if microsoft can remotely 'unlegitimize' a copy of windows, couldn't a virus or worm massively remotely cripple loads of machines by exploiting this...?
seems like about the best way to introduce massive RF interference into the atmosphere -- massive high-power unshielded anteneas modulated by square waves... blech.:-P
power is generally sent over unshielded lines at 60hz. when you modulate that sine wave with data, you're scrambling a 60hz tone into what sounds like a modem -- and since the power lines are unshielded, instead of pumping out a 60hz sine-wave TONE, you end up getting the most disruptive power signal possible.
unshielded data over power lines causes an inordinate amount of radio signal interference -- more than any other technology out there, simply because the whole system of power line transmission becomes a massive disruptive antenea.
to get documents to match exactly, you've got to have the same fonts, or everything word-wraps different. users complain there is no easy way to get font-parity between the platforms, and this screws up power-points and word documents -- people won't for it until these sorts of 'glitches' have been worked out.
> Converting to any other format is going to cause a loss of quality. > Even if you go to WAV or CD Audio, if you ever want to rip it back > into some compressed format, you're going to lose quality.
the quality you get from converting from aac > aiff will BE what you hear, because the aac file has to decompress for you to hear it!! -- so it is not less quality doing your aac backup to AIFF (and then you could convert back to apple-lossless encoding if you want to save some space).
your second point, however, is correct -- you will lose quality if you convert back from aiff TO some other lossless format, due to dithering and artifacts.
in short: i) lossy (aac) -> lossless (aiff) = no quality loss ii) lossy (aac) -> lossless (aiff) -> lossy (mp3/ogg/whatever) = quality loss
Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks. In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual content of work at all levels. (Shoshana Zuboff)
If it is possible to train millions in the black art of violence, which is the law of the Beast, it is more possible to train them in the white art of non-violence, which is the law of regenerate man.
Human dignity is best preserved not by developing the capacity to deal destruction but by refusing to retaliate. (Gandhi; I-228)
so true! -- why is this debate always discussed so polarically?? it is tiring to always hear of this framed as a false dichotomy.
either you're with darwin/evolution/science OR you're with faith/belief/creationism/religion.
so often the phenomenon are mixed willy-nilly with the theory of interpretation -- everything is seen through the lens of one idea or another.
given the same phenomenon, is there an alternate explanation?? -- where is option C ?
some years back, found a great book written by a scientist, JOHN DAVIDSON. called: NATURAL CREATION OR NATURAL SELECTION? -- and he gives just such an option --
his basic premise being: 'Whatever changes or degrees of evolution may appear are not just the result of outward causal influences, but are caused from within... and this is because we are part of the 'universal formative force'.
a couple years later, i found a similar idea in goethe's 'organic and inorganic science'.
originally, kant thought that biology could not be subject to the 'knowing' activity we have for physics. but today, many scientists simply assume that biology must be studied from the standpointt of physics.
goethe sees another possibity -- he PRESUMES darwin's evolution, but it requires a revision in our understanding of TIME.
goethe shares this idea of evolutionary development as being not just a process of causal natural selection, but rather as an INNER development -- and what leads this development IN TIME is the TYPUS -- here's probably the best single chapter on the subject:
From: RMS@MIT-OZ@mit-eddie.UUCP (Richard Stallman) Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.usoft Subject: new UNIX implementation Date: Tue, 27-Sep-83 13:35:59 EDT Organization: MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA
Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.
To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.
GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen. Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages. We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol, far superior to UUCP. We may also have something compatible with UUCP.
Who Am I? I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.
Why I Must Write GNU I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.
So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.
How You Can Contribute I am asking computer manufacturers for donations of machines and money. I'm asking individuals for donations of programs and work.
One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power.
Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.
If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time. The salary won't be high, but I'm looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money. I view this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to working on GNU by sparing them the need to make a living in another way.
For more information, contact me. Arpanet mail: RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA
US Snail: Richard Stallman 166 Prospect St, Cambridge, MA 02139
OIDS -- just an old 2D scroller, but the feel and responsiveness are great, and the gameplay is superb. it combines the best of all the early games i'd been exposed to: defender, asteroids, lunar rescue; the closest we came on the TRS80 was a game called 'sea dragon' -- a side scroller.
the author has also shown years of cross-platform dedication -- first released for the atari, then the mac plus, then the powerPC mac, and finally, OSX -- every release has maintained the feel of the original, and improved it where the OS offered better abilities (e.g. the OSX version uses openGL).
