What?!? Because you have morals. The incentives are of course there for honest people, not thieves and scoundrels. That is, honest people who care about securing/protecting their own systems & privacy, and/or that of others (sometimes people like to help other people).

Presumably the hope is that incentivizing things this way will make the morally-upright people have a go at finding the bugs...ideally *before* the nefarious crowd swoops in...

Ah, I see what's going on. What these folks do is---to a first approximation---math ("Math, the first pseudocode!" "Pretty clear, too!"). Sometimes math can be useful for further math. Your use of "use/useful" clearly differs from mine. You must be an engineer.

No, he knows and has explicitly stated in a few places that it's uncomputable, in much the same way that Kolmogorov Complexity is uncomputable, but an interesting and potentially useful theoretical construct, nonetheless.

This vein of Schmidhüber's work is more or less descended from Solomonoff's work on induction and Chaitin's Algorithmic Information Theory stuff (the line of descent is less explicit with the latter), and a bunch of Schmidhüber's descendents, most prominently his student Marcus Hutter and *his* student Shane Legg have taken this ball and run with it in interesting ways.

Wait...your sister has parents who can't be cooked a meal, and thus is fed (alleged) junk. Are your parents somehow magically not like that? (if not, I'm thinking your sister needs to re-evaluate her relationship with her parents)

Cosma Shalizi rants a lot about scientists' (often physicists') claims about having found a power law description of some empirical phenomenon (upshot: finding a straight line on a log-log plot isn't enough). See the following:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/power-laws.html

Granted, I---probably erroneously---took the statement to which I responded to be a claim that studying the monkey's language would be informative vis-à-vis human language. The "proto" prefix is typically used to mean "ancestral to contemporary human language".

I think (hope!) that this position is becoming outmoded among the newer generations of linguistics & cognitive scientists. The evidence for abilities that map fairly straightforwardly onto human linguistic abilities is pretty much overwhelming at this point. (The final chapter of Bridget Samuels' dissertation talks about this a fair bit, mostly in relation of phonology)

Well, maybe yes, maybe no. There's a big push now toward viewing Language as a cultural artifact, whose properties are emergents of cultural evolution (cf. anything going on at the LEC in Edinburgh, or Mort Christiansen's work). This viewpoint, to which I'm generally sympathetic, always leads me to thinking about cooking and recipes. Cooking is, to the best of my knowledge, a purely human endeavour; one that has presumably been considerably refined via cultural evolution since the day when someone accidentally dropped her hunk of meat in the fire. And yet, no one would be tempted to say that the seeds of cooking/recipes/soufflé can be found in the behaviours of some animals (or maybe they would...I'm not ethologist).

I had a point, but it seems to be gone now...probably that appeals either to innateness or evolution alone are by necessity oversimplifications. The kind of empirical work being discussed here is what will move this domain of knowledge forward.

I don't think I'm understanding what you've said here. Surely not everything is built on something that came before? Mutation and exaptation have clear---in fact vitally important for the former---roles in evolutionary processes.

Given that our only unambiguous model for Language is human language, it should be unsurprising that that's what we take as our primary model. Nonetheless, see my earlier reference to Samuels 2009 for a clear indication that this trend is changing.

I now have the PNAS paper in hand (well, on-screen)...I may come back and say more...

I am, as---one would guess from your linked comment---you seem to be.

Nope...same guy, but that's from 2 years ago...I'm still waiting for the new one to show up.

While this is true, it's not clear to me that what's documented here is, in fact, syntax. The researcher in question (Zuberbühler) has written about this stuff before and has been much more cautious in attributing full-on linguistic properties (a search of LanguageLog will turn something up from 2006).

I'll reserve absolute judgment for when I get a chance to look at the actual paper, but this quote from NYT gives me pause: Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. This is not (typically) how human language works...meaning is compositionally built up from bits of syntax, whereas what's described here looks more like idiom. In fact, it looks more like phonology (*maybe* morphology) to me...meaningless bits that can be put together to make meaningful bits.

What they need to do now is get a linguist in there so slice & dice the recordings, play them back to the monkeys in various reconstructed forms, and see how they react.

Also...

some would argue against the subordinate clause here (pointing at Piraha, for example), but I'm not one of those. However, it might be the case that this "syntax" has developed in parallel to human syntax from some common protolanguage (since these are monkeys and not even apes, we're talking REALLY far back), and so this may be relatively uninformative with respect to human syntax.

0:26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoN6XfyQsr4

(really, just an excuse to promote something I think is good)

I...I can't tell if your sig is being facetious. I've gone all twitchy after reading it...

Yeah, but we're not talking about "hatred/dislike on the basis of intrinsic characteristics" here (viz. your "mis-X" examples)...you can dislike someone and still accept that they're highly competent (cf. many people's opinion of Theo de Raadt). The current brouhaha is about differential (i.e. worse) treatment on the basis of gender. I'm willing to just come out and say that there's none of that in the FOSS world as regards its overwhelmingly male membership..."obviously you can't code, you're just a dude"...

One of the major points of this discussion is that what I just quoted is a fictive characterization of the FOSS community. Obviously there are places where the situation is better (e.g. the kernel mailing list), and worse (e.g. several recent keynote talks). The thing is people are people and sociological things will typically get in the way of impartiality. In this case, we're talking about when that manifests as discrimination against women. Which it does. But shouldn't.

Not sure about the relevance of this...

This would be awful for people who live in Montreal...the axis that determines streets' "North/South" designation is pretty nearly NW-SE, and most people who've lived in Montreal for a while point NW when you ask them to show you N. In winter the sun rises & sets in really weird places. (or rather, it doesn't but a lot of people think it does *if* they bother to stop and think about it)

Dannnnnnng...my EeePC 900 with eeebuntu gives me about 2.5 hours.

Is there a magic bullet website that compiles all of the battery-life-increasing tips?

Huh ?

http://www1.ca.dell.com/ca/en/home/Laptops/laptop-inspiron-10/pd.aspx?refid=laptop-inspiron-10&s=dhs&cs=cadhs1&ref=lthp

Leftmost item is a Dell Mini 10v (as you pointed out), with Ubuntu pre-installed, and a 160GB hard drive. In fact,the page you linked to seems to have the same item (3rd from left), albeit at an inexplicably higher price (and in USD).

Who gives a shit about the "instant discount" for the Windows version?