The JVM is a specification
that may be implemented on different platforms as people are so inclined.
"Opening Java" will do nothing to address the problem of missing JVMs directly because the fundamental issue is one of demand. If you really need a JVM for your favorite toy OS, then start a project to build one.
If the law isn't taking assault seriously enough, then we should change that - not cook up extra "thought crime" statutes to tack on. And the use of the phrase "thought crime" here is completely apt - we're talking about a law that criminalises the thought behind the crime, rather than the act itself. This is a very very very bad precedent,
Courts routinely take into account the reasoning and motivations of the accused in determining what sort of charge to levy and the severity of the penalty. What is the difference between manslaughter and first degree murder if not the difference of the killer's mental state? Hate crimes are a natural extension of the well established precedent that some actions can be made worse when combined with a dispicable motive.
Assume for the sake of argument that life is ultimately found on Mars or elsewhere other than Earth, what can we imagine happening to religious faiths based upon the Bible?
The Absolutely Certain Answer
Exactly what has happened every other time in the history of religion when its descriptions of the world, past, present or future, are demonstrated to be false: after a period of shock, and reflection, doctrine and interpretation of the founding literature are modified to maintain an ostensibly consistent lineage of belief, and the religion continues on. Examples of this are abundant in physics and astronomy. Despite Kansas, many Christians are quite comfortable believing in both evolution and a creative God. And even in light of innumerable predictions of the end of the world that belief persists (many scholars believe the early Christians thought Jesus would return in their lifetimes). In every case where people of faith worried that a scientific discovery would undermine them (and where skeptics hoped), the desire to maintain the faith permitted the alteration of dogma should adherence to the dogma prove fatal to the system as a whole. Imagine how much coverage the passing of the Pope would have garnered had he maintained the flatness of the earth?
The point is that religious belief is amazingly resilient, (and religious texts amazingly ambivalent and their meaning malleable) and as long as no decisive proof against the existence of God is devised (proofs either way are impossible IMO) religion will always be adapting to changes forced by the progress of science. It's a perennial monkey on our collective backs, probably due to some wiring in our brains
I don't think this objection is fatal to Searle's basic view. He was interested in arguing that mental states could be derived from the physical processes of the brain, but not from simple computation using rules and states, which is what AI of the 60s and 70s was striving for.
The account, just by virtue of its monistic materialism, must allow for the possibility of a machine being in principle capable of generating consciousness. I mean, the brain is a physical entity performing observable actions that can be described according to physical, chemical and biological laws, so therefore it's basic functioning must be replicable. The weak spot in the theory is that a lot has to happen during the "emergence" phase. But there's nothing to prevent, say, a sufficiently complex neural network from generating emergent properties, perhaps even consciousness.
I don't see anything in this (admittedly thumbnail) view that would lead us either to dissect aliens or forbid us to attribute consciousness to the remote control Mao. What it does purport to prove is that any alien or communist Chairman we believe is intelligent cannot be just an overgrown Turing machine.
In short, the Chinese Room experiment is meant to undermine the AI of the previous decades for being too focused on rules and syntax and computational states. I don't see it as a rebuttal of the notion of AI in general. It wouldn't be a very good naturalistic account if it did forbid AI a priori IMO.
The system might generate syntactically correct outcomes, but have we really solved the problem if we the observers are still the ones to apply semantic content? Isn't the point of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment to show that syntactic transformations are not sufficient to imbue the transformer with a semantic understanding of its activity?
Ditto. The difference is between trying to elicit a desired response by breaking the server (like in a buffer overflow or bypassing security with a password cracker), and utilizing a well-known protocol in a normal way. HTTP is just a way of asking for information, and if you simply ask a server for something it's the server's duty to make sure it wants to honor the request.
Beyond that, I can easily imagine someone leaping at the chance to figure out if they're going to get into their dream school. This is a major overreaction on the part of HBS.
If you believe that the laws of physics are the most fundamental things there are, then the logic is inescapable.
Actually, reductionism/determinism at the level of mental phenomena is a hard sell and is hardly as obvious a conclusion as Schaeffer wants it to be. For one, there's plenty of good work going in CogSci about consciousness as an emergent phenomenon without a strictly causal relation underlying physical processes. For another, there are those (i.e., David Chalmers) who argue that consciousness is a fundamentally irreducible phenomenon. Still further, we have this strange capacity to formulate normative principles ("One ought to tell the truth") and it's hard to explain such things without some notion of free will (see Christine Korsgaard).
But Schaeffer doesn't care about these sorts of objections because he's really just interested in the punchline -- Jesus! -- and in order to set it up he has to create a problem: "The Horror of Modern (Mechanical) Man".
