First, you have to ensure that speed signs are authenticated (so can't be forged), this means not using visual recognition, but fitting every road in the country with a reliable radio based system or something...
Have they seriously thought this through or is it more mindless health and safety [alternative male cow produce]...???
There was a recent case where three SAS trainees tragically lost their lives due to training in hot weather. The banaholics thinking would suggest that training is an evil scourge that causes death and should thus be banned, and that we should stop training our soldiers in cases more training deaths occur. Anybody with half an ounce of sense can see that this would be silly. When it comes to exposure to media and games with strong content, we must take that as part of the challenge in how we develop: learn to resist the age-old 'monkey-see-monkey-do' instinct, rather than doing a 'see-no-evil-hear-no-evil' thing.
Moralistic mindless campaignaholics will get it that what they are campaigning against won't help what they say they are campaigning for. If people understand their instincitive desires surrounding violence, they are better equipped both to live them out and to control and train them out. People need to be encouraged to do the latter, and given good role models. Avoiding stimulating material only makes people more sensitive to it, and more interested in seeing it, and more likely to live out their 'caveman tendencies' in real life.
Strength and violence were important to man in evolutionary terms, as were feeding and sex. It is no wonder we have deep evolved instincts to seek out and enjoy the four F's in life: that is what we are evolved to seek. In modern day civilisation, we need to temper these instincts consciously, and live disciplined productive lives, and this cannot happen if people insist on hiding material which brings these tendencies to the surface. Sex and violence in media are challenging in how they can affect us, as are sex and violence in daily life. We must develop the discipline to live good productive lives despite these possibilities, rather than trying to hide in a 'civilised' corner where such things are absent.
Any tennis or squash player knows that you treat the racquet as an extension of your body. Likewise a musician treats the instrument as an extension of their body and that as an extension of their mind and emotions. Feeling one with your instrument is of great benefit to playing, and it is a similar 'illusion'.
A common misperception, according to what is taught in classical disciplines that involve serious mind training, like raja yoga or taiji, is that we are not our bodies, nor is our mind and consciousness really seated in our heads. After significant self-development, that illusion eventually dissipates.
What we perceive to be our body is that part of reality that appears to be strongly correlated to our minds. Thus it is easy to mistake ourselves to be our bodies, and our minds for our brains.
The problem with much of this research is that the researchers have not developed a detailed understanding of their own mind before trying to experimentally analyse someone else's. This is akin to trying to study an advanced maths paper when you haven't learned maths past high school level: the result is naive researchers whose qualifications and professional position give an illusion of greater research competence than they have.
Exercise that only tones the muscles isn't the most productive. Exercises that do this and integrate body and mind (such as a skilled sport or a martial art) do much more, and I doubt these drugs would accomplish any of that.
A human can easily recognise another human by asking him or her to do things it is unlikely a computer can do well. Likewise, a computer can easily recognise another computer by asking it to repeatedly perform prime factorisations at a rate beyond what human input could sustain. I do not expect a human will ever be able to pass as a digital computer, and likewise a digital computer as a human. In general, the ability of a reasonably complex entity to recognise similar entities via their abilities is more general than life, and ultimately it is the laws of complexity behind this (to get round it, you'd need, say, NP to be reducible in linear time with small coefficients to problems which are solvable in at most quadratic time and again with small coefficients -- this is already known to be impossible).
Sugar in the doses you find in coke and pepsi is like a stimulant, in many regards, giving a pronounced sugar rush to those more sensitive to sugar. This effect changes your behaviour unless you learn to counterbalance the effects it has on you. It is the same with anything stimulating. When it comes to things with the opposite effect, one needs to be aware of how their ability to control things can be inhibited so that lower levels of stimulation can then trigger greater responses not due to the stimulation but to the lack of inhibition. This is, quite frankly, familiar to anybody who has gone clubbing in their lives.
