only chemical machines have feelings. Just ask your VCR.
I asked a VCR whether it has any feelings and it suddenly started playing an old porn movie. I guess it meant to tell me to fsck off and stop asking personal questions. Don't know, maybe it really meant that it can feel horny... Or maybe it was just a gremlin in the machine. But who can really know what a freakin VCR feels?
This implies that the ERH (External Reality Hypothesis) is wrong (and it follows logically that the MUH, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, may also be wrong). But then we don't live in the same reality as dolphins, whales, ants, pigeons, cats, snails, trees, grass, or viruses (if these tiny things are what we call life - in fact they look more like genetic material without a host, and curiously their sole purpose seems to be to find a host, which probably implies that genetic material in general in all organisms is some sort of parasitic squatter). These creatures experience very different things than us. Whales and birds are expert in 3D reasoning (while us humans we tend to think in left-right rather than up-down-left-right). Ants probably regard pheromones as one of the most important part of their reality. Snails probably know more than you about plants. Grass surely has complete knowledge in how it feels to be walked over by smelly human feet every day. Different sensory organs and different mental setups result in different perceptions of reality. But if the reality is what you experience, then the realities of a human and a whale are different, or even we could say that different realities exist between two humans with different senses (eg a deaf and blind), so there must be many realities? And if there are many realities, then how can communication take place between these realities? Occam would probably freak out and threaten us with his big razor if we hinted at multiple realities, one for each set of sensory organs and mental wireups.
Maybe there is just one reality and we experience it differently because of different sensory organs. The problem is then, that we really do not know what reality really truly is. We have eyes for the shades but not for the light. We can hypothesise that reality is the dream of a god, the simulation of an alien race, the self-aware mathematical stuff in a fractal abyss of equations and fractions, or whatever, but in the end we don't even have the slightest idea of what the hell we are talking about.
Do you kill a life every time you breathe or you walk down the street? Take a microscope. There are tiny creatures everywhere. Some of them get hurt while you breathe or when your shoes cause some water in the street to be dropped away and dry up. You need a microscope to see them. They are perfectly alive creatures, they eat, they run away from predators, and they catch their food. Yet, they are completely undetectable to you without a microscope. A new sensory capability created by technology broadened your horizons of your reality. This is a strong argument in support of the ERH.
Do you kill a self-aware mathematical structure every time you shut down your computer? Nobody really knows with 100% certainty... until someone proves that self-aware mathematical structures cannot exist, in which case we can safely continue shutting off our PCs, or invents a device that expands our view of the cosmos and allows us to actually see that there is some kind of life or consciousness inside the beige box our technology created (or even everywhere around us and inside us and above us) in which case people who want to be perfectly ethical with no sense of practicality will probably declare bankruptcy after heightened electricity bills (and some could say this would be evolution at works, others could argue that it was the revenge of the mathematical stuff, while some sim philosophers would probably profess that everything is a simulation so we shouldn't take reality seriously).
There's no point trying to make it any more complicated than that.
Discoveries begin with questions, and questions need creativity and out of the box thinking. Taking reality as an unquestionable truth according to some sort of "common sense" criteria means we lose the chance to discover something about it... If your reality is that we live in a universe ruled by a god whose rele
One could very well use a fork, however. Do we really know anything for sure? We may choose to ignore some things or develop sets of rules to explain the reality, but is there anyone on this planet or anywhere that has even the slightest idea what the reality is?
This is good, but few people pay any attention to the other great danger beneath our feet: The earth's magma.
There are many supervolcanoes waiting to happen. With extreme volcanism, much of the life on earth can die. Some people have got the idea that a volcano can destroy an island or a small region, but few people realise that the whole planet (or more specifically its atmosphere, which is what we need most) is in danger of supervolcanoes, and that these phenomena happen from time to time (and we have no way to surely know when the next will hit, it literally hapens under our noses and we know nothing).
We may be able to somehow deorbit a small asteroid, but what about our very own planet? How could we manage all this magma under the ground? We literally live on small islands floating a boiling abyss. We know very well that there are good probabilities that many or all of us will sometime die when some of the boiling magma gets out in a huge explosion and toxicates our delicate atmosphere and hides the sun for years. Yet, there is no public discussion on this topic, no one seems to care, a few smart people have noticed that asteroids must be somehow managed, but I haven't seen many people realising that our very own planet is also a threat that must be somehow managed.
And do you think that you are not a machine and that you have feelings? And if so how do you know this?
How can you be so sure that the mathematical entities inside your beige box computer are not self-aware? How can you know that they don't scream when you shut the computer off and are not reborn when you grant them electrical current the next morning?
You don't really know this for absolutely sure, do you? Then how can you claim so easily that something is only a machine and has no feelings when you don't even known whether you are a machine, and whether what you call your feelings are nothing more than simulated or mathematical constructs that you perceive as feelings?
Unfortunately I have witnessed cases where historic mainframes were dumped in empty land with no special consideration. It is a direct insult to the engineers who built these wonderful machines to dump them like normal trash without some sign of respect. Old computing parts should be sent to museums, not dumped like trash.
Democracy can work only if the people are smart. If the electorate is stupid*, it gets what it deserves. The problem is, with stupid people any system is doomed to fail, not just democracy. So any system will fail if the people are stupid. No system is immune to the stupidity of the people. Even in an autocracy with a philosopher-king taking perfect decisions for society, stupid people would still find ways to destroy his insightful policies. Therefore the solution is to use whatever system is the most popular or already implemented, as long as it enables change (for example, democracy allows you to change things because you can set up a political party and let people vote for you, so democracy is a good system, but other systems are not only subjected to the stupidity of the people but also structurally disallow any change from taking place, for example communism is a bad system because only a central single party has control so change is difficult or impossible), and sit down and try to educate the people and make them capable of taking informed decisions. For example, one could set up a charity and teach people how to think critically, how to question what they hear, and how to properly evaluate the effects of various policies. There are direct links between democracy and education, and by improving people's understanding of the world and themselves and the way they think, we can actually make democracy work better (in the sense that more educated people will make more intelligent choices while voting, and more educated people will mean more political candidates and parties with sound and wise policies). The problem, of course, is that our technology has not found a device (yet) to get an uneducated kid and fill its brain with all the knowledge and wisdom the society has accumulated over thousands of years. Education is done in slow methods and takes decades. Some technologies (eg the Internet) can speed up one's ability to get knowledge, but it still takes years until a person can be said to be knowledgeable and in the position to take informed decisions for the betterment of themselves and of society (let's say a politician suggests to vote for them because they will build a nuclear station... how will you evaluate this if you don't know the pros and cons? You will have to sit down and read a lot to understand what nuclear is about and then take a decision - or rather this is how it should work, because nowadays people take voting decisions based on the looks of the politician or on whether they can make witty jokes on TV). So, we can see that while democracy is directly affected by the electorate's education, it is only technology that can speed up the acquisition of knowledge by the electorate, therefore this means that better technology can lead to better democracy. If an engineer devises some apparatus to instantly copy a library's books into a kid's brain, then this could result in perfect democracy within a lifetime*.
