Nonsense. 40 years ago, the field of computing was young, small and willing to experiment. Today, it's incredibly difficult to do anything disruptive at the architecture level, the OS level, the language level, the library level, the application level or, most importantly, at the conceptual "what are computers for?" level. Most investment goes into social media/Web crap because it's so difficult to get anything else adopted, especially in the places and at the scales that Engelbart was envisioning.
"Psychic" phenonema are just statistical errors which cause feedback in our cognitive biases. In other words:
In Soviet Russia, behaviour of objects controls psychic's mind!
In fact, the more effort goes into researching psychic powers, the more evidence we have in favour of mind control; ie. many respected scientists, despite always finding results to the contrary, can be convinced to keep looking for psychic powers!
Of course, in the West we do the majority of our mind control research under the term "marketing", which itself is a great example of mind control: "Don't worry, it's only marketing!"
The proper way to address reflection attacks is for network operators to set up rules that preclude forged packets from leaving their network. There's no reason the router solely responsible for 192.168.1.0/24 should be passing along outbound traffic with a source address of 172.25.1.15. A handful of progressive networks have made this change, but they're the exception, not the rule.
I don't forsee this working for IPv6, where one of the benefits of having so many addresses is that we can tie a load of them to individual devices and not have to suffer NAT. As a side-effect, the leaves on a network won't necessarily have correlated addresses.
And, no, computers can't do mathematical proof. They can help as tools but they are dumb. You do not prove that every number to infinity has a prime within, say, 600 numbers by printing out every number. By definition you'll be there until infinity on even the fastest possible machine in the universe. You could prove that primes up to a number X that would hold true, but X would never be sufficient to prove it was always true. Just the fact that primes only have to be N numbers apart before you hit the next one could lead to mathematics that might well accelerate the discovery and manipulation of primes themselves.
But if you come up with a clever mathematical proof that GUARANTEES the answer, no matter what X is or how many billions of digits it has, without having to worry about ever finding a *particular* prime, then you have something that a mathematician can take as "fact" and incorporate into larger proofs about the universe. Imagine if we just assumed that every prime was like this, and applied it to a large scale engineering project, and then found out that actually - once you get past a few billion atoms - the premise doesn't hold? It'd be catastrophic.
What you say has nothing to do with computers. Why would anyone program a computer to work case-by-case like that? It's just as futile as going case-by-case by hand. Likewise, if one is inclined to generate higher-level, logical proofs by hand, then why not program a computer to generate higher-level, logical proofs? Oh wait, that's been done for decades (eg. AUTOMATH, or the entire field of Automated Theorem Proving).
The last "proof by computer" (i.e. by brute-force rather than as a tool) was the four-colour theorem. And even that was just because the problem could be reduced (by a mathematician, and using other proven theories, and logical inference) to a few thousand cases that the computer could iterate. It was used as a time-saver back in the days of manual calculation, not mathematical proof.
Erm, what lets you define "proof by computer" as "by brute-force"? Are you claiming that all computer programs are brute-force? That's clearly nonsense. Are you claiming that a computer running an efficient algorithm is just a 'tool' and that the Mathematical ability actually exists in the algorithm's programmer? If so, you must also claim that Deep Blue's programmers are much better chess players than Deep Blue. In that case, why weren't they the world champions?
Also, the brute-force 'proof' of the Four Color Theorem, from 1976, was unsatisfactory to many people. It only proved the Four Color Theorem under the assumption that the program is correct, but nobody could verify such an assumption. In 2005 a new proof-by-program was constructed, but this time the program was written and verified in Coq. Only a tiny bit of code needs to be verfied in order to trust this proof (Coq's implementation of the Calculus of Inductive Constructions), and since this code is shared by all Coq users it's already had many eyes on it since appearing in the mid 1980s.
Wisdom now is to take your 1M and get some percentage of the future action, so when you're terribly wrong, and it's worth 1B instead, you don't have to kill yourself.
Erm, I'm confused. Why is it terrible for a business to succeed 1000x better than originally thought? Why would a millionaire kill themselves due to not having enough money?
By using zero as our origin, we can teach arithmetic using the integer set, rather than the whole number set.
Why would that be a good thing? The Naturals (including 0) can be associated with real, tangible things ("I have 0 apples", "I have 1 apple", etc.), whereas the Integers are a clever hack to make subtraction a closed operation by inventing non-physical 'negative numbers'. I think this is
We can teach that the minus sign just means a change of direction, and that addition and subtraction are actually the same thing. So addition/subtraction is nothing more than repeated counting - a shortcut.
The idea of a number line (ordinals) is quite abstract. Young children understand numbers more in terms of sizes (cardinals), eg. "this bag contains 3 apples". In this context addition and subtraction are not quite the same, since subtraction may not be defined: if I have 2 apples and you take 3 apples from me, how many apples do I have?
Rather than introducing a new, unphysical model of numbers, we can treat subtraction as a relation; "3 - 2 = 1" means that "1 + 2 = 3" (since, in general, for all Naturals x, y and z: x - y = z implies z + y = x). In the context of programming, this would be like Prolog.
Multiplication and division are repeated addition. Fractions are just another way of expressing division. Exponents/roots are repeated multiplication.
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Multiplication is indeed analogous to addition, but division is analogous to subtraction and hence it is also difficult to think of in terms of an operation (think: remainders). Fractions (ie. Rationals) are to division as Integers are to subtraction, ie. a closed set (except for division by 0). Useful to teach, but only as an interesting hack once multiplication and division are grasped for the Naturals. One thing I never understood about teaching fractions is the insistence on converting them to Naturals, Integers, etc. and decimal representations. Fractions are a beautiful expression of numbers, but in school they were always treated as problems which need to be 'simplified' into some obscure series of decimals.
Counting from zero allows us to teach euclidean coordinates / geometry as an extension of what students already are familiar with, rather than something new. Why do we start counting at zero? Because zero is "Origin".
Euclid didn't use coordinates; he used pure geometry, ie. points, lines, arcs, right-angles, etc. Coordinates, as a simple relationship between goemetry and algebra is attributed to Decartes (ie. Cartesian coordinates). Geometry is useful without coordinates, and arguably it is easier to grasp without them. For example, proofs of Pythagoras's theorem which cut up and rearrange shapes are more intuitive than ones that rearrange formulas.
How on earth are they going to make "unreliable transistors" that, upon failure, simply decode a pixel incorrectly, rather than, oh, I don't know, branching the program to an unspecified memory address in the middle of nowhere and borking everything.
Very easily: the developer specifies that pixel values can tolerate errors but that branch conditions/memory addresses can't. If you'd bothered to read the summary, you'll see it says exactly that:
a new programming framework that enables software developers to specify when errors may be tolerable.
