Yes, linux is less uniform than windows - I guess it's the inevitable price of choice. There's clearly a lot of convergence in the things that everyone just wants to work though.
Anyway, despite whether this is good or bad for users, the extreme interoperability, modularity and flexibility of it is a foundation for very fast evolution. That's not to say that a proprietary system can't evolve that fast - but most proprietary software business models seem to favor the production of monolithic systems and twingled-up code. The temptation to sacrifice long term flexibility for short term gain is just too high. I really think we're approaching the time at which we have to acknowledge that one company cannot manage all that complexity, even with the best of intentions.
Indeed... Free as in... oh, never mind. But let's just turn it around a little:
"Hilf claims that Linux now developed by paid, professional developers in most of the biggest and most experienced software and O/S development companies in the world."
One more reason for business to take it seriously. Thanks, Hilf:)
The sad thing is, there still isn't a great competitor to Windows. Linux is nice and Ubuntu and other distros have come far, but it seems they lack that final step (like "How do I change my screen resolution?" or other bits that only techies would know).
You mean the deeply obscure "System\Preferences\Screen Resolution" menu in Ubuntu?:) You clearly haven't used linux for quite a while. It's no harder than Windows for common tasks (arguably more logically laid out, in fact), and much, much easier for many common tasks (like installing software with all required dependencies).
Linux doesn't provide for binary drivers. If you want a closed-source driver you must make an open-source stub that communicates with your binary BLOB. It's a PITA, and the driver interfaces in Linux have traditionally very much been moving targets...
That I will completely concede. The kernel changes seem to come thick and fast... I suppose that as linux becomes more mainstream, there will be more pressure to keep things more stable.
True, it's not Microsoft's fault if an OEM configures the system that way. Except for the fact that in all other situations in the Windows world where a reboot is required, the completely standard method is to present a dialog box with a reboot button, so the user has time to deal with it. It's just common sense. Polite. Respectful. This dialog box had no buttons whatsoever, just a countdown to destruction - a completely daft system, IMHO.
I agree that when things don't work out of the box, linux is harder to fix for people used to the Windows world. Granny won't go to the command line, as you say. Having said that, I've had my share of strange Windows problems that I could never resolve, with no way of determining the problem. Most people just live with them, and eventually buy a new box when it gets too irritating (on the grounds that the computer is old and broken). For me, a complete reinstall was the usual fix. So far, I've had no problem on linux I couldn't fix with a bit of googling and no reinstall, and I'm no linux expert.
I also agree that drivers are still a greater problem for linux than windows, but not that it's the model that's the problem. Open source drivers work very well. Closed source ones also work very well, and there's no engineering reason I'm aware of why installing them cannot be made as simple as in windows. That seems mostly to be a problem of economics and market-share, rather than any fundamental ease-of-use difference between the linux and windows driver models.
During the OS install, you are specifically asked to configure automatic updates. Some of the service pack installs also ask you to do this. [...] If the user decides to just click away the dialog asking you to configure automatic updates (which many OEMs will leave for you) then that's their damage.
Hmmm.. like most people, windows was preinstalled on my machine. If enabling a feature can lose the vital work of the user, it should not be a default. Also, a clear warning of the consequences should be made. In actual fact, I intentionally enabled the automatic update and I still didn't know what I was letting myself in for. My bad, I guess, but I never thought for one moment that enabling it like this might just cause my machine to lose my work while I was sitting in front of it, never mind if I popped out for a coffee! It fails the principle of least surprise.
I think that for most people, computers are tools, not objects of intrinsic interest in themselves. Any boring software (ie - stuff that should just work and not get in the user's way unless absolutely necessary) should do just that: just work. If can't just work, at the very least it should not endanger the user's work if at all possible.
Funnily enough, the argument that linux is harder to configure than windows is often made, but in my recent experience, I have to tinker less with linux than I ever did with windows, and I feel much safer!
