However the fact that a physical system -brain- can do it proves that it can also be engineered.
You seem to have begged the question of whether or not the mind is a product of a purely physical system.
Well, I thought I was pretty explicit about it. My point was that as long as you assume mind runs on a physical hardware, details of the hardware (such as dependence on quantum processes) are irrelevant; it can be artifically engineered. If mind requires a non-physical entity (which is traditionally called "a soul") that argument does not hold.
If sentience depends on a lot of quantum computations, we will have hard time duplicating it with current technology. However the fact that a pysical system -brain- can do it proves that it can also be engineered. You need a metaphysical soul to stop computers from being able to think at (or above) human level.
Genome is the program and the data, and a combination of both, because all these three actually mean the same thing. We traditionally think of data that have a straightforward interpretation (such as a name in a database) as data, and data that has to be interpreted by complex macinery (such as being run by a cpu) as a program. But the distinction depends on the perspective, not on the innate properties of data and program. There is no program and/or data, there is only data. What makes data "a program" is a subjective evaluation of hardness of extraction of meaning from a piece of data. Therefore the article's point is trivial: we don't know much about the interpreter of "the data", therefore we cannot understand what "the program" means. We don't know what it means and we already know that we don't. The fact that we don't know much about the way the data is translated into instructions does not mean we cannot know the program is at most X bytes long. Such a statement is about the complexity of the content, not how it is interpreted.
By your definition center of the universe is you. There is a real, scientific explanation for this fact, but I'm too lazy to explain it to you. Just check out what "our universe" and "a single slice of time" means in context of relativity.
The way I'm reading GP, it is suggesting doing *more* with each clock tick. I am pretty sure that is not feasible. Internal CISC hit the wall long ago and VLIW seems to be an epic failure.
But taking this idea a step further for local power generation: Why convert to electricity in the first place? If you pump water to a higher place you might as well let the windmills pump it directly (that's why the Dutch invented them after all), you have an immediate buffer in the lake so you can never pump too hard, and the hydroelectric generators can be throttled easily. You have the benefits of a buffer and a higher efficiency, as well as a more simple design (no high-tech generators needed in every windmill). Damn great idea, if I say it myself... Must be because I'm Dutch.:-)
A pump is somewhat simpler than a generator but copper wires are much simpler than plumbing. Wires are more efficient too. Also maintaining an army of small pumps in good working order is hard to do. The sacrifices you have to make between pump longevity and efficiency are less severe when pumps are bigger and there would be fewer of them to service if they fail. Scaling down a generator to a single windmill size is relatively easy.
Try solving this, you might be enlightened: 2n numbers (not guaranteed to be distinct) are selected by an unknown procedure from 0-100000 interval. You know nothing about the selection process. Therefore you have no a priori information about expected distribution of numbers. You then put those 2n numbers in to 2 collections of n items without seeing the numbers (like "put first 3 numbers in the first collection, next 3 in the second collection etc.".) Someone picks a number m between 0 and n. Then someone else picks one of the sets (this time randomly, say by flipping a coin) and increase m of the numbers by 1, leaving m-n of them as they were. The selection process of numbers to be increased is unknown to you. He might have picked randomly, he might have carefully selected m numbers to increase to lower your chance of success or he might have just increased first m numbers - you just don't know. He then gives you two collections and asks you which one is the collection that had "some of them are increased by 1" function applied. You look for the number 100001, alas, no set has that number. Is there any way you could tell which is which? Can you quantify how sure you are about your answer without knowing m? If you want to be 95% sure of your answer, what should n and n/m be? After you analyse the distribution of numbers in both collections, can you give an upper bound of m with a specified confidence? Does any of this have anything to do with experimentally assessing efficiency of cloud seeding?
According to polls ratio of Turks who say they *are* religious is between 60-65% (a number quite close to USA and quite far from rest of the civilized world.) Not all of those are sunni muslims (almost 90% are), not all religious sunni muslims think that their religious views should be reflected in government (around 70% do), not all of those who do prefer a religious system go as far as claiming a shaira based law system is better (only around 10% do.) In consequence Turks who want to be ruled by shaira hit an all time high at around 10% in the early 90s, declined back to 5% - its historic level. The religious conservatives never took half of the votes and passed 40% mark only thrice, under somewhat exceptional circumstances.
