Well, I think you're missing my point..
You don't need to define the nature of your own experience to know it's real (you have direct evidence of its reality everytime you look at the red paint!:-)
You do need to define it in order to communicate it to someone.
That is why you know what red looks like to you, but you have no way of telling me what it looks like to you.
Conscious experience, in that it has an aspect that defies formal definition, is unlike your auto..
See?
Or are you saying that since you can't define your experience of red (can you?) then it isn't real?
Re the chinese room: your analogy with the car is a bit misleading - we're talking about consciousness, not a collection of auto parts!
You're basically arguing the functionalist / computationalist position that I outlined in my post - that consciousness can be exhaustively accounted for by the functional properties (in terms of inputs, states, relations between states, and outputs) of a given entity.
This is certainly a popular view. However, to be accounted for in a functional way, entities need to have well-defined properties - they need to have a representation in terms of some formal system, just as a computer program will only work if all the states it sends the CPU into have well-defined representations in terms of the formal system which describes the microcode of the CPU.
My contention is that our experience of red has no such well-defined representation. If it did, there would be a way of conveying to someone blind from birth what the experience of red is like, or what the difference is between red and green to a red/green colour-blind person, or, indeed, of verifying that my experience of red is like yours.
If you can come up with one, I will withdraw my contention!
Re: the red paint: The question is not whether the red paint is still red paint in a cave without light. Being red is indeed a "classification outside of perception" in that sense. The question is one of how we account for our experience of red. You can choose to account for it in terms of the functional relationship between "red experiences" and our behaviour and internal states (our response: "it is red!" when asked what colour the paint we're looking at is (once someone has dragged it out of the cave!;-) and all the computational processes that go into that response) but then you have to deal with my objection to that account, above, regards the lack of a functionalism-friendly well-defined representation not for the optical properties of the paint (they are plenty well defined) but for our experience of looking at it.
Re: "hook it up and talk to it"
Well, that's one view. On the other hand, imagine a room full of people, trained to collectively implement a simulation of a Chinese speaking brain. None of the people speak Chinese individually, they just follow symbol-manipulating rules. Then hook that room up to a Chinese speaking human and let them have a conversation. Does the ability of the room full of people to converse in Chinese indicate that there's a Chinese-speaking consciousness in the room somewhere? Where is it, exactly?
Re: your PS. Yes - we all agree that red paint is red. No problem with that. But: what does it look like? Are you saying that our experience of red is somehow present in the optical properties of the paint? The conventional picture is that the experience is in our heads, not in the paint!
This whole area is a rats-nest!
Two questions raised in the *parents - how would we tell if it was conscious? Is it a human consciousness?
Assume the completed project does model a human brain, then according to the leading theory ("functionalism") then as it's a functional replica of a human brain, it has all the properties of a human brain - including consciousness.
The question "how would you tell?" is one that the functionalists get asked a lot!
The usual answer is that in the future we will know how to match functional (or in some variations, physical) states to conscious states. When this is done, we'll have a set of psycho-functional (or psycho-physical) laws, and will be able to say, with confidence, that if it's in state X it is having experience Y.
The argument that stands best against that idea is that no matter how well correlated X is with Y, just naming Y doesn't tell us "what it's like to be in state Y" for the system that is in state X. Like the prisoners' jokes ("53!", "hahah, that's a good 'un!") there seems to be a big GAP between the code and the experience.
Even supposing the brain-model to be conscious, how would we verify that red looks to it as red looks to us? What could we do, print out the hex code for the colour it's experiencing ("#FF0000"!)? Put the colour on a screen? But wait - our just looking at the screen tells us what it's like to be us looking at the screen, not what it's like to be the brain-model looking at it...
Positions which hold there must be more than a functional state involved in determining "what it's like" range from "physicalism" - the physical details determine the experience, through "physical-functionalism" - it's a mixture, with the functional relations accounting for behaviour and information processing, and the experiential details provided by the physical realisation - to what has been called "transcendentalism": neither functional nor physical models have the epistemelogical clout to get us any closer to determining the "what it's like". Thomas Nagel's paper What is it like to be a bat? is the classic statement of that position.
Suppose the case goes on being undecided, and we really can't tell. Then, as Hilary Puttnam has argued, perhaps we should play safe and regard the permanent switching-off (or erasure) of such a model as an act equivalent to murder, so long as the model is functionally like a human (it is able to hold a normal conversation).
But given the higher prestige and longer prep time of povcomp (irtc competitions are bi-monthly) it's not so surprising that the balance of the images have a more polished feel.
