It's difficult really to tell from the article, but is it a distributed JVM? Or just software to migrate java processes from one computer to another? I've personally tested a distributed JVM on a small beowolf cluster:
http://www.cs.hku.hk/~clwang/projects/JESSICA2.htm l
It essentially keeps a single distributed heap for all of the objects, automatically migrates objects from one node to another, and migrates threads as well. To the programmer, it looks like a single computer, although you have to make sure as a programmer to utilize as many threading resources, and to decouple as many independent processes as possible to help the VM distribute resources better.
This seems like a high price, for a less ambitious technology.
-Jason Thomas.
I remember hacking my professor's website, and replacing his personal image with a morph of him and a chimp... Sticking first person shooters on every one of the PCs, and figuring out how to hack them. Making a Java space-shooter applet, where I replaced every one of the stars with pictures of his head--- and it was all encouraged!
This is, obviously, a rather remedial type of exploration and nusance--- but the basic childish need to annoy your elders can be a strong driving force to learn, and my CS teacher understood that, and had a sense of humor.
What's happened?
I'm not really as concerned with the implications of being able to inject images into the human brain, while that may be somewhat useful. It's likely the visual cortex may have many subtle differences as well between human and chimpanzee brains--- so this is likely to be a much more difficult set of technology to translate for human use. What's interesting about this is the fact they're claiming that an incredibly complicated set of algorithms, that have been evolved over billions of years in our brains, can be reverse engineered.
In AI we've yet to find what algorithms are responsible for consciousness, for visual recognition, and a myriad of other problems. They're all just sitting in our brains, likely on the lowest level of the neuron, waiting for us to extract them. This has infinitely more applications than forcing images into people's brains.
Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment doesn't seem to support your point. The idea Searle attempts to explain isn't that there's no difference between regurgitating information, and actually understanding it. Indeed many of the arguments against AI claim that 'only' machines that externally demonstrate intelligence, but lack a conscious mind, and an ability to actually understand that information, can exist. It's precisely this that Searle tries to demonstrate in his experiment--- the exact opposite of what you seem to be relying on.
It seems that my computer can offer a good explanation for a myriad of differing problems, but, I still doubt that there isn't any difference between this and understanding those problems.
The Turing experiment, I believe would support your opinion. Turing's major claim is that if you, as a third party observer, couldn't tell the difference between a computer and a human through blind dialog--- then that computer is intelligent. For one, this test judges intelligence through how well a machine relates to our particular brand of social interaction. It doesn't seem fair to say that something isn't intelligent if it's incapable of human communication. If an intelligent alien species that communicated through beams of light, or sonar, were to analyze our species this way, we would quickly be determined not to demonstrate intelligence. It also heavily relies on the social and conversational abilities of the judge in the situation. Many template based bots, whom most people would agree are not intelligent, have tricked judges into believing they're intelligent. An entertaining programming pass time involves creating bots and attempting to fool random individuals into having deep personal conversations with them. In the end Turing's method seems too subjective, and it doesn't seem entirely logical. It isn't apparent that a machine that only seems to be intelligent can't exist, and I would assume this could also be true for human beings;).
John Searle argued against this using a parody of the Turing Experiment, the "Chinese Room" experiment. This thought experiment involves an intelligent human being, interacting with the outside world via a proxy of a limited symbolic interface. Through this interface he can place answers to given questions in the Chinese language by following a complicated program, or rule book, without understanding a word of Chinese. In essence, he claims to have crated a machine incapable of ever being intentional. His second claim is that no rule book exists that would allow you to, as the operator, to understand Chinese.
While I agree with Daniel Dennett that this is just intellectual sleight of hand, and in the end Searle's experiment makes several logical errors that fail to prove that intelligent machines can not exist; I don't believe it either proves, or disproves, the possibility of zombie machines existing.
I think this is an illustration of the need for multinational labor unions, tariffs and taxes are only regional and limited (and prohibited by the WTO and NAFTA). I think it's foolish to pretend that human beings in India are any less talented, skilled, or possessing of all of those qualities we so often celebrate in humanity, than those in the United States. I continually hear the argument that workers in India are the enemies of the workers in the United States. When will people realize that our goals are in common? The differences in the economies of the United States, and India, allow for companies to exploit foreign workers by playing these economies against one another on an international scale.
India is no more immune to their jobs being transfered to China, or Russia, than we were to our jobs being transfered to India. And when India is once again significantly impoverished enough that their skilled population is again willing to accept marginalized salaries--- they will transfer their workforce back, until the lips of their Chinese workers are significantly parched enough to accept even lesser wages.
This situation is analogous to the fights, and races to the bottom, that occurred in the United States in regards to the influx of cheap immigrant labor, time and time again. It wasn't until we realized our common interests, and forged strong unions, that it became a fight back up to the top again. If Indian workers were to demand certain working conditions be met in the United States, and U.S. workers were to demand the same for Indian workers, we would be able to secure a great deal more of the profits that multinational corporations are usurping from our talents. It seems we even have a great organizing utility, that I think all computer scientists are familiar with: The Internet.
"Common Quote - We invented it, we want to keep it.
This of course is a stupid argument - the Internet is many things - WWW being the most obvious. And the Web was invented where?"
I think you're misinterpreting the argument. This is an example of the same oversimplification, and manipulation of an argument, that was used against Al Gore in the 2000 elections. The republicans would have you believe that Al Gore said that he "Invented the Internet." In reality, Al Gore said that he helped in "creating" the Internet. And this, without the oversimplification to the point of obvious absurdity, is in fact true.