'the top 3 percent' -- exactly -- as cringley said it in 'the best revenge'.
When Gates speaks about winning he means WINNING, the whole enchilada, mastery of the universe. At this point in his career, every thought that comes out of Bill Gates' mind is grandly strategic. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, thinks solely in terms of tactics, not strategy. His wins are today, tomorrow, next week, next quarter. He revels in every little chance to push people around and make things the way he wants them to be. He can't help it. It was a bad strategy, for example, to snub Gates with Vanity Fair, but in the tactical mind of Steve Jobs, it was brilliant.
In Steve Jobs' mind, he has already won. Those of us who last for a few decades in this business find our own kind of peace and Steve Jobs' is best exemplified by the George Herbert quote, "Living well is the best revenge." Apple's future as a boutique computer company is secure. He dominates Apple completely. When he doesn't feel like being a high tech mogul, he can be a movie mogul, something Gates will never be.
In Steve's mind, he has the best of everything. Apple software is cooler than Windows will ever be. Palo Alto, where Jobs lives, is trendier than Seattle. Even Jobs' plane, a Gulfstream V, is cooler than Gates' Challenger 604. It goes on and on. Gates has never even considered this latter point, but I'll guarantee you that Jobs has, and he revels in it.
This brief argument has a simple logical structure and I will lay it out:
On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.
But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.
This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.
It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"
Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.
But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.
The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.
We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.\**
> Wash your hands when you're done with the computer > she says to PC För Alla.
that's exactly wrong -- if you only wash them when you're DONE, then the accumulation on your keyboard will be the greater, because you're contributing to the greasiness of the keyboard by bringing it whatever is on your hands when you begin. -- oto, if you start out with a clean keyboard (don't need to buy a new one, just clean with rubbing alcohol) -- then simply adopting the habit to wash your hands BEFORE you use the keyboard will keep it from building up as much. that habit, and periodic cleaning w/rubbing alcohol will change things substantially.
format switches are bad for consumers -- for us, the VCR is still the primary viewing device. and the DVD has barely got started.
i bought my parents their FIRST DVD player the year before last. they have about 70-80 videotapes which took them since 1985 to accumulate. since they've got the DVD player they've accumulated 7-10 DVDs.
so now they have TWO boxes sitting in the living room (DVD & VCR), and are UNABLE to get rid of the VCR because many of those 70-80 videotapes will never be released on DVD.
we're not throwing out the DVD player yet -- we're far from even being able to throw out the VHS tapes. to transfer all the VHS videotapes to digital would take WEEKS. my parents are unwilling to sacrifice that much of their life in order to have one less box (the VCR) sitting in their living room.
still have a 1992 powerbook 520c that is still working (os7.6 w/netscape 4, and free PPP), and a 2001 g3 ibook - never needed a repair, and still working every day. she takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin...:-D j.
just to set the record straight -- donating computers to kids and schools has long been part of steve jobs' mission -- he personally offered to donate a hundred thousand computers to every school in america back in 1979...
(exerpt from Smithsonian Interview with Steve Jobs)
SJ: There were two kinds of customers. There were the educational aspects of Apple and then there were sort of the non-educational. On the non-educational side, Apple was two things. One, it was the first "lifestyle" computer and, secondly, it's hard to remember how bad it was in the early 1980's. With IBM taking over the world with the PC, with DOS out there; it was far worse than the Apple II. They tried to copy the Apple II and they had done a pretty bad job. You needed to know a lot. Things were kind of slipping backwards. You saw the 1984 commercial. Macintosh was basically this relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the goliath, IBM, and saying "Wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is not the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong and we are going to show you the right way to do it and here it is. It's called Macintosh and it is so much better. It's going to beat you and you're going to do it."
