For anyone interested in reading the law under which the prosecutor is planning to charge this guy, it is here
If the details of the story are correct, there's no way the DOJ can win this case, as all of the provisions under the law have to with intent to defraud or demonstrable harm having occurred. But, as others have pointed out, the details are little sketchy.
Speaking of confusion, please do not equate philosophy with religion. While it is true that they both deal with intangibles, they are radically different in their goals, methodology, and view of themselves.
Religion is characterized by dogma and an unwillingness to be found fallible. A review of the history of philosophy reveals a pattern of progress that, while glacial in comparison, is fundamentally similar to the empirical sciences.
Religion acts as an anchor dragging behind the progress of human thought in its abstract philosophical form as well as in the concrete scientific form.
I define philosophy as human self-reflection upon the nature of our own being such that we can ask the questions that we do when conducting experimental science. All thought begins with assumptions, and it is naive to think that scientific inquiry does without them. The task of philosophy is to reveal these assumptions.
Dr. Steinhardt said most theorists would have expected those changes to have occurred in the first seconds of the universe's life and be virtually unobservable by astronomers today. Still, he pointed out that several years ago, other astronomers unexpectedly found that the present universe is apparently filled with a mysterious kind of energy that counteracts gravity on large scales. Perhaps the two effects are somehow related, Dr. Steinhardt said.
The postulation of "dark energy" and "dark matter" gives me the heebie jeebies, not b/c they sound spooky, but b/c they are placeholder notions filling collossal gaps in our knowledge. One of my principal criticisms of religion is that the idea of God is often relied on as a magic variable to make sense of our world. Don't understand why your house burned down on Xmas? God's will! never mind that your meth-smoking kid decided to spark the pipe under the tree.
To my mind, the most important thing is for a theory to be internally consistent. If we lose the notion of the truly constant constant, but in exchange are able to generate a theory that explains more and leaves fewer mysterious variables, we have made some important progress.
No, that was not the point of the study's findings. The study showed that grandmaster's rely more on long-term memory due to an extraordinary amount of time spent examining other chess games, thereby becoming familiar with recurring or similar tactical situations.
In contrast, the average player relies more on brute calculation of their next move without the benefit of having memorized many a game.
The study demonstrates that, as in many activities, intelligence is not the sole component to success -- experience plays a major role.
My first response when seeing the petition to change the god awful name of Episode II was happiness at being able to voice my mind and support an effort to improve a series I care about.
On consideration however, I think that signing that thing ignores the real problem -- quality of content. It is my expectation that Ep II will suffer a weak storyline, lame characters, jackass explanations (i.e., the Force comes from bugs in your cells or whatever the hell that was) just as Ep I did. Given this near certainty, I think the title is great. Let shit be called shit and we can save ourselves some grief.
It's only 9am here, and my cisco's been locked up three times already. It kills me to shut down and restart a piece of equipment like this -- can't be good for its life expectancy. It also really screws up my aim on Q3:)
I am not a long-time Perlie, but I've been working for a couple of years on a very large scale Perl system, and I have to say that I'm looking forward to Perl 6 like I have never awaited a new version of a language. I love the syntax changes for the most part, although why Larry won't just accept '+' for string concatenation I cannot understand.
Building more OO features into the language is a great move, especially with the emphasis on return values.
It's also worth noting that while Perl is improving it's OO support, it is not enforcing a specific OO model, as languages like Java do; for instance, Perl allows multiple inheritance but Larry mentioned the availability of abstract interface classes. To those worried about Perl becoming Python or Ruby -- this is added flexibility, not forced migration.
And threads! beautiful threads! need I say more? (well, yes -- Perl 5 threads are notoriously unstable, and very little attention has been paid historically to making modules thread safe).
sounds cool, but you're missing one very important cost involved -- changing human societies such that we could accept variations like the one you describe. We still struggle with issues of race and gender; how could we even begin to deal with differences on the scale required for a person to live comfortably on Mars due to genetic modifications?
Furthermore, a human being engineered to live on Mars would have very little choice about his/her future, as the modifications would likely prohibit a life on Earth. We would be intentionally depriving these people of their autonomy.
Taken together, this represents a significant cost in human terms, even though the financial gains might be promising.
A 7-Eleven spokesperson added "This profound discovery will shave years off our plans to offer Slurpies(R) on the Martian surface, and represents a giant leap toward the goal of ubiquitous instant refreshment." While current plans include only the popular Coke and grape flavors, an insider confirmed that the 7-Eleven R&D department is already hard at work creating flavors unique to the Red Planet, such as "Extreme Exfoliating Sandstorm Fury", and "Cup of Dirt and Rocks".