Al Gore: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
From ISOC: "In 1988, a National Research Council committee, chaired by Kleinrock and with Kahn and Clark as members, produced a report commissioned by NSF titled "Towards a National Research Network". This report was influential on then Senator Al Gore, and ushered in high speed networks that laid the networking foundation for the future information superhighway."
I don't believe that by saying that the U.S. was instrumentally responsible in the creation and formation of the underlying infrastructure and technology through which the World Wide Web, IRC, World Of Warcraft, etc. operate (The Internet), is the same as saying that the U.S. is solely responsible for all of the content that uses the Internet as its infrastructure.
This, alone, is obviously not an argument for retaining sole U.S. control over the Internet. And, I think it's obvious that the United States has ulterior motives in retaining control of the Internet. I do, however, see legitimate arguments for U.S. maintained control, based on this fact.
Primarily that the United States invested originally in the technology, and formation of the infrastructure for the Internet, as a means of national security. It seems to me, that any country practicing Realism as a means by which to determine foreign policy, would be extremely reluctant to allow its military technology, to be controlled by a conglomerate of foreign powers. GPS technology, for instance, was created originally for U.S. military purposes. It now controls the guidance systems in a great deal of our missiles. The International community has, as has the domestic public in the United States, usurped this technology for practical and industrial use. Even within our own country, citizens are fighting the balancing interests of the public to have greater GPS accuracy, against the interests of the U.S. Military to retain a technological advantage over other countries. The origin of this technology is as relevant domestically, as it is internationally. This illustrates that this is not an issue of just "blind U.S. patriotism," although I do not deny that there may be some of this position, but more of the reality of the origins of the Internet, and the fact that it is undeniably tied with, as it has been since its birth, the national security of the United States.
This isn't just a simple minded argument of "We created it, therefor it's ours." I personally think the potential of the Internet to act as a gateway between various communities, making the international community at large a more tangible thing to ordinary people, trumps the need for keeping an active network by which communication could be achieved despite a nuclear attack. I support fully giving Internet control to the United Nations. However, I'm not going to pretend that any arguments for retained U.S. control are groundless, or by any means just "stupid."
Clinton's administration is different than Democrats in congress. Just look at the current major split betweeen replublicans, and the insurrection lead by John McCain. I don't believe it would be fair to claim Bush and McCain as one unified entity, just as I don't believe it would be fair to say the same thing about congress during the Republican revolution, and Clinton's administration.
It's easy to overlook 'facts' when they are in reality fiction.
In reality Clinton's administration negotiated, supported, and he personally eventually signed the Kyoto protocol.
"Former President Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, negotiated the treaty for the United States and had a major role in its final form."
According to Wikipedia: "On June 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was to be negotiated, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Aware of the Senate's view of the protocol, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol for ratification."
The criticism is that Bush doesn't support the Kyoto protocol. If Clinton commanded a congress with a dominant Democrat majority, as Bush commands a Republican majority, the Kyoto protocol would have passed under his administration.
His administration undeniably supported the Kyoto protocol.
It seems very strange for me to hear conservatives, which I'm sure you undeniably are, cry foul at simply criticizing the policy of the Bush administration. The only way you could find these criticisms innately negative, is if you agreed that the policy they criticize is innately negative. Clinton suffered an array of actual 'shots' that had nothing to do with his policy, by 24 hour cable news networks, and independent councils; working full time to dig up information on fabricated crimes he supposedly committed (yet predictably never yielded anything substantial).
It's pretty simple, just time consuming. I've seen a few reverse engineering books floating around: "Reversing," "Exploiting Software." Since it's mostly stdC, it shouldn't be nearely as difficult to reverse engineer. Other languages can make things more complicated (Multiple calling mechanisms, more dynamic memory allocation, etc..).
Tools:
OllyDbg - Awesome usermode debugger, probably better suited than softice for this particular task. You can add assembly wherever you want, and it will create patches for the exe that can be automagically applied. It's also FREE.
Numega Softice - Just in case you need to bring in the big guns.
IDA Pro - Best reverse engineering tool available. Lots of extension scripts to do anything imaginable..
TSearch - Can search memory at runtime, set breakpoints, disassemble code on the stack, and dynamically insert new assembly at runtime. Nice for understanding the flow of the software as it runs, and identifying interesting variables and structures.
REC Decompiler - Awesome decompiler that produces a high level representation of the code. Not a replacement for your brain, but can save a lot of time tracing over assembly code to understand the purpose of a function.
WinPCap & Ethereal - For reversing game protocols, and understanding client-server interaction. Sometimes it's nicer to just figure out where the host name/IP string is located in the binary and replace it with 127.0.0.1, then write a little proxy program to sit in between the client and the server.
HVIEW: Hex editor with the ability to disassemble.
(Use Cygwin or mingw for the following)
strace: Traces signals, system calls, and spits them out to the screen.
nm: Dump binary symbol table and names.
I've definitely forgotten a plethora of other useful tools (especially the binutils ones), but the above consist of some of my favorites.
For a game, you'll probably be dealing mostly with OllyDbg, HVIEW, REC, and winpcap/proxy. I'd recommend using nm to get a list of all of the symbols in the program, and then maybe split up and assign each student some number of symbols to understand and rewrite in C. Then they can use HVIEW or OllyDbg to navigate to those symbols, and try translating them. If they have a difficult time, have them use REC to get a higher level representation they can cheat off of.
I'm a bit split on this issue. I'm as liberal as they come, and I definitely don't agree with a lot of U.S. foreign policy.
