IT has had a problem for its entire lifetime of thinking that computing and networks are above politics, that access by the people would somehow improve democracy.
It's had the opposite effect. Computers and networks are tools of calculation and communication, and such things have always been as usable by the forces of politics. It was sheer naievety to believe that they would not be adopted by politicians.
And since such things cost money, no matter how low the learning curve goes, they will be skewed by cost towards those willing to spend money to purchase political power.
So here we are. Managing the very tools that will be used to enslave us if we allow them to.
Because in the end, our only protection against the embargo of our freedoms by those who concentrate power in themselves for penurious goals is to exercise them at all necessary pain to ourselves.
Get off your ass and vote. And vote for the good person, not the one who promises you the shiniest toys.
Everyone here has, often, been paid far less than half the value they add.
Nobody here has ever been paid more than the value they add.
Is that fair?
Why should some putz with too much gel in his hair make money off your hard work simply because he got the email and passed it on to you?
Why should some dried-up old man living in Boca Raton shouting orders at his nurse be your boss when he's got eight layers of bosses between you and him, sucking cash out of your production?
All you have to do is go to the customer, offer to split the difference between your pay and the billing rate, and take the business back from the non-productive opportunists.
I've done it a couple of times, but only seen one other person with the balls (and he was fired-up only because he was being paid $33/hour and found out his time was billed at $125...).
You've never done it. You didn't even know there was a scam being run on you until I told you.
You only think liberalism has changed because of propaganda campaigns like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, which have moved the meaning of "center" by demonizing anything left of hard-right.
It's not liberalism that's changed.
It's conservatism.
Conservatives used to have morals. So did liberals, but liberal morals have tightened and conservative morals include torture and propaganda.
Liberals are still liberal. Conservatives are now fascist.
Get a cable modem and put a router on the inner link set up to do NAT (they come that way out of the box usually, with a 192.* or 10.* network on the inner side).
Anyone sniffing will get nowhere, and you can get out to the internet without any hassle.
I've always had this setup and never once had any of the problems my neighbors get.
Get some of Carnap's books. Read them. There is a distinct difference between syntax (logic) and semantics (meaning). And there is no reason a computer can't understand both.
The logic of language is in its syntax. The meaning of language is in its semantics. But you can't develop the extra-syntactic information without applying logic to previously unknown words, so that they can be associated with named words later without being themselves named in a sentence.
What the human brain does, if it has any semantic experience stored, is try several semantic associations against the syntactic logic of a sentence until one "makes sense"; i.e., the inferred logic is not broken by the stated logic.
This process can be applied by a computer.
If you decide that your brain is somehow magical; that it is not a computer; then you are wrong.
And if you think that all computers are Turing machines, you're wrong about that, too.
Just for the record, Tom Delay, as Majority Whip in the Gingrich House, was given a single extracurricular task during that period: Install a Conservative as the chief executive of every lobbying organization in Washington.
Naturally, there are a few that couldn't be turned, but he almost succeeded, and the last ten years of political distortion are the result of that effort. That they also used that system for personal financial gain just shows how craven and shameless the GOP is, in general.
Rudolf Carnap knew that syntax was logic and semantics was "meaning".
If you give the computer non-structural associations, it certainly can provide semantic relationships in reaction to the structural associations you input.
The difference between computers and humans isn't the ability to reason. It's the reasons for reasoning. Their needs are different, and their means of obtaining them are not generally in their own control, so they would naturally not develop certain associations on their own. But we don't really want computers that act alive. We want them to be more efficient than that.
These search engines have no right and no compulsion to turn over any customer data, anonymous or otherwise, in response to politically motivated fishing expeditions.
Slashdot Mirror
You've chosen #2 in your second list.
I'm not whining. I'm educating.
The more you know, the less the leeches can afford to take from me.
Middlemen and managers are fungible. Which is how they treat you. But you're the one with the skills. You can do their job. They can't do yours.
IT has had a problem for its entire lifetime of thinking that computing and networks are above politics, that access by the people would somehow improve democracy.
It's had the opposite effect. Computers and networks are tools of calculation and communication, and such things have always been as usable by the forces of politics. It was sheer naievety to believe that they would not be adopted by politicians.
And since such things cost money, no matter how low the learning curve goes, they will be skewed by cost towards those willing to spend money to purchase political power.
So here we are. Managing the very tools that will be used to enslave us if we allow them to.
Because in the end, our only protection against the embargo of our freedoms by those who concentrate power in themselves for penurious goals is to exercise them at all necessary pain to ourselves.
Get off your ass and vote. And vote for the good person, not the one who promises you the shiniest toys.
Everyone here has, often, been paid far less than half the value they add.
Nobody here has ever been paid more than the value they add.
Is that fair?
Why should some putz with too much gel in his hair make money off your hard work simply because he got the email and passed it on to you?
Why should some dried-up old man living in Boca Raton shouting orders at his nurse be your boss when he's got eight layers of bosses between you and him, sucking cash out of your production?