* There is a caveat: I assume that smart people are ethical by default. That's my position, but of course one could argue that intelligence and ethics are unrelated or even negatively proportional. And of course one could also point out that there is no good definition of ethics. There are some other caveats as well: I also assume that one becomes smarter with more knowledge acquisition, and that rules of sound reasoning can be taught.
And the president using his new counter-terrorism law dubbed I.O.W.N.Y.O.U. enacted a ban on any research on the dangerous internets and their evil series of tubes, because as he said they are full of pornography and therefore a danger to the innocent unborn. The vice president later suggested to use all jobless researchers as forced labour for the new human missions to Alpha Centauri, which are of course relying on the space infrastructure of an otherwise very democratic dictatorship run by a former KGBer. People in the free world over the Atlantic scratch their heads and wonder what their WW2 ally is smoking.
There are still many people in the world who don't have cheap access to the Internet, especially for downloading large files. This creates a barrier to the penetration of free software in rural communities and developing countries, or even in developed countries that suffer from a big telco megacorp that is either a state monopoly or recently privatised (and still a monopolist).
This may be a problem especially for free software and opensource developers, who often need to download large files (new distros or development libraries). They contribute to our global economy by creating free GPLed/BSDed software, but they may live in places where they have to pay too much for bandwidth, or even in places where broadband doesn't exist. This is unjust: Free software programmers should enjoy free services (gifts) by the society in which they live, because they create value for the economy through gifts (free software). Free software developers know how to participate in a gift economy, but the society at large only takes from them without giving them anything in return. This must change, we must teach the concepts of gift economies to more people, and especially help free software developers who don't have access to cheap broadband.
For these people the solution is to let others help them by sending them the free software they need (distros or devel libs, or even openoffice.org) in a CD or DVD. This can be done between friends, but some people, maybe perhaps some free software volunteers who are shy nerds, may not have many friends.
I am trying to bootstrap a wiki community (modelled after philanthropist giving circles) of people who want to help free software volunteers, and this Slashdot post gave me the idea to create this wiki page where you can use as a venue to organise shipments of CDs/DVDs containing free software (like openoffice.org) to verified free software volunteers. While the site is not well-known, it could work well if enough people join. So, if you are a free software developer and you need to download openoffice.org or other package and your download limit of your Internet connection has been reached and you can't easily pay for the download yourself (you may, for example, be between jobs or whatever), you can place your name (and a link to a changelog/etc that proves your free software status) in the wiki page explaining what software you need. Then when a person willing to send CDs/DVDs for free in your region joins the site and sees your request, they may agree to send you a disc containing the software you need (but you should check the MD5 hash, of course!).
Considering that many people choose to apply their programming skills in writing computer viruses, should we expect like-minded people to disseminate real synthetic viruses once the technology becomes sufficiently mainstream?
This is part of swarm intelligence research, which is in fact also my own area of academic research (specifically business applications of swarm intelligence and effects on adaptability and implications for non-hierarchical self-organised companies). This journal is nice reading if you want to learn more. This conference (organised by the IEEE Computational Society where I am a member) is also of interest, but the "classic" workshop is ANTS. Swarm intelligence is so important that one of the first researchers in the field got an award from the King of Belgium and the European Union. If you are curious enough you can learn even more... swarming has many applications including data mining. There are many business applications, particularly of ant-colony optimisation, but also other techniques (PSO is the one I like most). Interestingly there are whole spinoffs and consultancies making money solely by applying swarming in businesses. In fact this is a good niche for consulting.
How did I chose swarming as my research topic? Well, one day I was in my garden watching my beautiful ants collecting the food I feed them (especial cheese, they enjoy it a lot, but they also like meat and eggs but nothing is better than honey which I give to them drop by drop, although I should note that different species have very different tastes! it has been over 15 years that I feed ants and I like to capture them on camera and watch as they collect the food, it's extremely insightful how they organise around the food, and I like doing various funny experiments with them like placing the food on a level above their nest and watching them to see how they discover it, or placing the food in many locations around the nest in a multitude of distances, or placing some "good" food like meat farther away than some "bad" food like dry nuts or fruits etc to see what they prefer to collect first! the amount of fun and engagement these tiny creatures can give you is amazing). So while watching my ants, I was wondering what I should research in the area of business management. I wanted something to do with engineering or mathematics, but I wasn't sure what exactly would be the best area to research. I knew about swarm intelligence but it didn't came up to my brain at that moment. I also knew of various other ways to combine engineering and science with management, but I needed something I was particularly attracted to it... Coincidentally, I later saw a related slashdot story, so I said "this is it, swarm business applications!", so I credit slashdot for finding me a way to do business research without giving up my preferences for the exact sciences:)
I agree with sousveillance. In fact for me the problem is not so much the invasion of privacy, but rather the monopoly of surveillance. I don't really have much of a problem with cameras (although I am a bit unsure about microphones just above the seats in subway stations - how exactly do they protect the subway's property and the public?), but my problem is actually who has access to the recorded data and who gets the monopoly of surveillance...
For example: A supermarket here has two signs, one saying "you are on CCTV" and another saying "you can't operate recording equipment here". The first sign (CCTV) is ok. But the second sign is problematic: Suppose I want to put a camera on my head and let it record 24h and send pics over a 3G or WiFi connection to my server, in case someone attacks me and kills me on the street or on a mountain, so that the police etc can see the pics from the camera and catch the killer (this is good for society as well, not only for me, in fact sometimes I think that everyone should have such a safety device). If a supermarket tells me that operating my own personal safety camera is not ok, then it should at least accept liability in case someone kills me while inside their premises. I'm paranoid here to make a point, and in fact I don't have such a safety device on me, but I could have one if I wanted, and my question is: Why should I give up my safety to buy a banana? Why should I trust that the supermarket is a safe place and not operate my own safety camera? One could argue that I have much more important assets to protect (my life which is one-off) than the supermarket's company (their material property which can easily be repurchased in case of a criminal attack). So, why on earth should the supermarket operate cameras but not me? One could say that the supermarket is the owner of its land and can decide the rules, but my answer is whether it is reasonable to expect to give up one's safety just to buy something to eat.
