If the Justice Departement appeals to the Supreme Court things could get interesting. There have been cases in the past where the Court made a ruling that violated the Constititution but were in the interest of national security (Japenese internment during WWII for example). And with the moderate to conservative court that exists today, something along these lines could very well come about.
The article was lacking in detail so it is diffecult to say if this case would be heard by the Court. If for one reason or another five of the justices did not feel that this was a case that properly layed out the _Consititutional_ issues they could very well ignore it and wait for a better opertunity. This would not mean that they will not eventually take this up but mearly that this case was not a good platform to make a ruling on.
Well that is enough speculation, I will just wait for some more information before I form a real oppinion.
If the Justice Departement appeals to the Supreme Court things could get interesting. There have been cases in the past where the Court made a ruling that violated the Constititution but was in the interest of national security (Japenese internment during WWII for example). And with the moderate to conservative court that exists today, something along these lines could vary well come about.
The article was lacking in detail so it is diffecult to say if this case would be heard by the Court. If for one reason or another five of the justices did not feel that this was a case that properly layed out the
Consititutional
issues they could very well ignore it and wait for a better opertunity. This would not mean that they will not eventually take this up but mearly that this case was not a good platform to make a ruling on.
Well that is enough speculation, I will just wait for some more information before I create a real oppinion.
That, and the range on wireless ethernet sucks ATM.
Also, I noticed something odd while watching "Entrapment" last night. During the time when the movie was playing, my pager was telling me that it was out of range. Oddly enough, when the movie was over, the pager worked again. I'll have to talk to my friend to see if the theatre (which is brand new) has cellular blocking in its walls, or if teh projector generates enough interference to block cellular stuff. --- Donald Roeber
I can't resist. This line of reasoning is just so great.
We have imagination, a universal sense of morality which is ingrained in us from birth, the ability to create, and we are self-aware. These attributes arrise from our soul, something that fundamentally man does not seem able to reproduce in our inventive attempts. The soul is immortal; the fact that you are self-aware means you are immortal.
Man does not seem to be able to reproduce a soul . No one has made a 1 Terabyte hard drive yet either. Does that mean that man is incapable of it? Wait and see.
What makes a soul immortal? How do you know a soul is immortal? I would like to see a demonstration of this. How does a soul work? What is it made of? These are impossible to answer until some concrete test-able definition of a soul is proposed. I'm not holding my breath.
So self-awareness can only come from a soul? So my program which lets my robot keep track of its own current location and internal configuration has a soul and is immortal? Then why did it keep crashing?
Seems to me that arguments based ultimately on faith, such as the entire concept of a soul, have little bearing on scientific truths and technical possibilities.
The reverse is also true: scientific truths have little effect on religion. Wasn't Galileo just recently forgiven by the Catholic curch? I'm sure many religious people will deny that the first N generations of intelligent programs are really intelligent, for some large value of N.
Sony makes one, Sony DVMC-DA1 firewire / analog video converter. You can see it on the Sony site or use this link: http://www.angelfire.com/tx2/dv/dvmc.html
I really hated to see the article on the Firewire HD's. There goes yet another reason not to buy the ReplayTV box, Damn, I guess now I'll tell myself I'm waiting for an Ethernet Port and HDTV compatability.
The leap that some theorists make is that the mind can likewise be an emergent property of the tiny actions of molecules/corpuscles/quantum mechanics/etc. of the mind. You cannot make this leap. As you state an emergent property has to be explainable by all the elements under it (it simply describes the summed phenomenon of the smaller phenomena). There is no "small" mind, you can't explain the mind in terms of the elements that supposedly comprise it, that is my argument.
So how does the brain work? Magic? A soul? It sounds like you are saying the phenomena of mind does not come from physical brain matter and energy interactions (chemistry and physics). A common viewpoint among religious people, but not one which is useful for figuring out how the brain works or how to write an intelligent program.
There is no "small" car inside a larger car which is a part of it, so why does there have to be a "small" mind inside a complete mind to explain the complete behavior?
Another way to look at the part/whole relationship: if you start taking pieces off a car, eventually some component of its behavior will stop working, like the air conditioning, steering, brakes, engine, etc. The same thing has been found in people: there have been interesting cases of aphasias where the subject could write but not read, or could sing but not speak normally, or simpler situations such as blindness or deafness. When examined after death, these people almost always have some physical component of their brain damaged. Or the case of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who had a spike go through his head. Amazingly he lived, but his personality was drastically changed. When you shoot enough holes in a car's engine, it will certainly run differently.
