In the early 2000s the University of Oxford named Nick Bostrom as the Director for the newly founded institute: "Future of Humanity Institute".
He thinks about "existential risk". If we are indeed living in a simulation, an existential risk is that it will be turned off.
He has collected and summarised the various aspects ("how would you change your behaviour if you knew you were living in a simulation?") at the above website.
It is unlikely that any one of us here has more to contribute on the topic than what this guy has already forgotten.
The guy who wrote it got his own department at the University of Oxford (to study "existential risk" -- earth and life on it are threatened by the power button on a space-age playstation...):
I hate and mistrust Microsoft as much as the next guy, but let me say this:
* Mathematics is powerful because you take two numbers and an operator and as a result you get something that you can re-use in the same fashion
* Unix is powerful because you take text files and an operator and as a result you get something that you can re-use in the same fashion
* Relational DBMSs are powerful because you take two relations and an operator and as a result you get something that you can re-use in the same fashion
* Monad Shell (now called Power Shell) is powerful because you take object streams and an operator and as a result you get something that you can re-use in the same fashion
A Monad really is something where you put (typically) a constant into a function and get out a specialised function (like, you put 5 into your Monad and out comes a function that takes an integer and returns that same thing plus five).
The Unix world has Perl Shell, Python Shell, and something that the Power Shell is a copy of, the Haskell Shell.
Your first sentence is the best characterisation I have read.
People should go and look up "culpable deniability".
I believe that the tweet was meant to first raise warm feelings in the believers and then to deliberately debase this elevation by pointing to an icon for the perceived opposing faction. I find "baiting" a very appropriate word to describe the process.
I also find it witty. Yet, I don't think it is clever to address a public which already supports cutting the science budget with something that further infuriates them.
I recommend you consult your friendly "history & philosophy of science" major to explain this topic to you. As a second-best option, please read the book "the history of scientific revolutions". As a worst, last resort, please consider this explanation of mine:
--- define the terms:
* bertrand russel said (I paraphrase): "things that can be known are the domain of science, things that cannot be known are the domain of theology and things and the stuff in between is the domain of philosophy"
* the difference between science and engineering is that science tries to explain stuff and that engineering tries to predict future environments and optimise a solution for that expectation
--- describe the process:
* science obtains (repeatable) experimental results, then develops a theory to explain those results, then takes the theory to its extremes (where it breaks) and repeats the cycle
* a fine example of this cycle is kepler-newton-einstein
* do a basic course in logic: deduction is not the same as induction; the scientific process includes a step which amasses a convincing body of evidence and argument to get us to a consensus that something which has a clear correlation is also in a causal relationship; deduction is applicable in areas of causality; any single contradicting (repeatable) experiment is qualified to undo this consensus
* please observe that the more accurate model (in the kepler-newton-einstein cascade) still holds for all previous results and that the observed error is not allowed to grow with the next acceptable model
* when you have multiple theories from different corners of science that finely explain their respective experimental evidence, yet they contradict each other, then we acknowledge the situation and keep looking
* a fine example is relativity vs. quantum
* climate science is where a mix of multiple disciplines have recently come together; they can't even explain what they do themselves, let alone explain what happens at the intersection
* rising sea levels is a fine example: apparently rising sea levels are the least disputed observable phenomenon from "global warming"; and water is a fine energy store and is snarfing up a lot of energy; yet water volume depends on both temperature and pressure; it seems that we don't know where (which layer of water) the absorbed energy ends up in -- yet this affects gravely how much expansion we see
--- conclusion & recommendation
* please keep collecting facts
* please propose ever more outlandish models and check them against the collected data
* talk to each other, discuss and debate
* try to find experiments which break existing theories
Western society claims to be founded on two principles: democracy and "rule of law". I am disillusioned with both these claims. If there are so many laws that you are likely violating something at any point in time and not every violation is prosecuted, then the situation from enforcing laws is turned on its head to hunting people -- which is precisely what "rule of law" is claimed to not do. Having hierarchically structured political parties that the voter is restricted to chosing from extinguishes the benefits claimed of democracy.
before you all get worked up, please remember that Ubuntu was founded by Mark Shuttleworth. Mark became a billionaire by running Thawte. Thawte is a certificate authority for X.509 certificates.
