duncan_bayne

On 07/06/2016 at 1:16 AM, BaalChatzaf said:

I must tell you that this article caused my flesh to crawl  a bit.  What if a pig fetus went to term  with a quasi human brain?

It'd wind up running for President.

Here is the computer that Charles Babbage conceived of but never was able to finish:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gallery/2015/apr/12/thrilling-adventures-lovelace-babbage-in-pictures#img-6

I am afraid this would not have fit on your desk top. Perhaps it is fortunate that the programmable computer had to wait for the age of electricity before it could be made. The image shows what a computer in the age of steam would have looked like.

Over on the right hand side is a cartoon image Of Ada Augusta King, Lady Lovlace, the world's first computer programmer. She was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, the Mad Poet. Born 1815 Died 1852 of ovarian cancer. In addition to being a genius she was a gambling addict.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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?

George,

This is an absolutely brilliant approach to changing the core story of a culture.

You build on the old one, not deny it. That would work. Too bad there is no Superman to help out. But this approach is the right path.

Have you read much about the Baha'i religion?

Throughout history, God has sent to humanity a series of divine Educators—known as Manifestations of God—whose teachings have provided the basis for the advancement of civilization. These Manifestations have included Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad. Bahá’u’lláh, the latest of these Messengers, explained that the religions of the world come from the same Source and are in essence successive chapters of one religion from God.

That's their explicitly stated approach.

Channeling Feynman: nope. I can't connect with him. I'd try Einstein, but they removed his brain after he died.

--Brant

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).

Thanks for the reading suggestions; I have added them to my (sadly growing) reading list.

A silenced rifle? that never misses from 400 yards?

No-one's yet made a rifle that never misses ... but silenced, lethal and accurate at 400 yards? Sure.

Is It Time to Embrace Unverified Theories?

...

In other words, some scientists are calling for new rules of the game. They’re asking the community to put as much faith in math as they historically have in evidence.

The challenge arises from two ideas prominent in modern theoretical physics. The first is string theory, in which small, vibrating strings make up subatomic particles such as protons and electrons.* The second is the so-called multiverse, which postulates that the Big Bang created not just one universe, but instead an infinite array of universes. Both ideas are beautiful; neither can, as far as we know, be tested.

...

This seems quite unreasonable to me, but then I'm not a professional scientist. From the article:

What if that gap becomes infinite? Many physicists fear that string theory and the multiverse might in practice never be observable.

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.

.

No, "layperson junk" in this context alludes to the appeals made to the Gödel Incompleteness Theorems to fake one's way to a confirmation of one's plain old belief in the impotence of reason. Such theorems imply no such thing ...

Indeed. The analogy I like is that the incompleteness theorem invalidates reason no more than the presence of a singularity invalidates physics.

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

I don't have experience with coding for security, so your claim might be true. I am somewhat skeptical, though. The author having confidence does not assure no security holes. Modifying authors may not be as careful as originating authors.

Security through obscurity having done quite a bit of programming in APL during my career.

True for proprietary software if the owner and user are not the same, but not if they are the same.

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.

Merlin,

A person can't just modify a piece of software and peak at your assets. They would need to modify it, distribute it, and have Fidelity users download and run it. Just don't download software from any site other than Fidelity, which goes without saying.

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.

Welcome to OL.

I understand you were trying to make a point here, however, the distinctions between the two are quite clear. I do not perceive the similarity between a peaceful evangelical and a political Islamist who will decapitate you for being a non Muslim.

A...

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.

Lol Duncan the war on Terror is about as effective as "the war on drugs".

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.

I hope you enjoy it here. Lots of really good people.

You are one, too.

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!

Weren't you the guy who decamped to Australia? Was that you in a bi-plane waving goodbye several years ago?

It's gotta be toxic if it drove away Michael Moeller.

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.

You can go, last I knew, to SOLOP and see it as an archive ending in late 2005. As for the rest, I might talk about it with someone in person if we were both drunk out of our minds or if I had a gun to my head. It's so old and boring and dead.

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.