Remember what happened to
MegaHal when the public was invited to "educate" it? The result was an utterly, tediously, foulmouthed bot. However I must confess to teaching it that Smurfette had a foot fetish.
How I long for this movie not to be retarded. But frankly, I'm skeptical about the capacity of Hollywood to deliver a story about AI that actually treats the subject with any sensitivity to the field. It's clear from the trailers that the kind of AI we're talking about here is more than that taught in undergrad CS courses and used commonly in games. They're trying to tell a story about an intelligence that at the very least passes the Turing test, and supposedly much more.
Trouble is, the conception of AI taught in CS courses is largely still the 1970's version that resulted in projects like cyc. The metaphor of "brain as computer", or a set of inference rules governing a vast filing cabinet of brute facts. Peruse the work of leading contemporary cognitive scientists however, and you'll see a very different picture of intelligence. For one, there has been a deep shift in emphasis from the view of mind as disembodied thinker, to a view that takes embodiment and real activity in the world to be an indespensible constituent of what we recognize as intelligence. Intelligence isn't just thinking logically and drawing correct conclusions (and in fact humans often don't), but it consists in activity, social interaction, language, tool use, care about one's projects, and a myriad of concrete behaviors. Interestingly, a highly similar sea change occured in philosophy from Descartes' Meditations to Heidegger's Being and Time (1926), where the former is an analysis of the human mind that works by gradually removing everything "external" and material, and the latter begins with and resolutely holds to the self's doings and cares in the world throughout the analysis, even to the point of coining a new term to describe the human self, dasein, "there-being".
I worry then that the trailer suggests that the same kind of AI is responsible for smart houses and a robot capable of all things human.
Your second suggestion is right on the mark. I'm so bored with Trek resorting to anthopomorphized aliens I cringe every time the Federation encounters yet another species that happens to share identical life support needs and has 46 chromosomes (c'mon and cross-breed everybody!). And of course the justification for these similarities is complete bullshit that only the Kansas board of education would like. You remember the Star Trek version of creationism right? That's right, just toss reason out the window. Toss it. Now!
Well, this is fine, but then you have to build your object-flattening code into your CORBA objects, which is one of the primary reasons to go with an OODBMS in the first place. With an OODBMS you can build CORBA-capable objects that get stored directly in the DB, as long as the CORBA OIDs match or map to the OODB OIDs, and you settle on a policy to correlate activated and deactivated CORBA objects with their representations in the DB.
But it's a big one. A company I worked for recently employed a RogueWave product to emulate an OODBMS on top of an relational DB, and the result was utter horror. Having to recompile everything as the result of a schema change is a major pain, especially if you have to deal with multiple versions of the codebase. Of course, the situation was worsened in this case because the RW software had to generate all of the mapping code.
I also find that building entity-relation models for relational DBs -- that is, thinking of objects
in the form of tables, rows, and columns -- is a very clear way to figure out the problem domain and evaluate different solutions. A successful development process might well include a preliminary stage working with an RDBMS, even if only in working out the conceptual kinks, and then move on to an OODMS.
Finally, a crucial criterion I would employ in which system to go with is the complexity of the data to be stored. The application I worked with was a horrible candidate for an OODBMS because the information itself was simple: names, contact info, and the like, which fits the relational model quite naturally. On the other hand, I'm about to start on a project of my own utilizing highly complex objects, capable of much greater sophistication than in my other example. I will most likely use an OODBMS, for instance db40.
Seems there's consensus so far that the NSA shouldn't be barred from contributing just because they're the NSA. And the comment that the whole point of Open Source is that it accepts contributions from every possible source is well taken. However, I'm curious about this idea of back doors hidden even when the source code is disclosed.
I have two questions:
Is anyone able to comment on what such a back door would look like, or how it might be implemented such that it would remain hidden even when in an uncompiled form?
Assuming the above is truly feasible, how would the OS philosophy deal with contributing bodies or individuals who unrepentantly submit code with such hidden and deliberate vulnerabilities? Are there provisions for dealing with Open Source "vandals"?
Slashdot Mirror
For anyone interested in reading the law under which the prosecutor is planning to charge this guy, it is here
If the details of the story are correct, there's no way the DOJ can win this case, as all of the provisions under the law have to with intent to defraud or demonstrable harm having occurred. But, as others have pointed out, the details are little sketchy.
for once it won't be a totally inane waste of time.
Speaking of confusion, please do not equate philosophy with religion. While it is true that they both deal with intangibles, they are radically different in their goals, methodology, and view of themselves.
