Re:Space Privatization -> Scarcity value
on
Hubble Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
> Most asteroids are filled with precious minerals (gold, platnium, etc);
Gold is not valuable. I mean, it is not widely used in industry. It gets dug out of one hole in the ground (a mine) and put in another one (a vault) so people can pretend that its presence there influences the price of money. If there were more of it around, that notion would run into trouble, which some think would be a Bad Thing.
Whoa, a book is basically text, and perhaps a few pictures. WTF is wrong with using HTML for that? I mean HTML is standard, open, simple, portable and unencrypted.
Oh wait, it's standard, open, simple, portable and unencrypted.
> . Quickified version - imagine an anglophone man at a computer terminal, with a giant book telling him exactly what to type in response to messages sent to him in Chinese. This man does not understand what he is doing at all, and yet this hypothetical manual he is following allows him to exactly simulate an intelligent response. If this man passes a Chinese Turing test this way, do we claim that he understands Chinese??
Sigh. See what Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, et all, have to say about the Chinese room question. Quickified version: It's bit like saying that a nerve cell doesn't understand what it is doing, therefor the brain cannot be concious.
Are you arguing that carbon has magical properties that silicon does not? If intelligence such as it is can be imnplemented in carbon, why not silicon?
> Look at the people who are running Windows 2000 at home. It's just silly
Not at all. NT 4 is stable (relative to other versions of windows), but doesn't support the latest games. 98se does, but crashes regularly. So, NT2K is worth a try.
Same difference. You seem to be quoting some dogma here, Christian or otherwise. If not, show a reference to where it has been proved that "Awareness" cannot be created. Otherwise, we should assume that it as as everyday and simple an event as the birth and gradual awakening of yet another self-aware person.
Stop wasting our time with True Belief and open your mind.
> The creation is something involuntary. Ok, so if my heartbeat is involuntary, does that mean I'm not the one doing it? Don't be silly.
To veer briefly in the direction of the original topic, if a runanway nanotech is not "aware" or even "alive", does that make it any less dangerous? Not.
> You cannot destroy complexity. Conservation principle.
Er, wot? Either 1) I slept a bit to much in those early-morning physics lectures all those years ago, or 2) You're working from a different set of axioms. Why not come clean with the agenda?
Conceration of complexity? Rubbish again, entropy says the opposite. A good 1000 degree flame will reduce the awesomely complex structure of the human body down to a pile of simple inorganics within an hour. If you bury it instead, the process takes longer but the end result is the same. Heck, I could reduce all the complexity of my 500Mz processor to nothing just by applying the wrong voltage. Look, when the dogma conflicts with common sense, *discard the dogma*
Agreed - there are better anergy sources than people.
>simply because an awareness of self is something more than just 10 billion neurons (or transistors) firing in a coherent fashion
Agreed too. There is complexity and structure that is needed.
> To aquire true AI or intelligence is to be aware of one's self this can neither be created
Rubbish. 1 unskilled female can create an intelligence in a little over nine months. Admittedly years of training are needed before the new mind is fit for human society, but the principal still holds
I once made the mistake of reading a book by Brian Herbert. It sucked so badly I have resolved never to make that mistake again.
If he is any good as an authour, then why 1) Is he trading on the family name of being "Frank Herbert's son"? 2) is he trading on the "Dune" name? 3) Does he need a co-writer?
Why doesn't he just give it up and let real authours write Dune books instead? I'm not going to watch as he tears down his father's legacy.
> There's just something inherently discouraging about seeing a page full of code whose sole purpose is to simply open your main program window, followed by another several pages just to populate some menus...
I wouldn't know, as a Delphi programmer I am allergic to VB. But I do know that you can't do either of templates or operator overloading in Delphi.
IMHO templates could be cool, if the syntax could be kept under control. Operator overloading is just syntactic sugar, and can backfire badly, and thus is not worthwhile.
> Delphi looks very much like a tool to bind widgets against odbc data sources
And ADO data sources, and BDE data sources. Oh, and by the way, it is a general purpose programming language that happens to have some nice data-binding tools. If that's your thing. If not, you can do what you want. Do you get the programming-lanaguage concept?
If you had said "perl looks like tool to bind MySQL to cgi" you would be just as blinkered.
x86. Borland does not have multiplatform compiler backends. They already have great x86 backend.
Linux executables may not be compatible with win32 executables, but the x86 machine code generated is mostly the same inside. The compiler backend for x86 Linux was the *easy* part of the Kylix project.
> On Win32 Delphi uses COM to a great extent. How will that translate to Linux?
I wouldn't say great extent. But COM will not be supported directly under Linux.
