Size is relative. A well-organized, commented, documented, 200k-300k program is by no means large. Even for a single newstart developer. But 10k-20k of, say, badly written Perl might require a few sessions of therapy afterwards.
I think that if more people wrote code (or, for that matter, books) like George Orwell wrote his books, code (and books) would be generally more readable: shorter sentences (lines of code) which convey a single meaning (function), strung together into short paragraphs (code blocks), chained together into a larger cohesive whole.
Complexity of that last sentence:
* 52 words,
* 17 punctuation characters,
* 5 parentheses blocks,
* at least half a dozen ideas.
This is something that I've always found hard to understand with the argument for evolution. Surely the natural selection process would strongly bias against any traits that result in the animal being killed off in the first few minutes. (And likewise a strong bias towards traits that improve birth mortality rates). Yet we see so many instances of "poor design" in the birth process. Four in this article alone.
If natural selection does such a "poor" job of refining the birthing mechanism when there is a clear correlation between some new (good or bad) trait and the likelihood of that trait being propagated to future generations, then how can we reasonably expect that it is also responsible for highly refined systems where there is a much lower correlation between the new trait and the likelihood of producing offspring. (For example, in esoteric features of the imune system, or the brain - the new trait may only even come into play in certain situations during the animals life, and therefore only has any selective power in the specific animals for which it occurs... unlike traits relating to birth which are immediately tested for all creatures)
If evolution is about compromise, then the most obvious compromises would favour succesful birth. If birth is unsuccesful than other traits don't even get a chance to be tested.
As has already been posted, the soul is already defined: "Immortal spiritual being".
So it's quite simple. If there really are supernatural spiritual being, then they're beyond the physical world and there is no reason to suppose that they can be simulated. If there are no supernatural spirital beings, then there is absolutely no way that machines can be spiritual beings. So it doesn't really matter which side of the fence you sit on, either way machines aren't getting souls.
The problems only start to arise when people decide that they want to start redefining already existing words to suit their own needs. (Perhaps for no purpose grander than to add a bit of spice to his article). The word 'soul' has been around a long time. Perhaps the author wants to say he has a soul, but wants to believe all he has is a bunch of neurons.
And I don't think that anyone is saying that plate tectonics didn't play a role. To acknowledge that the tops of multiple mountain ranges carry evidence of being under water is to suggest that water has managed to cover even the most difficult places (albeit while they were lower).
Really the only thing left to dispute is whether or not all of these places were covered with water at the same time, not whether or not they were all covered.
The problem with multiverses is that they try to explain how finely tuned the universe in terms of something that we can't observe/test... pretty much the same objections that are often raised against an Intelligent Creator.
For the slightly more mundane task of just backing up from one PC to another, I've started using Microsoft's free SyncToy tool on family and friend's networks.
It will actually come as no surprise to bible readers that the additional details of the resurection are not found in the book of Mark in this version. Many modern and popular translations (NIV, ESV, NASB) note in the footnotes or the text itself that "Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include [Mark] 16:9-20"
However Mark 16:6, which is included, still declares the resurection:
"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him."
Additionally, the article only refers to the book of Mark as making no reference to the resurection. No mention is made of the other three gospels.
(If it were technically possible,) how would you react to a website where anyone (including potential employers) could search for you and see what your average bug count per 100 lines of code was?
BlueJ is actually based on Blue, which in turn is based on Eiffel.
I first saw Blue in action in 1997 at Sydney University, and then used Blue in COMP1901 at Sydney University in 1998. The Blue IDE also featured an 'Object Test Bench' like feature for examining objects and invoking methods interractively at runtime, as well as a visual class designer that showed references and inheritance. (In fact, the first thing I thought when I saw VS2005 was, "Hey cool, I haven't seem someone do this since Blue.")
I still have my Blue CD, my "Blue Reference Resources" text (1998) and my "An Introduction to Computer Programming with Blue" text (1998).
The Blue language was based on Eiffel (which afaik does not have these things in the IDE). Blue had language support for generics, pre-conditions, post-conditions, and class invariants.
While it's finally going to be legal to transfer a CD to an iPod, and tape a TV show, they're replacing a bunch of dumb laws with a bunch of other dumb laws:
You can only watch a recorded TV show once
You can't get someone else to format shift for you (eg can't go help your mum do it)
You can't loan a recorded TV show to a friend
You can't make a backup of a CD you own - unless you back it up into a different format
Twits.
In short, people will continue doing what they're currently doing - ignoring the laws because they're dumb, and drawing their own lines as to what's right and wrong. Which isn't a good thing for *anyone*.
I think it sounds like one of the more intelligent proposals that have been put forward.
