It's even more incredible to believe that a species that is completely a product of the universe, existing within the universe, could POSSIBLY create a system like mathematics, based on logic, and that system NOT end up being closely related, in some way, to the structure or machinations of the universe. You seem to think you can isolate the experimenter from the experiment; you can't.
Sure, mathematics is closely related to the structure of the universe -- as I said, we have yet to notice a discrepancy. However, that does not mean that mathematics is "correct", it just means that it's the best thing we've got so far.
2,000 years ago, Western civilization had mathematics without having a concept of zero. Could the Romans have used mathematics to help model the universe? Sure. Would there be mistakes in their model because of their lack of zero? Sure. Is our model of mathematics complete? I don't know. Does this mean that our model could contain mistakes? It's a possibility.
We derived mathematics like we derived science: lots of tests to determine what worked and what didn't. What didn't work got thrown away, what worked was kept. This does not mean that what worked is actually correct, and will not be thrown out in the future -- just that it's the best we have right now.
I'm really sick of you anthropomorphizing the universe. It's not a single entity. It isn't a person. Your argument is totally misguided.
Well, gee, I'd hate to get you upset. However, your choice to attack the language I use has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of my argument. The notions of "true" and "false" are symbols, and only symbols. They're abstract concepts, and they do not exist, just like "Wednesday" doesn't exist, or "red" doesn't exist, or "meter" doesn't exist. We might use them because they're helpful in our model, but that does not imply that the universe works in the same way.
Godel's proof is done using a discrete system, but there is nothing limiting its result there.
Er. The proof is done using a discrete system. That seems to pretty concretely limit its result to discrete systems.
our beloved set of basic axioms cannot exist. This pretty much kills the mathematicians "theory of everything"
I don't agree with the first part -- the axioms can "exist" (as much as axioms can) just fine. However, it does kill a theory of everything in mathematics.
it doesn't *say* you cannot know everything, but it is indeed a natural conclusion.
No, there's a difference between "It is impossible to know all true statements" and "It is possible to form statements that are neither true nor false." To take an example, I can formulate the statement, "This statement is false." Since this statement is not true, it does not violate the first definition ("possible to know all true statements").
I still have a problem with this "only" it's correct of course, but it applies exactly on logic thus on our way to solve problems thus on our ability to cover *all problems* so it is indeed an important fact.
True. But, it's a distinction that I think needs to be made -- formal logic in it's current state has really only existed for the last 400 years. It is not unreasonable that 1,000 years from now, something else entirely may have taken it's place.
You are however right in the general idea of your post that Godel definitely did not prove that was going necesarily to happen, he just proved it is a possibility.
1. Incorrect. Godel's proof applies to any system that is capable of self-reference.
No, it only applies to formal systems (which, by definition, require a small number of operations to be considered formal...) To take human knowledge as an example: If I wish to classify my knowledge as either 'true' or 'false', I will run into Godel's proof. However, if I wish to abandon a formal system and simply say that all of my knowledge is true, contradictions and usefulness be damned, Godel's proof does not apply, even though my system is self-referential.
2. Godel's proof says that either it is impossible to prove every true statement or that some statements are both true and false.
That's what I said (or meant, by "invalid statement").
3. Godel's proof works for any formal system of logic that is recursive. If we accept that math is a result of the laws of our universe, we have to accept that godel's proof is also.
That's a mighty big 'if' there: Mathematics is an abstract tool created by humans in order to understand the universe. That doesn't imply that the rules we have discovered in mathematics actually have anything at all to do with the universe...just that we have yet to discover a discrepancy. "True" and "False" are even worse, having absolutely no relationship with the universe at all.
1) Godel's proof only works in discrete systems that support (at least) a small number of operations. It is not, despite the occasional comment to the contrary, necessarily applicable to, say, human existance.
2) Godel's proof does not say that it is impossible to know everything. It says that in these discrete systems, it is either a) impossible to make some valid statements (an incomplete system), or b) possible to make some invalid statements (an incorrect system).