Proper self control comes from trained self-discipline, and this comes through meditative practices that train and reward the ability to focus your mind on something and keep it focussed. Eventually your attention learns to do what it's told. There is a facebook campaign with the slogan 'teach kids meditation' and with more and more mind and mood affecting stuff become more and more readily available, this self-discipline is more and more necessary. Unfortunately too little understanding, too many charlatan gurus and a dismissive attitude by many of those in academic research means that this will most probably be learned too late rather than too soon.
If you have no calculator, you need to master mental arithmetic. If you have a calculator, you just keep a-pressing those buttons, and don't even notice when something goes amiss (like when you (think you) pressed 5 * 7 6 3 = and got 4578). If you rely on a wordprocessor to type your work rather than a typesetting language, you can just tap away until things look about right, whereas with non wysiwyg methods you need to have a greater understanding of how the document is set out. If you can recall your notes from your laptop via Spotlight or from some database, you don't need to learn to organise your notes like you do with paper.
These and many more examples are the problem. Pen and paper rewards a disciplined mind in a way that mindlessly tapping away on a laptop doesn't. (When writing my PhD thesis, I first handwrote pretty much everything, then typed it up in LaTeX. When helping someone set out precise diagrams in Microsoft Word, I ended up having to print to postscript, preview in gv (this was circa 2000) and then move things around in Word so that they looked wrong in Word but right on paper.)
Laptops reward non-intelligent laziness in a bad way, and people who use computers should be encouraged more to learn to do things in a harder and more manual way to learn the self-discipline, and the need for sufficient practice to maintain this discipline, before fully relying on a computer to make life easier.
There is a well known saying in mathematics: once you've learned to do things the hard way, people don't care if you're sloppy. Learn things the hard way first.
If you break apart data into chunks, hash each chunk to a hash smaller than a chunk, make an incorrect assumption about lack of collisions and then try to reconstruct, this is what you'd come across.
I have been thinking about such possibilities for a while, but was always beyond me to do the details of an implementation. What would be of further interest is the possibilities of interactive feedback loops. Rather than just controlling an otherwise fixed pointer, have a moving object that you have to counterbalance (that unbalances in a predictable way, like a bicycle) and then use the counterbalancing as a means to send a gesture language into the computer.
Number of (behaviorally distinct) programs possible in X Kb of machine code. Number of intelligibly represented programs using a comparable amount of source code in a typical C like language. I suspect the former is much greater than the latter, and this can be exploited for the purpose of creating a program that works but is hard to reverse engineer.
Another thing to think about is various notions of approximation. If only a small number of inputs to a function are actually used, and this set of inputs can be mathematically determined, then the function can be replaced with something weird which gives the right output on desired inputs but various other stuff for other inputs. If an attacker cannot determine the actual inputs used, the function when analysed will look confusing.
I am reading Heisenberg's Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory and the 'observer effects change on the observed' interpretation is rife. More modern people tend to use the fact from Fourier/wavelet theory relating how increased containment in the time domain equates to decreased containment in the frequency domain (I like Mallat's book for an explanation of this rather than the QM textbooks.)
The idea behind crypto is to make undesired access to data impractical. What is required next is to use mathematical techniques to ensure that the data to which undesired access is unwanted cannot be known to exist. We begin on this road with steganography. We could also invisage a gameplay-fingerprint scenario where I need to interact with a system in such a way that it can get a basic behavioural fingerprint and then use this to resynthesise data. This may well result in lossy compression where the output looks similar but is not identical. We then use language and algorithmic compression techniques from there to shape how things are reconstructed. I can imagine much covert research into such concepts.
And of course, once you get back to hardcore dynamical systems, qualitative reasoning tends to resurface due to the inability to analytically solve things.
