As far as I can tell, his argument was "quantum physics is complicated. The brain is complicated. Therefore it can only be explained as quantum physics".
It isn't quite that bad. His argument, essentially, was this: Godel proved that a consistent formal reasoning system cannot be both correct and complete at the same time. The human mind can be, therefore it isn't a formal reasoning system. Ordinary algorithms are equivalent to formal reasoning systems therefore the human mind can't be an algorithm, it must use quantum effects instead.
I don't accept his conclusion because I believe one of his initial premises (essentially that there is nothing that human intelligence cannot achieve) is incorrect. People are wrong sometimes, therefore Godel's theorem does not apply to them.
No, I don't call using platform standard APIs to view publically available metadata reverse engineering. Class metadata is essentially automatically processable documentation, not code that needs to be reverse engineered to be understood.
When you look at the code for java.util.HashMap, there are several fields that are serialized *before* the documented fields, using a call to ObjectInputStream.defaultReadObject(). That's a slightly magical call, in that it reads several fields automatically.
OK, but (a) the ordering of the fields is irrelevant as it is annotated in the stream, and (b) the definitions of the variables that are serialized are easily obtainable from the class metadata of Sun's implementation[1]. In fact, 'javap' tells me they are these:
int threshold;
final float loadFactor;
All we have to do now is guess what's stored in them: not hard.
Admittedly, some other classes may be harder, but I doubt many are truly problematic. And before you ask, yes, I have worked on the serialization system of a Java reimplementation (although only a subset), so I do know what I'm talking about.
[1]: Sun does not, I believe, claim any IP protection over this metadata. A lawyer ought to be consulted before following this kind of procedure, though. Failing this, it would be easy to determine the names (and example values) of the fields by examining existing serialized data. If Sun have any rights over that, making a binary compatible implementation would be nearly impossible: merely testing your implementation and correcting it if it failed to load data serialized by Sun's implementation would render it a derivitive of Sun's implementation. I'm pretty sure they don't, though.
JVM implementors basically have to rely on reserve engineering to get the ordering of the class data members right.
No you don't, javap will tell you the order of the data members. All you'll have to do is guess their meaning, which ought to be obvious from the names. In fact, it's:
But Apache are already well-and-truly on the Java bandwagon. Look at the projects listed on the front page of www.apache.org; about a third of them are Java related. An Apache Java implementation is hardly a surprise, and I don't see them getting involved in.NET related work in the foreseeable future (except potentially to incorporate an ASP.NET implementation in the httpd project).
Err, I doubt it. I don't really think anyone is using mono rather than Java because of licensing problems. There are already free implementations of Java that are just as useful as Mono is; the only problem with them is that they're severely lagging behind Sun's Java implementation in terms of new features and APIs.
As somebody who's recently done some C# /.NET programming, I can see where you're coming from. But I'm afraid the platform has a long way to go before it becomes as useful to the open source community as Java. When there is a well accepted platform-independent GUI for it (I've seen GTK#, which is getting there, but the number of projects using it so far seems to be fairly small), when its APIs reach the same level of functionality in areas like 3D graphics, telephony, e-mail manipulation and cryptography as Java's, maybe then you'll be right.
I reckon it'll take about 3-5 years before it catches up.
Note that there will actually be no problem implementing GPL projects that use the Harmony runtime. This is because the GPL excludes from its licensing requirements "anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs"; clearly the Harmony runtime will be distributed with the Harmony Java compiler, so this clause will come into effect.
It will be at least a nuisance to, say, reimplement java.util.HashMap in a binary-compatible way without illegally appropriating Sun's IP
Why do you say that? The serialized format is documented fully:
Serial Data:
The capacity of the HashMap (the length of the bucket array) is emitted (int), followed by the size of the HashMap (the number of key-value mappings), followed by the key (Object) and value (Object) for each key-value mapping represented by the HashMap The key-value mappings are emitted in the order that they are returned by entrySet().iterator(). (source)
What do you mean by page-widening? I've looked at the top two posts on your list and neither causes anything unusual to happen on my browser (firefox 1.0) until I've made the window so small the standard slashdot header doesn't fit correctly. What's the problem with these posts exactly (other than the offtopic/trollish content)?
