According to a Swedish former minister, the head of the American Homeland Security admitted the identity checks on international flights were pointless, since a terrorist could just travel via Canada instead.
I've never heard of an actual case where someone tried to bring explosive liquids on board a plane, either. The searches seem to be based entirely on hypothetical scenarios.
Please take this as advice for the future: your videos do not, under ANY circumstances, require background music. What you think is uplifting and inspirational is, to the viewer, annoying and distracting. They close the tab and move on.
Well, it depends on how you define "background" music, but I see a lot of videos on YouTube where people remix footage from TV or a computer game with music, and the result is very good.
I've also seen videos where people just put an annoying tune, unedited, on top of their unedited footage, and it's as bad as you describe.
Precisely. That's what everybody else has to do to secure their retirement.
Btw, I write a lot in my spare time, but I don't expect to automatically get paid, not even if a lot of people read it. It's up to me to find a way to turn readers into profit.
"Sentience" is one of those words everybody seems to be using different definitions for. You're defining it as "self-awareness"; the GP seems to be defining it as "the capacity to experience" (which is probably closer to the original meaning).
There are no laws at all except those made by humans (there are no known higher lifeforms than humans); and there are no rights whatsoever other than those that have the power of some human or humans willing to put force behind the idea of said rights. Without that force, all you have is wishful thinking. What you are saying here is incoherent, invalid philosophical rambling with absolutely no relationship to reality.
I bet you're one of those people who believes Elvis is dead too.
Ustream may have the right to cut their service at any time, but it's wrong to say they don't have a business relationship with their users. If there was no business relationship, there'd be no need for a service agreement, which almost every free service has, from Facebook to Google+.
With free (as in beer) services, the end-user *does* offer the service company something in return. In legal terms, they agree to be bound by the service agreement in exchange for access to the service. In practical terms, the user sacrifices, for example, their privacy so the service company can gain ad revenue. There may be no exchange of money between the end-user and the service company, but the end-user provides a service to the company as much as the company provides a service to them.
This is an important distinction, because it *is* possible, under the current legal system, to sue someone for failing to provide a "free" service (if the service company hasn't successfully disowned all responsibility in the service agreement).
I doubt this was a technical error; rather, it's a design error, caused by the current legal system. Service providers design their take-down bots to take down everything that looks like copyright infringement to be on the safe side and avoid being sued. Respecting the end user's fair use rights barely registers, because they are unlikely to sue, can't claim much damages, and the service provider can disown their responsibility against the end-user in the service agreement.
You really have no problems with the Gnome desktop at all? In Ubuntu 11.10, the system menu applet (top right) used to disappear regularly for me, and be replaced with a duplicate switch user applet. In the Gnome version of Ubuntu 12.04, the sound applet disappears instead. If I switch to Unity, the desktop freezes with alarming regularity. Or sometimes, all program windows freeze, while the Unity menus are still active.
I'd still rather use Linux than the backdoor-infested parasite that is Windows, but it could be a lot better.
One way to model such randomness is that the random events are a function of the time at which a computation begins. It's commonly approximated by including a measurement of this time as part of the input and using that to seed a pseudorandom number generator.
That means we've introduced an external source of randomness, since the time at which the computation begins is dependent on external physical processes. This means the model is not computable in the Turing sense.
Any process that can be described by computations is incapable of performing anything more powerful than computation. Therefore, if the human mind can be described by computations, creativity is no more powerful than computation.
Not more computationally powerful, no. But it's still more powerful at solving mathematical problems. To compute a solution to a mathematical problem, an algorithm is needed, but the creative mind can solve them without algorithms. Which is what happens every time someone solves a mathematical problem for the first time.
In fact, ALL problem-solving using computation is dependent on a creative mind to first devise an algorithm for the solution.
Simulating a human mind using computations doesn't help us either, because then we get the same risk for errors as with a real human, while taking much, much longer.
Here's where I'm confused: Are you claiming or not claiming that the brain is capable of doing things that a computer cannot, that a computer inherently cannot simulate a brain? If so, on what basis do you make this claim?
I'm not claiming that, since I have no idea if the brain is capable of doing things that computers can't.