In short, you don't know what you are talking about.
Not a big deal in the sense that there is no evil administration in Turkey cencoring google search (or facebook, where did the submitter got that?). Google does not share IP range of youtube with the search engine, google news, gmail, groups etc. Most important services are available. But it is a very big deal for Turkish citizens because all websites that use banned IPs one way or the other (most commonly thru google-analytics or google maps) also suffer. They are either inaccessible, or very slow to load. This hits bussinesses hard (our traffic last week dropped to one third before we removed google-analytics.) Also there are almost 7000 websites banned, at least 65% of them without a good reason (about %35 are supposedly banned due to child porn.) Currently vast majority of them are "banned" with removal from Turk Telekom DNSs only, but if they decide to implement IP based cencoring for others too, there will be thousands of inaccessible sites without any legal reason at all, just due to technical incompetence.
I am not sure. In fact I don't see how could any of the three things I have done are relevant. I don't think the fix is due to ATI driver because the hang happened well before X (there is a known issue about gdm failing without proper drivers, mine was not that.) I don't think ubuntu uses ATI driver to display boot splash screen:) Also recovery mode sometimes did not work even though it had nothing to do with anything graphical. Anyway, if you are somehow related to ubuntu development and need a proper bug report, I can do that./. is not the way to go.
I assume you are talking about NX bit because all others are known bugs. I am not near that computer right now, so I can't give you much detail. It is a non-overclocked Core i7 920, 6 GB ram, radeon hd 48xx (IIRC 4850) I have downloaded desktop 32bits version (don't ask) on Saturday (presumably a few days after the boot bug at release got fixed) and installed on/sda5 (sda1 is a non-boot NTFS partition, there are no other partitions on disk.) The install went without a glitch. At first reboot it boots into windows because grub is on wrong partition. I change boot order, and can see grub screen. However the computer locks after grub when normal boot is selected. Booting windows always works fine, while rescue mode sometimes works, sometimes locks up at different points in boot (always before during kernel phase.) If rescue mode works, there are no further problems (including X.) During one lucky boot I did three things:
1) I installed closed source ati driver
2) I deleted quiet option from grub menu to be able to see kernel messages without rescue mode
3) I saw a warning about NX bit being disabled in the BIOS and entered BIOS during next boot, enabled NX bit, continued booting.
You would do well to forget about the system because it will drive you nuts if you don't. I installed 10.04 the other day and had a few nagging problems, like being unable to boot (due to grub being on wrong partition), random hang ups on boot (enabling NX bit fixed it, go figure!), being unable to update mysql (it hangs while configuring mysql, and if you kill the process, you are left with broken dependencies which synaptic cannot fix.) I gave up on 10.04 at this point, because I was only installing it to use lazarus and mysql. You see, three tasks out of four failed: install (went wrong), boot (went wrong), install lazaurs (suprisingly, worked), install mysql (went wrong again.) I am not a long term ubuntu user but I have used all versions from 8.04 to 10.04 and every new version is worse than the older one. Server versions are fine but the desktop and notebook versions are going backwards.
Linux Mint works much better for "install and forget" kind of use.
The most comforting fact is that many muslims (at least in Turkey) chose the way of aphaty. Except for their core beliefs, they actively refuse to know more about their religion. Many would use the above mentioned difficulties in interpreting Koran as an excuse for not reading it at all.
BTW, there is also an oral tradition of memorizing and reciting Koran in its entirety that makes reading text easier.
I love guys like you. You say it like what it is, without trying to fool unbelievers to underestimate your potential for ruining their way of life.
Islam is the final classical religion today. All others have subsumed into mish-mash of fairy tales, practical ethics and bad existential philosophy. Islam still aspires to rule each and every aspect of human life, as all religions had tried and failed to do. Others have failed more gracefully as they had many different viewpoints right in the holy text from the beginning. When scientific knowledge, newer technologies or novel social realities made some kind of scripture impertinent, it was easier to let go of some part and keep adhering to rest.
