Hannibal

So you're on Linux/BSD/Solaris now, right? Or on a Mac? Please? All these people hating Microsoft and then not backing it up. Tsk.

Didn't you get a 3500+? That'd seem more likely given the 2.2ghz, too... Oh, now I'm posting here anyway: Intel P4 650 (3.4Ghz) 1GB (2x512) DDR2 RAM nVidia 6600GT graphics card 250GB harddrive space, of which half is partitioned. Don't really need it for now. It runs Windows XP SP2, though I'm planning to dual boot with fedora core 5 or debian or ubuntu gracing the other half of the box. Then I also have a laptop Intel Celeron 850Mhz 384MB RAM unknown video card - don't use it for games at all 20GB HDD Runs Debian Sarge Linux. Then I'm behind a firewall pc I setup myself. It also runs CVS, a webserver, and some other stuff I need. Intel Pentium 2 350Mhz 256MB RAM some old ATI 8MB video card. 2 6GB hard drives. Runs Debian Sarge Linux as well.

Runescape is written in a scripting language which in turn is written in Java. What kind of code editors they use for writing their java or their own script language, no idea. Ask them. I'd be betting on something like Eclipse, Visual Studio or Komodo though.

Is the code online, or on your private server? I'd tend to think you're right, but to figure that out you'll have to look at logs, check if sendmail is configured correctly and such... :)

And the exact same reply when someone mentions Sequoiaview. I smell copypasting! :P

So who says that that is the only requirement? Who defines that? It's like arbitrarily deciding that you need to wear a red shirt if you want to cross the street - having a biological brain is merely one way of making a 'mind' that is aware of itself and/or others. Granted, it's currently the only way (at least, if you're aiming for the extent humans are aware of others and themselves), but that doesn't mean it's a requirement. It's not like protein folding is at all comparable to a brain, except that both seem hard to do, with the protein folding thing being 'easier'. Which is mostly because we understand how we can tell a computer to do these calculations, while we don't really yet understand how we could instruct a computer to be self-aware, or interpret human speech at the same level as humans can. Either way, just linearly comparing the amount of computing power needed for both is ridiculous.

Wait. You're claiming that only a brain is required to do any of these things? Why is that? The functional part of your brain is nothing more than a big bunch of neurons stuck together. You could theoretically simulate all those neurons with man-made equipment. Why does that immediately mean there is no self-awareness? Your windmill comparison is nice and all, but it doesn't fly here because you can't even tell a windmill what to do (as opposed to a robot which is told what do by the programmer, or so you said (I don't agree with that either, see below)). A windmill doesn't move on its own, it is moved by the wind. A robot, these days, is hardly ever only preprogrammed. Just about every robot these days has the ability to learn something - some, such as MIT's kismet, learn the meaning of social behaviour, others will learn how to beat people at games (no, I'm not talking about the stereotypical brute force chess computers). Others will try to figure out the optimal way to mow the lawn. Either way, before you go "but the algorithm used for learning was done by the programmers" - yes, that's true. How did you end up with your neurons? Biology did that, and neurons do the exact same thing - learning from existing connections with other neurons, and making new connections. It's just not sufficient anymore to see a robot as some box filled with (if (a) then (B)) type behaviour. I wasn't saying the fetus is a person, I think the debate is difficult and don't really have an opinion on that matter (apart from the rather ambiguous "maybe, after week X, in normal development, the right phase of the moon..."), and was merely responding to the, in my view very quick, drawing of conclusions by some other people here that cows were more self-aware than human babies.

I must congratulate you, it seems. You had a bullet entering your spine, but a day later you are fit to (a) sit in a wheelchair, (B) go on a 20-hour plane trip (we'll conveniently forget the US is not that far from Iraq - at least, the west coast isn't, and this guy seems a Bronx kinda person to me...), and © immediately recount your sad sad story to a forum for an online game - who needs friends or family! - finally, (d) you are in a condition to be on a computer while you're "just out of sergury". You sir, are a miracle.

Leave it to the individual to decide. If your pro-life, don't get an abortion. Leave it to the individual to decide. If you're pro-life, don't murder anyone. But if you want to murder someone, go for it. Your logic is astounding... I thought we already established that not everybody agrees abortion is murder, and hence your reply just doesn't apply at all?