When the beauty is wrested back from the consumer oriented performance art it has become, back to a deep and meaningful means of learning and communicating. Music without interaction is like a one-way conversation, and listening to most music these days is little more an inspiring experience than reading a mass-media tabloid newspaper. Yes, some works of music are true beautiful works of art, but really the fact that musical beauty can be expressed through recordings is a done thing, and we need to move on. It is in the ability to move each other that music's true beauty lies, and much of the industry is devoid of this. But until people realise that music is more than buying CDs and sticking them in your hifi, they won't move back to the days where music was always performed, each and every time, to the audience you had around you. Until the industry is weakened, this won't happen. Thus I shed no tears for much of the industry, nor for professional artists who prize income over getting heard. Spotify is a good legal way to get your music out, though it doesn't pay as much as the industry of old. Maybe that is because in the past the music business was too lucrative? Anyway, music is bigger than business, and music will outlive the music business, and I care not for business, only music.
Music lovers use their equipment to listen to their music; Audiophiles use their music to listen to their equipment.
In any case, little attention is paid to the difference it makes to seriously train your ability to listen: and a well trained ear can pick out either the music or the equipment on any decent system.
(yes, Dropbox syncs, but to what? the local hard drive! -- without a local hard drive your're dependent on the internet connection and volatile memory. By local hard drive, BTW, I essentially mean local nonvolatile mass storage.)
is a business school grad-type who doesn't fully understand the utility of a hard disk. Some particular uses are easily replaced with Dropbox. Accessing your files when there's no internet connection is not one of them.
That things like physical movement can't be reduced to a simple 'this is the sole mechanism' model. The body is much more complicated in its dynamics than the average medical textbook makes out, and this is a fact that is well known to anybody with a serious interest in martial arts, dance, or even musical performance (if you took the movements of a typical concert pianist and did the maths to show how the muscle-contraction model explains it, you'd come up against apparent physical impossibilities: and it is not that concert piano playing is impossible, simply that the overly simplistic 'western science' model of musculature and movement is precisely that: overly simplistic, and to a certain extent wrong).
Let's not forget that the Gospel account clearly illustrates Jesus teaching _against_ formalised self-serving religious elites, and Jesus being executed for doing so. Can anyone think of an appropriate long word beginning with H?
We'd screw up scraps of paper and throw them at each other. Here is their 'rich corporate' version: pay expensive lawyers to write lots of 'legal magick' words on lots of expensive paper, then pay expensive lawyers to throw said paper on behalf of the corporation. Essentially it's a mischievous children's activity for those with money to burn. Both corporations can easily pay their 'big' losses, and neither has anything useful to do with the winnings except pay more lawyers to throw more 'paper snowballs'.
Turing complete is a bad measure when dealing with real computers. Brainfuck is Turing complete, but incapable of displaying a single typical webpage on a modern computer.
All computer data is computer data. That is, it is a sequence of 0s and 1s. All computer data may be arbitrarily interpreted by an interpreter. An interpreter reads computer data and follows its programmed instructions based on the computer data. A computer program is computer data for an interpreter. A binary is a translation of a computer program so that a microprocessor may be used as the interpreter. A text file may be seen as a program for an interpreter such as notepad which compiles the text file into a memory image that then causes Windows to display a rectangle on screen whose content resembles the text file.
There is no formal barrier between program, source and data. All computer data is computer data and is subject to arbitrary interpretation. All data may be seen as a program for a suitable interpreter. Some interpreters languages permit more complex variations in behaviour than others, and Turing Compleness places a theoretical maximum bound on this complexity. But it is a very rough bound in many ways, having no connection with measurable aspects of practicality (so a programming language that requires ten million lines of code and ten years per line of code per line-of-code and microsecond for another language are equally Turing Complete if they can, given countably infinite resources, compute the same countable sequences of 1s and 0s.)
A bigger issue is the potential for GPL source for a proprietary interpreter, or GPL source for a chain of GPL interpreters where a proprietary transformation is required at some stages of the build process. The GPL does not require disclosure of a fully working build process (else a Windows binary compiled from GPL source in Visual Studio would require providing the recipient with a licensed copy of Visual Studio or a working alternative).
Slashdot Mirror
First, you have to ensure that speed signs are authenticated (so can't be forged),
this means not using visual recognition, but fitting every road in the country with a reliable radio based system or something...