A brief survey of the Web didn't really turn up much in the way of details on this project, except a couple of hints that these "chromosomes" are encoded behavior patterns that may be transmitted among machines. I'm thinking of plugins. Or maybe Sex.pm.
This seems fundamentally like building a AI with pretermined valuations of objectives. Pushing the ball towards the goal is worth 50 points, running into a wall -25, inserting antenna into that sexy vixen, model HSR-VI, +1000! All of this however presumes that the act of feeling for biological creatures -- which he claims to emulate -- is fundamentally a discursive act of a calculating mind. But we don't experience feeling as the evaluation of rules, but as a physical or psychological response to stimulation.
On the other hand, code just is instruction that's translated into action via electrical impulses through hardware. It's causal the whole way through, unlike a norm that we humans utilize like "do unto others...". A norm you can violate, but there's no way for a computer to choose to violate this.humpThat(vixen). In that sense perhaps it does have the non-discursive character I think is required to make feeling what it is. Still though, I guess I'd be more impressed if there were a greater physical component to the system. Say, if upon sighting the hot vixen, model HSR-VI, the robot would overheat, thereby causing a failure to concentrate on hitting the soccer ball until satisfaction (and cooling off) were achieved.
What's your opinion about using it on nodes in a server cluster? I've been pondering using it on a cluster of about a dozen machines with identical setups (java, tomcat, mysql primarily). The idea would be to run a master server locally from which to download patches onto the nodes. Of course I'd need some way of testing the updated packages before cloning the other machines...
When it comes to something as critical to the welfare of the public and to our form of government as the assurance of fair elections, open source software should be encouraged vigorously.
Software does not become more secure by hiding the sourcecode, and election results are not made more secure by entrusting the results to a corporation. These facts, compounded by the rampant infiltration of corporate interests in the US government, and, at the same time, the vast amount of public scrutiny sure to be given an open source voting system like this one, make the choice IMO a no brainer.
can you trust a precompiled Apache HTTPD from ACME GPU/Linxu
Nope, but you also cannot trust Thugs R' Us Locksmiths.
OSS commoditizes software: it devalues code in exchange for freedom of collaboration, the ability to build on others' successes, probably a greater amount of software overall, and I would argue, a faster development cycle. The author of the original article apparently thinks that this is a detriment because it makes it easy to start a malicious company like ACME GPU/Linxu to sell a forked open source product with intentional security holes.
But we're used to this problem in other industries where products become commonly available and people can form their own businesses utilizing those commodities. And while there *are* scams, most of us accept that we need to exercise judgment in whom we trust. Anyone can go out and buy locksmithing equipment, but if you skip over a known, reputable and trusted vendor in favor of the cheaper 'Thugs' alternative, you get what deserve: a lock with more keys than you know about.
That's a different problem than the one suggested by the original -- and badly misguided -- article. In the case you mention, a security breach allowed unauthorized alterations to the codebase. And of course after any such intrusion a full code review is a necessity regardless of your development model.
The argument presented though is predicated on the "core developers" of a project intentionally creating a secret fork of the source containing security holes and using that compromised branch to build binaries. Of course this threat is equally if not more likely to occur in closed source products, and so the author presses his case with the scenario of a no-name company being formed to sell compromised open source products. Somehow we're asked to believe that the virtue of OSS -- the ability to build off of others' work -- is actually a security liability because of the ease of creating a malicious startup. Never mind that any IT manager who chooses to use the binaries from an unknown software vendor, especially if verifiably pure source is available, is clearly being negligent.
Oh give me a break. A "trust issue" in the security world means determining the extension of capacities and freedoms based upon predominately social concerns. I can allow a group password to my database, but who should be permitted into the group, etc.
Assuming that a link will take you to where it advertises is a basic expectation on the Web, not an extention of trust. IE apparently is unable to meet that expectation. To treat this as a trust issue is akin to blaming the patient for the doctor's mistake.
This is a fun thing to think about, but it's really not a good precedent for F&OSS to make compatibility decisions based upon opinions of a corporation's business practices, however despicable we think they are. F&OSS justifies its existence by claiming to give users freedom; to drop support for a platform for non-technical reasons would be a violation of its own guiding principles. Business issues should be addressed at the business level, not the technological level.
I don't like this mandatory 5 pm camp time. It seems to me that a critical test of solar technology for travel is being able to move even in low/no light situations, and thus of batteries. Why not give a start time and destination, and simply go by first across the finish line? If someone manages to build a machine that gets the optimal balance of power gathering plus battery capacity to maintain the highest average speed across lighting changes then they win.