To give a real example of frustation with unbalanced supermarket policies (unbalanced in the meaning that the policies are designed only with the supermarket in mind, not taking into account customer needs), it has happened to me many times to enter a supermarket to buy something to eat while being on travel, of course always carrying my laptop bag because I never get out of my home office without a laptop or subnotebook, and employees always come to me and ask me to give them my laptop bag to keep it while I shop because they are afraid of shoplifters. My reaction in all cases is either to explain my reluctance and refuse to give them my laptop and continue my shopping (I specifically say "will your manager sign me a paper accepting liability of such and such thousands euros in case you lose my laptop or you damage it?"), if they let me do so under their supervision, or if I see that they don't like this (until now in 100% of all cases, and from their part this is ok if they merely follow company policies, the problem is the company policy not the individual employees) then my reaction is to not buy anything and leave, never to buy anything from the same shop again. I can't understand this paranoia in big supermarkets. I mean, in small independent shops the owner either just discreetly supervises people as they buy stuff, and this is the proper and reasonable thing to do (someone comes to buy stuff from you, you want to protect against shoplifters, the reasonable thing is to stay near them while they buy stuff and watch them, not to demand them to give you their bags or anything). In big supermarkets and department stores they demand that you surrender all your bags to them, as if bags are now some sort of dangerous weapon or something... My answer is that they already have cameras, but if they really feel so nervous they should hire more employees to oversee customers as they buy rather than take away customer's property even temporarily. Shoplifting is a serious crime that must be tackled, but passing the cost to the consumer is not ac
Just saw this might be a hoax. The criticism was based in the case that this incident were true. But since now we have some information suggesting that this may be a hoax, the criticism should be understood in a general way and not specific to this school.
I find it funny that while in theory schools exist to help students learn about the nature and the society they are growing in, detention punishes students by making them stay in the school more, therefore implying that school is probably a bad place to spend one's time.
Here we have a great example of a brainless bureaucracy punishing one of its subjects for being smarter than the crowd. This student may have done something wrong (installed software on someone else's PC without permission) BUT I hope we all can see here that this student was smart enough to understand the deficiencies of mainstream browser(s), find a better browser, and install it. One would assume that society and schools should encourage children to take initiative, fix mistakes when they see them, and take decisions that make their life and the life of everyone better. This student discovered that the big bureaucracy they were subjected in was using a stone age browser, and he took a bold decision to fix the problem immediately without bureaucratic inefficiencies (the only problem being that he should have asked for some kind of permission first because the computer was probably not their property, but we can overlook this because we can't expect from young kids to observe complex society rules, so we should have used this as an opportunity to teach them, but detention really doesn't help a pupil to understand the concept of property at all, it only makes them feel alienated from society and think that they live in a dangerous place).
This is exactly how self-organised societies can function (by the way my academic research is related to self-organised non-hierarchical business companies and swarm intelligence algorithms), self-organisation is a good thing, and yet big bureaucracies like this school kill every spark of self-organisation at first opportunity. One has to wonder whether discipline and hierarchical control has become the new religion and it causes us to live in greatly inefficient bureaucratic McDonaldised iron cages (ironically McDonaldisation implies efficiency but in reality the associated bureaucracies create inefficiencies in many ways). Really, how much time have you lost trying to persuade your boss (if you work in a traditionally hierarchical company, which I thankfully managed to avoid as an independent) that your next project should be done in a serious language such as Python or Lisp instead of.NET? Or that Firefox and Thunderbird should be allowed on your work PC?
Also, why should schools be designed with teachers being superior to students? All humans are students, after all, and some students may know more in one subject than the teachers. For example, in this case probably the teacher knew more in some academic subject (let's say history) and the kid knew more in technology. I see this as a good opportunity to learn: The teacher could invite the student to speak publicly to the class about why this mysterious program "firefox.exe" is a better browser, and they could ask the student to write an academic essay analysing their position on browser choice and argue for or against allowing students to install whatever they want on school PCs. The teacher could offer guidance to the student, explaining that while some students may know better and install good software (firefox), other students may put the school in risk by installing malicious software (viruses), and for this reason some sort of efficient supervision needs to exist. The student then would be required to search online for examples of arguments supporting each view and come up with their own position on the matter, etc... All this could be a great academic exercise, and it would also offer the teacher the opportunity to *learn* from the student, specifically to learn why "firefox.exe" is a better browser. This is what I mean that everyone is a student... Even PhD holders and well-known researchers are nothing more than students, they d
Correct, more people should donate, especially to software they use (of course it has to be said that the greatest donation is your time in writing code). I am trying to bootstrap a project (AlgoLibre) modelled after philanthropy giving circles to enable people donate services (eg free email, web space, svn, cvs etc) to free software developers (the idea is, whoever manages Internet servers to take a small slice of each server, VPS or not, and give it gratis for use by free software developers, then my idea is to extend this somehow and I specifically want to create the impetus for the creation of various benefits for free software people, like some form of health insurance scheme). There is Advogato as well.
I thank the HTML 5 guys for their attempts, but I prefer XHTML v2
From TFA:
XHTML V2 isn't aimed at average HTML authors
XHTML is for intelligent human beings, you know, people who can actually understand what separation of concerns is.
[HTML v5] propose features that might simplify the lives of average Web developers
So HTML v5 is for people who don't understand separation of concerns.
Unfortunstely that's the 99% of web kiddies out there.
The standards will appeal to different audiences.
One standard for smart people who know programming and actually work with an engineering mindset, another for those who see the web as a big graffiti and work with an "anything goes" mindset. No thanks, I prefer ONE standard for smart people, XHTML v2, and just to kick out everyone who isn't qualified.
Interestingly there is some research indicating that people acting as individuals can be intelligent, but when placed within a bureaucracy then everyone acts as if they were completely stupid. I think that's a good reason to avoid creating massive bureaucracies. But I cannot understand why people in general continue building bureaucracies over and over again... new departments, bigger governments, massive multinationals, franchises... Everything is overbureaucratised even though everyone with an open mind can see that bureaucracy makes people stupid, with no initiative, and with no decision making skills. If bureaucratisation is bad, then why do people continue doing it?