You missed this one: is their test methodology fair? It seems not to be. They disabled file access time collection on Windows, but did not do the same under Linux. For most web serving applications, access time collection is a significant drag.
It could be. However, this test is severely flawed in that they performed registry level optimisations to the Windows setup, yet equivalent optimisations that are well documented for Linux were not performed. Therefore, we don't know.
I've actually seen this ridiculously unfair test before. The main thing that is wrong with it is that last access time gathering is switched off on the windows set up but not the Linux one. For web serving, which typically relies on large numbers of accesses to small files, last access time recording is a _severe_ performance drag.
Sorry, I'm waiting for Serenity. That's the SF event of the year, as far as I'm concerned.
The one review I've heard from someone who's seen a preview of it is that both existing and new fans will be happy with it. I'll be counting the days down.
The common viewpoint I see with them is that they believe in micro evolution but not macro evolution.
Interesting. I've never actually met anyone who holds this view. Perhaps it's a regional difference; creationism in general is less prevalent over here in the UK.
Another interesting thing to research is the Cambrian Explosion. All of a sudden a ton of new species came into existence where there were no creatures similar to them previously.
I'm not quite sure what relevance this has to your argument. Yes, the Cambrian Explosion is interesting, and the cause of it is certainly contentious. There are no shortage of theories, however, and one very interesting one is that the entire thing was triggered by the evolution of the eye, which led to an evolutionary arms race as it suddenly made possible a whole range of new adaptations and ecological niches.
I'm not sure about the legal status in either US or AU, but over here in the UK, the government is specifically exempt from patent law. That's right: patents do not apply to the government, they can use your patented invention for any government related purpose they choose.
Use of patented inventions for services of the Crown
55.-(1) Notwithstanding anything in this Act, any government department and any person authorised in writing by a government department may, for the services of the Crown [..] do any of the following acts [...] without the consent of the proprietor of the patent [...]
(a) (i) make, use, import or keep the product [etc.]
In fact, any organisation can view the source and make their own risk assessment; something you can't do with closed source software.
Hmmm. Actually, this possibility is probably a negative factor in your ability to defend against patent infringement cases. If you are running a piece of closed source software that infringes somebody's patents, and they decide to sue you over it (a weird choice, but there you go), your defence is simple: "I do not know how this software works, there is no reasonably easy way of finding out how this software works, so I cannot reasonably be expected to have known that I was infringing this patent." With open source software, all you could say is "I didn't have the time or technical expertise to examine the source code and therefore did not know that I was infringing this patent." Much less likely to work, I suspect.
Great how this software does not discuss where it comes into play..
Assumingly through a proxy, or web portal software...
It does. Read it again. Claim 9 talks about receiving an indication of a web page, retrieving that page and sending it to the user with additional information attached. Clearly a proxy server. The other two claims don't specify any particular mechanism, so either client side modification or code executing during production of the 'first web page' could implement the mechanism.
Is it just me, but aren't two of these claims the same, only 1 describes how the server performs the work whereas 16 describes it from the user's perspective?
And 9 just seems to be such a minor variation that it should be written as 'the method of claim 1, wherein the first web site is retrieved by the system and forwarded to the user with the information attached'.
The lack of References is probably going to kill this one, since nearly everything in it goes way back before 1999/2000, and they didn't cite them. That's usually a no-no.
The patent cites and "includes by reference" a prior application. I didn't realise this was possible, but presumably that document has the necessary references to prior work in the field.
Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in/home/www/php/functions/executequery.php on line 21
This is a _silly_ configuration error. Basically, apache is running with more processes than the mysql concurrent user limit. They probably upped the number of apache processes to handle the slashdotting, but didn't think about updating the mysql settings to match.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can tell, his argument was "quantum physics is complicated. The brain is complicated. Therefore it can only be explained as quantum physics".
It isn't quite that bad. His argument, essentially, was this: Godel proved that a consistent formal reasoning system cannot be both correct and complete at the same time. The human mind can be, therefore it isn't a formal reasoning system. Ordinary algorithms are equivalent to formal reasoning systems therefore the human mind can't be an algorithm, it must use quantum effects instead.