On the other hand, some of the povcomp entries are recognisable versions of irtc entries. The Gilles Tran "Wet Bird", posted as an example of good tracing (yeah! It's my favourite ever raytraced image - see the link somewhere up above) was itself an irtc winner.
Anyone inspired to look into POVRay by this story should take advantage of http://news.povray.org/ too. Lots of expertise available for mere politeness over there.
All the stories I found on this are from an AFP story which quotes a story by Cuban government daily Juventud Rebelde, which you can find here in Spanish. The Google translation which follows seems to hint they have already demo'ed their own distro, but that may be an automated translation vagary:
Cuba is organizing the progressive migration of the computers installed in the organisms of the Central Administration of the State towards free software, on the base of the operating system Linux, eliminating therefore the almost exclusive presence of the Windows in the machines.
The news extended during a conference offered by Robert of the Port [Haha! "Roberto Del Puerto"], director of the Office for the Computerization of the Society[!], in III the Factory of Free Software, which took place during just finalized Convention the Computer science International 2005.
The operating system Linux, created in the decade of 1980 by Linus Torval, difference of similars like Windows, Microsoft, in which its source code totally is opened, and therefore can be modified and distributed by the user whichever times it wants.
The Island, that it has at the moment more than 1500 users of Linux and one community of strong developer in several provinces of the country, already counts also on its own distribution of Linux --un joint of programs grouped according to its benefits and quality -- that was presented/displayed yesterday.
In addition, the Office for Computerization has designed a strategy that includes/understands actions of organization, techniques, design of a legal frame, as well as the qualification and the gradual change of the systems of Windows to Linux.
The policy will be rectoreada by a National Group, that integrates among others the own Office, the ministries of Justice, the Interior, of Computer science and the Communications, the Network Telematics of Health (Infomed), the CUJAE, the Young Club and the University of Computer science Sciences. This last one, with more than 6 000 students, already has destined one of its faculties for the development of programs on Linux.
They're obviously just in the habit of making things up. Look at the other "apology" here:
The BBC also released a quote from Christopher, claiming he had said he hoped viewers "continued to enjoy the series," but it's now admitted it did not consult him about that statement.
So: they "released a quote" without "consulting" the author of the "quote"?
I think what they're trying to say is: "Also, we made up a statement from Christopher that he didn't actually say, but it sounded nice, so we published it."
The practiced way in which they dress up their lying ("released a quote"? There was no @#!$ing "quote"!) shows how endemic this is. Probably a habit acquired from their political reporting where they can often diverge from the facts with impunity.
Fact: George Orwell based much of 1984 on his experience working in BBC news.
Re:Big surprise... feh
on
CherryOS On Hold
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· Score: 4, Informative
From reading some of the posts at PearPC forum CherryOS thread, the developers' lawyers have been in touch and CherryOS has not only been withdrawn, but the company are offering refunds to customers requesting them.
We are currently evaluating a number of issues with the product [CherryOS]. Unfortunately at this time we have another important requirement with a different product. Since we cannot fix CherryOS right now we've decided to take it off the shelves.
Should you require a refund we would be more then happy to obligate you.
That might also fit the scenario of limiting legal exposure and/or acting in response to legal approaches made on behalf of the PearPC developers.
I agree about the "flying car" aspect, absolutely - the only info available on 3dsolar is a sorry piece of PR fluff. In particular there seems to be confusion about the 3D aspect. The PR claims that "the images are created using a single 2D view". Now you simply can't create 3D images from a single 2D image (if I am understanding this vagueness correctly), because you don't have the 3D information. Information does not magic itself into existence!
But why do you say it's not related? They both project "into the air", and both mimic interactivity. (Heliodisplay is explicitly 2-D, 3Dsolar is likely at most "2.5-D";-) So do you have a particular reason to suspect that 3Dsolar is not just an enhancement or adaption of helio?
Typo, sorry, that's "heliodisplay" (not "heliosdisplay") - while I'm here, heliodisplay works by "modifying" air (apparently electromagnetically, perhaps ionization) so that it can act as a screen onto which a 2-D image is projected.
Heliodisplay and 3Dsolar seem to share the interactive property whereby the user's hand or pointing stick can appear to push objects around - in heliodisplay this works by laser-tracking the user's hand and simulating the results of pushing, apparently.
Noting the semantic compatibility between "solar" and "helios", could this be a development based on (or just a re-hash of) the heliosdisplay technology that's been mentioned here before? (to get the nyt article without a login, just google this and click on the link, at least that works for me.)
A U.S. Army internal study of the war reveals, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, that as the Iraqi regime was collapsing that day, U.S. Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad. It was a Marine colonel who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said, with the PSYOP team making it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi action.