Trusting that your computer won't just go ahead and lose all your work if you pop out for a moment makes the user stupid? Sorry - no operating system should automatically reboot itself by default with no permission or special instruction from the user. I nearly lost work to this too. I had lots of stuff open, and this damn auto update dialog box tells me it's going to reboot my machine in 4 minutes... counting down... and no way to even cancel it. Here's a hint: it's not the users who are dumb in this situation, it's the cretinous idiots who wrote that system (with some blame aimed at their apologists too...)
It's one of the reasons (but by no means the only reason) I switched to linux a year ago, and haven't looked back. Things are just... calmer, somehow. I feel like... it's my computer again. We certainly seem to inhabit different kinds of computing universe.
What is it with all you lot on here who obsess about spelling? Did you win some spelling competition when you were younger? Or maybe you used to be really bad at it, so now you're an obnoxious tw*t on the subject?
You would disregard an argument with poor spelling, no matter how good it may be? That's all I need to hear. There are plenty of poor spellers out there with more intelligence than you appear to have, including my best friend, who's dyslexic. Geez.
As for your desktop still looking like your Win98 one, that's understandable. People who started with Windows a few years earlier than you went to great trouble to turn it back to the Win3.1 look, because that's what they were familiar with.
Wow, that's a new one on me. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I worked with all versions of DOS and windows, and when windows 95 came out, I can't remember seeing a single windows 95 machine that was configured to look like 3.1. 3.1 was ugly and unstable - most people seemed to be glad to see the back of it.
I'm not saying that just because I rarely look at the source no-one else does. Clearly some people do! I'm saying that very few users of an open source product bother, and even fewer invest the time to actually understand it to any useful extent. I don't have statistics on this, so I'm just guessing here - if you can point me to any metrics that would be very interesting.
For very small bits of software, the many eyes theory probably does have an effect, but I would venture that there aren't significantly more developers that really understand the larger pieces of open source software than for a comparable proprietary product.
I do not dispute the many benefits of open source software - I am a big fan of it, for many reasons. I give full credit to those who give up their time to create something wonderful. I have even paid for open source software, even though I could get it for free, to support those developers. I just don't really subscribe to the many eyes theory for larger pieces of software.
Having said that, the fact that anyone *can* do so is a huge advantage for me over proprietary solutions. Not so much the "many eyes" theory, as the "any eyes" theory.
Parent is making a valid point, and is not a troll, whoever modded them that way. The 'more eyes' argument doesn't really work for me either. I use open source software all the time, and I rarely have a look at the source code, and even less frequently take the trouble to understand even a small part of it.
What does work for me with open source is that the nature of open, distributed development tends to promote code modularity, which helps keep those defect counts down. And the fact that code is publicly available exerts an influence on developers to publish code they aren't be ashamed of (unlike what happens in proprietary software development with tight deadlines set by the sales team making unrealistic promises to clients - I have been there).
However, there is a real distinction between defect-free software (probably does not exist) and software that intentionally includes back-doors. With open-source, you can have more confidence that there is no back door, spy-ware, or anything else that shouldn't be part of the application. But it certainly doesn't mean the software will be defect free.
Why make a computer work like a brain? How about to find out how to process complicated, fuzzy information efficiently, which is something that all our best technologies do poorly, but the brain has spent millions of years evolving to do? Or to produce neural implants for people with brain damage? Or to understand more about ourselves? To be able to simulate brain architecture and stop it, rewind, feed in new inputs (not so easy to do on a biological brain that's still functioning...)
In fact, people are trying to make submarines swim like a fish - yet again, evolution has produced some superb optimizations here. People are trying to make micro aircraft fly like insects. Security systems from immune systems. There's a lot to learn from biology.
I agree with a lot of what you say, although I'm no quantum physics expert, just an interested amateur. The idea that you can do away with the special status of the observer seems to be one of the features of the decoherence approach to quantum theory. This does away with the collapse of the wave-function, and thus the need for an observer to collapse it, by instead describing interacting systems. When they interact, they decohere, giving the appearance of wave-function collapse.
I can't go from there to "every interacting system is conscious" though. My problem with it is that it doesn't really explain anything for me. For example, there are a lot of things going on in your body and brain that you are never conscious of, but systems interact to manage them. Do they have a separate consciousness? What defines the boundaries of systems and consciousness?