Regarding the questions about whether AIs would fight for dominance, have compassion, be annoyed with us, etc: you get out what you put in. As has been said before here, the most common emergent behavior is failure (a bug).
When someone builds a system which crosses a threshold such that people say it is intelligent, why would it suddenly do something not programmed? It would use its intelligence to do whatever it was programmed to do. If it were a brick-laying robot, maybe it could intelligently pick up a brick which fell off the wall and put it back. If it were a Star-Trek style computer with a nice conversational voice interface, it would simply be able to understand better what people wanted it to do, or understand more complicated instructions.
I expect that an AI or robot which acts like it is annoyed with people would not sell very well. What purpose would it serve? If it serves no purpose, who will build it? OK, maybe it's a toy. If it injures someone, just imagine how quickly it will be removed from the shelves.
If there's one thing we've learned in the 50 years or so that AI research has been going on, it's that it is a lot harder than we thought. I personally have no fear of too-successful AIs. It's hard enough to get a robot to not fall down the stairs or to understand an english sentence, let alone independently deciding that it should try to control the world. We don't even know how to tell it what the world is!
Tell ya what, read up a little on AI and cognitive science FIRST, then come back and answer these questions:
1) Humans are already capable of improving ourselves and you don't see our complexity and intelligence growing exponentially. You are mixing levels by assuming that an intelligent machine is necessarily good at machine-type things.
2) What better way for "fear-driven" humanity to become non-"barbaric" than to understand the nature of thought and apply it?
You can have both gtk 1.0 and gtk 1.2 on your system at the same time. I do, right now. Just make sure that you only have one _devel_ RPM or equivalent.
Never underestimate the power of the Linux community. That was, by far, the most popular chat held in the Technology section. Linus was a true sport in the face of nearly 1,000 questions -- 500 of which were posted during the hour he was on. My thanks to all the slashdot folks who stopped by.
And, just to answer the post above about the nuclear power plants....would you prefer they were run on WinNT? Just food for thought.
There is a garbage collection mechanism in the Mozilla codebase, in the form of the reference counting provided by XPCOM (AddRef/Release, thank MS/DEC COM for the poor names).
The basic problem, as Scott Collins described very well in his posting to mozilla.builds, is one of ownership model (objects owning objects, not people owning code). This problem doesn't go away by using mark-and-sweep or any other GC technique: you still need to have a Grand Plan for which objects root other objects, and which have weak refs, etc.
While all the GC weenies are here, though, I have a question: does the Boehm GC allow weak refs?
FYI, the esteemed Bruce Mitchener and his many clones produce frequent Purify reports and file dozens of good bugs (with fixes, often) from the results.
Re:advertised as Beta, performs as pre-Alpha
on
Mozilla M5 Released
·
· Score: 1
Posted by shaver@netscape.com:
If we've advertised M5 as a beta, I must apologize: it is certainly not beta quality (perhaps not even alpha, as if anyone agrees on what those terms mean) yet.
If anyone out there finds something describing M5 as a beta, please mail webmaster@mozilla.org and we'll get it fixed. Thanks.
M5 is simply the fifth milestone, and will be followed in three weeks by M6. There's no beta here, and I promise that everyone will hear _all_ about it when the first beta is released.
You are right that his basic argument is that computers are different than human brains--but he makes it a premise, not a conclusion. Sorry, Roger, you are supposed to PROVE that computers are different if you want to prove they can't think.
As for using Godel as an argument against AI, go read Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
In the course of your in-depth investigation, you no doubt discovered that the page in question was authored by Adam Lock, an external contributor.
Speaking for mozilla.org, we really don't mind people using whatever tools they want to write documentation for their contributions. Rumour has it that mozilla needs MS VC++ to compile on Win32, too!
The layout guys -- including the guy who is responsible for integrating expat into the layout engine -- tell me that expat does handle well-formedness and entities (though maybe not ``PEntities''? What are those?).
In fact, the switch to the expat parser found a pile of well-formedness errors in our XUL files, so I'm pretty sure they're correct. Maybe you need a newer version of expat?
