Fair enough. Let's grant that corporations aren't people, and therefore aren't entitled to the protections on the Constitution that are extended to individual citizens. What if the government wanted to shut down a newspaper? It's a corporation, so it wouldn't necessarily be entitled to 'free speech'. Scary thought, no?
Language-specific processors have always been losers and this was always a stupid idea.
This is one of the first things I learned in my computer architecture class. I'm actually too young to remember previous language-specific processors. I've heard of the Lisp machines of yesteryear, but I'm not aware of any others offhand.
It's been established that nature plays a lesser role than nurture in the personality of a human.. obviously, the same must apply to animals as well..
Some have suggested that nature's role in human paersonality has been underestimated. Steven Pinker's recent book entitled The Blank Slate argues against the idea that nature plays (almost) no role in personality (i.e. theat we are born as blank slates).
True, the government doesn't really care about you (unless you happen to be from certain unpopoular countries these days). Companies, on the other hand, would love to know all about you so that they can target your particular interests for all sorts of products they'd like to sell you. They're the ones you really have to worry about when it comes to privacy issues, because they really *do* care about your personal info.
According to the article, import duties were once different for "dolls" and "toys". If the X-Men toys were considered humans, they'd be classified as dolls and subject to a tax rate. This is why the issue came to court, to rule on how they should be classified.
I think this is definitely a good thing. I've been using various incarnation of Palms for about 4 years now, and I vastly prefer Jot to Graffiti. Jot was one of the only commercial software products I ever purchased for my Palm. It's much more intuitive than Graffiti, though I don't think it's any faster.
The only difficulty I've had with Jot is getting it to do the underscore properly. But othe
If your wicket's not already sticky in reverie, I have two more words taken from the British Boy's Own Lexicon: soggy biscuits, a treat seemingly unique to the cuisine of that northern island country of queens.
I am aware of a Canadian variant called "Cream the cookie", which I learned of in summer camp (and, thankfully, never participated in).
DISCIPLINE, DISCPLINE, DISCIPLINE. I fully expect to see the usual barrage of comments to the tune of: "C is outdated, insecure, brittle, yadda yadda..." No. Some PROGRAMMERS are "outdated, insecure, and brittle."
The moral is to always use the right tool for the right job. You wouldn't use a chainsaw to do heart surgery and you wouldn't fly a 747 to travel 30 miles.
C is really good at certain things, but writing secure code isn't really one of them: meaning that you have to go through some extra effort to ensure your C code is secure. If you can solve your problem in another language with less effort and that language meets all your requirements (speed, memory use, portability, whatever else), then why pick C in that case? Not every application requires maximum speed or easy bit twiddling.
The C language doesn't write bugs. Programmers write bugs. If the programmer can't handle C, then take it away from him. But don't try to take it away from ME.
Nobody's advocating take C away. But you shouldn't be slavishly devoted to it as the One True Language. You should choose the language that will allow you to solve your problem with the minimum amount of effort, taking into account whatever constraints are relevant.
I'm surprised how few people have mentioned Rational Purify. This is the only Rational tool I have ever really used (I played with Quantify a little bit, but didn't really invest the time to judge its usefulness).
I've found Purify on Windows to be quite useful at tracking down memory violations and leaks, certainly much better than Visual C++'s debugger can. And it's also really easy to use.
The only other product I know of on Windows that does this is Parasoft' Insure++, and I'm under the impression that it's quite a bit more expensive.
Your argument is, once again, pretty similar to Searle's (he give the example of having the people of India carry out the telephone calls, and asks "Is India concious?").
Here's where I think our intuitions just differ. I would think that no matter how many people are carrying out the exeuctions of the program, even if it was one person carrying it out, or the entire planet, conciousness wouild arrive through the act of carrying out the computations (albeit at a much slower level).
Unfortunately, there's no real sense of arguing after this point, because what we think would happen simply differs, and there's no way to check conciousness (though you could interact with the simulated brain and it would respond intelligently).
C'mon, thought experiments are the stuff that philosophy is made of. You give me a scientific, measurable definition of conciousness and I'll lay off the thought experiments.
