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Comment not binary (Score 1) 208

1: Talk to a notary.

2: Digital methods can and will fail. Either on your end or because the recipient doesn't know how to use them properly.

Talk to a notary. These people have been handing over sensitive information about bank accounts, secret swiss safe deposit boxes and other stuff from one generation to the next for centuries, and you have a human who can work around any failures.

Sure, you can find 10 possible digital solutions on the pages of Applied Cryptography, but... goto 2

throw new Exception("you failed to follow the goto");

Comment Re:Two things (Score 1) 85

I do not agree that the question is difficult.

I do agree that a lot of people consider it difficult, because they are trapped in category mistakes and cannot properly seperate their levels of abstraction.

Once you get that right, it isn't all that hard anymore. You just need to go beyond the word, into meaning. What is it, exactly, that you mean by the word "algorithm"? Is it

a) the particular formula in particular mathematical notation?
b) the operations described by that formula?
c) the process described by those operations?

Comment Re:untrue (Score 2) 85

until someone invents Russian and invents the word ÃþÃ'Ã'ÃÃ').

seriously, slashdot ?

It's 2014, not 1994. Fucking get some Unicode support.

Comment Re:Two things (Score 1) 85

From that page:
Although most mathematicians and physicists (and many philosophers) would accept the statement "mathematics is a language", [...bla bla... it's not as simple, but the more we think about it... ] that the distinction between mathematical language and natural language may not be as great as it seems.

There's actually a more specific article right on WP, but as always, never believe anything you read on WP without checking it against other sources.

Comment Re:untrue (Score 2) 85

You do realize that these two things are not nearly equivalent, yes?

Finding if a combination of words satisfies all semantical and grammatical requirements is not the same as verifying if some combination of symbols has been published before, no matter which language you talk about.

Math certainly is a very special language in that it strictly obeys the rules of logic, and thus can be used to derive and formulate proofs in such a clear and unambigious way that computers can be used for the purpose. I would certainly not say it's a language like English or Spanish.

If you need help to bridge the gap, think about computer and other functional languages. They inhabit the space between mathematics and human languages and have elements of both.

So maths is more like the world, a country (proof) exists whether you have discovered it yet or not.

You make the exact category mistake that I wrote about in my original post. You confuse the word "Russia" with the physical area on the planet that we describe with that word. Of course the land area with all its rivers and lakes and mountains exists independently. But it is not "Russia" until someone creates the English language and invents this word to describe it (or, if you want, until someone invents Russian and invents the word ÐоÑÑÐÑ).

Likewise, the fact that you have 2 stones in your hand if you have 1 stone in it and then put another stone into it as well is an objective fact. 1+1=2 is mathematics and was invented. Other ways of describing the same fact are imagineable, just like names for countries are pretty much arbitrary combinations of sounds.

Comment Re:Two things (Score 2) 85

You mean like Latin didn't have a word for computer or laser or neutron star?

Because words are added to languages when they are needed. Languages are not created in the "a designer sits down and invents it" sense, but in the sense of continuous improvement.

Comment Re:Two things (Score 5, Insightful) 85

are mathematics (of which algorythms are a small part) discovered or created ? No one has a clear answer to that question.

Really? Maybe it's because the answer is so simple, no one serious has bothered tackling it.

Mathematics is a language. As such, it is created.

The things that mathematics describes are where it gets interesting. Much like in other languages, you have tangible things (easily verified as existing independent of the language), intangible things (dreams, emotions, forces) that are generally accepted as existing independent of language. And then you have two classes of things that are not entirely independent.

You have categories or groups. "Animal" is not an intangible thing, because it doesn't describe anything that actually exists, it is a term for a collection of things that exist. The term itself is semantics, but most categories have an objective component that exists independent of language.

The final category is pure language constructs. Rhymes, sentences, grammar, poems, etc. - while you can argue that they are linked to some biological or neurological element of human nature, a rhyme or a poem is very much a language construct and does neither describe a thing nor a group of things, it's a self-referential language construct.

And if you look closely, you find the same in mathematics.

Comment Re:Lipstick on a Pig (Score 1) 135

Except you still have thousands of people, thousands of voices calling "bullshit" and asking for citations.

ROTFL. Maybe in an article about a porn star or manga character. Even articles about entire countries are largely edited by less than a dozen people. On more specific topics that require expertise, there are many pages that have two or three editors. Many articles are so much pets of individual editors that even spelling corrections get reverted - a quite common complaint of casual WP editors.

Once more, we've believed in this "enough eyeballs" shit in Open Source software for many years, and Heartbleed was a rude awakening, but by far not the only or first case proving it wrong.

