Re:Any mailer that lets me use vim must be good :)
on
Mutt Hits 1.0
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· Score: 1
If it's using vim that turns you on, I think most (if not all) text email clients let you use any editor you specify. Certainly Pine, Elm, or my favorite MH do.
Mutt is pretty cool, though, I wish it were installed in my university's servers.
This is a fascinating subject, but I really have to read this book I got right now:-).
I'll just mention that I have read Tarski's "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages", and what he was trying to do is to put in more precise terms the good ole correspondence theory of truth; that a sentence is true iff it corresponds to a current state of affairs. Models are what he uses to formalize the notion of "states of affairs". (BTW, this is a very hurried exposition, so if anyone has to correct me, be kind).
However, I do remember from a Semantic Conception of Truth grad course I once took that it is posible to have a consistent language that includes its own truth predicate. Most of the languages that have been proposed with this feature, however, abandon bivalence (that is, they allow formulas to be something other than true or false) and have quite complicated semantics (involving successive interpretations of the self referential sentences, up into the infinite ordinals-- now that's esoteric). Also, somebody (sorry, don't have the reference here) proved that Tarski's conditions for a language to permit a self-referential construction has also been proved defective.
Let me be a bit more precise. What Tarski did was give list of criteria that a language had to meet in order to define its own bivalent truth predicate, and then show that any language that met that criteria was inconsistent.
You (and I) concede that mathematical Platonism is belief. However, I take this to illustrate my earlier criticism, that Godel and Tarski did not prove anything with regard to the nature of truth itself (which is beyond mathematics). Anyway, before Godel came along, there were anti-Platonists. Think of Hilbert, or the Intuitionists. Even if many mathematicians today aren't Platonists thanks to Godel, it is not thanks to Godel that there are anti-Platonists at all:-).
You might want to check up the so-called "Revision Theory of Truth". I only remember by now the name of just one of its exponents, Herzberger, and the name of one of his articles, "Naive Semantics".
Godel and Tarski showed that mathematics isn't about truth, it's about logical relationships between statements.
I'm sorry I don't really have time to discuss this point with you properly, but I must mention that this is quite a bizarre conclusion you get here. Gödel himself was a mathematical platonist; for example, he believed that there were such objects as nautral and real numbers, and that some statements were true of them while others were false of them, even beyond what we can actually prove about them. Thus Gödel's theorems show us an unprovable statement of arithmetic which is actually true (the statement that encodes its own unprovability).
Note that the parallel postulate *or* its negation can be added to geometry and result in a consistent (i.e. useful) system. Hence the possibility of useful *and* conflicting theories is real. One is useful for planes, the other for curved surfaces.
This reminds me of the continuum (sp?) hypothesis in math; Gödel and other guy showed it was independent from the rest of axioms of math, that is, that you could accept it or deny it without contradiction. However, Gödel did write a paper where he, anticipating this discovery, basically shows that he still believes that one of the two possibilities must be the true one.
I can't remember Tarksi's position regarding this, though.
I don't think a distributed chess engine would be a particularly good one.
Why? Response time. It would take a fair amount of time and resources to distribute and receive back the analysis of the game with all the participating computers. Which means that the game would develop at quite a slow pace, a factor that is well-know benefits the human players and hurts the computer. When there is relatively little time to think over each move (say, a blitz game), the computer's superior calculation power is what makes them powerful-- the computer will make no obvious mistakes that can be exploited in a fast-paced game, while the human will make many mistakes and oversights that the computer can quickly discover. Also, with little time, the human does not get the chance to come up with elaborate plans, or subtle endgame play.
But as you crank up the time available for analyzing each move, the situation changes. The human makes less blunders (and if there are multiple people participating, "ore eyes catch more blunders), and his strategic outlook over the game is given free rein. The computer, in contrast, has no sense of strategy, and when faced with an opponent that makes no obvious mistakes, can not formulate a coherent plan to try to win.
As a matter of fact, as far as I can recall humans are the supreme champions of correspondence chess. This is quite a good demonstration of my thesis above.