3) Godel's proof only works if you are using boolean logic (and, in fact, works only because boolean logic is so bad at handling self-referential statements). This does not mean that the universe works the same way.
VNC is a good one, as mentioned, but it's not exactly an automated solution. Since these are school-provided computers, you could also have a client/service/component/whaddeva on the machine that, when prodded remotely, enumerates the running processes/windows and matches them against a list of what's being looked for (eg, email, webbrowsing, solitaire, etc.) and returns any offenders.
Of course, anything that's done this way can be gotten around with enough time and effort (a reformat is simple, but the lack of the client/service/component/whaddeva would be suspicious), but that's the risk you take when you give laptops to people who might use 'em.
Assuming that you're talking about a big company, with all the HR people I've ever talked to, a college degree was the only certification they ever looked at. The other certs might be tie-breaking material, if you've got two equally qualified candidates, but that happens so rarely that it's not IMHO worth bothering with.
With smaller companies, it depends on the person (usually singular) who screens you: either all certs and degrees will be worthless, or that's all they'll base their opinion on, depending upon who they are.
Here's an interesting idea. It seems to me that black holes would provide a near infinite source of green (haha) power. Considering the fact that their gravitational power only increases, it is obvious that they constitute a never-ending supply of kinetic power
Problem: You can't really harness potential energy (it's potential, see?) Sure, as the black hole gets bigger, you can rest well in the knowledge that, where you to plunge towards it, you'd gain a lot more kinetic energy, but until you actually start falling towards it, you're getting squat.
Oh god! I used those words. "Perpetual Machine". Surely someone is hovering over the keys about to remind me about the three laws of thermodynamics.
Yep. =)
you connect them by some sort of cable of unbelievable properties and have once end attached to a large expandable spool of cable, which happens to be attached to a generator. ... But... we can tap the energy of the expansion of the universe by allowing the spool to feed cable (while generating electricity) as the universe expands.
If I understand what you're saying (and I might not), you run into a few problems:
* The cable would have to be infinitely long. Once we know how to make an infinite mass, infinite energy is a snap, but until then...If the cable is not infinitely long, eventually reach it's length and that's that.
* (The more serious one) Assuming Big Bang theory, yadda yadda, the reason the universe expands is because of kinetic energy -- mass moving away from the "big bang". Assuming enough kinetic energy, gravity will never catch up -- this is true. However, if you're attaching a cable to an object and you expect the object to move the cable, the cable will be taking it's energy from the object, which means eventually the object would stop moving. Unless, of course, the cable is frictionless, but given a frictionless material, you can get perpetual motion much easier.
It watches for a suspect to start a popular encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy. It then logs the passphrase used to start the program, essentially given agents access to keys needed to decrypt files.
If this is true, then it would seem all you need to do to foil this latest slightly-hare-brained-scheme would be to rename pgp to something else, such as goawayfbi.
In other news today, the FBI was arrested en masse for violating numerous newly legislated anti-terrorist laws prohibiting compromising remote computers...
Does anyone else expect that this collection will grow to include all of the orphaned packets, lost and all alone, that will appear when the server becomes slashdotted?
What is it about these replies complaining that the show won't be the same? Of course it won't be the same -- if it was the same show, what would be the point?
Then there's the people who say that the show won't be as good because it's the inherent Japanese-ness that makes it good. Could be true, could be true...but I kind of doubt it. The show won't be the same as the original -- it's obviously going to be far less somber and and dignified -- but that doesn't immediately translate into "bad". It's different. Give it a chance.
Clockless applications
on
Clockless Chips
·
· Score: 2, Funny
...chips work very much faster...
...Intel hade some experiments...
Unfortunately, these chips only seem to have half the spell-check and grammar-check capability.
Re:You forgot the loss of 3rd-person perspective
on
First Review of Halo
·
· Score: 2
I don't think there was a 1st person shooter with plot 'til Half-life for PCs
System Shock 1, System Shock 2, and Thief all did (SS2 may have come out around the same time as Halflife; not sure). Unreal, while I don't think it had a "plot" per se, had materials you could read, which Halflife did not, so I'd put it on the same level.
