Since the US and UK have mandated biometric passport data, they would be collecting biometric data anyway.
Funny, that's the same excuse they gave us in the UK! Seems like every government is trying to blame other governments for requiring biometric passports. Where does the requirement actually come from? The International Civil Aviation Organization. Why is an opaque, unelected and unaccountable committee dictating the domestic policy of major powers? Interesting question.
It looks like this idiocy might finally be coming to an end. A recent RAND Corporation report recommends that "U.S. policymakers should end the use of the phrase "war on terrorism" since there is no battlefield solution to defeating al Qa'ida."
You're running a numbers game, but don't for a second think that international mail is any safer than hand carrying.
So you encrypt the contents of your hard drive with a one-time pad, carry the hard drive across the border and mail yourself the one-time pad. They can intercept both parts, but only way they can decrypt it is inter-agency cooperation, and the odds of that happening are less than 1 in 2^256. Better than AES!
I'd use gnus, except I don't have enough hard drive space to install emacs.
No problem, just uninstall OpenOffice. Emacs contains a complete implementation anyway. Come to think of it you could also uninstall Firefox, Thunderbird, MPlayer, Pidgin, Xterm and The Gimp.
Better keep a copy of vi though, in case you need to write some code.
You must've heard the joke about the engineer, the physicist and the mathematician on a train from London to Edinburgh. Just after crossing the border the train passes a black sheep. The engineer says, "Look at that! Sheep in Scotland are black!" The physicist says, "Not so fast - some of the sheep in Scotland are black." The mathematician looks at the table and says quietly, "In Scotland there exists at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."
Is anyone reporting on the fact that the US Congress has only a 14% job approval rating while Bush is at least above 25%? No? I wonder why - maybe it doesn't fit the biased story the MSM wants to portray.
I think it could be that simple, if we knew how to design the digital organism's sensors, state classifier, memory, imagination and state-space-pathfinder. But since we don't, I guess we have to wait for genetic algorithms to evolve those features for themselves.:-)
In my opinion the state classifier is the really hard part - how do you determine that two situations are (in some abstract sense) instances of the same situation?
If you know what selects for intelligence, by all means post it here; I've asked every biology teacher I've had since 9th grade and never gotten a reasonable answer.
Maybe you should ask a more specific question.:-) If "What selects for intelligence?" means roughly the same as "Which survival problems can be solved by intelligence?" then the answer is "Pretty much all of them."
Let's take a fairly broad definition of intelligence:
1. The ability to learn which actions, in which states, lead to which outcomes
2. The ability to predict the outcomes of actions without performing them
3. The ability to compose predictions (action A will lead to state X; in state X, action B will lead to state Y)
Evolution takes thousands of generations to solve problems, good solutions can only spread by reproduction, and it can only search the solution space greedily (each step of the solution must be neutral or beneficial compared to the previous step). Intelligence solves problems in a single generation, solutions can spread by imitation, and solutions can include steps away from the goal. Where evolution has trial and error, intelligence has thought experiments - falling into a river costs your life, but imagining falling into a river only costs a few calories.
On the other hand, intelligence isn't free - for part 1 of the definition above you need sensors, a state classifier and a memory. For part 2 you also need an imagination. For part 3 you need a way of finding paths through a network of imaginary states. So a hard-coded solution might be cheaper if the solution space is static on an evolutionary timescale. But every organism's environment contains other organisms that help to define the solution space, and those organisms are evolving, changing the solution space on an evolutionary timescale. So it may turn out that there are few problems for which a hard-coded solution is better than an intelligent solution; perhaps non-intelligent organisms will only survive in niches where intelligence is impossible to implement (eg microorganisms) or unnecessary for survival (eg domesticated animals and plants).
Maybe our forefathers did some bastardly things in their day, but we're still pretty peaceful and don't go stomping around the globe attacking anyone that MAY just be a terrorist, all because we're too scared to admit that shit happens sometimes.
Sorry, I thought we were talking about Britain - you know, the country that helped the US to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. The country with a long and ongoing history of international aggression. Falklands War ring a bell? Mau Mau Rebellion? How about the Suez Crisis? But you seem to be talking about a nation of tolerant, self-possessed, peace-loving people, which bears no resemblance to Britain past or present. Would you be so kind as to tell me the name of this wonderful country so I can move there?
