Before this, there was only one thing from Dutch culture that had spread to become universally known: "apartheid". Now we also have this. I am so proud of being a Dutchie, you can't even imagine.
Obama won't run. Not yet. But take heart: Nancy Pelosi will ! So after having had Ségolene Royal elected as PS candidate in France simply "because she is a woman" ( 37% of the French, and 41% of the PS members, according to one major european newspaper !!), we'll have Nancy vs. Hilary. Deepfreeze some of your sperm, and retire with your PS3 in a cabin in Montana.
True. I used to own a ( nice ) car, a Saab. It ran fine, except for some squeaking noise under the plastic cover surrounding the gear stick, close to the handbrake. I found out that hitting it hard, with my full fist, once every 15 minutes would make the noise go away, so smacking that part of my car got hard-wired into my right hand. Then, one day while I was driving on a holiday through Greece, I picked up two *definitely* nice Canadian girls, who were hitchhiking their way through Europe. After 15 minutes or so, I smacked the car as usual, really hard. 15 mins later, again. The girls got silent, and while we stopped by the side of the road for a cup of coffee, I unwillingly overheard them talking to eachother, that I must be a violent guy, maybe even dangerous. One of them came up to me and, nervously, told me that they'd rather go on by themselves.
Being able to do great research in a stimulating environment is not about technology in the first place, nor is it about the formal type of structure you are conducting that research in. As one post said it below, it is about people. It **is** possible to find a privately owned corporation, even small or medium-sized, that will let you do exactly such a thing, simply because there is a good human contact between you and the management / executives. It's about trust. I am speaking from my own experience: a French ( now ) 800-employee tech company let me set up their research department. From scratch, and on a low budget. It was until now the greatest time in my life, professionally speaking. The morale of this story: think outside of the box. Go look for what you want in usual places taking the usual means - and what you'll find will be predictable. Go look for what you want in unusual places, take unusual means - and you'll find unusual things.
Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem - necnon voluptatem ( Ockam's razor, hack #3254.1 )
I live and work as a free-lancer in Italy, where it is *normal* for me and *expected* by people in the corporations I work for that I wear button-collar shirts, a tie and -- very, very important in Italy -- polished, leather shoes. But I am of Dutch nationality. If I did the same thing in the Netherlands, I'd be looked upon as a pushy, haughty would-be yup. There, people would rather expect me to turn up in black-not-too-new-jeans, a polo shirt, and converse-style shoes. And when I did my own project at the university of Cairo, Egypt ? I went to work in khakis and a wide-open cotton shirt-with-long-sleeves. I don't know about Australia. But this shows that even within Europe there are huge differences, while in Egypt - if you don't want to be buggered about your dressing style - you need to be conformist. Up to a certain degree. I have heard from other people that Lebanon, for resident europeans, is even worse.
...can an intelligent republic like the USA become ? To the european that I am, this sounds and looks ridiculous. Is there no intelligent ( probably a Democrat ) American politician who can stand up and underscore the ridiculous, resource-wasting character of this project ?
Intentionality doesnot necessarily require what you call "thought". Even thought can be considered as imaginary as "soul" without loss of descriptive power.
Can you write such a program ? Then *write it* and post it here, so we can discuss it !
Certainly intentionality is provable in a virus. Observing its environment - in a rudimentary way - it takes decisions about where ( in which host cell ) to multiply, after having injected its DNA. The intention = "multiplying itself". This is the goal at the end of a chain of actions. It "wants" to achieve that. And does it, deciding about the where and when. THAT is what intention is about.
I am not on about noos, pneuma, anima or soul. That is outside the scope of this discussion. I am on about intentionality.
There is something these people ( and other would-be Dr. Faust ) overlook. IT was clearly pointed out by John Searle that not only intelligence, but all life distinguishes itself from what is not alive by something called "intentionality". Even a virus has that. "Explained as if to a 4-year old", as Denzel Washington does it in "Philadelphia", this means that everything alive adds a purpose to any of its actions, from the virus up to the human being. As long as you havenot created something which provably *acts* in an intentional way, you only have a machine, and not life.
Now one might argue that these people, as a matter of fact, *do* have an intentionality to put into their new form of life: making money for them.
This is sad, really sad. Let an absolute idiot like Mr. Bush ( who not only cannot save the USA's problems, but is part of the problem himself ) steer a bunch of steerless, underbudgeted engineers in the way of demagogy, and this is what you get. These guys must have been desperate in order to put this up on their website.
Syracuse is a splendid natural harbor on the Ionian sea ( the Sicilian part ). Quite often, the sea is as smooth as oil over there, especially in the summer months. This *may* factor out wave movement.