So, I really don't think a distributed chess machine could play chess at a pace quick enough to meet a time control where it had a realistic chance of beating good human opposition.
I'm one of those. I sometimes read two slashdot stories at one, using 4 netscape windows. I write two replies at the same time, and hit the post button on each one after the other. I don't do it THAT much, but I sometimes do.
Although, you might want to adjust the posting interval windows according to the lenght of a comment. Or if you try to post a sufficiently long comment very shortly before your last one, the system may "forgive you" and let you go ahead.
I've given some thought to this IP business, and I think that my point would apply to slashdot today in the case that it logs source IP permanently with each comment.
If your IP is good enough to identify you, and slashdot keeps a history of every post together with the originating IP, then as correctly pointed out by several comments on this thread, the same objection I raise is raisable right now.
For "anonymous" posting to be really anonymous, slashdot may noy keep a permanent record of IP addresses for each post.
Note this does not mean slashdot can't keep a temporary record of IPs. That is, I think the best solution would be for slashdot to keep the IP for each post in recent stories (maybe front page, maybe a bit beyond front page). This could be used to defend the system from abuse-- if some IP is posting too many stories too fast which all are getting downmoderated, slashdot may block the IP group from posting temporarily (say, 18 hours). But when the story goes stale, you get rid of IP info, and anonymity is guaranteed (you still may keep a list of troublemaking IPs).
I agree it wouldn't be nice. Hey, I myself wouldn't enjoy reading articles in random order. But, since currently people get to moderate only once in a while, and you have the option not to moderate, it might be considered to require that if you're going to moderate, you're going to have to look at articles in random order for three days or till your points run out.
I think this is a very serious question. If I log in to slashdot and check the "Post Anonymously" box in a post, clearly my handle won't be revealed to the readers. But does the system log that it was me who posted anonymously? And what guarantees can I possibly have to that effect?
If in the future, people are required to give a handle or an email address to post "anonymously", their identity could be compromised, since/. would have an email address that might be possible to use to track down the person.
Not that I don't trust Rob and Co. with my privacy-- they have proved time and time again to be reliable. But such a record of the source of "anonymous" postings might even be exploited against their will.
Case in point: some guy X posts something "anonymously" in slashdot that offends some powerful company. Company considers the post to be difamatory, and demands slashdot give the email address of the poster. Slashdot refuses; the company sues slashdot for their posting records.
Even if the suit is unsuccessful, it wouldn't definitely be nice for/. to get harrassed.
The scientific method requires that physical phenomena be repeatable - political and economic behaviour are not purely repeatable.
There may be cycles, but that is vastly different than an electron acting the exact same way every time certain conditions are present.
Well, I made explicit in my post I was using a quite different sense of the word "science" at that point, one which I know many social scientists mean when they call what they do a "science". So I don't see what's the point of this response.
And, anyway, what about the following disciplines:
Evolutionary Biology
Geology
Cosmology
Is the evolution of a particular species a repeatable event? Is the forming of some layer of rock on the Earth's crust repeatable? Is the Big Bang repeatable?
Science has historically been attempting to understand _nature_ or something that is already there by applying a "scientific method" of theory, test the theory, new theory.
I understand your point fully; however, I think we still have to appreciate that many of the usages of the word "science" that you are attacking follow a consistent pattern. That of developing a set of concepts that allow people to intervene in their environment, in order to achieve some desired effect.
BTW, many social scientists I know mean something like above when they call what they do "science".
My point is not to challenge the distinction you rightly make, but rather to point out that the term "science" I don't think is being used in an arbitrary manner in all cases, like your post may lead some to believe.
Which, anyway, reminds me that there is not that much tradition for the word "science". Up until some point in the 19th century, people would say "Natural Philosophy" or "Natural History".
I think I'm going to look up a bit on the history of the word "science" in the 19th century, I can't remember exactly what happened (although I suspect the positivist philosophers had a lot to do with the change).
Political Science is NOT a science...
In the sense I mention above, it is, as also Economics, and in fact most of the Social Sciences.
Linguistics are not sciences, and it doesn't mean communication isn't important.