They'd have to completely re-architect whatever chip is doing the calculations.
Erm, that's the whole point. If we allowed high error rates with existing architectures, none of our results would be trustworthy. I imagine the most practical approach would be a fast, low-power but error-prone co-processor living alongside the main, low-error processor. This could be programmed just like GPUs are at the moment. The nice thing about this work is that the separation can be largely transparent; just annotate your programs and the compiler will figure out which parts can be offloaded to the co-processor.
I can't imagine a way of doing that where the overhead takes less time than actually using decent transistors in the first place.
As far as I can tell there is no overhead involved. In fact it's the other way around: calculating exact answers (as we do now) is a perfectly acceptable way to execute an error-tolerant program. The opposite is not true though: an error-intolerant program cannot be executed with errors. Since we're strictly increasing the execution strategies available, we can only ever increase efficiency (since we can choose to ignore the new strategies).
"to a user searching" - Who cares what the user happens to be doing at the time? What if they're scratching their ass, and the machine serves ads to the user scratching his ass? What the user happens to be doing is irrelevant.
Not really. If a user's scratching their ass, an "advertisment machine" has no idea which ads may or may not be relevant to that person. There's no mention of video cameras, gesture recognition or advanced AI algorithms in the patent.
However, when a user enters some search terms, we can get a pretty good idea what they care about. Hence, a more accurate summary would be:
Using search queries to look up ads from one database as well as results from another database
It's key to leave in the separate databases too, since this makes it different from existing search engines which could be paid to boost a result's ranking (ie. turning that result into an ad).
It's still bullshit, but the key idea is that offering search puts one in an enviable advertising position, since people are telling you what they want.
It should be ingrained in every programmer's brain that undefined behaviour is exactly that, so I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who's code suffers from this. Personally I try not to use languages like C unless I'm forced to interface with some particular library; not only is the semantics full of undefined behaviour, but it's also incredibly complex. This means programmers struggle to understand what's going on *exactly* and have to think in terms of approximations, which leads to some situations becoming unexpected (eg. integer overflow). This also leads to teams of very smart people having to invest a lot of time to make tools like the one in TFA, which is clearly a sign that the language is too complex.
Now, the really *interesting* security problems caused by optimisation are the side-channel attacks. For example, you might have code which checks a security token; if this is done character-by-character and fails on the first mis-match then an attacker can guess each character in turn by timing how long it takes to fail. Quick failure == first character is wrong, slightly slower failure == first character is right, and so on. You might decide to guard against this by looping through the whole token, so that every check takes the same amount of time. However, is your compiler going to optimise this away? Maybe you'll call some random number generator in your loop to force it to run, but maybe your compiler will move this out of the loop without affecting the semantics, etc.
I'm generally not a "government solutions" kind of person, but I do wonder how private insurance is allowed to exist for essential things like health care.
How is essential defined here?
Which of the following goods and services are essential?
insulin for a diabetic
acetaminophen for someone with a broken arm
acetaminophen for a child with muscle pains
a refrigerator at home to prevent food spoilage
hospice for a terminally ill patient
a liver transplant
a sex-change operation
a mammogram for a 55-year-old
a mammogram for a 16-year-old
genetic testing for Huntington's
jaw surgery to eliminate TMJ
a high-quality mattress
a quadruple bypass
a gastric bypass
cholesterol-lowering drugs
anxiety-reducing drugs
an electric toothbrush
sex
setting a broken leg
Every single one of these things could save lives or drastically improve one's quality of life. Some of these are commercially available, some are available in hospitals, some are neither. Is it the presence of a doctor that turns some of these things into "essentials" and others into goods? Which of these should we allow profits on? If a government system does not cover any of these things, is it unethical?
If profits are unethical, should we allow profits on anything? Why?
I know this is a smarmy post—I'm not trolling, honestly. But I find people come into these conversations with a pre-existing mental framework that "health = essential" and therefore "profiting on health is unethical" without much exploration. Not everything offered in the health care industry is essential or life-saving, and many goods and services which are absolutely essential and life-saving are offered privately with no objections from anybody (e.g., refrigerators). What makes "health care" exist outside of the framework of goods and services in general? Most health care spending is dedicated to gradually improving quality of life, not saving people from axe wounds. If allowing profit and unrestricted competition is a bad way to improve people's quality of life, why are we even talking about health? Shouldn't we jump to the conclusion that anything that improves people's lives should be strictly non-profit and centrally planned?
This isn't hard.
Some of those things only serve a medical purpose (eg. transplants, drugs, etc.), so they can be purchased based on a regular cost/benefit analysis; ie. what should the medical system's resources be spent on to maximise some agreed-upon measure, like lives saved, quality of life, etc?
Those which have no medical purpose (refrigerator) shouldn't factor in to the medical system at all; a fridge will not cure or prevent any medical condition. It stops food spoiling, but nobody is forcing you to eat spoiled food; you could buy fresh food every day and never need a fridge, although you may decide to invest your own money into buying one if you like. If you're struggling to feed yourself, that's something to be solved by a separate basic income/welfare system.
Those which aren't purely medical (matress) can be sold as usual, with doctors able to prescribe them at a discount.
Sex is a special case, since it may be illegal to purchase sex for any reason. If so, it doesn't factor into the economics. If prostitution is legal then it can be prescribed just like anything else.
We can never get an exact solution to this problem, but we can get an approximate one: create an environment which produces well-trained doctors with good judgement that doesn't encourage corruption, then have them make the decisions on a per-patient, per-treatment basis. Of course the oversight, budget-setting, etc. goes without saying, and ultimately loops back around to the patients via democracy.
This isn't new or controversial; I've held the same opinion for many years and Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind Of Science" states it explicitly, under the name "irreducibility" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_irreducibility
The usual SciFi trope is that 'Maths is the Universal language', and data is just Maths. There are people investigating how to use incredibly simple encodings to build up meaningful messages which may be understood by advanced extraterrestrials. For example, CosmicOS is a 4-symbol lambda calculus which aims to do just this http://people.csail.mit.edu/paulfitz/cosmicos.shtml
Well it's important to note that your "precise mathematical definition" was not a concept that we started with and applied an unfortunate word to it. The "precise technical meaning" was an attempt to refine and nail down what 'information' meant in the context of talking about the information that could be gathered from a physical system.
In other words, the concept of talking about "information" in relativity and quantum mechanics began with talking about 'information' in the normal, everyday usage. As these scientific fields progressed, people wanted to be more clear about what that really meant in these contexts, and so they developed more specific distinctions of what they intended when they used the word.