But, the Internet was never intended to be a "World Wide Service," it has been usurped into one, and provided graciously with American tax payer dollars (for development and now support) to the rest of the world. The truth is, the Internet was developed using significant tax payer money, and requiring a great deal of political support, for the purpose of providing a communications link in the case of a nuclear attack.
Now, I don't agree with hyper-national security, and cold-wars based on realist national views. But everything the Internet has become was completely unintentional, and merely an afterthought. And now, that the afterthought has become incredibly significant, I understand how the U.S. would be reluctant to hand over something originally developed for national security to a international agency. To the government, and the military, the Internet is merely the infrastructure they invested in for providing an aspect of national defense. By giving it away, they will either have to build a new infrastructure which they control (at the expense of more American tax payer dollars, which they can try to justify as a donation to the international community), or hope that international entities don't use their U.N leverage to compromise their network in case of a war.
But, the Internet is incredibly important to the international community as a channel of communication now. Perhaps another Internet should be developed, and controlled by the U.N. In parallel. I just don't see the U.S. Making another huge investment when it already has done so.
I think people need to stop reading, and spreading, the oil industry funded Popular Science propaganda.
If I'm not mistaken, the source of energy for all living organisms comes, directly or indirectly, from the process of photosynthesis, which involves separating H2O into hydrogen and oxygen (which accounts for oxygen being a large component our atmosphere). The hydrogen atoms are then used for production of ATP and NADPH. I think your conclusion lacks incite to what future innovations may come about, and about what natural processes already exist. If life can do it, why can't we?
Hydrogen 'can' be relatively pollution free, as is illustrated by living organisms. There have already been experiments involving disruption of photosynthesis in simple algae by depriving them of salt, which results in release of hydrogen. I'm assuming, as we become better at bioengineering, and understanding cellular processes, it becomes more and more likely that we will be able to find means to perform the same processes through artificial or biological means.
Once we reap the rewards for the histeria generated by Y2038 our children will have to wait for the Y292,288,146,631 problem to get the same opportunity.
That was precisely my point. We live under a republic, but we're often told and propegandized into believing it is a democracy. Ask any joe out on the street what type of government system we live under, and he'll very likely reply "a democracy."
I'm not sure where this 20% statistic comes from, my comment came primarily from this:
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/08/22/bush-nixon/
And, I believe this article is from the 22nd, before Katrina. I expect his approval rating may be a great deal lower after his recent lack of performance.
I wonder if George W. Bush will be able to find as perfect of an antithesis of a model candidate, as John Bolton is as a U.N ambassador, to fill the position left by Rehnquist's absence. It seems unfortunate that a president, with an approval rating lower than that of Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate, will be charged with appointing judges, that will be around to perversely interpret our constitution and law, decades into the future. It's times like this that the fallacies of our republic become painfully apparent, especially the claim that it is a true democracy.
The Executive branch is sometimes elected, not by the people, but through a Judicial decision that suspiciously adheres completely to party lines. And now the Judicial system is elected, not by the people, but by the Executive branch it originally implanted.
Do you actually know that 'all' of the sites that were shut down were related to terrorist groups? It seems to me that without due process, any entity is subject to attack and censorship.
The article mentioned sites related to the creation of chemical weapons. It is indeed a slippery slope from there, to censoring the mentioned American Millitia sites, because they contain information related to the creation of weapons.
I suppose arguments could also be made that the propegation of PGP and other encryption techniques could also call for censorship, since they may very well be used by terrorists. The United States already attempts to practice by restricting the distribution of certain levels of encryption in certain countries. This could go right along with hacking information, and a myriad of all different types of information.
I would like to see some kind of due process before I see any government entity shut down a source of information.
On your first point, I concede that Smalltalk is in many ways innately less efficient than C, but then again so is Java (Although this point is debatable given the dynamic optimization possibilities that are opened).
As for the difficulty of implementing a free Smalltalk compiler/interpreter. In many ways, it's a great deal easier. Smalltalk also doesn't require the entire environment be built around it, for instance see GNU smalltalk, or the smalltalk derivative Slate. C also has a more complicated syntax than Smalltalk. Smalltalk has a very small set of nonterminals that need to be considered, and most of the semantic rules associated with a production rule are simply for message passing. The compiler also doesn't have to consider operator precedence or store type information. C++ also had compilers readily created for it quite early despite the fact that it's known to be notoriously difficult to implement a compiler for.
As for anonymous inner classes, I never claimed they weren't better OOP, just that using them for functional programming is clunky, and they're slow. Java overall, however, is definitely not better oop. The fact that static non-object oriented types can exist on the stack, and not the Java heap, prevents them from having many of the capabilities smalltalk codeblocks have.
From Wikipedia:
In computer science, generics is a technique that allows one value to take different datatypes (so-called polymorphism) as long as certain contracts such as subtypes and signature are kept. The programming style emphasizing use of this technique is called generic programming.
Generics and generic programming have a much wider definition when applied to programming languages in overall, and not just C derivatives.
-Jason Thomas
Borland JBuilder, Delphi 2005, C++ Builder 6, are by no means crap. And by the looks of things, the up and comming DeXter won't be either.
-Jason Thomas.
Smalltalk didn't catch on, not due to problems with dynamic typing, or the language itself, but mostly because of lack of availability.
The PC was a huge success despite being inferior to Macs at the time, mostly due to the closed nature of Apple. Developers weren't able to create software or hardware without paying royalties. Often the price increase was passed on to the consumer, and software packages were noticeably more expensive than their PC counterparts. PCs developed a swelling shareware and BBS culture, and soon overtook the Mac.
