The emails were obtained by cracking the password to a MediaDefender employee's gmail account. He had forwarded all his MediaDefender email to his gmail account.
Actually, he's not violating Goodwin's law, he's following it. Also, I'd say it's pretty clear that calling someone a 'denier' lends credence to the thing that they're denying.
Yeah, that's actually what the storage is for. From the article:
"the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa; Gmail, a Google email application; and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google's office applications."
Gmail users can purchase it by going to Settings (top right of the gmail interface), then Accounts, then check out the new "Add additional storage" row. Or, you can just straight to https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage
Thanks for the link to the blog article. It's a lot more interesting and substantial than the somewhat embarassing DailyTech article.
A lot of people have been criticizing the DailyTech article for the line "Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media." It should be noted that the original blog entry does not contain this or other indications of paranoia, and attributes the people involved in the discovery.
If you really think your risk is only half a percent per month, then you would be much better off investing that $200/month. Even with a normal savings account making 4.5% interest, you could get the $20,000 required in seven years; get a good mutual fund or GIC making 8.5% and you're golden in just over six years. If your risk is only 0.5% per month, you've got about 16 years before you're likely to need insurance. Insurance companies make money by investing your money, so why not just invest it yourself? Yes, this exposes you to risk in the short term; that's what insurance provides, short term comfort. In the long term, you're better off investing. Some combination of cheaper insurance and investing is probably your best bet; gradually lower the amount of insurance you buy as your savings account grows.
Well, percentages can be used to inflate or deflate differences when you're comparing things. Take two numbers, A = 2 B = 3. To emphasize the difference, B is 50% larger than A, or B is 150% of A. To deflate the difference, A is 34% less than B, or A is 67% of B. That's four percentages for one set of two numbers, and the general public is going to feel differently simply based on the percentage they choose.
I agree that the first interpretation is undoubtedly correct for the quote, but not everyone can change simple formulas to words that easily, so there's the possibility of misinterpretation somewhere along the way (someone sees that it increases, and this month is 113% the last month, and sends that info along; since the next party isn't looking at the raw numbers, they might misinterpret). If they just release the numbers, there's less potential ambiguity.
Once again, a good example of using percentages to hide actual statistics. Check this:
According to Sony, sales of the console have increased 113 percent at its top five retail partners--Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Circuit City, and GameStop--when compared to average sales during the month before drop.
So, since we don't have the real figures, does this mean
Sales = LastMonthSales + LastMonthSales * 1.13
or does this mean
Sales = LastMonthSales * 1.13
? If we read it as it's written, it should mean the top one, but I somehow doubt sales have risen that much. Guess we'll have to wait for actual statistics.
Guitar Freaks/Drummania's soundtrack is quite similar to GH's in its quantity of rock, though it obviously features more recent Japanese rock and fewer new North American bands (licensing issues and whatnot). Problem is it was never released in North America, so you either had to import or play at the arcades. It's true that DDR and Beatmania focus heavier on techno-esque music, though. Unfortunately, you can't really compare the appeal of DDR's soundtrack to GH's by looking at game sales, as the gameplay is different enough that music taste isn't the only decider.
I'm inclined to agree with you, I don't think Rock Band will be as successful as many seem to think it will be. In addition to your points, there's also history: Konami's already done this. Guitar Freaks/Drummania machines are still being linked together, but there was a time (if memory serves) when you could link together Guitar Freaks, Drummania, DDR (I think it was 3rd mix?) and Beatmania. Obviously this didn't work out too well, as they only tried such a lofty proposition once. And it's not because arcade operators are cheap: they already owned the machines separately, to link them together would not have cost much extra, people just weren't interested. I have a feeling that Harmonix will find, like Konami did, that this will have limited appeal in practice, despite sounding awesome in theory.
Because, ignorant as he may be, people listen to him. If, instead of a movie review, he were to write a game review, people would take notice and games might have a bit more legitimacy in the minds of the newspaper-reading public. It's true, gamers, game creators and most slashdotters could give two shits what he thinks, and rightly so, but if people read his review and buy the game, suddenly there's some new money coming to the games industry from sources that were uninterested before. A more diverse audience might also mean more diverse games, which I think we can all agree would be a good thing. For Ebert to put down games only reinforces the idea that games are not worthwhile to his audience, and publishers keep putting out new iterations of the same rehashed crap that they know will sell to the existing audience.
But Polaris is a single bot that can adjust its style of play. It just does this by asking a bunch of other bots what they would do, then decides its action based on the other bots' past performance and some other metrics. Your argument doesn't really make any sense; there are no people using the computer during the match, the bot is completely autonomous other than someone pressing the start button.
For those curious about the bot, Polaris is being developed by the University of Alberta GAMES research group. Polaris' implementation is discussed in detail through publications hosted on the Poker group's website. The U of A's coverage (including video interviews of the participants) can be found here.
