I can say it because that's how it's been In My Experience. I didn't say "for all persons at all times with all configurations." The original question was "why do you like 2k more than XP?"
I'm not the original poster, but IME XP has been, on the whole, less stable than 2K. It has more features, but if it can't friggin' run for more than two hours at a time (three different machines, pulled-out-of-my-you-know-where uptime estimate) when doing serious work, it's just not worth it.
I think that's an important point. Do we really know, from the line included by a (probably not too tech-savvy) journalist, that Windows is a requirement here, or is it just one of those "golly, if you have this, and everybody does, then you can vote online" sort of lines? I mean, the article doesn't even say that Macs are excluded, and that's probably the only alternative the general public is even aware of.
Unless the author explains what (from the point of view of the implementors of the system) Windows offers, security or feature-wise, that any other OS with an HTML / CSS compliant browser does not, there's no reason to take that line seriously.
If you use a system with a package manager, then installing something this close to the core of what you use can really ruin your day down the road.
Of course, if you like to rely on the package management features, you should expect to have to wait for releases before a distributor is going to bother packaging 'em up for you.
Ibiblio's archive still occasionally has RPMS for releases that aren't available on mozilla.org's FTP servers (look under the contributed subdirectory in a release directory to see if they have one for the release you're interested in). They don't have even 1.4RC1 RPMS yet for any recent RH version, and for others they don't have 'em for v9. Maybe somebody will put one together when the final is release (whoever you are, by the way, thank you!). Check your own favourite mirror, you never know.
What is it with the editors? They posted an article like "here's some news, but don't bother reading it because the guy is wrong".
Where, in the whole of the editorial comment on the story,
McNett misreads the Red Hat documents. Their contract is for the various services, not the software, and for the services they are entitled to demand whatever concessions they think the market will bear.
If you like libxml2, then howzabout adding
Perl:
XML::LibXML Perl frontend to libxml2
XML::LibXSLT Perl frontend to libxslt
As for editing, in order of (my personal) preference:
X?Emacs
jEdit
vim
the PSGML modes make X?Emacs really nice to work with (after you figure out all the key bindings, anyhow). jEdit's facilities aren't too far behind, espectially if you learn to use its structure browser; my ranking of vim is in part due to an inability to get it to do what I want it to do, even though it's killer for a lot of stuff and I know others more diligent and skilled than I have been able to make it do magical things.
Bah! Too Much for Consumers to Remember
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 1
After all, a sleezy lawyer from SCO could claim IBM already is under investigation by the SEC for other issues of fraud.
Well, they could try that, but there's the small problem that while we're talking about the same corporate entity, we're not talking about the same people. With Enron, there appeared to be a widespread problem at the upper echelons, who all interacted on a regular basis, where in the current case, you've got your code monkeys in one place and your accountants in another. It's highly likely the IBM people involved in SCO's ridiculous case have ever met or even heard of the people involved in this SEC investigation.
It's hardly proof that the company's rotten to the core, and it would reek of desperation even more than SCO already does. Besides, SCO does not want this to go to court. They'd get slaughtered, and they know it, that's why it's all being played out at the PR level.
Given that "regular" media isn't likely to focus on the Beowulf cluster, and that this is a geeky tech site where there are a lot of fans of open source, I think that it clearly does matter that open source technology was heavily implicated in the matter. If you wanted to know that a lab had sequenced the virus, all you had to do was turn on your TV, read a newspaper, or listen to the radio.
(yeah, sure, hiv has mortality rate of 100%, but to get it you at least have to have some sort of fun)
Yeah, like all those people who got it from blood transfusions, or through being raped, or being paid to have humiliating sex with lots of people because there's no other way to feed your children.
Please, do think about it.
Block's not interested in what you're calling "theoretical" possiblity, but logical possiblity. I actually have a degree of sympathy for the claim that it's not clear that Blockhead is *not* thinking; at the very least, we'd have to say that its lookup table embodies understanding, or codes for it, or some such. I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that terms such as "thinking" are probably too undisciplined to use, and maybe "understanding" is too, but I don't think anybody could disagree with the claim that there is something special about a Blockhead's lookup table. All I've been concerned to argue for is that the point is one about logical possiblity, and AFAI can tell, you want to challenge that point (but then you seem to say you're challenging a different point).
