellant sentiment. Ironically it seems to mirror the sad, mean outlook on life that drives the virus writers: I will make them pay for my misery!
Clearly some pranks are off-bounds. When the prank goes from mischief to outright malice, swift and appropriate punishment needs to be meted out. Viruses that spy on you, or turn your computer into a spam factory, or purposely destroy data, are completely unacceptable. But for the rest? Rule number one remains that people shouldn't open attachments that they don't trust. As responsible adults, we should know better.
AppleScript is not really a programming language in the sense that Perl or Python or Ruby are programming languages. Not that it is fundamentally less powerful or anything like that, but it really serves a rather different purpose.
AppleScript is based on AppleEvents. AppleEvents are messages that applications can send to eachother. These messages appear in the event loop of the receiving application, just like mouse click events and window resize events. There are a number of predefined AppleEvents, such as open file, print file and quit. Applications can also define their own application specific events.
Now, very generally, AppleScript is a mechanism which translates AppleEvents into text (code) and vice versa. Its English appearance is just one of many dialects that it can understand.
It's a very flexible system. The lexical syntax and the grammar can be changed, the system can be extended by other applications and the "dictionary" makes it sort of self-documenting. And since it's based on AppleEvents, it can automatically generate script based on the actions that one performs in an application (although this requires a fair bit of work on the part of the application writer).
Drawbacks of AppleScript are its horrible default syntax, the cumbersome type system, and the difficulty of writing programs that fully support all its features. Also it's very slow and riddled with special cases, exceptions, and things that just flat out don't work.
So yes, on the one hand you can compare AppleScript to any other programming language, but on the other hand it is so deeply rooted in MacOS application programming that the comparison really wouldn't make sense. The closest thing you could compare it to on GNU/Linux is a combination of strace, bash, the man page database, and a fairly daft programmer.
There's another school of thought to the effect that qualia is simply a side effect of qualifying physical processes; this happens to be the one that I subscribe to.
If you believe in the primacy of physical processes, then it will not do to gloss over the colossal differences between (living) matter and a software model just like that. As far as I'm concerned, embodiment and situatedness are key to intelligence -- even though I'm no fan of Brooks.
(As for determining which physical processes qualify, what mechanism do we have other than observing behaviour to attempt inference? This is why I believe in the Turing test and its equivalents).
What this comes down to is that you claim to believe that I might as well be a computer program. My argument is that I don't think you actually believe this to be true, except perhaps as an intellectual excercise of sorts.
Reductionism has an alluring finality and irreverent quality that resonates particularly with the young and daring of mind. But its strength is simultaneously its biggest problem, because it denies the experience of everyday life. There is actually a world out there separate from our observation of same.
I think getting your hands on the full specs for the internal micro-ops the CPU process is quite hard.
Yes, but that doesn't prevent anybody from programming the chip.
The argument that open source drivers would divulge sensitive IP is just a ruse. Realistically the risk that a competitor would be able to use an open source driver to obtain crucial information for his own product is negligable when you factor in time-to-market and knowhow. What's more, extracting the same information from the binary drivers only takes perhaps five to ten times the effort. If the information is really that valuable, the competitor just puts 10 good assembly programmers on the case (as I'm sure they do).
Not providing driver source does very little to protect the competitive advantage of the companies involved. It's just mindless corporate policy.
Well, we've been exposed to tables, and we've been exposed to chairs, and we've internally formulated a set of criteria that distinguish between the two.
The issue is that we make distinctions because it helps us to give meaning to the world. The mechanism involved is largely irrelevant to our conscious awareness of the world. It all starts from awareness; not the other way around.
It's nice that you had a few lectures on neural nets and brain physiology.
Why is human intelligence necessarily real, and artificial intelligence necessarily fake?
"A good chance" isn't good enough for many companies, especially when they have to cater to large numbers of customers and have a very tight IT budget.
Why should everything yield to corporate needs? I'm wholly unimpressed.
Besides, why upgrade? Part of the freedom is in the fact that the software won't expire and won't nag at you to register or update.
but if you want the kernel to be truly modular,
Well, not really. It leads to all sorts of problems (such as this one).
Uh, they don't want to release their proprietary information. Especially if it gives too much detail about their hardware when their market is very competitive (eg. video drivers).
The CPU market is easily as competitive. But I'm still waiting for a CPU with a classified instruction set.