Look at the Borland chats, particularly this one on Delphi R&D: http://community.borland.com/article/1,1410,10459, 00.html) Q: Is COM/DCOM going to be supported in Kylix? What about the future of MIDAS & Kylix? A: We won't be directly supporting COM and DCOM under Linux. We will have MIDAS solutions on Linux.
> Will they jump to Corba?
Delphi/Win32 already has some CORBA support. IMHO that will most likely carry over.
Also see the live chat on the topic of ADO: http://community.borland.com/article/1,1410,20067, 00.html Q: Any idea of how Delphi ADO applications might convert to the forthcoming Linux version of Delphi? A: Unless MS provides ADO for Linux, we don't anticipate providing ADO supporting components on Linux.
Background: ADO is a back-end independant database connectivity package made by MS for MS operating systems. It is implemented as COM interfaces. Therefor chances of MS providing ADO for Linux are effectively nil.
>When do those pascal-based languages finally die? I hate pascal since they wanted us to learn it at school...
If you don't like it, don't code in it. Why are you wishing it ill? Read the article. "Linux is about choice". I learned Pascal at University, and I for one love coding in Delphi. My choice. I *don't* go around asking when C++ is going to die. Choice is good.
> btw, isn't the battle between kde and gnome enough? do we need a third environment?
huh? Delphi for Linux will (acording to Borland) be able to build apps that run under KDE and Gnome. It will not introduce a new GUI (duh).
> Interesting. If this is "good news" you're admitting gcc sucks and the Open Source model produces a product so inferior that people would gladly pay money for something else.
If what you are saying is that "people would gladly pay money for anything else" then no. if what you are saying is "people would gladly pay money for something really good" then yes. And that doesn't imply that gcc must suck.
You make it sound like it has slipped on a release schedule. It hasn't. Borprise is not usiually specific with release dates far in advance. All that they are saying at this time is that the work is going great, and it will be out this year. There have been some early demos already.
> stop harping on about the hells of the near future
If you don't want to hear it, don't read it.
> would kill to read a positive, yet realistic, prediction
You assume that positive & realistic is possible. Maybe you don't want to hear it.
Actually, IMHO there is lots of exciting cool stuph mentioned in the article, as well as improved quality of life. It's just not the focus of what he is trying to say.
The Joint Endevour of Delphi Inovators (in thier own way they see themseles as fighting the evil empire) is an umbrella organisation of various open-source Delphi code library projects (starting with windows API headers).
They favour the mozilla public licence http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/annotated.html
If you use this licence, your code would be easily compatible with thiers.
> But how do you diff some of the file types Delphi uses?
With Delphi 5, almost all the files that delphi uses are text and thus easily diff'able. In delphi 1-4 the form layouts (.dfm files) were stored as binary. Delphi 5 now makes these text by default.
If you have project which started off in Delphi 1..4, and is now in Delphi 5, and you still have binary dfms, I would seriously recomend using the conversion utility to change them over. The process is painless and relatively quick.
Now if only we could convince MS SourceSafe that what was once a binary file is now a text file, then it would show us the diffs.
> There's only one problem... how do you explain Tux to them?
How about: "It's a penguin" already.
StrawberryFrog, Living in Cape Town, Africa, Currently wearing a tshirt with a large Penguin (tux) on it, thinking of the large, noisy and ever-growing colony of Jackass penguins on a beach near here.
See http://www.wcape.school.za/mickle/penguins/jacka ss.htm http://www.botany.uwc.ac.za/Envfacts/facts/pengu in.htm
Wait a minute... noisy Jackass penguins? As seen on slashdot?
specifically, dates on the entries to better distingush '70s slang from new 90's slang.
Ah, the jargon file. Back in '88, when I was a fresher, late one night I printed the entire thing out on the big old (but fast) lineprinter on that concertina-foldy paper.
William of Occam formulated the idea "do not multiply entities unneccisarily", or put differently, "all things being equal the simplest explanation is probably the correct one".
Arkham's razor, IMHO, is something from a H.P. Lovecraft story.
Slashdot Mirror
> Most asteroids are filled with precious minerals (gold, platnium, etc);
Gold is not valuable. I mean, it is not widely used in industry. It gets dug out of one hole in the ground (a mine) and put in another one (a vault) so people can pretend that its presence there influences the price of money. If there were more of it around, that notion would run into trouble, which some think would be a Bad Thing.
MS Book reader?
Whoa, a book is basically text, and perhaps a few pictures. WTF is wrong with using HTML for that? I mean HTML is standard, open, simple, portable and unencrypted.