But both electronic computers and human brains can do things which aren't computable, such as generate output with an element of randomness. Lots of electronic computers have physical sources of randomness built-in, such as temperature and sound sensors.
Now, you could argue that even apparently random physical phenomena are fundamentally computable, but this has little practical importance, since you'd need to simulate a large portion of the universe down to subatomic scales to include these phenomena. (It also implies non-locality in physics, per Bell's theorem).
No, a mathematician's creativity is not a computation (in the mathematical sense) at all, since it may give incorrect answers
All that means is the algorithm is flawed, not that it isn't computation.
But then you're talking about the (hypothetical) algorithm which describes how a mind functions, right?
I wasn't addressing the question of whether the human mind can be *described* by computations, only whether it *performs* computations. And it seems clear to me that it doesn't. A device needs to live up to some minimum requirements to be able to perform computations in the mathematical sense, such as unlimited storage, unlimited running time, and being able to perform a few basic operations flawlessly, such as choices and skips. Humans fail to meet these requirements, since their life span is limited, they make mistakes, and could even have limited memory capacity.
If we allow some computations to yield errors, than arguments such as Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting argument aren't applicable, and even ordinary mathematical algorithms can compute what's normally incomputable. But that's normally not allowed, since a device which computes X with errors, strictly speaking doesn't compute X at all.
My opinion is that the rape allegations are used as an excuse to cause trouble for Assange. Not even in Sweden has a man been charged with rape because he had sex with a woman without a condom when she only agreed to have sex with one -- much less internationally wanted for it.
The women themselves weren't sure they had been raped and molested -- they only decided to go to the police after they met and talked, and then they only went there for advice, not to file charges.
And if you want to talk about "covering up", read the criticism of the editorializing that Assange did on his "Collateral Murder" presentation, regarding edits made to the video and missing context.
And yet, Wikileaks also released an unedited version without editorial, so you could compare them and decide for yourself. That's better than you get from an ordinary news outlet.
To date, and by recent google searches, I have been unable to figure out what crimes / abuses are being referred to, unless they are the "collateral murder" video-- which on actually watching the thing is pretty underwhelming except as a record of a friendly fire incident. So if there is more of substance, please do enlighten me.
The leak also revealed that hundreds of civilians were being killed in drone strikes against villages (while the US military, as usual, claimed that their strikes were very precise and the "collateral damage" was much lower).
No matter what country the first and last part of that sentence is still treason. If he had found something that was wrong, there are appropriate channels to funnel information to the proper people to handle it, within your own country. Instead of broadcasting it out to every foreign nation in the world wouldn't you agree?
Do you also believe that if you report a policeman's inappropriate behaviour to the police, the problem will be dealt with in a swift and fair manner?
You sign away your rights and freedoms when you join the military. You, as a grunt, such as Manning, have signed their lives away willingly to do what the Army asks them to do. And to follow orders./quote
There are also national laws which trump military orders. If your officer asks you to send a rocket into a nearby residential area during training, it's hardly a war crime, but I doubt you'd be court-martialed for refusing that order.
Legally, it is. But if those documents were classified to hide how badly the war was going, it may be morally right to break the law.
The war is paid for by the public, and the public can only make an informed decision on whether to support the war if they have access to relevant information. If the government is hiding information just to avoid embarrassing themselves, it's a betrayal against the public.
Most of the stuff Manning revealed didn't provide any evidence of wrongdoing, so he's not protected as a whistleblower. The "collateral murder" video, for instance.
That's just your opinion. The US government apparently disagreed, since they were embarrassed enough about the video to deny its existence when the event was formally investigated.
Regardless of whether the video actually shows any wrongdoing, leaking the video proves that the US government lied. In that situation, I think it's appropriate to leak the video so people can decide for themselves.
Releasing the cables may also have been life insurance for Manning, since it ensured he had the world's attention and the US government couldn't just let him slip between their hands.
No, a mathematician's creativity is not a computation (in the mathematical sense) at all, since it may give incorrect answers, and yield different outputs when presented with the same input on different occasions.
Slashdot Mirror
According to a Swedish former minister, the head of the American Homeland Security admitted the identity checks on international flights were pointless, since a terrorist could just travel via Canada instead.