First, the colonel, who was not named in the report, selected the statue as a "target of opportunity." Then the PSYOP team used loudspeakers to encourage Iraqi civilians, many of them young people, to assemble and assist.
But Marines had already draped an American flag over the statue's face. "God bless them, but we were thinking from PSYOP school that this was just bad news," the PSYOP member wrote in the report. "We didn't want to look like an occupation force." A PSYOP sergeant quickly replaced the American flag with an Iraqi flag.
"Ultimately," the Los Angeles Times report concluded, "a Marine recovery vehicle toppled the statue with a chain, but the effort appeared to be Iraqi-inspired because the PSYOP team had managed to pack the vehicle with cheering Iraqi children."
A warranty is that the item is fit for some purpose.
Simply state the purpose as "hard-disk filler": This product is guaranteed to occupy more than 50 kilobytes on your hard disk. Any other use is at your own discretion.
Re:You aren't going to be able to fix this locally
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Traffic Shaping on DSL?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Nope. It may well work to apply a fix at the local end. It all depends on what actual traffic is causing the problem
The asymmetry of ADSL is a business not a technical "feature" - and it's based not on some wild conspiracy to stamp out freedom and file sharing (as in the response far above this one) but on the sound knowledge that most traffic just is asymmetric - typically you have 1500 bytes of webpage arriving downstream for every 40 byte acknowledgement you send upstream, at least in the use-model that ADSL was constructed on. So it would just be a plain old waste of money to provision for symmetric network use.
Where I am, we have a network of about 80 users sharing a 2M down, 256k up, ADSL connection. This worked fine until some of our users discovered gnutella.
Gnutella is a very bandwidth-hungry protocol, and tends to saturate the upstream bandwidth on ADSL. This resulted in dramatic loss of performance for our web users, for reasons explained above (namely that since acks get delayed, the nagel algorithm on the other end kicks in, reading this as general congestion, and slows the sending rate down dramatically.
I fixed this by installing iptables and the tc ("traffic control") application on the linux box we use for a router. This works using "class based queueing" - you divide up your traffic into several classes, depending what their source and destination IP and ports are (or if they're related to other traffic, with particular ports and IPs). And then you give each class a bandwidth limit (hard or soft).
The way we do this is to use the iptables (successor of ipchains) functionality to insert a "marker" into each relevant packet, and then have tc put them into the appropriate class based on that mark - this gives you all the selectivity (and clarity!) of picking packets that iptables offers.
In our simple setup, reserving 64k or so of bandwidth purely for acks going back to web servers (ie going to port 80) and a few other types of traffic, and a bit of fine tuning, is enough to keep the connection very usable, and let people use gnutella on it as well (at a rate that's reduced a little.)
In the face of constant gnutella traffic, this improved our web connectivity by about 900% rather than 10%. Since you only send a 40 byte ack for each 1500 bytes you receive, a ratio of about 37:1, reserving 64k for acks is enough to cover for 37*64 = (over 2M) downstream traffic.
If you run, say, a local ftp server, you could isolate the traffic from that very easily by marking packets which originate from port 20 and 21 on its IP address (assuming the ftp server is well-behaved and sends its data-connection packets from port 20) and limiting them so that you save 30k or whatever upstream for your other traffic.
None of this needs to be done at or beyond the provider's equipment. Because we limit the rate at which we send traffic to the provider, their equipment doesn't get its queue filled, ever! (unless they're not fulfilling their committed data rate, which we can't really control).
So a local solution may be entirely possible - this will depend on just what traffic is clogging up the upstream.
As for specific software recommendations, I don't know of anything that does this on windows, personally. I suspect it's likely to be payware, and will cost more than an old PC that you can run linux on. We're using a P133 with 32M and I have a feeling that it's slightly overspecified (at least on RAM - I think 16 or likely 8 M would do fine).
Perhaps the most interesting is Scot Aaranson's, submitted to Quantum Information and Computing, where some of Wolfram's claims are actually unearthed and analysed by someone who knows their stuff.
Here's a quote from the conclusion of that review:
In computational complexity, we argued that Wolfram often recapitulates existing ideas (such as pseudorandomness and the intractability of simple instances of NP-complete problems), albeit without precise definitions or proofs, and with greater claims of significance. On the other hand, some of the book's contents, such as the explicit constructions of Turing machines, may be of interest to theoretical computer scientists.
[Wolfram has supplied a construction of a UTM for a "rule 110" 1D CA, found by a worker at Wolfram Research. I think he means this. However, Wolfram has failed to note that the construction involves exponential slowness as the complexity of the input increases..]
In physics, the book proposes that spacetime be viewed in terms of causal networks arising from graph rewriting systems. The causal network models are intriguing, and in our opinion merit further mathematical study. However, their relevance to physics is difficult to evaluate without the details that Wolfram declines to supply.
