duncan_bayne

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About duncan_bayne

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    Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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    Duncan Bayne
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  1. It'd wind up running for President.
  2. Hmph. I don't think you can reasonably call Lovelace the first computer programmer, given that computers didn't exist during her lifetime. If you're looking for female role models in computer science, how about Margaret Hamilton, the person in charge of the software that put human beings on the moon?
  3. Have you read much about the Baha'i religion? That's their explicitly stated approach.
  4. I guess that's better than removing it before he died, as was clearly the case with a few professional academics I've worked with. (The minority, for what it's worth).
  5. Thanks for the reading suggestions; I have added them to my (sadly growing) reading list.
  6. No-one's yet made a rifle that never misses ... but silenced, lethal and accurate at 400 yards? Sure.
  7. This seems quite unreasonable to me, but then I'm not a professional scientist. From the article: What is the point of a theory of physics that has no observable consequences? Surely this is just mental masturbation? If there are no observable consequences one might as well posit that a unicorn sculpted the multiverse from fairy dust.
  8. Indeed. The analogy I like is that the incompleteness theorem invalidates reason no more than the presence of a singularity invalidates physics.
  9. Thanks for the reply - sounds (in terms of its suitability to matrix manipulation) a little like R. I'm amazed to discover a language that requires a custom keyboard ... I use a (very lightly modified) Unicomp Model-M derivative at home, but the only real changes are cosmetic. Meta, Super, Hyper keys on my Unicomp On-The-Ball by Duncan Bayne, on Flickr
  10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-OjTPj7K54y "... and I basically hate hieroglyphs, so I won't use APL." Seriously, I have no first-hand experience of APL, and would be interested to know what you think are its strengths and weaknesses. Talking of confidence was loose language on my part. What I meant by that was: in order to safely release the source code to a program that is security-sensitive, the security cannot rely upon attackers having restricted knowledge of the internal workings of the software. It must be actually secure by design. Relatedly, almost all software must be coded for security these days, as almost everyone uses data obtained over networks from untrusted sources. Even seemingly innocent MIDI music files have been used to break into systems. Agreed. re. owner and user. If its your system and you own the code, you will of course enjoy some of the benefits of open source software. Not all of them though; the benefits of a large community of developers and users are many.
  11. My point was that open-source software would likely make it easier for hackers and others to gain access to my assets. A person with an account with Fidelity doesn't need to download anything from Fidelity. Actually, it's usually the opposite: in order to release the code to a program, its authors must be fairly confident in the inherent security of the program. They can't rely upon people simply failing to notice the security holes (known derisively as 'security through obscurity'). Also, if you're running proprietary software, you're at the mercy of the owners for a fix. If they go broke, or don't care, or don't fix it properly, then that's your bad luck. In the case of open source software, though, you can always fix it yourself or pay someone to do likewise. There's some confusion about terminology on this thread. In the hopes of clearing it up: Free Software: software that respects the freedom of the user of the software to "run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software". Open source software: software for which the source code is available to the public.Proprietary software: also known as closed-source, this is software for which the source code is not available to the public.An example of Free Software is the Linux kernel. The source code is available to the public, and if you distribute a modified version, you must also make your modified source code available under the same terms. You can't derive proprietary software from Free Software because of this. An example of open source software is el-get, a package management tool for the Emacs editor. The source code is available to the public, and you may do what you want with it. If you want to derive your own version and release it as proprietary software, you may. An example of proprietary software is iTunes. The source code is not available, and you most certainly may not freely use, distribute or modify it. You may be sued, face jail time, or both if you reverse-engineer it to try to figure out what it's doing, let alone release a derivative version.