And that's what Apple stood for. That was one of the things. The other thing was a little bit further back in time. One of the things that built Apple II's was schools buying Apple II's; but even so there was about only 10% of the schools that even had one computer in them in 1979 I think it was. When I grew up I was lucky because I was in Silicon Valley. When I was ten or eleven I saw my first computer. It was down at NASA Ames (Research Center). I didn't see the computer, I saw a terminal and it was theoretically a computer on the other end of the wire. I fell in love with it. I saw my first desktop computer at Hewlett-Packard which was called the 9100A. It was the first desktop in the world. It ran BASIC and APL I think. I fell in love with it. And I thought, looking at these statistics in 1979, I thought if there was just one computer in every school, some of the kids would find it. It will change their life.
We saw the rate at which this was happening and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy a computer for the school and it was real slow. We realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through the school before they even got their first computer so we thought the kids can't wait. We wanted to donate a computer to every school in America. It turns out that there are about a hundred thousand schools in America, about ten thousand high schools, about ninety thousand K through 8. We couldn't afford that as a company. But we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books, a national law that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction. That basically means you don't make any money, you loose some but you don't loose too much. You loose about ten percent. We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to Kthrough 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America and it would cost our company ten million dollars which was a lot of money to us at that time but it was less than a hundred million dollars if we didn't have that. We decided that we were willing to do that.
It was one of the most incredible things I've ever done. We found our local representative, Pete Stark over in East Bay and Pete and a few of us sat down an we wrote a bill. We literally drafted a bill to make these changes. We said "If this law changes
just tried it -- but it STILL doesn't have the basic UI features you'd expect of a 1.0 release. for example, just basic text text selection in the URL becomes a pain, because it doesn't abide by standard text selection keyboard shortcuts.
to be fair, firefox does support : left and right arrows do move the cursor left and right, and using SHIFT+arrow DOES select the text in either direction.
but if the URL text is selected, and i type down-arrow, why doesn't it go to the end of the text? or if i type up-arrow, why doesn't it go to the beginning of the URL text?
on the mac, this is just text keyboard shortcut 101. but when you get these cross platform apps, why do so very few open-source apps ever manage to get them right?
- up-arrow: move cursor to beginning of URL text. - down-arrow: move cursor to end of URL text. - shift-up-arrow: select text from current location to start of text. - shift-down-arrow: select text from current location to end of text. - right arrow (when text is selected) > cursor ends up at end of selected text (which it does). - left arrow (when text is selected) > cursor SHOULD end up at start of selected text (but it doesn't, it ends up there shifted an extra character to the left, which is wrong).
these are standard expected behaviours, and firefox implements these behaviours in SOME parts of the programme, but not others -- so it is inconsistent and annoying. its just these basic 'rough edges' that apple always seems to get right, but seem so hard for other to 'just get the basics' that keep me from switching from safari to firefox -- tabs and pop-up blocking are already in safari, so why should i put up with a whole bunch of rough edges, when safari already HAS (and has always had) these things already working?
alas -- it actually works in SOME parts of the programme -- if you enable the preference setting 'Allow Text to be Selected with Keyboard' -- but although it works THERE, it still does NOT work in the URL.:-(
ten-to-one these arrow keys will still not be working in the URL when firefox 2.0 comes out, and i still won't use it then.
2cents, j
oto -- if its a matter of using that virus-prone abomination called Explorer, well, it is firefox anyday over THAT.
so what to get the man who has everything... what to get steve jobs -- the father of the ipod...!?!?
| So then finally, what is the last piece of technology that | he [Steve Jobs] acquired - not made by Apple - that really | delighted him? He pauses for long seconds, looks down, | puts his hands on his knees, looks away. | "I ACTUALLY BOUGHT A BICYCLE RECENTLY. | IT'S JUST...WONDERFUL." | | (Steve Jobs: The Guru Behind Apple, Charles Arthur; October 29, 2005)"
Slashdot Mirror
if microsoft can remotely 'unlegitimize' a copy of windows,
couldn't a virus or worm massively remotely cripple loads of machines
by exploiting this...?
seems like about the best way to introduce massive RF interference
into the atmosphere -- massive high-power unshielded anteneas
modulated by square waves... blech.
power is generally sent over unshielded lines at 60hz.
when you modulate that sine wave with data, you're scrambling
a 60hz tone into what sounds like a modem -- and since the power
lines are unshielded, instead of pumping out a 60hz sine-wave TONE,
you end up getting the most disruptive power signal possible.
unshielded data over power lines causes an inordinate amount of
radio signal interference -- more than any other technology out there,
simply because the whole system of power line transmission becomes
a massive disruptive antenea.
the parent is totally right.