[Apparently Wolfram hints in ANKOS that he has worked out details of this using standard physics formalisms, but he is shy about providing them, apparently preferring that physicists should do the constructions themselves!].
As for the proposal that a deterministic, relativistically invariant, causal invariant model underlies quantum mechanics, we argued that it fails - even if quantum mechanics breaks down for more than two particles, and even if, as Wolfram suggests, one allows long-range threads to connect entangled particles. Exactly what kinds of classical models could underlie quantum mechanics is a question of great importance, but Wolfram makes no serious effort to address the question.
[There's a section in the review which analyses Wolfram's theories in the light of Bell's theorem, and apparently finds big fault with it.]
In general, Aaronson finds that Wolfram's decision to go it alone works to the detriment of the book, but still credits it with being an excellent popularisation of many scientific fields, once you subtract the posturing and grandiose claims about CA. A common thread in some of the more literate reviews is that Wolfram ignores and downplays the work of many people in fields where he's claiming to have made big advances.
windows has been preemptive since win95??? Is this some other form of 'preemptiveness'?
Windows' "preemptiveness" refers, as explained somewhere else here, to the windows kernel being able to jump in and stop any user process executing to give the next one its term - so (in theory) no user-run program can hog all of the CPU and resources.
Linux has always done this - it's the standard way to write a unix kernel.
In relation to the audio discussion, preemptive in a linux kernel means (as far as I understand it) that the kernel attempts to guarantee a minimum time between an interrupt coming in on some device and control being handed to the driver for that device. It does this by preempting its own tasks in order to hand control over to the driver for the device needing the attention (the driver, of course, runs as a kernel process, also).
Typically, the goal is to get a maximum latency of 10ms or better (less) between the interrupt and the waking up of the driver.
In a professional audio situation, of course, the user can go a long way by stripping all the unnecessary hardware and tasks out of the configuration of the machine, which will mean that (if done properly) the only thing which can get in the way is linux' internal book-keeping. This is a different situation to playing with audio apps on a networked computer while you print out web pages..;)
Beyond this, there is real-time linux in which (as I recall) a hard maximum latency of 2ms or so is claimed. But the overheads introduced by all the timing and checking which guarantees this impact the performance to the extent that it's quite a different beast, for specialised applications.
Some audio programmers would like a low-latency patch (either the preemptive one or some other) which has a soft guarantee of "almost all" latencies below 5-10 ms to go into the standard kernel because they would like their userbase not to have to deal with the complexities of kernel recompilation and/or patching, but this is a pretty tall order because Linux will not like having basically ugly fiddly designs with lots of volatile little conditionals which have to be fiddled with everytime something changes going into the beautiful kernel.
Maybe vendors like mandrake should pick up the baton and provide a low-latency alternative kernel installable with their gui tools or at install time, which would keep everyone happy at the cost of not too much effort and space.
So yes, if there was a bug that stopped an installer working, I would expect it to be fixed so soon. Traditionaly before it was released.
I realise that the installer in question is not a standard part of every Linux distribution, but then you can't point out all of the good things of distributed open source developments, and then gloss over bad things like this as being impossible to spot before release.
Just the usual rebuttal to the usual 'open source fixes bugs quickly' post.
Hardly a valid comparison. You should rather compare distros if you're going to make comparisons with payware. And of course the distributors do have their testing procedures.
It's pretty obvious that a kernel bug such as this one would never make it into a distro such as suse or mandrake, etc, simply because (apart from any testing they do) they do read the kernel list!
Linus' stand on this and other "marketing" issues has always been admirably robust: "do what you like with the kernel, I'm only interested in keeping improving it".
If you want to compare the Linux development process to payware processes, do it like this:
kernel mailing list
=> internal development releases
distro teams => QA department
distribution realeases => "release to manufacturing"
Anyone who uses computer networks much comes to realize sooner or later that interoperability is a sine qua non for the effective use of these technologies.
The words "reasonable and non-discriminatory", in this context, would hopefully suggest that the w3c are rightly concerned about the effects of licensing on this interoperability. But they are fuzzy and subjective terms - I would have thought a standards committee would have sufficient experience to teach them that such terms are a major disadvantage in defining a policy which will affect millions of people world-wide.
In my view, the words "reasonable and non-discriminatory" are best interpreted to mean "guaranteed to be open and free to use by all".
The GPL is an excellent example of a license which meets the aspirations indicated by "reasonable and non-discriminatory". It is so because it does not impose restrictions on who can use what is licensed.