My take is he knows a thing or two about such infrastructures and I also think he is a positive influence for the free software world.
We had tags for people and assets (printers, photocopiers, overhead projectors, computer manuals) that were used for location information, for door access, for having your computer screen follow around (they built an X-proxy and later developed it into VNC). This was 1992-1999 at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in cooperation with the Olivetti Research labs (was changed to AT&T research labs or the other way around), who manufactured the devices. The tags worked on infrared, so putting them in your pocket would hide them. The people tags had rapid updates (few seconds) and the asset tags seldom updates (minutes). It was a voluntary experiment and I estimate 2/3 of the staff had them. Today I'm a privacy zealot.
Features: * it is GPL * it is used for exporting and importing * it creates a digital certificate for the machine it's run on * it creates a 1-1 relationship with a machine that it's synching with * it creates an export file on the source machine & imports it on the target machine (you have to move it) * the export file is a zip file * you build a ruleset on the export machine (files, directories, regexes) what you wish to export * you build a ruleset on the import machine (same) what you wish to import * these two rulesets give you total control even when you're exchanging with someone else * you have rules for "soft master", "hard master", "soft slave", "hard slave", "progress", etc.
If you can use "unison", use that. If you wish to automate, use "app_dsync".
do you believe the query engine of MySQL could be rebuilt to become a tuple flow system (or any other mechanism) which would be able to scale single-query perfomance on a multi-CPU (core) system?
I would claim that PostgreSQL is an object database. This is based on the following taxonomy of 4 variants of what "object" means: 1) relational with object extensions -- this of course being the PostgreSQL people; 2) object stores with declarative query language; 3) knowledge management rule base systems; 4) persistent programming language stores. In fact, when the "2)" camp published the "object database manifesto", the "1)" camp (the empire) struck back with the "third generation database manifesto". My personal criteria for calling something DBMS are: ACID properties, declarative query language, query optimiser, larger than volatile memory dataset handling.
There is no free implementation of CORBA that does all the things that com+ does. For message queueing, use IBM MQSeries, for transaction mgmt, use BEA Tuxedo, for connection sharing, use any commercial CORBA implementation. Thus, MS is very good at providing superb services on their own platform (which is probably going to be stable as the "datacenter edition" where only certain hardware and drivers are allowed). CORBA et al are a similarly good solution in a cross-platform environment
Hi, ATT research have built a system that lets you pull the plug on your box and get your session back. It's an X-proxy which dumps your whole screen into an in-memory area. You can download it from http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc.
Hi, the main problem with this is consumer protection. The threshold to do something that is legally binding is lowered tremendously (blatant assertion, I know).
Hi, I've had a Matrox Ultima/VLB and now I have a Matrox Permedia G100. The Ultima came with NDAs for driver development and the G100 was too new for XFree when I bought it. My opinion of AccX (one of the products from Xig) is: very fast, very stable, but non-linux directories make X-app development awkward. As an European, I'm not used to comparative advertising and find it rude and even somewhat childish.
Please take a step back and look at the big picture: 1) a small step back: what is the difference between a prof and a TA (2 years maybe?) 2) a bigger step back: maybe it is possible that the TA is currently IMPLEMENTING some of the work and the prof is guiding it? (that would make the TA the person more appropriate to the teaching task IMHO) 3) a big step back: with a large uni, you are paying for infrastructure (and they can afford to pay for a really bright student even if that student is poor, they give you access to "contacts") --- maybe those things lead to a high ROI...
