Update, Sep. 10, 2007:
Remember back in 2005, when Sony decided it would be a smashingly brill idea to include a rootkit on one of their CDs? Well, now they’re selling USB keychain drives with built-in fingerprint scanners, and they figured it’d be totally rad to include a rootkit with that as well.
As the old saying goes, subvert my security to prevent the inevitable release of your IP onto the net by 15 minutes, shame on you; subvert my security etc. twice, shame on you still, dumbass.
Remember Ted Haggard, the right-wing preacher who got busted for having sex with a male prostitute, and buying meth from him?
If Bonnie Goldstein at Slate is right, he might be entering the lucrative field of financial shenanigans (a career for which his experience as a preacher prepared him well) (maybe he can share a cell with Kent Hovind).
The nutshell version: he doesn’t have his old salary, and in the current housing market, he can’t sell his $700,000 house, so he sent out a letter asking people to donate to Families With A Mission, which will pass on 90% of donations to Haggard, and keep 10% for administrative expenses.
However, it appears that Families With A Mission was dissolved in February 2007. And its registered agent was a sex offender.
So something funny’s going on.
From an Ubuntu security advisory:
After a standard system upgrade you need to restart emacs to effect the necessary changes. Details follow: Hendrik Tews discovered that emacs21 did not correctly handle certain GIF images. By tricking a user into opening a specially crafted GIF, a remote attacker could cause emacs21 to crash, resulting in a denial of service.
Gosh, they make it sound as if Emacs is a daemon, run from an init file, running all the time and… oh, wait. Right.
From Newsweek:
China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”
This may seem silly, but I think a country that executes as many people as China does would want to regulate reincarnation. It’s only a matter of time before Texas does the same.
http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1770138
I either really really want to see this movie, or I really really don’t. I can’t tell which.
(Update, Aug. 20: John Wilkins, an honest to God philosopher, tells me in the comments that I’m wrong. So take this with a grain of salt.)
For those not aware of it, John Searle’s Chinese room is an argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence.
As recounted by Roger Penrose in The Empereor’s New Brain, it goes something like this: let’s say someone has written a program that understands natural language. This program reads a short story in a human language (e.g., “a man went to a restaurant. When his meal arrived, it was burned to a crisp. He stormed out without paying the bill or leaving a tip.”), then takes questions (e.g., “did the man eat his meal?”) and answers them. Now, let’s make two changes: first of all, the program “understands” Chinese, rather than English. And secondly, instead of a computer, it is John Searle (who doesn’t speak a word of Chinese), who will be executing the program. He is sealed in a room, given detailed instructions (in English), and some Chinese text. The instructions explain what to do with the Chinese characters; eventually, the instructions have him draw other Chinese characters on a sheet of paper, and push them out through a slot in the wall. The instructions don’t include a dictionary or anything like that; he is never told what the characters mean. Searle’s argument, then, is that although to the people outside it appears that the room has read a story and answered questions about it, no actual understanding has taken place, since Searle still doesn’t speak Chinese, and has no idea what the story was about, or even that it was a story. It was all just clever symbol manipulation.
One objection that recently occurred to me is this: what if, instead of a natural-language recognition program, the Chinese researchers had given Searle a program that forecasts the weather, or finds a route from one address to another, or typesets Chinese text, or plays go, or even one that does simple arithmetic (written out in Chinese, of course)?
I don’t see that this makes a significant difference to the argument, so if the Chinese room argument is sound, then its conclusion should stand. Let’s assume that Searle, a philosopher, knows absolutely nothing about meteorology, and is given a weather-forecasting program. To the people outside, it looks as though the room is predicting the weather, however well or poorly. But Searle, inside, has no understanding of what he’s doing. Therefore, by his earlier argument, there is no true weather forecasting, just clever symbol manipulation. Therefore, computers cannot forecast the weather.
I think we can all agree that this is nonsense: of course computers can forecast the weather: they do it all the time. They also find routes between addresses (surely no one thinks that Mapquest has a bunch of interns behind the scenes, frantically giving directions), and all of the other things listed above. In short, if the Chinese room argument worked, it would prevent computers from doing a whole lot of things that we know perfectly well that they can do. The programs may just be clever symbol manipulation, but if the solution can be implemented using sufficiently-clever symbol manipulation, then what’s the problem? (BTW, I don’t imagine that I’m the first person to discover this flaw; I just happened to rediscover it independently.)
The real problem with the Chinese room argument, as I see it, is that in his analogy, he takes the place of the CPU (and associated hardware), and the detailed English instructions are analogous to software. While a statement like “my computer can play chess” is quite uncontroversial, if I were to say “my Intel Pentium can play chess”, people would think that I don’t know what I’m talking about (or at best, ask me to explain myself).
Of course, Searle came up with this argument in 1980, back before everyone had a computer, so perhaps he can be forgiven this misunderstanding. Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding some subtle aspect of his argument, though I don’t think so.
I just watched PZ Meiarz’s talk about mind and brain, and listened to Ron McLeroy’s talk at his church, about the evils of materialism and evolution. I’ve also listened to Kent Hovind‘s schpiel, and seen his show live.
One thing that struck me—and it’s a small thing, but I think significant—is that PZ took questions during the talk, while McLeroy and Hovind didn’t.
Yes, the last section of Hovind’s seminar is a Q&A session, but that comes at the end of 14 hours of Gish Gallop, while PZ’s audience asked questions while they were fresh in their minds, and while the relevant slides were up on the screen.
And again, to be fair, I’ve attended talks by scientists and researchers who asked that questions be kept until the end, but even there, this was considered unusual enough that it was announced at the beginning. Certainly, throughout school and college, it was the norm that you raise your hand when a question occurs to you, not at the end: if you don’t understand something at the beginning, you should correct that as soon as possible, otherwise you won’t understand the stuff that comes later.
Of course, the other difference is that PZ is trying to teach his audience, and explain why (he thinks that) something is true. McLeroy and Hovind, on the other hand, are telling their audience what to think.
Does anyone need more proof that Ron McLeroy, the newly-appointed Texas State Board of Education Chairman, is a superstitious asshat who’s out to cripple the state’s education system? Here’s what he told his church in 2005:
“Whether you’re a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young-Earth, old-Earth, it’s all in the tent of intelligent design,” McLeroy said. “And intelligent design here at Grace Bible Church is actually a smaller tent than you would have in the intelligent design movement as a whole, because we are all Biblical literalists…. So because it’s a bigger tent, just don’t waste our time arguing with each other about…all of the side issues.”
“Modern science today,” McLeroy complained, “is totally based on naturalism,” thus “it is the naturalistic base that is [our] target.”
What’s frightening is that this assclown is in charge of education in Texas. And as bad as that is, the effect of his militant ignorance won’t be confined to one state: Texas is the second-largest market for school textbooks (after California). This means that publishers will tone down the science in their books if they think it’ll make them more likely to sell in Texas.
Maybe we need a new rule: that someone in charge of X must not be ideologically committed to destroying X.
(HT Texas Observer → Texas Freedom Network → Americans United)