In addition, sometimes passengers in a car can aid driving by pointing out things that you may have missed -- "Stop, Dave, there's a car RIGHT THERE", for instance.
I think I recall a study in which they found that a passenger who is an adult and licensed driver can actually aid driving.
I do not contest that there are problems that Turing machines can't solve. I do not know whether being a human being is one of them. (Sounds like a stupid assertion, but I don't really want to get into it here, because it isn't the point.)
Further, I know that humans do not follow predicate logic exclusively. If this were even close to accurate, many humans would be a lot better at predicate logic than they are, because of a "built-in" ability to use it.
If someone wants to build an AI system that matches humans, I think it is a mistake to build it entirely out of logic, and it pretty much dooms him to failure.
Whether he's right or not, doesn't alter my opinion that he argues from insecurity. It makes it very hard to argue something with someone who is emotionally afraid of being wrong.
Selmer wrote that fiction-generating program, Brutus, in Prolog, which still makes me boggle when I think about it. It's an exaggeration to say it writes fiction. It writes pieces of fiction involving betrayal in an academic setting. Of course, that's based on Prolog predicate-logic rules, but that doesn't mean it doesn't write them.
Selmer Bringsjord is the professor who doesn't believe AI can be intelligent. He has given a talk called "How to Build Smart Machines: Relax 'Smart', or Pray" -- the idea being that you should either expect less from AI, or hope for divine intervention. In my opinion, he's got huge insecurity issues, and asserts that humans are better than computers to assuage his fears that he really isn't good enough. His fundamental belief is that AI should be based on formal logic, which is something I disagree fairly strongly with. I'm sure he knows a lot -- he teaches a course on Logic and AI which I'm sure he really shines in -- but he needs to work through his issues before I can focus on any argument he makes.
In other news, RPI is really good at hunting for grants, and Selmer is really good at making noise when he gets one. I wouldn't be so interested until they actually make something.
This card, as it is stated in TFA, isn't meant to compete successfully in the category of "renders Doom III at appreciable speeds". It's not the result of years of R&D, and it's not bleeding-edge. It's a chance for a company to service the niche market of people who want a decent-quality card, and are willing to pay for the freeness of it. Making a product that kicks the ass of the competitors in the category of how Free-Software-compatible it is, is the idea, and I think Techsource can compete successfully with ATI and nVidia here.
I'm surprised he didn't mention Katamari Damancy in the article. This game is probably the most innovative game of 2004, and Namco, the company that made it, isn't exactly the indiest of indie companies. (Oh, and it's for PS2, a console system.)
I'm not sure you can truly say the innovation in gaming was on the computers and not consoles. Sure, MMORPGs were on computers first (but now there's also X-Box live).. but actual multiplayer games were on consoles first!
I'm conflicted about this book. It covers a lot of things which are important for first-time Linux users: "This is KDE", "This is what a superuser is", "Everything is a file". Each chapter has FAQ-type troubleshooting questions that may or may not be helpful to people throwing their hands up in despair about Knoppix. However, I'm a little leery that they put boot time options before use of KDE (advanced topic before beginner's stuff). In general, I think the book bounces back and forth between good "So You Want To Be A Linux Consultant" material, like the stuff about hda, fd0, boot process, init, and so on, and good "Grandpa Computer User" material, like the stuff about KDE ("click on things to start them", "you can lasso many things at once"). This makes it difficult for either group to use. Also, despite the article summary, I don't see anything in this book about Windows disaster recovery.
Ethan
Re:Grokking.. "Man from Mars" reference?
on
Grokking Knoppix
·
· Score: 1
As another poster mentions, the book you're thinking of is "Stranger in a Strange Land". However, "grok" is fairly common term in places like Slashdot. See the Jargon File entry, and note examples such as Grokking the GIMP.