When it comes to building circuits that act like neurons, I'm not a neuromorphic engineer. But even today people are building circuits that can interface with neurons (look at the guys at Cal Tech, for example). There was that guy in Britian (can't remember his name, references somebody?) who was doing experiments with re-routing electrical signals from his arm to his computer and back to his arm to see if the computer could reproduce the signal adequately to control the muscle (this was the same guy who walked around with implants that tracked where he was around the school).
If it makes you feel better you can skip the step about "synthetic" neurons and go right to the step where you've got a little computer that simulates the neurons and can interface with them.
As for simulating the brain exactly: first of all, there isn't much evidence that there is any quantum effects in the behavior of a neuron (people don't seem to take Roger Penrose too seriously in this area). Second of all, even if there are quantum effects and there was some randomness to the simulation, so what? Just because there are quantum effects, doesn't mean you can't simulate them. You aren't trying to *predict* what someone else's brain is going to do, you just want a simulation that follows the same laws. You just have to add some randomness to your experiment.
What makes a neuron a neuron is that it is, well, a neuron.
No matter how smart you can make a computer look, it is still performing the same fetch-execute cycle on primitive instructions like "add," "shift," and "branch." If that is a conscious life form, then so is a pencil and piece of paper on which you perform all these primitive instructions manually.
How's this for a thought experiment. Take a human being, and swap one of his neurons for an electronic circuit that behaves identically to a neuron. One at a time, swap out each real neuron and swap in an electronic one. Is he still concious when his brain is entirely made up of electronic neurons instead of organic ones? OK, now swap out each neuron, and swap in a tiny computer that can simulate the I/O behavior of a neuron. Swap these in one at a time. Is he still concious? OK, now start swapping out groups of neurons for computers that can simulate the I/O behavior of the group. Proceed until his entire brain is just one computer. When did he go from a human being to a soulless automaton?
Winnie (he's NOT American, and DOES NOT SKATEBOARD) the Pooh (tm)
Just to swerve way off topic here, but as a Canadian, I think it's worth mentioning that the actual bear that inspired A.A. Milne to write Winne the Pooh was a Canadian bear that he saw in a zoo. In fact, that bear's name was indeed "Winnie", short for Winnipeg.
I don't think Milne was Canadian, though. British, right?
No he didn't - he made the three laws to show they WOULDN'T WORK, as he demonstrated in several stories.
I think that's a bit simplistic. I think Asimov was really good at asking "what if..." and then exploring all of the possible consequences. From reading his stuff, I don't get the impression he thought the three laws were a bad idea, per se. Rather, he tried to show that they weren't perfect. More specifically, that the actions that robots would take would not be the ones that you would assume they would, even though they were acting in accordance with the three laws.
I don't like his business practices, but as a philanthropist I don't think he deserves the scorn. (And, quite frankly, I don't care what his motivations for giving are either. The world would be better off if people always did the right thing for the wrong reasons, rather than the other way around.)
That's like the people who say Trainspotting glorifies drug use.
There were people who said that Trainspotting glorified drug use. Of course, those people hadn't actually seen the movie. I once read that 1984 was banned in some places for promoting communism (yes, you read that right).
Moral of the story: some people are very, very stupid.
I'm rather curious as to how the anti-cloning people are going to react to this; seeing as how the major argument AGAINST stem cell research is the usage of embryos, the use of fat-based stem cells should THEORETICALLY be OK.
I've never heard anyone voice objections to adult stem cell research such as mentioned in the article above (as opposed to the controversial embryonic stem cell research).
In fact, I've heard the anti-cloning crowd heartily endorse adult stem cell research as an ethical alternative.
Besides, the users going to have to static cast the reference in order to get to your methods.
No, they don't. The "using" declarations bring the methods into the scope of the derived class. Absolutely no casting is necessary.
I don't like returning a vector iterator, because then people who use the code have to declare their iterators of type vector::iterator, rather than MyClass::iterator. So, if I change the underlying representation, all the clients have to change their code. This, in my opinion, is worse.