On the one hand, censorship will never work on the Internet. You can never stop determined people. On the other hand - many people (especially those with children) don't want to be exposed to these sites.
The government has recognised the need for something to be done. But if their solution is inappropriate or inadequate then perhaps it is because the technical arena has not clearly presented what needs to be done.
Imho, the following needs to happen:
A law requiring these sites to self regulate.
A PICS tag (or other rating system) become a mandatory tag in the HTML spec. If a site is safe - then people should say so.
Better public education about how to protect their children
Operating systems should change default settings to screen these sites (or in some other way make it easier for people not to leave these things open unintentially)
Web developers need to be better educated (which would be aided by making it mandatory in the spec )
Importantly: This is not censorship - this is self rating. It improves user control rather than restrict it. Censorship is when some third party then blanket filters on this metadata, which frankly in a school is the appropriate thing to do.
Personally I would rather trust a site's self rating instead of leave the task up to some client-side filter that blocks access to a webpage because it happens to see a word it doesn't like, even if the context is completely innocent and non-adult material.
Fair comment that without a generally accepted definition of free will, it is not possible to state whether or not a deterministic device can exhibit it.
Some may say that an entity has free will if it is presented genuine choice of possible actions that it could take, and it is entirely up to that entity to decide which action it will take based on the stimulus that it was exposed to. Though I think my fridge exhibits this much free will when it decides whether or not to start its motor. It examines the temperature, and it 'decides' whether or not it needs to work.
But in another sense, it never really chose. It either was going to run, or it wasn't. Any deterministic system will always come to the same output given the (exact) same input and internal state.
Given devices already have this level of faux free-will, maybe the question at hand is "will computers ever have free-will more real than the 'fridge' free will?". imho, any deterministic system is the same in this respect. It will choose what it chooses because thats the only thing its interal mechanism allowed it to choose in that situation.
I personally believe humans have a level of free-will beyond this. So maybe the question of computer free will is more a question of how much freedom one believes can be achieved in free-will.
As pointed out earlier, this is tied up with moral responsibility. If someone gets trapped in a (large) refridgerator, clearly the fridge isn't morally responsible for freezing that person to death. Do people bear more responsibility? I think they do - but again this is really just another rephrasing of the believes question.
Peter
----
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
Slashdot Mirror
Size is relative. A well-organized, commented, documented, 200k-300k program is by no means large. Even for a single newstart developer. But 10k-20k of, say, badly written Perl might require a few sessions of therapy afterwards.
I think that if more people wrote code (or, for that matter, books) like George Orwell wrote his books, code (and books) would be generally more readable: shorter sentences (lines of code) which convey a single meaning (function), strung together into short paragraphs (code blocks), chained together into a larger cohesive whole.
Complexity of that last sentence:
* 52 words,
* 17 punctuation characters,
* 5 parentheses blocks,
* at least half a dozen ideas.
But I'm just having fun. I agree with you 100%.
This, in an age when prospective employers are known to check out candidates blogs. Entertaining.
This is something that I've always found hard to understand with the argument for evolution. Surely the natural selection process would strongly bias against any traits that result in the animal being killed off in the first few minutes. (And likewise a strong bias towards traits that improve birth mortality rates). Yet we see so many instances of "poor design" in the birth process. Four in this article alone.
If natural selection does such a "poor" job of refining the birthing mechanism when there is a clear correlation between some new (good or bad) trait and the likelihood of that trait being propagated to future generations, then how can we reasonably expect that it is also responsible for highly refined systems where there is a much lower correlation between the new trait and the likelihood of producing offspring. (For example, in esoteric features of the imune system, or the brain - the new trait may only even come into play in certain situations during the animals life, and therefore only has any selective power in the specific animals for which it occurs ... unlike traits relating to birth which are immediately tested for all creatures)
If evolution is about compromise, then the most obvious compromises would favour succesful birth. If birth is unsuccesful than other traits don't even get a chance to be tested.
OK, I know: it's off topic, it's flame-bait ... but I couldn't resist.
Alas with Chrome around I don't think we'll see browser stats on the zeitgeist again for a while.
Perhaps they'd be better called WMeDs.
So did the moon in Australia last night as the cresent moon, Venus and Jupiter all aligned for a nice smiley.
So it's quite simple. If there really are supernatural spiritual being, then they're beyond the physical world and there is no reason to suppose that they can be simulated. If there are no supernatural spirital beings, then there is absolutely no way that machines can be spiritual beings. So it doesn't really matter which side of the fence you sit on, either way machines aren't getting souls.
The problems only start to arise when people decide that they want to start redefining already existing words to suit their own needs. (Perhaps for no purpose grander than to add a bit of spice to his article). The word 'soul' has been around a long time. Perhaps the author wants to say he has a soul, but wants to believe all he has is a bunch of neurons.