The set of rules a human uses to make that same distinction is based on the photographs and paintings which he or she has been exposed to. Would you say that a human is capable of distinguishing between photographs and paintings because he or she has been given a set of rules to use in doing so?
It's completely irrelevant. We (us humans) don't distinguish paintings from photographs because we were "exposed to a set of rules", we do it because it gives meaning to our world.
I mean, when in the hell will my Wacom Intuos2 tablet finally work correctly?!
Who cares?
(If you can answer that question, maybe you can work with them to solve your problem.)
I don't give a crap about some utopian vison of Linux greatness because all manufacturers support Linux. It isn't happening any time soon and I have real work to do.... Just let me use the Windows drivers please.
NNs learn by example -- nobody "tought" the system a set of rules for distinguishing between one and the other,
The rules are implicit in the selection of the test sets.
A system which perfectly simulates intelligence is for all intents and purposes intelligent;
What you're saying right now is that Johnny the bodybuilder would make a good forklift -- it's completely backwards.
It is not necessary for a system to "perfectly simulate intelligence", whatever that means. For example, I think that dogs are more intelligent than chess playing machines.
Slashdot Mirror
That was the Trieste, designed and built by the Frenchmen Auguste and Jacques Piccard. The US Navy bought it from them. To my knowledge, since that great achievement, nobody has ever gone deeper (or even as deep), so it's not exactly a good example of "not hard".
I think you might mean "asinine".
No, I was being sarcastic.
I don't believe that your logic here is correct
Maybe, you make a good point...
No, _your_ argument is astute. Basically you're saying that people who support freedom of speech (fine, let's throw in music copying), also have to support child molestation and nazism. What kind of ridiculous argument is that?
The problem with FreeNet is that it is morally vacuous and philosophically corrupt. On the one hand it claims that its functionality is, or should be, covered under freedom of speech. But on the other hand it makes every effort to make it impossible to determine whether speech is in fact involved, and what the nature of the speech is: both of which are critical to establishing whether a particular expression can be protected under freedom of speech. So effectively it argues for absolute freedom of communication without any personal responsibility. This is tantamount to eradicating the rule of law: but it is exactly the rule of law that is supposed to uphold the freedom of speech!
Your statement makes very little sense. Communism is an economic system - and an economic system has very little to do with freedom of speech.
Is that so. What about the terror of the proletariat, then?
Global communication is killing language specialization.
No, not at all. Instant global communication might just as well contribute to increasing balkanization because it spreads new words and speech patterns so much faster than in the old days.
Language diversity is a function of population isolation.
Yes, but the notion that "the Internet" will blend us all into a homogenous global population is rubbish. Isolation is not always involuntary. More often than not, people actively seek out ways to isolate themselves from the broader population. This is how a group identity is created. It is exactly this mechanism that allows a forum such as Slashdot to thrive.
As the world begins talking to one another, it turns out there's only one language they all speak.
Um, I don't think you've developed a proper appreciation of how big the world really is. Yes, English is widely used as a lingua franca. But that doesn't mean that the speech patterns of Jamaicans, East Londoners and Indians all over the world are converging. If anything, they're getting more idiosyncratic with the passage of time.
Microsoft is receiving the same kind of security review that makes OpenSource products so strong in the first place.
Where is the proof of this alleged strength?
All of the biggest exploits/worms on Windows can be explained by a combination of popularity and user unawareness. The fact that the source code is not available for public auditing might be a factor in mitigating these exploits, but from all available data, it seems to be a minor factor at best.
How does the "open source is more secure" theory explain the excellent security record of closed source systems such as HPUX, AIX and Solaris when compared to (say) Linux? How does it account for the fact that shell.sourceforge.net, debian.org and savannah.gnu.org have all been hacked recently, whereas microsoft.com has never been known to be hacked?
Sorry, I don't buy it. The position that open source leads to more secure software is simply untenable.
To my considerable surprise, many people seem to think that a free software/open source solution will be or will have to be cheaper than the proprietary solutions. That's a misconception.
Free software doesn't compete with proprietary software on cost, reliability, performance or features. It's not even really appropriate to use the word compete, since the metric of success is so different for free software than for proprietary products. A proprietary product succeeds when it makes money. But when does free software succeed? When it attracts a lot of users, maybe. But what does that accomplish?