Indeed, this approach is the ONLY reasonable one in a world where interoperability is paramount - any restrictions, financial or otherwise, on the users of "standards" issued under a lesser license do not meet the definition "reasonable and non-discriminatory" and will have a negative impact on the usability and effectiveness of the technologies they are ostensibly set up to enhance.
If the w3c don't insist on real openness (and straight-talking in their own descriptive terms) they are not only damaging severely their own credibility, they are inflicting major damage on the cultures and artisans who have played a large part in creating the major public good we have in the web today. Therefore they are harming that public good. We all lose.
It hardly seems the w3c will be doing a good job of fulfilling their obligations in maintaining that public good if they are prepared to endorse standards which may be impossible to implement on the most popular web server on the Internet for the simple reason that no money is available to pay the license fees, or that will be impossible to implement on new browser software for the same reason. Such licenses, in the context of interoperability, can only be described as "reasonable" by a lawyer or a liar.
So my question is: why don't the w3c simply require that the licenses concerned meet the standards exemplified by the GPL, or, if that is their intent, why don't they use words which are less Orwellian and less susceptible to subtle changes of meaning and interpretation? Personally I would prefer the words "No-fee and unrestricted use", which have the advantage of saying what they mean.
I think the American public should be a little more sceptical about political posturing. When a politician says there will be "a new kind of war" it doesn't necessarily follow that there will be anything "new" about what will happen - except new levels of debasement of the English language, perhaps.
Use of overwhelming force to beat already poor countries further into the ground, continued erosion of civil liberties, increasing the gap between political rhetoric and what is actually going on and why - none of these are "new" at all, just the continuation of existing trends, going back 40 years or so.
As for a war on "terrorists and those who harbour them" avenging the terrible "assault on democracy" - this is laughable. The CIA has been subverting elections around the globe since its inception, and propping up dictatorial regimes where there is no democracy in sight. There's a long, long list of countries where this has occurred.
America is also one of the largest state sponsors of terrorism. They trained noted terrorist Osama bin Laden at their famous "School of the Americas"
which specialises in teaching subversion, torture and terrorism (recently renamed, but not shut down), they helped Saddam Hussein into power and helped him keep there...
Politicians lie, distort and fabricate in order to manipulate you, and the case in point is just another example of their tweaking your emotional response to a human tragedy in order to justify big arms spending, further interventionist adventures, and further erosion of your freedoms. Don't buy it.
This is quite true. Moreover, Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion material just in order to create a world and a set of events for the elvish languages he'd been inventing since his late childhood to exist in. He describes in his foreward how he set out to write a simple sequel to the Hobbit at the insistence of his publishers, who had found the Silmarillion material to be unpublishable, and found himself drawn into the world of the silmarils despite these intentions, with the result that, as you state, the LOTR becomes a bridge between originally separate worlds of the Shire and Gondolin.
Also JRRT was well into the writing of LOTR during the second world war - he notes somewhere that he was sending an early draft of the part dealing with Frodo and Sam's journey into Mordor in letters to his son Christopher who was serving as a soldier at the time.
Bilbo left middle-Earth at an age of 100 (I think) and he was then the oldes hobbit ever to live.
Um, no. Recall that Bilbo's party at the start of LOTR was for his 111th birthday (Frodo was 33, making the sum of their ages one gross - a joke that didn't go down to well with the ever-so refined hobbits at the party). It was then some years before Frodo headed off for his own adventure. Bilbo was 130 by the time he left for the blessed isles - beating the previous record Gerontius (the Old) Took by one year.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think you're missing my point.. You don't need to define the nature of your own experience to know it's real (you have direct evidence of its reality everytime you look at the red paint! :-)
You do need to define it in order to communicate it to someone.
That is why you know what red looks like to you, but you have no way of telling me what it looks like to you.
Conscious experience, in that it has an aspect that defies formal definition, is unlike your auto..
See?
Or are you saying that since you can't define your experience of red (can you?) then it isn't real?
You're basically arguing the functionalist / computationalist position that I outlined in my post - that consciousness can be exhaustively accounted for by the functional properties (in terms of inputs, states, relations between states, and outputs) of a given entity.
This is certainly a popular view. However, to be accounted for in a functional way, entities need to have well-defined properties - they need to have a representation in terms of some formal system, just as a computer program will only work if all the states it sends the CPU into have well-defined representations in terms of the formal system which describes the microcode of the CPU.
My contention is that our experience of red has no such well-defined representation. If it did, there would be a way of conveying to someone blind from birth what the experience of red is like, or what the difference is between red and green to a red/green colour-blind person, or, indeed, of verifying that my experience of red is like yours.
If you can come up with one, I will withdraw my contention!