I have argued for too much time that Wikipedia should become a general knowledge base, since the encyclopedia is an out of date concept not suited for the 21st century. This can be implemented without significant software changes (although specialist software can greatly assist in the creation and management of a KB). Unfortunately, it seems that very few people really understand exactly what a KB is, so most people think of an encyclopedia as an ideal, rather than as a limitation.
With a wiki knowledge base, users could set their options to choose what level of details they would like to read, and the software could automatically retrieve exactly the level and depth of details that any specific user wants. For example, in wikitext, we could have the mathematical proofs tagged with a tag "nerds-only" and then only users who would have set the option "I am a nerd" in their account preferences would see these sections (anonymous users could still access the nerdy sections by clicking on a tab link or similar facility). This is how it could work with customised software (it really could be implemented simply as a mediawiki plugin only). Without software changes or additions, Wikipedia could implement some KB-like features right now by using namespaces, subpages, and other facilities (eg an article "Pythagoras theorem" could be accompanied by its "for nerds" counterpart in a "Nerds:Pythagoras theorem" namespace or in a "Pythagoras theorem/nerds" subpage. Once these basic features are in place, Wikipedia could start implementing more KB features, and perhaps also get incpiration from Cyc (in the past for some time I freely hosted a similar "wiki-style Cyc" project).
Encyclopedias are the result of old 19th century thought when people needed to limit the information they could put on paper simply because having thousands of volumes to carry around would be impractical. But now with computers there is no reason to limit how much information goes into a wiki, especially for one hosted by a biggish organisation.
Note that the fact that I am somewhat of a critic of Wikipedia's policies and sometimes also parts of its leadership doesn't mean that I don't support the project, I actually contribute and donate as well.
Now back to the original question... Whether Wikipedia (a project that unfortunately positions itself as an encyclopedia rather than a general KB, at least until its current leadership understands why KBs are important and why it is Wikipedia that should implement one) should include mathematical proofs. Well, I would say that since Wikipedia already contains articles in obscure porn stars, obscure music groups, politicians only known to their local communities, and little-known villages all over the world, it would be ridiculous to not include mathematical proofs of *all* theorems (including only the "important" ones is not viable because very few people are in position to understand what is important and what isn't). As a user, I expect to see mathematical proofs in every encyclopedia, especially online ones like Wikipedia.
On a similar fashion, Wikipedia currently does not accept articles on many free software and open-source developers based on notability policies. Yet it has articles for very obscure musicians etc (and it fails to properly accoutn for the correct name GNU/Linux in its Linux-related pages). Ridiculous.
Unfortunately Wikipedia has started to suffer from its own popularity (thanks to BBC): The project in beginning included a large proportion of users really caring about creating a useful resource. Now that so many new people have joined, the proportion of people genuinely interested in making Wikipedia useful is very small. Most people just want to push their agendas, write articles that they like being there (eg their favourite obscure porn star, politician, or artist) rather than on what *should* be there (eg mathematical theorems and chemical substances etc). This happens because the
Could this mean that if you keep a password in your head it counts as counts of your brain and therefore protected by the constitution, but if you write down your password then it simply counts as some form of keys and therefore not protected? IANAL, but could this be another reason to keep your passwords in your head?
Also, I see so many people assuming that no one on the planet can currently break strong encryption in short time. Well, to break strong encryption efficiently it takes only a breakthrough mathematical algorithm, nothing else. Well, I wouldn't bet that there is no one on the planet who knows a secret algorithm... In fact the public Shor's algorithm could break RSA if one had a big quantum computer. It isn't incomprehensible that one could have found a classical algorithm for fact factorisation and kept it secret or sold it only to a select few three-letter-acronym clients. This proposition, however, is easily testable in the sense that if one was able to do that then we should expect within a reasonable number of years someone else to find the same or a similar solution, since mathematical knowledge is built upon itself and most probably a hypothetical person or organisation in possession of a secret fast factorisation algorithm wouldn't have an immensely superior mathematical base to begin from in the first place. Many times multiple people end up to the same or similar discoveries, very simply because we all begin from the same basic knowledge and have more-or-less similar intelligences (speaking for orders of magnitude), and there are also so many people who research the same questions at the same time. I really wouldn't be surprised if a three-letter acronym shop is already in possession of a smart algorithm that no one else knows about (although I would really be surprised if they could manage to keep it secret for more than 30-40 years, such things aren't easily kept secret).
In fact, Clifford Cocks (who worked for a four-letter acronym shop) had probably found RSA in 1970s, before the RSA guys, and the world only learnt about it in the 90s. Would you bet that no one currently knows a fast algorithm capable of breaking strong encryption in reasonable time?
Companies do the mistake to misunderstand free software and open-source in many ways. Some companies think that free software and open-source are the same thing (it's not). Others think that merely putting some code under the GPL makes it truly free software (a licence isn't enough). Some see opensource simply as something to get from, rather than sharing with it.
Free software is a social process. Merely saying "look guys, our code is GPL now, we are an opensource shop! buy from us, we are good!" isn't enough, because the heart of free software is the social process involved, not the licence (the licence is simply an instrument used to reinforce the community's customs and values and help make the social process more official).
People wishing to understand free software should look at it from a social viewpoint, not from technical or legal point of views.
This happens with whole commercial sites as well. For example, a.com site may be illegally copied onto the.ru tld and every detail but the contact info be kept the same.
Oh, and of course it happens a lot in software companies as well... I would bet that 75-90% of all commercial closed-source software probably contains more than 500 lines of code that was copied from somewhere (FLOSS or otherwise) without a proper licence (GPL or other)... Perhaps that's why software companies don't easily open-source their stuff even though they know that the resulting popularity surge would bring in more profits (the fact that closed-source software is scientifically proven to contain orders of magnitude more bugs than open-source is probably also a reason).
I don't like this way of advertising one's product, so I'm voting with my euros and I am going to not buy anything from companies that I know are using this advertising method, as far as it is practical and possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I asked a VCR whether it has any feelings and it suddenly started playing an old porn movie. I guess it meant to tell me to fsck off and stop asking personal questions. Don't know, maybe it really meant that it can feel horny... Or maybe it was just a gremlin in the machine. But who can really know what a freakin VCR feels?
Reality is what you experience.