This is going to be a huge, huge, market. The music companies are the first ones to experience this. Hence, hardware companies are building end-to-end security. All of this is nicely outlined in the whitepaper that Entrust (investment from NatWest and everyone else in the money business) used to have online (they've investorified all their documentation into PDF). They say that you need a TCB (trusted computing base) to process the containers and my guess is that IBM is doing just that. It will be possible to hack this and Entrust even says so, but they don't worry, because legal steps are taken to make things "safe for business".
a program that takes a BNF grammar and a file conforming to the grammar. It would return an XML parse tree of the input that contains the DTD as its header
an XML format for emails
simple XML formats for letters/faxes
a convertor that takes this and turns it into usable latex/MSWord
a dream-reiserfs based repository with set based access
a command line client that produces orders of the form (address, (quantity, product_description, product_number, price)*, max_invoice_price, (payment_details)) and encrypts this with a public key scheme, turning it into email
a gtk/qt/athena/xxx based front end for this client (not for me though...)
an BSD-style licensed parser that works on Windows and extracts this, so that bookshops (or whatever) can easily sell to me even if they're assimilated into the borg
an extensible from-and-to convertor that can gather all the config files around my hdd and turn them into one big XML file and back (that's more to the topic)
DTDs for emacs bbdb/cal/todo
convertors to turn emacs-bbdb/cal/todo files into XML and back
An XML merge utility to merge two files conforming to the same DTD
Well, I will only reproduce parts of it so that they don't sue me for copyright infringement. Here comes the "fair use":
Our Philosophy: [which should mean "how we explain existence", but really is only a mission statement...]
We wish to aid our customers during all phases of inter- and intra-net [note that the internet is first priority...] projects. Our encompassing competence [note that they don't know how to operate the demoronizer, or, for that matter, their web page generator, so that their homepage is vanilla without frames; *and* they ignore blind people or lynx users] positions us as external advisers. Through a lively mindset of service and better service [sorry my fault, try translating "dienstleistungsgedanke" yourself then...] we attempt to tie customers to us [oh, gee, that's confidence-inspiring...]. During realisation of our projects we focus on the optimal synthesis of doability and technical avantgarde [= lots of JS, little use...]
We offer an encompassing competence in all areas of internet technologies, with the synergistic effects are exhibited in better results and quicker reaction times.
Also, the company was founded by a single person in 1995, the guy employes 33 people. They have just entered digital TV (I kid you not, but it's probably not meant literally...) and started the ISO 9000 process. Let's see whether they have documented how to deal with a zillion slashdot inquiries yet...
Finally, the company that undoubtedly is going to utilise the OPEN word of the Linux world as a marketing gimmick asks for your mail reader (outlook or netscape) when you subscribe to their mailing list.
My favourite interpretation of the matter comes from Bertrand Russel's "History of Western Philosophy". There's the foreword, the ToC and then the introduction. The third paragraph goes like this:
"Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge -- so I should contend -- belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries...."
I just loved that quote where they're talking about making bacteria that eat atomic waste. And how is that going to help? Sorry, but I'd rather have my nuclear waste to be inanimate (oh, now I've brought up philosophical questions: anima is latin and means "soul", can I bring nuclear waste to life? Or is everything alive, like Demokritus thought?... but I digress.)!
on sci.crypt was a message saying that anyone with any sense keeps something as sensitive as a key for 80m machines in a tamperproof hardware device. Thus, if you got an earthquake or thunderstorm, that device might interpret the environmental factors as an attempt at breaking it and respond by self-destructing. This would explain why a key could get lost. I do agree, however, that they could stick the same key into two such devices. Also, I would not overwrite the NSA key with junk, but rather with the first key.
Hi FeiYen, you appear to be very knowledgeable regarding NT. I have read (in the context of BO articles) that Internet Explorer runs not only with administrator privileges, but even partially in kernel space. Can you confirm or deny this? Thanks
Slashdot Mirror
website: www.simulation-argument.com
In the early 2000s the University of Oxford named Nick Bostrom as the Director for the newly founded institute: "Future of Humanity Institute".