YOU SHOULD NEVER INHERENT FROM AN STL CONTAINER. Period. There is no good reason to do this. If your design calls for it, then you have a bad design. Besides, STL containers do not have to have virtual destructors so you are introducing potential memory leaks if you inherent from them (this was made part of the standard on purpose).
I respectfully disagree. Often I want to write my own container class that's based on an STL class (let's say a vector). I want to expose some of the methods, but not all of them.
One way to do it is to have a vector instance be a member variable. But if you want your class to support iterators, then you have to write your own iterator class. Writing STL-style iterators is, in my opinion, an enormous pain in the ass, involving lots of tedious coding.
Instead, you can use private inheritence, and just expose the methods of the base class you want (including the iterator) with the using keyword. There's no need to worry about virtual destructors because you're never going to provide the users of your class a pointer to the base class: the inheritence is private.
In other words, you can do something like this:
class MyIntVector : vector < int > { public:
typedef vector< int > base;
using base::iterator;
using base::begin;
using base::end;
using base::operator[];
using base::size; // etc.
// Here you'd add your own methods };
If you're never going to give the user a pointer to the base class, then what's the harm in deriving from an STL class? Seems to save a lot of typing to me.
Also, the methods are written along the lines of, "if it's not optimal, you have to write the code yourself." I'm sorry - that sucks. Sometimes I need to remove an element from a Vector. Maybe I should be using another Container. Or maybe the API should allow it, but make it clear in the documentation that it's not efficient. I vote for the latter.
Doesn't the vector::erase method do what you want?
Actual quantum Computing with Perl
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Fair enough. Let's grant that corporations aren't people, and therefore aren't entitled to the protections on the Constitution that are extended to individual citizens. What if the government wanted to shut down a newspaper? It's a corporation, so it wouldn't necessarily be entitled to 'free speech'. Scary thought, no?
I believe what you previously saw on his site was a quote from the Unix-Haters Handbook: "Linux is only free if your time has no value".
(Insert gratuituous comment of Unix-Haters handbook webpage on Microsoft's site here)
Language-specific processors have always been losers and this was always a stupid idea.
This is one of the first things I learned in my computer architecture class. I'm actually too young to remember previous language-specific processors. I've heard of the Lisp machines of yesteryear, but I'm not aware of any others offhand.
It's been established that nature plays a lesser role than nurture in the personality of a human.. obviously, the same must apply to animals as well..
Some have suggested that nature's role in human paersonality has been underestimated. Steven Pinker's recent book entitled The Blank Slate argues against the idea that nature plays (almost) no role in personality (i.e. theat we are born as blank slates).
True, the government doesn't really care about you (unless you happen to be from certain unpopoular countries these days). Companies, on the other hand, would love to know all about you so that they can target your particular interests for all sorts of products they'd like to sell you. They're the ones you really have to worry about when it comes to privacy issues, because they really *do* care about your personal info.
According to the article, import duties were once different for "dolls" and "toys". If the X-Men toys were considered humans, they'd be classified as dolls and subject to a tax rate. This is why the issue came to court, to rule on how they should be classified.
I think this is definitely a good thing. I've been using various incarnation of Palms for about 4 years now, and I vastly prefer Jot to Graffiti. Jot was one of the only commercial software products I ever purchased for my Palm. It's much more intuitive than Graffiti, though I don't think it's any faster.
The only difficulty I've had with Jot is getting it to do the underscore properly. But othe
Similarly if there really were such a things as a "law of averages" people could use it to win at roulette.
There are people who win at roulette by "law of averages". They're called casino owners. Having deep pockets helps too, of course.
If your wicket's not already sticky in reverie, I have two more words taken from the British Boy's Own Lexicon: soggy biscuits, a treat seemingly unique to the cuisine of that northern island country of queens.
I am aware of a Canadian variant called "Cream the cookie", which I learned of in summer camp (and, thankfully, never participated in).
DISCIPLINE, DISCPLINE, DISCIPLINE. I fully expect to see the usual barrage of comments to the tune of: "C is outdated, insecure, brittle, yadda yadda..." No. Some PROGRAMMERS are "outdated, insecure, and brittle."
