Eques Peregrinus

Obviously not. For propaganda purpose, the NASA mandated Stanley Kubrick to make a fake Moon landing. Due to his perfectionism, he went with his whole crew to the Moon to add more realism to the scene.

The best way to increase your IQ is to practice answering questions found in IQ tests, but given all the more useful and interesting things we could do with that time, this is definitively a stupid activity. More seriously, a whole part of western magical practices is dedicated to improve intellectual faculties, from gaining knowledge through demons in the Goetia, to obtaining the "vision of God in Glory" in the Liber Juratus. What looks the most to what you are looking for seems to be the Art of Memory, or mnemonic practices which were and still are practiced today to optimize our memorization. Yates wrote a nice book on it. To illustrate briefly in what consists this Art of Memory, it is easier to remember the image of a woman having bull horns on her head and sitting on a crab than to remember that the domicile of the Moon is Cancer and its Exaltation is Taurus.

A warning on solutions to wipe specific files instead of entire drives: If it is rater easy to erase an entire drive, it is not possible to guarantee that the content of a file is completely erased in a modern file system. File systems are designed to avoid data loss at all costs and implement several strategies to ensure this. The same can be said for SSD, but for different reasons. So it is not surprising to find these lines in this software's website: A better option to ensure that sensitive data remain secret would be to use an encrypted drive, there are a few tools that exists for that, like BitLocker or dm-crypt.

Music works extremely well to "transmit energy". In general, it's also nicer to listen than ASMR.

nichts

Don't worry about world population, Trump and the jihadists have already found a solution. To quote Scott Adams: "There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives."

It can turn you into a smurf... Well, not really, to be a real smurf, you have to be communist and practice polyandry... To be more serious: a relatively high consumption of colloidal gold over a long period of time could cause chrysiasis, which is a medical condition where gold accumulates under skin and turns it to a greyish color. The same phenomena happens with colloidal silver, in this case the condition is called argyria.

Maybe it is due to how the cache deletion is handled by your browser. Have you tried reloading the page while pressing on Ctrl to bypass the cache? Complete explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bypass_your_cache

A few months ago, there already were some witches who casted a mass spell to make him lose the election, I wonder whether they are the same?

Here is a list of images of Mohamed: http://zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/islamic_mo_full/

This online book is nice if you want to learn about neural networks. At the moment, I don't think researchers have as a priority to develop a "quantum AI". In fact, a mathematically unsolvable problem is not solvable whether in a classical or in a quantum framework. But a few problems hard to solve with a classical computer can be solved faster with a quantum computer. This is the case for the discrete logarithm and the integer factorization problems, which are used, respectively, in the El Gamal and RSA algorithms. (These algorithms are used in cryptography, for key exchange.) Also: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

Consciousness is not computable, but an AI does not needs to be sentient to be dangerous. This is why I took the example of a competition to build "hacking AI". When an attack occurs on a system, it will, in general, be detected by a program (which uses sometimes an AI) called an IDS (intrusion detection system), which is going to identify, and block the attack then log it for the administrator. The problem is that the IDS, being a program, is subject to the same limitations you mentioned. Therefore, in this situation, we can have a fight between equal opponents (as long as the admin is not doing any intervention). A few years ago, even a simple program, attacking a very specific weakness, could spread worldwide in minutes (this is what is called a worm). Today malwares appears by thousands each day, and sometimes they are programmed to hide from the anti-virus by changing some parts of itself to change its signature. Given their increasing complexity it would not be surprising to see malwares using machine learning techniques to search for certain common vulnerabilities in the future. On the good side, such techniques could also be used by developers to test their software.

OK, I misunderstood it, my English is not perfect. (And now, I notice than I reversed AI into IA, this is because in English the adjective precede the name, while in French it is the opposite.) They really are speaking about a (yet) non existing AI. Current AI can still be used to determine the shape of some proteins with a good accuracy. I am not a specialist in AI either. Still I did not learn of any major discovery made in the last 20 years. Of course multiple variants of neural network or strategies were invented since then, like the Monte Carlo Tree Search you mentioned (which was invented in 2006). They are useful in certain situations, but not really ground-breaking. Because we have way more computation power now, heuristics which can technically be made are also better. It was already relevant in the progress on AI even in 1996 when DeepBlue beat Kasparov (DeepBlue was simulating 200 millions moves per second), but as you mentioned, the heuristic was build differently. I did not find the number of moves computed by AlphaGo, but, according to this article, it ran on 1202 cores to beat the world 2nd best player. The computing power needed to train the neural network, however is not mentioned. I was quite serious in this statement (well almost, the comparison between Muhammad Ali and Kasparov was a joke). It is not really a problem of having or not having a body, an AI analyse a model, in which the data is obtained from a real game. For example, at the moment, an AI is able to determine what is a pick-and-rolls and can be used to help to determine what was a good or a bad throw (but we are still far from placing and directing players on the pitch with an AI). To go back to the dangerous AI, like SkyNet in Terminator, which is able to hack and take control of other systems automatically. Such AI does not yet exists, but there already is a competition to make an ersatz. Currently the binaries hacked are much simplified compared to real programs, but, frankly speaking, this is quite frightening. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/the-world-series-of-hacking-without-humans/ edit: typo