Oh wait, it's standard, open, simple, portable and unencrypted.
> Business attracts people interested in money. Government attracts people interested in power.
Money is power measured. Nowhere is this more evident than in Washington DC.
> If I dislike a corporation, I can more or less ignore it.
One word. Microsoft.
> . Quickified version - imagine an anglophone man at a computer terminal, with a giant book telling him exactly what to type in response to messages sent to him in Chinese. This man does not understand what he is doing at all, and yet this hypothetical manual he is following allows him to exactly simulate an intelligent response. If this man passes a Chinese Turing test this way, do we claim that he understands Chinese??
Sigh. See what Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, et all, have to say about the Chinese room question.
Quickified version: It's bit like saying that a nerve cell doesn't understand what it is doing, therefor the brain cannot be concious.
Are you arguing that carbon has magical properties that silicon does not? If intelligence such as it is can be imnplemented in carbon, why not silicon?
> For instance, a little "adaptor" that captures keystrokes for later retrieval
Read the article dude. They make those too.
> Look at the people who are running Windows 2000 at home. It's just silly
Not at all. NT 4 is stable (relative to other versions of windows), but doesn't support the latest games. 98se does, but crashes regularly. So, NT2K is worth a try.
> Awareness you dolt.
Same difference. You seem to be quoting some dogma here, Christian or otherwise. If not, show a reference to where it has been proved that "Awareness" cannot be created. Otherwise, we should assume that it as as everyday and simple an event as the birth and gradual awakening of yet another self-aware person.
Stop wasting our time with True Belief and open your mind.
> The creation is something involuntary.
Ok, so if my heartbeat is involuntary, does that mean I'm not the one doing it? Don't be silly.
To veer briefly in the direction of the original topic, if a runanway nanotech is not "aware" or even "alive", does that make it any less dangerous? Not.
> You cannot destroy complexity. Conservation principle.
Er, wot?
Either
1) I slept a bit to much in those early-morning physics lectures all those years ago, or
2) You're working from a different set of axioms. Why not come clean with the agenda?
Conceration of complexity? Rubbish again, entropy says the opposite.
A good 1000 degree flame will reduce the awesomely complex structure of the human body down to a pile of simple inorganics within an hour. If you bury it instead, the process takes longer but the end result is the same. Heck, I could reduce all the complexity of my 500Mz processor to nothing just by applying the wrong voltage. Look, when the dogma conflicts with common sense, *discard the dogma*
> AI as portrayed in the Matrix will never happen
Agreed - there are better anergy sources than people.
>simply because an awareness of self is something more than just 10 billion neurons (or transistors) firing in a coherent fashion
Agreed too. There is complexity and structure that is needed.
> To aquire true AI or intelligence is to be aware of one's self this can neither be created
Rubbish. 1 unskilled female can create an intelligence in a little over nine months. Admittedly years of training are needed before the new mind is fit for human society, but the principal still holds
> nor destroyed.
Oh yeah, this is also all too easy...
Again rubish.
I once made the mistake of reading a book by Brian Herbert. It sucked so badly I have resolved never to make that mistake again.
If he is any good as an authour, then why
1) Is he trading on the family name of being "Frank Herbert's son"?
2) is he trading on the "Dune" name?
3) Does he need a co-writer?
Why doesn't he just give it up and let real authours write Dune books instead? I'm not going to watch as he tears down his father's legacy.
> There's just something inherently discouraging about seeing a page full of code whose sole purpose is to simply open your main program window, followed by another several pages just to populate some menus...
Uh, try Delphi instead?
> How do I do something like templates in VB?
I wouldn't know, as a Delphi programmer I am allergic to VB. But I do know that you can't do either of templates or operator overloading in Delphi.
IMHO templates could be cool, if the syntax could be kept under control. Operator overloading is just syntactic sugar, and can backfire badly, and thus is not worthwhile.
> Delphi looks very much like a tool to bind widgets against odbc data sources
And ADO data sources, and BDE data sources. Oh, and by the way, it is a general purpose programming language that happens to have some nice data-binding tools. If that's your thing. If not, you can do what you want. Do you get the programming-lanaguage concept?
If you had said "perl looks like tool to bind MySQL to cgi" you would be just as blinkered.
> Linux on x86 or multiplatorm?
x86. Borland does not have multiplatform compiler backends. They already have great x86 backend.
Linux executables may not be compatible with win32 executables, but the x86 machine code generated is mostly the same inside. The compiler backend for x86 Linux was the *easy* part of the Kylix project.
> On Win32 Delphi uses COM to a great extent. How will that translate to Linux?