I'm sure some people will be disappointed by Star Wars Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace but I think my generation will love it regardless. Star Wars was the second film I ever saw (the first was Grease,embarassing & no comparison), I remember beign excited just going to the cinema and then to see a movie like that...wow. That's how it was for all my friends then too..then the merchandise appeared, the first figure I got was Han Solo, I remember it clearly because I lost the blaster that came with it for a while and was dead upset. Anyway, the point is that I really don't remember all that much else from 1977, but I remember everything to do with Star Wars clearly and so do millions like me all over the world. We'll all love the movie regardless because each showing of Star Wars films and the site of memorabilia brings back happy memories from childhood....I don't think many of us would be so hooked on all things tech if we hadn't seen that movie.
I'm sure some people will be disappointed by Star Wars Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace but i think my generation will love it regardless. Star Wars was the second film I ever saw (the first was Grease,embarassing & no comparison), I remember beign excited just going to the cinema and then to see a movie like that...wow. That's how it was for all my friends then too..then the merchandise appeared, the first figure I got was Han Solo, I remember it clearly because i lost the blaster that came with it for a while and was dead upset.
>>Yes, but how many of you have 15 (or 4 for that matter) computers sitting around in your living room? And if you don't, then it's a huge hassle to get them all in your living room.
Check the URL I have listed above, if everyone brings their own computer, it's not a problem at all. We've had over 20 computers on our lan before.
This is what we were told about the PSX , two years ago. We'll have gigahertz machines before the end of the year (I hope), the CPU power will be there within two years, it's just a question of who will do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by kenmcneil:
If the Justice Departement appeals to the Supreme Court things could get interesting. There have been cases in the past where the Court made a ruling that violated the Constititution but were in the interest of national security (Japenese internment during WWII for example). And with the moderate to conservative court that exists today, something along these lines could very well come about.
The article was lacking in detail so it is diffecult to say if this case would be heard by the Court. If for one reason or another five of the justices did not feel that this was a case that properly layed out the _Consititutional_ issues they could very well ignore it and wait for a better opertunity. This would not mean that they will not eventually take this up but mearly that this case was not a good platform to make a ruling on.
Well that is enough speculation, I will just wait for some more information before I form a real oppinion.
If the Justice Departement appeals to the Supreme Court things could get interesting. There have been cases in the past where the Court made a ruling that violated the Constititution but was in the interest of national security (Japenese internment during WWII for example). And with the moderate to conservative court that exists today, something along these lines could vary well come about.
The article was lacking in detail so it is diffecult to say if this case would be heard by the Court. If for one reason or another five of the justices did not feel that this was a case that properly layed out the
- Consititutional
issues they could very well ignore it and wait for a better opertunity. This would not mean that they will not eventually take this up but mearly that this case was not a good platform to make a ruling on.Well that is enough speculation, I will just wait for some more information before I create a real oppinion.
Posted by DonR:
That, and the range on wireless ethernet sucks ATM.
Also, I noticed something odd while watching "Entrapment" last night. During the time when the movie was playing, my pager was telling me that it was out of range. Oddly enough, when the movie was over, the pager worked again. I'll have to talk to my friend to see if the theatre (which is brand new) has cellular blocking in its walls, or if teh projector generates enough interference to block cellular stuff.
---
Donald Roeber
I can't resist. This line of reasoning is just so great.
We have imagination, a universal sense of morality which is ingrained in us from birth, the ability to create, and we are self-aware. These attributes arrise from our soul, something that fundamentally man does not seem able to reproduce in our inventive attempts. The soul is immortal; the fact that you are self-aware means you are immortal.
Man does not seem to be able to reproduce a soul . No one has made a 1 Terabyte hard drive yet either. Does that mean that man is incapable of it? Wait and see.
What makes a soul immortal? How do you know a soul is immortal? I would like to see a demonstration of this. How does a soul work? What is it made of? These are impossible to answer until some concrete test-able definition of a soul is proposed. I'm not holding my breath.
So self-awareness can only come from a soul? So my program which lets my robot keep track of its own current location and internal configuration has a soul and is immortal? Then why did it keep crashing?
Seems to me that arguments based ultimately on faith, such as the entire concept of a soul, have little bearing on scientific truths and technical possibilities.
The reverse is also true: scientific truths have little effect on religion. Wasn't Galileo just recently forgiven by the Catholic curch? I'm sure many religious people will deny that the first N generations of intelligent programs are really intelligent, for some large value of N.