I don't accept his conclusion because I believe one of his initial premises (essentially that there is nothing that human intelligence cannot achieve) is incorrect. People are wrong sometimes, therefore Godel's theorem does not apply to them.
do we really need to see it posted here, every time a firefox sploit is found?
Or, more accurately, do we need to see it posted here twice?
It is the correct term in Britain for a lawyer who is not a barrister. I'm not sure if there's an equivalent term in the US?
No, I don't call using platform standard APIs to view publically available metadata reverse engineering. Class metadata is essentially automatically processable documentation, not code that needs to be reverse engineered to be understood.
When you look at the code for java.util.HashMap, there are several fields that are serialized *before* the documented fields, using a call to ObjectInputStream.defaultReadObject(). That's a slightly magical call, in that it reads several fields automatically.
OK, but (a) the ordering of the fields is irrelevant as it is annotated in the stream, and (b) the definitions of the variables that are serialized are easily obtainable from the class metadata of Sun's implementation[1]. In fact, 'javap' tells me they are these:
int threshold;
final float loadFactor;
All we have to do now is guess what's stored in them: not hard.
Admittedly, some other classes may be harder, but I doubt many are truly problematic. And before you ask, yes, I have worked on the serialization system of a Java reimplementation (although only a subset), so I do know what I'm talking about.
[1]: Sun does not, I believe, claim any IP protection over this metadata. A lawyer ought to be consulted before following this kind of procedure, though. Failing this, it would be easy to determine the names (and example values) of the fields by examining existing serialized data. If Sun have any rights over that, making a binary compatible implementation would be nearly impossible: merely testing your implementation and correcting it if it failed to load data serialized by Sun's implementation would render it a derivitive of Sun's implementation. I'm pretty sure they don't, though.
JVM implementors basically have to rely on reserve engineering to get the ordering of the class data members right.
No you don't, javap will tell you the order of the data members. All you'll have to do is guess their meaning, which ought to be obvious from the names. In fact, it's:
int threshold;
final float loadFactor;
But Apache are already well-and-truly on the Java bandwagon. Look at the projects listed on the front page of www.apache.org; about a third of them are Java related. An Apache Java implementation is hardly a surprise, and I don't see them getting involved in .NET related work in the foreseeable future (except potentially to incorporate an ASP.NET implementation in the httpd project).
Thank god, this puts an end to the Mono fiasco.
Err, I doubt it. I don't really think anyone is using mono rather than Java because of licensing problems. There are already free implementations of Java that are just as useful as Mono is; the only problem with them is that they're severely lagging behind Sun's Java implementation in terms of new features and APIs.
As somebody who's recently done some C# / .NET programming, I can see where you're coming from. But I'm afraid the platform has a long way to go before it becomes as useful to the open source community as Java. When there is a well accepted platform-independent GUI for it (I've seen GTK#, which is getting there, but the number of projects using it so far seems to be fairly small), when its APIs reach the same level of functionality in areas like 3D graphics, telephony, e-mail manipulation and cryptography as Java's, maybe then you'll be right.
I reckon it'll take about 3-5 years before it catches up.
Note that there will actually be no problem implementing GPL projects that use the Harmony runtime. This is because the GPL excludes from its licensing requirements "anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs"; clearly the Harmony runtime will be distributed with the Harmony Java compiler, so this clause will come into effect.
It will be at least a nuisance to, say, reimplement java.util.HashMap in a binary-compatible way without illegally appropriating Sun's IP
Why do you say that? The serialized format is documented fully:
Serial Data:
The capacity of the HashMap (the length of the bucket array) is emitted (int), followed by the size of the HashMap (the number of key-value mappings), followed by the key (Object) and value (Object) for each key-value mapping represented by the HashMap The key-value mappings are emitted in the order that they are returned by entrySet().iterator(). (source)
What do you mean by page-widening? I've looked at the top two posts on your list and neither causes anything unusual to happen on my browser (firefox 1.0) until I've made the window so small the standard slashdot header doesn't fit correctly. What's the problem with these posts exactly (other than the offtopic/trollish content)?
