And I am sadly glad that many Americans are armed and am now a left wing liberal who supports the NRA. Scary.
I find myself in the same, terrible boat. After years of arguing for gun control, there's now very definitely a part of me that appreciates all those right wing, AK-47's for 'home defense' wackos.
. That's to say, if there's a Perl module Foo and you subclass it to Foo::Advanced by adding a frobnitz method, then what happens when the original author of Foo produces the next version of Foo that already has a frobnitz method?
What am I missing here? In the subclass frobnitz() would be overridden, and the superclass should not care about subclasses.
Security issues aside, having a networked brain and the capacity to access an unlimited wealth of information is surely my wettest dream. However, getting from the point of attaching neurons to computer circuits to the point of downloading knowledge a la the Matrix ("Now I know how to fly a huey, yahoo!") is a much harder problem.
The human brain 1) develops over many many years and throughout that time develops patterns unique to the individual's experiences; and 2) it develops in relation to a body via which it interacts with the world. This is why so much CogSci research focuses on the issue of "embodiment". The paradigm of brain as discursive controller is fading away in favor an emphasis on the role of the physical (both body and environment) in what we typically regard as cognition. (See Being There by Andy Clark for an amazing read).
Given this, knowledge, especially knowledge that manifests in physical behavior, must either be "installed" in a manner highly sensitive to the idiosyncracies of the person, or through a long period in which the body and brain are trained to work together on a problem. Therefore, I don't think it's all that plausible to instantaneously know how to fly a huey, to drive a car, to type, etc.. As someone else observed, we'll see this technology used in prosthetics far sooner than we'll have Matrix/Johny Mnemonic style scenarios.
This is an excellent observation. Take the example of the Myxoma virus introduced into rabbit populations in Australia several decades ago. After a couple of years in the wild, research showed that the virus had decreased in virulence. The reason is that a hyper efficient virus kills its host before it can be transferred to new hosts, and so natural selection (working at the level of the group, not individual) produces a virus population with moderate virulence. Therefore, an intelligent virus certainly would not result in armageddon, but would reduce its own virulence in order to keep enough hosts around for it to reside within.
C++ through and through (even a C++ OODBMS emulation layer (nightmare!))
fairly brain-dead ecommerce stuff
Project 2:
Java, Emacs Lisp, Perl, SQL
much more intricate system, designed for online document publishing
Major relevant difference? In the first app (which I inherited, and was in no way responsible for) was so poorly designed that absolutely everything from the front end NSAPI DLLs to the backend to the db emulation code had to be compiled into one gigantic package -- absolutely zero compartmentalization of behavior.
In the second app, we have very clear boundaries of responsibility, such that each bit of code is largely testable independently.
The bottom line is that if you're going to use multiple languages for a single project, just make sure that each part has a clearly defined role. This helps with development, testing, and replacing team members if need be.
We're in a period of consolidation, now that the dot-com boom has collapsed. Our task as programmers over the next few years is to make all the stuff that sort of works now work 100%.
Are we? I think we could be, and should be, but thanks to a lot of folks' insistence upon reinventing the wheel, we aren't going to be in the forseeable future. Every month there's a new language that offers miniscule advantages over existing languages (i.e., Ruby, the "two thirds Perl, one third Python" language), and of course MS wants to duplicate in C# and.NET all the work that went into Java and the advances we've seen in distributed computing, such as CORBA. Say what you will about Java and CORBA (here, I'll say it for you: "If it's not C or Perl it's shite!", "CORBA's a bloated standard!"), but they have the advantage of being mature technologies.
MS is pulling their usual bullshit tactic of releasing a product that offers nothing new except the new bugs introduced in unproven rewrites.
And given the current state of the economy, telling developers to go learn yet another language is not a very prudent expenditure of resources. Nonetheless, a great many PHB's will give precisely that directive.
Are you aware that Java can be compiled to native code giving it damn near equivalent performance to C++?
Are you aware that you can run c code from within a Java app?
Are you aware that hardware is goddamn cheap and the 'bloat' from a VM is dwarfed in comparison to a powerful box?
And it's worth noting as well that Java is often easier to program in not b/c of the much cited absence of pointers, but b/c it's a well-organized language unlike so many others.
Find a way to improve [the fitness function] automatically, then you will have true machine intelligence with infinite potential.
Why should we expect "true" intelligence to manifest in a form of evolution that differs fundamentally from the evolutionary processes that produced the human brain? We did not evolve according to an improving fitness function, but rather through a messy series of brutal conflicts with other organisms and the forces of nature, those organisms most able to contribute genetic material to future generations being the most fit. Fitness does not exist in a vacuum (as the genetic programming task seems to imply), but as a relation between an organism and its environment. In fact, if genetic programming is to bear any resemblance to biological evolution, we shouldn't expect an orgaism that is "best" according to some absolute measure ultimately to appear, but rather a program that produces the most viable offspring within that environment.