This implies that the ERH (External Reality Hypothesis) is wrong (and it follows logically that the MUH, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, may also be wrong). But then we don't live in the same reality as dolphins, whales, ants, pigeons, cats, snails, trees, grass, or viruses (if these tiny things are what we call life - in fact they look more like genetic material without a host, and curiously their sole purpose seems to be to find a host, which probably implies that genetic material in general in all organisms is some sort of parasitic squatter). These creatures experience very different things than us. Whales and birds are expert in 3D reasoning (while us humans we tend to think in left-right rather than up-down-left-right). Ants probably regard pheromones as one of the most important part of their reality. Snails probably know more than you about plants. Grass surely has complete knowledge in how it feels to be walked over by smelly human feet every day. Different sensory organs and different mental setups result in different perceptions of reality. But if the reality is what you experience, then the realities of a human and a whale are different, or even we could say that different realities exist between two humans with different senses (eg a deaf and blind), so there must be many realities? And if there are many realities, then how can communication take place between these realities? Occam would probably freak out and threaten us with his big razor if we hinted at multiple realities, one for each set of sensory organs and mental wireups.
Maybe there is just one reality and we experience it differently because of different sensory organs. The problem is then, that we really do not know what reality really truly is. We have eyes for the shades but not for the light. We can hypothesise that reality is the dream of a god, the simulation of an alien race, the self-aware mathematical stuff in a fractal abyss of equations and fractions, or whatever, but in the end we don't even have the slightest idea of what the hell we are talking about.
Do you kill a life every time you breathe or you walk down the street? Take a microscope. There are tiny creatures everywhere. Some of them get hurt while you breathe or when your shoes cause some water in the street to be dropped away and dry up. You need a microscope to see them. They are perfectly alive creatures, they eat, they run away from predators, and they catch their food. Yet, they are completely undetectable to you without a microscope. A new sensory capability created by technology broadened your horizons of your reality. This is a strong argument in support of the ERH.
Do you kill a self-aware mathematical structure every time you shut down your computer? Nobody really knows with 100% certainty... until someone proves that self-aware mathematical structures cannot exist, in which case we can safely continue shutting off our PCs, or invents a device that expands our view of the cosmos and allows us to actually see that there is some kind of life or consciousness inside the beige box our technology created (or even everywhere around us and inside us and above us) in which case people who want to be perfectly ethical with no sense of practicality will probably declare bankruptcy after heightened electricity bills (and some could say this would be evolution at works, others could argue that it was the revenge of the mathematical stuff, while some sim philosophers would probably profess that everything is a simulation so we shouldn't take reality seriously).
There's no point trying to make it any more complicated than that.
Discoveries begin with questions, and questions need creativity and out of the box thinking. Taking reality as an unquestionable truth according to some sort of "common sense" criteria means we lose the chance to discover something about it... If your reality is that we live in a universe ruled by a god whose rele
One could very well use a fork, however. Do we really know anything for sure? We may choose to ignore some things or develop sets of rules to explain the reality, but is there anyone on this planet or anywhere that has even the slightest idea what the reality is?
This is good, but few people pay any attention to the other great danger beneath our feet: The earth's magma.
There are many supervolcanoes waiting to happen. With extreme volcanism, much of the life on earth can die. Some people have got the idea that a volcano can destroy an island or a small region, but few people realise that the whole planet (or more specifically its atmosphere, which is what we need most) is in danger of supervolcanoes, and that these phenomena happen from time to time (and we have no way to surely know when the next will hit, it literally hapens under our noses and we know nothing).
We may be able to somehow deorbit a small asteroid, but what about our very own planet? How could we manage all this magma under the ground? We literally live on small islands floating a boiling abyss. We know very well that there are good probabilities that many or all of us will sometime die when some of the boiling magma gets out in a huge explosion and toxicates our delicate atmosphere and hides the sun for years. Yet, there is no public discussion on this topic, no one seems to care, a few smart people have noticed that asteroids must be somehow managed, but I haven't seen many people realising that our very own planet is also a threat that must be somehow managed.
But how do you know this?
And do you think that you are not a machine and that you have feelings? And if so how do you know this?
How can you be so sure that the mathematical entities inside your beige box computer are not self-aware? How can you know that they don't scream when you shut the computer off and are not reborn when you grant them electrical current the next morning?
Do you really know that you are anything different than a little sim in a simulated world, or a self-aware mathematical entity in a mathematical universe?
You don't really know this for absolutely sure, do you? Then how can you claim so easily that something is only a machine and has no feelings when you don't even known whether you are a machine, and whether what you call your feelings are nothing more than simulated or mathematical constructs that you perceive as feelings?
Unfortunately I have witnessed cases where historic mainframes were dumped in empty land with no special consideration. It is a direct insult to the engineers who built these wonderful machines to dump them like normal trash without some sign of respect. Old computing parts should be sent to museums, not dumped like trash.
Democracy can work only if the people are smart. If the electorate is stupid*, it gets what it deserves. The problem is, with stupid people any system is doomed to fail, not just democracy. So any system will fail if the people are stupid. No system is immune to the stupidity of the people. Even in an autocracy with a philosopher-king taking perfect decisions for society, stupid people would still find ways to destroy his insightful policies. Therefore the solution is to use whatever system is the most popular or already implemented, as long as it enables change (for example, democracy allows you to change things because you can set up a political party and let people vote for you, so democracy is a good system, but other systems are not only subjected to the stupidity of the people but also structurally disallow any change from taking place, for example communism is a bad system because only a central single party has control so change is difficult or impossible), and sit down and try to educate the people and make them capable of taking informed decisions. For example, one could set up a charity and teach people how to think critically, how to question what they hear, and how to properly evaluate the effects of various policies. There are direct links between democracy and education, and by improving people's understanding of the world and themselves and the way they think, we can actually make democracy work better (in the sense that more educated people will make more intelligent choices while voting, and more educated people will mean more political candidates and parties with sound and wise policies). The problem, of course, is that our technology has not found a device (yet) to get an uneducated kid and fill its brain with all the knowledge and wisdom the society has accumulated over thousands of years. Education is done in slow methods and takes decades. Some technologies (eg the Internet) can speed up one's ability to get knowledge, but it still takes years until a person can be said to be knowledgeable and in the position to take informed decisions for the betterment of themselves and of society (let's say a politician suggests to vote for them because they will build a nuclear station... how will you evaluate this if you don't know the pros and cons? You will have to sit down and read a lot to understand what nuclear is about and then take a decision - or rather this is how it should work, because nowadays people take voting decisions based on the looks of the politician or on whether they can make witty jokes on TV). So, we can see that while democracy is directly affected by the electorate's education, it is only technology that can speed up the acquisition of knowledge by the electorate, therefore this means that better technology can lead to better democracy. If an engineer devises some apparatus to instantly copy a library's books into a kid's brain, then this could result in perfect democracy within a lifetime*.
