Slashdot Mirror

Seeing no one else has, I should link to how our forebears managed at the time of Mad Men.

Eliza has been doing this for years.

You jest, but this is again appropriately hilarious:
http://fury.com/google-circa-1960.php

Not only is your calendar private by default, but if you go in to settings and make it public, it gives you the following warning/confirmation: http://fury.com/assets/are_you_sure.jpg

Voluntarily and explicitly choosing to reveal data to the world isn't a security hole. Being aware of what you say and who you say it to is part of a person's personal responsibility whether they're talking on teh phone in a public place or blogging while on vacation, telling the world what a great time they're having thousands of miles away from their stuff.

Titling the post 'Death by Google Calendar' is just sensationalism and FUD.

Maybe he found a slashdot interface similar to this one for google?

http://fury.com/images/weblog/google_circa_1960.jp g

Slashdot's crack squad of copy editing penguins. Here they are hard at workagain.

FYI, the linked page has a flash game if you care about such things.

Here's a bot with AI. Put one online and hilarity ensues. Pity no one's done it lately.

Interacting with the environment in a manner like C-3PO is not neccessary in order to be intelligent. Otherwise, Steven Hawking and Christopher Reeves would not be considered intelligent.

That's why the Turing Test was specified to take place over a teletype. It didn't take long for a program to pass the Turing Test either. Anecdotally Eliza fooled a leading scientist in the field of AI. She is still fooling people today.

AI programs are being used to sentence criminals, split assets after a divorce, and approve legal aid applications according to a recent article in the Tech Review.

I remember reading about a program in the eighties that proscribed antibiotics. It was a difficult problem for physicians because infections often involve multiple types of bacteria, antibiotics vary in how effective they are and what they are effective against, many antibiotics are contra-indicated by others, and there are many reasons to want to use the minimum number and dosages. The program was able to create better prescriptions than the doctors, and it was able to explain why it choose what it did.

I couldn't find the paper that described the prescription program, but the Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine probably has plenty of descriptions of AI making choices in a "real capacity".

You cannot define "truely human thought and thought processes", so you cannot judge when machines have reached that level. The history of AI is filled with people claiming some skill or ability required human-level intelligence, and then deciding that the software didn't have human level intelligence when it aquired that skill. There was the Turing Test in the beginning, chess now, poker and Go are next.

Written four years ago, here's a piece about Apple's other historical tablet initiatives

Written four years ago, here's a piece about Apple's other historical tablet initiatives, and speculation about a Mac tablet (there's always speculation)...

Did anyone else notice that the QinetiQ logo 'painted' on the body of the fighter appears to be just a poor photoshop job? Looks like their logo wasn't on the aircraft (or at least visible in this shot) so they decided to slap one on after the fact.

High-res photo and a zoomed close-up

I worked on the O/S and some utilities for this. It was announced at an WWDC as the Hancock and was canned in favor of the Newton. It was based on a Powerbook Duo, and like the Duo, would dock into a desktop setup. I google'd someone's essay about Apple's previous tablet computers (including Hancock).

http://fury.com/images/weblog/google_circa_1960.jp g

AOLisa

I remember having to walk uphill in the snow both ways to the mailbox to mail my google queries in!

...just use Google's alternate search form...

What would you consider a slow web search engine?

This...

I have seen several reviews of Google's user interface (here, here, and here), as well as google's screenshots of the inbox and conversation view. and it seems that a lot of them are really unique, especially in a web application. Apparently it "autocompletes" from your address book. It looks like Google will be raising the bar of the standard for web applications. I sure hope they open up an API for accesing it. (as well as POP / IMAP access).

Have you ever seen AOLiza on this web site? Funny stuff, I need a Trillian plugin for that.

Response

> Review from a current user with pictures and information on ads

Kevin Fox isn't just "a current user". He's a UI designer at Google and works on GMail.

It's hardly a good review. It's descriptive of the features, but the author makes it a point to emphasize apparent facts. He dedicates one paragraph just defending the fact that 1 GB is good for you, as if there was strong opposition and people lined up with posters "Give me back my Hotmail 2 MB!" outside of Google's offices.

Then in two paragraphs he explains what "clear text" means, providing gratuitous analogies of your ISP techs potentially reading your e-mail.

Here're some more interesting first-hand experiences:

GMail review, about spam filters and all

Another review with screenshots

Review from a current user with pictures and information on ads

Mark Pilgrim, complaining GMail's JavaScript broke his Firefox shortcuts.

Gmail screenshot

so it's simple, simple is good.

can't wait for it goes public.

aoliza.

not the same thing, but worth mentioning.