Ah, now you're stepping on my turf:-). Linguistics is an interdisciplinary research field; and there are definitely many people on it who are doing work I'm sure you should classify under your concept of science. After all, isn't the attempt to make precise, testable theories about the structure of human languages science?
That being said, I don't mean to put any less value on the studies of Computer Science majors. I have a great deal of respect for (most) of them. But I don't think it fits the mold of what most people think of when they think about the word "science."
The last sentence I find a bit shocking. I don't really think you are somehow insulated from the popular understanding of the word "science". (I'm taking that when you say "most people", you are thinking of people in general.) Most people think Medicine and Pharmacology to be sciences, for instance. Which, BTW, fit in with the alternate definition of science I mentioned above.
By the way, I do agree with your point on several posts that many people in different professions are somewhat desperate to get the prestige born by the bearers of the word "science" in our society (hell, my former university had a "secretarial sciences" department!!!). But I don't think the short history of the modern usage of the word "science" is going to turn out to be favorable to you, in that it might possibly turn out to historically validate other senses of the word, like the one I mention above (it might turn out that the same group of people "invented" both natural and social science, for example). But, I _do_ have to look up some books, cause I can still be wrong on this.
Frankly, linguistics is an art. And, of that, they should be proud. It's one of the most highly evolved, technical, elaborate, insightfull, and exciting of all forms of art. But none the less, it's an art, because it's primarly about _language_ which is NOT a science, it's something manmade.
Human languages are no more manmade than human bladders are. Unless you can provide us with a credible account of how was it that people "made" language, you're on slippery ground here.
The syntactic structure of natural languages is quite simply completely independent from conscious choices by people made by people anytime, anywhere (in contrast to say, culture, which is shaped in a significant degree by such choices).
I don't think humans are evolving anymore. The Darwin evolution theory does not apply to humans in this age because we have outgrown nature. If a child is born disabled, diseased, dumb as a doorknob etc. they continue to live and have other childred and spread their poor DNA further into the genepool. This is all because of the great and wonderful world of science and medicine.
Humans have not stopped evolving. By definition, a population evolves when there is differential reproduction, which leads to some genes increasing their frequency in the gene pool (and the diminishing of the frequency of their alleles). I don't expect you to be able to prove that there is no differential reproduction between human specimens, but rather the opposite to be true. Therefore, humans are evolving.
If we were to abandon medicine, these "unfit" individuals would not survive long enough to reproduce.
Your mistake is based on thinking that evolution is based on "unfit" individuals not reproducing. This is true of most species, but not a necessary thing for evolution. As I said above, evolution is just alleles changing frequency in the gene pool.
But being such a warm hearted race, we humans nurture the weak and by doing so we break the evolutionary system.
As regarding the survival of "unfit" human beings, I think you are looking at the whole situation in a manner that glosses over human nature. Remember humans are a social species; specifically, we are descended from hunter-gatherer bands, which practiced collective hunting of big game. The survival of one human being depends on that of his mates. It is in the genetic interest of each human to see that they survive and be as healthy aand strong as they can be (weighed against his/her personal fitness). If the overall contribution of the survival of "weaker" individual (including even those "disabled, diseased, dumb as a doorknob") to the fitness of each individual in a group is more than what each individual spends on nurturing them, then it is not surprising that such behavior could be evolutionarily enforceable.
Do you really believe that in 200 years humans will have more intellectual ability than the humans today? I don't.
I'm not to confident that people will be in a good shape 200 years from now. So I'll qualify my answer with a "supposing we don't blow the environment or each other to bits in the meantime".
I don't know what you intend to be understood when you mention "intellectual ability". Your previous comments leave the impression that your are a biological determinist with regards to intelligence, so I take you believe that how intelligent people are depends on their genes; then the question becomes whether one believes people will be more "genetically intelligent" 200 years from now.
However, how intelligent people are depends not only in their genes; in fact, you should think of genes as setting up the neurological framework in which their intelligence develops as they grow. This means as follows: how people are brought up has at least as much to do with their intelligence as genes. And I would say it is actually more important.