Having taken Chinese I this term, I have learned that there's a whole lot more to a language than just vocabulary. In order to be a useful English-killer or monolinguism-killer, a language site needs to have information on how to pronounce words, how to write all of the glyphs used in the language (which might not be important if it uses a Latin-based script and so does your native language, but a lot of languages don't), and some idea of how to construct a useful sentence. (Word order, how to conjugate verbs/decline nouns, use of measure words/particles/prepositions, even synonyms and homonyms..) Also useful would be free media in the language -- TV shows, music, menus, newspapers -- but I know this would be very difficult to host effectively. My Chinese textbook's name translates as "Chinese Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing". Developing skill with all of these facets of a language is part of gaining facility with it.
I would love a free-content languages database, full of audio samples of native speakers and grammar rules, but this isn't quite there yet. I do hope something like it gets off the ground, though, because monolinguism is a terrible disease in a global community:).
Also, I forgot to mention, but two of the late Warren Zevon records -- The Wind and Life'll Kill Ya, are put out by Artemis Records, which is an independent label according to RIAA Radar (and the Artemis Records site itself, and I think Wikipedia too). I love Warren Zevon and most of his music is RIAA-owned, so it was really nice to find that someone so mainstream could be at least a little free.
Webjay is a great help. Its express purpose is to help share great music you found put out by people who are distributing their works on the Internet.
I bought some albums by Brad Yoder -- he's a folk-ish kind of singer so I feel guilty about liking his songs. Check out wwjd -- it's hidden in a bad place on his site but it's a great song. Brad: "I love to play this song because it makes people at both extremes upset."
Looking at Table 1, the numbers given are of the form "% Bush 2000", "% Dole 1996". Using proportions is an effective way to remove population size from consideration. Unless you are insinuating that their analysis is faulty because an abnormally large number of Republicans turned 18 this year -- which isn't unheard of, but I would like to see some data on that.
Your suggestion that counties that went electronic were also counties that would have a dramatic increase of voters for Bush is vague at best. Please consider that this analysis isn't saying, "Counties with voting machines voted for Bush more than counties without voting machines." They are saying "Counties with voting machines voted for Bush more than they did in 2000, and a similar effect did not occur for counties without voting machines."
Despite your claim that this analysis is similar to simple statistical analysis by high school students, your rebuttal is totally inaccurate, and certainly not "Insightful" as it was modded.
Yeah, and in 2040 we will have found that Kerry *did* win the popular vote, and that we really *didn't* vote to become the slaves of multinational corporations and endless war. Oh well! Now we know for next time.
It's my opinion that peer-to-peer filesharing improves sales for RIAA and the like. As such, I no longer find it ethical to distribute their copyrighted works -- it's like giving them advertising. What I would *like* to do to them isn't very ethical either, though, so I'm just going to try to wait for their eventual demise to market forces, and promote things like Webjay and Gnomoradio.
If, as I do, you believe that distribution over the Internet is no different in principle than playing over radio (copyright law has exemptions for radio, btw, although they're too subtle for this particular post), and gets the owner of the copyrighted work valuable publicity which translates into sales, then the right thing to do to protest their hamfisted tactics is to ditch the copyrighted works and stop distributing them. Start distributing works that you agree with. In other words, vote with your bandwidth. It gets easier every day, since things like Webjay started happening.
How nice for RIAA to donate money to bands that they make money from! (12 cents per CD sold goes to the band, is that correct?)
If they stopped destroying artists, we wouldn't have to end RIAA.
This isn't a flame, but a serious question, because I like to know where the OSS tools stand when I advocate them, and highlighting their shortcomings is often a good way to get them improved. I've heard people complain that using the GIMP with a crappy window manager (ie. under OSX or Win32) sucks because you have to click on each window to get it activated, whereas Photoshop has one huge window with all panels as subwindows which are all active at once. I've also heard that OO.o and GIMP are hard to learn. Are these what you're referring to? If not, what's wrong with them?