AC is better for power TRANSMISSION -- getting it there.
DC is better for a local area... once it is there.
to get documents to match exactly,
you've got to have the same fonts,
or everything word-wraps different.
users complain there is no easy way
to get font-parity between the platforms,
and this screws up power-points and
word documents -- people won't for it
until these sorts of 'glitches' have been
worked out.
> Converting to any other format is going to cause a loss of quality.
> Even if you go to WAV or CD Audio, if you ever want to rip it back
> into some compressed format, you're going to lose quality.
the quality you get from converting from aac > aiff will BE what you hear,
because the aac file has to decompress for you to hear it!! -- so it is not
less quality doing your aac backup to AIFF (and then you could convert
back to apple-lossless encoding if you want to save some space).
your second point, however, is correct -- you will lose quality
if you convert back from aiff TO some other lossless format,
due to dithering and artifacts.
in short:
i) lossy (aac) -> lossless (aiff) = no quality loss
ii) lossy (aac) -> lossless (aiff) -> lossy (mp3/ogg/whatever) = quality loss
you can burn all your itunes tracks to AIFF or MP3,
and then backup that as many times as you would
ever want... so what's the problem??
Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks.
In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual
content of work at all levels. (Shoshana Zuboff)
the things don't make you addicted to them.
one will crave what others passes by.
the addiction comes out of the person,
not the thing.
j
If it is possible to train millions in the black art of violence,
which is the law of the Beast, it is more possible to train them
in the white art of non-violence, which is the law of regenerate man.
Human dignity is best preserved not by developing the capacity to
deal destruction but by refusing to retaliate. (Gandhi; I-228)
so true! -- why is this debate always discussed so polarically??
it is tiring to always hear of this framed as a false dichotomy.
either you're with darwin/evolution/science
OR you're with faith/belief/creationism/religion.
so often the phenomenon are mixed willy-nilly with
the theory of interpretation -- everything is seen
through the lens of one idea or another.
given the same phenomenon, is there an alternate
explanation?? -- where is option C ?
some years back, found a great book written by a scientist, JOHN DAVIDSON.
called: NATURAL CREATION OR NATURAL SELECTION? -- and he gives just such
an option --
http://www.johndavidson.org/NaturalSelectionRevie
his basic premise being: 'Whatever changes or degrees of evolution
may appear are not just the result of outward causal influences,
but are caused from within... and this is because we are part of
the 'universal formative force'.
a couple years later, i found a similar idea
in goethe's 'organic and inorganic science'.
originally, kant thought that biology could not be subject to
the 'knowing' activity we have for physics. but today, many scientists
simply assume that biology must be studied from the standpointt of physics.
goethe sees another possibity -- he PRESUMES darwin's evolution,
but it requires a revision in our understanding of TIME.
goethe shares this idea of evolutionary development as
being not just a process of causal natural selection,
but rather as an INNER development -- and what leads this
development IN TIME is the TYPUS -- here's probably the
best single chapter on the subject:
GOETHE'S ORGANIC SCIENCE:
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA002/English/GA002
regards,
j
From: RMS@MIT-OZ@mit-eddie.UUCP (Richard Stallman)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.usoft
Subject: new UNIX implementation
Date: Tue, 27-Sep-83 13:35:59 EDT
Organization: MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA
Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.
To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.
GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen. Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages. We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol, far superior to UUCP. We may also have something compatible with UUCP.
Who Am I? I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.
Why I Must Write GNU I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.
So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.
How You Can Contribute I am asking computer manufacturers for donations of machines and money. I'm asking individuals for donations of programs and work.
One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power.
Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.
If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time. The salary won't be high, but I'm looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money. I view this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to working on GNU by sparing them the need to make a living in another way.
For more information, contact me.
Arpanet mail: RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA
US Snail: Richard Stallman
166 Prospect St, Cambridge, MA 02139
OIDS -- just an old 2D scroller, but the feel and responsiveness are great,
and the gameplay is superb. it combines the best of all the early games
i'd been exposed to: defender, asteroids, lunar rescue; the closest we
came on the TRS80 was a game called 'sea dragon' -- a side scroller.
the author has also shown years of cross-platform dedication --
first released for the atari, then the mac plus, then the powerPC mac,
and finally, OSX -- every release has maintained the feel of the original,
and improved it where the OS offered better abilities (e.g. the OSX version
uses openGL).