Therefore, to answer your question we would have to ask: how will kids grow up 200 years from now? Wil there be a grossly unequal distribution of wealth and nourishment as now, where huge numbers of children don't get a chance to develop fully?
I end warning you of the dangers of evolutionary reasoning. The subtlety needed for good arguments of this kind is huge-- frankly, more than you show in your post. And their conclusions can still be shaky; especially in a cultural species like ours.
Also, you you forgot to mention that more sensitive senses could possibly come at a cost-- a higher caloric requirement. So actually, having senses much more acute than really needed could turn out to be maladaptive.
I fail to see how it would be wrong to augment the intelligence of the human race as a whole.
That's relatively easy to do. You just have to make sure everyone is well fed and gets a good education. You know, if someone grows up undernourished and with bad education, you can't expect them to end up geniuses.
The point being, of course, that if the current productive capacity of the planet is more than sufficient to feed and educate everyone on it, we already have the capacity to "augment the intelligence of the human race as a whole", without resorting to such trickery as genetic engineering.
Just remember: no excess of nature will make up for a lack of nurture... No gene will make up for malnourishment.
And, just one more final point. We are nowhere near being able to "increase intelligence" of the human species by means of genetic engineering, while we do have the productive capacity for feeding and educating everyone today.
Either you're lying, RMS is, or both are. RMS claims that a GPL'd library imposes *use* restirctions. That simply *using* the library is viral. Perens says it's not.
Well, I know I'm not lying.
As regards to the other, you do not have to accept the GPL to use a GPL'd program someone gives to you, that depends on a GPL library (and is thus a derived work of said library). You have to accept the GPL if and only if you distribute the program.
Suppose I give you a copy of bash that depends on libreadline, both of which I received under GPL. In that situation, the only one who is required to accept the terms of the GPL is me. If you further on intended to pass them to someone else, you would also have to accept the GPL, since nothing else gives you permission to redistribute.
Now, say I write some program that critically depends on some GPL library, say, libreadline again. In this case, if I gave you a binary of this program that links to libreadline, I would be distributing a derivative work of libreadline, and would have to accept the terms of the GPL, which require me to GPL my program. This does not stop _me_ from distributing the source to my program under any other license I wish, as long as I don't link it to libreadline.
The effect is that I, as a distributor, may link a program to a GPL library like libreadline only if I accept to distribute the program under GPL. This does not force you to accept the GPL in any way whatsoever, and does not restrict me from distributing the program under other license terms in the case I don't link it to libreadline. (In fact, there exist non-GPL programs like Python that can be compiled to use libreadline-- if you use the option, you have to distribute the resulting binary under GPL, but you don't have to use the option if you don't want.)
FreeBSD handled these corner cases with a lot more grace than Linux ever did. The fact that file system metadata is written asynchronously is a technical disadvantage if stability is desired; and FreeBSD has it in spades in this area. Until Linux fixes its file system (perhaps under ext3) so that it's more robust, I wouldn't run Linux unless I have a UPS.
Ok, now I see clearly what your argument is. I am not inclined to count "corner cases" where one system works better than the other with problematic hardware setups as "technical superiority", but as you rightly said, I'm not going to get my face blue about it:-).
Well, this might well be an advance of genetic engineering, but I don't really think it is as relevant to people as most slashdotters (who, time and time again, show themselves to be, despite their technical sophistication, scientifically naive) think it to be.
I first saw this story last night, on a Yahoo headline that read "Scientists boost mouse IQ". (I'm reproducing it from memory; the important bit is "mouse IQ"). Yeah right, as if someone gave a mouse an IQ test. I am aware that one may quantify increased performance on some kind of exercises that mice do (e.g., running mazes), but to call this "IQ" and compare it to human intelligence is at best silly, and at worst ideological doublespeak.
Simply, what we call "intelligence" both in people and in mice are qualitatively different things. And we know that human intelligence has a lot to do with upbringing; i.e., no matter what their genes are, if humans don't develop in an environment conducive to the development of their intelligence, they will turn out to be sub-optimal relative to their potential.