After SCO loses they'll bill Linux vendors for their own legal/advertising expenditures. I mean c'mon, their behavior is so bizarre that surely their plan all along was to serve the community right? Surely they should see some of Red Hat, Suse, et al's profits as a result of the GPL validation!
Ethical valuations do not occur in a vacuum, but rather in a complex matrix of concerns both of principle and of practical consequence. The fact of the poor economy in is a meaningful and critical factor in choosing morality over a paycheck, especially for someone responsible for a family. Choosing to make a political statement against a pump and dump scheme at the expense of one's family is not noble or praiseworthy. If you're a bachelor and don't mind living on the edge, fine. If you have a trust fund, great. But
to claim that an action or principle is always ethical regardless of context is, frankly, naive. The sort of rigidity that you are advocating leads to absurdity.
Almost certainly, "witnessed" here means bragged to, which frankly makes perfect sense for an 18 year old probably male, probably virgin programmer. Hey, if he's up all night reading/. he may yet beat the feds and run to Canada;^)
The question is about propulsion, not weight-to-surface tension ratios sufficient for flotation. This research gives a better explanation of the mechanism by which the water skimmers move with such great efficiency (namely by created subsurface vortices with their middle pair of legs) and puts to rest the notion that it is attributable to the waves themselves created by a rowing action.
There's a process in compilation here, they don't just enter this into a database and sell it.
Hmm, perhaps what we need is an auto-spoofing service kinda like a combination of a free HTTP proxy and something like a free online encyclopedia. Rather than submitting information that is obviously false (judged by internal consistency it sounds like from your comment), you should be able to submit a request to a server that generates false but plausible personal data.
[I]t is possible to track EVERYTHING. ALL the minutes of your life... Nothing by itself may be relevant, but it is possible to uniquely identify a person by 3 or 4 markers. These markers may vary, but they CAN be pulled together.
Right, it's not so much that one data point be absolutely correct, but that there be enough roughly correct points to build a composite picture.
The metaphor I like for this is of an ever-thickening fog, where as the particle density increases so does the visibility of patterns of movement through the mist. When you think about the number of activities the average person engages in where a transaction is uniquely identified and logged it becomes clear that with access to the right databases a great portion of your day can be mapped out.
Slashdot Mirror
The JVM is a specification that may be implemented on different platforms as people are so inclined.
"Opening Java" will do nothing to address the problem of missing JVMs directly because the fundamental issue is one of demand. If you really need a JVM for your favorite toy OS, then start a project to build one.
If the law isn't taking assault seriously enough, then we should change that - not cook up extra "thought crime" statutes to tack on. And the use of the phrase "thought crime" here is completely apt - we're talking about a law that criminalises the thought behind the crime, rather than the act itself. This is a very very very bad precedent,
Courts routinely take into account the reasoning and motivations of the accused in determining what sort of charge to levy and the severity of the penalty. What is the difference between manslaughter and first degree murder if not the difference of the killer's mental state? Hate crimes are a natural extension of the well established precedent that some actions can be made worse when combined with a dispicable motive.
Assume for the sake of argument that life is ultimately found on Mars or elsewhere other than Earth, what can we imagine happening to religious faiths based upon the Bible?
The Absolutely Certain Answer
Exactly what has happened every other time in the history of religion when its descriptions of the world, past, present or future, are demonstrated to be false: after a period of shock, and reflection, doctrine and interpretation of the founding literature are modified to maintain an ostensibly consistent lineage of belief, and the religion continues on. Examples of this are abundant in physics and astronomy. Despite Kansas, many Christians are quite comfortable believing in both evolution and a creative God. And even in light of innumerable predictions of the end of the world that belief persists (many scholars believe the early Christians thought Jesus would return in their lifetimes). In every case where people of faith worried that a scientific discovery would undermine them (and where skeptics hoped), the desire to maintain the faith permitted the alteration of dogma should adherence to the dogma prove fatal to the system as a whole. Imagine how much coverage the passing of the Pope would have garnered had he maintained the flatness of the earth?
The point is that religious belief is amazingly resilient, (and religious texts amazingly ambivalent and their meaning malleable) and as long as no decisive proof against the existence of God is devised (proofs either way are impossible IMO) religion will always be adapting to changes forced by the progress of science. It's a perennial monkey on our collective backs, probably due to some wiring in our brains
I don't think this objection is fatal to Searle's basic view. He was interested in arguing that mental states could be derived from the physical processes of the brain, but not from simple computation using rules and states, which is what AI of the 60s and 70s was striving for.