He thinks about "existential risk". If we are indeed living in a simulation, an existential risk is that it will be turned off.
He has collected and summarised the various aspects ("how would you change your behaviour if you knew you were living in
a simulation?") at the above website.
It is unlikely that any one of us here has more to contribute on the topic than what this guy has already forgotten.
Enjoy.
Oliver
Dear /.
the underlying doubt comes from Descartes' deliberations on how to obtain knowledge (chapter 3, "meditations"):
http://plato.stanford.edu/entr...
The re-loaded version for the 21st century can be found here:
http://www.simulation-argument...
The guy who wrote it got his own department at the University of Oxford (to study "existential risk" -- earth and life on it are threatened by the power button on a space-age playstation ...):
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/
Best regards,
Oliver
I hate and mistrust Microsoft as much as the next guy, but let me say this:
* Mathematics is powerful because you take two numbers and an operator and as a result you get something that you can re-use in the same fashion
* Unix is powerful because you take text files and an operator and as a result you get something that you can re-use in the same fashion
* Relational DBMSs are powerful because you take two relations and an operator and as a result you get something that you can re-use in the same fashion
* Monad Shell (now called Power Shell) is powerful because you take object streams and an operator and as a result you get something that you can re-use in the same fashion
A Monad really is something where you put (typically) a constant into a function and get out a specialised function (like, you put 5 into your Monad and out comes a function that takes an integer and returns that same thing plus five).
The Unix world has Perl Shell, Python Shell, and something that the Power Shell is a copy of, the Haskell Shell.
https://github.com/chrisdone/h...
http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2...
Best regards,
Oliver
Your first sentence is the best characterisation I have read.
People should go and look up "culpable deniability".
I believe that the tweet was meant to first raise warm feelings in the believers and then to deliberately debase this elevation by pointing to an icon for the perceived opposing faction. I find "baiting" a very appropriate word to describe the process.
I also find it witty. Yet, I don't think it is clever to address a public which already supports cutting the science budget with something that further infuriates them.
I recommend you consult your friendly "history & philosophy of science" major to explain this topic to you. As a second-best option, please read the book "the history of scientific revolutions". As a worst, last resort, please consider this explanation of mine:
--- define the terms:
* bertrand russel said (I paraphrase): "things that can be known are the domain of science, things that cannot be known are the domain of theology and things and the stuff in between is the domain of philosophy"
* the difference between science and engineering is that science tries to explain stuff and that engineering tries to predict future environments and optimise a solution for that expectation
--- describe the process:
* science obtains (repeatable) experimental results, then develops a theory to explain those results, then takes the theory to its extremes (where it breaks) and repeats the cycle
* a fine example of this cycle is kepler-newton-einstein
* do a basic course in logic: deduction is not the same as induction; the scientific process includes a step which amasses a convincing body of evidence and argument to get us to a consensus that something which has a clear correlation is also in a causal relationship; deduction is applicable in areas of causality; any single contradicting (repeatable) experiment is qualified to undo this consensus
* please observe that the more accurate model (in the kepler-newton-einstein cascade) still holds for all previous results and that the observed error is not allowed to grow with the next acceptable model
* when you have multiple theories from different corners of science that finely explain their respective experimental evidence, yet they contradict each other, then we acknowledge the situation and keep looking
* a fine example is relativity vs. quantum
* climate science is where a mix of multiple disciplines have recently come together; they can't even explain what they do themselves, let alone explain what happens at the intersection
* rising sea levels is a fine example: apparently rising sea levels are the least disputed observable phenomenon from "global warming"; and water is a fine energy store and is snarfing up a lot of energy; yet water volume depends on both temperature and pressure; it seems that we don't know where (which layer of water) the absorbed energy ends up in -- yet this affects gravely how much expansion we see
--- conclusion & recommendation
* please keep collecting facts
* please propose ever more outlandish models and check them against the collected data
* talk to each other, discuss and debate
* try to find experiments which break existing theories
best regards,
os10000
Western society claims to be founded on two principles: democracy and "rule of law". I am disillusioned with both these claims. If there are so many laws that you are likely violating something at any point in time and not every violation is prosecuted, then the situation from enforcing laws is turned on its head to hunting people -- which is precisely what "rule of law" is claimed to not do. Having hierarchically structured political parties that the voter is restricted to chosing from extinguishes the benefits claimed of democracy.