That's pretty much always how these "precise technical meanings" originate, with some guy trying to explain something using common ideas, the listener getting confused, and the speaker attempting to clarify by being more specific. These terms were not handed down on high from the Science God who knows how the universe actually works.
So the fact that it's a scientific term doesn't give it absolute authority. You still have to ask what it means, and it still means something like 'information' in the proper sense. Information still implies an observer who can make use of the information, and it still bound up with consciousness.
I was in complete agreement until that last sentence. An 'observer' is anything which can be causally affected by the information; causing one observable difference in the state of an observer requires one bit of information to flow.
There is no need for consciousness, unless you want to debate useless philosophical trivia like 'does the world cease to exist when I close my eyes?'. I don't, since it usually boils down to arguments about the definition of words like 'exist' and contributes nothing to the world but hot air.
It is a well known and tested fact that you do not need a conscious observer to collapse a wavefunction. Take your classical double slit experiment, put a measuring device by one of the slits to force a collapse of the wavefunction (and thus no interference pattern). Now, put a piece of tape over your measuring devices display so no conscious observer can see it. The result doesn't change.
Yes, a philosopher or someone taking the collapse notion a bit too seriously would argue that the entire system (detector, double slits, measuring device etc) is in a mixed state until the observer checks the output on the detector but that is quite a stretch. (See the whole Schrodingers Cat debate)
All measuring devices are huge from a quantum mechanical standpoint. We can barely make calculations on large objects like molecules (and that with rather heavy approximations) and measuring devices typically consist of lots and lots of molecules. It is currently quite impossible to write down a quantum mechanical description of even a simple experiment with a simple measuring device. If we could, maybe we would see that the that the addition of a measuring device causes a mixed state to evolve into a pure state, just by the laws of QM. No conscious observers would then be necessary and the 'collapse' would be just a consequence of the theory. However, making those calculations is way too complicated and far from what we can currently do.
So, neither the instrumentalist or realist interpretation of standard QM theory requires conscious observers.
I agree that this largeley results from our lack of ability to apply theory to experiment; as I mentioned in another post, is "poking with a stick" a unitary transformation? I think the information-theoretic view is useful, because it makes a precise distinction between an experiment/measurement/observation (ie. something which *must* extract information) and everything else (which *may* extract information, but could theoretically be cooled/isolated/etc. to prevent interaction).
For example, if we place a photon-detector at one of Young's Slits, then isolate the whole thing, the photon will collapse to one of the two slits, but we don't know which; so we still have a superposition, this time between which individual slit. Hence what was previously a 'measurement' is now simply a different experimental configuration. We can think of this like adding elements to a circuit in a quantum computer; we bias the states of the system, but we still don't know which one it's in until we measure the output.
Personally, I think your notion of "information flow" makes it more weird, spooky, and bound up with consciousness. Because what determines whether a thing is "information" if not consciousness?
It reminds me of how people talk about relativity, and how things can move faster than light as long as they don't contain information. Speaking of it that way implies that we could send a signal back in time, so long as it message was garbled and unintelligible, which is not the point. To my understanding, it's more a way of determining whether the "faster than light" travel is somehow illusory.
It's one of those unfortunate words which can lead to misunderstandings, since it can mean many things in everyday language, but also has a precise technical meaning. Another example of such a word is "chaos".
In all seriousness, the answer to that question is consciousness.
That's like saying "you can't explain this, therefore God did it". There is no answer to the question, and may never be. It may not even be a meaningful question.
Note that the quote you took is from an embellishment of the Copenhagen Interpretation, which I am specifically arguing against because I think it is full of non-explanations like this.
Anyway, to play devil's advocate I would argue that it's not the same thing at all. We know that consciousness exists, even though we may not be able to define it exactly. It is a perfectly valid answer to the question, since it's a property which all experimenters possess but no experimental apparatus has; we could argue that Schroedinger's cat is conscious, in which case we could predict that the wavefunction will collapse when the cat observes whether the poison is released, not when the box is opened.
If the quote you took were a little longer, you would see I already said that it's the wrong question to ask! The point is that consciousness only appears to be special because of anthropic bias. Let's say we replace Schroedinger's cat with a human experimenter A, inside the box, who measures the decay of the radioactive source. According to Copenhagen, A's act of measurement will collapse the wavefunction and hence by the time another experimenter B opens the box to look at the contents, the outcome is already determined.
According to Many Worlds, A will gain information about the source, which *looks like* the wavefunction has collapsed, but actually they have just become part of it. From B's perspective, the contents of the box is still indeterminate. When B opens the box, they become part of the wave function too, which *appears to B* like it's collapsed, but if we put the whole thing in another box, then the source, A and B will still be indeterminate to another experimenter C outside this larger box.
Now, let's say we do the same experiment with something that's not conscious, like a table. Copenhagen says Table A will not collapse the wavefunction; Many Worlds says that the wavefunction will *look* like it's collapsed from Table A's perspective, but tables don't care about this kind of thing. Likewise Copenhagen says Table B won't collapse the wavefunction; Many Worlds says it would *look* like it's collapsed from Table B's perspective; but again, Table B doesn't have a perspective since it's a table. And so on.
Copenhagen implies that there's a fundamental difference between conscious and non-conscious observations. Many Worlds says that the distinction is simply between 'the information hasn't reached us yet' versus 'the information has now reached us', where 'us' can be defined as conscious beings *because we are conscious*. Many Worlds proposes an equivalent distinction between non-table-like and table-like observations, which is the difference between 'the information hasn't reached a table yet' and 'the information has now reached a table'.
Do you actually know what you're talking about, or have you just read too much science fiction? I don't remember the Copenhagen Interpretation being related to "consciousness", either in the requirement that an observer be "conscious" or in using quantum mechanics to explain consciousness. Are you sure that's not just some whacky interpretation of the Copenhagen Interpretation that people have come up with more recently, due to misunderstanding?
Well I've got a Master's degree in Physics, which doesn't make me an expert in all things Physicsy, but the Copenhagen Interpretation isn't exactly cutting edge.
The Copenhagen Interpretation itself doesn't mention conscious observers, but it makes a vague distinction between measurements (which collapse the wavefunction) and non-measurements (which don't), without actually explaining what the difference is.
For example, in the classic Young's Slits experiment, light shines on to a surface containing two slits. If we measure which slit a photon passes through, it will appear on the other side as expected. If we don't measure which slit a photon passes through, it will pass through both and cause an interference pattern. But what consitutes a measurement and, more importantly, why does it depend on something 'we' do?