My ISP probably has long-TTL records for bankofamerica.com and www.bankofamerica.com, but I don't need to wait for them to expire. If I ask for 000000001.bankofamerica.com, my ISP's DNS server will recurse to bankofamerica.com's DNS server, which will return NXDOMAIN. Meanwhile I bombard my ISP's DNS server with fake responses, hoping to beat the real response. I probably fail, so I try again with 000000002.bankofamerica.com. Eventually I'll succeed, and when one of my fake responses is accepted I can replace the long-TTL records for bankofamerica.com and www.bankofamerica.com because they belong to the same domain.
I suppose that it irritates you when British authors reproduce cockney or Scottish accents in their writing, too?
Ah wuz gunae say thur's a beg deffrunce butween writen dialoag fer feckshunal characturs an quoten a spokespairsun fer the Scoatesh Consairvatuv Partay. But the joak wuz just too easay.
I'm considering an amendment to Godwin's Law: every Wikipedia link in a thread halves the expected number of posts before a comparison to the Nazis is made. Corrolary: eventually, searching for Nazis on Google will turn up nothing but Wikipedia articles. At which point Wikipedia will presumably be bought by the History Channel.
Look how little it does here in the US, then imagine how much worse it could get if Congress (both houses) were appointed by the various State governments and not elected, and if the President were a rotating chair that round-robined between the Governors of various States.
The European Parliament is elected by the citizens, not the member states, and the President is largely a figurehead whose powers aren't comparable to those of the US President. There's a lot I don't like about the structure of the EU (such as the fact that only the Commission can propose new legislation), but your comparison with the US system is way off target.
I'm no fan of Khomeini or Castro, I certainly don't support their repressive governments, but the US-backed governments they overthrew weren't necessarily any better.
The similarity, conceptually, between NADA and Freenet is quite interesting.
If ordinary users are able to publish data anonymously using NADA, I will come to your house and pay you one thousand pounds to watch me eating my hat. If, on the other hand, it's just a way for the same old centralised media companies to distribute their DRMed data more cheaply, I will not.
Funnily enough I was having a similar conversation with my flatmate last weekend. He was arguing that religion is beneficial, on balance, because it preserves moral and spiritual ideas that might otherwise be lost. I was arguing that the ideas could survive on their own, and that religion was parasitic, using the appeal of the ideas to justify oppressive power structures. But you seem to be saying that religion doesn't even need to appeal to moral or spiritual ideas - that it can just appeal to materialism if the audience is too ignorant to question its claims?
Slashdot Mirror
That used to be funny before we discovered our governments were actually torturing people. Nowadays I don't find it funny.
Funny, that's the same excuse they gave us in the UK! Seems like every government is trying to blame other governments for requiring biometric passports. Where does the requirement actually come from? The International Civil Aviation Organization. Why is an opaque, unelected and unaccountable committee dictating the domestic policy of major powers? Interesting question.
It looks like this idiocy might finally be coming to an end. A recent RAND Corporation report recommends that "U.S. policymakers should end the use of the phrase "war on terrorism" since there is no battlefield solution to defeating al Qa'ida."
So you encrypt the contents of your hard drive with a one-time pad, carry the hard drive across the border and mail yourself the one-time pad. They can intercept both parts, but only way they can decrypt it is inter-agency cooperation, and the odds of that happening are less than 1 in 2^256. Better than AES!
No problem, just uninstall OpenOffice. Emacs contains a complete implementation anyway. Come to think of it you could also uninstall Firefox, Thunderbird, MPlayer, Pidgin, Xterm and The Gimp.
Better keep a copy of vi though, in case you need to write some code.
But then again I plan a lot of things, and few of them ever happen. :-)
You must've heard the joke about the engineer, the physicist and the mathematician on a train from London to Edinburgh. Just after crossing the border the train passes a black sheep. The engineer says, "Look at that! Sheep in Scotland are black!" The physicist says, "Not so fast - some of the sheep in Scotland are black." The mathematician looks at the table and says quietly, "In Scotland there exists at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."
I'm sorry, I've been spending a lot of time offline recently and I guess my standards are slipping. ;-)
Here's a Reuters story about it. Here's an ABC News story. Here's an MSNBC story. All from the first page of a Google search. Are those mainstream enough for you?
In my opinion the state classifier is the really hard part - how do you determine that two situations are (in some abstract sense) instances of the same situation?
Perhaps I shouldn't have said "aggression" - "imperial defense" might have been more accurate.
Maybe you should ask a more specific question. :-) If "What selects for intelligence?" means roughly the same as "Which survival problems can be solved by intelligence?" then the answer is "Pretty much all of them."