I've never heard of an actual case where someone tried to bring explosive liquids on board a plane, either. The searches seem to be based entirely on hypothetical scenarios.
Doesn't that, in practice, give them the right to ask for anyone's papers, since anyone can be a non-citizen until they've checked?
Please take this as advice for the future: your videos do not, under ANY circumstances, require background music. What you think is uplifting and inspirational is, to the viewer, annoying and distracting. They close the tab and move on.
Well, it depends on how you define "background" music, but I see a lot of videos on YouTube where people remix footage from TV or a computer game with music, and the result is very good.
I've also seen videos where people just put an annoying tune, unedited, on top of their unedited footage, and it's as bad as you describe.
Precisely. That's what everybody else has to do to secure their retirement.
Btw, I write a lot in my spare time, but I don't expect to automatically get paid, not even if a lot of people read it. It's up to me to find a way to turn readers into profit.
"Sentience" is one of those words everybody seems to be using different definitions for. You're defining it as "self-awareness"; the GP seems to be defining it as "the capacity to experience" (which is probably closer to the original meaning).
There are no laws at all except those made by humans (there are no known higher lifeforms than humans); and there are no rights whatsoever other than those that have the power of some human or humans willing to put force behind the idea of said rights. Without that force, all you have is wishful thinking. What you are saying here is incoherent, invalid philosophical rambling with absolutely no relationship to reality.
I bet you're one of those people who believes Elvis is dead too.
Ustream may have the right to cut their service at any time, but it's wrong to say they don't have a business relationship with their users. If there was no business relationship, there'd be no need for a service agreement, which almost every free service has, from Facebook to Google+.
With free (as in beer) services, the end-user *does* offer the service company something in return. In legal terms, they agree to be bound by the service agreement in exchange for access to the service. In practical terms, the user sacrifices, for example, their privacy so the service company can gain ad revenue. There may be no exchange of money between the end-user and the service company, but the end-user provides a service to the company as much as the company provides a service to them.
This is an important distinction, because it *is* possible, under the current legal system, to sue someone for failing to provide a "free" service (if the service company hasn't successfully disowned all responsibility in the service agreement).
Then why do we need copyright to stimulate the production of literary and artistic works?
I doubt this was a technical error; rather, it's a design error, caused by the current legal system. Service providers design their take-down bots to take down everything that looks like copyright infringement to be on the safe side and avoid being sued. Respecting the end user's fair use rights barely registers, because they are unlikely to sue, can't claim much damages, and the service provider can disown their responsibility against the end-user in the service agreement.
Ah... but what if they anticipated that argument?
You really have no problems with the Gnome desktop at all? In Ubuntu 11.10, the system menu applet (top right) used to disappear regularly for me, and be replaced with a duplicate switch user applet. In the Gnome version of Ubuntu 12.04, the sound applet disappears instead. If I switch to Unity, the desktop freezes with alarming regularity. Or sometimes, all program windows freeze, while the Unity menus are still active.
I'd still rather use Linux than the backdoor-infested parasite that is Windows, but it could be a lot better.
One way to model such randomness is that the random events are a function of the time at which a computation begins. It's commonly approximated by including a measurement of this time as part of the input and using that to seed a pseudorandom number generator.
That means we've introduced an external source of randomness, since the time at which the computation begins is dependent on external physical processes. This means the model is not computable in the Turing sense.
Any process that can be described by computations is incapable of performing anything more powerful than computation. Therefore, if the human mind can be described by computations, creativity is no more powerful than computation.
Not more computationally powerful, no. But it's still more powerful at solving mathematical problems. To compute a solution to a mathematical problem, an algorithm is needed, but the creative mind can solve them without algorithms. Which is what happens every time someone solves a mathematical problem for the first time.
In fact, ALL problem-solving using computation is dependent on a creative mind to first devise an algorithm for the solution.
Simulating a human mind using computations doesn't help us either, because then we get the same risk for errors as with a real human, while taking much, much longer.
Here's where I'm confused: Are you claiming or not claiming that the brain is capable of doing things that a computer cannot, that a computer inherently cannot simulate a brain? If so, on what basis do you make this claim?
I'm not claiming that, since I have no idea if the brain is capable of doing things that computers can't.