The fact that humans are so frequently irrational is explained well by a theory of evolution that operates according to a contextualized measure of fitness rather than a constantly improving fitness function independent of a changing environment. Perhaps such a function would yield extremely powerful AI, but I think it would be a much different form of intelligence from that of human beings.
I recently moved and had to reestablish DSL in Seattle. Qwest is the only line provider, and the deal with MSN of course applies here as elsewhere. I'm paying an extra $70 connection fee for not going with MS, but with another ISP. So far, not only has service been faster with the ISP, but every problem I've had so far has been with Qwest. Six months ago I didn't really pay attention to the DSL providers and ISPs dropping like flies, but now I'm feelin' the burn. BTW, I typed this entire message while on hold at Qwest with some genius who has to check to see if my ISP supports DSL. Fuckers.
The difference is the speed with which felons / unwanted persons can be found - "you can't come on the plane, you're under arrest" versus "CNN has just learned that person x, who flew into the World Trade Center last month, was actually tagged in a government database somewhere!"
If the suspected bad guy is already in the DB, shouldn't the FBI/CIA/whatever already have looked into the matter? I don't take much comfort in a system that will simply make it easier to harass people at the gate who, by definition, should have been investigated thoroughly before ever getting to the airport.
But what if you need something that the website provides?
If you need it, fucking pay for it. And while you're right that consumer demand can create new openings, all you're really arguing is that if you bait-and-switch content providers you can freeload indefinitely.
The ship design, loosely modeled after the P-38 Lightening. Clunky but compelling. The submarine feel inside is great for a ship that is supposedly testing fundamentally new technologies, in which functionality takes precedence over, e.g., carpet.
Low tech solutions: I'm sick of every problem being solved by firing a purple beam of something.
The fact that the Vulcan chick, though yet another obvious geek masturbation fastasy (someone tell me again why Seven's skin tight clothes and two inch pumps are the ultimate in efficiency?), was not (contra Michael), as stale rehash of logic vs. emotion. She's actually a little soft compared to the likes of Tuvok and that painfully wooden younger Vulcan on Voyager.
Finally, and too bad this is gonna change now, I think a reliance on shuttlecraft would be nice change. Beaming is just too damn easy.
Combine this redefinition of cracking as a form of terrorism, combine it with the new powers of surveillance to be granted to investigative bodies, and doesn't this look like clear justification for programs like Carnivore?
If they can get approval now for tapping all phones that a suspected terrorist supposedly uses, not just a single phone they *know* he uses, isn't it just a stone's throw to track *all* communications that a terrorist uses? Suddenly monitoring a large amount of Internet traffic suspected to be associated with a terrorist is necessary to national security.
As a raging alcoholic, I firmly advocate the utilization of multi-billion dollar technology to create an orbital version of a substance only slightly less common than water.
Given that their weapons were mere knives, a single well-armed sky marshall on each of these planes would have likely prevented this from happening. I expect we'll have them on flights regularly starting ASAP.
And I certainly hope we see a retrofit of supposedly "user friendly" cockpits such as in 757/767s with biometric devices to identify pilots. After all, almost certainly the pilots were either killed or incapacitated, the planes being flown subsequently by the terrorists.
Why the hell is the entirely non-sensical parent modded up? Please don't waste our time by recommending comments that don't make sense b/c the author didn't care enough to get it right the first time (Never mind the extra karma). And by the way, comment 2206763 suffers the same idiotic moderation.
Funny, Qwest is my provider as well, and the only phone call I got was notification that my bill was overdue.
On the whole I've been very happy with Qwest also, however I would like very much to know why they gave out bad information regarding the fix for more than a week. In case you didn't know, for some time they insisted that the only thing necessary was to disable remote web access to the Cisco router. This didn't work, and I suffered periodic outages for a week after I applied their prescription. It wasn't for quite some time that they revealed that blocking port 80 on the router was the only way to stop the scans from hanging it.
As a telecommuter, my productivity was cut enormously over those two weeks. Now, if it turns out that Qwest was negligent, i.e., they knew that their original "fix" didn't work but wasted time releasing that info, then I would expect compensation. However I suspect that, as happens often in complex systems, it simply took them a while to figure out what worked and what didn't. If that's the case, then I cannot reasonably demand anything more from them.
It wasn't packet size, it was that CBOS (Cisco Broadband OS) versions earlier than 2.4 suffer the same vulnerability to specifically malformed URI's as IIS.