According to (Heisenberg's formulation of) the theory, everything can be modelled as matrix transformations. A unitary transformation is not a measurement, so it will not collapse the wavefunction. A non-unitary transformation is a measurement and will cause collapse (specifically, the system will collapse to an eigenstate in the basis of the transformation). All well and good *in theory*, but it's difficult to apply to the real world. Is "looking at something" a unitary transformation? Is "poking with a stick" a unitary transformation? It's difficult to tell. What's more, transformations aren't just caused by actions, they depend on the configuration of the whole system. For example, we can collapse a wavefunction by measuring where a particle *isn't*!
So, in the case of Young's Slits, why is it that when *we* try to interact with a photon its wavefunction collapses (ie. a measurement is made), but it *doesn't* happen when the slits themselves interact with the photons, or electrons in the air absorb and re-emit the photon, etc.? The Copenhagen Interpretation doesn't say anything about this; it makes the distinction and leaves it at that. But if there's a distinction, what is it? What's the only thing that sets apart all of the possible measurement-making things and all of the possible non-measurement-making things? In all seriousness, the answer to that question is consciousness. This has perplexed Physicists for decades, leading to philosophies like "shut up and calculate".
However, it turns out that this is the wrong question to be asking in the first place! According to Many Worlds, measurement is all about information flow. If information is transmitted between two things, they become part of a QM system with a corresponding wavefunction; it doesn't matter whether those things are electrons, slits, screens or humans.
An analogy would be to think of the boundary of the system as being like a bubble, expanding to engulf anything which interacts information-theoretically with the contents. What Copenhagen calls 'wavefunction collapse' would be the moment when that bubble engulfs the experimenter. According to Copenhagen, when the bubble hits the experimenter it bursts, causing the entire contents of the bubble to instantly take a fixed configuration (as an aside, since QM systems can be any size, this line of thinking has also lead to the 'faster than light' nonsense, since the bubble must burst instantly everywhere as soon as anyone measures its contents). Accoring to Many Worlds, engulfing an experimenter is just like engulfing an electron, or a table, or a planet; the bubble just keeps growing as long as information keeps flowing.
*From the point of view of the observer* these inter
'Wavefunction collapse' is how the Copenhagen Interpretation 'explains' this phenomenon, but like many of its 'explanations' they don't provide a compelling reason for things to happen this way. Terms like 'measurement' go from a precise QM meaning (eg. matrix multiplication) to a vague, ambiguous meaning like 'a concious observer'. This leads to tenuous extrapolations and conclusions, like the distinguished position of observers, the inclusion of conciousness into the interpretation and all the quantum 'explanations' of consciousness which that has spawned.
Alternative interpretations are much less mysterious. For example, the Many Worlds Interpretation explains it via information transmission. A measument is anything which transmits information from inside the system to outside the system. When a system is measured, it doesn't 'collapse' into one state; rather, the thing which performed the measurement becomes part of the (now larger) system.
The Transactional Interpretation explains it as two-way communication between events at different times; a measurement is any event which propagates information back in time and a system is only in multiple states because the event which caused it is awaiting the information from the measurement.
Schrodinger's cat can be used to point out the difference:
The Copenhagen Interpretation says that the cat is literally both alive and dead at the same time in the box, then when a concious observer (a human) opens the box, the cat immediately becomes either alive or dead. This is very strange, for example why is a concious observer necessary?
The Many Worlds Interpretation says that the cat is literally both alive and dead at the same time in the box. Anything which interacts with it, for example photons of light, will become part of the system; ie. the light will literally be both a reflection of a living cat and a reflection of a dead cat. If those photons enter my eye then I will literally be both a human who has seen a living cat and a human who has seen a dead cat. If you talk to me, you will literally be a human who has talked to a human who has seen a living cat and a human who has talked to a human who has seen a dead cat, and so on. This propagation is exactly the flow of information between systems; there is nothing magical about humans, except that we happen to be human. A photon would get the same results as us if it repeated our experiments, with no 'concious observer' involved, except for the fact that photons don't tend to perform experiments (ie. the 'conciousness' part of Copenhagen is an anthropic bias).
The most useful concept I've ever come across is the notion of a closure in Lisp. The entire operating state of a function is contained within that function. This, and the McCarthy lisp paper (1955!) where it is explained how a lisp interpreter could be created using only a handful of assembly instructions is well worth the read. It is from the fundamental concepts first pioneered in lisp that all object oriented programming paradigms spring; if you can understand and appreciate lisp, the notions of encapsulation, data hiding, abstraction, and privacy will become second nature to you.
I think these are excellent suggestions, but I think lexical scope (eg. Scheme) should be understood before dynamic scope (eg. McCarthy's LISP). I often see a lack of understanding of lexical scope, eg. in Javascript and PHP, leading to redundant arguments, abuse of globals, etc. McCarthy's LISP and LISP-in-LISP is an amazing achievement and discovery, but it got its scoping wrong!;)
Kids bypassing security is a total failure for this program? Come onnnn. If anything it's giving them a reason to want to use them more and learn a little something about technology and security. But I guess they're not satisfied unless they have properly trained obedient creatures, not humans with the ability to think for themselves.
It only takes one kid to 'learn a little something about technology and security', everyone else can press the resulting "click me to crack" button. Buying $1,000,000,000 worth of iPads just so one kid can learn a little about security, while the rest spend their school time tweeting, would be a total failure.
I'm not in favor of the program as it's originally intended, but I'm not in favor of this inevitabe crack either.
On a related note, the Babel project is getting pushed for Reproducible Research http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html It allows code to be embedded in other documents, eg. the LaTeX source of a paper, and executed during rendering.
Also the Recomputation project is trying to archive scientific code, complete with virtual machines set up to run them http://www.recomputation.org/
But I'm hoping we never actually prove that souls exist. That's one door I'd prefer to remain closed. If science determined that souls exist, then we'd be figuring out ways to harness souls for energy. And then that'd bring up the whole question of what else is out there in that sphere of reality--and I'd really rather not draw a Nyarlathotep-analogue's attention.
Since "souls" are wild speculation, let me make an analogy to human bodies.
Bodies are mainly water; does that make hydroelectric power equivalent to slavery? No. Human bodies contain energy; do we harness bodies for energy? Not since the steam engine was invented.
There's a difference between emmigrating to Mars permanantly and dying soon after reaching Europa. There's lots of focus on "dying on Mars", but the point is that you get to live on Mars first. Maybe your lifespan will be reduced, due to radiation exposure, the risk of accidents in the colony's habitat, lack of quick access to specific medices, etc. but it would still be appreciable. With Europa, there's not going to be much living to do at all.