Experiments have shown that the brain decision potential peaks about half a second before people become conscious of having made the decision - why would there be this delay if consciousness arose naturally out of the system interactions? And if all systems produce it by the mere fact of their interaction, why does it exist at all? At the very least, the theory doesn't give any insight into what consciousness is and why it exists.
Having said all that, I don't have a better explanation than yours. I swing between quite a mechanistic information-processing viewpoint stance (although why should some information processing be conscious and some not?) but then I get hung up on qualia, experience, and why is the feeling even necessary - why are we and all other animals not simply clever "zombies"? Daniel Dennet argues that this is exactly what we are, that consciousness is a sort of illusion. Searle asks "who is having the illusion, and why is it necessary?". I really don't know the answers to these, but I sure love to think about them.
I can't remember his precise arguments (his book Shadows of the Mind goes into this).
It has something to do with Godel's proofs - something along the lines that you can't prove something to be true or false inside a particular system, but since we as humans can see that something is true/false nevertheless, so we must be doing something different.
I don't think the argument holds up very well myself (we can apply lots of different systems, for one thing, we aren't limited to only one), and I am sure I am somewhat misrepresenting his ideas here - it's been a while since I read it.
Why do you need to invoke one mystery to "explain" another? I can't see why consciousness "may not be so easily explained without taking into account quantum effects". What particular things about consciousness seem to indicate quantum effects to you?
Other people have proposed this before, but present a theory of why quantum effects may be necessary. Roger Penrose makes the argument that we can compute things that a Turing-style computer could not compute, so something else must be going on. His proof that some things we do cannot be done by a Turing style computer isn't exactly accepted though, and no-one seriously believes that the brain works in this way in any case.
Also, consciousness is not the same thing as "self-awareness". Is a dog conscious? Is it self-aware? What about a rabbit? When I dream, I'm not usually self-aware, but there's some sort of consciousness there. What about phenomena like blind-sight, where a person is self-aware, but unconscious of visual information, even though they can access that information by guessing remarkably accurately, just without any direct consciousness of it. Does this mean that these supposed quantum-consciousness effects have broken down only for information originating in visual centers, but keeps working on all other information?
Of course, coming from quantum theory, there is the Copenhagen Interpretation which places a special status on the 'observer' - but no-one has managed to define what an observer is, or whether they must be conscious or not.
That's a valid point, but it's no kind of defense to say "but the other lot did it as well". You should be outraged in both cases.
Frankly, all this political partisanship gets right on my nerves. In the UK, we had the Labour government blaming all their ills on the previous administration. They can't get away with that now, as they've been in power for 10 years - although it still surfaces occasionally.
If *your* government is breaking your own laws, no matter which party they belong to, go after them. If you don't, eventually they'll be coming after you. I thought you guys were in favor of small accountable government?
Hmmm... copyright law varies a bit from place to place. In the UK, copyright applies to any work you create at the moment of creation. So code I write on my computer IS protected by copyright, as soon as its written, without having to do anything, or without having to publish it. If my computer gets stolen, and I hadn't arranged for any proof that I wrote it, I may have a hard time proving I wrote it though - so publication may help you there. Or a copy can be placed in escrow.
The GPL works because of copyright, as you say. It relies on the fact that copyright law prohibits copying of copyrighted works, unless a license grants you some rights to do so. This has nothing to do with whether the code is "published" or not - merely that it is subject to copyright protection. If it is copyrighted, a GPL license can be issued for it. Of course, as soon as you make it available to others, it is published really, so this discussion makes no practical difference to the GPL.
I think we are basically in agreement, except that, in the UK at least, copyright protection is not dependent on some notion of prior publication.
You seem to be confusing copyright and patent law.
Copyright is automatically owned by the creator (or whoever the rights are sold to). There is no need to apply for copyright; it is automatic. The work is not public domain until copyright expires. There is no obligation to publish a copyrighted work. If the artist chooses not to sell their rights, they still have copyright. Copyright grants a time-limited monopoly on making copies of the work. You cannot violate copyright if you have never had a copy, even if you accidentally produce something very similar. You can say the same things as someone else's copyrighted work, and that work will be your copyright. It's all about a particular expression of something.