As everyone else, that using a collection of tapes with a single or small number of tape drives is impractical.
Instead, I recommend reading up on hierarchical storage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_storage_management/
Also, if you really want a solution which does what you ask for, SamFS may be for you:
http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/4240-Less-known-Solaris-features-SamFS.html/
Bye,
os10000
Hi Guys & Gals,
before you all get worked up, please remember that Ubuntu was founded by Mark Shuttleworth. Mark became a billionaire by running Thawte. Thawte is a certificate authority for X.509 certificates.
My take is he knows a thing or two about such infrastructures and I also think he is a positive influence for the free software world.
have a good day!
We had tags for people and assets (printers, photocopiers, overhead projectors, computer manuals) that were used for location information, for door access, for having your computer screen follow around (they built an X-proxy and later developed it into VNC). This was 1992-1999 at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in cooperation with the Olivetti Research labs (was changed to AT&T research labs or the other way around), who manufactured the devices. The tags worked on infrared, so putting them in your pocket would hide them. The people tags had rapid updates (few seconds) and the asset tags seldom updates (minutes). It was a voluntary experiment and I estimate 2/3 of the staff had them. Today I'm a privacy zealot.
Hello,
I have built a java program. You can find it here: http://www.os10000.net/fs/java/app_dsync/index.html
Features:
* it is GPL
* it is used for exporting and importing
* it creates a digital certificate for the machine it's run on
* it creates a 1-1 relationship with a machine that it's synching with
* it creates an export file on the source machine & imports it on the target machine (you have to move it)
* the export file is a zip file
* you build a ruleset on the export machine (files, directories, regexes) what you wish to export
* you build a ruleset on the import machine (same) what you wish to import
* these two rulesets give you total control even when you're exchanging with someone else
* you have rules for "soft master", "hard master", "soft slave", "hard slave", "progress", etc.
If you can use "unison", use that. If you wish to automate, use "app_dsync".
Have a good day,
Oliver
Hello Brian,
do you believe the query engine of MySQL could be rebuilt to become a tuple flow system (or any other mechanism) which would be able to scale single-query perfomance on a multi-CPU (core) system?
Thanks,
Oliver
I would claim that PostgreSQL is an object database. This is based on the following taxonomy of 4 variants of what "object" means: 1) relational with object extensions -- this of course being the PostgreSQL people; 2) object stores with declarative query language; 3) knowledge management rule base systems; 4) persistent programming language stores. In fact, when the "2)" camp published the "object database manifesto", the "1)" camp (the empire) struck back with the "third generation database manifesto". My personal criteria for calling something DBMS are: ACID properties, declarative query language, query optimiser, larger than volatile memory dataset handling.
There is no free implementation of CORBA that
does all the things that com+ does. For message
queueing, use IBM MQSeries, for transaction mgmt,
use BEA Tuxedo, for connection sharing, use any
commercial CORBA implementation. Thus, MS is
very good at providing superb services on their
own platform (which is probably going to be stable
as the "datacenter edition" where only certain
hardware and drivers are allowed). CORBA et al
are a similarly good solution in a cross-platform environment
Hi, ATT research have built a system that lets you pull the plug on your box and get your session back. It's an X-proxy which dumps your whole screen into an in-memory area. You can download it from http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc.
Hi, the main problem with this is consumer protection. The threshold to do something that is legally binding is lowered tremendously (blatant assertion, I know).