I read this in one of Europe's least recommendable newspapers yesterday at lunch: the Italian edition of the International Herald Tribune, a poor subclass of an already bad newspaper: the New York Times. I didnot see anything coming from either Sun or Google, nor any comments from Microsoft.
This way of presenting unconfirmed information - at its best a minor news item, at worst a hoax - like big business news seems quite typical for the internet age and may be resumed by the paradigm "It's reliable, as it's on more than one spot on the internet !" Observed the same attitude with my 14-year old stepdaughter: when she pulls something from the internet for school work, she ****never*** ( like in ever ) checks it.
Serious journalism seemds dead, or dying.
Re:As small a business as you can find...
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 1
I agree. I have been working both for major corporations and small / tiny businesses. The small / tiny ones were FAR more rewarding to work for. And it is there, I feel, or rather: through them, that I left a mark, however tiny, within my own field ( software design ).
Even more rewarding: after doing nothing - NOTHING, just traveling around and studying and working on a private project - I began my own, one-man business. In a country reputed "difficult" for business: Italy ( Tuscany ). I called the business Ursa Maior. Every euro I earn, I really have to sweat for.
And I love it.
-- non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem -- necnon voluptatem
No. Rather for a semitic language, like Arabic, Hebrew ( Ivrit ) or one of the old ones like neo-babylonian, also called chaldew. Semitic languages do have simplicity
But... Latin ?. The grammar, syntax and spelling of Latin are not THAT rational - only computer languages have such rational grammar, syntax and spelling.
Finally, both Latin and semitic languages will give problems to any grammar checker. Language - especially context - is ALSO about something called intentionality, and AI simply doesnot know that.
... I sign my code. As when I was in a team which wrote that large network monitoring application in Java, and we made an applet version of its client. The applet needed to write.tmp files on the user's HD, so we tweaked the SecurityManager, and signed the whole thing.
BUT -- and I insist upon the BUT --- we had tech-savvy users, who knew about code signing. Who KNEW that this was not about absence of bugs, but more about integrity of the coders than about anything else.
Not everyone is blessed with clients who are network admins, able-issimo BOFH and PFY's....
you are right about the hype. For some heavy-duty train-regulation & aeronautics stuff, however, I have been using IOA, a specification-based language:
1) overcome fear and 19th- / 20th century attitudes regarding privacy ( donot forget that, after all, privacy is a relatively recent invention, adopted by the bourgeois Europeans in the 19th century )
2) be transparent, and let ALL your data be open and accessible. Your shopping behavior.
Although attitude 2) seems crazy, in this moment, its adoption on a wide scale would yield a quite massive push for development of new technologies that guard a transparent person from malicious use of his - publicly accessible - data.
...to many submitters of this place. Data cannot be free, or enslaved. Data is public or secret (guarded, shielded, whatever ).
Apart from the silly meaning of "free" in the sense of "gratis", i.e. "not for money", only living beings that have intentionality can be free.
And then something else: there are two ( 2 ) kinds of freedom. The "lower" one is the freedom people are talking about here: freedom FROM, e.g. tyranny, oppression, injustice... There is a higher sort of freedom: freedom TO, e.g to do something, to go somewhere, to love, to hate...
I learned Morse code and used it for 5 years, in the French Foreign Legion, from remote places like Chad, the Centrafrican Republic and the Kerguelen islands. We sent all kind of stuff ( remember telling a guy in the desert he had become a father of twins... ) up to banking checks etc. HF, more particularly SSB or Single Side Band on HF, is great for emergencies, and for places and / or circumstances in which even the phone net is down or inexistent. And we all know that these places and circumstances still are plenty, also in our times. HF is especially very, very noise-resilient and, indeed, may travel the entire world. I remember picking up a private chat with a guy back home in California, of some officer on the USS Lincoln which was 1000s of miles away, while I was on an island in the Indian Ocean. Quite amusing.
And all that is reason enough to keep the combination ( HF + Morse ) going.
Slashdot Mirror
That first wall looks like the wall of St Bavo in Haarlem. And that first guy looks like **me**. Really. I want my 15 minutes of fame. Now.
Before this, there was only one thing from Dutch culture that had spread to become universally known: "apartheid". Now we also have this. I am so proud of being a Dutchie, you can't even imagine.
Scott Adams'blog post and all the comments here make me think... why doesn't someone start an open-source religion ? Seriously.
:-P
As a buddhist I could fully embrace it, as there would be nothing to embrace
Obama won't run. Not yet. But take heart: Nancy Pelosi will ! So after having had Ségolene Royal elected as PS candidate in France simply "because she is a woman" ( 37% of the French, and 41% of the PS members, according to one major european newspaper !!), we'll have Nancy vs. Hilary. Deepfreeze some of your sperm, and retire with your PS3 in a cabin in Montana.
