For example, it is panthiestic, and there are many users, both good and bad, who are equal in the higher world.
In that case, I think the word you meant to use is polytheistic. They would be pantheists if they thought all things (including themselves) were a part of one universal User.
You know how the liberals go around saying that if guns were outlawed no one would have guns?
You know how conservatives consistently lie about what liberals say?
I've never actually met a liberal who said this, although I've met plenty of conservatives who like to claim liberals say this. Mostly I suspect it's because most conservatives are too stupid to understand what liberals are actually saying, so they make up gross oversimplications of what liberals say, and then of course find it easy to argue against the gross oversimplication...
[This is off topic, but for the record, people who support banning handguns do not believe doing so will stop criminals from ever obtaining them. However, noting that the majority of handguns used by criminals are stolen from the homes of honest people, they for some reason believe that if honest people didn't have so many guns lying around, fewer of them would end up in the hands of criminals. This is almost certainly true. But it's an open question whether this justifies a ban on handguns or not. Of course, very few people who argue against this address this issue, they instead exagerate and oversimplify their opponents opinions (i.e. lie about them), drop "hand" from "handgun", argue not the merits of this position but instead "it's just a first step towards banning all guns" and then argue that banning all guns is a bad idea, even though that's not what their opponents are arguing for. I've rarely seen a conservative actually argue against a liberal position. They instead make up a position, call it "the liberal position", and then argue against that. It's called a straw-man argument. Conservatives are the masters of debating straw-men -- they're on the same intellectual plane...]
...but for some reason it just doesn't seem to happen. Almost all the servers out there faithfully talk to the auth server and refuse non-authozised connections.
Hey! No fair using empirical evidence! This is slashdot, you're supposed to just make wild assertions about what people could technically do! Pointing out that, in practice, they usually don't behave this way is dirty pool...
Another bad analogy. By your reasoning, because there's already a law against burglary which I can enforce against you if you steal my computer, I'm not allowed to install locks on my door to make it easier to enforce my right to keep my machine.
Actually, his analogy is good, and yours badly mischaracterizes it. Your analogy would be closer to correct if you characterized him as saying "because there's already a law against burglary with I can enforce against you if you steal my computer, I'm not allowed to install locks on your door to make it harder for you to exit your house, which you would need to do to steal my computer (never mind what legimate reasons you might have to leave your house -- if leaving your house makes it easier for you to steal my computer, I have the right to protect my property by keeping you locked in)."
Of course, if you had correctly characterized his analogy, it would make it rather obvious that he was right and you were wrong, so I understand why you shifted it the way you did...
I played all of Blizzard's games before buying them. A lack of piracy would have cost Blizzard a couple hundred dollars in my case. Thus, I always find it amusing when companies talk about how much money they've "lost to piracy". There exists nowhere in a world a single shred of evidence that any company has ever lost any money at all due to piracy. This doesn't stop people from making up figures about their "losses", though...
I think I saw this explained on one of this websites at one time (it's been through several regenerations). Dr. Jackson actually translates for them everywhere they go. But for TV purposes, it would get really annoying watching all dialog relayed through Dr. Jackson...
Of course, in several episodes people talk to the natives while Dr. Jackson isn't around... so much for the official explanation...
I suspect all the planets with recent Goa'uld(sp?) presence speak the same dialect the people on Abydos spoke, and everyone on the SG teams have been trained to speak it...
Michael Shanks was really the first star of StarGate. He played a major role in the movie
He did? What role did he play in the movie? I don't remember seeing him in it. Perhaps you're thinking of James Spader...
Are they nuts? This was Stargate's MAIN CHARACTER!
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Trouble at Stargate SG-1
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I just watched the original movie again recently (the DVD version with the extra 9 minutes), and it reminded me what a great idea for a story this was, and a great idea for a series, too. Unfortunately, execution hasn't always been up to the potential, but when it's been good, it's been real good.
But, rewatching the original movie, I was reminded again as to who the real central character of this story used to be. And what it used to be about.
It's very disappointing to see how far this series has strayed from the things that made it great. Dr. Daniel Jackson was the embodiment of everything that was great about Stargate. The rest of the characters were expendable. Granted, it wouldn't have been the same without them, especially Teal'c, but it could have stayed true to Stargate. Stargate without Daniel Jackson just isn't Stargate...
Whoa, this is the first time I've ever heard of Bitkeeper... I do use a lot of open-source software, and this is the first time the name Bitkeeper came up...