Islam resisted because it has a much more unified worldview, thanks to being compiled from older mythology by a single man and records of original compilation (or something very close to it) still surviving. That doesn't make it more right. In fact it makes it easier to show there are plenty of bullshit in Koran, without any easy way of explaining away its inaccuracy. I guess when it is time, Islam will go down very hard. Such hard that what remains as Islam won't be recognizable to us as Islam at all.
(By the way, ex-Muslims with any knowledge call it the "Quran" or "Qur'an", because they generally know a bit of Arabic and can differentiate between Qaf/Kaaf and sometimes make a distinction around the Hamza. Just FYI, the next time you want to pretend being an ex-Moslum.)
I am on the same boat as united and personally use the spelling current company uses. I can't be bothered by providing most close transliteration to make muslims happy at the expense of getting my message across.
It is somewhat similar. For starters Koran does not have a united voice, just like the bible. It says something (fight unbeleivers and kill them during holy months) in a chapter and says completely opposite in the next (the poeople of the book can peacefully coexist with muslims and they should be respected.) The traditional explanation for this is although Koran is the unchanging word of God (therefore timeless) the founding of religion Islam do have a history. The chapters have been revealed to Mohammad in a known order (which is not the "print order" btw.) If two parts of Koran are not compatible, a muslim is supposed to adhere to latest rule and see the previous rule as an intermediate in the process of letting people know of God's will. The previous passage is not wrong, it is still the word of God. However the intent of God had been made clearer later, so previous rule is no longer applicable. This works well enough for some conflicts, such as drinking in moderation and not drinking at all. There is a clear progression in this case, where the actual rule is not drink at all, but that had to be sugar coated for people of Mohammad's time before coming in to full effect. However for stuff like fighting non muslims, there are sevelar conflicting passages without a clear progression to a simple rule. Historical context does not give enough clues to which part is still the rule. This is one source of different interpretations.
The other major source of difference of interpretations are the language and the script. The Arabic of Koran's time is not a current language. There are several passages a native Arabic speaker of today would not understand at all. The problem is compounded because of lack of wovels and punctuation in the Arabic script originally used to record Koran. This tasks the reader of Koran to dechipher heterophonic homographs, deduce which word is actually meant. There is also another problem, due to literary properties of Koran. It is meant to be poetic, with all the literary devices, concealed meanings and so on. Therefore it is imperative to study lingusitic context (not just the ortography or semantics, but also the historic Arabic literature etc) of Koran to understand it properly. Of course there are different schools which attribute different words to passages, different meanings to the same word and different interpretations of to same sentence.
That said, I cannot see how the Koran can be interpreted in a way compatible with the norms of a modern society. You can argue with any specific interpretation of the text with a Muslim, but when all is said and done, your argument still has to fit with Koran, however you interpret it. And there are just too many unambigious passages in Koran that makes a modern society incompatible with Islam.
Although information about production processes are important for good design, there is an even more important case for having production: customers. To have a good design you have to know about your users' needs, preferences, complaints etc. and that is impossible to know without having any products. IP cannot be generated out of academic information. In fact the raw material for industrial IP is feedback from production and customers, what education provides is just means to convert that raw material into products.
What is inevitable, is that people will force change in the modern democracies and establish a basis of fair trade to ensure products are manufactured upon a fair and reasonable basis, taking into account humane conditions and environmental practices, labour with a future, rather than being worked to death.
Why do you say that is inevitable? The western powers had maintained their high standarts of living and afforded luxuries like environmental safety, work safety, welfare nets, public healthcare system etc. mostly due to being able to dominate worlds economic output. Now that China is becoming the major producer of goods, the western economic domination is in serious danger. The fact that we are talking about miserable state of laborers in communist China, not capitalist Britain of Das Capital, is proof enough that political revolution is ineffective in the long term. So how come you are so sure that people in modern democracies (which may have neither the money nor the power in the future) may impose a policy on China and other emergent nations, instead of devolving their own laborers' state?
Inline 8 instead of V8 does not make sense. Both are unbalanced and V8 is much easier to pack. However both straight and flat 6 has perfect balance, unlike V6. I couldn't find a single sexy, current car with a straight 6 on wikipedia, so perhaps you are right.
