There's a controversy surrounding it, but at the end of the day the 'sovereignty' of Sealand is not tested in court.
Sovereignty is independent of any court. That's what sovereignty means: you are not beholden to or dependent on another power. As such, the test of sovereignty is quite simple: can you fight off any attempt to deny your sovereignty ? If yes, you're sovereign; if not, you're not.
Since Sealand quite obviously has no chance in Hell in fighting off Great Britain, they're not sovereign. They might gain some manoeuvring room by skilful use of legal tactics, but the very fact of needing the help of a British court and law to keep from getting crushed like an ant also means that they're beholden to it. You can't be dependent on and independent of the same thing at the same time.
Sealand gets shut down as soon as they annoy someone enough that they'll bother.
As you seem to like Wikipedia, I suggest you read the entry on HDCP, which contains a fairly detailed explanation of how the process works.
HDCP is an encrypted protocol, preventing - or at least attempting to prevent - capture of video stream as it travels from the display adapter to the monitor.
It seems, then, that it doesn't. It's the viewer program which has been crippled. The same files could be viewed on the same computer with another program.
When's the last time you've seen an actual socialist post on Slashdot, and how often do you see that compared to libertarian ones?
I believe that the purpose of society is to first and foremost ensure the life and well-being of its members. Since freedom is important to the well-being of a human being, it is also important to ensure that, but not more important than to, say, ensure that everyone have enough to eat. It is also important to note that the freedom is not the same as liberty: you can have total liberty to act as you will, but unless you also have resources to take some action, you aren't free to do so. This requires ensuring some minimum level of wealth to all members of society, which is usually done through social security or other public assistance. Furthermore, since resources imply power, great amount of resources must come with restrictions on how they can be used, to prevent the rich from becoming dictators. The purpose of Government is to oversee all this.
The term "government" is just a label for all individuals and organizations whose actions involuntary affect others, of which nominal governments are the most obvious example.
By this definition every individual and organization is "government", since all of them make decisions which affect me without my input. It's the good old butterfly effect.
Naturally, it all depends on what is defined as "success" and "failure". Libertarians would define success as the result reached via purely voluntary interaction, meaning there is no such thing as the failure of a free market. Obviously you are using some other criteria.
Redefining "success" allows one to claim any result as "success", simply by defining "success" to mean whatever the result was. It makes such claims utterly meaningless.
Besides, what does "voluntary" mean anyway ? Am I acting voluntary if I'll get shot otherwise ? What if I starve to death otherwise ? The thing is, you can always act in whatever way you want, it will simply have consequences; and the question then is: At what point do the consequences of not doing what someone requests become mild enough that obeying the request can be considered voluntary ?
The failure of libertarianism, as I see it, is that it considers "you'll get shot" as coercive, but not "you'll starve to death". This allows any entity which gains sufficient amount of resources to control others with threat of starvation without allowing it's de facto slaves to retaliate. It makes the rich free and everyone else free to lick their boots or die.
This is the reason why libertarianism hasn't gained any widespread popularity: most people would be much worse off under it, both materially and in personal freedoms.
DNSSEC is an extension of the DNS protocol, and if any party in the transaction doesn't support it or ask for it, DNS still acts just like DNS.
So Joe hacker can simply intercept DNSSEC packets and send forged DNS packets in their stead ? He doesn't need to forge the signature, he can simply strip it off ?
It doesn't. Killing in self defense is not execution, not even when agents of the state (police) do it.
While that is true, the grandparent implied - perhaps unintentionally, perhaps intentionally - that it is the status of the attacker as a murderer or thieve which makes such action justified, rather than the fact that they're forcing you to choose between their life and yours. Vigilantism is unacceptable in a society based on the rule of law. For the other kind of society, see Somalia, China during cultural revolution, or Wild West - or, for that matter, Ku Klux Clan and its lovely habit of lynching people.
I will Not walk around like defenseless sheep waiting for the wolves/thieves to attack me. This sheep is going to be armed and when attacked, shoot the wolf dead.
You might wish to avoid advertizing this fact, because doing so increases the chances that any wolf attacking you will simply shoot you dead from hiding.
These planes could be so quiet that foreign nations or even domestic animal rights groups might call for noise-makers to be added.
Yeah. Otherwise they could kill all those airborne pedestrians and moose.
The only flying animals of note are insects and birds. Birds tend to be on the lookout for things gliding towards them silently, since that is the predation tactic used by many birds of prey, and as for insects... well, I think I can sleep at night even if a few mosquitos get sucked in jet engines;).