Either you live under a rock or have no need for/have never investigated CVS alternatives. Anyone who has has known about Bitkeeper for years...
Is it just me or does it look like they want to show once again that Linux is different from all other projects?
It's just you... and possibly a few other people who've been living under rocks for the last few years...
and now, he uses some exotic software program
Nothing terribly exotic about it.
which now suddently everyone hears of. I wish my company made that program, that'd get me some licenses!:)
Anyone likely to have a use for this sort of program has probably heard about it long before. OTOH, being adopted by Linus will probably cause some people to give it a closer look, which will probably get some more licenses...
Re:Brain Emulation no longer a hardware challenge.
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
The human brain has 10 to the power of 14 synapses. Each synapse will take around one byte of computer memory.
Bzzt! Wrong answer, try again.
Any analog system, to be simulated perfectly, requires an infinite amount of memory on a digital computer. Of course, we're hoping that a perfect simulation is not necessary, but even if not, we have to know how close the simulation has to be before we can make any calculations on the amount of memory it will be required to simulate it. The whole rest of your post we can ignore, as it's based on utter speculation...
Re:Random Rant on the purpose of Science
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
Some would argue you're not an objective, disinterested observer, and therefore biased, and should recuse yourself from questions like that.
Of couse, this attitude is based on the absurd notion of the objective observer...
Re:what do you believe?
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
However, if you belive in souls, then reducing the human mind to 1's and 0's is rediculous.
This is a non-starter. There's no reason to believe, if souls exist, that they are unique to human beings. If humans make usable vessels for souls to inhabit, why couldn't computers?
Whether souls exist or not has no bearing in any way on any arguments for or against aritificial intelligence.
Re:I work in AI, and...
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
I mean, what are humans but computers?
Complex, mostly analog systems, bearing no real resemblance to a digital computer.
We have our central processor unit
Not per se, no.
There are no good reasons I can think of why humans can't construct intelligent artifacts. But there are many good reason to doubt if it can be done using anything resembling a computer running anything resembling software...
Re:Von Neumann Architecture Can't Do It.
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
In *principle*, if we understoon the human
brain entirely, we could implemented in todays
PC (although it would run at least trillions of
times slower than the real thing).
This statement is flat out wishful thinking. Since we don't understand the human brain entirely, we cannot possibly say whether it would be implementable on today's PC, even in principle. It may very well be that the human brain cannot be implemented on a digital computer. A "neuron" in a neural net is a gross oversimplication of the real thing. The real thing varies the rate at which it fires. In specific increments, or over a whole range? If it's over a whole range, we have a problem. A digital computer can only do things in time with it's timing crystal. For a computer to accurately simulate this, it would require it be running at infinite MHz. And how would it store the information on how often it would fire? It would need an infinte amount of memory to store this information digitally. Thus, to accurately simulate a single human neuron requires infinite memory and infinite processor speed on a digital computer. Our only hope is that some approximation is "good enough", but we don't know that to be the case.
And that's only one question. Here's another -- can a human brain be implemented on a deterministic system? The universe is definately non-deterministic (see a text on quantum mechanics). We take great pains to make sure, on the other hand, that a computer is a deterministic system. We may be removing an essential element of the mind by doing so. Or maybe not. We just don't know. Which, of course, is my point. I get tired of hopelessly optimistic and underinformed AI advocates who believe on faith alone that if we understood the human brain completely, we could accurately simulate one on a digital computer. For all we know, this may be, even in principle, flat out impossible.
My gut insticts tell me artificial intelligence is perfectly possible, but not on anything resembling a computer running anything resembling software. AI is, simply put, not a computer science field. But I don't know that to be true, either, and I certainly advocate research by both computer scientists and others to find out whether this is the case or not. I just have a hunch we'll find out it's not a proper field of computer scientists...
Re:an old Dennett lie
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If that isn't fair to attribute to Searle, then it's certainly not fair to attribute to AI supporters.
Actually, it is. The problem is, most people take dualism to mean Cartesian dualism, which is to cast the whole concept into it's most extreme form. Plenty of physicalists/materialists are dualists of a sort, just not Cartesian dualists.