Re: the red paint: The question is not whether the red paint is still red paint in a cave without light. Being red is indeed a "classification outside of perception" in that sense. The question is one of how we account for our experience of red. You can choose to account for it in terms of the functional relationship between "red experiences" and our behaviour and internal states (our response: "it is red!" when asked what colour the paint we're looking at is (once someone has dragged it out of the cave! ;-) and all the computational processes that go into that response) but then you have to deal with my objection to that account, above, regards the lack of a functionalism-friendly well-defined representation not for the optical properties of the paint (they are plenty well defined) but for our experience of looking at it.
Re: your PS. Yes - we all agree that red paint is red. No problem with that. But: what does it look like? Are you saying that our experience of red is somehow present in the optical properties of the paint? The conventional picture is that the experience is in our heads, not in the paint!
Assume the completed project does model a human brain, then according to the leading theory ("functionalism") then as it's a functional replica of a human brain, it has all the properties of a human brain - including consciousness.
The question "how would you tell?" is one that the functionalists get asked a lot!
The usual answer is that in the future we will know how to match functional (or in some variations, physical) states to conscious states. When this is done, we'll have a set of psycho-functional (or psycho-physical) laws, and will be able to say, with confidence, that if it's in state X it is having experience Y.
The argument that stands best against that idea is that no matter how well correlated X is with Y, just naming Y doesn't tell us "what it's like to be in state Y" for the system that is in state X. Like the prisoners' jokes ("53!", "hahah, that's a good 'un!") there seems to be a big GAP between the code and the experience.
Even supposing the brain-model to be conscious, how would we verify that red looks to it as red looks to us? What could we do, print out the hex code for the colour it's experiencing ("#FF0000"!)? Put the colour on a screen? But wait - our just looking at the screen tells us what it's like to be us looking at the screen, not what it's like to be the brain-model looking at it...
Positions which hold there must be more than a functional state involved in determining "what it's like" range from "physicalism" - the physical details determine the experience, through "physical-functionalism" - it's a mixture, with the functional relations accounting for behaviour and information processing, and the experiential details provided by the physical realisation - to what has been called "transcendentalism": neither functional nor physical models have the epistemelogical clout to get us any closer to determining the "what it's like". Thomas Nagel's paper What is it like to be a bat? is the classic statement of that position.
Suppose the case goes on being undecided, and we really can't tell. Then, as Hilary Puttnam has argued, perhaps we should play safe and regard the permanent switching-off (or erasure) of such a model as an act equivalent to murder, so long as the model is functionally like a human (it is able to hold a normal conversation).
There's a vast literature concerning the issue. See this bibliography by David Chalmers for a list of 1082 papers, just on the "what it's like" aspect, alone! That is part one of Chalmers' excellent and comprehensive bibliography of the philosophy of mind.
But given the higher prestige and longer prep time of povcomp (irtc competitions are bi-monthly) it's not so surprising that the balance of the images have a more polished feel. On the other hand, some of the povcomp entries are recognisable versions of irtc entries. The Gilles Tran "Wet Bird", posted as an example of good tracing (yeah! It's my favourite ever raytraced image - see the link somewhere up above) was itself an irtc winner. Anyone inspired to look into POVRay by this story should take advantage of http://news.povray.org/ too. Lots of expertise available for mere politeness over there.
I think what they're trying to say is: "Also, we made up a statement from Christopher that he didn't actually say, but it sounded nice, so we published it."
The practiced way in which they dress up their lying ("released a quote"? There was no @#!$ing "quote"!) shows how endemic this is. Probably a habit acquired from their political reporting where they can often diverge from the facts with impunity.
Fact: George Orwell based much of 1984 on his experience working in BBC news.
One post quotes a letter from them:
That might also fit the scenario of limiting legal exposure and/or acting in response to legal approaches made on behalf of the PearPC developers.But why do you say it's not related? They both project "into the air", and both mimic interactivity. (Heliodisplay is explicitly 2-D, 3Dsolar is likely at most "2.5-D" ;-) So do you have a particular reason to suspect that 3Dsolar is not just an enhancement or adaption of helio?
Heliodisplay and 3Dsolar seem to share the interactive property whereby the user's hand or pointing stick can appear to push objects around - in heliodisplay this works by laser-tracking the user's hand and simulating the results of pushing, apparently.
At least one blogger seems to be equating them.
I'm not sure about the following ID of Chalabi, though.. looks a lot like David Ferry to me!</conspiratology>
Simply state the purpose as "hard-disk filler": This product is guaranteed to occupy more than 50 kilobytes on your hard disk. Any other use is at your own discretion.