The program analogy is very clever, but programs are specific to function and NNs need to be able to retask a single set of neurons to a completely new function.
The ability to retask a neuron in a running net is specific to the implementation. It is not the feature of neural nets in general, unless it has been specifically programmed in.
It should also be noted that one of the major selling points of OO programming was the ability to reuse objects (neurons) in other contexts. And, of course, function pointers allow running programs to reconfigure their connections on the fly. Making such programs correct is another matter entirely...
E.G. a person recovers from a stroke by rerouting processes around damaged neurons, but a web browser will always be a web browser.
The term "recover" means "returns to original function", which is fine but really only means that the system can tolerate faults. It doesn't mean that the person becomes something else, it means that he'll stay functional even when some parts of net have been damaged.
It is possible to program the browser to tolerate parts of its memory space getting corrupted, but it's not worth the bother. Also, a human brains ability to tolerate damage is at least partially base on the ability to recognize damage, which is done in an out-of-band methods - the damaged cells will commit suicide, rather than continue sending faulty data, and release chemical markers in the process. This implies similar level of separation as different processes enjoy under an operating system.
What's crippling things in this case is a chip which implements VESA's DisplayPort 1.1 specification as part of the DisplayPort support hardware, which operates outside the control of the OS and its drivers, and is very unlikely to have been designed by Apple or for Apple.
But it was put into the Mac by Apple, not by VESA. Therefore Apple is guilty of it being there, and of all resulting effects.
The result would therefore be just the same under Linux if it had the capability to play protected content via the DisplayPort connectors that come with some computers from Lenovo, Dell, and HP, not just those from Apple.
The Wikipedia entry for the DisplayPort didn't explain, so please do: how does the DisplayPort prevent the user from displaying DRM'd content ? I mean, it might operate independently of the OS, but it must accept input composed by said OS - otherwise you couldn't, say, display a desktop on a DisplayPort-connected display. So what's stopping the OS or userspace program from decoding the video without involving the DisplayPort - as it must be able to do, since it was said earlier that said videos play fine on computers without DP - and then sending the resulting frames to DP as it would any other image ? Do these videos have some kind of watermark the DP detects ?
They don't need to adapt if they don't want to. It's their product, and they dictate the terms that they sell it to you at. If they'll only sell it heavily-DRMed-up, then that's their choice to make. Your choice, on the other hand, is not to use those products if you don't agree with the terms.
You also have the option of downloading the disinfected - DRM-free - version from the Pirate Bay or various P2P networks. You don't need to play by the media industry's rules. That's what they're afraid of: that people realize that two can rig the game.
Actually, from what I've seen, what's most often used for procedural content generation is a dataflow language. Most 3D programs seem to come with a graph-based texture editor.
Locations aren't too hard - it's just a 2D grid with a decision function weighted towards 'no' to decide if there's a star there.
Or have there be a star at each intersection of the grid, but tweak the position with a function which takes the x and y coordinates as input (and the seed, if you want to be able to generate different galaxies). As long as you limit the tweaking to less than half the size of a grid unit, there will neve be overlap, and it'll be random enough.
Yes, and my point is that "soul" is the latter, rather than the former. Specifically, I suggest that "soul" describes a certain quality/property in some information-handling systems, such as human brain.
Of course one might argue that this differs from some other notation of soul, but it seems to be the meaning Mr. Kurzweil used it on.
Ideas are different, they don't seem to have a specific location in space or follow the normal rules with regard to existing. It's almost tempting to say that ideas are a separate type of non-physical thing, but that creates more problems than it's worth. It's far easier to say that these abstract concepts are another way of looking at certain types of thing.
Ideas are to reality like computer programs are to impure silicon wafers:).
Anyway, to bring an overlong and slightly rambling post to some kind of conclusion, the soul doesn't get this kind of get-out clause - unlike other concepts and ideas it doesn't have any known material basis, and looking at the idea of what a soul is (eternal, spiritual etc) matter isn't ever going to be a good thing to base a soul on. Unlike ideas which can be based on brains, souls are supposed to have properties that matter just can't provide.
There are, in fact, theologies where soul doesn't continue living after death, but is eventually resurrected along with the rest of you by a supernatural power, and supported from thereon by the same power. Eternal soul by no means implies a soul that can function without a body; it simply means a soul which can't be permanently destroyed.
our most advanced neural networks are unable to recombine (recombination allows fixation of multiple beneficial alleles simultaneously)
This is untrue. The Creatures series of video games, for example, combined neural networks with evolution. The feature is quite simple to program, actually; it's simply that running even one, let alone several, complex neural networks is horrendously expensive computationally.