I am all in favour of a one-way colonising mission to Mars, although I think it would be much more efficient to do it with robots first and add the humans later, and do it on the Moon first and Mars later.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. 40 years ago, the field of computing was young, small and willing to experiment. Today, it's incredibly difficult to do anything disruptive at the architecture level, the OS level, the language level, the library level, the application level or, most importantly, at the conceptual "what are computers for?" level. Most investment goes into social media/Web crap because it's so difficult to get anything else adopted, especially in the places and at the scales that Engelbart was envisioning.
"Psychic" phenonema are just statistical errors which cause feedback in our cognitive biases. In other words:
In Soviet Russia, behaviour of objects controls psychic's mind!
In fact, the more effort goes into researching psychic powers, the more evidence we have in favour of mind control; ie. many respected scientists, despite always finding results to the contrary, can be convinced to keep looking for psychic powers!
Of course, in the West we do the majority of our mind control research under the term "marketing", which itself is a great example of mind control: "Don't worry, it's only marketing!"
The proper way to address reflection attacks is for network operators to set up rules that preclude forged packets from leaving their network. There's no reason the router solely responsible for 192.168.1.0/24 should be passing along outbound traffic with a source address of 172.25.1.15. A handful of progressive networks have made this change, but they're the exception, not the rule.
I don't forsee this working for IPv6, where one of the benefits of having so many addresses is that we can tie a load of them to individual devices and not have to suffer NAT. As a side-effect, the leaves on a network won't necessarily have correlated addresses.
And, no, computers can't do mathematical proof. They can help as tools but they are dumb. You do not prove that every number to infinity has a prime within, say, 600 numbers by printing out every number. By definition you'll be there until infinity on even the fastest possible machine in the universe. You could prove that primes up to a number X that would hold true, but X would never be sufficient to prove it was always true. Just the fact that primes only have to be N numbers apart before you hit the next one could lead to mathematics that might well accelerate the discovery and manipulation of primes themselves.
But if you come up with a clever mathematical proof that GUARANTEES the answer, no matter what X is or how many billions of digits it has, without having to worry about ever finding a *particular* prime, then you have something that a mathematician can take as "fact" and incorporate into larger proofs about the universe. Imagine if we just assumed that every prime was like this, and applied it to a large scale engineering project, and then found out that actually - once you get past a few billion atoms - the premise doesn't hold? It'd be catastrophic.
What you say has nothing to do with computers. Why would anyone program a computer to work case-by-case like that? It's just as futile as going case-by-case by hand. Likewise, if one is inclined to generate higher-level, logical proofs by hand, then why not program a computer to generate higher-level, logical proofs? Oh wait, that's been done for decades (eg. AUTOMATH, or the entire field of Automated Theorem Proving).
The last "proof by computer" (i.e. by brute-force rather than as a tool) was the four-colour theorem. And even that was just because the problem could be reduced (by a mathematician, and using other proven theories, and logical inference) to a few thousand cases that the computer could iterate. It was used as a time-saver back in the days of manual calculation, not mathematical proof.
Erm, what lets you define "proof by computer" as "by brute-force"? Are you claiming that all computer programs are brute-force? That's clearly nonsense. Are you claiming that a computer running an efficient algorithm is just a 'tool' and that the Mathematical ability actually exists in the algorithm's programmer? If so, you must also claim that Deep Blue's programmers are much better chess players than Deep Blue. In that case, why weren't they the world champions?
Also, the brute-force 'proof' of the Four Color Theorem, from 1976, was unsatisfactory to many people. It only proved the Four Color Theorem under the assumption that the program is correct, but nobody could verify such an assumption. In 2005 a new proof-by-program was constructed, but this time the program was written and verified in Coq. Only a tiny bit of code needs to be verfied in order to trust this proof (Coq's implementation of the Calculus of Inductive Constructions), and since this code is shared by all Coq users it's already had many eyes on it since appearing in the mid 1980s.
Wisdom now is to take your 1M and get some percentage of the future action, so when you're terribly wrong, and it's worth 1B instead, you don't have to kill yourself.
Erm, I'm confused. Why is it terrible for a business to succeed 1000x better than originally thought? Why would a millionaire kill themselves due to not having enough money?
By using zero as our origin, we can teach arithmetic using the integer set, rather than the whole number set.
Why would that be a good thing? The Naturals (including 0) can be associated with real, tangible things ("I have 0 apples", "I have 1 apple", etc.), whereas the Integers are a clever hack to make subtraction a closed operation by inventing non-physical 'negative numbers'. I think this is
We can teach that the minus sign just means a change of direction, and that addition and subtraction are actually the same thing. So addition/subtraction is nothing more than repeated counting - a shortcut.
The idea of a number line (ordinals) is quite abstract. Young children understand numbers more in terms of sizes (cardinals), eg. "this bag contains 3 apples". In this context addition and subtraction are not quite the same, since subtraction may not be defined: if I have 2 apples and you take 3 apples from me, how many apples do I have?
Rather than introducing a new, unphysical model of numbers, we can treat subtraction as a relation; "3 - 2 = 1" means that "1 + 2 = 3" (since, in general, for all Naturals x, y and z: x - y = z implies z + y = x). In the context of programming, this would be like Prolog.
Multiplication and division are repeated addition. Fractions are just another way of expressing division. Exponents/roots are repeated multiplication.
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Multiplication is indeed analogous to addition, but division is analogous to subtraction and hence it is also difficult to think of in terms of an operation (think: remainders). Fractions (ie. Rationals) are to division as Integers are to subtraction, ie. a closed set (except for division by 0). Useful to teach, but only as an interesting hack once multiplication and division are grasped for the Naturals. One thing I never understood about teaching fractions is the insistence on converting them to Naturals, Integers, etc. and decimal representations. Fractions are a beautiful expression of numbers, but in school they were always treated as problems which need to be 'simplified' into some obscure series of decimals.
Counting from zero allows us to teach euclidean coordinates / geometry as an extension of what students already are familiar with, rather than something new. Why do we start counting at zero? Because zero is "Origin".
Euclid didn't use coordinates; he used pure geometry, ie. points, lines, arcs, right-angles, etc. Coordinates, as a simple relationship between goemetry and algebra is attributed to Decartes (ie. Cartesian coordinates). Geometry is useful without coordinates, and arguably it is easier to grasp without them. For example, proofs of Pythagoras's theorem which cut up and rearrange shapes are more intuitive than ones that rearrange formulas.
the modern day Library of Alexandra burning
That's precisely why the Library of Alexandra hosts a mirror of the Internet Archive http://archive.bibalex.org/
How on earth are they going to make "unreliable transistors" that, upon failure, simply decode a pixel incorrectly, rather than, oh, I don't know, branching the program to an unspecified memory address in the middle of nowhere and borking everything.