The asymmetry of ADSL is a business not a technical "feature" - and it's based not on some wild conspiracy to stamp out freedom and file sharing (as in the response far above this one) but on the sound knowledge that most traffic just is asymmetric - typically you have 1500 bytes of webpage arriving downstream for every 40 byte acknowledgement you send upstream, at least in the use-model that ADSL was constructed on. So it would just be a plain old waste of money to provision for symmetric network use.
Where I am, we have a network of about 80 users sharing a 2M down, 256k up, ADSL connection. This worked fine until some of our users discovered gnutella.
Gnutella is a very bandwidth-hungry protocol, and tends to saturate the upstream bandwidth on ADSL. This resulted in dramatic loss of performance for our web users, for reasons explained above (namely that since acks get delayed, the nagel algorithm on the other end kicks in, reading this as general congestion, and slows the sending rate down dramatically.
I fixed this by installing iptables and the tc ("traffic control") application on the linux box we use for a router. This works using "class based queueing" - you divide up your traffic into several classes, depending what their source and destination IP and ports are (or if they're related to other traffic, with particular ports and IPs). And then you give each class a bandwidth limit (hard or soft).
The way we do this is to use the iptables (successor of ipchains) functionality to insert a "marker" into each relevant packet, and then have tc put them into the appropriate class based on that mark - this gives you all the selectivity (and clarity!) of picking packets that iptables offers.
In our simple setup, reserving 64k or so of bandwidth purely for acks going back to web servers (ie going to port 80) and a few other types of traffic, and a bit of fine tuning, is enough to keep the connection very usable, and let people use gnutella on it as well (at a rate that's reduced a little.)
In the face of constant gnutella traffic, this improved our web connectivity by about 900% rather than 10%. Since you only send a 40 byte ack for each 1500 bytes you receive, a ratio of about 37:1, reserving 64k for acks is enough to cover for 37*64 = (over 2M) downstream traffic.
If you run, say, a local ftp server, you could isolate the traffic from that very easily by marking packets which originate from port 20 and 21 on its IP address (assuming the ftp server is well-behaved and sends its data-connection packets from port 20) and limiting them so that you save 30k or whatever upstream for your other traffic.
None of this needs to be done at or beyond the provider's equipment. Because we limit the rate at which we send traffic to the provider, their equipment doesn't get its queue filled, ever! (unless they're not fulfilling their committed data rate, which we can't really control).
So a local solution may be entirely possible - this will depend on just what traffic is clogging up the upstream.
As for specific software recommendations, I don't know of anything that does this on windows, personally. I suspect it's likely to be payware, and will cost more than an old PC that you can run linux on. We're using a P133 with 32M and I have a feeling that it's slightly overspecified (at least on RAM - I think 16 or likely 8 M would do fine).
Perhaps the most interesting is Scot Aaranson's, submitted to Quantum Information and Computing, where some of Wolfram's claims are actually unearthed and analysed by someone who knows their stuff.
Here's a quote from the conclusion of that review:
[Wolfram has supplied a construction of a UTM for a "rule 110" 1D CA, found by a worker at Wolfram Research. I think he means this. However, Wolfram has failed to note that the construction involves exponential slowness as the complexity of the input increases..]
[Apparently Wolfram hints in ANKOS that he has worked out details of this using standard physics formalisms, but he is shy about providing them, apparently preferring that physicists should do the constructions themselves!].
[There's a section in the review which analyses Wolfram's theories in the light of Bell's theorem, and apparently finds big fault with it.]
In general, Aaronson finds that Wolfram's decision to go it alone works to the detriment of the book, but still credits it with being an excellent popularisation of many scientific fields, once you subtract the posturing and grandiose claims about CA. A common thread in some of the more literate reviews is that Wolfram ignores and downplays the work of many people in fields where he's claiming to have made big advances.
Windows' "preemptiveness" refers, as explained somewhere else here, to the windows kernel being able to jump in and stop any user process executing to give the next one its term - so (in theory) no user-run program can hog all of the CPU and resources.
Linux has always done this - it's the standard way to write a unix kernel.
In relation to the audio discussion, preemptive in a linux kernel means (as far as I understand it) that the kernel attempts to guarantee a minimum time between an interrupt coming in on some device and control being handed to the driver for that device. It does this by preempting its own tasks in order to hand control over to the driver for the device needing the attention (the driver, of course, runs as a kernel process, also).
Typically, the goal is to get a maximum latency of 10ms or better (less) between the interrupt and the waking up of the driver.
In a professional audio situation, of course, the user can go a long way by stripping all the unnecessary hardware and tasks out of the configuration of the machine, which will mean that (if done properly) the only thing which can get in the way is linux' internal book-keeping. This is a different situation to playing with audio apps on a networked computer while you print out web pages..