In philosophy of mind, physicalism (the idea that everything is based on physical things, there is no soul or "mind-substance" or whatnot) comes in several varieties. Reductive physicalists are of course not dualists at all. But then, they cannot accept the idea of AI, either, since according to a reductive physicalist, a statement like "I believe the sky is blue" reduces to a statement about the state of your neurons or some other physiological state (which in turn reduces to a statement about the chemical/electrical arrangement of the atoms in your brain, etc.). Such a person must deny the possibility of AI, since a computer could never believe the sky is blue if what that statement means is that there's a particular arrangement of atoms inside your head. Of course, reductive physicalism also has the problem that a martian who appeared with nothing but an odd green goo in his head would also be incapable of believing the sky is blue, and most people find this view absurd. Thus, we don't find too many reductive physicalists these days.
The alternatives are non-reductive physicalism (what Davidson likes to call anomolous monism) or eliminative physicalism. Discarding the later (which asserts there really is no such things as "beliefs", "desires", etc. to begin with), we have non-reductive physicalism. This is what the AI proponents you talk about believe in -- that the mind is based (more accurately, supervenes) upon the physical world, but something like the belief that the sky is blue does not reduce to a statement about neurophysiology. Now, unlike Decartes, they're not substance dualists, but they are property dualists -- they assert that there are mental properties, and there are physical properties, and that mental properties are not reducible to physical properties.
Coming back to the eliminative materialist, this person denies the property dualism of the non-reductive physicalist. This person cannot believe in the possibility of AI, because they don't actually believe in natural intelligence (intelligence, like beliefs and attitudes and such, are more nonsense that doesn't actually exist in the world).
Since neither a reductive nor eliminative materialist can consistently also believe in AI, it follows that anyone who does, if they are a physicalist at all, must be a non-reductive physicalist, and therefore they must believe in property dualism. Anyone who believes in AI is a kind of dualist, just not necessarily of the Cartesian sort...
17. Klingon multitasking systems do not support "time-sharing". When a Klingon program wants to run, it challenges the scheduler in hand-to-hand combat and owns the machine.
Oh gods... is anyone else thinking of a Redcode-based task scheduler? Now THAT would be an , umm, innovative OS design decision...:)
I'm not sure about A, but B and C are definately true. C especially. The Klingons actually seem more realistic than the humans in Star Trek. Now there's a race that couldn't possibly exist in real life. (For a more realistic view of viable humans in space, see just about any episode of B5.)
If you do this enough times, you'll eventually produce a working program. Granted, it'll probably be a long time before you produce a working replacement for Emacs, for example. On the other hand, you'll probably produce a working version of WINE before the WINE development team does...:)
Heh! I was about to mention that. The St. Paul paper is the Pioneer Press. For years the battle was between the "Minneapolis Star Tribune" vs. the "St. Paul Pioneer Press". Then the Star Tribune people decided it was bad marketting if they were trying to sell papers in St. Paul, and now they call themselves "Newspaper of the Twin Cities". Bah -- it's always going to be the Minneapolis Star Tribune until those of us who remember drop over dead. I have a hard enough time not calling the other paper the "Pioneer Press Dispatch"... (I'm probably dating myself when I say I remember when the Star, Tribune, Pioneer Press, and Dispatch were all different papers...)
In any case, there is not now nor was there a newpaper in the Twin Cities called "The St. Paul Star Tribune"...
Actually, you've hit the nail on the head without realizing it. Java, like Perl, is a wonderful scripting langauge, and things like Perl are exactly the kinds of things it should be compared with. It's talk as if Java were in the same category as C or C++ that rankles everyone. If Sun wants to push Java as a much better alternative to Perl, I think people would be less rankled than when Sun acts like Java is the C++ killer or some such nonsense...
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, I think the word you meant to use is polytheistic. They would be pantheists if they thought all things (including themselves) were a part of one universal User.
We should be able to offset this with good compression, though...
You do not recall correctly, see the GPL.
However, note this from the GPL: The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
If the company intends to keep a non-obfuscated version, this would be "the preferred form", and their lawyer is dead wrong...
You know how conservatives consistently lie about what liberals say?
I've never actually met a liberal who said this, although I've met plenty of conservatives who like to claim liberals say this. Mostly I suspect it's because most conservatives are too stupid to understand what liberals are actually saying, so they make up gross oversimplications of what liberals say, and then of course find it easy to argue against the gross oversimplication...