* There is a caveat: I assume that smart people are ethical by default. That's my position, but of course one could argue that intelligence and ethics are unrelated or even negatively proportional. And of course one could also point out that there is no good definition of ethics. There are some other caveats as well: I also assume that one becomes smarter with more knowledge acquisition, and that rules of sound reasoning can be taught.
And the president using his new counter-terrorism law dubbed I.O.W.N.Y.O.U. enacted a ban on any research on the dangerous internets and their evil series of tubes, because as he said they are full of pornography and therefore a danger to the innocent unborn. The vice president later suggested to use all jobless researchers as forced labour for the new human missions to Alpha Centauri, which are of course relying on the space infrastructure of an otherwise very democratic dictatorship run by a former KGBer. People in the free world over the Atlantic scratch their heads and wonder what their WW2 ally is smoking.
There are still many people in the world who don't have cheap access to the Internet, especially for downloading large files. This creates a barrier to the penetration of free software in rural communities and developing countries, or even in developed countries that suffer from a big telco megacorp that is either a state monopoly or recently privatised (and still a monopolist).
This may be a problem especially for free software and opensource developers, who often need to download large files (new distros or development libraries). They contribute to our global economy by creating free GPLed/BSDed software, but they may live in places where they have to pay too much for bandwidth, or even in places where broadband doesn't exist. This is unjust: Free software programmers should enjoy free services (gifts) by the society in which they live, because they create value for the economy through gifts (free software). Free software developers know how to participate in a gift economy, but the society at large only takes from them without giving them anything in return. This must change, we must teach the concepts of gift economies to more people, and especially help free software developers who don't have access to cheap broadband.
For these people the solution is to let others help them by sending them the free software they need (distros or devel libs, or even openoffice.org) in a CD or DVD. This can be done between friends, but some people, maybe perhaps some free software volunteers who are shy nerds, may not have many friends.
I am trying to bootstrap a wiki community (modelled after philanthropist giving circles) of people who want to help free software volunteers, and this Slashdot post gave me the idea to create this wiki page where you can use as a venue to organise shipments of CDs/DVDs containing free software (like openoffice.org) to verified free software volunteers. While the site is not well-known, it could work well if enough people join. So, if you are a free software developer and you need to download openoffice.org or other package and your download limit of your Internet connection has been reached and you can't easily pay for the download yourself (you may, for example, be between jobs or whatever), you can place your name (and a link to a changelog/etc that proves your free software status) in the wiki page explaining what software you need. Then when a person willing to send CDs/DVDs for free in your region joins the site and sees your request, they may agree to send you a disc containing the software you need (but you should check the MD5 hash, of course!).
Me thinks that was a probably a cracker, not a hacker.
Cracker: Malicious, illegal, wants to do damage (usually for their benefit)
Hacker: Just wants to help fix security holes in unorthodox way, play as well, and do no damage.
Considering that many people choose to apply their programming skills in writing computer viruses, should we expect like-minded people to disseminate real synthetic viruses once the technology becomes sufficiently mainstream?
Man, I wouldn't set up Vista even if it were free*, it's just too much for my bogofilter.
* Unless absolutely needed for my work (consultant)
This is part of swarm intelligence research, which is in fact also my own area of academic research (specifically business applications of swarm intelligence and effects on adaptability and implications for non-hierarchical self-organised companies). This journal is nice reading if you want to learn more. This conference (organised by the IEEE Computational Society where I am a member) is also of interest, but the "classic" workshop is ANTS. Swarm intelligence is so important that one of the first researchers in the field got an award from the King of Belgium and the European Union. If you are curious enough you can learn even more... swarming has many applications including data mining. There are many business applications, particularly of ant-colony optimisation, but also other techniques (PSO is the one I like most). Interestingly there are whole spinoffs and consultancies making money solely by applying swarming in businesses. In fact this is a good niche for consulting.
How did I chose swarming as my research topic? Well, one day I was in my garden watching my beautiful ants collecting the food I feed them (especial cheese, they enjoy it a lot, but they also like meat and eggs but nothing is better than honey which I give to them drop by drop, although I should note that different species have very different tastes! it has been over 15 years that I feed ants and I like to capture them on camera and watch as they collect the food, it's extremely insightful how they organise around the food, and I like doing various funny experiments with them like placing the food on a level above their nest and watching them to see how they discover it, or placing the food in many locations around the nest in a multitude of distances, or placing some "good" food like meat farther away than some "bad" food like dry nuts or fruits etc to see what they prefer to collect first! the amount of fun and engagement these tiny creatures can give you is amazing). So while watching my ants, I was wondering what I should research in the area of business management. I wanted something to do with engineering or mathematics, but I wasn't sure what exactly would be the best area to research. I knew about swarm intelligence but it didn't came up to my brain at that moment. I also knew of various other ways to combine engineering and science with management, but I needed something I was particularly attracted to it... Coincidentally, I later saw a related slashdot story, so I said "this is it, swarm business applications!", so I credit slashdot for finding me a way to do business research without giving up my preferences for the exact sciences :)
I agree with sousveillance. In fact for me the problem is not so much the invasion of privacy, but rather the monopoly of surveillance. I don't really have much of a problem with cameras (although I am a bit unsure about microphones just above the seats in subway stations - how exactly do they protect the subway's property and the public?), but my problem is actually who has access to the recorded data and who gets the monopoly of surveillance...