Well, it liberates users. The goal of proprietary software is to make money. The goal of free software is to liberate users. Not to make cheaper software, or even better software (although we try), but to make users more free. Any other motive just does not survive contact with reality. Nobody starts their project with the idea of making a cheaper widget. Most people start their project with the idea of making a better widget, but this seems to be a very elusive and highly subjective quality. The truth is we don't know how to make "better" software any more than the proprietary people do.
The benefit of free software is not that it's cheaper or better, since these are after the fact rationalizations at best and misleading fantasies at worst. The benefit is that it frees users from mindlessly protectionist policy, draconian restrictions on use and distribution, and a whole universe of demeaning do-not-trust-the-customer attitudes.
This freedom might be more expensive than the alternative, or it might be less expensive in the long run, or it might lead to better software, or not: these are issues that are infinitely malleable in the hands of a skilled advocate. But it all derives from the motive of freedom -- not the mere availability of source code.
I love linux as much as the next guy, but the duty of this agency is to provide the cheapest solution to server their constinuents.
Their duty is to act in the best interest of their constituents. Saving money is obviously part of that, but not the only or even the most important part. They're not a business. Linux affords them a level of freedom that proprietary solutions can't, and this is arguably a good thing for the constituents, even if it is more expensive.
Business realities, not propoganda, should dictate migration to linux.
That is just a different kind of propaganda, namely that everything should yield to market forces. Money talks, but it doesn't always have the last word.
What this experiment will have to do is prove that Linux can do it for less money and be more efficient than proprietary solutions such as Windows.
Not really, not in the limited sense you seem to be suggesting anyway. What Linux gets them is freedom from one-size-fits-all solutions, freedom from restrictive license agreements, and freedom from vendor lock-in. It's not easy putting a price tag on these freedoms, since it takes years for them to translate into tangible benefits. It might very well turn out to be more expensive than a proprietary solution and less efficient. But cost isn't the only consideration. Even if cooking yourself is more expensive and less efficient than eating at McDonalds every day, it is still a good idea to cook your own food.
For my money, I would have bet on OS X providing a better system from these perspectives.
Maybe. But OS X still isn't free. Plus, Apple sucks in Europe. It is difficult to find stuff, very expensive, and the service is lousy.
Haven't you denial-of-information-service people learned a damned thing? If port 25 is blocked, we'd just get SMTP-over-HTTP within 6 months.
You might as well ask whether Homer Simpson is insulting to Americans.
I don't see what all the fuss is about. Most of these guys are just pranksters. I see some people here frothing at the mouth about how these guys should be locked into the slammer for months, even years. What a vicious and repellant sentiment. Ironically it seems to mirror the sad, mean outlook on life that drives the virus writers: I will make them pay for my misery!
Clearly some pranks are off-bounds. When the prank goes from mischief to outright malice, swift and appropriate punishment needs to be meted out. Viruses that spy on you, or turn your computer into a spam factory, or purposely destroy data, are completely unacceptable. But for the rest? Rule number one remains that people shouldn't open attachments that they don't trust. As responsible adults, we should know better.
AppleScript is not really a programming language in the sense that Perl or Python or Ruby are programming languages. Not that it is fundamentally less powerful or anything like that, but it really serves a rather different purpose.
AppleScript is based on AppleEvents. AppleEvents are messages that applications can send to eachother. These messages appear in the event loop of the receiving application, just like mouse click events and window resize events. There are a number of predefined AppleEvents, such as open file, print file and quit. Applications can also define their own application specific events.
Now, very generally, AppleScript is a mechanism which translates AppleEvents into text (code) and vice versa. Its English appearance is just one of many dialects that it can understand.
It's a very flexible system. The lexical syntax and the grammar can be changed, the system can be extended by other applications and the "dictionary" makes it sort of self-documenting. And since it's based on AppleEvents, it can automatically generate script based on the actions that one performs in an application (although this requires a fair bit of work on the part of the application writer).
Drawbacks of AppleScript are its horrible default syntax, the cumbersome type system, and the difficulty of writing programs that fully support all its features. Also it's very slow and riddled with special cases, exceptions, and things that just flat out don't work.
So yes, on the one hand you can compare AppleScript to any other programming language, but on the other hand it is so deeply rooted in MacOS application programming that the comparison really wouldn't make sense. The closest thing you could compare it to on GNU/Linux is a combination of strace, bash, the man page database, and a fairly daft programmer.