As far as the brick point goes, Block's argument transposed would concern whether the concept of a brick implies that bricks can't fly.-- but that's clearly not what the argument's about here.
I will reiterate: for all you've said, the Blockhead is logically possble, in that assuming it exists implies no contradiction.
"The number of theoretical conversations is infinite"... wait a minute right there, I agree with that, properly qualified, but the goal of the Turing test is not to be able to hold all possible conversations, but to respond in a manner indistinguishable from the way a reasonably intelligent adult human would respond. That problem space is thus significantly smaller (part of my point about the die-roling example was meant to speak to that.).
The point about storage: for yuks, suppose the lookup table has two parts: a big XML document where each question and each answer has a unique id, and an array consisting of arrays of question and answer ids. Storing the state of play would then only require storing enough information storage to filter to the set already encountered, and/that/ could be just the array of ids already 'used', so storage of the state information would be the tiny part -- it's the representation of the state space that's the problem.;but it's not a *logical* problem.
Again, there is no logical impossibility here. The argument concerns the concepts.
I still think you're not getting the nature of Block's claim correct. Assume Blockhead holds a lookup table of all possible Turing-test passing conversations. That's pure fantasy already, but there is nothing inconsistent about the hypothesis. That's all he needs to get his argument up and running, because his point is that it is logically possible for a machine to pass a Turing Test and not think. The nature of the "can't" is precisely my point: it doesn't matter if the device can't exist in the real word, all that matters is that there is no contradiction in the assumption that such a machine exists. I also note that the Blockhead device is a way overpowered approach to the problem of passing the Turing Test.
Thus, your new example is beside the point. I'll cop to not understanding why Blockhead would need to be infinite, because your linguistic transaction amounts to
You: "what's one more than n?"
Blockhead: "n + 1"
If you're imagining that each roll of the die is a linguistic transaction, then a Blockhead would have stored conversations that have him saying, somewhere before the 153rd iteration, "Stop rolling that damn die, I thought we were supposed to have a conversation.' (what kind of intelligent being would put up with that?)
Now, if you think the huge(infinite) lookup table machine thinks, then you're denying a premise of Block's, but you're not offering a challenge to the validity [ in the technical sense of "if the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true" ] of his reasoning.
Philosophical or "analytical" behaviorism, in its purest form, is the view that what goes on "inside" doesn't matter at all. Dennett, in particular, is a little hard to pin down on this issue. When you push him, he says "of course what goes on inside matters, because the overt displays depend crucially on what goes on inside," but that depends on further Quinean views about the lack of a theoretically significant distinction between conceptual analysis and empirical research, which is not held by everybody. At any rate, whether or not anybody actually holds the view that Searle is attacking is a different matter. Just because a methodology employed by behaviorists has proved effective does not mean that analytical behaviorism is true.
You also seek to tar "cognitivists" with a wide brush, but although some woho would describe themselves in that way have expressed doubts about being able to in practice discharge all homunculi, nobody is actually happy with postulating them as solutions to theoretical problems. In the absence of an account of behaviorism that goes beyond allegiance to the method of discharging homunculi, I offer the following hypothetical challenge to you:
Your counterexample to my claim that p rests on a misunderstanding, for I intended my claim that p to have no counterexamples.
Block is well aware of the "impossiblity" issue, and his response to you is that he's trying to elucidate the nature of thought period, not answer the question "how, in the actual world, does a system manage to think?"
In the philosopher's jargon, he'sworking with logical possiblities, not physical ones. The question he's working with is, "would any computer that produces the right output one that understands?" and his answer, based on that example, is "no." That's just not the thing that makes a system a thinking system. It doesn't matter, for that kind of argument, whether the described system is one that could actually be built, since the question concerns the nature of thinking, and this would still be an issue in a universe with a vastly different physics (compare: in a universe where you could collect neutrinos in a lead cube, could you use them as currency?).
None of this means that on Block's view, we couldn't build a computer that understands, it just means that it has to have the right kind of program (minimally, one that produces its responses on the fly, rather than one that just looks them up in a table). As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the target here is not "functionalism", which implies that an appropriately programmed computer could think, but behaviorism. the view that anything that produces the right response would be a thinker.