Posted by MC BoB:
Sony makes one, Sony DVMC-DA1 firewire / analog video converter.
You can see it on the Sony site or use this link:
http://www.angelfire.com/tx2/dv/dvmc.html
I really hated to see the article on the Firewire HD's. There goes yet another reason not to buy the ReplayTV box, Damn, I guess now I'll tell myself I'm waiting for an Ethernet Port and HDTV compatability.
MC BoB
Posted by Mac Daniel:
;-)
In a society complete with Take Your Daughter To Work Day, I propose geeks in the U.S. and Canada unofficially declare May 19, 1999
National Geek's Day Out.
Although I must admit, the Jedi religion does have some appeal as well.
Dan Knight, Mac Advocate, dknight@reformed.net
Low End Mac, http://lowendmac.com/index.shtml
the iMac channel, http://lowendmac.com/imac/index.shtml
"In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man,
it seems unfair that He did not also limit his stupidity."
- Konrad Adenauer
The leap that some theorists make is that the mind can likewise be an emergent property of the tiny actions of molecules/corpuscles/quantum mechanics/etc. of the mind. You cannot make this leap. As you state an emergent property has to be explainable by all the elements under it (it simply describes the summed phenomenon of the smaller phenomena). There is no "small" mind, you can't explain the mind in terms of the elements that supposedly comprise it, that is my argument.
So how does the brain work? Magic? A soul? It sounds like you are saying the phenomena of mind does not come from physical brain matter and energy interactions (chemistry and physics). A common viewpoint among religious people, but not one which is useful for figuring out how the brain works or how to write an intelligent program.
There is no "small" car inside a larger car which is a part of it, so why does there have to be a "small" mind inside a complete mind to explain the complete behavior?
Another way to look at the part/whole relationship: if you start taking pieces off a car, eventually some component of its behavior will stop working, like the air conditioning, steering, brakes, engine, etc. The same thing has been found in people: there have been interesting cases of aphasias where the subject could write but not read, or could sing but not speak normally, or simpler situations such as blindness or deafness. When examined after death, these people almost always have some physical component of their brain damaged. Or the case of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who had a spike go through his head. Amazingly he lived, but his personality was drastically changed. When you shoot enough holes in a car's engine, it will certainly run differently.
Posted by hersh:
Regarding the questions about whether AIs would fight for dominance, have compassion, be annoyed with us, etc: you get out what you put in. As has been said before here, the most common emergent behavior is failure (a bug).
When someone builds a system which crosses a threshold such that people say it is intelligent, why would it suddenly do something not programmed? It would use its intelligence to do whatever it was programmed to do. If it were a brick-laying robot, maybe it could intelligently pick up a brick which fell off the wall and put it back. If it were a Star-Trek style computer with a nice conversational voice interface, it would simply be able to understand better what people wanted it to do, or understand more complicated instructions.
I expect that an AI or robot which acts like it is annoyed with people would not sell very well. What purpose would it serve? If it serves no purpose, who will build it? OK, maybe it's a toy. If it injures someone, just imagine how quickly it will be removed from the shelves.
If there's one thing we've learned in the 50 years or so that AI research has been going on, it's that it is a lot harder than we thought. I personally have no fear of too-successful AIs. It's hard enough to get a robot to not fall down the stairs or to understand an english sentence, let alone independently deciding that it should try to control the world. We don't even know how to tell it what the world is!
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Tell ya what, read up a little on AI and cognitive science FIRST, then come back and answer these questions:
1) Humans are already capable of improving ourselves and you don't see our complexity and intelligence growing exponentially. You are mixing levels by assuming that an intelligent machine is necessarily good at machine-type things.
2) What better way for "fear-driven" humanity to become non-"barbaric" than to understand the nature of thought and apply it?
Posted by shaver@netscape.com:
You can have both gtk 1.0 and gtk 1.2 on your system at the same time. I do, right now. Just make sure that you only have one _devel_ RPM or equivalent.
Posted by Mike@ABC:
Never underestimate the power of the Linux community. That was, by far, the most popular chat held in the Technology section. Linus was a true sport in the face of nearly 1,000 questions -- 500 of which were posted during the hour he was on. My thanks to all the slashdot folks who stopped by.
And, just to answer the post above about the nuclear power plants....would you prefer they were run on WinNT? Just food for thought.
Posted by shaver@netscape.com:
You are quite right. My apologies.