Very easily: the developer specifies that pixel values can tolerate errors but that branch conditions/memory addresses can't. If you'd bothered to read the summary, you'll see it says exactly that:
a new programming framework that enables software developers to specify when errors may be tolerable.
They'd have to completely re-architect whatever chip is doing the calculations.
Erm, that's the whole point. If we allowed high error rates with existing architectures, none of our results would be trustworthy. I imagine the most practical approach would be a fast, low-power but error-prone co-processor living alongside the main, low-error processor. This could be programmed just like GPUs are at the moment. The nice thing about this work is that the separation can be largely transparent; just annotate your programs and the compiler will figure out which parts can be offloaded to the co-processor.
I can't imagine a way of doing that where the overhead takes less time than actually using decent transistors in the first place.
As far as I can tell there is no overhead involved. In fact it's the other way around: calculating exact answers (as we do now) is a perfectly acceptable way to execute an error-tolerant program. The opposite is not true though: an error-intolerant program cannot be executed with errors. Since we're strictly increasing the execution strategies available, we can only ever increase efficiency (since we can choose to ignore the new strategies).
"to a user searching" - Who cares what the user happens to be doing at the time? What if they're scratching their ass, and the machine serves ads to the user scratching his ass? What the user happens to be doing is irrelevant.
Not really. If a user's scratching their ass, an "advertisment machine" has no idea which ads may or may not be relevant to that person. There's no mention of video cameras, gesture recognition or advanced AI algorithms in the patent.
However, when a user enters some search terms, we can get a pretty good idea what they care about. Hence, a more accurate summary would be:
Using search queries to look up ads from one database as well as results from another database
It's key to leave in the separate databases too, since this makes it different from existing search engines which could be paid to boost a result's ranking (ie. turning that result into an ad).
It's still bullshit, but the key idea is that offering search puts one in an enviable advertising position, since people are telling you what they want.
It should be ingrained in every programmer's brain that undefined behaviour is exactly that, so I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who's code suffers from this. Personally I try not to use languages like C unless I'm forced to interface with some particular library; not only is the semantics full of undefined behaviour, but it's also incredibly complex. This means programmers struggle to understand what's going on *exactly* and have to think in terms of approximations, which leads to some situations becoming unexpected (eg. integer overflow). This also leads to teams of very smart people having to invest a lot of time to make tools like the one in TFA, which is clearly a sign that the language is too complex.
Now, the really *interesting* security problems caused by optimisation are the side-channel attacks. For example, you might have code which checks a security token; if this is done character-by-character and fails on the first mis-match then an attacker can guess each character in turn by timing how long it takes to fail. Quick failure == first character is wrong, slightly slower failure == first character is right, and so on. You might decide to guard against this by looping through the whole token, so that every check takes the same amount of time. However, is your compiler going to optimise this away? Maybe you'll call some random number generator in your loop to force it to run, but maybe your compiler will move this out of the loop without affecting the semantics, etc.
I'm generally not a "government solutions" kind of person, but I do wonder how private insurance is allowed to exist for essential things like health care.
How is essential defined here?
Which of the following goods and services are essential?
Every single one of these things could save lives or drastically improve one's quality of life. Some of these are commercially available, some are available in hospitals, some are neither. Is it the presence of a doctor that turns some of these things into "essentials" and others into goods? Which of these should we allow profits on? If a government system does not cover any of these things, is it unethical?
If profits are unethical, should we allow profits on anything? Why?
I know this is a smarmy post—I'm not trolling, honestly. But I find people come into these conversations with a pre-existing mental framework that "health = essential" and therefore "profiting on health is unethical" without much exploration. Not everything offered in the health care industry is essential or life-saving, and many goods and services which are absolutely essential and life-saving are offered privately with no objections from anybody (e.g., refrigerators). What makes "health care" exist outside of the framework of goods and services in general? Most health care spending is dedicated to gradually improving quality of life, not saving people from axe wounds. If allowing profit and unrestricted competition is a bad way to improve people's quality of life, why are we even talking about health? Shouldn't we jump to the conclusion that anything that improves people's lives should be strictly non-profit and centrally planned?
This isn't hard.
Some of those things only serve a medical purpose (eg. transplants, drugs, etc.), so they can be purchased based on a regular cost/benefit analysis; ie. what should the medical system's resources be spent on to maximise some agreed-upon measure, like lives saved, quality of life, etc?
Those which have no medical purpose (refrigerator) shouldn't factor in to the medical system at all; a fridge will not cure or prevent any medical condition. It stops food spoiling, but nobody is forcing you to eat spoiled food; you could buy fresh food every day and never need a fridge, although you may decide to invest your own money into buying one if you like. If you're struggling to feed yourself, that's something to be solved by a separate basic income/welfare system.
Those which aren't purely medical (matress) can be sold as usual, with doctors able to prescribe them at a discount.
Sex is a special case, since it may be illegal to purchase sex for any reason. If so, it doesn't factor into the economics. If prostitution is legal then it can be prescribed just like anything else.
We can never get an exact solution to this problem, but we can get an approximate one: create an environment which produces well-trained doctors with good judgement that doesn't encourage corruption, then have them make the decisions on a per-patient, per-treatment basis. Of course the oversight, budget-setting, etc. goes without saying, and ultimately loops back around to the patients via democracy.
This isn't new or controversial; I've held the same opinion for many years and Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind Of Science" states it explicitly, under the name "irreducibility" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_irreducibility
Can someone give me the math version of "I like chocolate!". Or "I love my wife"?
forall c, (isChocolate c) -> (likes me c)
forall w, (married me w) -> (loves me w)
"married", "isChocolate", "likes", "loves" and "me" are left as exercises for the reader.
The usual SciFi trope is that 'Maths is the Universal language', and data is just Maths. There are people investigating how to use incredibly simple encodings to build up meaningful messages which may be understood by advanced extraterrestrials. For example, CosmicOS is a 4-symbol lambda calculus which aims to do just this http://people.csail.mit.edu/paulfitz/cosmicos.shtml
There are even simpler encodings, like Binary Lambda Calculus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_lambda_calculus and the more-verbose but conceptually-simpler Binary Combinatory Logic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_combinatory_logic
Well it's important to note that your "precise mathematical definition" was not a concept that we started with and applied an unfortunate word to it. The "precise technical meaning" was an attempt to refine and nail down what 'information' meant in the context of talking about the information that could be gathered from a physical system.
In other words, the concept of talking about "information" in relativity and quantum mechanics began with talking about 'information' in the normal, everyday usage. As these scientific fields progressed, people wanted to be more clear about what that really meant in these contexts, and so they developed more specific distinctions of what they intended when they used the word.