I think Searle's arguments are actually pretty atrocious for slightly different reasons. For one, he's attacking behaviorism, not functionalism. Behaviorism, in a nutshell, is the view that anything that produces the right kind of response ipso facto understands, while functionalism is the view that how the system produces the right kind of response is what determines it. There's no need to assume that the "computers" in our heads work anything like the Chinese room (like there's this giant lookup table whose keys are ALL POSSIBLE SENTENCES you might interact with, and whose values are sensible reponses to those sentences -- I think it's pretty clear our language use is more productive than that, and exhibits what linguists like to call compositionality), and so Searle's whole argument misses its supposed target.
In the larger issue, the sleight of hand in the arguments is that he always tries to focus your attention on the parts of the system, not the whole. Each neuron, taken individually, is pretty simple, and clearly doesn't understand. So how could just a whole bunch more of 'em understand? When I think of things from the point of view of the neurons, I don't get a sense of the special glow of understanding...
The problem, as you suggest, is that my neurons don't do the understanding -- *I* do (so it's something about the way my neurons work together). Searle wants to find the part in the system that does the understanding, but that seems just silly. Moreover, it's not clear what would satisfy him as an explanation (I'm pretty serious about the "special glow" charge). He wants to find a homunculus, somewhere in the brain, a little being you could talk to that does the understanding ("the guy in the Chinese room doesn't understand Chinese, but if he doesn't understand Chinese, what does?"); but's that's just ignoring the fact that any system that does the understanding has to be viewed from a different perspective.
Anyhow, back to Turing. I think the attitude you attribute to AI researchers today started with him. If you read his original paper, he spends a lot of time pointing out that questions like "could a computer be conscious/intelligent?" are kind of undisciplined, so he seeks to replace those with a different kind of question, the answer to which we have a much better chance of coming to agree on: here's a test, could a computer pass it? That's not an "operationalist" view of the matter, he's not trying to redefine "intelligent" as "passes this test." And given that 50 years on, nothing has passed the test outside of artificial restrictions, possession of the "Turing-property" (having an internal structure that allows it to pass the TT) is manifestly not a trivial property (still less so would be a system that could "discourse" sensibly on the range of topics the average human can handle).
Well, there is that bit of water there, which traditionally has mattered a great deal -- those on the island of Britain could pretty much ignore what was going on in the rest of Europe. And visually, well, just look at it -- it's not connected, so even though Spain is separated from France by mountains, you can't deny they're on the same landmass. Is it rational? Well, no, not really, in this day and age, since that bit of water really isn't a barrier any more. In more recent times, I'd lay it down to traditional tribalism more than any other factor -- they want to distinguish, they speak a different language, the water's right there, so they do. Recent events have shown that British leadership seems to think its interests are distinct from those on "the continent," although you can now see evidence that Blair, anyhow, realizes that the area of overlap is still considerable.
You could say the same about the River Clyde, too, I think, most of the Welsh I know are proud to not be English, though of course they haven't had a direct say in who calls the shots since about a hundred years after the last successful cross-channel invasion. Similarly, note that Ireland is not part of the UK...
Off the top of my head, it doesn't seem to me that people consider Scandinavia "Europe", at least not Europe ''proper''. But then I doubt the Norwegians care as much to distinguish themselves from Europeans as do the Brits.
Don't get me started on the "America" issue, I've pontificated enough based on vaguely felt impressions as it is =)
An April Fool's joke about Enlightenment 1.0 being released would work much better had not Slashdot run the serious story about how Enlightenment.17 is still a way off. Some of us have these things called memories =)
FWIW, the, uhh, classical source (in western "civilization", props to Gandhi) of the argument about the strength of testimony required to establish an extraordinary claim stems back to David Hume. Amongst his diverse interests were arguments concerning the existence of a deity, and here's his encapsulated response to attempts to establish the existence of a deity by appeal to testimony about miracles:
That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish... [ An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding ]
Strange that people seem to be so religious about all the details of the GPL, except when it might hurt RedHat, in which case it's okay for them to sell it like proprietary software.
OK, name one. =)
More seriouslier: please do not attribute some views some Slashdot posters espouse to other views espoused on Slashdot, unless those views are expressed by the same individuals. "I see lots of rabid defenses of the GPL on Slashdot" and "I see people on Slashdot calling for others not to download of RedHat software before RedHat opens their servers to the public" do not, taken together. imply that anyone is being inconsistent.