Patent law is all about making knowledge about methods of doing something publicly available as a condition of acquiring a patent, in return for which a time-limited monopoly on exploiting that idea is granted to the patent holder. You have to apply for a patent; it is not automatic. You can violate a patent even if you have never heard of it before, or you expressed the ideas in the patent differently. The concepts in the patent are what matter, not their mode of expression.
Yes, I could care less. When my Sony Trinitron TV finally died about 3 years ago, I got one of these new-fangled 16:9 ratio TVs. Of course, all the content being broadcast in the UK is still basically 4:3.
For a while I got all excited about building a PVR system too, until I realised that the technology was more interesting than the TV content.
I will probably buy a Ultra-Blu-XD10000 (ZD-ready) 256:81 thingy in about another 10 years. Hopefully most broadcasts will be in HD by then.
Errr... people have already spent *decades* and *billions* already on this, and they haven't stopped doing it. If we just could spend a few millions / months to resolve this one, it would have already been done.
The evidence in from the last few decades of work by scientists all over this planet strongly suggests that (a) the earth is generally getting warmer naturally and (b) humans are accelerating the change. The relative amounts are in dispute, but the amount of warming coming up (no matter from what source) is going to cause us all sorts of trouble, first world or third world.
One simple change we could incentivize that has numerous benefits regardless of the global warming situation is just to use cleaner and more efficient technology. The one initiative Bush seems to like is using food as fuel; one of the few methods that has been shown to be energy-inefficient, water-inefficient and environmentally and socially harmful.
Maybe another 30 years and we'll get politicians who actually pay attention to the scientists - once a few more disasters make doing something that actually works a political necessity. Or maybe not. One thing is for sure - the pace of change and the effects we have on this planet are outpacing our political institutions ability to do anything about it. At some point we will do something disastrous (if we haven't already) that we cannot recover from. We were damn lucky with the ozone hole, as far as I can tell.
Imposing uniform ontologies on any but the most narrowly defined fields is impossible, and even within those fields nominally standard vocabularies will be used differently by rapidly-dividing "cultural" subgroups within the workers in the field.
I completely agree. This is why I don't see the "semantic web" taking off in the form it's proposed. There are too many viewpoints and there is too little payoff for structuring a vast amount of data just so other people can find it a bit easier, when the vast mass of people don't have a big problem finding the information they want. Specialists on the other hand can benefit a lot, as long as you don't insist on a single ontology.
What doesn't seem to be appreciated is that standardised semantic technologies that support the idea of multiple ontologies, and possibly some kind of trust or reputation system could be very useful for academic work or for high-value data. Pick your own sets of semantic markups for a published work. Create your own, publish it to other people. Combine them, but they still all point at the same source data. For high value data, this would be invaluable and would allow people to keep building on each others work in a way that can be extended by others later. Could be useful in the academic, engineering and scientific worlds.
But it's only really useful if the data is published, and has long-term value. Your average web page, with the life of a housefly, wouldn't benefit from having the ability to accumulate many different ontologies and link them up how you desire. I think that's the essence of it - semantic technology is great for persistent, personalised and highly information-intensive work, not for the mass classification of short-lived data.
Yes, its just a shame about all that eternal suffering for those who aren't saved. Its quite a harsh punishment for his children that get squashed by a falling piano before they repent, or die as babies, or believe in a different religion, or whatever. Couldn't he have come up with something a little more... forgiving?
When Jesus returns, does this mean that there will be no more evil? Is this because we suddenly lose our free will, or just that only the nice people will be left, and they won't be tempted to do evil, because everything will just be provided for them (removes quite a lot of temptation, IMHO).
If I believed in a God, it would not be this one, sorry.
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Yes, linux is less uniform than windows - I guess it's the inevitable price of choice. There's clearly a lot of convergence in the things that everyone just wants to work though.