The account, just by virtue of its monistic materialism, must allow for the possibility of a machine being in principle capable of generating consciousness. I mean, the brain is a physical entity performing observable actions that can be described according to physical, chemical and biological laws, so therefore it's basic functioning must be replicable. The weak spot in the theory is that a lot has to happen during the "emergence" phase. But there's nothing to prevent, say, a sufficiently complex neural network from generating emergent properties, perhaps even consciousness.
I don't see anything in this (admittedly thumbnail) view that would lead us either to dissect aliens or forbid us to attribute consciousness to the remote control Mao. What it does purport to prove is that any alien or communist Chairman we believe is intelligent cannot be just an overgrown Turing machine.
In short, the Chinese Room experiment is meant to undermine the AI of the previous decades for being too focused on rules and syntax and computational states. I don't see it as a rebuttal of the notion of AI in general. It wouldn't be a very good naturalistic account if it did forbid AI a priori IMO.
The system might generate syntactically correct outcomes, but have we really solved the problem if we the observers are still the ones to apply semantic content? Isn't the point of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment to show that syntactic transformations are not sufficient to imbue the transformer with a semantic understanding of its activity?
Ditto. The difference is between trying to elicit a desired response by breaking the server (like in a buffer overflow or bypassing security with a password cracker), and utilizing a well-known protocol in a normal way. HTTP is just a way of asking for information, and if you simply ask a server for something it's the server's duty to make sure it wants to honor the request.
Beyond that, I can easily imagine someone leaping at the chance to figure out if they're going to get into their dream school. This is a major overreaction on the part of HBS.
If you believe that the laws of physics are the most fundamental things there are, then the logic is inescapable.
Actually, reductionism/determinism at the level of mental phenomena is a hard sell and is hardly as obvious a conclusion as Schaeffer wants it to be. For one, there's plenty of good work going in CogSci about consciousness as an emergent phenomenon without a strictly causal relation underlying physical processes. For another, there are those (i.e., David Chalmers) who argue that consciousness is a fundamentally irreducible phenomenon. Still further, we have this strange capacity to formulate normative principles ("One ought to tell the truth") and it's hard to explain such things without some notion of free will (see Christine Korsgaard).
But Schaeffer doesn't care about these sorts of objections because he's really just interested in the punchline -- Jesus! -- and in order to set it up he has to create a problem: "The Horror of Modern (Mechanical) Man".
A brief survey of the Web didn't really turn up much in the way of details on this project, except a couple of hints that these "chromosomes" are encoded behavior patterns that may be transmitted among machines. I'm thinking of plugins. Or maybe Sex.pm.
This seems fundamentally like building a AI with pretermined valuations of objectives. Pushing the ball towards the goal is worth 50 points, running into a wall -25, inserting antenna into that sexy vixen, model HSR-VI, +1000! All of this however presumes that the act of feeling for biological creatures -- which he claims to emulate -- is fundamentally a discursive act of a calculating mind. But we don't experience feeling as the evaluation of rules, but as a physical or psychological response to stimulation.
On the other hand, code just is instruction that's translated into action via electrical impulses through hardware. It's causal the whole way through, unlike a norm that we humans utilize like "do unto others...". A norm you can violate, but there's no way for a computer to choose to violate this.humpThat(vixen). In that sense perhaps it does have the non-discursive character I think is required to make feeling what it is. Still though, I guess I'd be more impressed if there were a greater physical component to the system. Say, if upon sighting the hot vixen, model HSR-VI, the robot would overheat, thereby causing a failure to concentrate on hitting the soccer ball until satisfaction (and cooling off) were achieved.
What's your opinion about using it on nodes in a server cluster? I've been pondering using it on a cluster of about a dozen machines with identical setups (java, tomcat, mysql primarily). The idea would be to run a master server locally from which to download patches onto the nodes. Of course I'd need some way of testing the updated packages before cloning the other machines...
Read some Thomas Kuhn
C'mon, dust devils? Super wind? Driving at a tilt? Clearly there's a simpler explanation.
When it comes to something as critical to the welfare of the public and to our form of government as the assurance of fair elections, open source software should be encouraged vigorously.
Software does not become more secure by hiding the sourcecode, and election results are not made more secure by entrusting the results to a corporation. These facts, compounded by the rampant infiltration of corporate interests in the US government, and, at the same time, the vast amount of public scrutiny sure to be given an open source voting system like this one, make the choice IMO a no brainer.
can you trust a precompiled Apache HTTPD from ACME GPU/Linxu
Nope, but you also cannot trust Thugs R' Us Locksmiths.