When I say above that equating mice "IQ" with human IQ (which, BTW, is a dubious idea anyway) is "at worst ideological doublespeak", what I have in mind is the fact that establishment is interested in propagating a certain view of the state of science and of human intelligence, one that downplays precisely what I stated above, the decisive role of upbringing in the development of human intelligence. Understandable when millions go hungry and uneducated on a planet that produces enough to feed and educate everyone well, and only a minority gets good conditions under which to develop.
People crying about the GPL being evil because it prevents them from including code into their products really bug me. If you want to sell products/services, get off your own lazy ass and build your own damned product. Stop expecting others to do it for you.
Precisely. I have a funny name for this which you criticise here: "The Libertine Software Movement".
The idea is "Give people the choice". It's better than the choice of "Either accept the GPL or don't use *any* of the software."
This is a common misconception about the GPL. Go read the license, and try to find where it says that you have to accept it to _use_ (as opposed to redistribute) the GPL software.
The fact is, the GPL places _absolutely no restrictions on mere use of the software_.
Slashdot Mirror
Mutt is pretty cool, though, I wish it were installed in my university's servers.
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I'll just mention that I have read Tarski's "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages", and what he was trying to do is to put in more precise terms the good ole correspondence theory of truth; that a sentence is true iff it corresponds to a current state of affairs. Models are what he uses to formalize the notion of "states of affairs". (BTW, this is a very hurried exposition, so if anyone has to correct me, be kind).
However, I do remember from a Semantic Conception of Truth grad course I once took that it is posible to have a consistent language that includes its own truth predicate. Most of the languages that have been proposed with this feature, however, abandon bivalence (that is, they allow formulas to be something other than true or false) and have quite complicated semantics (involving successive interpretations of the self referential sentences, up into the infinite ordinals-- now that's esoteric). Also, somebody (sorry, don't have the reference here) proved that Tarski's conditions for a language to permit a self-referential construction has also been proved defective.
Let me be a bit more precise. What Tarski did was give list of criteria that a language had to meet in order to define its own bivalent truth predicate, and then show that any language that met that criteria was inconsistent.
You (and I) concede that mathematical Platonism is belief. However, I take this to illustrate my earlier criticism, that Godel and Tarski did not prove anything with regard to the nature of truth itself (which is beyond mathematics). Anyway, before Godel came along, there were anti-Platonists. Think of Hilbert, or the Intuitionists. Even if many mathematicians today aren't Platonists thanks to Godel, it is not thanks to Godel that there are anti-Platonists at all :-).
You might want to check up the so-called "Revision Theory of Truth". I only remember by now the name of just one of its exponents, Herzberger, and the name of one of his articles, "Naive Semantics".
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I'm sorry I don't really have time to discuss this point with you properly, but I must mention that this is quite a bizarre conclusion you get here. Gödel himself was a mathematical platonist; for example, he believed that there were such objects as nautral and real numbers, and that some statements were true of them while others were false of them, even beyond what we can actually prove about them. Thus Gödel's theorems show us an unprovable statement of arithmetic which is actually true (the statement that encodes its own unprovability).
Note that the parallel postulate *or* its negation can be added to geometry and result in a consistent (i.e. useful) system. Hence the possibility of useful *and* conflicting theories is real. One is useful for planes, the other for curved surfaces.
This reminds me of the continuum (sp?) hypothesis in math; Gödel and other guy showed it was independent from the rest of axioms of math, that is, that you could accept it or deny it without contradiction. However, Gödel did write a paper where he, anticipating this discovery, basically shows that he still believes that one of the two possibilities must be the true one.
I can't remember Tarksi's position regarding this, though.
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I don't think a distributed chess engine would be a particularly good one.
Why? Response time. It would take a fair amount of time and resources to distribute and receive back the analysis of the game with all the participating computers. Which means that the game would develop at quite a slow pace, a factor that is well-know benefits the human players and hurts the computer. When there is relatively little time to think over each move (say, a blitz game), the computer's superior calculation power is what makes them powerful-- the computer will make no obvious mistakes that can be exploited in a fast-paced game, while the human will make many mistakes and oversights that the computer can quickly discover. Also, with little time, the human does not get the chance to come up with elaborate plans, or subtle endgame play.