Good starting points:
You missed this one: is their test methodology fair? It seems not to be. They disabled file access time collection on Windows, but did not do the same under Linux. For most web serving applications, access time collection is a significant drag.
Why couldn't IIS be faster than Apache?
It could be. However, this test is severely flawed in that they performed registry level optimisations to the Windows setup, yet equivalent optimisations that are well documented for Linux were not performed. Therefore, we don't know.
I've actually seen this ridiculously unfair test before. The main thing that is wrong with it is that last access time gathering is switched off on the windows set up but not the Linux one. For web serving, which typically relies on large numbers of accesses to small files, last access time recording is a _severe_ performance drag.
Sorry, I'm waiting for Serenity. That's the SF event of the year, as far as I'm concerned.
The one review I've heard from someone who's seen a preview of it is that both existing and new fans will be happy with it. I'll be counting the days down.
The common viewpoint I see with them is that they believe in micro evolution but not macro evolution.
Interesting. I've never actually met anyone who holds this view. Perhaps it's a regional difference; creationism in general is less prevalent over here in the UK.
Another interesting thing to research is the Cambrian Explosion. All of a sudden a ton of new species came into existence where there were no creatures similar to them previously.
I'm not quite sure what relevance this has to your argument. Yes, the Cambrian Explosion is interesting, and the cause of it is certainly contentious. There are no shortage of theories, however, and one very interesting one is that the entire thing was triggered by the evolution of the eye, which led to an evolutionary arms race as it suddenly made possible a whole range of new adaptations and ecological niches.
Gah. You your notation polish reverse and hell to go can.
e tt er))).
Should(any(fool),know(is(functional(notation),b
I'm not sure about the legal status in either US or AU, but over here in the UK, the government is specifically exempt from patent law. That's right: patents do not apply to the government, they can use your patented invention for any government related purpose they choose.
Use of patented inventions for services of the Crown
55.-(1) Notwithstanding anything in this Act, any government department and any person authorised in writing by a government department may, for the services of the Crown [..] do any of the following acts [...] without the consent of the proprietor of the patent [...]
(a) (i) make, use, import or keep the product [etc.]
-- Patents Act 1977, as amended
I would expect other countries to have similar provisions in their own implementations.
In fact, any organisation can view the source and make their own risk assessment; something you can't do with closed source software.
Hmmm. Actually, this possibility is probably a negative factor in your ability to defend against patent infringement cases. If you are running a piece of closed source software that infringes somebody's patents, and they decide to sue you over it (a weird choice, but there you go), your defence is simple: "I do not know how this software works, there is no reasonably easy way of finding out how this software works, so I cannot reasonably be expected to have known that I was infringing this patent." With open source software, all you could say is "I didn't have the time or technical expertise to examine the source code and therefore did not know that I was infringing this patent." Much less likely to work, I suspect.
Great how this software does not discuss where it comes into play..
Assumingly through a proxy, or web portal software...
It does. Read it again. Claim 9 talks about receiving an indication of a web page, retrieving that page and sending it to the user with additional information attached. Clearly a proxy server. The other two claims don't specify any particular mechanism, so either client side modification or code executing during production of the 'first web page' could implement the mechanism.
Is it just me, but aren't two of these claims the same, only 1 describes how the server performs the work whereas 16 describes it from the user's perspective?
And 9 just seems to be such a minor variation that it should be written as 'the method of claim 1, wherein the first web site is retrieved by the system and forwarded to the user with the information attached'.
The lack of References is probably going to kill this one, since nearly everything in it goes way back before 1999/2000, and they didn't cite them.
That's usually a no-no.
The patent cites and "includes by reference" a prior application. I didn't realise this was possible, but presumably that document has the necessary references to prior work in the field.
Nah, you have to do it in your head. Quick, whats 37 * 52?
Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in /home/www/php/functions/executequery.php on line 21
This is a _silly_ configuration error. Basically, apache is running with more processes than the mysql concurrent user limit. They probably upped the number of apache processes to handle the slashdotting, but didn't think about updating the mysql settings to match.