Although I'm pretty sure everybody would be using turbo V8s instead of turbo flat 6s if "up to 8 cylinders at any configuration with or without F.I." were permitted in F1 but that is not the case. Atmospheric V8 with up to 2.4l displacement is mandatory. Turbo inline 4 cylinders of 1 litres used to kick asses of 3 liter atmospheric V12's in the eighties, so there would be no contest between a similar sized turbo flat 6 and atmospheric V8.
Its your business and your customers. If you are sure backing up your customers' drive is not an option then don't, you don't have to convince us. If you asking for our opinion, you sure don't sound like doing that.
No, because the universe is so fucking huge that the probability of aliens visiting Earth or humans visiting Rsdflkjasd is zero. There is extraterrestrial life - it's just that nobody will ever get to confirm it.
I see, thanks for the detailed explanation, I hadn't thought of those. I like the first example, and the fact that the compiler can recognize your code and make that replacement confidently. Thats just cool.
Any compiler from the late 80ties will do that, but that is not really a safe optimization. If your optimization is safe, optimized and unoptimized versions should produce the same output, even if they calculate it in different ways. However in the given example there is no guarantee when (non-optimized) y=x+2 is executed, x will still be 3 (and y will still be assigned 5.) Optimized version always assigns 5. So the optimized and unoptimized versions might do different things. Even if two assignments follow each other (so there is no way the immediate context of the code change x) x may be changed in another thread, or it may be memory mapped to an IO address. In case of x=3; foo(); y=x+2; there is an additional issue of foo's side effects. Purely functional languages solve a major component of these problems by elimination of destructive updates (so that x can *never* change.) This allows a huge variety of optimizations, including, not executing anything at all unless and until necessary. Still, only Concurrent Clean is as quick as C.
I love the book, but neither film worked for me. I couldn't even stand to watch to the end. Lem didn't like them either, so that is good enough for me.
You are wrong. Please go read those laws to see why: http://www.edebiyatdefteri.com/index.asp?istek=tum_yazilar&k=detay&yazi_id=9886 I'm not defending their existence in any way; they are meant to violate a basic human right (freedom of expression) and are completely unenforceable in practice. But enforced or unenforced, right or wrong, they do not ban any kind of dress for women. None at all.
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However the fact that a physical system -brain- can do it proves that it can also be engineered.
You seem to have begged the question of whether or not the mind is a product of a purely physical system.
Well, I thought I was pretty explicit about it. My point was that as long as you assume mind runs on a physical hardware, details of the hardware (such as dependence on quantum processes) are irrelevant; it can be artifically engineered. If mind requires a non-physical entity (which is traditionally called "a soul") that argument does not hold.
If sentience depends on a lot of quantum computations, we will have hard time duplicating it with current technology. However the fact that a pysical system -brain- can do it proves that it can also be engineered. You need a metaphysical soul to stop computers from being able to think at (or above) human level.
Genome is the program and the data, and a combination of both, because all these three actually mean the same thing. We traditionally think of data that have a straightforward interpretation (such as a name in a database) as data, and data that has to be interpreted by complex macinery (such as being run by a cpu) as a program. But the distinction depends on the perspective, not on the innate properties of data and program. There is no program and/or data, there is only data. What makes data "a program" is a subjective evaluation of hardness of extraction of meaning from a piece of data. Therefore the article's point is trivial: we don't know much about the interpreter of "the data", therefore we cannot understand what "the program" means. We don't know what it means and we already know that we don't. The fact that we don't know much about the way the data is translated into instructions does not mean we cannot know the program is at most X bytes long. Such a statement is about the complexity of the content, not how it is interpreted.
By your definition center of the universe is you. There is a real, scientific explanation for this fact, but I'm too lazy to explain it to you. Just check out what "our universe" and "a single slice of time" means in context of relativity.
The way I'm reading GP, it is suggesting doing *more* with each clock tick. I am pretty sure that is not feasible. Internal CISC hit the wall long ago and VLIW seems to be an epic failure.