This is much the same situation as what happened with smalltalk.
I'm sure anyone who has ever used a smalltalk system can hardly deny its simplicity, and elegance, compared to that of C++ or even Java. The problem really existed in the fact that smalltalk wasn't available cheaply. It was heavily controlled by Xerox, and compilers for it tended to be far too expensive for novice programmers, or startup companies, to afford.
Sun released Java out to the public, and supported it documentation-wise. It allowed third party vendors to create compilers, and development environments, royalty free.
Smalltalk is still, in many ways, superior to Java. It supports functional programming using code-blocks, a feature Java tries to emulate using anonymous inner classes (but which ends up being clunky and slow). It supports generic programming naturally, since code will simply work if the objects it is working with have all of the required interface. A great deal of doors are opened in the Object-Oriented paradigm when you include dynamic typing.
The static typing provided in C/C++ is pretty weak compared to that in Ocaml or SML. In practice, it tends to step on your toes a great deal more than help you create a well-defined error free program. Smalltalk can make use of type inference analysis the same way Ocaml does. Most runtime-errors will reveal flaws in your code, and static analysis can weed out the rest. In the end, the advantages of dynamic programming are pretty considerable.
Smalltalk has actually, over the past couple of years, began to build up a bit of steam. Some open-source implementations have been popping up here and there.
For an example of the power of Smalltalk, check out the open-source Squeak project: www.squeak.org
I'm a big fan of Java, but maybe even a bigger fan of Smalltalk. I think after playing around with it a bit, it will become apparent to anyone that they seem to have very little in common.
Web servers have the ability to track users requesting specific web-sites via their IP address. If you're only interested in gaging how well your particular site is doing, and keep a number of how many visitors are viewing a specific web-page, this is all doable without cookies. You could very well determine if a specific form was used on a specific web-page by tracking requests from a particular IP address.
There are also other alternatives to storing session information via GET or POST variables. For example, look up the continuations based web-application framework SeaSide. All of the session information is saved in a specialized format being passed back and forth via GET or POST, and never to the client's disk.
There are few other 'real' uses for cookies that I can see, and these are mostly undesirable to most web users. With cookies, vendors can associate visitation of one webserver, with another. They can also produce a history of that user, and track their buying and browsing habits. And, while producing a great deal of insecurity, and the potential for websites to spy on users, make the job of a web-programmer easier. The two prior, are simply only desirable to marketing companies, and the latter is only desirable to lazy programmers. None of these abilities are really desirable to customers.
I think people will be skeptical about the supposedly "benign" nature of cookies when this marketing article is using many of the same selling points for them as a great deal of Spyware does. Most spyware claims to be your buddy: simply examining your purchasing behaviors to provide you, the customer, with a more enjoyable internet experience. Many come under the guise of helpful toolbar attachments to Internet Explorer.
In the end, 'most' useful web-functionality, and statistics information can be obtained via other non-invasive and more secure means. And that which can not, probably isn't worth opening the can of worms.
I never bothered looking at the ingredients to find out why Mexican coke tasted so good... I always assumed it had something to do with some magical property in the glass bottle.
The difference is, there is a higher moral imperative than just business and money. This is yet another demonstration of the innate ammoral standing of business. It's not about right, or wrong, it's about money. And if the most efficient way to make a tee-shirt is to use virtual slave labor, and to violate the basic rights of millions of people--- then capitalism will naturally evolve to take that path.
And, often corporations will say, "So?" too, involving these violations. It's true, that if they don't save money by dumping toxic waste into rivers, or by paying their workers virtually nothing and cutting their benefits, it's likely their competitor will-- and they'll be taken out of buisiness. And many companies use this an excuse for their egregious activities, it's nature's fault they say. But as a human being, you have the ability to judge a situation morally, and you can see that this is innately wrong. The correct response isn't "So What?" but instead "How do we make it not profitable for companies to abuse people's basic rights?"
Microsoft may be more interested in money than the rights the founders of the United States deemed inalienable, but as a human being, and an American citizen, I have a VERY hard time saying "So?" about this issue. Microsoft could have at least feigned an attempt to champion democracy using it's considerable bargaining chips against China. It seems to me like, since this is in a way in Microsoft and corporate America's best interests, they more than willingly "submitted" to China's requests.
OpenSolaris is so completely different than Windows. This is completely not a trap. The big difference is, this is OPEN. The GPL, and GNU, isn't just about Linux, it is all about open source. Windows competes by being more closed, and convincing vendors to be closed as well. This is great, because it shows that the main incentive of capitalism, competition, can co-exist with open-source as well. Instead companies are competing to be more open. Sun has taken a step towards being more open, and this demonstrates just how enormously successful Linux and the open source movement has become.
Just like BSD "competes" with Linux, and everyone benefits, so will people benefit from these ideas. There really shouldn't be any blind allegiance to Linux, that is irrational, Linux is simply a result of the open source movement. The advantage of having open source ideas is that advancement isn't impeded by these irrational financial motives. If solaris is the better option, if all of the ideas contained within it are open, then I see no rational reason not to use Solaris, or BSD, or whatever open operating systems or software that will exist in the near and distant future.
Cross your fingers and wait for OpenJava people... I predict it may not be far behind.