Argh. Death_by_pod: robots can have traits, feelings or behaviour. The fact that something is programmed doesn't detract from what it is. Surely you won't say "evolution/God and individual growth put every neuron in my brain where they are now, so it's not my identity but God's/nobody's"? What a robot can and can't comprehend depends on how much knowledge was put into it and how much (if anything) it has learned since then. As for reading your post, I did read it, though if I'm picky I might add that you only ever wrote that they need to recognize themselves in the mirror - leaving open how you would notice if they did. Either way, cognitive creatures can surely decide for themselves what they'll do? All I'm saying (and was saying, regarding this point) is that the test is not failsafe or objective. Of course it is physical recognition, isn't the point of recognition that you manage to distinguish multiple (groups of) entities from eachother by their qualities? How is this not physical recognition? I know the point of the mirror test, I'm simply saying the test is too simplistic and doesn't say much altogether, apart from: "The animal might have some level of self-awareness (or an itch wherever that dye was placed). We don't really know how much, but hey, at least it's doing better than a stone so far" versus "It doesn't seem like this animal is self-aware. Either that or it's not in the mood.". It's about as accurate as Freud's sexist interpretations of dreams. But I'm wandering off-topic now, so I guess I'll call this a post.

Merm, I've used Dyndns, never ran anything on my computer. I guess that's probably because my ip is static anyway :P. Hrm. My excuse for not thinking of that is (a) being a student who doesn't have money to spare, and (B) I'd never heard of ISPs doing that. Maybe it's a Dutch thing that they don't, but most IPs here are static anyway...

I personally think we're currently debating the nature of self-awareness, and how self-aware a fetus and/or baby really is. So what should a government do if there's no right or wrong we all agree on? (let's not start talking about "absolute" rights or wrongs, that's an entire debate in its own right ;) )

Why only within the species? Why is the line of specification so significant to self awareness? I've seen cows react to stimulus, I've seen them nurture their calves, learn to avoid the electric fence etc. I can make the same assumptions about other organisms of the bovine world as I can about the human ones. You're trying to tell me that I can't say that a cow is aware of myself because I'm not a cow. If that's the case, the logical extension of your theory is that I can't state that anything other than myself is self-aware. You can only ever be sure about yourself, yes. I'm simply saying it seems logical to assume that other members of the same species would tend to have similar capabilities. Strictly speaking, you are right that you can't state anything other than that you yourself are self-aware. Reacting to stimuli, learning and taking care of others has very little to do with self-awareness. Robots can do all of the former, but have no self-awareness (in most cases, that is. Recently robots have been fabricated which do have some sense of "self-awareness", which is then optimistically defined as being able to recognize yourself in the mirror, which is not the philosophical or psychological meaning of the word (see below)). There are a number of tests for self awareness. One of the simplest is to examine whether or not the animal recognises itself in a mirror. A chimpanzee will examine and play with it's reflection in the same way a human would, a cat on the otherhand will act as if another cat has been placed in front of it. I'm using the term for what it means, a recognition by an organism that it exists. And recognizing something in the mirror is enough for that? I can make a robot understand he's seeing himself in a mirror, that is, make him react to the general kind of pixels he'd see. That wouldn't make him understand anything about him/her/itself, so I don't consider that self-awareness. Recognizing something in the mirror is not quite the same as self-awareness, if only because self-awareness is not a black/white distinction (as you already implied saying that a cow had "rather more" self-awareness than a baby). So if self-awareness is not black and white, how can a mirror test suffice? See also: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/selfaware/node1.html (not quoting it all because it's a lot of info) Self awareness has nothing to do with the ability to reason. A cow doesn't need to be able to ask "why am I here" in order to know that it is indeed here. How would anyone/anything be able to demonstrate self-awareness without reasoning? What use would it be to know something (eg, "I am"), and not be able to reason about it? How do you even think you can separate having knowledge and using that knowledge? Humour me for a bit and quote your argument for claiming that it is stupid to say a cow isn't self-aware. For a start I've neither instigated an ad-hominem attack on you, nor flamed you. An ad-hominem attack would be an attack on you rather than your arguments. Again, if you read my posts you will see that I referred to the concept of arguing that cows posess no self-awareness as "blatantly stupid", not you. And stated that if I was to misquote someone and then attack the misquoted argument rather than the actual one (Which is called a Straw Man Attack by the way) then I might be percieved as a "right prat". It seems that your understanding of Latin terms for logical fallacies is right up there with your understanding of philosophy and reading comprehension. Looks like you conveniently missed the word "inferred" here. I suppose that can happen to anyone though. If you want to lecture me about Latin terms, feel free to tell me what you call derogative comments about someone's knowledge or intellectual capabilities, if not ad-hominem attacks. (just so we're clear, I'm talking about that last sentence of your last post). Death_By_Pod, I'd go as far as saying it is not only "not perfect", it's totally useless. First of all, whether an animal passes the test depends on your observer's highly subjective view of whether or not the animal is recognizing him/her/itself. Heck, for all we know babies are just not interested in themselves, spending 9 months alone in that womb must have bored it to death! Second, as said above, it's a big grey line/area. You're not either self-aware or not self-aware. Third, any kind of self-recognition doesn't necessarily mean self-awareness (see above point about robots). Fourth, self-awareness as defined by psychology and/or philosophy is not just about physical recognition.