Religion is characterized by dogma and an unwillingness to be found fallible. A review of the history of philosophy reveals a pattern of progress that, while glacial in comparison, is fundamentally similar to the empirical sciences. Religion acts as an anchor dragging behind the progress of human thought in its abstract philosophical form as well as in the concrete scientific form.
I define philosophy as human self-reflection upon the nature of our own being such that we can ask the questions that we do when conducting experimental science. All thought begins with assumptions, and it is naive to think that scientific inquiry does without them. The task of philosophy is to reveal these assumptions.
Dr. Steinhardt said most theorists would have expected those changes to have occurred in the first seconds of the universe's life and be virtually unobservable by astronomers today. Still, he pointed out that several years ago, other astronomers unexpectedly found that the present universe is apparently filled with a mysterious kind of energy that counteracts gravity on large scales. Perhaps the two effects are somehow related, Dr. Steinhardt said.
The postulation of "dark energy" and "dark matter" gives me the heebie jeebies, not b/c they sound spooky, but b/c they are placeholder notions filling collossal gaps in our knowledge. One of my principal criticisms of religion is that the idea of God is often relied on as a magic variable to make sense of our world. Don't understand why your house burned down on Xmas? God's will! never mind that your meth-smoking kid decided to spark the pipe under the tree.
To my mind, the most important thing is for a theory to be internally consistent. If we lose the notion of the truly constant constant, but in exchange are able to generate a theory that explains more and leaves fewer mysterious variables, we have made some important progress.
No, that was not the point of the study's findings. The study showed that grandmaster's rely more on long-term memory due to an extraordinary amount of time spent examining other chess games, thereby becoming familiar with recurring or similar tactical situations.
In contrast, the average player relies more on brute calculation of their next move without the benefit of having memorized many a game.
The study demonstrates that, as in many activities, intelligence is not the sole component to success -- experience plays a major role.
for anyone w/ Cisco 600 series routers, blocking port 80 is the only fix the for problem of the routers hanging.
It took some time for my ISP to figure this out. They spent two weeks saying that web access just had to be denied, but that's insufficient.
And by the way, the fact that Verizon called is downright heartwarming ;) -- Qwest flat refuses to accept inquiries!
My first response when seeing the petition to change the god awful name of Episode II was happiness at being able to voice my mind and support an effort to improve a series I care about.
On consideration however, I think that signing that thing ignores the real problem -- quality of content. It is my expectation that Ep II will suffer a weak storyline, lame characters, jackass explanations (i.e., the Force comes from bugs in your cells or whatever the hell that was) just as Ep I did. Given this near certainty, I think the title is great. Let shit be called shit and we can save ourselves some grief.
What if he's threatening to clone Jar-Jar ?!
It's only 9am here, and my cisco's been locked up three times already. It kills me to shut down and restart a piece of equipment like this -- can't be good for its life expectancy. It also really screws up my aim on Q3 :)
I am not a long-time Perlie, but I've been working for a couple of years on a very large scale Perl system, and I have to say that I'm looking forward to Perl 6 like I have never awaited a new version of a language. I love the syntax changes for the most part, although why Larry won't just accept '+' for string concatenation I cannot understand.
Building more OO features into the language is a great move, especially with the emphasis on return values. It's also worth noting that while Perl is improving it's OO support, it is not enforcing a specific OO model, as languages like Java do; for instance, Perl allows multiple inheritance but Larry mentioned the availability of abstract interface classes. To those worried about Perl becoming Python or Ruby -- this is added flexibility, not forced migration.
And threads! beautiful threads! need I say more? (well, yes -- Perl 5 threads are notoriously unstable, and very little attention has been paid historically to making modules thread safe).
sounds cool, but you're missing one very important cost involved -- changing human societies such that we could accept variations like the one you describe. We still struggle with issues of race and gender; how could we even begin to deal with differences on the scale required for a person to live comfortably on Mars due to genetic modifications?
Furthermore, a human being engineered to live on Mars would have very little choice about his/her future, as the modifications would likely prohibit a life on Earth. We would be intentionally depriving these people of their autonomy.
Taken together, this represents a significant cost in human terms, even though the financial gains might be promising.
A 7-Eleven spokesperson added "This profound discovery will shave years off our plans to offer Slurpies(R) on the Martian surface, and represents a giant leap toward the goal of ubiquitous instant refreshment." While current plans include only the popular Coke and grape flavors, an insider confirmed that the 7-Eleven R&D department is already hard at work creating flavors unique to the Red Planet, such as "Extreme Exfoliating Sandstorm Fury", and "Cup of Dirt and Rocks".