I'm not going to get into a flamewar with you, but I just want to say that "philosophy" is less of a buzzword than "artifical intelligence." I'm pretty zealotous about science myself, but that doesn't mean that philosophical issues are not worth discussing. Scientists need to be more open to collaboration with "artsy" people, rather than shutting them out because their reasoning isn't rigorous enough.
The FBI (law enforcement in general) already has pretty sophisticated systems for face recognition and matching fingerprints, which is really what they're concerned about. A general puropse image matching algorithm will never fare as well as one tailored to a specific problem.
All of the robotics problems you described - cleaning your floor, carrying your groceries, navigation, etc. - are AI problems. In fact, even the "(1) high-speed visual similarity search using two-step search clustering technology" that Hitachi is promoting could be considered AI. You see, in computer science, if a problem has some kind of real world application (even in theory) it goes under the moniker of AI, and this gets papers published. In my opinion, AI's just a rebranding of the rest of computer science; object orientation becomes "frames," complicated parsing problems become "natural language processing," robotic navigation is "pathfinding." But I digress!
Anyway, more to the point, Hitachi's technology doesn't do any learning, and thus, doesn't require training. It's also not particularly new technology, they abstract out some features for the images in their database, then search for images with similar features. This is probably oversimplification, I'm not a computer vision guy, but I'm relatively confident that Hitachi has not furthered the state of the art in computer vision. The reason I guess it's newsworthy is the second part: "(2) faster reading through optimized data allocation on an HDD." This isn't a new technology either, though. I'm not sure if TFA is really that newsworthy.
Robots have a lot of trouble trying to match the environment around them to stored records of objects unless the environment is severely constrained. This is mainly because robots are specialized. For navigation, infrared/laser/sound sensors are better suited, as they tell the robot how far away obstacles are. Robots that are concerned with identifying objects usually do not need to navigate.
I lived there for a year too, and I can't agree more. In fact, even the article summary sums it up pretty well: "soap operas, panel games and comedy variety shows." A lot of great stuff comes out of Japan (movies from Takeshi, Kurosawa, etc.; some anime; the games that are usurping TV time), but you would never know it watching Japanese TV.
Thank you for correcting me, I agree wholeheartedly. Looking at the article, they focus a lot of Webkit's widespread adoption, but don't go into the development of either codebase other than Webkit abstracting out KDE and Qt specific code.
The summary is a bit vague as to what 'coming together' means. Basically, Webkit is going to be adopted in KDE as a Kpart, features in KHTML that aren't in Webkit are being added to Webkit, then KHTML will die out. Seems at least some KHTML developers will be working on Webkit in the future. The article also goes into the history behind the forking, and is actually a decent read.
Slashdot Mirror
The emails were obtained by cracking the password to a MediaDefender employee's gmail account. He had forwarded all his MediaDefender email to his gmail account.
Source: the description on the torrent on ThePirateBay.
Sexist! Jimmy/Janey's girlfriend/boyfriend!
Actually, he's not violating Goodwin's law, he's following it. Also, I'd say it's pretty clear that calling someone a 'denier' lends credence to the thing that they're denying.
Thanks for the link to the blog article. It's a lot more interesting and substantial than the somewhat embarassing DailyTech article.
A lot of people have been criticizing the DailyTech article for the line "Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media." It should be noted that the original blog entry does not contain this or other indications of paranoia, and attributes the people involved in the discovery.
o_O That's bizarre... did you restart? Restarting fixes everything!
If you really think your risk is only half a percent per month, then you would be much better off investing that $200/month. Even with a normal savings account making 4.5% interest, you could get the $20,000 required in seven years; get a good mutual fund or GIC making 8.5% and you're golden in just over six years. If your risk is only 0.5% per month, you've got about 16 years before you're likely to need insurance. Insurance companies make money by investing your money, so why not just invest it yourself? Yes, this exposes you to risk in the short term; that's what insurance provides, short term comfort. In the long term, you're better off investing. Some combination of cheaper insurance and investing is probably your best bet; gradually lower the amount of insurance you buy as your savings account grows.
Well, percentages can be used to inflate or deflate differences when you're comparing things. Take two numbers, A = 2 B = 3. To emphasize the difference, B is 50% larger than A, or B is 150% of A. To deflate the difference, A is 34% less than B, or A is 67% of B. That's four percentages for one set of two numbers, and the general public is going to feel differently simply based on the percentage they choose.
I agree that the first interpretation is undoubtedly correct for the quote, but not everyone can change simple formulas to words that easily, so there's the possibility of misinterpretation somewhere along the way (someone sees that it increases, and this month is 113% the last month, and sends that info along; since the next party isn't looking at the raw numbers, they might misinterpret). If they just release the numbers, there's less potential ambiguity.
Guitar Freaks/Drummania's soundtrack is quite similar to GH's in its quantity of rock, though it obviously features more recent Japanese rock and fewer new North American bands (licensing issues and whatnot). Problem is it was never released in North America, so you either had to import or play at the arcades. It's true that DDR and Beatmania focus heavier on techno-esque music, though. Unfortunately, you can't really compare the appeal of DDR's soundtrack to GH's by looking at game sales, as the gameplay is different enough that music taste isn't the only decider.
