Actually he's right. The statement is pure bullshit.

Or maybe that's too much. Kurzweil just doesn't understand how Kolmorogrov complexity works.

Let's say the brain as a machine is the output of a process. How complicated is that process? The Kolmorogrov complexity of a string (or whatever) is the minimum size of the data that you have to give to a machine in order to produce the string. E.g. a string of 100 0s is simpler than a string of alternating 0s and 1s and simpler than encoding the first 100 digits of pi. Write code for each of those and you'll see the measure works (and it's actually a lower limit, but it's the closest concept...)

But the crucial point is that the size of this string depends on the kind of machine. The size of the input (program) for a Turing machine is very different than that for an actual computer.

So, yes. 800MB of code. But that's not the library code. The library that interprets that program is the egg that grows those 800MB of data into a human, together with all the laws of physics and chemistry involved in the process.

Take all the chromosomes encoding a whole human genome and drop it into a test tube of distilled water. Does it grow a brain? What if you put it into a chicken egg. What grows out? Putting those 800 MB into a computer doesn't do anything if you don't provide the equivalent of the egg. The bootstrap structure and the underlying architecture are as important as the code in understanding the whole system.

Myers is right. In order to understand the human brain directly from the genes you have to understand all chemistry that interacts with it, all the self replicating machinery provided by the mother and simulate that at a molecular level.

So the upper bound is NOT 800 MB. It's 800 MB plus the size of a codebase good enough to simulate every interaction at an atomic level plus a full 3D scan at an atomic level of the egg provided by the mother. Or simplified models of all those things, provided by the chemists and biologists out there, as Myers points out. (Plus data equivalent to a few years of training like we do with children)

Not saying that simulating the brain is necessarilly that hard, it's just that Kurzweil's pseudo-scientific measurement is just bullshit.

She pushes the mouse as she clicks?

I once worked in a somewhat similar arrangement. We had L-shaped desks in a cross arrangement. Each person sat in one of the inside corners of the cross.

Pros:
- It was easy to talk to each other.
Cons:
- It was harder to look at the person across from you over the monitors
- If you ever wanted to show each other your code, one of you had to walk around the desk or roll around it in your chair.

That last one was the dealbreaker. It might be easier on a round table (but then each would have very little room for their stuff), but you'd have the same problem to talk to someone who is not right next to you: you'd still have to walk around your neighbors.

I'm currently working in another department with the same desks, but arranged as the outside of the square. Takes up about the same space but it is much easier to roll over to someone's desk and work with them. You can take your laptop if you want (and wifi permitting).

And let's face it, it's just as easy to turn around to talk to someone behind you as to someone next to you. And if they are wearing headphones they won't hear you either way. Add rolling chairs and anything but carpet and it's just as easy to take something to show them too. Even without the corner desks, you can set them up in two rows back to back and it still works.

You could add a small central table for quick meetings, but I prefer the back to back arrangement any day.

(And people tend not to slack off as much because someone might be looking over their shoulder :) )

Pity I don't have mod points. I'd mod you up just for that.

Nope. One of his moves a few years ago was to set up the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) which absorbed a bunch of parties that supported him at one time and he's campaigned for people to see this as the only socialist party in existence. Of course he controls it and it would only propose him for president. Anyone leading another party is politically a nobody

There are other socialist politicians. Real socialists, even some that have been fighting for change for decades and are appalled at what Chavez is doing now. One of them said lately that Chavez is not a socialist but a communist, for example. There are, of course, people who were with Chavez but have fallen out of favor and might want to set themselves up as new socialists leaders, but without the PSUV's backing they are not getting anywhere.

So, no.

A lot of people love their dear leader and his personality more than the ideology. And a lot of people like socialism, but believe socialism is whatever Chavez says, or that letting the opposition get any foothold will make them lose "all they've fought for". Others think Chavez simply can do no wrong, whatever he does. All of them still insist on calling a 10 year old entrenched government "the revolution" and anyone who doesn't like whatever Chavez says is "against the process" (and some of them say it with a "they deserve death" attitude)

Bringing up that they could back another better socialist is a good way to make them face the fact that they love him more than the process or the ideology.

As to the Putin scenario, he's not going to do that. Why would he back a constitutional reform whose only point was to allow him to run again in the next presidential elections?

He also managed to get the last opposition guy to run against him to flee the country, so there's no credible person to run against him from the opposition anyway. But that's a story for another post.

Sorry, I didn't mean a TV Show like a sitcom or whatever. La Hojilla was a news/opinion show with a guy discussing the day's events, and so on.

It never pretended to be fiction, or fiction pretending to be reality, or anything like that.

Actually, the venezuelan government has been trying to close Globovision for a while now, and one of the biggest problems is that they have NEVER advocated any kind of violence against the government, be it the president or anyone else. It would cost too much international support for them to close another oposition TV station without a good reason.