Most seriously: if someone asks you to do something in order to support a commercial Linux vendor, they are not forcing you to do anything at all. Please distinguish "please do this, it is a good thing to do because it will benefit these guys" from "do this, or I will slap charge you under the DMCA so fast the change will fall out of your pockets and into my bank account."
The statue of Liberty should be claimed back by its owner. You have a point there.
Its owner is (some entity inside, probably the federal government of the) U.S. It was a gift, and AFAIK everybody takes that seriously (the one site that hosts an online petition to "give the statue back" was apparently put up for auction on eBay soon afterwards). One of the interesting points in all this is that, according to what I've heard, the French are by and large pretty good about distinguishing USIans from the present administration. They're dealing with the animosity with a touch of class (again, by and large, I'm sure there are incidents.).
Of course, I'm sure the French would accept it, albeit with a heavy heart, if enough USians wanted to return it. I mean, it would apparently mean that the US has given up on what the statue symbolises, on the motto on the plaque posted at the statue's feet, and NY State license plates (ok, no biggie on the last one). While the US is at it, they could also send the Constitution back, since that was based in part on the ideas of a Frenchman. It's not like it's getting heavy use any more.
Sure there are going to be grey areas, but what the various vendors do wrt Linus' kernel tree doesn't qualify as a "fork" because they don't make a separate project out of what they do that goes on to have its own lifecycle. Often, the contributions they make get folded back into Linus' tree, and new versions of the SuSE and RedHat kernels are always based off of Linus' tree. It's more like development branches in CVS off a main trunk where features added to the branches are often folded back into the main trunk when that becomes feasible.
If this really was the case, why wouldn't American companies win ALL the contracts?
Not having read the evidence or anything, but just as a general matter: it's not too smart to use a tool like this that gives you the edge all the time, just because it becomes too obvious that you've got something up your sleeve. As others in the thread have noted, the Allies in WWII kept the fact that they'd cracked Enigma from the enemy.
More mundanely, the biggest twits that cheat at multiplayer online FPS type games set their cheats to automatically shoot at opponents' heads. When a guy gets like 90% kill/death ratio with nothing but headshots, you know he's cheating (it's even more obvious if you can watch him in first-person mode). If he's smart, he'll just put on the autoaim for any part of the body and do the shooting himself, or switch it off from time to time. He still ends up with a 70% ratio and it's much harder to tell he's cheating.
I am reminded of the Harry Golden rule, which says that you can't produce genuine satire, because chances are that your satire is literally true of something somewhere! Well, OK, except my comment wasn't satire =)
Slashdot Mirror
I can say it because that's how it's been In My Experience. I didn't say "for all persons at all times with all configurations." The original question was "why do you like 2k more than XP?"
I'm not the original poster, but IME XP has been, on the whole, less stable than 2K. It has more features, but if it can't friggin' run for more than two hours at a time (three different machines, pulled-out-of-my-you-know-where uptime estimate) when doing serious work, it's just not worth it.
I think that's an important point. Do we really know, from the line included by a (probably not too tech-savvy) journalist, that Windows is a requirement here, or is it just one of those "golly, if you have this, and everybody does, then you can vote online" sort of lines? I mean, the article doesn't even say that Macs are excluded, and that's probably the only alternative the general public is even aware of.
Unless the author explains what (from the point of view of the implementors of the system) Windows offers, security or feature-wise, that any other OS with an HTML / CSS compliant browser does not, there's no reason to take that line seriously.
If you use a system with a package manager, then installing something this close to the core of what you use can really ruin your day down the road.
Of course, if you like to rely on the package management features, you should expect to have to wait for releases before a distributor is going to bother packaging 'em up for you.
Ibiblio's archive still occasionally has RPMS for releases that aren't available on mozilla.org's FTP servers (look under the contributed subdirectory in a release directory to see if they have one for the release you're interested in). They don't have even 1.4RC1 RPMS yet for any recent RH version, and for others they don't have 'em for v9. Maybe somebody will put one together when the final is release (whoever you are, by the way, thank you!). Check your own favourite mirror, you never know.
Where, in the whole of the editorial comment on the story,
is the admonition to not read the linked story?