If primed properly for the task, with words and phrases appropriate to an 18 month old, I'm quite sure that MegaHAL could fool the same experts. The only point of interest in this story is that they're trying to grow the language ability (rather than merely update and draw upon a database of previous remarks, as MegaHAL does).
Slashdot Mirror
And I am sadly glad that many Americans are armed and am now a left wing liberal who supports the NRA. Scary.
I find myself in the same, terrible boat. After years of arguing for gun control, there's now very definitely a part of me that appreciates all those right wing, AK-47's for 'home defense' wackos.
. That's to say, if there's a Perl module Foo and you subclass it to Foo::Advanced by adding a frobnitz method, then what happens when the original author of Foo produces the next version of Foo that already has a frobnitz method?
What am I missing here? In the subclass frobnitz() would be overridden, and the superclass should not care about subclasses.
Security issues aside, having a networked brain and the capacity to access an unlimited wealth of information is surely my wettest dream. However, getting from the point of attaching neurons to computer circuits to the point of downloading knowledge a la the Matrix ("Now I know how to fly a huey, yahoo!") is a much harder problem.
The human brain 1) develops over many many years and throughout that time develops patterns unique to the individual's experiences; and 2) it develops in relation to a body via which it interacts with the world. This is why so much CogSci research focuses on the issue of "embodiment". The paradigm of brain as discursive controller is fading away in favor an emphasis on the role of the physical (both body and environment) in what we typically regard as cognition. (See Being There by Andy Clark for an amazing read).
Given this, knowledge, especially knowledge that manifests in physical behavior, must either be "installed" in a manner highly sensitive to the idiosyncracies of the person, or through a long period in which the body and brain are trained to work together on a problem. Therefore, I don't think it's all that plausible to instantaneously know how to fly a huey, to drive a car, to type, etc.. As someone else observed, we'll see this technology used in prosthetics far sooner than we'll have Matrix/Johny Mnemonic style scenarios.
They're called mirrors.
This is an excellent observation. Take the example of the Myxoma virus introduced into rabbit populations in Australia several decades ago. After a couple of years in the wild, research showed that the virus had decreased in virulence. The reason is that a hyper efficient virus kills its host before it can be transferred to new hosts, and so natural selection (working at the level of the group, not individual) produces a virus population with moderate virulence. Therefore, an intelligent virus certainly would not result in armageddon, but would reduce its own virulence in order to keep enough hosts around for it to reside within.
As dorkstar says, you WILL have place, you cow!
I've used CORBA on two projects.
Project 1:
- C++ through and through (even a C++ OODBMS emulation layer (nightmare!))
- fairly brain-dead ecommerce stuff
Project 2:Major relevant difference? In the first app (which I inherited, and was in no way responsible for) was so poorly designed that absolutely everything from the front end NSAPI DLLs to the backend to the db emulation code had to be compiled into one gigantic package -- absolutely zero compartmentalization of behavior.
In the second app, we have very clear boundaries of responsibility, such that each bit of code is largely testable independently.
The bottom line is that if you're going to use multiple languages for a single project, just make sure that each part has a clearly defined role. This helps with development, testing, and replacing team members if need be.
We're in a period of consolidation, now that the dot-com boom has collapsed. Our task as programmers over the next few years is to make all the stuff that sort of works now work 100%.
Are we? I think we could be, and should be, but thanks to a lot of folks' insistence upon reinventing the wheel, we aren't going to be in the forseeable future. Every month there's a new language that offers miniscule advantages over existing languages (i.e., Ruby, the "two thirds Perl, one third Python" language), and of course MS wants to duplicate in C# and .NET all the work that went into Java and the advances we've seen in distributed computing, such as CORBA. Say what you will about Java and CORBA (here, I'll say it for you: "If it's not C or Perl it's shite!", "CORBA's a bloated standard!"), but they have the advantage of being mature technologies.
MS is pulling their usual bullshit tactic of releasing a product that offers nothing new except the new bugs introduced in unproven rewrites.
And given the current state of the economy, telling developers to go learn yet another language is not a very prudent expenditure of resources. Nonetheless, a great many PHB's will give precisely that directive.
Fucking Christ ...
Are you aware that Java can be compiled to native code giving it damn near equivalent performance to C++?
Are you aware that you can run c code from within a Java app?
Are you aware that hardware is goddamn cheap and the 'bloat' from a VM is dwarfed in comparison to a powerful box?
And it's worth noting as well that Java is often easier to program in not b/c of the much cited absence of pointers, but b/c it's a well-organized language unlike so many others.
Find a way to improve [the fitness function] automatically, then you will have true machine intelligence with infinite potential.