, 00.html)
, 00.html
I wouldn't say great extent. But COM will not be supported directly under Linux.
Look at the Borland chats, particularly this one on Delphi R&D: http://community.borland.com/article/1,1410,10459
Q: Is COM/DCOM going to be supported in Kylix? What about the future of MIDAS & Kylix?
A: We won't be directly supporting COM and DCOM under Linux. We will have MIDAS solutions on Linux.
> Will they jump to Corba?
Delphi/Win32 already has some CORBA support. IMHO that will most likely carry over.
Also see the live chat on the topic of ADO: http://community.borland.com/article/1,1410,20067
Q: Any idea of how Delphi ADO applications might convert to the forthcoming Linux version of Delphi?
A: Unless MS provides ADO for Linux, we don't anticipate providing ADO supporting components on Linux.
Background: ADO is a back-end independant database connectivity package made by MS for MS operating systems. It is implemented as COM interfaces. Therefor chances of MS providing ADO for Linux are effectively nil.
>When do those pascal-based languages finally die? I hate pascal since they wanted us to learn it at school...
If you don't like it, don't code in it. Why are you wishing it ill? Read the article. "Linux is about choice". I learned Pascal at University, and I for one love coding in Delphi. My choice. I *don't* go around asking when C++ is going to die. Choice is good.
> btw, isn't the battle between kde and gnome enough? do we need a third environment?
huh? Delphi for Linux will (acording to Borland) be able to build apps that run under KDE and Gnome. It will not introduce a new GUI (duh).
> Interesting. If this is "good news" you're admitting gcc sucks and the Open Source model produces a product so inferior that people would gladly pay money for something else.
If what you are saying is that "people would gladly pay money for anything else" then no. if what you are saying is "people would gladly pay money for something really good" then yes. And that doesn't imply that gcc must suck.
You make it sound like it has slipped on a release schedule. It hasn't. Borprise is not usiually specific with release dates far in advance. All that they are saying at this time is that the work is going great, and it will be out this year. There have been some early demos already.
Good software takes time.
> stop harping on about the hells of the near future
If you don't want to hear it, don't read it.
> would kill to read a positive, yet realistic, prediction
You assume that positive & realistic is possible. Maybe you don't want to hear it.
Actually, IMHO there is lots of exciting cool stuph mentioned in the article, as well as improved quality of life. It's just not the focus of what he is trying to say.
See http://www.delphi-jedi.org/
The Joint Endevour of Delphi Inovators (in thier own way they see themseles as fighting the evil empire) is an umbrella organisation of various open-source Delphi code library projects (starting with windows API headers).
They favour the mozilla public licence http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/annotated.html
If you use this licence, your code would be easily compatible with thiers.
> But how do you diff some of the file types Delphi uses?
With Delphi 5, almost all the files that delphi uses are text and thus easily diff'able.
In delphi 1-4 the form layouts (.dfm files) were stored as binary. Delphi 5 now makes these text by default.
If you have project which started off in Delphi 1..4, and is now in Delphi 5, and you still have binary dfms, I would seriously recomend using the conversion utility to change them over. The process is painless and relatively quick.
Now if only we could convince MS SourceSafe that what was once a binary file is now a text file, then it would show us the diffs.
> There's only one problem... how do you explain Tux to them?
a ss.htm u in.htm
How about: "It's a penguin" already.
StrawberryFrog, Living in Cape Town, Africa, Currently wearing a tshirt with a large Penguin (tux) on it, thinking of the large, noisy and ever-growing colony of Jackass penguins on a beach near here.
See
http://www.wcape.school.za/mickle/penguins/jack
http://www.botany.uwc.ac.za/Envfacts/facts/peng
Wait a minute... noisy Jackass penguins? As seen on slashdot?
specifically, dates on the entries to better distingush '70s slang from new 90's slang.
Ah, the jargon file. Back in '88, when I was a fresher, late one night I printed the entire thing out on the big old (but fast) lineprinter on that concertina-foldy paper.
Why is it that Americans are so ignorant of anything beyond the borders of thier own country? Not only that, but they don't *want* to know. Sheesh.
StrawberryFrog in South Africa (which is not in South America. Duh).
> Whats to stop Microsoft from creating their OWN Linux distribution
1) MS will do anything to make money if they have to.
2) MS reinvents themselves when the market changes.
Add it up. MS Linux is inevitable. You know it's true.
William of Occam formulated the idea "do not multiply entities unneccisarily", or put differently, "all things being equal the simplest explanation is probably the correct one".
Arkham's razor, IMHO, is something from a H.P. Lovecraft story.
Akums razor??