Have they seriously thought this through or is it more mindless health and safety [alternative male cow produce]...???
There was a recent case where three SAS trainees tragically lost their lives due to training in hot weather. The banaholics thinking would suggest that training is an evil scourge that causes death and should thus be banned, and that we should stop training our soldiers in cases more training deaths occur. Anybody with half an ounce of sense can see that this would be silly. When it comes to exposure to media and games with strong content, we must take that as part of the challenge in how we develop: learn to resist the age-old 'monkey-see-monkey-do' instinct, rather than doing a 'see-no-evil-hear-no-evil' thing.
Moralistic mindless campaignaholics will get it that what they are campaigning against won't help what they say they are campaigning for. If people understand their instincitive desires surrounding violence, they are better equipped both to live them out and to control and train them out. People need to be encouraged to do the latter, and given good role models. Avoiding stimulating material only makes people more sensitive to it, and more interested in seeing it, and more likely to live out their 'caveman tendencies' in real life.
Strength and violence were important to man in evolutionary terms, as were feeding and sex. It is no wonder we have deep evolved instincts to seek out and enjoy the four F's in life: that is what we are evolved to seek. In modern day civilisation, we need to temper these instincts consciously, and live disciplined productive lives, and this cannot happen if people insist on hiding material which brings these tendencies to the surface. Sex and violence in media are challenging in how they can affect us, as are sex and violence in daily life. We must develop the discipline to live good productive lives despite these possibilities, rather than trying to hide in a 'civilised' corner where such things are absent.
Any tennis or squash player knows that you treat the racquet as an extension of your body. Likewise a musician treats the instrument as an extension of their body and that as an extension of their mind and emotions. Feeling one with your instrument is of great benefit to playing, and it is a similar 'illusion'.
A common misperception, according to what is taught in classical disciplines that involve serious mind training, like raja yoga or taiji, is that we are not our bodies, nor is our mind and consciousness really seated in our heads. After significant self-development, that illusion eventually dissipates.
What we perceive to be our body is that part of reality that appears to be strongly correlated to our minds. Thus it is easy to mistake ourselves to be our bodies, and our minds for our brains.
The problem with much of this research is that the researchers have not developed a detailed understanding of their own mind before trying to experimentally analyse someone else's. This is akin to trying to study an advanced maths paper when you haven't learned maths past high school level: the result is naive researchers whose qualifications and professional position give an illusion of greater research competence than they have.
Exercise that only tones the muscles isn't the most productive. Exercises that do this and integrate body and mind (such as a skilled sport or a martial art) do much more, and I doubt these drugs would accomplish any of that.
A human can easily recognise another human by asking him or her to do things it is unlikely a computer can do well. Likewise, a computer can easily recognise another computer by asking it to repeatedly perform prime factorisations at a rate beyond what human input could sustain. I do not expect a human will ever be able to pass as a digital computer, and likewise a digital computer as a human. In general, the ability of a reasonably complex entity to recognise similar entities via their abilities is more general than life, and ultimately it is the laws of complexity behind this (to get round it, you'd need, say, NP to be reducible in linear time with small coefficients to problems which are solvable in at most quadratic time and again with small coefficients -- this is already known to be impossible).
Sugar in the doses you find in coke and pepsi is like a stimulant, in many regards, giving a pronounced sugar rush to those more sensitive to sugar. This effect changes your behaviour unless you learn to counterbalance the effects it has on you. It is the same with anything stimulating. When it comes to things with the opposite effect, one needs to be aware of how their ability to control things can be inhibited so that lower levels of stimulation can then trigger greater responses not due to the stimulation but to the lack of inhibition. This is, quite frankly, familiar to anybody who has gone clubbing in their lives.