Do you have any reason to believe, besides paranoid fantasies, that anything like your scenario has ever taken place? Say, you're not spreading FUD about Wikipedia, are you?

I thought I had made it very clear in my first post that this is from research done on how it could be done. If I were actually working in this field, I certainly wouldn't be posting my methods on /. would I?

I'm thinking someone who tried to follow your James Bond super-villian recipe for disinfo spreading better think it through, because if the story gets out to Techdirt or Boing Boing or Wired about what they'd done, it goes mainstream in a big hurry and the Streisand effect kicks in, leaving them in worse shape than before they started.]

Your faith in humanity is large. Mine not. Larger stunts have been pulled in plain sight of the public and nobody so much as shrugged.

Comment Re:Laws of Physics have become Heresy? (Score 2) 649

Now the 2nd law of thermodynamics says: "All natural systems (e.g. nature) progresses from a state of order (creations) to a state of chaos (puddle of mud)".

When your assumption is wrong, all of your argument is bullshit, so I'll ignore everything after this because it is a flat out lie.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics actually states that the entropy in an isolated system never decreases.

Keyword being "isolated system". You can absolutely decrease entropy within parts of a system. In fact, life is pretty much a system for reducing entropy locally. But here's the catch: Life requires energy input from the outside. Sunlight for plants, food for animals, to put it simply. That's just a fancy term for entropy exchange. Life can exist because the entropy reduction it accomplishes is paid for by decreasing entropy elsewhere. Breaking down your food accomplishes that for you.

So, please fix your understanding of entropy and then try again. Your argument is false because you ignore an important part of the law. That's like leaving out parts of the bible and concluding that "you shall murder your neighbor" is part of the 10 commandments. Uh... yeah... those words are in there, in that order, but there are some other words in there are well which kind of change the overal meaning.

Comment Re:A minority view? (Score 2) 649

I suppose this would be similar to thinking of an experiment that would prove or disprove that some same particular species of spider lives in the rainforest.

The experiment is "look for the spider", and if you find it, then it exists, and if you don't, then you don't really know, but it makes sense to tentatively assume the null hypothesis (that it doesn't exist).

Also, to be more complete, when you've searched the whole forest, several times over, and had a hundred cases of believers saying "there, that's the spider!" and then you caught it and it turned out to be ... not the spider, then you can a) put more confidence on the null hypothesis and b) ignore the next time the believers say "but this time, over there, certainly!".

There is a good argument to be made that the existence of God is also not falsifiable in principle. You could have a super powerful alien capable of destroying entire worlds and causing us to hallucinate in anyway it desires. You could never really trust that an entity claiming to be the creator of the whole universe was telling the truth. Any beings significantly more technologically advanced than us would be practically indistinguishable from a God.

There are two excellent arguments that disprove creator-of-the-universe type gods quite thoroughly. The first is by extrapolation, like above: Everywhere we have looked and thought we'd find godly influence, it turned out to be not so. This has been going on for hundreds of years, so it's safe to assume it's not a fluke. If we can assume that it will continue, then god will retreat further and further the more closely we can look. In the end we will end up with something that a few religious people are already postulating: A being that supposedly created everything and is allmighty, but can never be found because it's actually a total hands-off guy. But then, Nietzsche really killed him, because the argument becomes really simple: A thing can be defined completely by the effects it has upon other things. If it has no effect on anything, then it does not exist. From this follows a) there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself and b) there is no such thing as a no-touching-the-universe-god.

The second is that we know entropy to increase over time. God, however, is a highly ordered state and explaining how the universe went from a high entropy state to a low entropy state, and from high complexity to low complexity turns out to not make the claims more likely or simpler, but the opposite.

Comment Re:We should have a choice (Score 2) 455

I remember fondly the days when we couldn't buy computers, hairdryers, video recorders and even luggage containers in a supermarket, because those needed 'special' vendors with 'secret' knowledge.

As a matter of fact, yes I do fondly remember my first computer dealer because they actually knew shit and helped me put together as well as upgrade several of my first PCs. I spent a ton of my money there and didn't regret one cent of it.

Dealers absolutely can add value to the system. It's just that most don't, and sadly too many consumers shoot for the cheapest price so aggressively that good dealers go out of business and the scum survives, and it's getting ridiculous. Have you bought crap online recently? Same scummy behaviour showing up there now. I was taken aback when I wanted to buy a plane ticket and at the very end of the deal a "payment processor fee" showed up - except that no matter which payment option I picked, there was always this fee, so it should've been figured into the real price, but of course that wouldn't have placed the site so highly in the price-search engines... (yes, I bought elsewhere, even though the final price was the same).

Dealers are scum, but part of the reason is that market evolution strongly selects for the scumbags.

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