In other news, people are now selling "exercise bikes" that can be used while watching TV. Despite this ability to burn calories while watching TV, Americans still seem to be overweight. Researchers admit to being puzzled, but maintain that cycling while playing a video game is totally different in a way they can't yet explain.
And how many people remember Bungie promising over and over that Halo would not become a console game? Or, later, that it would be released for the XBox and (PC or Mac) simultaneously? Oh well. Here's to waiting for the port.
Of course. I've lost track of the numbers of times that my boss has told me to add in a screen with a progress bar that slowly fills up while accessing random bits on the hard drive, and then going straight to the pregenerated data we had sitting around.
The sad thing is that it works so well. Quite the demotivator.
Cringely tells us that the true threat is servers with mis-set clocks
No, Cringely mentions 2,000 IIS servers that are still in "infection" mode because they have misset clocks. The real "problem" is that disassembly of the worm indicates that it might have a monthly cycle, instead of being a one shot wonder; y'know, when the other x00,000 IIS servers join in again.
No, it was neither Texas nor Kansas (Kansas did do the 'evolution' thing, though).
There was, a year or so back, a hoax on the Internet about Alabama doing the same thing, but it was a hoax. The only factual evidence that anything of the sort ever happened was in Indiania, 1897, and it never even got close to passing: the Senators considered it to be a complete joke.
Slashdot Mirror
It's even more incredible to believe that a species that is completely a product of the universe, existing within the universe, could POSSIBLY create a system like mathematics, based on logic, and that system NOT end up being closely related, in some way, to the structure or machinations of the universe. You seem to think you can isolate the experimenter from the experiment; you can't.
Sure, mathematics is closely related to the structure of the universe -- as I said, we have yet to notice a discrepancy. However, that does not mean that mathematics is "correct", it just means that it's the best thing we've got so far.
2,000 years ago, Western civilization had mathematics without having a concept of zero. Could the Romans have used mathematics to help model the universe? Sure. Would there be mistakes in their model because of their lack of zero? Sure. Is our model of mathematics complete? I don't know. Does this mean that our model could contain mistakes? It's a possibility.
We derived mathematics like we derived science: lots of tests to determine what worked and what didn't. What didn't work got thrown away, what worked was kept. This does not mean that what worked is actually correct, and will not be thrown out in the future -- just that it's the best we have right now.
I'm really sick of you anthropomorphizing the universe. It's not a single entity. It isn't a person. Your argument is totally misguided.
Well, gee, I'd hate to get you upset. However, your choice to attack the language I use has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of my argument. The notions of "true" and "false" are symbols, and only symbols. They're abstract concepts, and they do not exist, just like "Wednesday" doesn't exist, or "red" doesn't exist, or "meter" doesn't exist. We might use them because they're helpful in our model, but that does not imply that the universe works in the same way.
Godel's proof is done using a discrete system, but there is nothing limiting its result there.
Er. The proof is done using a discrete system. That seems to pretty concretely limit its result to discrete systems.
our beloved set of basic axioms cannot exist. This pretty much kills the mathematicians "theory of everything"
I don't agree with the first part -- the axioms can "exist" (as much as axioms can) just fine. However, it does kill a theory of everything in mathematics.
it doesn't *say* you cannot know everything, but it is indeed a natural conclusion.
No, there's a difference between "It is impossible to know all true statements" and "It is possible to form statements that are neither true nor false." To take an example, I can formulate the statement, "This statement is false." Since this statement is not true, it does not violate the first definition ("possible to know all true statements").
I still have a problem with this "only" it's correct of course, but it applies exactly on logic thus on our way to solve problems thus on our ability to cover *all problems* so it is indeed an important fact.
True. But, it's a distinction that I think needs to be made -- formal logic in it's current state has really only existed for the last 400 years. It is not unreasonable that 1,000 years from now, something else entirely may have taken it's place.