Anyway, despite whether this is good or bad for users, the extreme interoperability, modularity and flexibility of it is a foundation for very fast evolution. That's not to say that a proprietary system can't evolve that fast - but most proprietary software business models seem to favor the production of monolithic systems and twingled-up code. The temptation to sacrifice long term flexibility for short term gain is just too high. I really think we're approaching the time at which we have to acknowledge that one company cannot manage all that complexity, even with the best of intentions.
Indeed... Free as in... oh, never mind. But let's just turn it around a little:
:)
"Hilf claims that Linux now developed by paid, professional developers in most of the biggest and most experienced software and O/S development companies in the world."
One more reason for business to take it seriously. Thanks, Hilf
The sad thing is, there still isn't a great competitor to Windows. Linux is nice and Ubuntu and other distros have come far, but it seems they lack that final step (like "How do I change my screen resolution?" or other bits that only techies would know).
You mean the deeply obscure "System\Preferences\Screen Resolution" menu in Ubuntu? :) You clearly haven't used linux for quite a while. It's no harder than Windows for common tasks (arguably more logically laid out, in fact), and much, much easier for many common tasks (like installing software with all required dependencies).
All programs are already copyrighted, it's automatically granted to the author of any work.
Linux doesn't provide for binary drivers. If you want a closed-source driver you must make an open-source stub that communicates with your binary BLOB. It's a PITA, and the driver interfaces in Linux have traditionally very much been moving targets...
That I will completely concede. The kernel changes seem to come thick and fast... I suppose that as linux becomes more mainstream, there will be more pressure to keep things more stable.
True, it's not Microsoft's fault if an OEM configures the system that way. Except for the fact that in all other situations in the Windows world where a reboot is required, the completely standard method is to present a dialog box with a reboot button, so the user has time to deal with it. It's just common sense. Polite. Respectful. This dialog box had no buttons whatsoever, just a countdown to destruction - a completely daft system, IMHO.
I agree that when things don't work out of the box, linux is harder to fix for people used to the Windows world. Granny won't go to the command line, as you say. Having said that,
I've had my share of strange Windows problems that I could never resolve, with no way of determining the problem. Most people just live with them, and eventually buy a new box when it gets too irritating (on the grounds that the computer is old and broken). For me, a complete reinstall was the usual fix. So far, I've had no problem on linux I couldn't fix with a bit of googling and no reinstall, and I'm no linux expert.
I also agree that drivers are still a greater problem for linux than windows, but not that it's the model that's the problem. Open source drivers work very well. Closed source ones also work very well, and there's no engineering reason I'm aware of why installing them cannot be made as simple as in windows. That seems mostly to be a problem of economics and market-share, rather than any fundamental ease-of-use difference between the linux and windows driver models.
During the OS install, you are specifically asked to configure automatic updates. Some of the service pack installs also ask you to do this. [...] If the user decides to just click away the dialog asking you to configure automatic updates (which many OEMs will leave for you) then that's their damage.
Hmmm.. like most people, windows was preinstalled on my machine. If enabling a feature can lose the vital work of the user, it should not be a default. Also, a clear warning of the consequences should be made. In actual fact, I intentionally enabled the automatic update and I still didn't know what I was letting myself in for. My bad, I guess, but I never thought for one moment that enabling it like this might just cause my machine to lose my work while I was sitting in front of it, never mind if I popped out for a coffee! It fails the principle of least surprise.
I think that for most people, computers are tools, not objects of intrinsic interest in themselves. Any boring software (ie - stuff that should just work and not get in the user's way unless absolutely necessary) should do just that: just work. If can't just work, at the very least it should not endanger the user's work if at all possible.
Funnily enough, the argument that linux is harder to configure than windows is often made, but in my recent experience, I have to tinker less with linux than I ever did with windows, and I feel much safer!
Trusting that your computer won't just go ahead and lose all your work if you pop out for a moment makes the user stupid? Sorry - no operating system should automatically reboot itself by default with no permission or special instruction from the user. I nearly lost work to this too. I had lots of stuff open, and this damn auto update dialog box tells me it's going to reboot my machine in 4 minutes... counting down... and no way to even cancel it. Here's a hint: it's not the users who are dumb in this situation, it's the cretinous idiots who wrote that system (with some blame aimed at their apologists too...)
