Re:Watson wasn't exactly conversing with humans
on
Talking To Computers?
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· Score: 1
That's...completely wrong.
First, it's wrong because Watson was not responding to verbal input. Watch the first 5 minutes of the first Watson Jeopardy! episode that aired: Alex Trebek says explicitly that it does not see or hear them but receives the clues electronically.
Second, that would not really be impressive, at least, not in this day and age. The impressive part is the natural language parsing and being able to determine the answer to a question based on circumspect clues, often filled with puns and wordplay. Especially the "SPOKEN" part, which you put in all-caps as though it were a particular achievement: they had a handful of stock phrases and a text-to-speech synthesizer the likes of which you could run on your home computer for many years now. About the only thing Watson did that was less impressive than that was the mechanism to press the buzzer (even the stupid globe-orbits animation was kinda cool and at least highly customized).
That's humans doing the *opposite* of this. If everybody takes the shortest path between two points, then the overall path network is much longer than the shortest one.
It's not a "controversial" statement. People are questioning the parsimonious rule-lawyering. Is there even a rule written anywhere about how contestants must receive the information?
It's not clear at all that the communication method used is in any way relevant to the question of whether the game is Jeopardy. It also didn't chit-chat with Alex Trebek, which seems to be a staple of Jeopardy but doesn't seem to be all that important. Also, it was mostly not physically present, and it didn't have any cardiovascular activity whatsoever.
Deep Blue didn't move the chess pieces, it just instructed a human to do so. But chess isn't about the manual dexterity required to move the pieces. Deep Blue was playing chess. Not almost-chess, but chess.
Don't get me wrong, one thing I definitely wondered about was the timing with which this data was sent to Watson. Did a human press a button when Alex finished speaking to let Watson "see" the data?
Globalive cannot operate (the last sentence kind of implied that anyway). Sequence of events.
1. Golbalive wants to operate in Canada. 2. CRTC says "no, you can't". 3. Tory Cabinet says "forget the CRTC, you can operate". 4. Canadian Federal Court says "forget the Tory Cabinet, you can't operate".
You were talking about makework jobs inasmuch as the person you were responding to was talking about automation. Denying automation on the basis of creating/maintaining jobs is the definition of makework jobs. If you wanted to talk about something else, you should have made that clear, because nobody else was talking about that.
And tribalism is not the same as neighbourliness. Neighbourliness isn't exclusive. Tribalism is. Neighbourliness is also inherently limited in scope (people in New York are not the neighbours of people in California -- if they were, why wouldn't people in India be your neighbours?). Tribalism is not.
Now, you may have a point about leaving people far away alone...but I'm not convinced and I haven't seen a strong argument for it.
Typically a stay-at-home parents were still doing work; it's not a lifetime vacation.
As for car prices, here's a chart comparing income to brand new car prices for the past 30 years:
I don't think your perception is justifiable. One reductio ad absurdum is that anything I do to benefit myself at the expense of anybody and everybody else in the world reduces the suffering of one person, me, and therefore it is impossible to commit an unethical action because by definition the actions you take are those you ultimately decided it would be best to take. Also, you could just as easily frame it as increasing the suffering of 50 or 5 people, and it's neither more nor less valid than speaking of reducing suffering. Suffering, in this scenario, will happen. You're choosing 5 or 50 people to suffer, or to not suffer, and dropping the other side of the equation is a bare rationalization.
In Google's post they said they were doing click-fraud in order to SEO their honeypot results onto Bing's index. It was their experimental method. Their spoofing attack was meant to reveal Bing's copying.
I don't think Google's experiment was doing anything wrong, but I also don't think Bing's doing anything wrong in using information sent to them in their indexing & ranking algorithm.
No, you're intentionally obfuscating the fact that they're using click stream data by narrowing it down to "using click data about what Google results users clicked on for a particular Google search". When you say that it is technically true but very misleading, because it's not about Google at all.
It's not arbitrary at a personal use level because you can't personally decide, by whimsy, that a 59 knot storm that was particularly devastating was in fact a Hurricane.
But it is arbirary at a definition level because 64 knots has no particular meaning, and it could just as easily have been some other number without losing any real meaning.
In your GPP post I assumed that "New Atheists" meant the specific subset of Internet asshole that says things like "fuck off and die" as a counterargument to strange rejections of science. But now you're just inventing facts, like claiming that everybody has an origin story they believe in 100% (I doubt most people "believe in" any particular origin story "100%", religious or not).