And I don't think that anyone is saying that plate tectonics didn't play a role. To acknowledge that the tops of multiple mountain ranges carry evidence of being under water is to suggest that water has managed to cover even the most difficult places (albeit while they were lower).
Really the only thing left to dispute is whether or not all of these places were covered with water at the same time, not whether or not they were all covered.
If God created time and physics, and is outside of these systems, then why does he need to be created? Or as God puts it himself in the Bible, "I AM".
The problem with multiverses is that they try to explain how finely tuned the universe in terms of something that we can't observe/test... pretty much the same objections that are often raised against an Intelligent Creator.
It's simple. It works.
However Mark 16:6, which is included, still declares the resurection:
"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him."
Additionally, the article only refers to the book of Mark as making no reference to the resurection. No mention is made of the other three gospels.
See Mark 16 in the Wikipedia
World Vision
Amnesty International
Etcetera
Google seems to over-report the number of results. If you click through the pages of results, there are only a few dozen pages. As at 8:27am+10
Page 23: Results 221 - 230 of about 46,900 for "died in a blogging accident"
Page 24: Results 231 - 234 of 234 for "died in a blogging accident".
(If it were technically possible,) how would you react to a website where anyone (including potential employers) could search for you and see what your average bug count per 100 lines of code was?
I first saw Blue in action in 1997 at Sydney University, and then used Blue in COMP1901 at Sydney University in 1998. The Blue IDE also featured an 'Object Test Bench' like feature for examining objects and invoking methods interractively at runtime, as well as a visual class designer that showed references and inheritance. (In fact, the first thing I thought when I saw VS2005 was, "Hey cool, I haven't seem someone do this since Blue.")
I still have my Blue CD, my "Blue Reference Resources" text (1998) and my "An Introduction to Computer Programming with Blue" text (1998).
The Blue language was based on Eiffel (which afaik does not have these things in the IDE). Blue had language support for generics, pre-conditions, post-conditions, and class invariants.
I'm no lawyer, but isn't: "you do the crime. you do the time." a more sensible middle ground?
Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Record it and play it back to them at half-speed.
(Or find a non-tech solution: like a younger police officer)
Twits.
In short, people will continue doing what they're currently doing - ignoring the laws because they're dumb, and drawing their own lines as to what's right and wrong. Which isn't a good thing for *anyone*.
On the one hand, censorship will never work on the Internet. You can never stop determined people. On the other hand - many people (especially those with children) don't want to be exposed to these sites.
The government has recognised the need for something to be done. But if their solution is inappropriate or inadequate then perhaps it is because the technical arena has not clearly presented what needs to be done.
Imho, the following needs to happen:
Importantly: This is not censorship - this is self rating. It improves user control rather than restrict it. Censorship is when some third party then blanket filters on this metadata, which frankly in a school is the appropriate thing to do.
Personally I would rather trust a site's self rating instead of leave the task up to some client-side filter that blocks access to a webpage because it happens to see a word it doesn't like, even if the context is completely innocent and non-adult material.
A fair chunk of the useful stuff currently on the Internet is in the US.
A fair chunk of the Internet's users are in the US.
Development of pretty much every major OS is based wholely or partly in the US.
Development of pretty much every major browser is based wholely or partly in the US.
Development of many important web standards is based wholely or partly in the US.
This question is being posed by someone in the US. They might not miss the rest of the world, but the rest of the world might think differently.
System weighing only 50-100kg handles motion of every atom in human body in real time.
User interface found to be cumbersome.
Some may say that an entity has free will if it is presented genuine choice of possible actions that it could take, and it is entirely up to that entity to decide which action it will take based on the stimulus that it was exposed to. Though I think my fridge exhibits this much free will when it decides whether or not to start its motor. It examines the temperature, and it 'decides' whether or not it needs to work.
But in another sense, it never really chose. It either was going to run, or it wasn't. Any deterministic system will always come to the same output given the (exact) same input and internal state.
Given devices already have this level of faux free-will, maybe the question at hand is "will computers ever have free-will more real than the 'fridge' free will?". imho, any deterministic system is the same in this respect. It will choose what it chooses because thats the only thing its interal mechanism allowed it to choose in that situation.
I personally believe humans have a level of free-will beyond this. So maybe the question of computer free will is more a question of how much freedom one believes can be achieved in free-will.
As pointed out earlier, this is tied up with moral responsibility. If someone gets trapped in a (large) refridgerator, clearly the fridge isn't morally responsible for freezing that person to death. Do people bear more responsibility? I think they do - but again this is really just another rephrasing of the believes question.
Peter
----
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.