'the top 3 percent' -- exactly -- as cringley said it in 'the best revenge'.
When Gates speaks about winning he means WINNING, the whole enchilada, mastery of the universe. At this point in his career, every thought that comes out of Bill Gates' mind is grandly strategic. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, thinks solely in terms of tactics, not strategy. His wins are today, tomorrow, next week, next quarter. He revels in every little chance to push people around and make things the way he wants them to be. He can't help it. It was a bad strategy, for example, to snub Gates with Vanity Fair, but in the tactical mind of Steve Jobs, it was brilliant.
In Steve Jobs' mind, he has already won. Those of us who last for a few decades in this business find our own kind of peace and Steve Jobs' is best exemplified by the George Herbert quote, "Living well is the best revenge." Apple's future as a boutique computer company is secure. He dominates Apple completely. When he doesn't feel like being a high tech mogul, he can be a movie mogul, something Gates will never be.
In Steve's mind, he has the best of everything. Apple software is cooler than Windows will ever be. Palo Alto, where Jobs lives, is trendier than Seattle. Even Jobs' plane, a Gulfstream V, is cooler than Gates' Challenger 604. It goes on and on. Gates has never even considered this latter point, but I'll guarantee you that Jobs has, and he revels in it.
this point has been made before,
by cognitive scientist john searle in his paper:
is the brain a digital computer?
in the summary, searle puts it this way:
--| Summary of the Argument |---
This brief argument has a simple logical structure and I will lay it out:
On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.
But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.
This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.
It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"
Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.
But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.
The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.
We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.\**
--
regards,
j.
> Wash your hands when you're done with the computer
> she says to PC För Alla.
that's exactly wrong -- if you only wash them when you're DONE,
then the accumulation on your keyboard will be the greater, because
you're contributing to the greasiness of the keyboard by bringing it
whatever is on your hands when you begin. -- oto, if you start out with
a clean keyboard (don't need to buy a new one, just clean with rubbing
alcohol) -- then simply adopting the habit to wash your hands BEFORE
you use the keyboard will keep it from building up as much. that habit,
and periodic cleaning w/rubbing alcohol will change things substantially.
2cents
j.
format switches are bad for consumers --
for us, the VCR is still the primary viewing device.
and the DVD has barely got started.
i bought my parents their FIRST DVD player the year before last.
they have about 70-80 videotapes which took them since 1985
to accumulate. since they've got the DVD player they've
accumulated 7-10 DVDs.
so now they have TWO boxes sitting in the living room (DVD & VCR),
and are UNABLE to get rid of the VCR because many of those 70-80
videotapes will never be released on DVD.
we're not throwing out the DVD player yet -- we're far from even
being able to throw out the VHS tapes. to transfer all the VHS videotapes
to digital would take WEEKS. my parents are unwilling to sacrifice that
much of their life in order to have one less box (the VCR) sitting in
their living room.
2cents
j
still have a 1992 powerbook 520c that is still working (os7.6 w/netscape 4,
and free PPP), and a 2001 g3 ibook - never needed a repair, and still working
every day. she takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin...
j.
when are they going to have gilligan's island and star trek!?
(some addams family and twilight zone would be cool too).
just to set the record straight -- donating computers to kids and schools
has long been part of steve jobs' mission -- he personally offered to donate
a hundred thousand computers to every school in america back in 1979...
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist
(exerpt from Smithsonian Interview with Steve Jobs)
SJ: There were two kinds of customers. There were the educational aspects of Apple and then there were sort of the non-educational. On the non-educational side, Apple was two things. One, it was the first "lifestyle" computer and, secondly, it's hard to remember how bad it was in the early 1980's. With IBM taking over the world with the PC, with DOS out there; it was far worse than the Apple II. They tried to copy the Apple II and they had done a pretty bad job. You needed to know a lot. Things were kind of slipping backwards. You saw the 1984 commercial. Macintosh was basically this relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the goliath, IBM, and saying "Wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is not the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong and we are going to show you the right way to do it and here it is. It's called Macintosh and it is so much better. It's going to beat you and you're going to do it."