There's another school of thought to the effect that qualia is simply a side effect of qualifying physical processes; this happens to be the one that I subscribe to.
If you believe in the primacy of physical processes, then it will not do to gloss over the colossal differences between (living) matter and a software model just like that. As far as I'm concerned, embodiment and situatedness are key to intelligence -- even though I'm no fan of Brooks.
(As for determining which physical processes qualify, what mechanism do we have other than observing behaviour to attempt inference? This is why I believe in the Turing test and its equivalents).
What this comes down to is that you claim to believe that I might as well be a computer program. My argument is that I don't think you actually believe this to be true, except perhaps as an intellectual excercise of sorts.
Reductionism has an alluring finality and irreverent quality that resonates particularly with the young and daring of mind. But its strength is simultaneously its biggest problem, because it denies the experience of everyday life. There is actually a world out there separate from our observation of same.
I think getting your hands on the full specs for the internal micro-ops the CPU process is quite hard.
Yes, but that doesn't prevent anybody from programming the chip.
The argument that open source drivers would divulge sensitive IP is just a ruse. Realistically the risk that a competitor would be able to use an open source driver to obtain crucial information for his own product is negligable when you factor in time-to-market and knowhow. What's more, extracting the same information from the binary drivers only takes perhaps five to ten times the effort. If the information is really that valuable, the competitor just puts 10 good assembly programmers on the case (as I'm sure they do).
Not providing driver source does very little to protect the competitive advantage of the companies involved. It's just mindless corporate policy.
Well, we've been exposed to tables, and we've been exposed to chairs, and we've internally formulated a set of criteria that distinguish between the two.
The issue is that we make distinctions because it helps us to give meaning to the world. The mechanism involved is largely irrelevant to our conscious awareness of the world. It all starts from awareness; not the other way around.
It's nice that you had a few lectures on neural nets and brain physiology.
Why is human intelligence necessarily real, and artificial intelligence necessarily fake?
I never made this claim.
"A good chance" isn't good enough for many companies, especially when they have to cater to large numbers of customers and have a very tight IT budget.
Why should everything yield to corporate needs? I'm wholly unimpressed.
Besides, why upgrade? Part of the freedom is in the fact that the software won't expire and won't nag at you to register or update.
but if you want the kernel to be truly modular,
Well, not really. It leads to all sorts of problems (such as this one).
There is no sense of responsibility to the users to make it easy to leverage the power of the linux kernel.
Programs written for Linux version 1.0 stand a good chance of still running today.
But yes, the internal API changes to meet user demands. The responsibility is to the future rather than the past.
The Windows drivers work right now. Easy solution.
Well, who knows. Maybe you're right.
Uh, they don't want to release their proprietary information. Especially if it gives too much detail about their hardware when their market is very competitive (eg. video drivers).
The CPU market is easily as competitive. But I'm still waiting for a CPU with a classified instruction set.
The set of rules a human uses to make that same distinction is based on the photographs and paintings which he or she has been exposed to. Would you say that a human is capable of distinguishing between photographs and paintings because he or she has been given a set of rules to use in doing so?
It's completely irrelevant. We (us humans) don't distinguish paintings from photographs because we were "exposed to a set of rules", we do it because it gives meaning to our world.
I mean, when in the hell will my Wacom Intuos2 tablet finally work correctly?!
... Just let me use the Windows drivers please.
Who cares?
(If you can answer that question, maybe you can work with them to solve your problem.)
I don't give a crap about some utopian vison of Linux greatness because all manufacturers support Linux. It isn't happening any time soon and I have real work to do.
Why don't you just use Windows?
Linux will always be behind if it doesn't allow binary drivers.
It allows binary drivers. It just doesn't encourage them, for a variety of reasons.
Companies have to make a living.
Since when do companies make a living writing binary drivers?
NNs learn by example -- nobody "tought" the system a set of rules for distinguishing between one and the other,
The rules are implicit in the selection of the test sets.
A system which perfectly simulates intelligence is for all intents and purposes intelligent;
What you're saying right now is that Johnny the bodybuilder would make a good forklift -- it's completely backwards.
It is not necessary for a system to "perfectly simulate intelligence", whatever that means. For example, I think that dogs are more intelligent than chess playing machines.