If you like libxml2, then howzabout adding
Perl: XML::LibXML Perl frontend to libxml2 XML::LibXSLT Perl frontend to libxslt
As for editing, in order of (my personal) preference: X?Emacs jEdit vim the PSGML modes make X?Emacs really nice to work with (after you figure out all the key bindings, anyhow). jEdit's facilities aren't too far behind, espectially if you learn to use its structure browser; my ranking of vim is in part due to an inability to get it to do what I want it to do, even though it's killer for a lot of stuff and I know others more diligent and skilled than I have been able to make it do magical things.
OmniCorp.
Well, they could try that, but there's the small problem that while we're talking about the same corporate entity, we're not talking about the same people. With Enron, there appeared to be a widespread problem at the upper echelons, who all interacted on a regular basis, where in the current case, you've got your code monkeys in one place and your accountants in another. It's highly likely the IBM people involved in SCO's ridiculous case have ever met or even heard of the people involved in this SEC investigation.
It's hardly proof that the company's rotten to the core, and it would reek of desperation even more than SCO already does. Besides, SCO does not want this to go to court. They'd get slaughtered, and they know it, that's why it's all being played out at the PR level.
The last time I looked, Canada was still a sovereign nation. But that was over a week ago.
Given that "regular" media isn't likely to focus on the Beowulf cluster, and that this is a geeky tech site where there are a lot of fans of open source, I think that it clearly does matter that open source technology was heavily implicated in the matter. If you wanted to know that a lab had sequenced the virus, all you had to do was turn on your TV, read a newspaper, or listen to the radio.
(yeah, sure, hiv has mortality rate of 100%, but to get it you at least have to have some sort of fun) Yeah, like all those people who got it from blood transfusions, or through being raped, or being paid to have humiliating sex with lots of people because there's no other way to feed your children. Please, do think about it.
Block's not interested in what you're calling "theoretical" possiblity, but logical possiblity. I actually have a degree of sympathy for the claim that it's not clear that Blockhead is *not* thinking; at the very least, we'd have to say that its lookup table embodies understanding, or codes for it, or some such. I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that terms such as "thinking" are probably too undisciplined to use, and maybe "understanding" is too, but I don't think anybody could disagree with the claim that there is something special about a Blockhead's lookup table. All I've been concerned to argue for is that the point is one about logical possiblity, and AFAI can tell, you want to challenge that point (but then you seem to say you're challenging a different point).
As far as the brick point goes, Block's argument transposed would concern whether the concept of a brick implies that bricks can't fly.-- but that's clearly not what the argument's about here.
I will reiterate: for all you've said, the Blockhead is logically possble, in that assuming it exists implies no contradiction.
"The number of theoretical conversations is infinite" ... wait a minute right there, I agree with that, properly qualified, but the goal of the Turing test is not to be able to hold all possible conversations, but to respond in a manner indistinguishable from the way a reasonably intelligent adult human would respond. That problem space is thus significantly smaller (part of my point about the die-roling example was meant to speak to that.).
The point about storage: for yuks, suppose the lookup table has two parts: a big XML document where each question and each answer has a unique id, and an array consisting of arrays of question and answer ids. Storing the state of play would then only require storing enough information storage to filter to the set already encountered, and /that/ could be just the array of ids already 'used', so storage of the state information would be the tiny part -- it's the representation of the state space that's the problem.;but it's not a *logical* problem.
Again, there is no logical impossibility here. The argument concerns the concepts.
I still think you're not getting the nature of Block's claim correct. Assume Blockhead holds a lookup table of all possible Turing-test passing conversations. That's pure fantasy already, but there is nothing inconsistent about the hypothesis. That's all he needs to get his argument up and running, because his point is that it is logically possible for a machine to pass a Turing Test and not think. The nature of the "can't" is precisely my point: it doesn't matter if the device can't exist in the real word, all that matters is that there is no contradiction in the assumption that such a machine exists. I also note that the Blockhead device is a way overpowered approach to the problem of passing the Turing Test.
Thus, your new example is beside the point. I'll cop to not understanding why Blockhead would need to be infinite, because your linguistic transaction amounts to
- You: "what's one more than n?"
- Blockhead: "n + 1"
If you're imagining that each roll of the die is a linguistic transaction, then a Blockhead would have stored conversations that have him saying, somewhere before the 153rd iteration, "Stop rolling that damn die, I thought we were supposed to have a conversation.' (what kind of intelligent being would put up with that?)Now, if you think the huge(infinite) lookup table machine thinks, then you're denying a premise of Block's, but you're not offering a challenge to the validity [ in the technical sense of "if the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true" ] of his reasoning.