The other two big independent TV stations have been scared off enough that they don't dare play anything political. The only other one is VTV, the government's channel (and I don't mean Bush' Fox, I mean wholly owned by the government). They do play show like "La Hojilla" (The razor blade) that openly advocated a few times killing oposition as a legitimate means of defending "the revolution".

Not to mention Chavez himself sometimes applauding relatively violent acts in his defense.

Now, I won't say that Globovision is fair and balanced, but as far as I can tell they never outright lied about anything. I understand Fox news to be more radical and distorting than Globovision and yet I don't see the Fox owners being hounded for years and finally arrested like Zuloaga.

FWIW, it seems Zuloaga was released after appearing in court, with a prohibition against leaving the country. We'll see whether he'll fold and close Globovision or be thrown in jail on trumped up charges.

Disclaimer on my stance on the government: Chavez has been in power for 10 years. He's changed the constitution multiple times, tried out different reforms all while oil was at an all time high and money was flowing into the country like crazy. He's had a BIG chance to reform the country and It's all been a failure. Lately all he's doing helps the government more than the people.

Hell, we even have rolling blackouts now, when we used to export electricity. This is a situation that was predicted over a year ago, but 10 years of ignoring the power infrastructure have left its mark, and yet he blames it all on el niño and the previous governments.

If you want change, don't prop up the same old government. If you're a socialist, elect a different socialist president. If you're a capitalist, same thing. There's no reason to maintain Chavez in power for another 50 years.

The Import question was a long conversation in IRC actually. The conclusion is that it doesn't really add anything to split open and import, while save/export does.

Yes it is different from other programs, but the only one I can think of OOo, and the other formats (word, etc) do save enough info to keep your work.

Currently when you open a PNG, the export item becomes "Overwrite foo.png" so it's very obvious in the menu. After you export the menu gets overwrite foo.png, export to bar.png export to... plus the usual save and save to. The overwrite item goes away when you save to a XCF.

Yes very nonstandard, that's one of the things I dislike.

My biggest annoyance with all this is that when you type in foo.png in the save dialog it'll show a very unfriendly "You can use this dialog to save to the GIMP XCF format. Use File ->export to export to other file formats". The obvious thing to do would be to add an export button to that dialog or a "take me to the export dialog" so the user doesn't have to waste time navigating to the right directory again. But, in the words of the UI guy "we cannot allow the user to think of the save dialog as an unofficial way to export".

And yes, they now have a "UI expert" designing things. So it's not random developers coming up with weird things. Some of his ideas are good, but not down to the details IMHO. And he has a real NIH syndrome problem. Look at the export dialog, the adjustment layers and the non-MDI single window UI for examples.

Int his case I think the feature does make sense, but it does need some changes, liek the ones you suggest. The double save-path export offers does seem very useful for something like GImp.

I've been running SVN versions for a while now, and I was skeptical of the change too, but when I found out the reason why it makes perfect sense.

Let's say you're editing an image to put up in a web page. You have a .xcf with all the layers and data and a jpg you are putting up. In the old version you could save the jpg and then forget to update the xcf, so you'd lose data unknowingly (Say, you closed the Gimp and it didn't tell you you had a modified image).

The current version keeps track of whether a file has been saved and whether it has been exported. If you want to update the xcf you hit ctrl-s. If you want to reexport the jpg you hit ctrl-e. If you close Gimp it'll tell you you have unsaved changes even if you have exported the picture. Hitting export as a second time will place you in the directory you were exporting to (not necessarily the one you saved to). It's nice for repeated saving and testing (to web, blender, whatever) while keeping track of update to you XCF for you.

Yes, it is nonstandard but the Gimp is one of the few programs whose internal format is not what is published or used as part of a workflow, but still needs to keep up to date with your work.

Also note that the export dialog does do "Intelligent Save". You type in the file name you want and it'll guess the file type.

Either way don't worry about it too much. Current estimate is to release 2.8 in December 2010, but they'll probably cut some features before then.

Which can then be merged into a 3d copy?

(Avatar with Blue/Red glasses!, oh wait, you lose half the Navi)

The massive rewrite is not in progress yet.

Currently the projects being worked on git are:
-Single window interface (Their own private kind of MDI, not anything standard)
-Integrating the brush dynamic GSoC project
-Adding a test suite
-Including code to work on a XMP model (?)
-Real dynamic hardness support for both generated and pixmap brushes
-Some work on file format. It seems new features in 2.8 might require 2.8 to read, but that code isn't there yet

They also added simple layer groups so far, plus the usual bugfixes and improvements. I can't say I understand all the git comments though.

GEGL integration is not actually happening yet, and it'll take a year or two at least. Internal representatiuon when rendering will be floating point RGB but I remember hearing the buffers will be able to store (or Gimp will be able to read) any pixel format understood by babl.

Personally I don't much care for GEGL. It's Pulseaudio for graphics, and way too alpha to make it an integral part of Gimp.

Anyway don't hold your breath for more than 8-bits on Gimp. It'll be at least 2012 before it can be used for anything more than what you can do now.