I'm also not you. Does that mean you are not self aware? I can observe you, and your interaction with your environment and make a judgement as to the level of self awareness you posess. However, yes you are technically correct. You could indeed be an android with absolutely no self awareness. Except that we're both the same species (human) and we assume a similar level of self-awareness within similarly developed entities within the species, and, self-referencing, you're aware that you're self-aware. Additionally, how would you test an animal or creature for self-awareness, then? You're using that term very lightly here - it's not as simple as you're trying to make it sound. For me, self-awareness is defined by having the ability to know that 'you' are there, and the ability to reason about yourself. It would be up for discussion entirely to what extent a cow can reason, if at all, so I don't see how it'd make me stupid to propose that a cow is not self-aware. You also didn't provide any arguments for your 'point', I might add. Again. Also, what did I ever do to you to merit all the pointless inferred ad-hominem attacks here? Because of my opinion I'm "blatantly stupid", and because I left out two words in a quote I'm a "right prat". What kind of logic is that, anyway? I thought the topic said 'no flaming' - I guess I should have known that that is kind of impossible on boards like these. Sigh.

*quietly inserts the words "on a UNIX server" after "dynamic websites" 8) Wait, can I add "if you don't know Ruby on Rails, Perl or Python" to that? Oh, and I vote we remove the "on a UNIX server" bit, since ASP is crap anyway :D

How do you know that the cow is self-aware? You think a cow is not aware of it's own existence to some degree? I like how you removed the conditional modifier "rather more" to make it look like I was inferring that a cow is fully self-aware in the same sense that a normal human adult is self-aware. When in actual fact it was quite sufficiently apparent that I was referring to self-awareness being something that exists across a broad spectrum rather than as an absolute state. A human is more self-aware than a cow, and a cow is more self-aware than an oyster. I might use that debating strategy some time, but then I'd run the risk of looking like a right prat wouldn't I? The fact that you used the words "rather more" does not make a difference. You are not a cow, nor a just-born baby, so you have absolutely no way of knowing how self-aware they are. Also, making pointless ad-hominem attacks trying to discredit the line of arguments I'm following here is not really a nice thing to do. I'm fine with apologizing for not including those words when asking my question if it really offended you all that much. As just said, I don't believe they make any difference in the point I'm trying to make here.

http://forum.tip.it/viewtopic.php?t=55

I'm ignoring the rest of the post because I already defined when I believe human life begins. Your point on government doesn't make sense. The government is responsible for stopping murder from happening and catching who did it - as they should be responsible for stopping abortions and catching who has one. Those are equal points. Neither has ANYTHING to do with taking care of whoever wasn't aborted/murdered. You're comparing abortion to murder, while it is only comparable when you already commit to your definition of life, ie, your point of view on abortion. So you're making a really weird argument here: Abortion is wrong because it is murder because you kill something that's alive, and since it's murder the government should stop it and it's wrong. That's not an argument. Kat was questioning when something was alive - you may have given your definition, but below you admit that not everyone agrees, so not everyone agrees that abortion is actually murder - while if you kill someone walking on the street, currently about 99% of America (or any western country) will agree that you can generally call that murder (if you can prove it's premeditated, of course (at least, in Dutch law, you have a different name for it if it wasn't premeditated, but that might be different in the US, I'm not sure...)). So, the fact that the government catches murderers and tries to stop them from committing murder in the first place is because it's generally agreed upon that killing a human that's sustained by its own heart, lungs and brains is wrong. We do not agree whether killing a human/parasite that's sustained by something else is wrong (otherwise we wouldn't be having this debate) and hence the government can't make laws based on 'general opinion', because there is none. So, the decision should be left to the people. For what it's worth, the argument here is similar to what the US Supreme Court decided in the Roe vs. Wade case: That's simply not true, a lot of the people in this debate have said they want it to be illegal after day X because then organ Y will have developed so much that it can be called human, other people want to have it legal for rape and incest victims, still others think that sperm and eggs, while separate, are 'seeds to life' and should be left alone (see some people's views on the use of contraception), still others think that taking a morning after pill or having an abortion should be illegal, but using contraception is legal.... there are so many varying opinions from the people who are talking about this. How do you know that the cow is self-aware?

C++ is compiled code. If you write good C++ code and use GNU make and preprocessor macros, you should be able to manage to make it compile cross-platform just as well. Java is interpreted code. It is slow. It is bloated. It is the language most commonly taught in university computer classes, which you will use least of all as soon as those courses are over (or so I hope). Most programmers/hackers (no, not crackers) I know hate Java. Python is the cool language. It's interpreted, but not as slow as Java afaik. Or maybe that's just appearance as Python makes it easy to do cool stuff, whereas Java makes it hard. Python is also cross-platform. Object Oriented Programming means you represent everything in your program as some kind of object which you can use in some way, or get info out of or store info on. More info on, where else, wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Ori ... rogramming

Do you have a router? If so, you're probably looking at your internal IP. Try a simple yet effective solution like http://www.whatismyip.com to check your external IP (the IP the internet at large can use). If you don't have one, or already knew what I was telling you and you /are/ talking about your external IP, then there's not much you can do. If whatever you need this IP address for also accepts hostnames, you could look into using http://www.dyndns.org to keep a hostname referring to your changing IP address.