Beyond this, there is real-time linux in which (as I recall) a hard maximum latency of 2ms or so is claimed. But the overheads introduced by all the timing and checking which guarantees this impact the performance to the extent that it's quite a different beast, for specialised applications.
Some audio programmers would like a low-latency patch (either the preemptive one or some other) which has a soft guarantee of "almost all" latencies below 5-10 ms to go into the standard kernel because they would like their userbase not to have to deal with the complexities of kernel recompilation and/or patching, but this is a pretty tall order because Linux will not like having basically ugly fiddly designs with lots of volatile little conditionals which have to be fiddled with everytime something changes going into the beautiful kernel.
Maybe vendors like mandrake should pick up the baton and provide a low-latency alternative kernel installable with their gui tools or at install time, which would keep everyone happy at the cost of not too much effort and space.
It's pretty obvious that a kernel bug such as this one would never make it into a distro such as suse or mandrake, etc, simply because (apart from any testing they do) they do read the kernel list!
Linus' stand on this and other "marketing" issues has always been admirably robust: "do what you like with the kernel, I'm only interested in keeping improving it".
If you want to compare the Linux development process to payware processes, do it like this:
The words "reasonable and non-discriminatory", in this context, would hopefully suggest that the w3c are rightly concerned about the effects of licensing on this interoperability. But they are fuzzy and subjective terms - I would have thought a standards committee would have sufficient experience to teach them that such terms are a major disadvantage in defining a policy which will affect millions of people world-wide.
In my view, the words "reasonable and non-discriminatory" are best interpreted to mean "guaranteed to be open and free to use by all".
The GPL is an excellent example of a license which meets the aspirations indicated by "reasonable and non-discriminatory". It is so because it does not impose restrictions on who can use what is licensed.
Indeed, this approach is the ONLY reasonable one in a world where interoperability is paramount - any restrictions, financial or otherwise, on the users of "standards" issued under a lesser license do not meet the definition "reasonable and non-discriminatory" and will have a negative impact on the usability and effectiveness of the technologies they are ostensibly set up to enhance.
If the w3c don't insist on real openness (and straight-talking in their own descriptive terms) they are not only damaging severely their own credibility, they are inflicting major damage on the cultures and artisans who have played a large part in creating the major public good we have in the web today. Therefore they are harming that public good. We all lose.
It hardly seems the w3c will be doing a good job of fulfilling their obligations in maintaining that public good if they are prepared to endorse standards which may be impossible to implement on the most popular web server on the Internet for the simple reason that no money is available to pay the license fees, or that will be impossible to implement on new browser software for the same reason. Such licenses, in the context of interoperability, can only be described as "reasonable" by a lawyer or a liar.
So my question is: why don't the w3c simply require that the licenses concerned meet the standards exemplified by the GPL, or, if that is their intent, why don't they use words which are less Orwellian and less susceptible to subtle changes of meaning and interpretation? Personally I would prefer the words "No-fee and unrestricted use", which have the advantage of saying what they mean.
Use of overwhelming force to beat already poor countries further into the ground, continued erosion of civil liberties, increasing the gap between political rhetoric and what is actually going on and why - none of these are "new" at all, just the continuation of existing trends, going back 40 years or so.
As for a war on "terrorists and those who harbour them" avenging the terrible "assault on democracy" - this is laughable. The CIA has been subverting elections around the globe since its inception, and propping up dictatorial regimes where there is no democracy in sight. There's a long, long list of countries where this has occurred.
America is also one of the largest state sponsors of terrorism. They trained noted terrorist Osama bin Laden at their famous "School of the Americas" which specialises in teaching subversion, torture and terrorism (recently renamed, but not shut down), they helped Saddam Hussein into power and helped him keep there ...
Politicians lie, distort and fabricate in order to manipulate you, and the case in point is just another example of their tweaking your emotional response to a human tragedy in order to justify big arms spending, further interventionist adventures, and further erosion of your freedoms. Don't buy it.
Also JRRT was well into the writing of LOTR during the second world war - he notes somewhere that he was sending an early draft of the part dealing with Frodo and Sam's journey into Mordor in letters to his son Christopher who was serving as a soldier at the time.
Um, no. Recall that Bilbo's party at the start of LOTR was for his 111th birthday (Frodo was 33, making the sum of their ages one gross - a joke that didn't go down to well with the ever-so refined hobbits at the party). It was then some years before Frodo headed off for his own adventure. Bilbo was 130 by the time he left for the blessed isles - beating the previous record Gerontius (the Old) Took by one year.
Not stictly relevant to anything here, but..: a nice intro to quantum logic
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