But as you crank up the time available for analyzing each move, the situation changes. The human makes less blunders (and if there are multiple people participating, "ore eyes catch more blunders), and his strategic outlook over the game is given free rein. The computer, in contrast, has no sense of strategy, and when faced with an opponent that makes no obvious mistakes, can not formulate a coherent plan to try to win.
As a matter of fact, as far as I can recall humans are the supreme champions of correspondence chess. This is quite a good demonstration of my thesis above.
So, I really don't think a distributed chess machine could play chess at a pace quick enough to meet a time control where it had a realistic chance of beating good human opposition.
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On a historical, semi-ironical note, wasn't it a proprietary printer driver that sent RMS on the GNU trip in the early 80's? :-)
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Although, you might want to adjust the posting interval windows according to the lenght of a comment. Or if you try to post a sufficiently long comment very shortly before your last one, the system may "forgive you" and let you go ahead.
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If your IP is good enough to identify you, and slashdot keeps a history of every post together with the originating IP, then as correctly pointed out by several comments on this thread, the same objection I raise is raisable right now.
For "anonymous" posting to be really anonymous, slashdot may noy keep a permanent record of IP addresses for each post.
Note this does not mean slashdot can't keep a temporary record of IPs. That is, I think the best solution would be for slashdot to keep the IP for each post in recent stories (maybe front page, maybe a bit beyond front page). This could be used to defend the system from abuse-- if some IP is posting too many stories too fast which all are getting downmoderated, slashdot may block the IP group from posting temporarily (say, 18 hours). But when the story goes stale, you get rid of IP info, and anonymity is guaranteed (you still may keep a list of troublemaking IPs).
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If in the future, people are required to give a handle or an email address to post "anonymously", their identity could be compromised, since /. would have an email address that might be possible to use to track down the person.
Not that I don't trust Rob and Co. with my privacy-- they have proved time and time again to be reliable. But such a record of the source of "anonymous" postings might even be exploited against their will.
Case in point: some guy X posts something "anonymously" in slashdot that offends some powerful company. Company considers the post to be difamatory, and demands slashdot give the email address of the poster. Slashdot refuses; the company sues slashdot for their posting records.
Even if the suit is unsuccessful, it wouldn't definitely be nice for /. to get harrassed.
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Especially in the longer threads, virtually nothing past the first couple hundred posts seem to get moderated.
Maybe if moderators are required to look at articles with the top-level threads in random order, this could be solved...
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I've never used python or do I know anything about it
Then schedule a visit one of these day to and see for yourself...
It is a really nifty language.
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There may be cycles, but that is vastly different than an electron acting the exact same way every time certain conditions are present.
Well, I made explicit in my post I was using a quite different sense of the word "science" at that point, one which I know many social scientists mean when they call what they do a "science". So I don't see what's the point of this response.
And, anyway, what about the following disciplines:
Is the evolution of a particular species a repeatable event? Is the forming of some layer of rock on the Earth's crust repeatable? Is the Big Bang repeatable?
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I understand your point fully; however, I think we still have to appreciate that many of the usages of the word "science" that you are attacking follow a consistent pattern. That of developing a set of concepts that allow people to intervene in their environment, in order to achieve some desired effect.
BTW, many social scientists I know mean something like above when they call what they do "science".
My point is not to challenge the distinction you rightly make, but rather to point out that the term "science" I don't think is being used in an arbitrary manner in all cases, like your post may lead some to believe.
Which, anyway, reminds me that there is not that much tradition for the word "science". Up until some point in the 19th century, people would say "Natural Philosophy" or "Natural History".
I think I'm going to look up a bit on the history of the word "science" in the 19th century, I can't remember exactly what happened (although I suspect the positivist philosophers had a lot to do with the change).
Political Science is NOT a science...
In the sense I mention above, it is, as also Economics, and in fact most of the Social Sciences.