For example: A supermarket here has two signs, one saying "you are on CCTV" and another saying "you can't operate recording equipment here". The first sign (CCTV) is ok. But the second sign is problematic: Suppose I want to put a camera on my head and let it record 24h and send pics over a 3G or WiFi connection to my server, in case someone attacks me and kills me on the street or on a mountain, so that the police etc can see the pics from the camera and catch the killer (this is good for society as well, not only for me, in fact sometimes I think that everyone should have such a safety device). If a supermarket tells me that operating my own personal safety camera is not ok, then it should at least accept liability in case someone kills me while inside their premises. I'm paranoid here to make a point, and in fact I don't have such a safety device on me, but I could have one if I wanted, and my question is: Why should I give up my safety to buy a banana? Why should I trust that the supermarket is a safe place and not operate my own safety camera? One could argue that I have much more important assets to protect (my life which is one-off) than the supermarket's company (their material property which can easily be repurchased in case of a criminal attack). So, why on earth should the supermarket operate cameras but not me? One could say that the supermarket is the owner of its land and can decide the rules, but my answer is whether it is reasonable to expect to give up one's safety just to buy something to eat.
To give a real example of frustation with unbalanced supermarket policies (unbalanced in the meaning that the policies are designed only with the supermarket in mind, not taking into account customer needs), it has happened to me many times to enter a supermarket to buy something to eat while being on travel, of course always carrying my laptop bag because I never get out of my home office without a laptop or subnotebook, and employees always come to me and ask me to give them my laptop bag to keep it while I shop because they are afraid of shoplifters. My reaction in all cases is either to explain my reluctance and refuse to give them my laptop and continue my shopping (I specifically say "will your manager sign me a paper accepting liability of such and such thousands euros in case you lose my laptop or you damage it?"), if they let me do so under their supervision, or if I see that they don't like this (until now in 100% of all cases, and from their part this is ok if they merely follow company policies, the problem is the company policy not the individual employees) then my reaction is to not buy anything and leave, never to buy anything from the same shop again. I can't understand this paranoia in big supermarkets. I mean, in small independent shops the owner either just discreetly supervises people as they buy stuff, and this is the proper and reasonable thing to do (someone comes to buy stuff from you, you want to protect against shoplifters, the reasonable thing is to stay near them while they buy stuff and watch them, not to demand them to give you their bags or anything). In big supermarkets and department stores they demand that you surrender all your bags to them, as if bags are now some sort of dangerous weapon or something... My answer is that they already have cameras, but if they really feel so nervous they should hire more employees to oversee customers as they buy rather than take away customer's property even temporarily. Shoplifting is a serious crime that must be tackled, but passing the cost to the consumer is not ac
Just saw this might be a hoax. The criticism was based in the case that this incident were true. But since now we have some information suggesting that this may be a hoax, the criticism should be understood in a general way and not specific to this school.
I find it funny that while in theory schools exist to help students learn about the nature and the society they are growing in, detention punishes students by making them stay in the school more, therefore implying that school is probably a bad place to spend one's time.
Here we have a great example of a brainless bureaucracy punishing one of its subjects for being smarter than the crowd. This student may have done something wrong (installed software on someone else's PC without permission) BUT I hope we all can see here that this student was smart enough to understand the deficiencies of mainstream browser(s), find a better browser, and install it. One would assume that society and schools should encourage children to take initiative, fix mistakes when they see them, and take decisions that make their life and the life of everyone better. This student discovered that the big bureaucracy they were subjected in was using a stone age browser, and he took a bold decision to fix the problem immediately without bureaucratic inefficiencies (the only problem being that he should have asked for some kind of permission first because the computer was probably not their property, but we can overlook this because we can't expect from young kids to observe complex society rules, so we should have used this as an opportunity to teach them, but detention really doesn't help a pupil to understand the concept of property at all, it only makes them feel alienated from society and think that they live in a dangerous place).
This is exactly how self-organised societies can function (by the way my academic research is related to self-organised non-hierarchical business companies and swarm intelligence algorithms), self-organisation is a good thing, and yet big bureaucracies like this school kill every spark of self-organisation at first opportunity. One has to wonder whether discipline and hierarchical control has become the new religion and it causes us to live in greatly inefficient bureaucratic McDonaldised iron cages (ironically McDonaldisation implies efficiency but in reality the associated bureaucracies create inefficiencies in many ways). Really, how much time have you lost trying to persuade your boss (if you work in a traditionally hierarchical company, which I thankfully managed to avoid as an independent) that your next project should be done in a serious language such as Python or Lisp instead of .NET? Or that Firefox and Thunderbird should be allowed on your work PC?
Also, why should schools be designed with teachers being superior to students? All humans are students, after all, and some students may know more in one subject than the teachers. For example, in this case probably the teacher knew more in some academic subject (let's say history) and the kid knew more in technology. I see this as a good opportunity to learn: The teacher could invite the student to speak publicly to the class about why this mysterious program "firefox.exe" is a better browser, and they could ask the student to write an academic essay analysing their position on browser choice and argue for or against allowing students to install whatever they want on school PCs. The teacher could offer guidance to the student, explaining that while some students may know better and install good software (firefox), other students may put the school in risk by installing malicious software (viruses), and for this reason some sort of efficient supervision needs to exist. The student then would be required to search online for examples of arguments supporting each view and come up with their own position on the matter, etc... All this could be a great academic exercise, and it would also offer the teacher the opportunity to *learn* from the student, specifically to learn why "firefox.exe" is a better browser. This is what I mean that everyone is a student... Even PhD holders and well-known researchers are nothing more than students, they d
Correct, more people should donate, especially to software they use (of course it has to be said that the greatest donation is your time in writing code). I am trying to bootstrap a project (AlgoLibre) modelled after philanthropy giving circles to enable people donate services (eg free email, web space, svn, cvs etc) to free software developers (the idea is, whoever manages Internet servers to take a small slice of each server, VPS or not, and give it gratis for use by free software developers, then my idea is to extend this somehow and I specifically want to create the impetus for the creation of various benefits for free software people, like some form of health insurance scheme). There is Advogato as well.
I thank the HTML 5 guys for their attempts, but I prefer XHTML v2
From TFA:
XHTML V2 isn't aimed at average HTML authorsXHTML is for intelligent human beings, you know, people who can actually understand what separation of concerns is.
[HTML v5] propose features that might simplify the lives of average Web developersSo HTML v5 is for people who don't understand separation of concerns.
Unfortunstely that's the 99% of web kiddies out there.
The standards will appeal to different audiences.One standard for smart people who know programming and actually work with an engineering mindset, another for those who see the web as a big graffiti and work with an "anything goes" mindset. No thanks, I prefer ONE standard for smart people, XHTML v2, and just to kick out everyone who isn't qualified.