Philosophical or "analytical" behaviorism, in its purest form, is the view that what goes on "inside" doesn't matter at all. Dennett, in particular, is a little hard to pin down on this issue. When you push him, he says "of course what goes on inside matters, because the overt displays depend crucially on what goes on inside," but that depends on further Quinean views about the lack of a theoretically significant distinction between conceptual analysis and empirical research, which is not held by everybody. At any rate, whether or not anybody actually holds the view that Searle is attacking is a different matter. Just because a methodology employed by behaviorists has proved effective does not mean that analytical behaviorism is true.
You also seek to tar "cognitivists" with a wide brush, but although some woho would describe themselves in that way have expressed doubts about being able to in practice discharge all homunculi, nobody is actually happy with postulating them as solutions to theoretical problems. In the absence of an account of behaviorism that goes beyond allegiance to the method of discharging homunculi, I offer the following hypothetical challenge to you:
Block is well aware of the "impossiblity" issue, and his response to you is that he's trying to elucidate the nature of thought period, not answer the question "how, in the actual world, does a system manage to think?"
In the philosopher's jargon, he'sworking with logical possiblities, not physical ones. The question he's working with is, "would any computer that produces the right output one that understands?" and his answer, based on that example, is "no." That's just not the thing that makes a system a thinking system. It doesn't matter, for that kind of argument, whether the described system is one that could actually be built, since the question concerns the nature of thinking, and this would still be an issue in a universe with a vastly different physics (compare: in a universe where you could collect neutrinos in a lead cube, could you use them as currency?).
None of this means that on Block's view, we couldn't build a computer that understands, it just means that it has to have the right kind of program (minimally, one that produces its responses on the fly, rather than one that just looks them up in a table). As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the target here is not "functionalism", which implies that an appropriately programmed computer could think, but behaviorism. the view that anything that produces the right response would be a thinker.
I think Searle's arguments are actually pretty atrocious for slightly different reasons. For one, he's attacking behaviorism, not functionalism. Behaviorism, in a nutshell, is the view that anything that produces the right kind of response ipso facto understands, while functionalism is the view that how the system produces the right kind of response is what determines it. There's no need to assume that the "computers" in our heads work anything like the Chinese room (like there's this giant lookup table whose keys are ALL POSSIBLE SENTENCES you might interact with, and whose values are sensible reponses to those sentences -- I think it's pretty clear our language use is more productive than that, and exhibits what linguists like to call compositionality), and so Searle's whole argument misses its supposed target.
In the larger issue, the sleight of hand in the arguments is that he always tries to focus your attention on the parts of the system, not the whole. Each neuron, taken individually, is pretty simple, and clearly doesn't understand. So how could just a whole bunch more of 'em understand? When I think of things from the point of view of the neurons, I don't get a sense of the special glow of understanding ...
The problem, as you suggest, is that my neurons don't do the understanding -- *I* do (so it's something about the way my neurons work together). Searle wants to find the part in the system that does the understanding, but that seems just silly. Moreover, it's not clear what would satisfy him as an explanation (I'm pretty serious about the "special glow" charge). He wants to find a homunculus, somewhere in the brain, a little being you could talk to that does the understanding ("the guy in the Chinese room doesn't understand Chinese, but if he doesn't understand Chinese, what does?"); but's that's just ignoring the fact that any system that does the understanding has to be viewed from a different perspective.
Anyhow, back to Turing. I think the attitude you attribute to AI researchers today started with him. If you read his original paper, he spends a lot of time pointing out that questions like "could a computer be conscious/intelligent?" are kind of undisciplined, so he seeks to replace those with a different kind of question, the answer to which we have a much better chance of coming to agree on: here's a test, could a computer pass it? That's not an "operationalist" view of the matter, he's not trying to redefine "intelligent" as "passes this test." And given that 50 years on, nothing has passed the test outside of artificial restrictions, possession of the "Turing-property" (having an internal structure that allows it to pass the TT) is manifestly not a trivial property (still less so would be a system that could "discourse" sensibly on the range of topics the average human can handle).