A Seattle TV station is reporting that the deal between AOL and Amazon leaves a loophole for a "quiet" buyout by AOL.
to your sig:
Is the idea of soup contingent upon the idea of the spoon? I thought it was lips and bowls.
but I'll stick with my mercury switch and handgrenade setup right now.
oh, gtg, that's my cousin at the door here to swap my video card for me. hehe.
Must the fascination with redefining the term "hacker" with a positive connotation govern moderation criteria as well?
To say Battlebots is only about destruction is silly.
Remember what happened to MegaHal when the public was invited to "educate" it? The result was an utterly, tediously, foulmouthed bot. However I must confess to teaching it that Smurfette had a foot fetish.
Well first I was going to suggest the following poll:
the best Doctor is:
- Tom Baker
- Tom Baker
- Tom Baker
- Tom Baker
- CowboyTomBaker
But since you all already seem to grant that he was the pinnacle of Whohood, I'll just point out his site.How I long for this movie not to be retarded. But frankly, I'm skeptical about the capacity of Hollywood to deliver a story about AI that actually treats the subject with any sensitivity to the field. It's clear from the trailers that the kind of AI we're talking about here is more than that taught in undergrad CS courses and used commonly in games. They're trying to tell a story about an intelligence that at the very least passes the Turing test, and supposedly much more.
Trouble is, the conception of AI taught in CS courses is largely still the 1970's version that resulted in projects like cyc. The metaphor of "brain as computer", or a set of inference rules governing a vast filing cabinet of brute facts. Peruse the work of leading contemporary cognitive scientists however, and you'll see a very different picture of intelligence. For one, there has been a deep shift in emphasis from the view of mind as disembodied thinker, to a view that takes embodiment and real activity in the world to be an indespensible constituent of what we recognize as intelligence. Intelligence isn't just thinking logically and drawing correct conclusions (and in fact humans often don't), but it consists in activity, social interaction, language, tool use, care about one's projects, and a myriad of concrete behaviors. Interestingly, a highly similar sea change occured in philosophy from Descartes' Meditations to Heidegger's Being and Time (1926), where the former is an analysis of the human mind that works by gradually removing everything "external" and material, and the latter begins with and resolutely holds to the self's doings and cares in the world throughout the analysis, even to the point of coining a new term to describe the human self, dasein, "there-being".
I worry then that the trailer suggests that the same kind of AI is responsible for smart houses and a robot capable of all things human.
For a bunch of great links, see: Minds, Machines, and Metaphysics
After looking at those pictures I feel like *much* less of a dork for staying in on a Saturday night to frag 13 year olds.
Your second suggestion is right on the mark. I'm so bored with Trek resorting to anthopomorphized aliens I cringe every time the Federation encounters yet another species that happens to share identical life support needs and has 46 chromosomes (c'mon and cross-breed everybody!). And of course the justification for these similarities is complete bullshit that only the Kansas board of education would like. You remember the Star Trek version of creationism right? That's right, just toss reason out the window. Toss it. Now!
Well, this is fine, but then you have to build your object-flattening code into your CORBA objects, which is one of the primary reasons to go with an OODBMS in the first place. With an OODBMS you can build CORBA-capable objects that get stored directly in the DB, as long as the CORBA OIDs match or map to the OODB OIDs, and you settle on a policy to correlate activated and deactivated CORBA objects with their representations in the DB.
But it's a big one. A company I worked for recently employed a RogueWave product to emulate an OODBMS on top of an relational DB, and the result was utter horror. Having to recompile everything as the result of a schema change is a major pain, especially if you have to deal with multiple versions of the codebase. Of course, the situation was worsened in this case because the RW software had to generate all of the mapping code.
I also find that building entity-relation models for relational DBs -- that is, thinking of objects in the form of tables, rows, and columns -- is a very clear way to figure out the problem domain and evaluate different solutions. A successful development process might well include a preliminary stage working with an RDBMS, even if only in working out the conceptual kinks, and then move on to an OODMS.
Finally, a crucial criterion I would employ in which system to go with is the complexity of the data to be stored. The application I worked with was a horrible candidate for an OODBMS because the information itself was simple: names, contact info, and the like, which fits the relational model quite naturally. On the other hand, I'm about to start on a project of my own utilizing highly complex objects, capable of much greater sophistication than in my other example. I will most likely use an OODBMS, for instance db40.
Seems there's consensus so far that the NSA shouldn't be barred from contributing just because they're the NSA. And the comment that the whole point of Open Source is that it accepts contributions from every possible source is well taken. However, I'm curious about this idea of back doors hidden even when the source code is disclosed.
I have two questions:
I'm gonna hold out for the model where the clock arms are penguin wings.
Hey wait, I can just write a script to do that! :P