Someone submits a rumor too two rumor boards, they report it, look at each other and say 'if they're reporting it too, then it's probably true!"

c|net and others write 'could be...' stories, and then one Macophilic reporter at a random paper (in this case, 'This is London', that bastion of Mac integrity?) writes that Apple 'has announced' the thing, though they say its 'unveiling' will be in a week.

Then Slashdot comes in and says the rumors are now probably true because an 'established paper' claims it as fact.

Bah. We'll see next week.

Have you seen AOLiza? Same concept except with AIM and very amusing.

I'm happy to hear this. Personally, what I hate most about cellphones is that some people don't know how to modulate their volume. I'm for any excuse that stops them from yelling a conversation right next to me for four hours (with an aircraft power supply charger so they don't run dry!)

Not for the first time, as it turns out...

Non Sequitur \Non seq"ui*tur\ [L., it does not follow]
n 1: a reply that has no relevance to what preceded it

AutoGoogle
AutoSlashBack
AutoEverything

Frankly I find that rather scary.

They'll just plaster butterfly (artickerfly?) stickers all over their virtual worlds, instead.

Check out this interesting speculative article.

My guess is that Apple has one, and it is good, but that they are waiting to see how the market likes Microsoft's Product. I've read that Job's said something like, "we have the tech to do it, but we're not sure it will be successful." But for the life of me I can't find the link.

Nah.

An iPhone is not just a big move for Apple -- it's a HUGE move. Something like the iPad would make a lot more sense.

Apple can create a web pad device that has mobility built in (thanks to Airport aka 802.11b) and because of the Unix OS features the device could just be a terminal extension to a large nearby desktop. You can take it into the living room and surf while you watch TV, or even talk on the phone using Apple's new iPhone program (with voice recognition no doubt!). They also have handwriting recognition built-in to 10.2 which is great for filling out forms while surfing.

The iPad makes more sense since it replaces the iBook as the low-end laptop and can be sold to Apple fans and new users alike. It's just less of a stretch than a phone and closer to Apple's roots of inventing new computing devices.
_________________

AOLiza seems quite similar to ActiveBuddy based on what little I know about it, and the first logged conversation in the archive is dated 8/15/00, one week before the ActiveBuddy filing. IANAL, but it seems like prior art to me.

http://www.zabaware.com/representative/aimbot.html was in existance in early 2000.

http://www.fury.com/aoliza/ was up a week before the filing any others?

The first conversation documented with this AIM bot is August 15th, 2000. The patent's date is August 22nd, 2000.

We have a weiner.

Right. Thanks.

Get your linkage here

# This script is a simple script that creates an aimbot
# shamelessly adapted from Net::IRC

33 is interesting enough.

See also AOLiza for some AIM chat logs of a perl port of the famous 1966 Eliza.

Another parody, combining 'switch' and the '.mac' debacle...

Yeah, I know it's a self-link, but.. well... mod me down if it's not funny.

I think I liked Eliza better. For some cheap entertainment check out AOLiza. It's a list of some chat logs where some unsuspecting AIM users end up talking to Eliza.

Have you ever read through the AOLiza chat logs? It's a Perl port of Eliza (1966 project that simulates a psychoanalyst). Eliza is less advanced (not by much) than some of the other creations that competed for the Loebner Prize but what it's good at, is listening to people. Its amusing reading the conversation logs and some of the beans spilled (33) to it. I think a more complex version of it could make for some interesting research on human behavior. I also think the first forms of AI will could essentially be a database front end and assist humans in decision making.

Offtopic but I just read this on your website, and I must say it was the most interesting thing I have read all day.

Check out www.fury.com/aoliza if you want to see some amusing logs of AIM users who were fooled into believing that they were talking to real people that they knew, when they were actually talking to an AI bot, like ALICE.

For funny Eliza sessions check out AOLiza. The page hasn't been updated in a while, but it is definitly a classic.

What about AOLiza?

...on th web, anyhow. All the time we deal with several languages, burying one inside another so they'll make sense as they go through successive levels of parsing.

For example, every day I write SQL that is buried in PHP libraries which extracts more PHP that in turn has HTML and Javascript in them.

For another example of the crazyness, check this simple example. Now if you look at the source, you'll notice the end part of that A-tag was: .');"> For those of you who are counting, that's SIX 'enders' in three syntax languages just to form a simple alert box.

. - English syntax
' - Javascript string syntax
) - Javascript function syntax
; - Javascript instruction syntax
" - HTML attribute syntax
> - XML (err, HTML, whichever) tag syntax

And that's not even a particularly hairy example. That's just client-side and wetware-side parsing.

I made one seven years ago for neurological pathogens, but I think in this case, the best idea might be a variant of the skull and crossbones, replacing the crossbones with the traditional radiation symbol.