Interestingly there is some research indicating that people acting as individuals can be intelligent, but when placed within a bureaucracy then everyone acts as if they were completely stupid. I think that's a good reason to avoid creating massive bureaucracies. But I cannot understand why people in general continue building bureaucracies over and over again... new departments, bigger governments, massive multinationals, franchises... Everything is overbureaucratised even though everyone with an open mind can see that bureaucracy makes people stupid, with no initiative, and with no decision making skills. If bureaucratisation is bad, then why do people continue doing it?
I have argued for too much time that Wikipedia should become a general knowledge base, since the encyclopedia is an out of date concept not suited for the 21st century. This can be implemented without significant software changes (although specialist software can greatly assist in the creation and management of a KB). Unfortunately, it seems that very few people really understand exactly what a KB is, so most people think of an encyclopedia as an ideal, rather than as a limitation.
With a wiki knowledge base, users could set their options to choose what level of details they would like to read, and the software could automatically retrieve exactly the level and depth of details that any specific user wants. For example, in wikitext, we could have the mathematical proofs tagged with a tag "nerds-only" and then only users who would have set the option "I am a nerd" in their account preferences would see these sections (anonymous users could still access the nerdy sections by clicking on a tab link or similar facility). This is how it could work with customised software (it really could be implemented simply as a mediawiki plugin only). Without software changes or additions, Wikipedia could implement some KB-like features right now by using namespaces, subpages, and other facilities (eg an article "Pythagoras theorem" could be accompanied by its "for nerds" counterpart in a "Nerds:Pythagoras theorem" namespace or in a "Pythagoras theorem/nerds" subpage. Once these basic features are in place, Wikipedia could start implementing more KB features, and perhaps also get incpiration from Cyc (in the past for some time I freely hosted a similar "wiki-style Cyc" project).
Encyclopedias are the result of old 19th century thought when people needed to limit the information they could put on paper simply because having thousands of volumes to carry around would be impractical. But now with computers there is no reason to limit how much information goes into a wiki, especially for one hosted by a biggish organisation.
Note that the fact that I am somewhat of a critic of Wikipedia's policies and sometimes also parts of its leadership doesn't mean that I don't support the project, I actually contribute and donate as well.
Now back to the original question... Whether Wikipedia (a project that unfortunately positions itself as an encyclopedia rather than a general KB, at least until its current leadership understands why KBs are important and why it is Wikipedia that should implement one) should include mathematical proofs. Well, I would say that since Wikipedia already contains articles in obscure porn stars, obscure music groups, politicians only known to their local communities, and little-known villages all over the world, it would be ridiculous to not include mathematical proofs of *all* theorems (including only the "important" ones is not viable because very few people are in position to understand what is important and what isn't). As a user, I expect to see mathematical proofs in every encyclopedia, especially online ones like Wikipedia.
On a similar fashion, Wikipedia currently does not accept articles on many free software and open-source developers based on notability policies. Yet it has articles for very obscure musicians etc (and it fails to properly accoutn for the correct name GNU/Linux in its Linux-related pages). Ridiculous.
Unfortunately Wikipedia has started to suffer from its own popularity (thanks to BBC): The project in beginning included a large proportion of users really caring about creating a useful resource. Now that so many new people have joined, the proportion of people genuinely interested in making Wikipedia useful is very small. Most people just want to push their agendas, write articles that they like being there (eg their favourite obscure porn star, politician, or artist) rather than on what *should* be there (eg mathematical theorems and chemical substances etc). This happens because the
Could this mean that if you keep a password in your head it counts as counts of your brain and therefore protected by the constitution, but if you write down your password then it simply counts as some form of keys and therefore not protected? IANAL, but could this be another reason to keep your passwords in your head?
Also, I see so many people assuming that no one on the planet can currently break strong encryption in short time. Well, to break strong encryption efficiently it takes only a breakthrough mathematical algorithm, nothing else. Well, I wouldn't bet that there is no one on the planet who knows a secret algorithm... In fact the public Shor's algorithm could break RSA if one had a big quantum computer. It isn't incomprehensible that one could have found a classical algorithm for fact factorisation and kept it secret or sold it only to a select few three-letter-acronym clients. This proposition, however, is easily testable in the sense that if one was able to do that then we should expect within a reasonable number of years someone else to find the same or a similar solution, since mathematical knowledge is built upon itself and most probably a hypothetical person or organisation in possession of a secret fast factorisation algorithm wouldn't have an immensely superior mathematical base to begin from in the first place. Many times multiple people end up to the same or similar discoveries, very simply because we all begin from the same basic knowledge and have more-or-less similar intelligences (speaking for orders of magnitude), and there are also so many people who research the same questions at the same time. I really wouldn't be surprised if a three-letter acronym shop is already in possession of a smart algorithm that no one else knows about (although I would really be surprised if they could manage to keep it secret for more than 30-40 years, such things aren't easily kept secret).
In fact, Clifford Cocks (who worked for a four-letter acronym shop) had probably found RSA in 1970s, before the RSA guys, and the world only learnt about it in the 90s. Would you bet that no one currently knows a fast algorithm capable of breaking strong encryption in reasonable time?
Companies do the mistake to misunderstand free software and open-source in many ways. Some companies think that free software and open-source are the same thing (it's not). Others think that merely putting some code under the GPL makes it truly free software (a licence isn't enough). Some see opensource simply as something to get from, rather than sharing with it.
Free software is a social process. Merely saying "look guys, our code is GPL now, we are an opensource shop! buy from us, we are good!" isn't enough, because the heart of free software is the social process involved, not the licence (the licence is simply an instrument used to reinforce the community's customs and values and help make the social process more official).
People wishing to understand free software should look at it from a social viewpoint, not from technical or legal point of views.
This happens with whole commercial sites as well. For example, a .com site may be illegally copied onto the .ru tld and every detail but the contact info be kept the same.
Oh, and of course it happens a lot in software companies as well... I would bet that 75-90% of all commercial closed-source software probably contains more than 500 lines of code that was copied from somewhere (FLOSS or otherwise) without a proper licence (GPL or other)... Perhaps that's why software companies don't easily open-source their stuff even though they know that the resulting popularity surge would bring in more profits (the fact that closed-source software is scientifically proven to contain orders of magnitude more bugs than open-source is probably also a reason).
I don't like this way of advertising one's product, so I'm voting with my euros and I am going to not buy anything from companies that I know are using this advertising method, as far as it is practical and possible.
Good to hear it's under the GPLv2, but why not GPLv3 or Affero GPL ? Was there any specific reason that made them choose GPLv2 ?