...some scientific news to really drool about
True. I used to own a ( nice ) car, a Saab. It ran fine, except for some squeaking noise under the plastic cover surrounding the gear stick, close to the handbrake. I found out that hitting it hard, with my full fist, once every 15 minutes would make the noise go away, so smacking that part of my car got hard-wired into my right hand. Then, one day while I was driving on a holiday through Greece, I picked up two *definitely* nice Canadian girls, who were hitchhiking their way through Europe. After 15 minutes or so, I smacked the car as usual, really hard. 15 mins later, again. The girls got silent, and while we stopped by the side of the road for a cup of coffee, I unwillingly overheard them talking to eachother, that I must be a violent guy, maybe even dangerous. One of them came up to me and, nervously, told me that they'd rather go on by themselves.
I should have hit myself that day, not the car.
As Zen master Eihei Dôgen Daiôshô ( 1200 - 1253 AD ) already put it:
"Mere lack of doubt does not imply understanding"
( "Uji", paragraph #2, in: Shôbogenzô )
Being able to do great research in a stimulating environment is not about technology in the first place, nor is it about the formal type of structure you are conducting that research in. As one post said it below, it is about people. It **is** possible to find a privately owned corporation, even small or medium-sized, that will let you do exactly such a thing, simply because there is a good human contact between you and the management / executives. It's about trust. I am speaking from my own experience: a French ( now ) 800-employee tech company let me set up their research department. From scratch, and on a low budget. It was until now the greatest time in my life, professionally speaking. The morale of this story: think outside of the box. Go look for what you want in usual places taking the usual means - and what you'll find will be predictable. Go look for what you want in unusual places, take unusual means - and you'll find unusual things.
Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem - necnon voluptatem
( Ockam's razor, hack #3254.1 )
These things are heavily culturally determined.
I live and work as a free-lancer in Italy, where it is *normal* for me and *expected* by people in the corporations I work for that I wear button-collar shirts, a tie and -- very, very important in Italy -- polished, leather shoes. But I am of Dutch nationality. If I did the same thing in the Netherlands, I'd be looked upon as a pushy, haughty would-be yup. There, people would rather expect me to turn up in black-not-too-new-jeans, a polo shirt, and converse-style shoes. And when I did my own project at the university of Cairo, Egypt ? I went to work in khakis and a wide-open cotton shirt-with-long-sleeves. I don't know about Australia. But this shows that even within Europe there are huge differences, while in Egypt - if you don't want to be buggered about your dressing style - you need to be conformist. Up to a certain degree. I have heard from other people that Lebanon, for resident europeans, is even worse.
These were my 2 cents. Now does that make a sig ?
...can an intelligent republic like the USA become ? To the european that I am, this sounds and looks ridiculous. Is there no intelligent ( probably a Democrat ) American politician who can stand up and underscore the ridiculous, resource-wasting character of this project ?
Sheesh.
>>my sig is better than yours, forcibly
I KNEW it !! Always thought that my ex-fiancee was a hooker !!
Intentionality doesnot necessarily require what you call "thought". Even thought can be considered as imaginary as "soul" without loss of descriptive power.
Can you write such a program ? Then *write it* and post it here, so we can discuss it !
Certainly intentionality is provable in a virus. Observing its environment - in a rudimentary way - it takes decisions about where ( in which host cell ) to multiply, after having injected its DNA. The intention = "multiplying itself". This is the goal at the end of a chain of actions. It "wants" to achieve that. And does it, deciding about the where and when. THAT is what intention is about.
I am not on about noos, pneuma, anima or soul. That is outside the scope of this discussion. I am on about intentionality.
There is something these people ( and other would-be Dr. Faust ) overlook. IT was clearly pointed out by John Searle that not only intelligence, but all life distinguishes itself from what is not alive by something called "intentionality". Even a virus has that. "Explained as if to a 4-year old", as Denzel Washington does it in "Philadelphia", this means that everything alive adds a purpose to any of its actions, from the virus up to the human being. As long as you havenot created something which provably *acts* in an intentional way, you only have a machine, and not life.
Now one might argue that these people, as a matter of fact, *do* have an intentionality to put into their new form of life: making money for them.
And that is just sad. Narrow-minded and sad.
This is sad, really sad. Let an absolute idiot like Mr. Bush ( who not only cannot save the USA's problems, but is part of the problem himself ) steer a bunch of steerless, underbudgeted engineers in the way of demagogy, and this is what you get. These guys must have been desperate in order to put this up on their website.