Well, there is that bit of water there, which traditionally has mattered a great deal -- those on the island of Britain could pretty much ignore what was going on in the rest of Europe. And visually, well, just look at it -- it's not connected, so even though Spain is separated from France by mountains, you can't deny they're on the same landmass. Is it rational? Well, no, not really, in this day and age, since that bit of water really isn't a barrier any more. In more recent times, I'd lay it down to traditional tribalism more than any other factor -- they want to distinguish, they speak a different language, the water's right there, so they do. Recent events have shown that British leadership seems to think its interests are distinct from those on "the continent," although you can now see evidence that Blair, anyhow, realizes that the area of overlap is still considerable.
You could say the same about the River Clyde, too, I think, most of the Welsh I know are proud to not be English, though of course they haven't had a direct say in who calls the shots since about a hundred years after the last successful cross-channel invasion. Similarly, note that Ireland is not part of the UK ...
Off the top of my head, it doesn't seem to me that people consider Scandinavia "Europe", at least not Europe ''proper''. But then I doubt the Norwegians care as much to distinguish themselves from Europeans as do the Brits.
Don't get me started on the "America" issue, I've pontificated enough based on vaguely felt impressions as it is =)
An April Fool's joke about Enlightenment 1.0 being released would work much better had not Slashdot run the serious story about how Enlightenment .17 is still a way off. Some of us have these things called memories =)
FWIW, the, uhh, classical source (in western "civilization", props to Gandhi) of the argument about the strength of testimony required to establish an extraordinary claim stems back to David Hume. Amongst his diverse interests were arguments concerning the existence of a deity, and here's his encapsulated response to attempts to establish the existence of a deity by appeal to testimony about miracles:
OK, name one. =)
More seriouslier: please do not attribute some views some Slashdot posters espouse to other views espoused on Slashdot, unless those views are expressed by the same individuals. "I see lots of rabid defenses of the GPL on Slashdot" and "I see people on Slashdot calling for others not to download of RedHat software before RedHat opens their servers to the public" do not, taken together. imply that anyone is being inconsistent.
Most seriously: if someone asks you to do something in order to support a commercial Linux vendor, they are not forcing you to do anything at all. Please distinguish "please do this, it is a good thing to do because it will benefit these guys" from "do this, or I will slap charge you under the DMCA so fast the change will fall out of your pockets and into my bank account."
Its owner is (some entity inside, probably the federal government of the) U.S. It was a gift, and AFAIK everybody takes that seriously (the one site that hosts an online petition to "give the statue back" was apparently put up for auction on eBay soon afterwards). One of the interesting points in all this is that, according to what I've heard, the French are by and large pretty good about distinguishing USIans from the present administration. They're dealing with the animosity with a touch of class (again, by and large, I'm sure there are incidents.).
Of course, I'm sure the French would accept it, albeit with a heavy heart, if enough USians wanted to return it. I mean, it would apparently mean that the US has given up on what the statue symbolises, on the motto on the plaque posted at the statue's feet, and NY State license plates (ok, no biggie on the last one). While the US is at it, they could also send the Constitution back, since that was based in part on the ideas of a Frenchman. It's not like it's getting heavy use any more.
Sure there are going to be grey areas, but what the various vendors do wrt Linus' kernel tree doesn't qualify as a "fork" because they don't make a separate project out of what they do that goes on to have its own lifecycle. Often, the contributions they make get folded back into Linus' tree, and new versions of the SuSE and RedHat kernels are always based off of Linus' tree. It's more like development branches in CVS off a main trunk where features added to the branches are often folded back into the main trunk when that becomes feasible.
Not having read the evidence or anything, but just as a general matter: it's not too smart to use a tool like this that gives you the edge all the time, just because it becomes too obvious that you've got something up your sleeve. As others in the thread have noted, the Allies in WWII kept the fact that they'd cracked Enigma from the enemy.
More mundanely, the biggest twits that cheat at multiplayer online FPS type games set their cheats to automatically shoot at opponents' heads. When a guy gets like 90% kill/death ratio with nothing but headshots, you know he's cheating (it's even more obvious if you can watch him in first-person mode). If he's smart, he'll just put on the autoaim for any part of the body and do the shooting himself, or switch it off from time to time. He still ends up with a 70% ratio and it's much harder to tell he's cheating.
I am reminded of the Harry Golden rule, which says that you can't produce genuine satire, because chances are that your satire is literally true of something somewhere! Well, OK, except my comment wasn't satire =)