Let's take a fairly broad definition of intelligence:
1. The ability to learn which actions, in which states, lead to which outcomes
2. The ability to predict the outcomes of actions without performing them
3. The ability to compose predictions (action A will lead to state X; in state X, action B will lead to state Y)
Evolution takes thousands of generations to solve problems, good solutions can only spread by reproduction, and it can only search the solution space greedily (each step of the solution must be neutral or beneficial compared to the previous step). Intelligence solves problems in a single generation, solutions can spread by imitation, and solutions can include steps away from the goal. Where evolution has trial and error, intelligence has thought experiments - falling into a river costs your life, but imagining falling into a river only costs a few calories.
On the other hand, intelligence isn't free - for part 1 of the definition above you need sensors, a state classifier and a memory. For part 2 you also need an imagination. For part 3 you need a way of finding paths through a network of imaginary states. So a hard-coded solution might be cheaper if the solution space is static on an evolutionary timescale. But every organism's environment contains other organisms that help to define the solution space, and those organisms are evolving, changing the solution space on an evolutionary timescale. So it may turn out that there are few problems for which a hard-coded solution is better than an intelligent solution; perhaps non-intelligent organisms will only survive in niches where intelligence is impossible to implement (eg microorganisms) or unnecessary for survival (eg domesticated animals and plants).
Sorry, I thought we were talking about Britain - you know, the country that helped the US to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. The country with a long and ongoing history of international aggression. Falklands War ring a bell? Mau Mau Rebellion? How about the Suez Crisis? But you seem to be talking about a nation of tolerant, self-possessed, peace-loving people, which bears no resemblance to Britain past or present. Would you be so kind as to tell me the name of this wonderful country so I can move there?
The code is heavily obfuscated to prevent reverse engineering (encrypted code, checksums, debugger detection, all kinds of fun).
My ISP probably has long-TTL records for bankofamerica.com and www.bankofamerica.com, but I don't need to wait for them to expire. If I ask for 000000001.bankofamerica.com, my ISP's DNS server will recurse to bankofamerica.com's DNS server, which will return NXDOMAIN. Meanwhile I bombard my ISP's DNS server with fake responses, hoping to beat the real response. I probably fail, so I try again with 000000002.bankofamerica.com. Eventually I'll succeed, and when one of my fake responses is accepted I can replace the long-TTL records for bankofamerica.com and www.bankofamerica.com because they belong to the same domain.
You use indentation to identify program structure? What are you, some kind of human?
I don't know why, but I can hear my mother saying, "And if all the other programmers jumped off a cliff, would you jump off it too?"
Ah wuz gunae say thur's a beg deffrunce butween writen dialoag fer feckshunal characturs an quoten a spokespairsun fer the Scoatesh Consairvatuv Partay. But the joak wuz just too easay.
Exactly! They must have got a bulk price on Hitler footage and decided to make the most of it...
I'm considering an amendment to Godwin's Law: every Wikipedia link in a thread halves the expected number of posts before a comparison to the Nazis is made. Corrolary: eventually, searching for Nazis on Google will turn up nothing but Wikipedia articles. At which point Wikipedia will presumably be bought by the History Channel.
The European Parliament is elected by the citizens, not the member states, and the President is largely a figurehead whose powers aren't comparable to those of the US President. There's a lot I don't like about the structure of the EU (such as the fact that only the Commission can propose new legislation), but your comparison with the US system is way off target.
> The groups that murdered their way into power hated the US with a passion
Ever wondered why? In both cases, the groups were fighting to overthrow dictatorships supported by the US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista#The_Second_Coup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
I'm no fan of Khomeini or Castro, I certainly don't support their repressive governments, but the US-backed governments they overthrew weren't necessarily any better.
If ordinary users are able to publish data anonymously using NADA, I will come to your house and pay you one thousand pounds to watch me eating my hat. If, on the other hand, it's just a way for the same old centralised media companies to distribute their DRMed data more cheaply, I will not.
Funnily enough I was having a similar conversation with my flatmate last weekend. He was arguing that religion is beneficial, on balance, because it preserves moral and spiritual ideas that might otherwise be lost. I was arguing that the ideas could survive on their own, and that religion was parasitic, using the appeal of the ideas to justify oppressive power structures. But you seem to be saying that religion doesn't even need to appeal to moral or spiritual ideas - that it can just appeal to materialism if the audience is too ignorant to question its claims?
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