Slashdot Mirror
It's difficult really to tell from the article, but is it a distributed JVM? Or just software to migrate java processes from one computer to another? I've personally tested a distributed JVM on a small beowolf cluster: http://www.cs.hku.hk/~clwang/projects/JESSICA2.htm l
It essentially keeps a single distributed heap for all of the objects, automatically migrates objects from one node to another, and migrates threads as well. To the programmer, it looks like a single computer, although you have to make sure as a programmer to utilize as many threading resources, and to decouple as many independent processes as possible to help the VM distribute resources better.
This seems like a high price, for a less ambitious technology.
-Jason Thomas.
Nothing a lil' patch can't solve...
I remember hacking my professor's website, and replacing his personal image with a morph of him and a chimp... Sticking first person shooters on every one of the PCs, and figuring out how to hack them. Making a Java space-shooter applet, where I replaced every one of the stars with pictures of his head--- and it was all encouraged! This is, obviously, a rather remedial type of exploration and nusance--- but the basic childish need to annoy your elders can be a strong driving force to learn, and my CS teacher understood that, and had a sense of humor. What's happened?
I'm not really as concerned with the implications of being able to inject images into the human brain, while that may be somewhat useful. It's likely the visual cortex may have many subtle differences as well between human and chimpanzee brains--- so this is likely to be a much more difficult set of technology to translate for human use. What's interesting about this is the fact they're claiming that an incredibly complicated set of algorithms, that have been evolved over billions of years in our brains, can be reverse engineered.
In AI we've yet to find what algorithms are responsible for consciousness, for visual recognition, and a myriad of other problems. They're all just sitting in our brains, likely on the lowest level of the neuron, waiting for us to extract them. This has infinitely more applications than forcing images into people's brains.
Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment doesn't seem to support your point. The idea Searle attempts to explain isn't that there's no difference between regurgitating information, and actually understanding it. Indeed many of the arguments against AI claim that 'only' machines that externally demonstrate intelligence, but lack a conscious mind, and an ability to actually understand that information, can exist. It's precisely this that Searle tries to demonstrate in his experiment--- the exact opposite of what you seem to be relying on.
t y.html.
;).
Just for an example of how a machine could 'regurgitate' a highly articulate explanation of a certain problem vist: http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/relativi
It seems that my computer can offer a good explanation for a myriad of differing problems, but, I still doubt that there isn't any difference between this and understanding those problems.
The Turing experiment, I believe would support your opinion. Turing's major claim is that if you, as a third party observer, couldn't tell the difference between a computer and a human through blind dialog--- then that computer is intelligent. For one, this test judges intelligence through how well a machine relates to our particular brand of social interaction. It doesn't seem fair to say that something isn't intelligent if it's incapable of human communication. If an intelligent alien species that communicated through beams of light, or sonar, were to analyze our species this way, we would quickly be determined not to demonstrate intelligence. It also heavily relies on the social and conversational abilities of the judge in the situation. Many template based bots, whom most people would agree are not intelligent, have tricked judges into believing they're intelligent. An entertaining programming pass time involves creating bots and attempting to fool random individuals into having deep personal conversations with them. In the end Turing's method seems too subjective, and it doesn't seem entirely logical. It isn't apparent that a machine that only seems to be intelligent can't exist, and I would assume this could also be true for human beings
John Searle argued against this using a parody of the Turing Experiment, the "Chinese Room" experiment. This thought experiment involves an intelligent human being, interacting with the outside world via a proxy of a limited symbolic interface. Through this interface he can place answers to given questions in the Chinese language by following a complicated program, or rule book, without understanding a word of Chinese. In essence, he claims to have crated a machine incapable of ever being intentional. His second claim is that no rule book exists that would allow you to, as the operator, to understand Chinese.
While I agree with Daniel Dennett that this is just intellectual sleight of hand, and in the end Searle's experiment makes several logical errors that fail to prove that intelligent machines can not exist; I don't believe it either proves, or disproves, the possibility of zombie machines existing.
First Google buys all unused fiber optics:/ 28/2156233&tid=217&tid=230&tid=193
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08
To corner the market.
And now mysterious fires ravage the competition.
I think this is an illustration of the need for multinational labor unions, tariffs and taxes are only regional and limited (and prohibited by the WTO and NAFTA). I think it's foolish to pretend that human beings in India are any less talented, skilled, or possessing of all of those qualities we so often celebrate in humanity, than those in the United States. I continually hear the argument that workers in India are the enemies of the workers in the United States. When will people realize that our goals are in common? The differences in the economies of the United States, and India, allow for companies to exploit foreign workers by playing these economies against one another on an international scale.
India is no more immune to their jobs being transfered to China, or Russia, than we were to our jobs being transfered to India. And when India is once again significantly impoverished enough that their skilled population is again willing to accept marginalized salaries--- they will transfer their workforce back, until the lips of their Chinese workers are significantly parched enough to accept even lesser wages.
This situation is analogous to the fights, and races to the bottom, that occurred in the United States in regards to the influx of cheap immigrant labor, time and time again. It wasn't until we realized our common interests, and forged strong unions, that it became a fight back up to the top again. If Indian workers were to demand certain working conditions be met in the United States, and U.S. workers were to demand the same for Indian workers, we would be able to secure a great deal more of the profits that multinational corporations are usurping from our talents. It seems we even have a great organizing utility, that I think all computer scientists are familiar with: The Internet.
"Common Quote - We invented it, we want to keep it.
This of course is a stupid argument - the Internet is many things - WWW being the most obvious. And the Web was invented where?"
I think you're misinterpreting the argument. This is an example of the same oversimplification, and manipulation of an argument, that was used against Al Gore in the 2000 elections. The republicans would have you believe that Al Gore said that he "Invented the Internet." In reality, Al Gore said that he helped in "creating" the Internet. And this, without the oversimplification to the point of obvious absurdity, is in fact true.