It's one of the reasons (but by no means the only reason) I switched to linux a year ago, and haven't looked back. Things are just... calmer, somehow. I feel like... it's my computer again. We certainly seem to inhabit different kinds of computing universe.
If they didn't set the mines off, you'd have a very good vehicle for traversing a minefield!
What is it with all you lot on here who obsess about spelling? Did you win some spelling competition when you were younger? Or maybe you used to be really bad at it, so now you're an obnoxious tw*t on the subject?
You would disregard an argument with poor spelling, no matter how good it may be? That's all I need to hear. There are plenty of poor spellers out there with more intelligence than you appear to have, including my best friend, who's dyslexic. Geez.
As for your desktop still looking like your Win98 one, that's understandable. People who started with Windows a few years earlier than you went to great trouble to turn it back to the Win3.1 look, because that's what they were familiar with.
Wow, that's a new one on me. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I worked with all versions of DOS and windows, and when windows 95 came out, I can't remember seeing a single windows 95 machine that was configured to look like 3.1. 3.1 was ugly and unstable - most people seemed to be glad to see the back of it.
I'm not saying that just because I rarely look at the source no-one else does. Clearly some people do! I'm saying that very few users of an open source product bother, and even fewer invest the time to actually understand it to any useful extent. I don't have statistics on this, so I'm just guessing here - if you can point me to any metrics that would be very interesting.
For very small bits of software, the many eyes theory probably does have an effect, but I would venture that there aren't significantly more developers that really understand the larger pieces of open source software than for a comparable proprietary product.
I do not dispute the many benefits of open source software - I am a big fan of it, for many reasons. I give full credit to those who give up their time to create something wonderful. I have even paid for open source software, even though I could get it for free, to support those developers. I just don't really subscribe to the many eyes theory for larger pieces of software.
Having said that, the fact that anyone *can* do so is a huge advantage for me over proprietary solutions. Not so much the "many eyes" theory, as the "any eyes" theory.
Parent is making a valid point, and is not a troll, whoever modded them that way. The 'more eyes' argument doesn't really work for me either. I use open source software all the time, and I rarely have a look at the source code, and even less frequently take the trouble to understand even a small part of it.
What does work for me with open source is that the nature of open, distributed development tends to promote code modularity, which helps keep those defect counts down. And the fact that code is publicly available exerts an influence on developers to publish code they aren't be ashamed of (unlike what happens in proprietary software development with tight deadlines set by the sales team making unrealistic promises to clients - I have been there).
However, there is a real distinction between defect-free software (probably does not exist) and software that intentionally includes back-doors. With open-source, you can have more confidence that there is no back door, spy-ware, or anything else that shouldn't be part of the application. But it certainly doesn't mean the software will be defect free.
Why make a computer work like a brain? How about to find out how to process complicated, fuzzy information efficiently, which is something that all our best technologies do poorly, but the brain has spent millions of years evolving to do? Or to produce neural implants for people with brain damage? Or to understand more about ourselves? To be able to simulate brain architecture and stop it, rewind, feed in new inputs (not so easy to do on a biological brain that's still functioning...)
In fact, people are trying to make submarines swim like a fish - yet again, evolution has produced some superb optimizations here. People are trying to make micro aircraft fly like insects. Security systems from immune systems. There's a lot to learn from biology.
I agree with a lot of what you say, although I'm no quantum physics expert, just an interested amateur. The idea that you can do away with the special status of the observer seems to be one of the features of the decoherence approach to quantum theory. This does away with the collapse of the wave-function, and thus the need for an observer to collapse it, by instead describing interacting systems. When they interact, they decohere, giving the appearance of wave-function collapse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence
I can't go from there to "every interacting system is conscious" though. My problem with it is that it doesn't really explain anything for me. For example, there are a lot of things going on in your body and brain that you are never conscious of, but systems interact to manage them. Do they have a separate consciousness? What defines the boundaries of systems and consciousness?