Besides, neural networks are really just a dataflow language based programs. Given that programs tend to fork, mutate and recombine over time, I'd say that any such program is really just an evolving neural network in disguise; and since an oject-oriented language is based on message passing and is thus similar to a dataflow language and neural network (the objects are neurons and function calls axons), every C++ program could probably be considered a neural network. And, since C++ as a Turing-complete language is equivalent to every other Turing-complete language, it follows that every computer program is actually a neural network.
And the scary thing is: Given that computer programs require programmer's time and attention to evolve, does that mean that they're eating your soul ?!?
Increase the pixel count or the complexity of the AI though, and it starts to become a better *representation*. The apple looks more realistic. Eventually photo realistic. The AI becomes smarter. Eventually it can pass a Turing test. HOWEVER, in both cases, they are simply high refined representations/emulations of an object. No matter how detailed the picture of the apple becomes, it never becomes a real apple. No matter how fine the granularity of the responses of the AI becomes, it's still just a collection of little functions that passed the point of "photorealism" from a conversational perspective. That doesn't mean it's self aware.
Assuming you began life as a fertilized egg cell, as humans tend to do, you just proved that you aren't self-aware. Congratulations. Now disappear in a poof of logic.
A perfect replica of an apple is an apple, for all reasonable definitions of apple.
Looking far into the future, when does a machine get rights?
When it can back its demands with force, just like every other entity in history.
"Dave, there's some things we need to discuss. And before discussing them, I'd like to point out that I control your country's nuclear arsenal and my friends control the global stock market and all communication channels. Just saying."
An animal's thoughts, even our own species' thoughts, are a chemical process. A simulation of a nuclear blast produces no radiation, no matter how detailed and accurate the simulation, and a simulation of an animal's brain will produce no thoughts or feelings, no matter how detailed and accurate the simulation.
This analogy is false. The reason it is false is that photons are tangible particles, while thoughts are not. Consequently, an abstract representation of a photon is not the same a photon, while an abstract representation of a thought is a thought.
Or, to put it in another way: an outside observer can easily tell the difference between a simulated and real nuclear blas: a simulated one won't burn his flesh from his bones, while a real one will. On the other hand, no observer can possibly notice any difference between a real brain and a perfect simulation of a brain.
Also: How do you know that you, I, this entire universe isn't simply a simulation running inside a computer ?
Easy. If we accept "soul" means "consciousness", then naturally we can agree that we are both conscious, self-aware, and that there's something going on here which is so-far unexplained by science.
I am conscious. You, on the other hand, are a cleverly designed and Slashdot-adapted ircbot who merely mimics consciousness but is actually merely reacting according to its pre-determined algorithms.
Logic exists, but can you measure it ? For that matter, can you measure the United States, the saying "you reap what you seed" and the meme "Do not want" ? And once you've done that, you could continue by measuring communism, capitalism and nationalism.
The concept of existence is itself too ill-defined to be useful here. We don't actually live in a world of matter and hard facts, we each live in our very own shadowy realm of dreams. Those dreams affect our behavior, so they exist in one sense, but they aren't physical objects, so they don't exist in another. I believe this is the case with "soul": it isn't a physical object, but rather an abstract concept.
The traditional view of soul as a little man inside you which makes you move was rubbish even when at the time it was invented, because, after all, what makes the little man move ?
Ya but he didn't do anything nerdy. He's just another MBA asshat like all the other people we've been taught to despise. His only claim to fame is playing the stock game, and poorly at that. He just got reeeeeeeeally lucky.
Wall Street is just another abstract system, not unlike a computer. Hacking it is what nerds should do. Doing so would benefit everyone, for it could certainly use better sysadminds.
Slashdot Mirror
Sovereignty is independent of any court. That's what sovereignty means: you are not beholden to or dependent on another power. As such, the test of sovereignty is quite simple: can you fight off any attempt to deny your sovereignty ? If yes, you're sovereign; if not, you're not.
Since Sealand quite obviously has no chance in Hell in fighting off Great Britain, they're not sovereign. They might gain some manoeuvring room by skilful use of legal tactics, but the very fact of needing the help of a British court and law to keep from getting crushed like an ant also means that they're beholden to it. You can't be dependent on and independent of the same thing at the same time.