But both electronic computers and human brains can do things which aren't computable, such as generate output with an element of randomness. Lots of electronic computers have physical sources of randomness built-in, such as temperature and sound sensors.
Now, you could argue that even apparently random physical phenomena are fundamentally computable, but this has little practical importance, since you'd need to simulate a large portion of the universe down to subatomic scales to include these phenomena. (It also implies non-locality in physics, per Bell's theorem).
No, a mathematician's creativity is not a computation (in the mathematical sense) at all, since it may give incorrect answers
All that means is the algorithm is flawed, not that it isn't computation.
But then you're talking about the (hypothetical) algorithm which describes how a mind functions, right?
I wasn't addressing the question of whether the human mind can be *described* by computations, only whether it *performs* computations. And it seems clear to me that it doesn't. A device needs to live up to some minimum requirements to be able to perform computations in the mathematical sense, such as unlimited storage, unlimited running time, and being able to perform a few basic operations flawlessly, such as choices and skips. Humans fail to meet these requirements, since their life span is limited, they make mistakes, and could even have limited memory capacity.
If we allow some computations to yield errors, than arguments such as Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting argument aren't applicable, and even ordinary mathematical algorithms can compute what's normally incomputable. But that's normally not allowed, since a device which computes X with errors, strictly speaking doesn't compute X at all.
My opinion is that the rape allegations are used as an excuse to cause trouble for Assange. Not even in Sweden has a man been charged with rape because he had sex with a woman without a condom when she only agreed to have sex with one -- much less internationally wanted for it.
The women themselves weren't sure they had been raped and molested -- they only decided to go to the police after they met and talked, and then they only went there for advice, not to file charges.
A real spy would try to hide the fact that he had obtained the information, to prevent the enemy from changing their codes and procedures.
If you back up to the GGP, you'll see it's about Bradley Manning, not Assange...
And if you want to talk about "covering up", read the criticism of the editorializing that Assange did on his "Collateral Murder" presentation, regarding edits made to the video and missing context.
And yet, Wikileaks also released an unedited version without editorial, so you could compare them and decide for yourself. That's better than you get from an ordinary news outlet.
To date, and by recent google searches, I have been unable to figure out what crimes / abuses are being referred to, unless they are the "collateral murder" video-- which on actually watching the thing is pretty underwhelming except as a record of a friendly fire incident. So if there is more of substance, please do enlighten me.
The leak also revealed that hundreds of civilians were being killed in drone strikes against villages (while the US military, as usual, claimed that their strikes were very precise and the "collateral damage" was much lower).
No matter what country the first and last part of that sentence is still treason. If he had found something that was wrong, there are appropriate channels to funnel information to the proper people to handle it, within your own country. Instead of broadcasting it out to every foreign nation in the world wouldn't you agree?
Do you also believe that if you report a policeman's inappropriate behaviour to the police, the problem will be dealt with in a swift and fair manner?
You sign away your rights and freedoms when you join the military. You, as a grunt, such as Manning, have signed their lives away willingly to do what the Army asks them to do. And to follow orders./quote
There are also national laws which trump military orders. If your officer asks you to send a rocket into a nearby residential area during training, it's hardly a war crime, but I doubt you'd be court-martialed for refusing that order.
Legally, it is. But if those documents were classified to hide how badly the war was going, it may be morally right to break the law.
The war is paid for by the public, and the public can only make an informed decision on whether to support the war if they have access to relevant information. If the government is hiding information just to avoid embarrassing themselves, it's a betrayal against the public.
Most of the stuff Manning revealed didn't provide any evidence of wrongdoing, so he's not protected as a whistleblower. The "collateral murder" video, for instance.
That's just your opinion. The US government apparently disagreed, since they were embarrassed enough about the video to deny its existence when the event was formally investigated.
Regardless of whether the video actually shows any wrongdoing, leaking the video proves that the US government lied. In that situation, I think it's appropriate to leak the video so people can decide for themselves.
Releasing the cables may also have been life insurance for Manning, since it ensured he had the world's attention and the US government couldn't just let him slip between their hands.
No, a mathematician's creativity is not a computation (in the mathematical sense) at all, since it may give incorrect answers, and yield different outputs when presented with the same input on different occasions.