For myself, I'm not an artist, I'm a programmer, and I very seldom actually need to do art-y things, but when I have, I've been able to do it in GIMP, but usually with a little struggling (which I ascribe to unfamiliarity with the application and unfamiliarity with a graphics mindset). I've only used Photoshop once, and didn't put in the time to get it to do what I wanted. And I much prefer the expressiveness of "GIMPing" to "Photoshopping" a picture.
I was seriously considering voting for Badnarik instead of Kerry, but then I remembered that I disagree violently with every part of the libertarian agenda.
Honestly, I think Kerry would be a decent president. I agree with him on a lot of areas. I think he is a good diplomat, which I think is important in assembling a global front against terrorism. I am concerned, as any American should be, that the two major candidates are almost identical (they were part of the same secret society at the same time), and for this reason alone consider voting for a third party candidate. However, it is more important to me that anybody-but-Bush is president long enough that I can finish my degrees.
Ethan
Coming from a psychology background, I agree that the relationship is probably very complicated. RSF has some figures on press freedom, and I've never heard anyone object strongly to them. As they note:
Wealth and press freedom don't always go together As in 2002, the ranking shows that a country's respect for press freedom is not solely linked to its economic development. The top 50 include countries that are among the poorest in the world, such as Benin (29th position), Timor-Leste (30th) and Madagascar (46th).
Conversely, the 50 countries that respect press freedom least include such rich nations as Bahrain (117th) and Singapore (144th).
While I know these numbers are for press freedom rather than personal freedom or anything more related to freedom of ideas, I think it's clear that greater freedom does not a GDP make. If anyone has any numbers on the GDPs of these nations, we can try to run the regression.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition, sometimes passengers in a car can aid driving by pointing out things that you may have missed -- "Stop, Dave, there's a car RIGHT THERE", for instance.
I think I recall a study in which they found that a passenger who is an adult and licensed driver can actually aid driving.
Ethan
I do not contest that there are problems that Turing machines can't solve. I do not know whether being a human being is one of them. (Sounds like a stupid assertion, but I don't really want to get into it here, because it isn't the point.)
Further, I know that humans do not follow predicate logic exclusively. If this were even close to accurate, many humans would be a lot better at predicate logic than they are, because of a "built-in" ability to use it.
If someone wants to build an AI system that matches humans, I think it is a mistake to build it entirely out of logic, and it pretty much dooms him to failure.
Whether he's right or not, doesn't alter my opinion that he argues from insecurity. It makes it very hard to argue something with someone who is emotionally afraid of being wrong.
Ethan
Selmer wrote that fiction-generating program, Brutus, in Prolog, which still makes me boggle when I think about it. It's an exaggeration to say it writes fiction. It writes pieces of fiction involving betrayal in an academic setting. Of course, that's based on Prolog predicate-logic rules, but that doesn't mean it doesn't write them.
Ethan
Selmer Bringsjord is the professor who doesn't believe AI can be intelligent. He has given a talk called "How to Build Smart Machines: Relax 'Smart', or Pray" -- the idea being that you should either expect less from AI, or hope for divine intervention. In my opinion, he's got huge insecurity issues, and asserts that humans are better than computers to assuage his fears that he really isn't good enough. His fundamental belief is that AI should be based on formal logic, which is something I disagree fairly strongly with. I'm sure he knows a lot -- he teaches a course on Logic and AI which I'm sure he really shines in -- but he needs to work through his issues before I can focus on any argument he makes.
In other news, RPI is really good at hunting for grants, and Selmer is really good at making noise when he gets one. I wouldn't be so interested until they actually make something.
Ethan
Did anyone else see this line and do a double-take?
Like pornography, I know bad code when I see it.
What? What??
Ethan
This card, as it is stated in TFA, isn't meant to compete successfully in the category of "renders Doom III at appreciable speeds". It's not the result of years of R&D, and it's not bleeding-edge. It's a chance for a company to service the niche market of people who want a decent-quality card, and are willing to pay for the freeness of it. Making a product that kicks the ass of the competitors in the category of how Free-Software-compatible it is, is the idea, and I think Techsource can compete successfully with ATI and nVidia here.