I will agree that there are people who believe in evolution the way that Christians believe in Adam and Eve, but I will not agree that:
1. All or even most of these people are atheists. 2. That all atheists believe in evolution in that way, or could even be said to "believe in" evolution at all anymore than you "believe in" integral calculus or translations of the Code of Hammurabi.
Since you did say "every single one of them", there's no hiding behind a claim of synecdoche here. You seem to understand that evolution can be taught on merit instead of belief and then you somehow turn around as though all atheists "believe in" evolution not on the basis of merits but on the basis of some faith that you ascribe, externally, with no backing. The idea that all atheists have capital-F Faith such that they "believe in [big bang, evolution, etc] 100%" is itself a very awkward article of faith that's completely asinine. It's a rationalization to ignore or shut up a group of people you disagree with.
I think assholes need to shut up and stay out of this debate, including assholes who want to tell other groups of people how they think and how they're stupid and don't even know what they believe in. That's both the guy your originally replied to, and you. Because both of you are making it "Christians vs. Atheists" and dragging in completely unrelated nonsense like the business about whether atheists have an Adam and Eve by proxy, instead of making an argument that has any merit at all. This is what bogs down agreement.
So to your original question, "How many Atheists think the theory of evolution is bunk?", I don't know the answer. I'm pretty sure greater than 0, but probably proportionately fewer than (self-professed) Christians *in the United States* who think that. But ultimately that's not even important. It has nothing to do with anything. "How many Christians think the Roman empire never existed?" is not an argument against the existence of the Roman empire -- which is widely agreed upon to be a real historical thing AND a thing that has biblical evidence (amongst lots of other evidence) that both Christians and non-Christians (including atheists) accept as legitimate biblical evidence.
There are legitimate reasons to transport savegames between different consoles. That would need a heuristic or something behind it to work out.
However there are also cases like unlocking achievements in online-only games while the account was offline. That's a pretty solid red flag.
I was looking for background information on this story and saw this: http://whywasibanned.com/ (some of it mentions the cheater label rather than outright banning). Some of the pithy comments are great. "You were suspended because your bio was talking about using baby blood to paint a house."
Using a browser's find-in-page feature (Ctrl+F) still breaks the layout. I recommend making the entire grey area a hit target for expanding a comment.
Otherwise, I'm mostly fine with it, but have two more minor criticisms:
1. I couldn't find "More Comments" at first -- I'd consider putting them in the same place as all the other comment controls, below the story but above the comments. Or give logged in users the option to always load all comments. I know the performance sucks but I don't like dealing with truncated comments.
2. I can't see the full expanded threads unless I lower my abbreviation threshold to 0. That's something I liked about the previous one. I get that it sucked in that it was difficult to figure out when you didn't have all comments loaded if you had thresholds hiding comments or there were more than 250 loaded, but I could otherwise understand up until the thread got so long that it did the flat listing. Part of what makes me look at a comment is not just the moderation but the number of comments it attracted.
You're misinterpreting the term flatlining. It's a flat line, smooth and slopeless. You're thinking it means dead, which coincides with an EEG flatlining on TV.
If it has been steady for 20 years then it's flatlined. That said, it doesn't look very steady for 20 years -- it looks like considerable growth right up until the.com bust, then steady up to now with the exception of a dip at the beginning of the recession.
New versions of OS X are cheap and have no copy protection on them. The trade off that you make for that is to only run it on macs.
Tying software to specific hardware is its own form of copy protection. As you say, they're subsidized by hardware purchases, or in other words, when you paid for the hardware you paid (most of the cost) for the software.
You can use a hackintosh, but that's basically breaking a copy protection scheme.
In Canada a lot of software engineers have actual engineering degrees and have gone through all the actual engineer processes to get all the actual engineer trappings. Myself included.
Google's market cap is almost 200 billion dollars, in the same league as Apple itself. No company has the cash or leverage to buy Google. It would have to be a true merger.
As for "intellectual tummy ache", I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at, but from everything I've heard the corporate culture is really different at those companies:
- Apple is reputed to be a very top-down culture, and one where the opinions of the designers direct product development. - Google is reputed to be a more bottom-up culture, and one where aggregated data from A/B testing etc. directs product development.