Why should we expect "true" intelligence to manifest in a form of evolution that differs fundamentally from the evolutionary processes that produced the human brain? We did not evolve according to an improving fitness function, but rather through a messy series of brutal conflicts with other organisms and the forces of nature, those organisms most able to contribute genetic material to future generations being the most fit. Fitness does not exist in a vacuum (as the genetic programming task seems to imply), but as a relation between an organism and its environment. In fact, if genetic programming is to bear any resemblance to biological evolution, we shouldn't expect an orgaism that is "best" according to some absolute measure ultimately to appear, but rather a program that produces the most viable offspring within that environment.
The fact that humans are so frequently irrational is explained well by a theory of evolution that operates according to a contextualized measure of fitness rather than a constantly improving fitness function independent of a changing environment. Perhaps such a function would yield extremely powerful AI, but I think it would be a much different form of intelligence from that of human beings.
Perl does have exception handling. I've been using the Experimental::Exception module in a large code base ( > 100,000 lines ) with much success.
I recently moved and had to reestablish DSL in Seattle. Qwest is the only line provider, and the deal with MSN of course applies here as elsewhere. I'm paying an extra $70 connection fee for not going with MS, but with another ISP. So far, not only has service been faster with the ISP, but every problem I've had so far has been with Qwest. Six months ago I didn't really pay attention to the DSL providers and ISPs dropping like flies, but now I'm feelin' the burn. BTW, I typed this entire message while on hold at Qwest with some genius who has to check to see if my ISP supports DSL. Fuckers.
The difference is the speed with which felons / unwanted persons can be found - "you can't come on the plane, you're under arrest" versus "CNN has just learned that person x, who flew into the World Trade Center last month, was actually tagged in a government database somewhere!"
If the suspected bad guy is already in the DB, shouldn't the FBI/CIA/whatever already have looked into the matter? I don't take much comfort in a system that will simply make it easier to harass people at the gate who, by definition, should have been investigated thoroughly before ever getting to the airport.
But what if you need something that the website provides?
If you need it, fucking pay for it. And while you're right that consumer demand can create new openings, all you're really arguing is that if you bait-and-switch content providers you can freeload indefinitely.
What I liked:
Combine this redefinition of cracking as a form of terrorism, combine it with the new powers of surveillance to be granted to investigative bodies, and doesn't this look like clear justification for programs like Carnivore?
If they can get approval now for tapping all phones that a suspected terrorist supposedly uses, not just a single phone they *know* he uses, isn't it just a stone's throw to track *all* communications that a terrorist uses? Suddenly monitoring a large amount of Internet traffic suspected to be associated with a terrorist is necessary to national security.
As a raging alcoholic, I firmly advocate the utilization of multi-billion dollar technology to create an orbital version of a substance only slightly less common than water.
Given that their weapons were mere knives, a single well-armed sky marshall on each of these planes would have likely prevented this from happening. I expect we'll have them on flights regularly starting ASAP.
And I certainly hope we see a retrofit of supposedly "user friendly" cockpits such as in 757/767s with biometric devices to identify pilots. After all, almost certainly the pilots were either killed or incapacitated, the planes being flown subsequently by the terrorists.
is a breathalyzer that disables email.
Incidentally, both of them also made a mistake with the tags not showing up, but noones perfect
This is what I was objecting to, since the punchlines were the tags.
Why the hell is the entirely non-sensical parent modded up? Please don't waste our time by recommending comments that don't make sense b/c the author didn't care enough to get it right the first time (Never mind the extra karma). And by the way, comment 2206763 suffers the same idiotic moderation.
You might consider reading the moderator guidelines, which explain in detail how moderators are selected.
Funny, Qwest is my provider as well, and the only phone call I got was notification that my bill was overdue.
On the whole I've been very happy with Qwest also, however I would like very much to know why they gave out bad information regarding the fix for more than a week. In case you didn't know, for some time they insisted that the only thing necessary was to disable remote web access to the Cisco router. This didn't work, and I suffered periodic outages for a week after I applied their prescription. It wasn't for quite some time that they revealed that blocking port 80 on the router was the only way to stop the scans from hanging it.
As a telecommuter, my productivity was cut enormously over those two weeks. Now, if it turns out that Qwest was negligent, i.e., they knew that their original "fix" didn't work but wasted time releasing that info, then I would expect compensation. However I suspect that, as happens often in complex systems, it simply took them a while to figure out what worked and what didn't. If that's the case, then I cannot reasonably demand anything more from them.
It wasn't packet size, it was that CBOS (Cisco Broadband OS) versions earlier than 2.4 suffer the same vulnerability to specifically malformed URI's as IIS.
But if there happens to be a giant dog
If primed properly for the task, with words and phrases appropriate to an 18 month old, I'm quite sure that MegaHAL could fool the same experts. The only point of interest in this story is that they're trying to grow the language ability (rather than merely update and draw upon a database of previous remarks, as MegaHAL does).