Ethan
If you can get laid in the ugliest, loudest, filtiest car around, then buddy, you don't *need* an SUV.
Ethan
I was going to write a post but this one says everything I could have ever wanted to say, better. Thank you.
Ethan
I'm surprised he didn't mention Katamari Damancy in the article. This game is probably the most innovative game of 2004, and Namco, the company that made it, isn't exactly the indiest of indie companies. (Oh, and it's for PS2, a console system.)
I'm not sure you can truly say the innovation in gaming was on the computers and not consoles. Sure, MMORPGs were on computers first (but now there's also X-Box live).. but actual multiplayer games were on consoles first!
Ethan
I'm conflicted about this book. It covers a lot of things which are important for first-time Linux users: "This is KDE", "This is what a superuser is", "Everything is a file". Each chapter has FAQ-type troubleshooting questions that may or may not be helpful to people throwing their hands up in despair about Knoppix. However, I'm a little leery that they put boot time options before use of KDE (advanced topic before beginner's stuff). In general, I think the book bounces back and forth between good "So You Want To Be A Linux Consultant" material, like the stuff about hda, fd0, boot process, init, and so on, and good "Grandpa Computer User" material, like the stuff about KDE ("click on things to start them", "you can lasso many things at once"). This makes it difficult for either group to use. Also, despite the article summary, I don't see anything in this book about Windows disaster recovery.
Ethan
As another poster mentions, the book you're thinking of is "Stranger in a Strange Land". However, "grok" is fairly common term in places like Slashdot. See the Jargon File entry, and note examples such as Grokking the GIMP.
Ethan
Exactly. Downloading Firefox encourages unsafe behavior. Using IE *is* unsafe behavior.
Ethan
At least this guy admits that his stuff is lifeless cacophony created by robots.
Ethan
Definitely. Sometimes it hurts. That's why detailed pronounciation information and audio samples would be needed too. Ethan
Having taken Chinese I this term, I have learned that there's a whole lot more to a language than just vocabulary. In order to be a useful English-killer or monolinguism-killer, a language site needs to have information on how to pronounce words, how to write all of the glyphs used in the language (which might not be important if it uses a Latin-based script and so does your native language, but a lot of languages don't), and some idea of how to construct a useful sentence. (Word order, how to conjugate verbs/decline nouns, use of measure words/particles/prepositions, even synonyms and homonyms..) Also useful would be free media in the language -- TV shows, music, menus, newspapers -- but I know this would be very difficult to host effectively. My Chinese textbook's name translates as "Chinese Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing". Developing skill with all of these facets of a language is part of gaining facility with it.
:).
I would love a free-content languages database, full of audio samples of native speakers and grammar rules, but this isn't quite there yet. I do hope something like it gets off the ground, though, because monolinguism is a terrible disease in a global community
Ethan
Also, I forgot to mention, but two of the late Warren Zevon records -- The Wind and Life'll Kill Ya, are put out by Artemis Records, which is an independent label according to RIAA Radar (and the Artemis Records site itself, and I think Wikipedia too). I love Warren Zevon and most of his music is RIAA-owned, so it was really nice to find that someone so mainstream could be at least a little free.
Ethan
Webjay is a great help. Its express purpose is to help share great music you found put out by people who are distributing their works on the Internet.
I bought some albums by Brad Yoder -- he's a folk-ish kind of singer so I feel guilty about liking his songs. Check out wwjd -- it's hidden in a bad place on his site but it's a great song. Brad: "I love to play this song because it makes people at both extremes upset."
Ethan
Looking at Table 1, the numbers given are of the form "% Bush 2000", "% Dole 1996". Using proportions is an effective way to remove population size from consideration. Unless you are insinuating that their analysis is faulty because an abnormally large number of Republicans turned 18 this year -- which isn't unheard of, but I would like to see some data on that.