Linguistics are not sciences, and it doesn't mean communication isn't important.
Ah, now you're stepping on my turf :-). Linguistics is an interdisciplinary research field; and there are definitely many people on it who are doing work I'm sure you should classify under your concept of science. After all, isn't the attempt to make precise, testable theories about the structure of human languages science?
That being said, I don't mean to put any less value on the studies of Computer Science majors. I have a great deal of respect for (most) of them. But I don't think it fits the mold of what most people think of when they think about the word "science."
The last sentence I find a bit shocking. I don't really think you are somehow insulated from the popular understanding of the word "science". (I'm taking that when you say "most people", you are thinking of people in general.) Most people think Medicine and Pharmacology to be sciences, for instance. Which, BTW, fit in with the alternate definition of science I mentioned above.
By the way, I do agree with your point on several posts that many people in different professions are somewhat desperate to get the prestige born by the bearers of the word "science" in our society (hell, my former university had a "secretarial sciences" department!!!). But I don't think the short history of the modern usage of the word "science" is going to turn out to be favorable to you, in that it might possibly turn out to historically validate other senses of the word, like the one I mention above (it might turn out that the same group of people "invented" both natural and social science, for example). But, I _do_ have to look up some books, cause I can still be wrong on this.
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Frankly, linguistics is an art. And, of that, they should be proud. It's one of the most highly evolved, technical, elaborate, insightfull, and exciting of all forms of art. But none the less, it's an art, because it's primarly about _language_ which is NOT a science, it's something manmade.
Human languages are no more manmade than human bladders are. Unless you can provide us with a credible account of how was it that people "made" language, you're on slippery ground here.
The syntactic structure of natural languages is quite simply completely independent from conscious choices by people made by people anytime, anywhere (in contrast to say, culture, which is shaped in a significant degree by such choices).
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I don't think humans are evolving anymore. The Darwin evolution theory does not apply to humans in this age because we have outgrown nature. If a child is born disabled, diseased, dumb as a doorknob etc. they continue to live and have other childred and spread their poor DNA further into the genepool. This is all because of the great and wonderful world of science and medicine.
Humans have not stopped evolving. By definition, a population evolves when there is differential reproduction, which leads to some genes increasing their frequency in the gene pool (and the diminishing of the frequency of their alleles). I don't expect you to be able to prove that there is no differential reproduction between human specimens, but rather the opposite to be true. Therefore, humans are evolving.
If we were to abandon medicine, these "unfit" individuals would not survive long enough to reproduce.
Your mistake is based on thinking that evolution is based on "unfit" individuals not reproducing. This is true of most species, but not a necessary thing for evolution. As I said above, evolution is just alleles changing frequency in the gene pool.
But being such a warm hearted race, we humans nurture the weak and by doing so we break the evolutionary system.
As regarding the survival of "unfit" human beings, I think you are looking at the whole situation in a manner that glosses over human nature. Remember humans are a social species; specifically, we are descended from hunter-gatherer bands, which practiced collective hunting of big game. The survival of one human being depends on that of his mates. It is in the genetic interest of each human to see that they survive and be as healthy aand strong as they can be (weighed against his/her personal fitness). If the overall contribution of the survival of "weaker" individual (including even those "disabled, diseased, dumb as a doorknob") to the fitness of each individual in a group is more than what each individual spends on nurturing them, then it is not surprising that such behavior could be evolutionarily enforceable.
Do you really believe that in 200 years humans will have more intellectual ability than the humans today? I don't.
I'm not to confident that people will be in a good shape 200 years from now. So I'll qualify my answer with a "supposing we don't blow the environment or each other to bits in the meantime".
I don't know what you intend to be understood when you mention "intellectual ability". Your previous comments leave the impression that your are a biological determinist with regards to intelligence, so I take you believe that how intelligent people are depends on their genes; then the question becomes whether one believes people will be more "genetically intelligent" 200 years from now.
However, how intelligent people are depends not only in their genes; in fact, you should think of genes as setting up the neurological framework in which their intelligence develops as they grow. This means as follows: how people are brought up has at least as much to do with their intelligence as genes. And I would say it is actually more important.