Al Gore: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
From ISOC:
"In 1988, a National Research Council committee, chaired by Kleinrock and with Kahn and Clark as members, produced a report commissioned by NSF titled "Towards a National Research Network". This report was influential on then Senator Al Gore, and ushered in high speed networks that laid the networking foundation for the future information superhighway."
I don't believe that by saying that the U.S. was instrumentally responsible in the creation and formation of the underlying infrastructure and technology through which the World Wide Web, IRC, World Of Warcraft, etc. operate (The Internet), is the same as saying that the U.S. is solely responsible for all of the content that uses the Internet as its infrastructure.
This, alone, is obviously not an argument for retaining sole U.S. control over the Internet. And, I think it's obvious that the United States has ulterior motives in retaining control of the Internet. I do, however, see legitimate arguments for U.S. maintained control, based on this fact.
Primarily that the United States invested originally in the technology, and formation of the infrastructure for the Internet, as a means of national security. It seems to me, that any country practicing Realism as a means by which to determine foreign policy, would be extremely reluctant to allow its military technology, to be controlled by a conglomerate of foreign powers. GPS technology, for instance, was created originally for U.S. military purposes. It now controls the guidance systems in a great deal of our missiles. The International community has, as has the domestic public in the United States, usurped this technology for practical and industrial use. Even within our own country, citizens are fighting the balancing interests of the public to have greater GPS accuracy, against the interests of the U.S. Military to retain a technological advantage over other countries. The origin of this technology is as relevant domestically, as it is internationally. This illustrates that this is not an issue of just "blind U.S. patriotism," although I do not deny that there may be some of this position, but more of the reality of the origins of the Internet, and the fact that it is undeniably tied with, as it has been since its birth, the national security of the United States.
This isn't just a simple minded argument of "We created it, therefor it's ours." I personally think the potential of the Internet to act as a gateway between various communities, making the international community at large a more tangible thing to ordinary people, trumps the need for keeping an active network by which communication could be achieved despite a nuclear attack. I support fully giving Internet control to the United Nations. However, I'm not going to pretend that any arguments for retained U.S. control are groundless, or by any means just "stupid."
Clinton's administration is different than Democrats in congress. Just look at the current major split betweeen replublicans, and the insurrection lead by John McCain. I don't believe it would be fair to claim Bush and McCain as one unified entity, just as I don't believe it would be fair to say the same thing about congress during the Republican revolution, and Clinton's administration.
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/pressrelease.c fm?ContentID=499
It's easy to overlook 'facts' when they are in reality fiction.
In reality Clinton's administration negotiated, supported, and he personally eventually signed the Kyoto protocol.
"Former President Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, negotiated the treaty for the United States and had a major role in its final form."
According to Wikipedia:
"On June 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was to be negotiated, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Aware of the Senate's view of the protocol, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol for ratification."
The criticism is that Bush doesn't support the Kyoto protocol. If Clinton commanded a congress with a dominant Democrat majority, as Bush commands a Republican majority, the Kyoto protocol would have passed under his administration.
His administration undeniably supported the Kyoto protocol.
It seems very strange for me to hear conservatives, which I'm sure you undeniably are, cry foul at simply criticizing the policy of the Bush administration. The only way you could find these criticisms innately negative, is if you agreed that the policy they criticize is innately negative. Clinton suffered an array of actual 'shots' that had nothing to do with his policy, by 24 hour cable news networks, and independent councils; working full time to dig up information on fabricated crimes he supposedly committed (yet predictably never yielded anything substantial).
It's pretty simple, just time consuming. I've seen a few reverse engineering books floating around: "Reversing," "Exploiting Software." Since it's mostly stdC, it shouldn't be nearely as difficult to reverse engineer. Other languages can make things more complicated (Multiple calling mechanisms, more dynamic memory allocation, etc..).
Tools:
OllyDbg - Awesome usermode debugger, probably better suited than softice for this particular task. You can add assembly wherever you want, and it will create patches for the exe that can be automagically applied. It's also FREE.
Numega Softice - Just in case you need to bring in the big guns.
IDA Pro - Best reverse engineering tool available. Lots of extension scripts to do anything imaginable..
TSearch - Can search memory at runtime, set breakpoints, disassemble code on the stack, and dynamically insert new assembly at runtime. Nice for understanding the flow of the software as it runs, and identifying interesting variables and structures.
REC Decompiler - Awesome decompiler that produces a high level representation of the code. Not a replacement for your brain, but can save a lot of time tracing over assembly code to understand the purpose of a function.
WinPCap & Ethereal - For reversing game protocols, and understanding client-server interaction. Sometimes it's nicer to just figure out where the host name/IP string is located in the binary and replace it with 127.0.0.1, then write a little proxy program to sit in between the client and the server.
HVIEW: Hex editor with the ability to disassemble.
(Use Cygwin or mingw for the following) strace: Traces signals, system calls, and spits them out to the screen.
nm: Dump binary symbol table and names.
I've definitely forgotten a plethora of other useful tools (especially the binutils ones), but the above consist of some of my favorites.
For a game, you'll probably be dealing mostly with OllyDbg, HVIEW, REC, and winpcap/proxy. I'd recommend using nm to get a list of all of the symbols in the program, and then maybe split up and assign each student some number of symbols to understand and rewrite in C. Then they can use HVIEW or OllyDbg to navigate to those symbols, and try translating them. If they have a difficult time, have them use REC to get a higher level representation they can cheat off of.