All you have to do is go to the customer, offer to split the difference between your pay and the billing rate, and take the business back from the non-productive opportunists.
I've done it a couple of times, but only seen one other person with the balls (and he was fired-up only because he was being paid $33/hour and found out his time was billed at $125...).
You've never done it. You didn't even know there was a scam being run on you until I told you.
So who's the loser here?
Let's not just moderate comments.
I want to be able to moderate articles for depth, due diligence, and bias.
This one's going to sit at top level for quite some time, trolling in everyone until they read the comments and discover they shouldn't have bothered.
I used to work on dull stuff.
Then I worked on interesting stuff.
They they took the interesting stuff and made it dull stuff in a foreign land.
Now I work on dull stuff.
As you work, remember who's creating the value, and who's getting paid for it without creating value.
In that game, you chose which side you were, and changed sides from time to time, and imagined the entire scenario.
In this game, you're stuck hating cops the whole time, and given plenty of extracultural inputs to help you do that.
There's a difference between make-believe and indoctrination.
Anyone using a Turing machine to simulate a fuzzy system is wasting the determinacy, or trying to test the process using a repeatable RNG.
Once you hook up a real RNG, or just stop tracking the seeds, it ceases to be Turing computable.
IOW, most code execution is not Turing computable, as it involves external inputs that are not recorded.
But, if you insist, you should posit that you've just proved that the human brain is a Turing machine, as it's at worst a quantum parallel computer.
That, ironically, is Benno Schmidt's opinion and should not be doctrine.
Ask the folks at Bob Smith University about it when they graduate from the 1820s...
You only think liberalism has changed because of propaganda campaigns like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, which have moved the meaning of "center" by demonizing anything left of hard-right.
It's not liberalism that's changed.
It's conservatism.
Conservatives used to have morals. So did liberals, but liberal morals have tightened and conservative morals include torture and propaganda.
Liberals are still liberal. Conservatives are now fascist.
Hey. Genius. This is the Internet.
MAKE YOUR OWN AUCTION SITE AND COMPETE.
End of moral.
One student was "discriminated" against by one academic institution which laid out the rules he flouted before he flouted them.
You'd think a "conservative" would follow the rules.
"I did not say that conservatives tend to be stupid people. I said that stupid people tend to be conservative."
-John Stuart Mill
As soon as I said "fuzzy" you should have realized Turing was off the table.
Get a cable modem and put a router on the inner link set up to do NAT (they come that way out of the box usually, with a 192.* or 10.* network on the inner side).
Anyone sniffing will get nowhere, and you can get out to the internet without any hassle.
I've always had this setup and never once had any of the problems my neighbors get.
There's always the highly lucrative career field of Internet Trolling...
Kirby sphere?
I don't get it...
Not Hoover, Dyson.
Get some of Carnap's books. Read them. There is a distinct difference between syntax (logic) and semantics (meaning). And there is no reason a computer can't understand both.
The logic of language is in its syntax. The meaning of language is in its semantics. But you can't develop the extra-syntactic information without applying logic to previously unknown words, so that they can be associated with named words later without being themselves named in a sentence.
What the human brain does, if it has any semantic experience stored, is try several semantic associations against the syntactic logic of a sentence until one "makes sense"; i.e., the inferred logic is not broken by the stated logic.
This process can be applied by a computer.
If you decide that your brain is somehow magical; that it is not a computer; then you are wrong.
And if you think that all computers are Turing machines, you're wrong about that, too.
You don't understand the semantics of the words syntax and semantics, if you beleive that.
Just for the record, Tom Delay, as Majority Whip in the Gingrich House, was given a single extracurricular task during that period: Install a Conservative as the chief executive of every lobbying organization in Washington.
Naturally, there are a few that couldn't be turned, but he almost succeeded, and the last ten years of political distortion are the result of that effort. That they also used that system for personal financial gain just shows how craven and shameless the GOP is, in general.
Rudolf Carnap knew that syntax was logic and semantics was "meaning".
If you give the computer non-structural associations, it certainly can provide semantic relationships in reaction to the structural associations you input.
The difference between computers and humans isn't the ability to reason. It's the reasons for reasoning. Their needs are different, and their means of obtaining them are not generally in their own control, so they would naturally not develop certain associations on their own. But we don't really want computers that act alive. We want them to be more efficient than that.
Semantics are associations between symbols.
So whatever this guy is on about, he's got it wrong.
Computers are perfectly capable of making fuzzy inferences from loose associations.
With a greater understanding of real connections, they will be better able to weed out the fuzzy associations and strengthen the remaining ones.
This is how intellectual learning works.
And there's no reason a computer can't simulate it better than a human can.
Makes it subjective anecdotal evidence, all the more reason it's less credible.
These search engines have no right and no compulsion to turn over any customer data, anonymous or otherwise, in response to politically motivated fishing expeditions.