Syracuse is a splendid natural harbor on the Ionian sea ( the Sicilian part ). Quite often, the sea is as smooth as oil over there, especially in the summer months. This *may* factor out wave movement.
Don't think you can learn programming from reading - even from something as useful as the IEEE Magazine or Dr. Dobb's.
The only way you can really *learn* is: rolling up your sleeves, getting hard at it, making the unavoidable errors, consulting other programmers.
Try to get yourself mentored by a senior engineer.
Most of all: love what you do ! ( Otherwise, you might as well become a milkman or a state welfare employee )
I read this in one of Europe's least recommendable newspapers yesterday at lunch: the Italian edition of the International Herald Tribune, a poor subclass of an already bad newspaper: the New York Times. I didnot see anything coming from either Sun or Google, nor any comments from Microsoft.
This way of presenting unconfirmed information - at its best a minor news item, at worst a hoax - like big business news seems quite typical for the internet age and may be resumed by the paradigm "It's reliable, as it's on more than one spot on the internet !" Observed the same attitude with my 14-year old stepdaughter: when she pulls something from the internet for school work, she ****never*** ( like in ever ) checks it.
Serious journalism seemds dead, or dying.
I agree. I have been working both for major corporations and small / tiny businesses. The small / tiny ones were FAR more rewarding to work for. And it is there, I feel, or rather: through them, that I left a mark, however tiny, within my own field ( software design ).
Even more rewarding: after doing nothing - NOTHING, just traveling around and studying and working on a private project - I began my own, one-man business. In a country reputed "difficult" for business: Italy ( Tuscany ). I called the business Ursa Maior. Every euro I earn, I really have to sweat for.
And I love it.
-- non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem -- necnon voluptatem
No. Rather for a semitic language, like Arabic, Hebrew ( Ivrit ) or one of the old ones like neo-babylonian, also called chaldew. Semitic languages do have simplicity
... Latin ?. The grammar, syntax and spelling of Latin are not THAT rational - only computer languages have such rational grammar, syntax and spelling.
But
Finally, both Latin and semitic languages will give problems to any grammar checker. Language - especially context - is ALSO about something called intentionality, and AI simply doesnot know that.
... I sign my code. As when I was in a team which wrote that large network monitoring application in Java, and we made an applet version of its client. The applet needed to write .tmp files on the user's HD, so we tweaked the SecurityManager, and signed the whole thing.
BUT -- and I insist upon the BUT --- we had tech-savvy users, who knew about code signing. Who KNEW that this was not about absence of bugs, but more about integrity of the coders than about anything else.
Not everyone is blessed with clients who are network admins, able-issimo BOFH and PFY's....
Frans,
g uage.html.
you are right about the hype. For some heavy-duty train-regulation & aeronautics stuff, however, I have been using IOA, a specification-based language:
http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu:8001/~garland/ioaLan
You may find this interesting.
It's simple, really:
1) overcome fear and 19th- / 20th century attitudes regarding privacy ( donot forget that, after all, privacy is a relatively recent invention, adopted by the bourgeois Europeans in the 19th century )
2) be transparent, and let ALL your data be open and accessible. Your shopping behavior.
Although attitude 2) seems crazy, in this moment, its adoption on a wide scale would yield a quite massive push for development of new technologies that guard a transparent person from malicious use of his - publicly accessible - data.
...to many submitters of this place. Data cannot be free, or enslaved. Data is public or secret (guarded, shielded, whatever ).
Apart from the silly meaning of "free" in the sense of "gratis", i.e. "not for money", only living beings that have intentionality can be free.
And then something else: there are two ( 2 ) kinds of freedom. The "lower" one is the freedom people are talking about here: freedom FROM, e.g. tyranny, oppression, injustice... There is a higher sort of freedom: freedom TO, e.g to do something, to go somewhere, to love, to hate...
I learned Morse code and used it for 5 years, in the French Foreign Legion, from remote places like Chad, the Centrafrican Republic and the Kerguelen islands. We sent all kind of stuff ( remember telling a guy in the desert he had become a father of twins... ) up to banking checks etc. HF, more particularly SSB or Single Side Band on HF, is great for emergencies, and for places and / or circumstances in which even the phone net is down or inexistent. And we all know that these places and circumstances still are plenty, also in our times. HF is especially very, very noise-resilient and, indeed, may travel the entire world. I remember picking up a private chat with a guy back home in California, of some officer on the USS Lincoln which was 1000s of miles away, while I was on an island in the Indian Ocean. Quite amusing.
And all that is reason enough to keep the combination ( HF + Morse ) going.