If the stuff in the release notes about font size doesn't work for you, you should file a bug.
Does your X server report the correct DPI for your monitor?
No -geometry support, as with all GTK apps.
There is a garbage collection mechanism in the Mozilla codebase, in the form of the reference counting provided by XPCOM (AddRef/Release, thank MS/DEC COM for the poor names).
The basic problem, as Scott Collins described very well in his posting to mozilla.builds, is one of ownership model (objects owning objects, not people owning code). This problem doesn't go away by using mark-and-sweep or any other GC technique: you still need to have a Grand Plan for which objects root other objects, and which have weak refs, etc.
While all the GC weenies are here, though, I have a question: does the Boehm GC allow weak refs?
Posted by shaver@netscape.com:
FYI, the esteemed Bruce Mitchener and his many clones produce frequent Purify reports and file dozens of good bugs (with fixes, often) from the results.
If we've advertised M5 as a beta, I must apologize: it is certainly not beta quality (perhaps not even alpha, as if anyone agrees on what those terms mean) yet.
If anyone out there finds something describing M5 as a beta, please mail webmaster@mozilla.org and we'll get it fixed. Thanks.
M5 is simply the fifth milestone, and will be followed in three weeks by M6. There's no beta here, and I promise that everyone will hear _all_ about it when the first beta is released.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
You are right that his basic argument is that computers are different than human brains--but he makes it a premise, not a conclusion. Sorry, Roger, you are supposed to PROVE that computers are different if you want to prove they can't think.
As for using Godel as an argument against AI, go read Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
In the course of your in-depth investigation, you no doubt discovered that the page in question was authored by Adam Lock, an external contributor.
Speaking for mozilla.org, we really don't mind people using whatever tools they want to write documentation for their contributions. Rumour has it that mozilla needs MS VC++ to compile on Win32, too!
The shame!
The layout guys -- including the guy who is responsible for integrating expat into the layout engine -- tell me that expat does handle well-formedness and entities (though maybe not ``PEntities''? What are those?).
In fact, the switch to the expat parser found a pile of well-formedness errors in our XUL files, so I'm pretty sure they're correct. Maybe you need a newer version of expat?
Posted by Mudokon23:
I'm sure some people will be disappointed by Star Wars Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace but I think my generation will love it regardless. Star Wars was the second film I ever saw (the first was Grease,embarassing & no comparison), I remember beign excited just going to the cinema and then to see a movie like that...wow. That's how it was for all my friends then too..then the merchandise appeared, the first figure I got was Han Solo, I remember it clearly because I lost the blaster that came with it for a while and was dead upset.
Anyway, the point is that I really don't remember all that much else from 1977, but I remember everything to do with Star Wars clearly and so do millions like me all over the world. We'll all love the movie regardless because each showing of Star Wars films and the site of memorabilia brings back happy memories from childhood....I don't think many of us would be so hooked on all things tech if we hadn't seen that movie.
Posted by Mudokon23:
I'm sure some people will be disappointed by Star Wars Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace but i think my generation will love it regardless. Star Wars was the second film I ever saw (the first was Grease,embarassing & no comparison), I remember beign excited just going to the cinema and then to see a movie like that...wow. That's how it was for all my friends then too..then the merchandise appeared, the first figure I got was Han Solo, I remember it clearly because i lost the blaster that came with it for a while and was dead upset.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>Yes, but how many of you have 15 (or 4 for that matter) computers sitting around in your living room? And if you don't, then it's a huge hassle to get them all in your living room.
Check the URL I have listed above, if everyone brings their own computer, it's not a problem at all. We've had over 20 computers on our lan before.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>When I said 'PSX' I meant 'PSX 2'
This is what we were told about the PSX , two years ago. We'll have gigahertz machines before the end of the year (I hope), the CPU power will be there within two years, it's just a question of who will do it.
LK
Posted by D-Rider:
This comment has the smell of a Windoze person that doesn't know anything about unix trying to get Linux to run.
WFM! (Works For Me) (486/40 through P166, SuSE Linux, versions from about 4.2 through 6.0)
Posted by TrustMe:
I agree with you on the number of pages. Just as an FYI, the editors for the magazine control the page breaks, not the server programming.
If you have a complaint, email the person who wrote the article and let them know, this way they can respond accordingly.
Eric Caldwell
eric.caldwell@32bitsonline.com
Associate Editor