And that's what Apple stood for. That was one of the things. The other thing was a little bit further back in time. One of the things that built Apple II's was schools buying Apple II's; but even so there was about only 10% of the schools that even had one computer in them in 1979 I think it was. When I grew up I was lucky because I was in Silicon Valley. When I was ten or eleven I saw my first computer. It was down at NASA Ames (Research Center). I didn't see the computer, I saw a terminal and it was theoretically a computer on the other end of the wire. I fell in love with it. I saw my first desktop computer at Hewlett-Packard which was called the 9100A. It was the first desktop in the world. It ran BASIC and APL I think. I fell in love with it. And I thought, looking at these statistics in 1979, I thought if there was just one computer in every school, some of the kids would find it. It will change their life.
We saw the rate at which this was happening and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy a computer for the school and it was real slow. We realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through the school before they even got their first computer so we thought the kids can't wait. We wanted to donate a computer to every school in America. It turns out that there are about a hundred thousand schools in America, about ten thousand high schools, about ninety thousand K through 8. We couldn't afford that as a company. But we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books, a national law that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction. That basically means you don't make any money, you loose some but you don't loose too much. You loose about ten percent. We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to Kthrough 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America and it would cost our company ten million dollars which was a lot of money to us at that time but it was less than a hundred million dollars if we didn't have that. We decided that we were willing to do that.
It was one of the most incredible things I've ever done. We found our local representative, Pete Stark over in East Bay and Pete and a few of us sat down an we wrote a bill. We literally drafted a bill to make these changes. We said "If this law changes
just tried it -- but it STILL doesn't have the basic UI features you'd expect of a 1.0 release.
:-(
for example, just basic text text selection in the URL becomes a pain, because it doesn't
abide by standard text selection keyboard shortcuts.
to be fair, firefox does support : left and right arrows do move the cursor
left and right, and using SHIFT+arrow DOES select the text in either direction.
but if the URL text is selected, and i type down-arrow, why doesn't it go to
the end of the text? or if i type up-arrow, why doesn't it go to the beginning
of the URL text?
on the mac, this is just text keyboard shortcut 101. but when you get these
cross platform apps, why do so very few open-source apps ever manage to
get them right?
- up-arrow: move cursor to beginning of URL text.
- down-arrow: move cursor to end of URL text.
- shift-up-arrow: select text from current location to start of text.
- shift-down-arrow: select text from current location to end of text.
- right arrow (when text is selected) > cursor ends up at end of selected text (which it does).
- left arrow (when text is selected) > cursor SHOULD end up at start of selected text (but it doesn't, it ends up there shifted an extra character to the left, which is wrong).
these are standard expected behaviours, and firefox implements these behaviours
in SOME parts of the programme, but not others -- so it is inconsistent and annoying.
its just these basic 'rough edges' that apple always seems to get right,
but seem so hard for other to 'just get the basics' that keep me from switching
from safari to firefox -- tabs and pop-up blocking are already in safari, so why
should i put up with a whole bunch of rough edges, when safari already HAS
(and has always had) these things already working?
alas -- it actually works in SOME parts of the programme -- if you enable
the preference setting 'Allow Text to be Selected with Keyboard' -- but although
it works THERE, it still does NOT work in the URL.
ten-to-one these arrow keys will still not be working in the URL when firefox 2.0 comes out,
and i still won't use it then.
2cents,
j
oto -- if its a matter of using that virus-prone abomination called Explorer,
well, it is firefox anyday over THAT.
france is not alone -- america has its own race riots.
the los angeles riots in 1992, fer example...
j
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle
I no longer despair for the future
of the human race. (H.G. Wells)
so what to get the man who has everything...
what to get steve jobs -- the father of the ipod...!?!?
| So then finally, what is the last piece of technology that
| he [Steve Jobs] acquired - not made by Apple - that really
| delighted him? He pauses for long seconds, looks down,
| puts his hands on his knees, looks away.
| "I ACTUALLY BOUGHT A BICYCLE RECENTLY.
| IT'S JUST
|
| (Steve Jobs: The Guru Behind Apple, Charles Arthur; October 29, 2005)"
they'll only get bigger than google if they're better than google.