OSS commoditizes software: it devalues code in exchange for freedom of collaboration, the ability to build on others' successes, probably a greater amount of software overall, and I would argue, a faster development cycle. The author of the original article apparently thinks that this is a detriment because it makes it easy to start a malicious company like ACME GPU/Linxu to sell a forked open source product with intentional security holes.
But we're used to this problem in other industries where products become commonly available and people can form their own businesses utilizing those commodities. And while there *are* scams, most of us accept that we need to exercise judgment in whom we trust. Anyone can go out and buy locksmithing equipment, but if you skip over a known, reputable and trusted vendor in favor of the cheaper 'Thugs' alternative, you get what deserve: a lock with more keys than you know about.
That's a different problem than the one suggested by the original -- and badly misguided -- article. In the case you mention, a security breach allowed unauthorized alterations to the codebase. And of course after any such intrusion a full code review is a necessity regardless of your development model.
The argument presented though is predicated on the "core developers" of a project intentionally creating a secret fork of the source containing security holes and using that compromised branch to build binaries. Of course this threat is equally if not more likely to occur in closed source products, and so the author presses his case with the scenario of a no-name company being formed to sell compromised open source products. Somehow we're asked to believe that the virtue of OSS -- the ability to build off of others' work -- is actually a security liability because of the ease of creating a malicious startup. Never mind that any IT manager who chooses to use the binaries from an unknown software vendor, especially if verifiably pure source is available, is clearly being negligent.
Oh give me a break. A "trust issue" in the security world means determining the extension of capacities and freedoms based upon predominately social concerns. I can allow a group password to my database, but who should be permitted into the group, etc.
Assuming that a link will take you to where it advertises is a basic expectation on the Web, not an extention of trust. IE apparently is unable to meet that expectation. To treat this as a trust issue is akin to blaming the patient for the doctor's mistake.
This is a fun thing to think about, but it's really not a good precedent for F&OSS to make compatibility decisions based upon opinions of a corporation's business practices, however despicable we think they are. F&OSS justifies its existence by claiming to give users freedom; to drop support for a platform for non-technical reasons would be a violation of its own guiding principles. Business issues should be addressed at the business level, not the technological level.
I don't like this mandatory 5 pm camp time. It seems to me that a critical test of solar technology for travel is being able to move even in low/no light situations, and thus of batteries. Why not give a start time and destination, and simply go by first across the finish line? If someone manages to build a machine that gets the optimal balance of power gathering plus battery capacity to maintain the highest average speed across lighting changes then they win.
After SCO loses they'll bill Linux vendors for their own legal/advertising expenditures. I mean c'mon, their behavior is so bizarre that surely their plan all along was to serve the community right? Surely they should see some of Red Hat, Suse, et al's profits as a result of the GPL validation!
Ethical valuations do not occur in a vacuum, but rather in a complex matrix of concerns both of principle and of practical consequence. The fact of the poor economy in is a meaningful and critical factor in choosing morality over a paycheck, especially for someone responsible for a family. Choosing to make a political statement against a pump and dump scheme at the expense of one's family is not noble or praiseworthy. If you're a bachelor and don't mind living on the edge, fine. If you have a trust fund, great. But to claim that an action or principle is always ethical regardless of context is, frankly, naive. The sort of rigidity that you are advocating leads to absurdity.
And correct! See for yourself!
Almost certainly, "witnessed" here means bragged to, which frankly makes perfect sense for an 18 year old probably male, probably virgin programmer. Hey, if he's up all night reading /. he may yet beat the feds and run to Canada ;^)
The question is about propulsion, not weight-to-surface tension ratios sufficient for flotation. This research gives a better explanation of the mechanism by which the water skimmers move with such great efficiency (namely by created subsurface vortices with their middle pair of legs) and puts to rest the notion that it is attributable to the waves themselves created by a rowing action.
There's a process in compilation here, they don't just enter this into a database and sell it.
Hmm, perhaps what we need is an auto-spoofing service kinda like a combination of a free HTTP proxy and something like a free online encyclopedia. Rather than submitting information that is obviously false (judged by internal consistency it sounds like from your comment), you should be able to submit a request to a server that generates false but plausible personal data.
[I]t is possible to track EVERYTHING. ALL the minutes of your life ... Nothing by itself may be relevant, but it is possible to uniquely identify a person by 3 or 4 markers. These markers may vary, but they CAN be pulled together.
Right, it's not so much that one data point be absolutely correct, but that there be enough roughly correct points to build a composite picture.
The metaphor I like for this is of an ever-thickening fog, where as the particle density increases so does the visibility of patterns of movement through the mist. When you think about the number of activities the average person engages in where a transaction is uniquely identified and logged it becomes clear that with access to the right databases a great portion of your day can be mapped out.