[This is off topic, but for the record, people who support banning handguns do not believe doing so will stop criminals from ever obtaining them. However, noting that the majority of handguns used by criminals are stolen from the homes of honest people, they for some reason believe that if honest people didn't have so many guns lying around, fewer of them would end up in the hands of criminals. This is almost certainly true. But it's an open question whether this justifies a ban on handguns or not. Of course, very few people who argue against this address this issue, they instead exagerate and oversimplify their opponents opinions (i.e. lie about them), drop "hand" from "handgun", argue not the merits of this position but instead "it's just a first step towards banning all guns" and then argue that banning all guns is a bad idea, even though that's not what their opponents are arguing for. I've rarely seen a conservative actually argue against a liberal position. They instead make up a position, call it "the liberal position", and then argue against that. It's called a straw-man argument. Conservatives are the masters of debating straw-men -- they're on the same intellectual plane...]
Hey! No fair using empirical evidence! This is slashdot, you're supposed to just make wild assertions about what people could technically do! Pointing out that, in practice, they usually don't behave this way is dirty pool...
Actually, his analogy is good, and yours badly mischaracterizes it. Your analogy would be closer to correct if you characterized him as saying "because there's already a law against burglary with I can enforce against you if you steal my computer, I'm not allowed to install locks on your door to make it harder for you to exit your house, which you would need to do to steal my computer (never mind what legimate reasons you might have to leave your house -- if leaving your house makes it easier for you to steal my computer, I have the right to protect my property by keeping you locked in)."
Of course, if you had correctly characterized his analogy, it would make it rather obvious that he was right and you were wrong, so I understand why you shifted it the way you did...
Only a half point? Man, did you get a good deal... :)
Yes, but you aren't the only one. I've purchased a copy of every game Blizzard has ever produced. But no more...
I played all of Blizzard's games before buying them. A lack of piracy would have cost Blizzard a couple hundred dollars in my case. Thus, I always find it amusing when companies talk about how much money they've "lost to piracy". There exists nowhere in a world a single shred of evidence that any company has ever lost any money at all due to piracy. This doesn't stop people from making up figures about their "losses", though...
Of course, in several episodes people talk to the natives while Dr. Jackson isn't around... so much for the official explanation...
I suspect all the planets with recent Goa'uld(sp?) presence speak the same dialect the people on Abydos spoke, and everyone on the SG teams have been trained to speak it...
He did? What role did he play in the movie? I don't remember seeing him in it. Perhaps you're thinking of James Spader...
But, rewatching the original movie, I was reminded again as to who the real central character of this story used to be. And what it used to be about.
It's very disappointing to see how far this series has strayed from the things that made it great. Dr. Daniel Jackson was the embodiment of everything that was great about Stargate. The rest of the characters were expendable. Granted, it wouldn't have been the same without them, especially Teal'c, but it could have stayed true to Stargate. Stargate without Daniel Jackson just isn't Stargate...
I'm very sorry to see this series go...
Either you live under a rock or have no need for/have never investigated CVS alternatives. Anyone who has has known about Bitkeeper for years...
Is it just me or does it look like they want to show once again that Linux is different from all other projects?
It's just you... and possibly a few other people who've been living under rocks for the last few years...
and now, he uses some exotic software program
Nothing terribly exotic about it.
which now suddently everyone hears of. I wish my company made that program, that'd get me some licenses! :)
Anyone likely to have a use for this sort of program has probably heard about it long before. OTOH, being adopted by Linus will probably cause some people to give it a closer look, which will probably get some more licenses...
Bzzt! Wrong answer, try again.
Any analog system, to be simulated perfectly, requires an infinite amount of memory on a digital computer. Of course, we're hoping that a perfect simulation is not necessary, but even if not, we have to know how close the simulation has to be before we can make any calculations on the amount of memory it will be required to simulate it. The whole rest of your post we can ignore, as it's based on utter speculation...
Of couse, this attitude is based on the absurd notion of the objective observer...
This is a non-starter. There's no reason to believe, if souls exist, that they are unique to human beings. If humans make usable vessels for souls to inhabit, why couldn't computers?
Whether souls exist or not has no bearing in any way on any arguments for or against aritificial intelligence.
Complex, mostly analog systems, bearing no real resemblance to a digital computer.
We have our central processor unit
Not per se, no.
There are no good reasons I can think of why humans can't construct intelligent artifacts. But there are many good reason to doubt if it can be done using anything resembling a computer running anything resembling software...
This statement is flat out wishful thinking. Since we don't understand the human brain entirely, we cannot possibly say whether it would be implementable on today's PC, even in principle. It may very well be that the human brain cannot be implemented on a digital computer. A "neuron" in a neural net is a gross oversimplication of the real thing. The real thing varies the rate at which it fires. In specific increments, or over a whole range? If it's over a whole range, we have a problem. A digital computer can only do things in time with it's timing crystal. For a computer to accurately simulate this, it would require it be running at infinite MHz. And how would it store the information on how often it would fire? It would need an infinte amount of memory to store this information digitally. Thus, to accurately simulate a single human neuron requires infinite memory and infinite processor speed on a digital computer. Our only hope is that some approximation is "good enough", but we don't know that to be the case.