You are however right in the general idea of your post that Godel definitely did not prove that was going necesarily to happen, he just proved it is a possibility.
Pretty much what I was aiming for. =)
1. Incorrect. Godel's proof applies to any system that is capable of self-reference.
No, it only applies to formal systems (which, by definition, require a small number of operations to be considered formal...) To take human knowledge as an example: If I wish to classify my knowledge as either 'true' or 'false', I will run into Godel's proof. However, if I wish to abandon a formal system and simply say that all of my knowledge is true, contradictions and usefulness be damned, Godel's proof does not apply, even though my system is self-referential.
2. Godel's proof says that either it is impossible to prove every true statement or that some statements are both true and false.
That's what I said (or meant, by "invalid statement").
3. Godel's proof works for any formal system of logic that is recursive. If we accept that math is a result of the laws of our universe, we have to accept that godel's proof is also.
That's a mighty big 'if' there: Mathematics is an abstract tool created by humans in order to understand the universe. That doesn't imply that the rules we have discovered in mathematics actually have anything at all to do with the universe...just that we have yet to discover a discrepancy. "True" and "False" are even worse, having absolutely no relationship with the universe at all.
A generation ago, you proved yourself talented by playing the guitar behind your back, or, in Hendrix's case, with your teeth.
Now, you'll have to prove yourself talented by playing your guitar in such a way as to hax0r slashdot.
There is a man called Godel who proved that so.
1) Godel's proof only works in discrete systems that support (at least) a small number of operations. It is not, despite the occasional comment to the contrary, necessarily applicable to, say, human existance.
2) Godel's proof does not say that it is impossible to know everything. It says that in these discrete systems, it is either a) impossible to make some valid statements (an incomplete system), or b) possible to make some invalid statements (an incorrect system).
3) Godel's proof only works if you are using boolean logic (and, in fact, works only because boolean logic is so bad at handling self-referential statements). This does not mean that the universe works the same way.
VNC is a good one, as mentioned, but it's not exactly an automated solution. Since these are school-provided computers, you could also have a client/service/component/whaddeva on the machine that, when prodded remotely, enumerates the running processes/windows and matches them against a list of what's being looked for (eg, email, webbrowsing, solitaire, etc.) and returns any offenders.
Of course, anything that's done this way can be gotten around with enough time and effort (a reformat is simple, but the lack of the client/service/component/whaddeva would be suspicious), but that's the risk you take when you give laptops to people who might use 'em.
Not to dispute the whole Fremen == Islam && spice == oil bit, but the whole business with Osama shows an example of how...
1) A sci-fi writer can predict events decades in the future, and weave them into their novels, or...
2) The human mind is capable of finding coincidences in the darnedest places.
Assuming that you're talking about a big company, with all the HR people I've ever talked to, a college degree was the only certification they ever looked at. The other certs might be tie-breaking material, if you've got two equally qualified candidates, but that happens so rarely that it's not IMHO worth bothering with.
With smaller companies, it depends on the person (usually singular) who screens you: either all certs and degrees will be worthless, or that's all they'll base their opinion on, depending upon who they are.
Here's an interesting idea. It seems to me that black holes would provide a near infinite source of green (haha) power. Considering the fact that their gravitational power only increases, it is obvious that they constitute a never-ending supply of kinetic power
Problem: You can't really harness potential energy (it's potential, see?) Sure, as the black hole gets bigger, you can rest well in the knowledge that, where you to plunge towards it, you'd gain a lot more kinetic energy, but until you actually start falling towards it, you're getting squat.
Oh god! I used those words. "Perpetual Machine". Surely someone is hovering over the keys about to remind me about the three laws of thermodynamics.
Yep. =)
you connect them by some sort of cable of unbelievable properties and have once end attached to a large expandable spool of cable, which happens to be attached to a generator.
...
But... we can tap the energy of the expansion of the universe by allowing the spool to feed cable (while generating electricity) as the universe expands.