Proper self control comes from trained self-discipline, and this comes through meditative practices that train and reward the ability to focus your mind on something and keep it focussed. Eventually your attention learns to do what it's told. There is a facebook campaign with the slogan 'teach kids meditation' and with more and more mind and mood affecting stuff become more and more readily available, this self-discipline is more and more necessary. Unfortunately too little understanding, too many charlatan gurus and a dismissive attitude by many of those in academic research means that this will most probably be learned too late rather than too soon.
If you have no calculator, you need to master mental arithmetic. If you have a calculator, you just keep a-pressing those buttons, and don't even notice when something goes amiss (like when you (think you) pressed 5 * 7 6 3 = and got 4578).
If you rely on a wordprocessor to type your work rather than a typesetting language, you can just tap away until things look about right, whereas with non wysiwyg methods you need to have a greater understanding of how the document is set out.
If you can recall your notes from your laptop via Spotlight or from some database, you don't need to learn to organise your notes like you do with paper.
These and many more examples are the problem. Pen and paper rewards a disciplined mind in a way that mindlessly tapping away on a laptop doesn't. (When writing my PhD thesis, I first handwrote pretty much everything, then typed it up in LaTeX. When helping someone set out precise diagrams in Microsoft Word, I ended up having to print to postscript, preview in gv (this was circa 2000) and then move things around in Word so that they looked wrong in Word but right on paper.)
Laptops reward non-intelligent laziness in a bad way, and people who use computers should be encouraged more to learn to do things in a harder and more manual way to learn the self-discipline, and the need for sufficient practice to maintain this discipline, before fully relying on a computer to make life easier.
There is a well known saying in mathematics: once you've learned to do things the hard way, people don't care if you're sloppy. Learn things the hard way first.
If you break apart data into chunks, hash each chunk to a hash smaller than a chunk, make an incorrect assumption about lack of collisions and then try to reconstruct, this is what you'd come across.
This so reminds me of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbp8jzAI-HY&t=7m40s
I have been thinking about such possibilities for a while, but was always beyond me to do the details of an implementation. What would be of further interest is the possibilities of interactive feedback loops. Rather than just controlling an otherwise fixed pointer, have a moving object that you have to counterbalance (that unbalances in a predictable way, like a bicycle) and then use the counterbalancing as a means to send a gesture language into the computer.
Number of (behaviorally distinct) programs possible in X Kb of machine code. Number of intelligibly represented programs using a comparable amount of source code in a typical C like language. I suspect the former is much greater than the latter, and this can be exploited for the purpose of creating a program that works but is hard to reverse engineer.
Another thing to think about is various notions of approximation. If only a small number of inputs to a function are actually used, and this set of inputs can be mathematically determined, then the function can be replaced with something weird which gives the right output on desired inputs but various other stuff for other inputs. If an attacker cannot determine the actual inputs used, the function when analysed will look confusing.
I don't believe there is any formal measurable definition of mental maturity, so ambiguity is unavoidable.
I am reading Heisenberg's Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory and the 'observer effects change on the observed' interpretation is rife. More modern people tend to use the fact from Fourier/wavelet theory relating how increased containment in the time domain equates to decreased containment in the frequency domain (I like Mallat's book for an explanation of this rather than the QM textbooks.)
The idea behind crypto is to make undesired access to data impractical. What is required next is to use mathematical techniques to ensure that the data to which undesired access is unwanted cannot be known to exist. We begin on this road with steganography. We could also invisage a gameplay-fingerprint scenario where I need to interact with a system in such a way that it can get a basic behavioural fingerprint and then use this to resynthesise data. This may well result in lossy compression where the output looks similar but is not identical. We then use language and algorithmic compression techniques from there to shape how things are reconstructed. I can imagine much covert research into such concepts.
And of course, once you get back to hardcore dynamical systems, qualitative reasoning tends to resurface due to the inability to analytically solve things.