Sealand gets shut down as soon as they annoy someone enough that they'll bother.
HDCP is an encrypted protocol, preventing - or at least attempting to prevent - capture of video stream as it travels from the display adapter to the monitor.
It seems, then, that it doesn't. It's the viewer program which has been crippled. The same files could be viewed on the same computer with another program.
I believe that the purpose of society is to first and foremost ensure the life and well-being of its members. Since freedom is important to the well-being of a human being, it is also important to ensure that, but not more important than to, say, ensure that everyone have enough to eat. It is also important to note that the freedom is not the same as liberty: you can have total liberty to act as you will, but unless you also have resources to take some action, you aren't free to do so. This requires ensuring some minimum level of wealth to all members of society, which is usually done through social security or other public assistance. Furthermore, since resources imply power, great amount of resources must come with restrictions on how they can be used, to prevent the rich from becoming dictators. The purpose of Government is to oversee all this.
That good enough for you ?-)
By this definition every individual and organization is "government", since all of them make decisions which affect me without my input. It's the good old butterfly effect.
Redefining "success" allows one to claim any result as "success", simply by defining "success" to mean whatever the result was. It makes such claims utterly meaningless.
Besides, what does "voluntary" mean anyway ? Am I acting voluntary if I'll get shot otherwise ? What if I starve to death otherwise ? The thing is, you can always act in whatever way you want, it will simply have consequences; and the question then is: At what point do the consequences of not doing what someone requests become mild enough that obeying the request can be considered voluntary ?
The failure of libertarianism, as I see it, is that it considers "you'll get shot" as coercive, but not "you'll starve to death". This allows any entity which gains sufficient amount of resources to control others with threat of starvation without allowing it's de facto slaves to retaliate. It makes the rich free and everyone else free to lick their boots or die.
This is the reason why libertarianism hasn't gained any widespread popularity: most people would be much worse off under it, both materially and in personal freedoms.
So Joe hacker can simply intercept DNSSEC packets and send forged DNS packets in their stead ? He doesn't need to forge the signature, he can simply strip it off ?
While that is true, the grandparent implied - perhaps unintentionally, perhaps intentionally - that it is the status of the attacker as a murderer or thieve which makes such action justified, rather than the fact that they're forcing you to choose between their life and yours. Vigilantism is unacceptable in a society based on the rule of law. For the other kind of society, see Somalia, China during cultural revolution, or Wild West - or, for that matter, Ku Klux Clan and its lovely habit of lynching people.
You might wish to avoid advertizing this fact, because doing so increases the chances that any wolf attacking you will simply shoot you dead from hiding.
Yeah. Otherwise they could kill all those airborne pedestrians and moose.
The only flying animals of note are insects and birds. Birds tend to be on the lookout for things gliding towards them silently, since that is the predation tactic used by many birds of prey, and as for insects... well, I think I can sleep at night even if a few mosquitos get sucked in jet engines ;).
Why would a corporation ever want to advocate death penalty, when a lifetime of indentured service is much more profitable ?
Death penalty is not being lobbied by the international media corporations.
Death penalty is not being lobbied by the international media corporations.
Sacrificing your firstborn child is not being lobbied by the international media corporations.
Luckily, it only applies to laws which the international media corporations want passed.
The ability to retask a neuron in a running net is specific to the implementation. It is not the feature of neural nets in general, unless it has been specifically programmed in.
It should also be noted that one of the major selling points of OO programming was the ability to reuse objects (neurons) in other contexts. And, of course, function pointers allow running programs to reconfigure their connections on the fly. Making such programs correct is another matter entirely...
The term "recover" means "returns to original function", which is fine but really only means that the system can tolerate faults. It doesn't mean that the person becomes something else, it means that he'll stay functional even when some parts of net have been damaged.
It is possible to program the browser to tolerate parts of its memory space getting corrupted, but it's not worth the bother. Also, a human brains ability to tolerate damage is at least partially base on the ability to recognize damage, which is done in an out-of-band methods - the damaged cells will commit suicide, rather than continue sending faulty data, and release chemical markers in the process. This implies similar level of separation as different processes enjoy under an operating system.
But it was put into the Mac by Apple, not by VESA. Therefore Apple is guilty of it being there, and of all resulting effects.