Obama seems to understand some basics. For example he make a difference between specialized IA (that is a real IA) and general IA (the sience fiction IA). Unfortunately, he also makes mistakes like claiming that an IA can produce a cure an unknown disease (maybe he meant researchers using IA to optimise certain molecular structures to find a cure, or that it possible to train an IA to recognise a certain known disease by its symptoms). His advisors are also quite correct in claiming we are still a long way away from a general IA. The other guy confirm it by stating that a general IA won't happen without a major breakthrough (and, at the same time, he spread more clichés about geeks). It must also be noted that there were no breakthrough in IA for at least 20 years. AlphaGo is a deep neural network, which exists since the 90s. The difference between now and then is that we have warehouse sized data-centers and we can analyse a large enough subset of the billions of possible moves in a go game to make a good guess about beneficial moves. Currently, the research on IA is oriented toward "fluzzy" problems, for which it is difficult to define "cases". To illustrate it, with games: There are games an IA can beat a human player, like chess, backgammon, cards against humanity, etc... For these games the cases are clearly defines, there is a situation before a move, then an other situation after the move. In the case of games where IA are still weak against a human opponent are soccer, basketball, boxing, etc... For these games the cases are ill defined and beneficial situation difficult to determine. Therefore Muhammad Ali is smarter than Kasparov. And now for something completely different: On the question about the impact of the IA on society, some problems occurs, as stated above, about job replacement. A similar situation occurred in the 19th century with the invention of the mechanical loom. Many people lost their job, which caused social troubles. Later, the same situation happened times to time due to technological progress. Essentially, the problem can be reduced to: "How to occupy these work-less people, knowing that some of them might not have the interest or capacities to work with sophisticated machines?" A few solutions were proposed to this social problem like basic income, or social security. In the current situation, "poor" economies are particularly at risk, because companies might delocalize the production back in the west, where machines becoming cheaper than manual labor. Who knows, depending on how the communists deals with it, we will have a new Chinese revolution.

The software components used to build these OS are mature, at least in the case of Qubes, (the container management of Subgraph is newer than Xen, which is used in Qubes). I have tried Qubes once, the concept is interesting. It essentially consists in a Linux kernel on which the Xen hypervisor is running differents virtual machines. The critical components of the OS, like the driver for the network card, are run in VMs and are therefore separated from other components like the mail client or the GPG agent, which are also running in separate VMs. The VMs communicate between themselves using the local network interface of dom0 (dom0 is the name of the physical machine, using Xen terminology) and these communication have to be explicitely allowed by a firewall. Each VM also uses its own encrypted partition using LUKS, therefore is is not possible to read the content of a file contained in a VM from a different VM. There also exists a concept of throwable VM, that is a VM which is launched once, and deleted once the application running inside it is closed. Finally, the graphical applications in the VMs communicate with the X server running in dom0 using the X protocol. Now about the user experience, it is definitively in experimental stage: common manipulations requires launching a VM, which takes a long time, Xen does not work well with the EFI, and we are constantly annoyed because a file we want to open with an application is not in the VM running the said application. The file needs therefore to be transferred, which can be done, but is still a hassle. It is nevertheless an interesting experiment, if we are interested in security. I have never tested Subgraph, but this project looks similar in its design, except that it uses containers. The kernel is therefore shared between the different software components. Therefore it should be less secure than Qubes, which do a complete virtualization, but it should be much smoother.

This thread made me wondering: Have someone here already tried an experimental OS focused on security, like Qubes or Subgraph? Both are based on hardened Linux and isolate processes from each others, the first by virtualisation, and the second by the use of containers.

Well, what is Truth can provoke a very deep philosophical debate. So deep, in fact (as more or less implicitely stated in my previous post), that the properties true/false, as used in logic, are taken as an axiom, without much reflection. And quite paradoxally, this axiom needs itself to be considered true. (Hell! What a minefield!) Now, a crucial point that did not appears in this thread is the difference between "critical thinking" or "rationality", and "logic", which are two different things. In their relations, rationality uses logic, but in certain cases uses also intuition and sometimes emotions to reach conclusions. This is the implications of emotions in that decision process which is subject to much criticism by philosophers, because these emotions are changing depending on the mood of the individual making the reflexion. This is why the course (about which this thread began) put so much emphasis on fallacies and cognitives biases. To illustrate the difference between rationality and logic: Suppose that you hear your door bell ringing at 8:00 in the morning. You can make many hypothesis about what it is about. The postman came and has a recommended letter you had to sign. The postman came hand has a large package he do not want to let in front of the door. The neighboor has something to tell us. Children are making a joke. The doorbell is broken. Jehovah witnesses. Aliens! ... Among this unlimited number of assumptions, the manner in which we will react is not logical, because all these possibilities are logical, even if certains of these events are (very) unlikely. Choosing to open the door while smiling instead of kicking the door while pointing a rifle (at the potential Jeh... aliens) is a rational choice depending on our experience/intuition/mood/etc...