I would suggest using a real IRC client. I'm assuming you're running Windows, in which case you can use mIRC ( http://www.mirc.com ). This is what most people use, though I personally find the interface clunky and not very userfriendly. Also, mIRC is not free - it is paid software with an evaluation period of 30 days (though it will let you use the software after this period, strictly speaking this is not allowed, plus, it nags you with a screen telling you you should be paying). So, other clients you might try (these are all Free (as in beer, libre, freedom), except for Opera's IRC client): ChatZilla ( https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/m ... .php?id=16 ) - Firefox extension, Mozilla extension, Flock extension, runs standalone on XULRunner if you need it to. Runs on just about any operating system. X-Chat (http://www.xchat.org/). Runs on Linux, Windows, and I think Mac too. It's probably been ported to other platforms as well, I'm not sure. Erm. Alright, the censor is owning me here. I'm hoping the mods are okay with me evading it for a bit here... the client is called [bleep]X. For its website, try www. [the name of the client] .org . Runs on Linux, Windows, and probably a lot of other things. Shell-based, afaict (that means commandline, aka DOS, if you're not familiar with it). Opera comes with its own IRC client, but I personally believe it's horrible. If you happen to have Opera installed and just want to see if the chat is any use without too much hassle, I guess you could use it. I recommend switching to something better if you plan on visiting IRC regularly. Merm, there are lots of other clients out there, but I can't be bothered listing them all. Wikipedia keeps a decent list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IRC_clients

You'd probably want a table in your MySQL database with a schema somewhat like this: visited(ip_address, page_id, visit_time); (with (ip_address, page_id) being the primary key, and page_id being something you set on the page itself - could be a name, but if you have lots of index.php things, or one php file which can turn into various kinds of pages depending on GET/POST vars, you might want something else, eg. a unique numeric id for each page) Then you run a select query on the database, somewhat like this: SELECT visit_time FROM visited WHERE ip_address = 'some.numeric.ip-address' AND page_id = 'myPageId'; (you might want to limit it to one result for sanity) Anyway, you use the date value you get, which should be represented as a unix timestamp (that is, you store numeric values in the visit_time field - a UNIX timestamp is the number of seconds that have passed since January 1st, 1970. The unix timestamp at the time of writing is 1143401453). So then you get the current UNIX timestamp, using php's time() function (no arguments, returns the current UNIX timestamp). You substract those and check for the difference you want. If it is not sufficient, you die() with an error message, if it is, you store the new timestamp with an UPDATE query or similar, and get on with generating the page data.

Umm, can we: [*:1juwgnea]Stop threadjacking. The topic was about ETA, an organization that used terrorist activity to attempt to fight for separation of a Basque country in the region currently controlled by Spain and France, not about whether or not Bush has been abducted by aliens, er, I mean, is only in Iraq for oil. [*:1juwgnea]Keep the conspiracy theories out of an otherwise serious topic. The link you posted, Invidious, is a very biased source in itself. Considering that by following one link (to the writers of this story), I ended up on some site filled to the rim with conspiracy theories about 9/11 (the 'new pearl harbour'? wtf?!), alleged that "Osama bin Laden's niece to become pop star on American TV show", and that since the year 2000, the world has been under a New World Order. This is a fact, according to them, because the British educational system added the requirement that its students would be familiarized with the notations BCE and CE as the secular equivalents of BC and AD, since these new notations were starting to be used more commonly in new research papers in Archaelogy and History. In other words, this site tries to spread rumours and theories as facts, based on misrepresented evidence. Please don't spoil a topic about facts with pointless conspiracy theories, especially since there is already another topic about this. Back on topic, it seems the Spanish and French governments are 'carefully optimistic', as they so diplomatically say, and are looking into preparing a democratic decision process. Which is good. barihawk, I am sorry for your loss :(. But as a Christian, shouldn't you be happy that new steps are being made in solving this conflict peacefully? Without organizational support it is a lot harder to execute major bomb attacks (or so I should think... I don't have any experience with it of course...).

After decades of bomb attacks, murders on politicians and other people who prominently opposed a separate Basque state, ETA has officially declared a permanent ceasefire. I personally don't live in Spain, but I'd imagine this is teriffic news for anyone there. :) For more information, see the BBC News article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4832672.stm

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/JavaScript