I'm inclined to agree with you, I don't think Rock Band will be as successful as many seem to think it will be. In addition to your points, there's also history: Konami's already done this. Guitar Freaks/Drummania machines are still being linked together, but there was a time (if memory serves) when you could link together Guitar Freaks, Drummania, DDR (I think it was 3rd mix?) and Beatmania. Obviously this didn't work out too well, as they only tried such a lofty proposition once. And it's not because arcade operators are cheap: they already owned the machines separately, to link them together would not have cost much extra, people just weren't interested. I have a feeling that Harmonix will find, like Konami did, that this will have limited appeal in practice, despite sounding awesome in theory.
Because, ignorant as he may be, people listen to him. If, instead of a movie review, he were to write a game review, people would take notice and games might have a bit more legitimacy in the minds of the newspaper-reading public. It's true, gamers, game creators and most slashdotters could give two shits what he thinks, and rightly so, but if people read his review and buy the game, suddenly there's some new money coming to the games industry from sources that were uninterested before. A more diverse audience might also mean more diverse games, which I think we can all agree would be a good thing. For Ebert to put down games only reinforces the idea that games are not worthwhile to his audience, and publishers keep putting out new iterations of the same rehashed crap that they know will sell to the existing audience.
"Sir, I am absolutely flabbergasted that you would insult my intelligence with such incoherent dribble."
Formal:
"I should hope you mean drivel, good sir, for I am neither slobbering like a hound nor partaking in a rousing game of basketball!"
Informal:
"lol, lern 2 english"
Save $20, save the world
But Polaris is a single bot that can adjust its style of play. It just does this by asking a bunch of other bots what they would do, then decides its action based on the other bots' past performance and some other metrics. Your argument doesn't really make any sense; there are no people using the computer during the match, the bot is completely autonomous other than someone pressing the start button.
For those curious about the bot, Polaris is being developed by the University of Alberta GAMES research group. Polaris' implementation is discussed in detail through publications hosted on the Poker group's website. The U of A's coverage (including video interviews of the participants) can be found here.
I'm not going to get into a flamewar with you, but I just want to say that "philosophy" is less of a buzzword than "artifical intelligence." I'm pretty zealotous about science myself, but that doesn't mean that philosophical issues are not worth discussing. Scientists need to be more open to collaboration with "artsy" people, rather than shutting them out because their reasoning isn't rigorous enough.
The FBI (law enforcement in general) already has pretty sophisticated systems for face recognition and matching fingerprints, which is really what they're concerned about. A general puropse image matching algorithm will never fare as well as one tailored to a specific problem.
All of the robotics problems you described - cleaning your floor, carrying your groceries, navigation, etc. - are AI problems. In fact, even the "(1) high-speed visual similarity search using two-step search clustering technology" that Hitachi is promoting could be considered AI. You see, in computer science, if a problem has some kind of real world application (even in theory) it goes under the moniker of AI, and this gets papers published. In my opinion, AI's just a rebranding of the rest of computer science; object orientation becomes "frames," complicated parsing problems become "natural language processing," robotic navigation is "pathfinding." But I digress!
Anyway, more to the point, Hitachi's technology doesn't do any learning, and thus, doesn't require training. It's also not particularly new technology, they abstract out some features for the images in their database, then search for images with similar features. This is probably oversimplification, I'm not a computer vision guy, but I'm relatively confident that Hitachi has not furthered the state of the art in computer vision. The reason I guess it's newsworthy is the second part: "(2) faster reading through optimized data allocation on an HDD." This isn't a new technology either, though. I'm not sure if TFA is really that newsworthy.
Robots have a lot of trouble trying to match the environment around them to stored records of objects unless the environment is severely constrained. This is mainly because robots are specialized. For navigation, infrared/laser/sound sensors are better suited, as they tell the robot how far away obstacles are. Robots that are concerned with identifying objects usually do not need to navigate.
I lived there for a year too, and I can't agree more. In fact, even the article summary sums it up pretty well: "soap operas, panel games and comedy variety shows." A lot of great stuff comes out of Japan (movies from Takeshi, Kurosawa, etc.; some anime; the games that are usurping TV time), but you would never know it watching Japanese TV.
"like the one where you're on the balance board doing the hula-hoop on the board and trying to see how many you can catch and keep going."
I don't know what kind of hula-hoop Harrison's been using, but there's usually no catching involved where I come from...
Thank you for correcting me, I agree wholeheartedly. Looking at the article, they focus a lot of Webkit's widespread adoption, but don't go into the development of either codebase other than Webkit abstracting out KDE and Qt specific code.
The summary is a bit vague as to what 'coming together' means. Basically, Webkit is going to be adopted in KDE as a Kpart, features in KHTML that aren't in Webkit are being added to Webkit, then KHTML will die out. Seems at least some KHTML developers will be working on Webkit in the future. The article also goes into the history behind the forking, and is actually a decent read.