You're looking at too narrow a scope. We need standard video codecs, because we have multiple competing implementations of "video codec" that need to be brought into alignment. We have a good one, H.264, but the patents on it displease industry members so they're trying to make another good one without patents -- which is okay, because we often have multiple standards when there are tradeoffs to be made.
Much as the industry doesn't need an independently published international standard for "Duracell form factors" but it is helpful to have standard "battery form factors" -- AAA, D, etc.
He's not using a damn meme. The GGP specifically compared the climate thousands of years ago to predicting the weather 3 hours from now. You're battling a straw man.
You yourself argued in this same thread, ten minutes ago, using the very data that the GGP poo-poo'd, that we are in a cool period compared to geological history (true but of questionable relevance).
You're equivocating in order to argue against everybody who doesn't explicitly agree with you. It's self-contradictory. You have to stick to one. Either we know we're colder than at other times because of the geological record, or the geological record is unknowable and is mentioned only to support confirmation bias of those who disagree with you. Not both.
Remember, even if you're right, not everybody who argues on the same "side" as you knows what they're talking about or is right for the right reasons. Your arguments would be better if you'd sat this one out or chimed in to concede that saleen was ignorant and offer your own actual argument.
People are proposing a solution for problem A and your counterargument is that it doesn't solve case B. Skype is not a malicious addon, it's an incompetent addon, and this is a fix for incompetent addons.
A lock on your door makes it slightly more difficult for unauthorized people to get in, even though a murderer could just set your house on fire while you sleep.
The point isn't that he's being exploited. The point is that if people keep trying it, it's an indication that it's probably successful for them some percent of the time. Which means lots of people are not blocking root access and blacklisting IP addresses, which is in turn an indication that really a lot of malware is hitting systems that are secure in and of themselves, but where the user goes out of his or her way to get owned -- by, for example, having dictionary passwords.
Slashdot Mirror
That's...completely wrong.
First, it's wrong because Watson was not responding to verbal input. Watch the first 5 minutes of the first Watson Jeopardy! episode that aired: Alex Trebek says explicitly that it does not see or hear them but receives the clues electronically.
Second, that would not really be impressive, at least, not in this day and age. The impressive part is the natural language parsing and being able to determine the answer to a question based on circumspect clues, often filled with puns and wordplay. Especially the "SPOKEN" part, which you put in all-caps as though it were a particular achievement: they had a handful of stock phrases and a text-to-speech synthesizer the likes of which you could run on your home computer for many years now. About the only thing Watson did that was less impressive than that was the mechanism to press the buzzer (even the stupid globe-orbits animation was kinda cool and at least highly customized).
Only if he were using MySpace.
That's humans doing the *opposite* of this. If everybody takes the shortest path between two points, then the overall path network is much longer than the shortest one.
It's not a "controversial" statement. People are questioning the parsimonious rule-lawyering. Is there even a rule written anywhere about how contestants must receive the information?
It's not clear at all that the communication method used is in any way relevant to the question of whether the game is Jeopardy. It also didn't chit-chat with Alex Trebek, which seems to be a staple of Jeopardy but doesn't seem to be all that important. Also, it was mostly not physically present, and it didn't have any cardiovascular activity whatsoever.
Deep Blue didn't move the chess pieces, it just instructed a human to do so. But chess isn't about the manual dexterity required to move the pieces. Deep Blue was playing chess. Not almost-chess, but chess.
Don't get me wrong, one thing I definitely wondered about was the timing with which this data was sent to Watson. Did a human press a button when Alex finished speaking to let Watson "see" the data?
What kind of mythical geeks do you know who are not obsessed with arbitrary rulesets and definitions?
Globalive cannot operate (the last sentence kind of implied that anyway). Sequence of events.
1. Golbalive wants to operate in Canada.
2. CRTC says "no, you can't".
3. Tory Cabinet says "forget the CRTC, you can operate".
4. Canadian Federal Court says "forget the Tory Cabinet, you can't operate".
You were talking about makework jobs inasmuch as the person you were responding to was talking about automation. Denying automation on the basis of creating/maintaining jobs is the definition of makework jobs. If you wanted to talk about something else, you should have made that clear, because nobody else was talking about that.