Let's restart the discussion more formally. First by defining the booleans values and their operators, which we are going to use as axioms. Let B = {true, false} Let ¬ the negation on one element a in B, such that: a | ¬a ---+---- f | t t | f Let ∧ the conjunction on two elements a, b in B, such that: a | b | a∧b ---+---+----- f | f | f f | t | f t | f | f t | t | t Let ∨ the disjunction on two elements a, b in B, such that: a | b | a∨b ---+---+----- f | f | f f | t | t t | f | t t | t | t From them we can define others operators, which are more traditionally used. Let → the implication, such that: a | b | a→b ---+---+----- f | f | t f | t | t t | f | f t | t | t To illustrate why it is defined as such, lets use an example with a common card game. With such a card game, the following tautology H can formulated: "if a card is a heart, then it is red". Then let's observe the following cases: The card is a heart and it is red: Then H holds. The card is not a heart and it is red: Then H still holds, the card can be a diamond. The card is not a heart and it is not red: Then H still holds, the card can be a club or a spade. If the card game is a common one, only these 3 cases can occure. If this fourth case occures: The card is a heart and it is not red: Then H does not holds, the card game is not a common one.We can also observe that if "a" is false, then "a→b" is true regardless of "b", more commonly said "we can learn nothing from a lie" or "we can learn nothing from something false". This possibility to formalise implication as such is particularly interesting, because it is possible to express it with 2 of our initial operators. "a→b" is equivalent to "¬a∨b". Other useful operators are the reverse implication and the equivalence. Let ← the reverse implication, such that: a | b | a←b ---+---+----- f | f | t f | t | f t | f | t t | t | t Let ↔ the equivalence, such that: a | b | a↔b ---+---+----- f | f | t f | t | f t | f | f t | t | t Remain to define the quantifiers, used to "speak about" elements in a set S verifying a property p. Let ∀ the universal quantifier. If all elements of S verify p, we write "∀e in S, p" Let ∃ the existancial quantifier. If one element of S verify p, we write "∃e in S, p" For historical reasons, logical reasonnings are often made using rules of inference (modus ponens, modus tollens, sillogisms, etc...) often written following the format: premise #1 premise #2 ... premise #n __________ ∴ conclusion which can be rewritten as: (premise #1 ∧ premise #2 ∧ ... ∧ premise #n) → conclusion

The Santa Claus character is based on a Dutch version of St. Nicholas, which came to the U.S. through their colonies, like New-Amsterdam, called today New-York. Therefore the debate on the existance of Santa can be reduced to the debate on the existance of that bishop. Concerning the anamita muscaria theory, it seems rather far-fetched. Ethnologists reported that these mushrooms are indeed consumed raw by shamans in Siberia, but no evidences exists for their use in western or central Europe, contrary to other hallucinogens like the deadly nightshade or the hemp. So if we follow the hallucinogen theory, Santa would more likely be clothed in black and green. A more satisfying explanation would be the use of these colors in St. Nicholas clothings during processions.

Logic is a very useful tool, but it has limitations. This is a problem relevant for mathematics, and just as much for theoretical computer science. For both, it has dire implications. In fact, that limitation was more or less understood in the antiquity, with the liar paradox: "That statement is a lie." We notice that such statement can be neither true nor false, because being one or the other leads to its own contradiction. This paradox was more or less forgotten as a philosophical curiosity when mathematics were formalised in the second half of the 19th century, and all mathematical problems were thought to be solvable. It reappeared in the 1930, this time well formalised by Gödel. That discovery put an end to the dogma that a formal system can be both consistent and complete. This has dire consequences in theoretical computer science, as I mentioned, a day-to-day example would be the reason anti-virus are ineffective, and needs to rely on signatures: Because a program can not determine if a program behave in a certain manner. More formally: Suppose there exists a function d(f, i), detecting if a certain behaviour infect() occurs in function f with input i. We define a function g(i), such that: g(i): if (d(g, i) == false) infect() Then d(g, i) lead to a paradox, therefore d(f, i) does not exists. Concerning fallacies, that paper [PDF] is great.

Like that one?

Donald Michael Kraig's Modern Magick has the reputation to be a nice introduction to the Golden Dawn system. But I can not vouch for it since this system was definitively not for me (you know, all that stuff with flashing colors).

That would be very doubtful, banks and enterprises are already making a large usage of cryptography and VPN, while Tor was developped by the US Navy and deployed (at least in part) by the NSA. The development part indicated on the Tor website, while the deployment part was revealed by Snowden. Hoever, it is indeed true that cryptography today is a real piece of art. Even for a simple TLS connection used to make a search on Google is technically unbreakable, if the certificates can be trusted. If we are speaking of large agencies like the NSA, I would not be surprised if they already have the private keys of a few certification authorities and are able to do a man-in-the-middle for specific targets.

I neither did spend any minutes searching for it, but I am quite sure that kind of stuff can be found in a text from Machiavelli.