That's pretty much always how these "precise technical meanings" originate, with some guy trying to explain something using common ideas, the listener getting confused, and the speaker attempting to clarify by being more specific. These terms were not handed down on high from the Science God who knows how the universe actually works.
So the fact that it's a scientific term doesn't give it absolute authority. You still have to ask what it means, and it still means something like 'information' in the proper sense. Information still implies an observer who can make use of the information, and it still bound up with consciousness.
I was in complete agreement until that last sentence. An 'observer' is anything which can be causally affected by the information; causing one observable difference in the state of an observer requires one bit of information to flow.
There is no need for consciousness, unless you want to debate useless philosophical trivia like 'does the world cease to exist when I close my eyes?'. I don't, since it usually boils down to arguments about the definition of words like 'exist' and contributes nothing to the world but hot air.
It is a well known and tested fact that you do not need a conscious observer to collapse a wavefunction. Take your classical double slit experiment, put a measuring device by one of the slits to force a collapse of the wavefunction (and thus no interference pattern). Now, put a piece of tape over your measuring devices display so no conscious observer can see it. The result doesn't change.
Yes, a philosopher or someone taking the collapse notion a bit too seriously would argue that the entire system (detector, double slits, measuring device etc) is in a mixed state until the observer checks the output on the detector but that is quite a stretch. (See the whole Schrodingers Cat debate)
I hope you're not implying that a piece of tape can stop the inexorable march of entropy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information ;)
All measuring devices are huge from a quantum mechanical standpoint. We can barely make calculations on large objects like molecules (and that with rather heavy approximations) and measuring devices typically consist of lots and lots of molecules. It is currently quite impossible to write down a quantum mechanical description of even a simple experiment with a simple measuring device. If we could, maybe we would see that the that the addition of a measuring device causes a mixed state to evolve into a pure state, just by the laws of QM. No conscious observers would then be necessary and the 'collapse' would be just a consequence of the theory. However, making those calculations is way too complicated and far from what we can currently do.
So, neither the instrumentalist or realist interpretation of standard QM theory requires conscious observers.
I agree that this largeley results from our lack of ability to apply theory to experiment; as I mentioned in another post, is "poking with a stick" a unitary transformation? I think the information-theoretic view is useful, because it makes a precise distinction between an experiment/measurement/observation (ie. something which *must* extract information) and everything else (which *may* extract information, but could theoretically be cooled/isolated/etc. to prevent interaction).
For example, if we place a photon-detector at one of Young's Slits, then isolate the whole thing, the photon will collapse to one of the two slits, but we don't know which; so we still have a superposition, this time between which individual slit. Hence what was previously a 'measurement' is now simply a different experimental configuration. We can think of this like adding elements to a circuit in a quantum computer; we bias the states of the system, but we still don't know which one it's in until we measure the output.
Personally, I think your notion of "information flow" makes it more weird, spooky, and bound up with consciousness. Because what determines whether a thing is "information" if not consciousness?
It reminds me of how people talk about relativity, and how things can move faster than light as long as they don't contain information. Speaking of it that way implies that we could send a signal back in time, so long as it message was garbled and unintelligible, which is not the point. To my understanding, it's more a way of determining whether the "faster than light" travel is somehow illusory.
In this context "information" has a precise Mathematical meaning with an exact Physical manifestation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information
It's one of those unfortunate words which can lead to misunderstandings, since it can mean many things in everyday language, but also has a precise technical meaning. Another example of such a word is "chaos".
That's like saying "you can't explain this, therefore God did it".
There is no answer to the question, and may never be. It may not even be a meaningful question.
Note that the quote you took is from an embellishment of the Copenhagen Interpretation, which I am specifically arguing against because I think it is full of non-explanations like this.
Anyway, to play devil's advocate I would argue that it's not the same thing at all. We know that consciousness exists, even though we may not be able to define it exactly. It is a perfectly valid answer to the question, since it's a property which all experimenters possess but no experimental apparatus has; we could argue that Schroedinger's cat is conscious, in which case we could predict that the wavefunction will collapse when the cat observes whether the poison is released, not when the box is opened.
If the quote you took were a little longer, you would see I already said that it's the wrong question to ask! The point is that consciousness only appears to be special because of anthropic bias. Let's say we replace Schroedinger's cat with a human experimenter A, inside the box, who measures the decay of the radioactive source. According to Copenhagen, A's act of measurement will collapse the wavefunction and hence by the time another experimenter B opens the box to look at the contents, the outcome is already determined.
According to Many Worlds, A will gain information about the source, which *looks like* the wavefunction has collapsed, but actually they have just become part of it. From B's perspective, the contents of the box is still indeterminate. When B opens the box, they become part of the wave function too, which *appears to B* like it's collapsed, but if we put the whole thing in another box, then the source, A and B will still be indeterminate to another experimenter C outside this larger box.
Now, let's say we do the same experiment with something that's not conscious, like a table. Copenhagen says Table A will not collapse the wavefunction; Many Worlds says that the wavefunction will *look* like it's collapsed from Table A's perspective, but tables don't care about this kind of thing. Likewise Copenhagen says Table B won't collapse the wavefunction; Many Worlds says it would *look* like it's collapsed from Table B's perspective; but again, Table B doesn't have a perspective since it's a table. And so on.
Copenhagen implies that there's a fundamental difference between conscious and non-conscious observations. Many Worlds says that the distinction is simply between 'the information hasn't reached us yet' versus 'the information has now reached us', where 'us' can be defined as conscious beings *because we are conscious*. Many Worlds proposes an equivalent distinction between non-table-like and table-like observations, which is the difference between 'the information hasn't reached a table yet' and 'the information has now reached a table'.
Do you actually know what you're talking about, or have you just read too much science fiction? I don't remember the Copenhagen Interpretation being related to "consciousness", either in the requirement that an observer be "conscious" or in using quantum mechanics to explain consciousness. Are you sure that's not just some whacky interpretation of the Copenhagen Interpretation that people have come up with more recently, due to misunderstanding?
Well I've got a Master's degree in Physics, which doesn't make me an expert in all things Physicsy, but the Copenhagen Interpretation isn't exactly cutting edge.
The Copenhagen Interpretation itself doesn't mention conscious observers, but it makes a vague distinction between measurements (which collapse the wavefunction) and non-measurements (which don't), without actually explaining what the difference is.
For example, in the classic Young's Slits experiment, light shines on to a surface containing two slits. If we measure which slit a photon passes through, it will appear on the other side as expected. If we don't measure which slit a photon passes through, it will pass through both and cause an interference pattern. But what consitutes a measurement and, more importantly, why does it depend on something 'we' do?