-Jason Thomas.
I'm a bit split on this issue. I'm as liberal as they come, and I definitely don't agree with a lot of U.S. foreign policy. But, the Internet was never intended to be a "World Wide Service," it has been usurped into one, and provided graciously with American tax payer dollars (for development and now support) to the rest of the world. The truth is, the Internet was developed using significant tax payer money, and requiring a great deal of political support, for the purpose of providing a communications link in the case of a nuclear attack. Now, I don't agree with hyper-national security, and cold-wars based on realist national views. But everything the Internet has become was completely unintentional, and merely an afterthought. And now, that the afterthought has become incredibly significant, I understand how the U.S. would be reluctant to hand over something originally developed for national security to a international agency. To the government, and the military, the Internet is merely the infrastructure they invested in for providing an aspect of national defense. By giving it away, they will either have to build a new infrastructure which they control (at the expense of more American tax payer dollars, which they can try to justify as a donation to the international community), or hope that international entities don't use their U.N leverage to compromise their network in case of a war. But, the Internet is incredibly important to the international community as a channel of communication now. Perhaps another Internet should be developed, and controlled by the U.N. In parallel. I just don't see the U.S. Making another huge investment when it already has done so.
I think people need to stop reading, and spreading, the oil industry funded Popular Science propaganda. If I'm not mistaken, the source of energy for all living organisms comes, directly or indirectly, from the process of photosynthesis, which involves separating H2O into hydrogen and oxygen (which accounts for oxygen being a large component our atmosphere). The hydrogen atoms are then used for production of ATP and NADPH. I think your conclusion lacks incite to what future innovations may come about, and about what natural processes already exist. If life can do it, why can't we? Hydrogen 'can' be relatively pollution free, as is illustrated by living organisms. There have already been experiments involving disruption of photosynthesis in simple algae by depriving them of salt, which results in release of hydrogen. I'm assuming, as we become better at bioengineering, and understanding cellular processes, it becomes more and more likely that we will be able to find means to perform the same processes through artificial or biological means.
Once we reap the rewards for the histeria generated by Y2038 our children will have to wait for the Y292,288,146,631 problem to get the same opportunity.
That was precisely my point. We live under a republic, but we're often told and propegandized into believing it is a democracy. Ask any joe out on the street what type of government system we live under, and he'll very likely reply "a democracy."
I'm not sure where this 20% statistic comes from, my comment came primarily from this: http://thinkprogress.org/2005/08/22/bush-nixon/ And, I believe this article is from the 22nd, before Katrina. I expect his approval rating may be a great deal lower after his recent lack of performance.
I wonder if George W. Bush will be able to find as perfect of an antithesis of a model candidate, as John Bolton is as a U.N ambassador, to fill the position left by Rehnquist's absence. It seems unfortunate that a president, with an approval rating lower than that of Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate, will be charged with appointing judges, that will be around to perversely interpret our constitution and law, decades into the future. It's times like this that the fallacies of our republic become painfully apparent, especially the claim that it is a true democracy. The Executive branch is sometimes elected, not by the people, but through a Judicial decision that suspiciously adheres completely to party lines. And now the Judicial system is elected, not by the people, but by the Executive branch it originally implanted.
Do you actually know that 'all' of the sites that were shut down were related to terrorist groups? It seems to me that without due process, any entity is subject to attack and censorship.
The article mentioned sites related to the creation of chemical weapons. It is indeed a slippery slope from there, to censoring the mentioned American Millitia sites, because they contain information related to the creation of weapons.
I suppose arguments could also be made that the propegation of PGP and other encryption techniques could also call for censorship, since they may very well be used by terrorists. The United States already attempts to practice by restricting the distribution of certain levels of encryption in certain countries. This could go right along with hacking information, and a myriad of all different types of information.
I would like to see some kind of due process before I see any government entity shut down a source of information.
On your first point, I concede that Smalltalk is in many ways innately less efficient than C, but then again so is Java (Although this point is debatable given the dynamic optimization possibilities that are opened). As for the difficulty of implementing a free Smalltalk compiler/interpreter. In many ways, it's a great deal easier. Smalltalk also doesn't require the entire environment be built around it, for instance see GNU smalltalk, or the smalltalk derivative Slate. C also has a more complicated syntax than Smalltalk. Smalltalk has a very small set of nonterminals that need to be considered, and most of the semantic rules associated with a production rule are simply for message passing. The compiler also doesn't have to consider operator precedence or store type information. C++ also had compilers readily created for it quite early despite the fact that it's known to be notoriously difficult to implement a compiler for. As for anonymous inner classes, I never claimed they weren't better OOP, just that using them for functional programming is clunky, and they're slow. Java overall, however, is definitely not better oop. The fact that static non-object oriented types can exist on the stack, and not the Java heap, prevents them from having many of the capabilities smalltalk codeblocks have. From Wikipedia: In computer science, generics is a technique that allows one value to take different datatypes (so-called polymorphism) as long as certain contracts such as subtypes and signature are kept. The programming style emphasizing use of this technique is called generic programming. Generics and generic programming have a much wider definition when applied to programming languages in overall, and not just C derivatives. -Jason Thomas
Borland JBuilder, Delphi 2005, C++ Builder 6, are by no means crap. And by the looks of things, the up and comming DeXter won't be either. -Jason Thomas.
Smalltalk didn't catch on, not due to problems with dynamic typing, or the language itself, but mostly because of lack of availability.