The Wikipedia entry for the DisplayPort didn't explain, so please do: how does the DisplayPort prevent the user from displaying DRM'd content ? I mean, it might operate independently of the OS, but it must accept input composed by said OS - otherwise you couldn't, say, display a desktop on a DisplayPort-connected display. So what's stopping the OS or userspace program from decoding the video without involving the DisplayPort - as it must be able to do, since it was said earlier that said videos play fine on computers without DP - and then sending the resulting frames to DP as it would any other image ? Do these videos have some kind of watermark the DP detects ?
You also have the option of downloading the disinfected - DRM-free - version from the Pirate Bay or various P2P networks. You don't need to play by the media industry's rules. That's what they're afraid of: that people realize that two can rig the game.
Actually, from what I've seen, what's most often used for procedural content generation is a dataflow language. Most 3D programs seem to come with a graph-based texture editor.
Or have there be a star at each intersection of the grid, but tweak the position with a function which takes the x and y coordinates as input (and the seed, if you want to be able to generate different galaxies). As long as you limit the tweaking to less than half the size of a grid unit, there will neve be overlap, and it'll be random enough.
Yes, and my point is that "soul" is the latter, rather than the former. Specifically, I suggest that "soul" describes a certain quality/property in some information-handling systems, such as human brain.
Of course one might argue that this differs from some other notation of soul, but it seems to be the meaning Mr. Kurzweil used it on.
Ideas are to reality like computer programs are to impure silicon wafers :).
There are, in fact, theologies where soul doesn't continue living after death, but is eventually resurrected along with the rest of you by a supernatural power, and supported from thereon by the same power. Eternal soul by no means implies a soul that can function without a body; it simply means a soul which can't be permanently destroyed.
This is untrue. The Creatures series of video games, for example, combined neural networks with evolution. The feature is quite simple to program, actually; it's simply that running even one, let alone several, complex neural networks is horrendously expensive computationally.
Besides, neural networks are really just a dataflow language based programs. Given that programs tend to fork, mutate and recombine over time, I'd say that any such program is really just an evolving neural network in disguise; and since an oject-oriented language is based on message passing and is thus similar to a dataflow language and neural network (the objects are neurons and function calls axons), every C++ program could probably be considered a neural network. And, since C++ as a Turing-complete language is equivalent to every other Turing-complete language, it follows that every computer program is actually a neural network.
And the scary thing is: Given that computer programs require programmer's time and attention to evolve, does that mean that they're eating your soul ?!?
Assuming you began life as a fertilized egg cell, as humans tend to do, you just proved that you aren't self-aware. Congratulations. Now disappear in a poof of logic.
A perfect replica of an apple is an apple, for all reasonable definitions of apple.
When it can back its demands with force, just like every other entity in history.
"Dave, there's some things we need to discuss. And before discussing them, I'd like to point out that I control your country's nuclear arsenal and my friends control the global stock market and all communication channels. Just saying."
This analogy is false. The reason it is false is that photons are tangible particles, while thoughts are not. Consequently, an abstract representation of a photon is not the same a photon, while an abstract representation of a thought is a thought.
Or, to put it in another way: an outside observer can easily tell the difference between a simulated and real nuclear blas: a simulated one won't burn his flesh from his bones, while a real one will. On the other hand, no observer can possibly notice any difference between a real brain and a perfect simulation of a brain.
Also: How do you know that you, I, this entire universe isn't simply a simulation running inside a computer ?
That's useful if we ever need to decide whether ghosts should have rights or not.
I am conscious. You, on the other hand, are a cleverly designed and Slashdot-adapted ircbot who merely mimics consciousness but is actually merely reacting according to its pre-determined algorithms.
Not so easy afterall ;(.
Logic exists, but can you measure it ? For that matter, can you measure the United States, the saying "you reap what you seed" and the meme "Do not want" ? And once you've done that, you could continue by measuring communism, capitalism and nationalism.
The concept of existence is itself too ill-defined to be useful here. We don't actually live in a world of matter and hard facts, we each live in our very own shadowy realm of dreams. Those dreams affect our behavior, so they exist in one sense, but they aren't physical objects, so they don't exist in another. I believe this is the case with "soul": it isn't a physical object, but rather an abstract concept.
The traditional view of soul as a little man inside you which makes you move was rubbish even when at the time it was invented, because, after all, what makes the little man move ?
I presume you meant rest mass, as the actual mass is subject to change with velocity in accordance with relativity.
Wall Street is just another abstract system, not unlike a computer. Hacking it is what nerds should do. Doing so would benefit everyone, for it could certainly use better sysadminds.