Therefore, to answer your question we would have to ask: how will kids grow up 200 years from now? Wil there be a grossly unequal distribution of wealth and nourishment as now, where huge numbers of children don't get a chance to develop fully?
I end warning you of the dangers of evolutionary reasoning. The subtlety needed for good arguments of this kind is huge-- frankly, more than you show in your post. And their conclusions can still be shaky; especially in a cultural species like ours.
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Of course, the classic case is eyeless fish :-)
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That's relatively easy to do. You just have to make sure everyone is well fed and gets a good education. You know, if someone grows up undernourished and with bad education, you can't expect them to end up geniuses.
The point being, of course, that if the current productive capacity of the planet is more than sufficient to feed and educate everyone on it, we already have the capacity to "augment the intelligence of the human race as a whole", without resorting to such trickery as genetic engineering.
Just remember: no excess of nature will make up for a lack of nurture... No gene will make up for malnourishment.
And, just one more final point. We are nowhere near being able to "increase intelligence" of the human species by means of genetic engineering, while we do have the productive capacity for feeding and educating everyone today.
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Well, I know I'm not lying.
As regards to the other, you do not have to accept the GPL to use a GPL'd program someone gives to you, that depends on a GPL library (and is thus a derived work of said library). You have to accept the GPL if and only if you distribute the program.
Suppose I give you a copy of bash that depends on libreadline, both of which I received under GPL. In that situation, the only one who is required to accept the terms of the GPL is me. If you further on intended to pass them to someone else, you would also have to accept the GPL, since nothing else gives you permission to redistribute.
Now, say I write some program that critically depends on some GPL library, say, libreadline again. In this case, if I gave you a binary of this program that links to libreadline, I would be distributing a derivative work of libreadline, and would have to accept the terms of the GPL, which require me to GPL my program. This does not stop _me_ from distributing the source to my program under any other license I wish, as long as I don't link it to libreadline.
The effect is that I, as a distributor, may link a program to a GPL library like libreadline only if I accept to distribute the program under GPL. This does not force you to accept the GPL in any way whatsoever, and does not restrict me from distributing the program under other license terms in the case I don't link it to libreadline. (In fact, there exist non-GPL programs like Python that can be compiled to use libreadline-- if you use the option, you have to distribute the resulting binary under GPL, but you don't have to use the option if you don't want.)
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Ok, now I see clearly what your argument is. I am not inclined to count "corner cases" where one system works better than the other with problematic hardware setups as "technical superiority", but as you rightly said, I'm not going to get my face blue about it :-).
Still, yo do have a point.
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I first saw this story last night, on a Yahoo headline that read "Scientists boost mouse IQ". (I'm reproducing it from memory; the important bit is "mouse IQ"). Yeah right, as if someone gave a mouse an IQ test. I am aware that one may quantify increased performance on some kind of exercises that mice do (e.g., running mazes), but to call this "IQ" and compare it to human intelligence is at best silly, and at worst ideological doublespeak.
Simply, what we call "intelligence" both in people and in mice are qualitatively different things. And we know that human intelligence has a lot to do with upbringing; i.e., no matter what their genes are, if humans don't develop in an environment conducive to the development of their intelligence, they will turn out to be sub-optimal relative to their potential.
When I say above that equating mice "IQ" with human IQ (which, BTW, is a dubious idea anyway) is "at worst ideological doublespeak", what I have in mind is the fact that establishment is interested in propagating a certain view of the state of science and of human intelligence, one that downplays precisely what I stated above, the decisive role of upbringing in the development of human intelligence. Understandable when millions go hungry and uneducated on a planet that produces enough to feed and educate everyone well, and only a minority gets good conditions under which to develop.
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Precisely. I have a funny name for this which you criticise here: "The Libertine Software Movement".
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This is a common misconception about the GPL. Go read the license, and try to find where it says that you have to accept it to _use_ (as opposed to redistribute) the GPL software.
The fact is, the GPL places _absolutely no restrictions on mere use of the software_.
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