According to (Heisenberg's formulation of) the theory, everything can be modelled as matrix transformations. A unitary transformation is not a measurement, so it will not collapse the wavefunction. A non-unitary transformation is a measurement and will cause collapse (specifically, the system will collapse to an eigenstate in the basis of the transformation). All well and good *in theory*, but it's difficult to apply to the real world. Is "looking at something" a unitary transformation? Is "poking with a stick" a unitary transformation? It's difficult to tell. What's more, transformations aren't just caused by actions, they depend on the configuration of the whole system. For example, we can collapse a wavefunction by measuring where a particle *isn't*!
So, in the case of Young's Slits, why is it that when *we* try to interact with a photon its wavefunction collapses (ie. a measurement is made), but it *doesn't* happen when the slits themselves interact with the photons, or electrons in the air absorb and re-emit the photon, etc.? The Copenhagen Interpretation doesn't say anything about this; it makes the distinction and leaves it at that. But if there's a distinction, what is it? What's the only thing that sets apart all of the possible measurement-making things and all of the possible non-measurement-making things? In all seriousness, the answer to that question is consciousness. This has perplexed Physicists for decades, leading to philosophies like "shut up and calculate".
However, it turns out that this is the wrong question to be asking in the first place! According to Many Worlds, measurement is all about information flow. If information is transmitted between two things, they become part of a QM system with a corresponding wavefunction; it doesn't matter whether those things are electrons, slits, screens or humans.
An analogy would be to think of the boundary of the system as being like a bubble, expanding to engulf anything which interacts information-theoretically with the contents. What Copenhagen calls 'wavefunction collapse' would be the moment when that bubble engulfs the experimenter. According to Copenhagen, when the bubble hits the experimenter it bursts, causing the entire contents of the bubble to instantly take a fixed configuration (as an aside, since QM systems can be any size, this line of thinking has also lead to the 'faster than light' nonsense, since the bubble must burst instantly everywhere as soon as anyone measures its contents). Accoring to Many Worlds, engulfing an experimenter is just like engulfing an electron, or a table, or a planet; the bubble just keeps growing as long as information keeps flowing.
*From the point of view of the observer* these inter
'Wavefunction collapse' is how the Copenhagen Interpretation 'explains' this phenomenon, but like many of its 'explanations' they don't provide a compelling reason for things to happen this way. Terms like 'measurement' go from a precise QM meaning (eg. matrix multiplication) to a vague, ambiguous meaning like 'a concious observer'. This leads to tenuous extrapolations and conclusions, like the distinguished position of observers, the inclusion of conciousness into the interpretation and all the quantum 'explanations' of consciousness which that has spawned.
Alternative interpretations are much less mysterious. For example, the Many Worlds Interpretation explains it via information transmission. A measument is anything which transmits information from inside the system to outside the system. When a system is measured, it doesn't 'collapse' into one state; rather, the thing which performed the measurement becomes part of the (now larger) system.
The Transactional Interpretation explains it as two-way communication between events at different times; a measurement is any event which propagates information back in time and a system is only in multiple states because the event which caused it is awaiting the information from the measurement.
Schrodinger's cat can be used to point out the difference:
The Copenhagen Interpretation says that the cat is literally both alive and dead at the same time in the box, then when a concious observer (a human) opens the box, the cat immediately becomes either alive or dead. This is very strange, for example why is a concious observer necessary?
The Many Worlds Interpretation says that the cat is literally both alive and dead at the same time in the box. Anything which interacts with it, for example photons of light, will become part of the system; ie. the light will literally be both a reflection of a living cat and a reflection of a dead cat. If those photons enter my eye then I will literally be both a human who has seen a living cat and a human who has seen a dead cat. If you talk to me, you will literally be a human who has talked to a human who has seen a living cat and a human who has talked to a human who has seen a dead cat, and so on. This propagation is exactly the flow of information between systems; there is nothing magical about humans, except that we happen to be human. A photon would get the same results as us if it repeated our experiments, with no 'concious observer' involved, except for the fact that photons don't tend to perform experiments (ie. the 'conciousness' part of Copenhagen is an anthropic bias).
The most useful concept I've ever come across is the notion of a closure in Lisp. The entire operating state of a function is contained within that function. This, and the McCarthy lisp paper (1955!) where it is explained how a lisp interpreter could be created using only a handful of assembly instructions is well worth the read. It is from the fundamental concepts first pioneered in lisp that all object oriented programming paradigms spring; if you can understand and appreciate lisp, the notions of encapsulation, data hiding, abstraction, and privacy will become second nature to you.
I think these are excellent suggestions, but I think lexical scope (eg. Scheme) should be understood before dynamic scope (eg. McCarthy's LISP). I often see a lack of understanding of lexical scope, eg. in Javascript and PHP, leading to redundant arguments, abuse of globals, etc. McCarthy's LISP and LISP-in-LISP is an amazing achievement and discovery, but it got its scoping wrong! ;)
Kids bypassing security is a total failure for this program? Come onnnn. If anything it's giving them a reason to want to use them more and learn a little something about technology and security. But I guess they're not satisfied unless they have properly trained obedient creatures, not humans with the ability to think for themselves.
It only takes one kid to 'learn a little something about technology and security', everyone else can press the resulting "click me to crack" button. Buying $1,000,000,000 worth of iPads just so one kid can learn a little about security, while the rest spend their school time tweeting, would be a total failure.
I'm not in favor of the program as it's originally intended, but I'm not in favor of this inevitabe crack either.
On a related note, the Babel project is getting pushed for Reproducible Research http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html
It allows code to be embedded in other documents, eg. the LaTeX source of a paper, and executed during rendering.
Also the Recomputation project is trying to archive scientific code, complete with virtual machines set up to run them http://www.recomputation.org/
But I'm hoping we never actually prove that souls exist. That's one door I'd prefer to remain closed. If science determined that souls exist, then we'd be figuring out ways to harness souls for energy. And then that'd bring up the whole question of what else is out there in that sphere of reality--and I'd really rather not draw a Nyarlathotep-analogue's attention.
Since "souls" are wild speculation, let me make an analogy to human bodies.
Bodies are mainly water; does that make hydroelectric power equivalent to slavery? No.
Human bodies contain energy; do we harness bodies for energy? Not since the steam engine was invented.
There's a difference between emmigrating to Mars permanantly and dying soon after reaching Europa. There's lots of focus on "dying on Mars", but the point is that you get to live on Mars first. Maybe your lifespan will be reduced, due to radiation exposure, the risk of accidents in the colony's habitat, lack of quick access to specific medices, etc. but it would still be appreciable. With Europa, there's not going to be much living to do at all.
I am all in favour of a one-way colonising mission to Mars, although I think it would be much more efficient to do it with robots first and add the humans later, and do it on the Moon first and Mars later.