The PC was a huge success despite being inferior to Macs at the time, mostly due to the closed nature of Apple. Developers weren't able to create software or hardware without paying royalties. Often the price increase was passed on to the consumer, and software packages were noticeably more expensive than their PC counterparts. PCs developed a swelling shareware and BBS culture, and soon overtook the Mac.
This is much the same situation as what happened with smalltalk.
I'm sure anyone who has ever used a smalltalk system can hardly deny its simplicity, and elegance, compared to that of C++ or even Java. The problem really existed in the fact that smalltalk wasn't available cheaply. It was heavily controlled by Xerox, and compilers for it tended to be far too expensive for novice programmers, or startup companies, to afford.
Sun released Java out to the public, and supported it documentation-wise. It allowed third party vendors to create compilers, and development environments, royalty free.
Smalltalk is still, in many ways, superior to Java. It supports functional programming using code-blocks, a feature Java tries to emulate using anonymous inner classes (but which ends up being clunky and slow). It supports generic programming naturally, since code will simply work if the objects it is working with have all of the required interface. A great deal of doors are opened in the Object-Oriented paradigm when you include dynamic typing.
The static typing provided in C/C++ is pretty weak compared to that in Ocaml or SML. In practice, it tends to step on your toes a great deal more than help you create a well-defined error free program. Smalltalk can make use of type inference analysis the same way Ocaml does. Most runtime-errors will reveal flaws in your code, and static analysis can weed out the rest. In the end, the advantages of dynamic programming are pretty considerable.
Smalltalk has actually, over the past couple of years, began to build up a bit of steam. Some open-source implementations have been popping up here and there.
For an example of the power of Smalltalk, check out the open-source Squeak project: www.squeak.org
I'm a big fan of Java, but maybe even a bigger fan of Smalltalk. I think after playing around with it a bit, it will become apparent to anyone that they seem to have very little in common.
Web servers have the ability to track users requesting specific web-sites via their IP address. If you're only interested in gaging how well your particular site is doing, and keep a number of how many visitors are viewing a specific web-page, this is all doable without cookies. You could very well determine if a specific form was used on a specific web-page by tracking requests from a particular IP address.
There are also other alternatives to storing session information via GET or POST variables. For example, look up the continuations based web-application framework SeaSide. All of the session information is saved in a specialized format being passed back and forth via GET or POST, and never to the client's disk.
There are few other 'real' uses for cookies that I can see, and these are mostly undesirable to most web users. With cookies, vendors can associate visitation of one webserver, with another. They can also produce a history of that user, and track their buying and browsing habits. And, while producing a great deal of insecurity, and the potential for websites to spy on users, make the job of a web-programmer easier. The two prior, are simply only desirable to marketing companies, and the latter is only desirable to lazy programmers. None of these abilities are really desirable to customers.
I think people will be skeptical about the supposedly "benign" nature of cookies when this marketing article is using many of the same selling points for them as a great deal of Spyware does. Most spyware claims to be your buddy: simply examining your purchasing behaviors to provide you, the customer, with a more enjoyable internet experience. Many come under the guise of helpful toolbar attachments to Internet Explorer.
In the end, 'most' useful web-functionality, and statistics information can be obtained via other non-invasive and more secure means. And that which can not, probably isn't worth opening the can of worms.
-Jason Thomas.
I never bothered looking at the ingredients to find out why Mexican coke tasted so good... I always assumed it had something to do with some magical property in the glass bottle.
The difference is, there is a higher moral imperative than just business and money. This is yet another demonstration of the innate ammoral standing of business. It's not about right, or wrong, it's about money. And if the most efficient way to make a tee-shirt is to use virtual slave labor, and to violate the basic rights of millions of people--- then capitalism will naturally evolve to take that path. And, often corporations will say, "So?" too, involving these violations. It's true, that if they don't save money by dumping toxic waste into rivers, or by paying their workers virtually nothing and cutting their benefits, it's likely their competitor will-- and they'll be taken out of buisiness. And many companies use this an excuse for their egregious activities, it's nature's fault they say. But as a human being, you have the ability to judge a situation morally, and you can see that this is innately wrong. The correct response isn't "So What?" but instead "How do we make it not profitable for companies to abuse people's basic rights?" Microsoft may be more interested in money than the rights the founders of the United States deemed inalienable, but as a human being, and an American citizen, I have a VERY hard time saying "So?" about this issue. Microsoft could have at least feigned an attempt to champion democracy using it's considerable bargaining chips against China. It seems to me like, since this is in a way in Microsoft and corporate America's best interests, they more than willingly "submitted" to China's requests.
OpenSolaris is so completely different than Windows. This is completely not a trap. The big difference is, this is OPEN. The GPL, and GNU, isn't just about Linux, it is all about open source. Windows competes by being more closed, and convincing vendors to be closed as well. This is great, because it shows that the main incentive of capitalism, competition, can co-exist with open-source as well. Instead companies are competing to be more open. Sun has taken a step towards being more open, and this demonstrates just how enormously successful Linux and the open source movement has become.
Just like BSD "competes" with Linux, and everyone benefits, so will people benefit from these ideas. There really shouldn't be any blind allegiance to Linux, that is irrational, Linux is simply a result of the open source movement. The advantage of having open source ideas is that advancement isn't impeded by these irrational financial motives. If solaris is the better option, if all of the ideas contained within it are open, then I see no rational reason not to use Solaris, or BSD, or whatever open operating systems or software that will exist in the near and distant future.
Cross your fingers and wait for OpenJava people... I predict it may not be far behind.