But taking this idea a step further for local power generation: Why convert to electricity in the first place? If you pump water to a higher place you might as well let the windmills pump it directly (that's why the Dutch invented them after all), you have an immediate buffer in the lake so you can never pump too hard, and the hydroelectric generators can be throttled easily. You have the benefits of a buffer and a higher efficiency, as well as a more simple design (no high-tech generators needed in every windmill). Damn great idea, if I say it myself... Must be because I'm Dutch. :-)
A pump is somewhat simpler than a generator but copper wires are much simpler than plumbing. Wires are more efficient too. Also maintaining an army of small pumps in good working order is hard to do. The sacrifices you have to make between pump longevity and efficiency are less severe when pumps are bigger and there would be fewer of them to service if they fail. Scaling down a generator to a single windmill size is relatively easy.
Try solving this, you might be enlightened: 2n numbers (not guaranteed to be distinct) are selected by an unknown procedure from 0-100000 interval. You know nothing about the selection process. Therefore you have no a priori information about expected distribution of numbers. You then put those 2n numbers in to 2 collections of n items without seeing the numbers (like "put first 3 numbers in the first collection, next 3 in the second collection etc.".) Someone picks a number m between 0 and n. Then someone else picks one of the sets (this time randomly, say by flipping a coin) and increase m of the numbers by 1, leaving m-n of them as they were. The selection process of numbers to be increased is unknown to you. He might have picked randomly, he might have carefully selected m numbers to increase to lower your chance of success or he might have just increased first m numbers - you just don't know. He then gives you two collections and asks you which one is the collection that had "some of them are increased by 1" function applied. You look for the number 100001, alas, no set has that number. Is there any way you could tell which is which? Can you quantify how sure you are about your answer without knowing m? If you want to be 95% sure of your answer, what should n and n/m be? After you analyse the distribution of numbers in both collections, can you give an upper bound of m with a specified confidence? Does any of this have anything to do with experimentally assessing efficiency of cloud seeding?
In short, you don't know what you are talking about.
Not a big deal in the sense that there is no evil administration in Turkey cencoring google search (or facebook, where did the submitter got that?). Google does not share IP range of youtube with the search engine, google news, gmail, groups etc. Most important services are available. But it is a very big deal for Turkish citizens because all websites that use banned IPs one way or the other (most commonly thru google-analytics or google maps) also suffer. They are either inaccessible, or very slow to load. This hits bussinesses hard (our traffic last week dropped to one third before we removed google-analytics.) Also there are almost 7000 websites banned, at least 65% of them without a good reason (about %35 are supposedly banned due to child porn.) Currently vast majority of them are "banned" with removal from Turk Telekom DNSs only, but if they decide to implement IP based cencoring for others too, there will be thousands of inaccessible sites without any legal reason at all, just due to technical incompetence.
I am not sure. In fact I don't see how could any of the three things I have done are relevant. I don't think the fix is due to ATI driver because the hang happened well before X (there is a known issue about gdm failing without proper drivers, mine was not that.) I don't think ubuntu uses ATI driver to display boot splash screen :) Also recovery mode sometimes did not work even though it had nothing to do with anything graphical. Anyway, if you are somehow related to ubuntu development and need a proper bug report, I can do that. /. is not the way to go.
1) I installed closed source ati driver
2) I deleted quiet option from grub menu to be able to see kernel messages without rescue mode
3) I saw a warning about NX bit being disabled in the BIOS and entered BIOS during next boot, enabled NX bit, continued booting.
There were no further boot problems.
Linux Mint works much better for "install and forget" kind of use.
BTW, there is also an oral tradition of memorizing and reciting Koran in its entirety that makes reading text easier.
Islam resisted because it has a much more unified worldview, thanks to being compiled from older mythology by a single man and records of original compilation (or something very close to it) still surviving. That doesn't make it more right. In fact it makes it easier to show there are plenty of bullshit in Koran, without any easy way of explaining away its inaccuracy. I guess when it is time, Islam will go down very hard. Such hard that what remains as Islam won't be recognizable to us as Islam at all.
(By the way, ex-Muslims with any knowledge call it the "Quran" or "Qur'an", because they generally know a bit of Arabic and can differentiate between Qaf/Kaaf and sometimes make a distinction around the Hamza. Just FYI, the next time you want to pretend being an ex-Moslum.)
I am on the same boat as united and personally use the spelling current company uses. I can't be bothered by providing most close transliteration to make muslims happy at the expense of getting my message across.