When the beauty is wrested back from the consumer oriented performance art it has become, back to a deep and meaningful means of learning and communicating. Music without interaction is like a one-way conversation, and listening to most music these days is little more an inspiring experience than reading a mass-media tabloid newspaper. Yes, some works of music are true beautiful works of art, but really the fact that musical beauty can be expressed through recordings is a done thing, and we need to move on. It is in the ability to move each other that music's true beauty lies, and much of the industry is devoid of this. But until people realise that music is more than buying CDs and sticking them in your hifi, they won't move back to the days where music was always performed, each and every time, to the audience you had around you. Until the industry is weakened, this won't happen. Thus I shed no tears for much of the industry, nor for professional artists who prize income over getting heard. Spotify is a good legal way to get your music out, though it doesn't pay as much as the industry of old. Maybe that is because in the past the music business was too lucrative? Anyway, music is bigger than business, and music will outlive the music business, and I care not for business, only music.
Someone divided listeners into two categories:
Music lovers use their equipment to listen to their music;
Audiophiles use their music to listen to their equipment.
In any case, little attention is paid to the difference it makes to seriously train your ability to listen: and a well trained ear can pick out either the music or the equipment on any decent system.
(yes, Dropbox syncs, but to what? the local hard drive! -- without a local hard drive your're dependent on the internet connection and volatile memory. By local hard drive, BTW, I essentially mean local nonvolatile mass storage.)
is a business school grad-type who doesn't fully understand the utility of a hard disk. Some particular uses are easily replaced with Dropbox. Accessing your files when there's no internet connection is not one of them.
That things like physical movement can't be reduced to a simple 'this is the sole mechanism' model. The body is much more complicated in its dynamics than the average medical textbook makes out, and this is a fact that is well known to anybody with a serious interest in martial arts, dance, or even musical performance (if you took the movements of a typical concert pianist and did the maths to show how the muscle-contraction model explains it, you'd come up against apparent physical impossibilities: and it is not that concert piano playing is impossible, simply that the overly simplistic 'western science' model of musculature and movement is precisely that: overly simplistic, and to a certain extent wrong).
Let's not forget that the Gospel account clearly illustrates Jesus teaching _against_ formalised self-serving religious elites, and Jesus being executed for doing so. Can anyone think of an appropriate long word beginning with H?
We'd screw up scraps of paper and throw them at each other. Here is their 'rich corporate' version: pay expensive lawyers to write
lots of 'legal magick' words on lots of expensive paper, then pay expensive lawyers to throw said paper on behalf of the corporation.
Essentially it's a mischievous children's activity for those with money to burn. Both corporations can easily pay their 'big' losses, and neither
has anything useful to do with the winnings except pay more lawyers to throw more 'paper snowballs'.
Turing complete is a bad measure when dealing with real computers. Brainfuck is Turing complete, but incapable of displaying a single typical webpage on a modern computer.
All computer data is computer data. That is, it is a sequence of 0s and 1s.
All computer data may be arbitrarily interpreted by an interpreter.
An interpreter reads computer data and follows its programmed instructions based on the computer data.
A computer program is computer data for an interpreter.
A binary is a translation of a computer program so that a microprocessor may be used as the interpreter.
A text file may be seen as a program for an interpreter such as notepad which compiles the text file into a memory image that then causes Windows to display a rectangle on screen whose content resembles the text file.
There is no formal barrier between program, source and data. All computer data is computer data and is subject to arbitrary interpretation. All data may be seen as a program for a suitable interpreter. Some interpreters languages permit more complex variations in behaviour than others, and Turing Compleness places a theoretical maximum bound on this complexity. But it is a very rough bound in many ways, having no connection with measurable aspects of practicality (so a programming language that requires ten million lines of code and ten years per line of code per line-of-code and microsecond for another language are equally Turing Complete if they can, given countably infinite resources, compute the same countable sequences of 1s and 0s.)
A bigger issue is the potential for GPL source for a proprietary interpreter, or GPL source for a chain of GPL interpreters where a proprietary transformation is required at some stages of the build process. The GPL does not require disclosure of a fully working build process (else a Windows binary compiled from GPL source in Visual Studio would require providing the recipient with a licensed copy of Visual Studio or a working alternative).