Experiments have shown that the brain decision potential peaks about half a second before people become conscious of having made the decision - why would there be this delay if consciousness arose naturally out of the system interactions? And if all systems produce it by the mere fact of their interaction, why does it exist at all? At the very least, the theory doesn't give any insight into what consciousness is and why it exists.
Having said all that, I don't have a better explanation than yours. I swing between quite a mechanistic information-processing viewpoint stance (although why should some information processing be conscious and some not?) but then I get hung up on qualia, experience, and why is the feeling even necessary - why are we and all other animals not simply clever "zombies"? Daniel Dennet argues that this is exactly what we are, that consciousness is a sort of illusion. Searle asks "who is having the illusion, and why is it necessary?". I really don't know the answers to these, but I sure love to think about them.
I can't remember his precise arguments (his book Shadows of the Mind goes into this).
It has something to do with Godel's proofs - something along the lines that you can't prove something to be true or false inside a particular system, but since we as humans can see that something is true/false nevertheless, so we must be doing something different.
I don't think the argument holds up very well myself (we can apply lots of different systems, for one thing, we aren't limited to only one), and I am sure I am somewhat misrepresenting his ideas here - it's been a while since I read it.
Why do you need to invoke one mystery to "explain" another? I can't see why consciousness "may not be so easily explained without taking into account quantum effects". What particular things about consciousness seem to indicate quantum effects to you?
Other people have proposed this before, but present a theory of why quantum effects may be necessary. Roger Penrose makes the argument that we can compute things that a Turing-style computer could not compute, so something else must be going on. His proof that some things we do cannot be done by a Turing style computer isn't exactly accepted though, and no-one seriously believes that the brain works in this way in any case.
Also, consciousness is not the same thing as "self-awareness". Is a dog conscious? Is it self-aware? What about a rabbit? When I dream, I'm not usually self-aware, but there's some sort of consciousness there. What about phenomena like blind-sight, where a person is self-aware, but unconscious of visual information, even though they can access that information by guessing remarkably accurately, just without any direct consciousness of it. Does this mean that these supposed quantum-consciousness effects have broken down only for information originating in visual centers, but keeps working on all other information?
Of course, coming from quantum theory, there is the Copenhagen Interpretation which places a special status on the 'observer' - but no-one has managed to define what an observer is, or whether they must be conscious or not.
That's a valid point, but it's no kind of defense to say "but the other lot did it as well". You should be outraged in both cases.
Frankly, all this political partisanship gets right on my nerves. In the UK, we had the Labour government blaming all their ills on the previous administration. They can't get away with that now, as they've been in power for 10 years - although it still surfaces occasionally.
If *your* government is breaking your own laws, no matter which party they belong to, go after them. If you don't, eventually they'll be coming after you. I thought you guys were in favor of small accountable government?
Hmmm... copyright law varies a bit from place to place. In the UK, copyright applies to any work you create at the moment of creation. So code I write on my computer IS protected by copyright, as soon as its written, without having to do anything, or without having to publish it. If my computer gets stolen, and I hadn't arranged for any proof that I wrote it, I may have a hard time proving I wrote it though - so publication may help you there. Or a copy can be placed in escrow.
The GPL works because of copyright, as you say. It relies on the fact that copyright law prohibits copying of copyrighted works, unless a license grants you some rights to do so. This has nothing to do with whether the code is "published" or not - merely that it is subject to copyright protection. If it is copyrighted, a GPL license can be issued for it. Of course, as soon as you make it available to others, it is published really, so this discussion makes no practical difference to the GPL.
I think we are basically in agreement, except that, in the UK at least, copyright protection is not dependent on some notion of prior publication.
You seem to be confusing copyright and patent law.