The other major source of difference of interpretations are the language and the script. The Arabic of Koran's time is not a current language. There are several passages a native Arabic speaker of today would not understand at all. The problem is compounded because of lack of wovels and punctuation in the Arabic script originally used to record Koran. This tasks the reader of Koran to dechipher heterophonic homographs, deduce which word is actually meant. There is also another problem, due to literary properties of Koran. It is meant to be poetic, with all the literary devices, concealed meanings and so on. Therefore it is imperative to study lingusitic context (not just the ortography or semantics, but also the historic Arabic literature etc) of Koran to understand it properly. Of course there are different schools which attribute different words to passages, different meanings to the same word and different interpretations of to same sentence.
That said, I cannot see how the Koran can be interpreted in a way compatible with the norms of a modern society. You can argue with any specific interpretation of the text with a Muslim, but when all is said and done, your argument still has to fit with Koran, however you interpret it. And there are just too many unambigious passages in Koran that makes a modern society incompatible with Islam.
You are so right. A nuclear detonation now will bring doom unlike the previously detonated (over 2000) nuclear devices.
Although information about production processes are important for good design, there is an even more important case for having production: customers. To have a good design you have to know about your users' needs, preferences, complaints etc. and that is impossible to know without having any products. IP cannot be generated out of academic information. In fact the raw material for industrial IP is feedback from production and customers, what education provides is just means to convert that raw material into products.
Why do you say that is inevitable? The western powers had maintained their high standarts of living and afforded luxuries like environmental safety, work safety, welfare nets, public healthcare system etc. mostly due to being able to dominate worlds economic output. Now that China is becoming the major producer of goods, the western economic domination is in serious danger. The fact that we are talking about miserable state of laborers in communist China, not capitalist Britain of Das Capital, is proof enough that political revolution is ineffective in the long term. So how come you are so sure that people in modern democracies (which may have neither the money nor the power in the future) may impose a policy on China and other emergent nations, instead of devolving their own laborers' state?
Inline 8 instead of V8 does not make sense. Both are unbalanced and V8 is much easier to pack. However both straight and flat 6 has perfect balance, unlike V6. I couldn't find a single sexy, current car with a straight 6 on wikipedia, so perhaps you are right.
Although I'm pretty sure everybody would be using turbo V8s instead of turbo flat 6s if "up to 8 cylinders at any configuration with or without F.I." were permitted in F1 but that is not the case. Atmospheric V8 with up to 2.4l displacement is mandatory. Turbo inline 4 cylinders of 1 litres used to kick asses of 3 liter atmospheric V12's in the eighties, so there would be no contest between a similar sized turbo flat 6 and atmospheric V8.
Its your business and your customers. If you are sure backing up your customers' drive is not an option then don't, you don't have to convince us. If you asking for our opinion, you sure don't sound like doing that.
Are you familiar with the Fermi paradox?
I see, thanks for the detailed explanation, I hadn't thought of those. I like the first example, and the fact that the compiler can recognize your code and make that replacement confidently. Thats just cool.
Any compiler from the late 80ties will do that, but that is not really a safe optimization. If your optimization is safe, optimized and unoptimized versions should produce the same output, even if they calculate it in different ways. However in the given example there is no guarantee when (non-optimized) y=x+2 is executed, x will still be 3 (and y will still be assigned 5.) Optimized version always assigns 5. So the optimized and unoptimized versions might do different things. Even if two assignments follow each other (so there is no way the immediate context of the code change x) x may be changed in another thread, or it may be memory mapped to an IO address. In case of x=3; foo(); y=x+2; there is an additional issue of foo's side effects. Purely functional languages solve a major component of these problems by elimination of destructive updates (so that x can *never* change.) This allows a huge variety of optimizations, including, not executing anything at all unless and until necessary. Still, only Concurrent Clean is as quick as C.
I love the book, but neither film worked for me. I couldn't even stand to watch to the end. Lem didn't like them either, so that is good enough for me.
You are wrong. Please go read those laws to see why: http://www.edebiyatdefteri.com/index.asp?istek=tum_yazilar&k=detay&yazi_id=9886 I'm not defending their existence in any way; they are meant to violate a basic human right (freedom of expression) and are completely unenforceable in practice. But enforced or unenforced, right or wrong, they do not ban any kind of dress for women. None at all.