The moral is to always use the right tool for the right job. You wouldn't use a chainsaw to do heart surgery and you wouldn't fly a 747 to travel 30 miles.
C is really good at certain things, but writing secure code isn't really one of them: meaning that you have to go through some extra effort to ensure your C code is secure. If you can solve your problem in another language with less effort and that language meets all your requirements (speed, memory use, portability, whatever else), then why pick C in that case? Not every application requires maximum speed or easy bit twiddling.
The C language doesn't write bugs. Programmers write bugs. If the programmer can't handle C, then take it away from him. But don't try to take it away from ME.
Nobody's advocating take C away. But you shouldn't be slavishly devoted to it as the One True Language. You should choose the language that will allow you to solve your problem with the minimum amount of effort, taking into account whatever constraints are relevant.
I'm surprised how few people have mentioned Rational Purify. This is the only Rational tool I have ever really used (I played with Quantify a little bit, but didn't really invest the time to judge its usefulness).
I've found Purify on Windows to be quite useful at tracking down memory violations and leaks, certainly much better than Visual C++'s debugger can. And it's also really easy to use.
The only other product I know of on Windows that does this is Parasoft' Insure++, and I'm under the impression that it's quite a bit more expensive.
Your argument is, once again, pretty similar to Searle's (he give the example of having the people of India carry out the telephone calls, and asks "Is India concious?").
Here's where I think our intuitions just differ. I would think that no matter how many people are carrying out the exeuctions of the program, even if it was one person carrying it out, or the entire planet, conciousness wouild arrive through the act of carrying out the computations (albeit at a much slower level).
Unfortunately, there's no real sense of arguing after this point, because what we think would happen simply differs, and there's no way to check conciousness (though you could interact with the simulated brain and it would respond intelligently).
But isn't this *exactly* what bees and ants do ALL the time? Are they not alive?
The ants are alive individually. The question in that case is whether the colony itself is alive, as some sort of meta-organism.
It's funny you mention this example, which is explored in Douglas Hofstadter's book: "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"
C'mon, thought experiments are the stuff that philosophy is made of. You give me a scientific, measurable definition of conciousness and I'll lay off the thought experiments.
:)
When it comes to building circuits that act like neurons, I'm not a neuromorphic engineer. But even today people are building circuits that can interface with neurons (look at the guys at Cal Tech, for example). There was that guy in Britian (can't remember his name, references somebody?) who was doing experiments with re-routing electrical signals from his arm to his computer and back to his arm to see if the computer could reproduce the signal adequately to control the muscle (this was the same guy who walked around with implants that tracked where he was around the school).
If it makes you feel better you can skip the step about "synthetic" neurons and go right to the step where you've got a little computer that simulates the neurons and can interface with them.
As for simulating the brain exactly: first of all, there isn't much evidence that there is any quantum effects in the behavior of a neuron (people don't seem to take Roger Penrose too seriously in this area). Second of all, even if there are quantum effects and there was some randomness to the simulation, so what? Just because there are quantum effects, doesn't mean you can't simulate them. You aren't trying to *predict* what someone else's brain is going to do, you just want a simulation that follows the same laws. You just have to add some randomness to your experiment.
What makes a neuron a neuron is that it is, well, a neuron.
Can't argue with you there.
No matter how smart you can make a computer look, it is still performing the same fetch-execute cycle on primitive instructions like "add," "shift," and "branch." If that is a conscious life form, then so is a pencil and piece of paper on which you perform all these primitive instructions manually.
Fan of John Searle, are you?
How's this for a thought experiment. Take a human being, and swap one of his neurons for an electronic circuit that behaves identically to a neuron. One at a time, swap out each real neuron and swap in an electronic one. Is he still concious when his brain is entirely made up of electronic neurons instead of organic ones? OK, now swap out each neuron, and swap in a tiny computer that can simulate the I/O behavior of a neuron. Swap these in one at a time. Is he still concious? OK, now start swapping out groups of neurons for computers that can simulate the I/O behavior of the group. Proceed until his entire brain is just one computer. When did he go from a human being to a soulless automaton?
