> On Thu, 22 Nov 2001 at 2:51pm Hakki Alacakaptan wrote:
>
>
>>Ken, if you want to know where I'm posting from paste my
>>IP into http://where-is.info/ or some other similar
>>server.
>>
>
> And this site, http://where-is.info/, is a laff riot!
>
hakki: try http://www.arin.net/ for IP lookups. there are billion dollar companies in existence today that claim to predict your geographic location based on your IP address but they are not very accurate (anything beyond continental accuracy cannot be guaranteed, at least for an end-user without access to additional network information). second, to determine your IP address from your messages is not possible in some cases and not foolproof in all cases.
proving a negative: isnt the issue highlighted in these examples at worst a problem of proving an infinite proposition (in CNF, no negation in sub-terms) to be true (not possible), or at best a complexity issue: can i complete the empirical proof in some finite (hopefully <= polynomial) time? the problem with showing that hakki is not a spy or whatever (it seems to me) hinges on whether there is a finite unambiguous definition of what a spy is (wears trenchcoats during the night, has a suspicious friend named boris, etc) or is not (posts 17 msgs a day to lbo-talk ;-)) that is susceptible to empirical verification. seems a bit unnecessary to start worrying about hempel's raven paradox w.r.t induction, no? or perhaps i am confused in associating this debate with the raven paradox...
--ravi