Copyright is automatically owned by the creator (or whoever the rights are sold to). There is no need to apply for copyright; it is automatic. The work is not public domain until copyright expires. There is no obligation to publish a copyrighted work. If the artist chooses not to sell their rights, they still have copyright. Copyright grants a time-limited monopoly on making copies of the work. You cannot violate copyright if you have never had a copy, even if you accidentally produce something very similar. You can say the same things as someone else's copyrighted work, and that work will be your copyright. It's all about a particular expression of something.
Patent law is all about making knowledge about methods of doing something publicly available as a condition of acquiring a patent, in return for which a time-limited monopoly on exploiting that idea is granted to the patent holder. You have to apply for a patent; it is not automatic. You can violate a patent even if you have never heard of it before, or you expressed the ideas in the patent differently. The concepts in the patent are what matter, not their mode of expression.
Yes, I could care less. When my Sony Trinitron TV finally died about 3 years ago, I got one of these new-fangled 16:9 ratio TVs. Of course, all the content being broadcast in the UK is still basically 4:3.
For a while I got all excited about building a PVR system too, until I realised that the technology was more interesting than the TV content.
I will probably buy a Ultra-Blu-XD10000 (ZD-ready) 256:81 thingy in about another 10 years. Hopefully most broadcasts will be in HD by then.
Errr... people have already spent *decades* and *billions* already on this, and they haven't stopped doing it. If we just could spend a few millions / months to resolve this one, it would have already been done.
The evidence in from the last few decades of work by scientists all over this planet strongly suggests that (a) the earth is generally getting warmer naturally and (b) humans are accelerating the change. The relative amounts are in dispute, but the amount of warming coming up (no matter from what source) is going to cause us all sorts of trouble, first world or third world.
One simple change we could incentivize that has numerous benefits regardless of the global warming situation is just to use cleaner and more efficient technology. The one initiative Bush seems to like is using food as fuel; one of the few methods that has been shown to be energy-inefficient, water-inefficient and environmentally and socially harmful.
Maybe another 30 years and we'll get politicians who actually pay attention to the scientists - once a few more disasters make doing something that actually works a political necessity. Or maybe not. One thing is for sure - the pace of change and the effects we have on this planet are outpacing our political institutions ability to do anything about it. At some point we will do something disastrous (if we haven't already) that we cannot recover from. We were damn lucky with the ozone hole, as far as I can tell.
Imposing uniform ontologies on any but the most narrowly defined fields is impossible, and even within those fields nominally standard vocabularies will be used differently by rapidly-dividing "cultural" subgroups within the workers in the field.
I completely agree. This is why I don't see the "semantic web" taking off in the form it's proposed. There are too many viewpoints and there is too little payoff for structuring a vast amount of data just so other people can find it a bit easier, when the vast mass of people don't have a big problem finding the information they want. Specialists on the other hand can benefit a lot, as long as you don't insist on a single ontology.
What doesn't seem to be appreciated is that standardised semantic technologies that support the idea of multiple ontologies, and possibly some kind of trust or reputation system could be very useful for academic work or for high-value data. Pick your own sets of semantic markups for a published work. Create your own, publish it to other people. Combine them, but they still all point at the same source data. For high value data, this would be invaluable and would allow people to keep building on each others work in a way that can be extended by others later. Could be useful in the academic, engineering and scientific worlds.
But it's only really useful if the data is published, and has long-term value. Your average web page, with the life of a housefly, wouldn't benefit from having the ability to accumulate many different ontologies and link them up how you desire. I think that's the essence of it - semantic technology is great for persistent, personalised and highly information-intensive work, not for the mass classification of short-lived data.
Yes, its just a shame about all that eternal suffering for those who aren't saved. Its quite a harsh punishment for his children that get squashed by a falling piano before they repent, or die as babies, or believe in a different religion, or whatever. Couldn't he have come up with something a little more... forgiving?
When Jesus returns, does this mean that there will be no more evil? Is this because we suddenly lose our free will, or just that only the nice people will be left, and they won't be tempted to do evil, because everything will just be provided for them (removes quite a lot of temptation, IMHO).
If I believed in a God, it would not be this one, sorry.
Not too hard to defeat evil if you're omnipotent. Especially since he created it in the first place, right?
So... when do the effects of evil being defeated kick in?