Winnie (he's NOT American, and DOES NOT SKATEBOARD) the Pooh (tm)
Just to swerve way off topic here, but as a Canadian, I think it's worth mentioning that the actual bear that inspired A.A. Milne to write Winne the Pooh was a Canadian bear that he saw in a zoo. In fact, that bear's name was indeed "Winnie", short for Winnipeg.
I don't think Milne was Canadian, though. British, right?
No he didn't - he made the three laws to show they WOULDN'T WORK, as he demonstrated in several stories.
I think that's a bit simplistic. I think Asimov was really good at asking "what if..." and then exploring all of the possible consequences. From reading his stuff, I don't get the impression he thought the three laws were a bad idea, per se. Rather, he tried to show that they weren't perfect. More specifically, that the actions that robots would take would not be the ones that you would assume they would, even though they were acting in accordance with the three laws.
Aw, c'mon. How do you know how much he gives? Cursory google search turned up that Bill Gates is the greatest philanthropist in American history. At the very least,in 1999, he made what is believed to be the largest ever individual donation to charity..
I don't like his business practices, but as a philanthropist I don't think he deserves the scorn. (And, quite frankly, I don't care what his motivations for giving are either. The world would be better off if people always did the right thing for the wrong reasons, rather than the other way around.)
That's like the people who say Trainspotting glorifies drug use.
There were people who said that Trainspotting glorified drug use. Of course, those people hadn't actually seen the movie. I once read that 1984 was banned in some places for promoting communism (yes, you read that right).
Moral of the story: some people are very, very stupid.
I'm rather curious as to how the anti-cloning people are going to react to this; seeing as how the major argument AGAINST stem cell research is the usage of embryos, the use of fat-based stem cells should THEORETICALLY be OK.
I've never heard anyone voice objections to adult stem cell research such as mentioned in the article above (as opposed to the controversial embryonic stem cell research).
In fact, I've heard the anti-cloning crowd heartily endorse adult stem cell research as an ethical alternative.
Why not declare iterator as a typedef in MyClass?
typedef vector::iterator iterator
Hey, that's pretty clever. Somehow, I hadn't thought of that.
Besides, the users going to have to static cast the reference in order to get to your methods.
No, they don't. The "using" declarations bring the methods into the scope of the derived class. Absolutely no casting is necessary.
I don't like returning a vector iterator, because then people who use the code have to declare their iterators of type vector::iterator, rather than MyClass::iterator. So, if I change the underlying representation, all the clients have to change their code. This, in my opinion, is worse.
YOU SHOULD NEVER INHERENT FROM AN STL CONTAINER. Period. There is no good reason to do this. If your design calls for it, then you have a bad design. Besides, STL containers do not have to have virtual destructors so you are introducing potential memory leaks if you inherent from them (this was made part of the standard on purpose).
I respectfully disagree. Often I want to write my own container class that's based on an STL class (let's say a vector). I want to expose some of the methods, but not all of them.
One way to do it is to have a vector instance be a member variable. But if you want your class to support iterators, then you have to write your own iterator class. Writing STL-style iterators is, in my opinion, an enormous pain in the ass, involving lots of tedious coding.
Instead, you can use private inheritence, and just expose the methods of the base class you want (including the iterator) with the using keyword. There's no need to worry about virtual destructors because you're never going to provide the users of your class a pointer to the base class: the inheritence is private.
In other words, you can do something like this:
class MyIntVector : vector < int > {
public:
typedef vector< int > base;
using base::iterator;
using base::begin;
using base::end;
using base::operator[];
using base::size;
};
If you're never going to give the user a pointer to the base class, then what's the harm in deriving from an STL class? Seems to save a lot of typing to me.
Also, the methods are written along the lines of, "if it's not optimal, you have to write the code yourself." I'm sorry - that sucks. Sometimes I need to remove an element from a Vector. Maybe I should be using another Container. Or maybe the API should allow it, but make it clear in the documentation that it's not efficient. I vote for the latter.
Doesn't the vector::erase method do what you want?
I know you were joking, but you really can do Quantum computing with Perl