And tribalism is not the same as neighbourliness. Neighbourliness isn't exclusive. Tribalism is. Neighbourliness is also inherently limited in scope (people in New York are not the neighbours of people in California -- if they were, why wouldn't people in India be your neighbours?). Tribalism is not.
Now, you may have a point about leaving people far away alone...but I'm not convinced and I haven't seen a strong argument for it.
Typically a stay-at-home parents were still doing work; it's not a lifetime vacation.
As for car prices, here's a chart comparing income to brand new car prices for the past 30 years:
http://www.comerica.com/Comerica_Content/Corporate_Communications/Docs/Auto_Affordability_Index_Q22008.pdf
I don't think your perception is justifiable. One reductio ad absurdum is that anything I do to benefit myself at the expense of anybody and everybody else in the world reduces the suffering of one person, me, and therefore it is impossible to commit an unethical action because by definition the actions you take are those you ultimately decided it would be best to take. Also, you could just as easily frame it as increasing the suffering of 50 or 5 people, and it's neither more nor less valid than speaking of reducing suffering. Suffering, in this scenario, will happen. You're choosing 5 or 50 people to suffer, or to not suffer, and dropping the other side of the equation is a bare rationalization.
In Google's post they said they were doing click-fraud in order to SEO their honeypot results onto Bing's index. It was their experimental method. Their spoofing attack was meant to reveal Bing's copying.
I don't think Google's experiment was doing anything wrong, but I also don't think Bing's doing anything wrong in using information sent to them in their indexing & ranking algorithm.
No, you're intentionally obfuscating the fact that they're using click stream data by narrowing it down to "using click data about what Google results users clicked on for a particular Google search". When you say that it is technically true but very misleading, because it's not about Google at all.
He's in Canada. Lottery winnings are not considered income in Canada, and therefore are not taxed at all.
He's Canadian. No IRS.
In Canada (as in many countries), lottery winnings are not considered income and thus are not taxed.
It's a matter of scope.
It's not arbitrary at a personal use level because you can't personally decide, by whimsy, that a 59 knot storm that was particularly devastating was in fact a Hurricane.
But it is arbirary at a definition level because 64 knots has no particular meaning, and it could just as easily have been some other number without losing any real meaning.
This entire post is complete nonsense.
In your GPP post I assumed that "New Atheists" meant the specific subset of Internet asshole that says things like "fuck off and die" as a counterargument to strange rejections of science. But now you're just inventing facts, like claiming that everybody has an origin story they believe in 100% (I doubt most people "believe in" any particular origin story "100%", religious or not).
I will agree that there are people who believe in evolution the way that Christians believe in Adam and Eve, but I will not agree that:
1. All or even most of these people are atheists.
2. That all atheists believe in evolution in that way, or could even be said to "believe in" evolution at all anymore than you "believe in" integral calculus or translations of the Code of Hammurabi.
Since you did say "every single one of them", there's no hiding behind a claim of synecdoche here. You seem to understand that evolution can be taught on merit instead of belief and then you somehow turn around as though all atheists "believe in" evolution not on the basis of merits but on the basis of some faith that you ascribe, externally, with no backing. The idea that all atheists have capital-F Faith such that they "believe in [big bang, evolution, etc] 100%" is itself a very awkward article of faith that's completely asinine. It's a rationalization to ignore or shut up a group of people you disagree with.
I think assholes need to shut up and stay out of this debate, including assholes who want to tell other groups of people how they think and how they're stupid and don't even know what they believe in. That's both the guy your originally replied to, and you. Because both of you are making it "Christians vs. Atheists" and dragging in completely unrelated nonsense like the business about whether atheists have an Adam and Eve by proxy, instead of making an argument that has any merit at all. This is what bogs down agreement.
So to your original question, "How many Atheists think the theory of evolution is bunk?", I don't know the answer. I'm pretty sure greater than 0, but probably proportionately fewer than (self-professed) Christians *in the United States* who think that. But ultimately that's not even important. It has nothing to do with anything. "How many Christians think the Roman empire never existed?" is not an argument against the existence of the Roman empire -- which is widely agreed upon to be a real historical thing AND a thing that has biblical evidence (amongst lots of other evidence) that both Christians and non-Christians (including atheists) accept as legitimate biblical evidence.
There are legitimate reasons to transport savegames between different consoles. That would need a heuristic or something behind it to work out.