  12. Selene, thanks for the welcome. The similarity is in the goals of both groups; the difference is how they apply violence. The Mujahideen do it like this: ... whereas your 'peaceful' Christians prefer this method: Back in New Zealand I was on good terms with a man who was, at the time, highly placed in the Christian Heritage Party. His party had goals that included the criminalisation of homosexuality and abortion. I think I offended him on several occasions by pointing out that those policies represented literal violence against gays and women. To be clear: the only difference between the Christian Heritage Party and the Mujahideen is that the latter do their fighting themselves; the former employ violence by co-opting the legal system, and thus the Police and occasionally Military to do the violence for them. Everyone has a Christian friend who is the nicest person imaginable (I have several). Friendly, generous, helpful, a real 'love thy neighbour' type. But, he or she will happily vote for laws that would set the above group of night-stick-wielding to beat and imprison a man for having the temerity to want to marry the man he loves. It's like being avowedly anti-hunting while still eating meat. You still want the meat, you just don't want to be elbow-deep in viscera on a Saturday afternoon when it's easier to visit the butcher. Most people refuse to acknowledge the violence inherent in supposedly peaceful political systems. It's one of the reasons I became so disheartened with politics. Edited: by 'only difference' I'm speaking of the difference between their intended societies; obviously, groups like the Christian Heritage Party are willing to work within the context of the democratic system to achieve their goals. This is actually one of the things that makes them so dangerous, as they have a veneer of respectability that the head-hackers and suicide-bombers lack in Western society.
  13. Depends how you measure effectiveness. As a means of funneling taxpayers wealth into the hands of politically connected moochers it's proved outstandingly effective, even more so than the War on Drugs. In terms of actually combating a real enemy, political Islam (to be understood in the same sense as political Shintoism during and before WW2), it's a dismal failure. But what are our options, politically speaking? In one corner we have Islam: submit to Allah, or be subjugated or slaughtered. In another, resurgent fundamentalist Christianity: same shit (as the Muslims), different day. In yet another, the 'liberals' who ought to be our allies but who blind themselves to the evils of Islam while enthusiastically (and correctly) criticising the folks who *won't* behead them for their temerity. Brave position, that. Finally you have the usual crop of racist fascists who have given their tired old xenophobic rants a veneer of modernity and respectability by claiming they're protecting Western values. Not an appealing set of choices, to be sure. We need more voices like Hitchens, Dawkins, Ali, and Maher - but they're being drowned out by the aforementioned.
  14. Thank you I probably won't be a very regular poster here - so much to do, plus I'm several years into a mostly-successful crusade to not be this guy. But it does seem to be more in line with my values than most other fora I've seen over the years. Congratulations on building such a community. Goodness knows it isn't easy! Yes, that was me. Although my association with SOLO continued for some time after my decamping; the decamping was to co-found a (now mothballed) software company with an old and close friend of mine. My abandonment of SOLO was roughly coeval with starting down the long path of correcting some of my own serious personal flaws. One of the consequences of regularly practicing much more thorough, honest introspection was that I realised that I was deeply dreading what I (correctly) predicted would be an emotionally painful flaming, should I state my recently formed opinions on the 'war on terror'. That realisation, combined with the predicted flaming when I did it anyway, lead me to re-evaluate my participation in SOLO. Simply put: the cost-benefit wasn't there any more for me. The ratio of anger to discourse was all wrong.
  15. On paper it was such a good idea - the greatest philosophy in history, presented by a world class broadcaster, with a vibrant and iconoclastic community. Politics, philosophy, news, technology... a veritable home for the Renaissance man of the 21st century. That's how I saw it when working with Lindsay and Julian to get the site set up on a shoestring budget in a few days of caffeine powered coding and configuration lasting into the early hours of each morning. I took a while to wise up. To my eternal discredit, it also took me being on the receiving end of the vitriol for me to understand how much it sucked. I realised one day that I was keeping opinions private because of the - correctly - anticipated emotional cost of posting them and getting flamed as a result. Lindsay has achieved some pretty remarkable things, including bringing Libertarianism and Objectivism to the attention of a great number of New Zealanders, myself included, who otherwise would have been decades late to the party. That doesn't alter the fact that Solopassion.com became a clusterfucked ghost town as contributor after contributor was driven off by the toxic atmosphere there, which was created and fostered by Lindsay himself. Let's raise a toast (or a handgun, whatever it takes to get Brant into a conversational mood) to the esteemed members of the Saddamite Pomowankers club.