If I understand what you're saying (and I might not), you run into a few problems:
* The cable would have to be infinitely long. Once we know how to make an infinite mass, infinite energy is a snap, but until then...If the cable is not infinitely long, eventually reach it's length and that's that.
* (The more serious one) Assuming Big Bang theory, yadda yadda, the reason the universe expands is because of kinetic energy -- mass moving away from the "big bang". Assuming enough kinetic energy, gravity will never catch up -- this is true. However, if you're attaching a cable to an object and you expect the object to move the cable, the cable will be taking it's energy from the object, which means eventually the object would stop moving. Unless, of course, the cable is frictionless, but given a frictionless material, you can get perpetual motion much easier.
Fifty dollars is cheaper than my Thanksgiving dinner's going to be. Wonder what the family'd say if they opened the serving tray and saw a Dreamcast?
It watches for a suspect to start a popular encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy. It then logs the passphrase used to start the program, essentially given agents access to keys needed to decrypt files.
If this is true, then it would seem all you need to do to foil this latest slightly-hare-brained-scheme would be to rename pgp to something else, such as goawayfbi.
In other news today, the FBI was arrested en masse for violating numerous newly legislated anti-terrorist laws prohibiting compromising remote computers...
Does anyone else expect that this collection will grow to include all of the orphaned packets, lost and all alone, that will appear when the server becomes slashdotted?
What is it about these replies complaining that the show won't be the same? Of course it won't be the same -- if it was the same show, what would be the point?
Then there's the people who say that the show won't be as good because it's the inherent Japanese-ness that makes it good. Could be true, could be true...but I kind of doubt it. The show won't be the same as the original -- it's obviously going to be far less somber and and dignified -- but that doesn't immediately translate into "bad". It's different. Give it a chance.
...chips work very much faster...
...Intel hade some experiments...
Unfortunately, these chips only seem to have half the spell-check and grammar-check capability.
I don't think there was a 1st person shooter with plot 'til Half-life for PCs
System Shock 1, System Shock 2, and Thief all did (SS2 may have come out around the same time as Halflife; not sure). Unreal, while I don't think it had a "plot" per se, had materials you could read, which Halflife did not, so I'd put it on the same level.
In other news, people are now selling "exercise bikes" that can be used while watching TV. Despite this ability to burn calories while watching TV, Americans still seem to be overweight. Researchers admit to being puzzled, but maintain that cycling while playing a video game is totally different in a way they can't yet explain.
And how many people remember Bungie promising over and over that Halo would not become a console game? Or, later, that it would be released for the XBox and (PC or Mac) simultaneously? Oh well. Here's to waiting for the port.
Of course. I've lost track of the numbers of times that my boss has told me to add in a screen with a progress bar that slowly fills up while accessing random bits on the hard drive, and then going straight to the pregenerated data we had sitting around.
The sad thing is that it works so well. Quite the demotivator.
Cringely tells us that the true threat is servers with mis-set clocks
No, Cringely mentions 2,000 IIS servers that are still in "infection" mode because they have misset clocks. The real "problem" is that disassembly of the worm indicates that it might have a monthly cycle, instead of being a one shot wonder; y'know, when the other x00,000 IIS servers join in again.
No, it was neither Texas nor Kansas (Kansas did do the 'evolution' thing, though).
There was, a year or so back, a hoax on the Internet about Alabama doing the same thing, but it was a hoax. The only factual evidence that anything of the sort ever happened was in Indiania, 1897, and it never even got close to passing: the Senators considered it to be a complete joke.
Of course, the PS would need electricity, whereas if you give them, say, a hand powered computer...
Sure, you say, solar electricity. But hand-cranking (discreet cough) builds character.
'Tis true...though I thought Junkbusters worked for Win32 as well.
I don't actually use Proxomitron anymore -- wrote my own proxy as a learning exercise a year or so back -- but yeah, that's an interesting point.
For Win32, all you need is regex knowledge and The Proxomitron.