However there are also cases like unlocking achievements in online-only games while the account was offline. That's a pretty solid red flag.
I was looking for background information on this story and saw this: http://whywasibanned.com/ (some of it mentions the cheater label rather than outright banning). Some of the pithy comments are great. "You were suspended because your bio was talking about using baby blood to paint a house."
Using a browser's find-in-page feature (Ctrl+F) still breaks the layout. I recommend making the entire grey area a hit target for expanding a comment.
Otherwise, I'm mostly fine with it, but have two more minor criticisms:
1. I couldn't find "More Comments" at first -- I'd consider putting them in the same place as all the other comment controls, below the story but above the comments. Or give logged in users the option to always load all comments. I know the performance sucks but I don't like dealing with truncated comments.
2. I can't see the full expanded threads unless I lower my abbreviation threshold to 0. That's something I liked about the previous one. I get that it sucked in that it was difficult to figure out when you didn't have all comments loaded if you had thresholds hiding comments or there were more than 250 loaded, but I could otherwise understand up until the thread got so long that it did the flat listing. Part of what makes me look at a comment is not just the moderation but the number of comments it attracted.
You're misinterpreting the term flatlining. It's a flat line, smooth and slopeless. You're thinking it means dead, which coincides with an EEG flatlining on TV.
If it has been steady for 20 years then it's flatlined. That said, it doesn't look very steady for 20 years -- it looks like considerable growth right up until the .com bust, then steady up to now with the exception of a dip at the beginning of the recession.
New versions of OS X are cheap and have no copy protection on them. The trade off that you make for that is to only run it on macs.
Tying software to specific hardware is its own form of copy protection. As you say, they're subsidized by hardware purchases, or in other words, when you paid for the hardware you paid (most of the cost) for the software.
You can use a hackintosh, but that's basically breaking a copy protection scheme.
I think it very well might be. Isn't that basically Microsoft's business model? They found a way to compete on price with free (as in beer).
In Canada a lot of software engineers have actual engineering degrees and have gone through all the actual engineer processes to get all the actual engineer trappings. Myself included.
Google's market cap is almost 200 billion dollars, in the same league as Apple itself. No company has the cash or leverage to buy Google. It would have to be a true merger.
As for "intellectual tummy ache", I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at, but from everything I've heard the corporate culture is really different at those companies:
- Apple is reputed to be a very top-down culture, and one where the opinions of the designers direct product development.
- Google is reputed to be a more bottom-up culture, and one where aggregated data from A/B testing etc. directs product development.
You're looking at too narrow a scope. We need standard video codecs, because we have multiple competing implementations of "video codec" that need to be brought into alignment. We have a good one, H.264, but the patents on it displease industry members so they're trying to make another good one without patents -- which is okay, because we often have multiple standards when there are tradeoffs to be made.
Much as the industry doesn't need an independently published international standard for "Duracell form factors" but it is helpful to have standard "battery form factors" -- AAA, D, etc.
He's not using a damn meme. The GGP specifically compared the climate thousands of years ago to predicting the weather 3 hours from now. You're battling a straw man.
You yourself argued in this same thread, ten minutes ago, using the very data that the GGP poo-poo'd, that we are in a cool period compared to geological history (true but of questionable relevance).
You're equivocating in order to argue against everybody who doesn't explicitly agree with you. It's self-contradictory. You have to stick to one. Either we know we're colder than at other times because of the geological record, or the geological record is unknowable and is mentioned only to support confirmation bias of those who disagree with you. Not both.
Remember, even if you're right, not everybody who argues on the same "side" as you knows what they're talking about or is right for the right reasons. Your arguments would be better if you'd sat this one out or chimed in to concede that saleen was ignorant and offer your own actual argument.
People are proposing a solution for problem A and your counterargument is that it doesn't solve case B. Skype is not a malicious addon, it's an incompetent addon, and this is a fix for incompetent addons.
A lock on your door makes it slightly more difficult for unauthorized people to get in, even though a murderer could just set your house on fire while you sleep.
The point isn't that he's being exploited. The point is that if people keep trying it, it's an indication that it's probably successful for them some percent of the time. Which means lots of people are not blocking root access and blacklisting IP addresses, which is in turn an indication that really a lot of malware is hitting systems that are secure in and of themselves, but where the user goes out of his or her way to get owned -- by, for example, having dictionary passwords.