Hi, I've had a Matrox Ultima/VLB and now I have a Matrox Permedia G100. The Ultima came with NDAs for driver development and the G100 was too new for XFree when I bought it. My opinion of AccX (one of the products from Xig) is: very fast, very stable, but non-linux directories make X-app development awkward. As an European, I'm not used to comparative advertising and find it rude and even somewhat childish.
Please take a step back and look at the big picture: 1) a small step back: what is the difference between a prof and a TA (2 years maybe?) 2) a bigger step back: maybe it is possible that the TA is currently IMPLEMENTING some of the work and the prof is guiding it? (that would make the TA the person more appropriate to the teaching task IMHO) 3) a big step back: with a large uni, you are paying for infrastructure (and they can afford to pay for a really bright student even if that student is poor, they give you access to "contacts") --- maybe those things lead to a high ROI ...
This is going to be a huge, huge, market. The music companies are the first ones to experience this. Hence, hardware companies are building end-to-end security. All of this is nicely outlined in the whitepaper that Entrust (investment from NatWest and everyone else in the money business) used to have online (they've investorified all their documentation into PDF). They say that you need a TCB (trusted computing base) to process the containers and my guess is that IBM is doing just that. It will be possible to hack this and Entrust even says so, but they don't worry, because legal steps are taken to make things "safe for business".
Well, I will only reproduce parts of it so that they don't sue me for copyright infringement. Here comes the "fair use":
Our Philosophy: [which should mean "how we explain existence", but really is only a mission statement ...]
We wish to aid our customers during all phases of inter- and intra-net [note that the internet is first priority ...] projects. Our encompassing competence [note that they don't know how to operate the demoronizer, or, for that matter, their web page generator, so that their homepage is vanilla without frames; *and* they ignore blind people or lynx users] positions us as external advisers. Through a lively mindset of service and better service [sorry my fault, try translating "dienstleistungsgedanke" yourself then ...] we attempt to tie customers to us [oh, gee, that's confidence-inspiring ...]. During realisation of our projects we focus on the optimal synthesis of doability and technical avantgarde [= lots of JS, little use ...]
We offer an encompassing competence in all areas of internet technologies, with the synergistic effects are exhibited in better results and quicker reaction times.
Also, the company was founded by a single person in 1995, the guy employes 33 people. They have just entered digital TV (I kid you not, but it's probably not meant literally ...) and started the ISO 9000 process. Let's see whether they have documented how to deal with a zillion slashdot inquiries yet ...
Finally, the company that undoubtedly is going to utilise the OPEN word of the Linux world as a marketing gimmick asks for your mail reader (outlook or netscape) when you subscribe to their mailing list.
... sorry to rant
My favourite interpretation of the matter comes from Bertrand Russel's "History of Western Philosophy". There's the foreword, the ToC and then the introduction. The third paragraph goes like this:
"Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge -- so I should contend -- belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries. ..."
I just loved that quote where they're talking about making bacteria that eat atomic waste. And how is that going to help? Sorry, but I'd rather have my nuclear waste to be inanimate (oh, now I've brought up philosophical questions: anima is latin and means "soul", can I bring nuclear waste to life? Or is everything alive, like Demokritus thought? ... but I digress.)!
on sci.crypt was a message saying that anyone with
any sense keeps something as sensitive as a key
for 80m machines in a tamperproof hardware device.
Thus, if you got an earthquake or thunderstorm,
that device might interpret the environmental
factors as an attempt at breaking it and respond
by self-destructing. This would explain why a key
could get lost. I do agree, however, that they
could stick the same key into two such devices.
Also, I would not overwrite the NSA key with junk, but rather with the first key.
the OPERA text mode tables don't look any different
than the one in w3m. Look at www.freshmeat.net.
This has been doing it for a long time.
Hi FeiYen, you appear to be very knowledgeable
regarding NT. I have read (in the context of BO
articles) that Internet Explorer runs not only
with administrator privileges, but even partially
in kernel space. Can you confirm or deny this?
Thanks