Your suggestion that counties that went electronic were also counties that would have a dramatic increase of voters for Bush is vague at best. Please consider that this analysis isn't saying, "Counties with voting machines voted for Bush more than counties without voting machines." They are saying "Counties with voting machines voted for Bush more than they did in 2000, and a similar effect did not occur for counties without voting machines."
Despite your claim that this analysis is similar to simple statistical analysis by high school students, your rebuttal is totally inaccurate, and certainly not "Insightful" as it was modded.
Ethan
Yeah, and in 2040 we will have found that Kerry *did* win the popular vote, and that we really *didn't* vote to become the slaves of multinational corporations and endless war. Oh well! Now we know for next time.
Ethan
It's my opinion that peer-to-peer filesharing improves sales for RIAA and the like. As such, I no longer find it ethical to distribute their copyrighted works -- it's like giving them advertising. What I would *like* to do to them isn't very ethical either, though, so I'm just going to try to wait for their eventual demise to market forces, and promote things like Webjay and Gnomoradio.
Ethan
If, as I do, you believe that distribution over the Internet is no different in principle than playing over radio (copyright law has exemptions for radio, btw, although they're too subtle for this particular post), and gets the owner of the copyrighted work valuable publicity which translates into sales, then the right thing to do to protest their hamfisted tactics is to ditch the copyrighted works and stop distributing them. Start distributing works that you agree with. In other words, vote with your bandwidth. It gets easier every day, since things like Webjay started happening.
Ethan
How nice for RIAA to donate money to bands that they make money from! (12 cents per CD sold goes to the band, is that correct?) If they stopped destroying artists, we wouldn't have to end RIAA.
Ethan
This isn't a flame, but a serious question, because I like to know where the OSS tools stand when I advocate them, and highlighting their shortcomings is often a good way to get them improved. I've heard people complain that using the GIMP with a crappy window manager (ie. under OSX or Win32) sucks because you have to click on each window to get it activated, whereas Photoshop has one huge window with all panels as subwindows which are all active at once. I've also heard that OO.o and GIMP are hard to learn. Are these what you're referring to? If not, what's wrong with them?
For myself, I'm not an artist, I'm a programmer, and I very seldom actually need to do art-y things, but when I have, I've been able to do it in GIMP, but usually with a little struggling (which I ascribe to unfamiliarity with the application and unfamiliarity with a graphics mindset). I've only used Photoshop once, and didn't put in the time to get it to do what I wanted. And I much prefer the expressiveness of "GIMPing" to "Photoshopping" a picture.
Ethan
I was seriously considering voting for Badnarik instead of Kerry, but then I remembered that I disagree violently with every part of the libertarian agenda. Honestly, I think Kerry would be a decent president. I agree with him on a lot of areas. I think he is a good diplomat, which I think is important in assembling a global front against terrorism. I am concerned, as any American should be, that the two major candidates are almost identical (they were part of the same secret society at the same time), and for this reason alone consider voting for a third party candidate. However, it is more important to me that anybody-but-Bush is president long enough that I can finish my degrees. Ethan
Coming from a psychology background, I agree that the relationship is probably very complicated. RSF has some figures on press freedom, and I've never heard anyone object strongly to them. As they note:
Wealth and press freedom don't always go together As in 2002, the ranking shows that a country's respect for press freedom is not solely linked to its economic development. The top 50 include countries that are among the poorest in the world, such as Benin (29th position), Timor-Leste (30th) and Madagascar (46th).
Conversely, the 50 countries that respect press freedom least include such rich nations as Bahrain (117th) and Singapore (144th).
While I know these numbers are for press freedom rather than personal freedom or anything more related to freedom of ideas, I think it's clear that greater freedom does not a GDP make. If anyone has any numbers on the GDPs of these nations, we can try to run the regression.
Ethan