And that's only one question. Here's another -- can a human brain be implemented on a deterministic system? The universe is definately non-deterministic (see a text on quantum mechanics). We take great pains to make sure, on the other hand, that a computer is a deterministic system. We may be removing an essential element of the mind by doing so. Or maybe not. We just don't know. Which, of course, is my point. I get tired of hopelessly optimistic and underinformed AI advocates who believe on faith alone that if we understood the human brain completely, we could accurately simulate one on a digital computer. For all we know, this may be, even in principle, flat out impossible.
My gut insticts tell me artificial intelligence is perfectly possible, but not on anything resembling a computer running anything resembling software. AI is, simply put, not a computer science field. But I don't know that to be true, either, and I certainly advocate research by both computer scientists and others to find out whether this is the case or not. I just have a hunch we'll find out it's not a proper field of computer scientists...
Actually, it is. The problem is, most people take dualism to mean Cartesian dualism, which is to cast the whole concept into it's most extreme form. Plenty of physicalists/materialists are dualists of a sort, just not Cartesian dualists.
In philosophy of mind, physicalism (the idea that everything is based on physical things, there is no soul or "mind-substance" or whatnot) comes in several varieties. Reductive physicalists are of course not dualists at all. But then, they cannot accept the idea of AI, either, since according to a reductive physicalist, a statement like "I believe the sky is blue" reduces to a statement about the state of your neurons or some other physiological state (which in turn reduces to a statement about the chemical/electrical arrangement of the atoms in your brain, etc.). Such a person must deny the possibility of AI, since a computer could never believe the sky is blue if what that statement means is that there's a particular arrangement of atoms inside your head. Of course, reductive physicalism also has the problem that a martian who appeared with nothing but an odd green goo in his head would also be incapable of believing the sky is blue, and most people find this view absurd. Thus, we don't find too many reductive physicalists these days.
The alternatives are non-reductive physicalism (what Davidson likes to call anomolous monism) or eliminative physicalism. Discarding the later (which asserts there really is no such things as "beliefs", "desires", etc. to begin with), we have non-reductive physicalism. This is what the AI proponents you talk about believe in -- that the mind is based (more accurately, supervenes) upon the physical world, but something like the belief that the sky is blue does not reduce to a statement about neurophysiology. Now, unlike Decartes, they're not substance dualists, but they are property dualists -- they assert that there are mental properties, and there are physical properties, and that mental properties are not reducible to physical properties.
Coming back to the eliminative materialist, this person denies the property dualism of the non-reductive physicalist. This person cannot believe in the possibility of AI, because they don't actually believe in natural intelligence (intelligence, like beliefs and attitudes and such, are more nonsense that doesn't actually exist in the world).
Since neither a reductive nor eliminative materialist can consistently also believe in AI, it follows that anyone who does, if they are a physicalist at all, must be a non-reductive physicalist, and therefore they must believe in property dualism. Anyone who believes in AI is a kind of dualist, just not necessarily of the Cartesian sort...
Oh gods... is anyone else thinking of a Redcode-based task scheduler? Now THAT would be an , umm, innovative OS design decision... :)
I'm not sure about A, but B and C are definately true. C especially. The Klingons actually seem more realistic than the humans in Star Trek. Now there's a race that couldn't possibly exist in real life. (For a more realistic view of viable humans in space, see just about any episode of B5.)
If you do this enough times, you'll eventually produce a working program. Granted, it'll probably be a long time before you produce a working replacement for Emacs, for example. On the other hand, you'll probably produce a working version of WINE before the WINE development team does... :)
In any case, there is not now nor was there a newpaper in the Twin Cities called "The St. Paul Star Tribune"...
<sigh> Like it took me two minutes to type that... (silly slashcode...)
Actually, you've hit the nail on the head without realizing it. Java, like Perl, is a wonderful scripting langauge, and things like Perl are exactly the kinds of things it should be compared with. It's talk as if Java were in the same category as C or C++ that rankles everyone. If Sun wants to push Java as a much better alternative to Perl, I think people would be less rankled than when Sun acts like Java is the C++ killer or some such nonsense...