"You are NOTHING but a political singularity, and infinitesimal point that emits no light, but plenty of sound and fury signifying nothing."
I think his point is well stated, that credentials don't always express the caliber or qualifications of a person. Your critisim of him chanting next, or the above rant seems to go counter to your critisim of him "You cannot debate."
It seems you can not debate either, given that measuring stick. (pot and black kettle problem).
It would seem that this Griffin character is possibly a credential collector and if he has been elected to an acedemic society, we know he is also very political. If you want hotbeds of political infighting, go to a university. You would think that the scientific community was of one mind. They in-fight incessantly. The process of science seems to be futhered by one scientist attacking anothers research or defending their own, with hopefully some good stable science being the only thing left. So it is not suprising that Griffin has his own fairly strong ideas about how things have been done in the past and I am sure that he will politically further the cause of science and space exploration stearing the process along his own lines when he can. But it does seem to me that his comments about the historical process and the current state of designs is only self serving. (reguardless of his many many degrees)
Better yet he just Shuts Up. There is that Texas style of management that is very opinionated and has to dis- the past to build up his Management image as a fixer and someone who know the direction to head. Too many times we see this only to find out they don't have a clue. Let's hope that's not the case here.
Exactly my point on Iraq. Faultly logic in, faulty logic to stay.
But the ISS is a different matter. It was the right thing to do to de-millitarize space and have a platform where all the world (well the developed countrys) could work together to start to reap the benifits from that new platform in the sky with micro gravity and a veiw of the stars that we don't have here on earth.
There was a lot of research that went into the ISS but most of it is expressed as the engineering to solve the issues of creating a good stable maintainable manned facility in space. The first work is building the platform that the research can happen on. The goal is to provide the world's scientists and industry a new research facility to develop new and better science and technology for all our futures. It was not a waste, it is not a waste, it will not be a waste.
You build the plane before you load in the passengers to take the trips. You have to do things in the proper order and not be too impatient. This is a long term project. The problem is short term thinking that micro manages scientific research.
What we are really lacking in the current legislative and executive branches is the "Vision Thing". Bush with his Cowboy "Yahoo" lets go to Mars space race mentality is wanting to re-kindle the cold war environment of international competition that just wastes your dollars and my dollars.
Scientists know about the benefits of cooperation. Thats how science progresses. It's the polititians that are greedy and possesive and try to hold back the advances of mankind because they haven't gotten their cut of the process, or their friends in industry that support them haven't gotten their cut.
What we need to do is realize things like there is Global Warming and that we are responsible for it and there are things we can do about it and to listen to the scientist and take real action, not "Well it will adversly effect my business friends so I'll find some detractors and hold them up as reasons for doubt so I can back out of Global Warming treaties, cause I don't want to pay the price for our past mistakes, let our grandchildren do it when were not here anymore". As one clear example where the current politics ignores the facts, and/or the clear advice of the scientific community. Another example of this old "I wish I lived in the Dark Ages again, as a King of course" is the administrations comments on Intellegent Design. Can the inquisition be far behind (seems like they have inquisitors in training right now).
Did you personally sign the Geneva Convention, No well sorry.
AIDS though I don't know that this would cure that. For the others that continue to take steroids or other medication that suppress the immune system, especially in transplant and bypass recoveries, I think kefir would have a hard time fighting up stream because they are continually taking medication that causes the suppression of the immune system. But wouldn't it be nice if it helped.
Those are very comforting words. If you add international travel and the extreme speed that people can flee an infested area, we may be able to combine the best of both plagues. Say in a crowded refugee camp in Africa with a large number of AIDS victims. Well it would be easier under those circumstanses to quarentine the lot and let the plague die out in that large group quickly.
Not sure which category "slow" of "fast" that particular form a plague falls but the avian flu seems to have a 50% mortality rate among normal people. Can you imagine among AIDS victims?
If you saw the movie with Robin Williams about a doctor that found a treatment for severly autistic patients that brought them back to full life for awhile until the treatment lost its effect and the went back to an unresponsive state. The same can be seen happening with modern antibiotics. The things it used to treat have evolved past and around those treatments so there are more and more desease resistant strains that we have no cure for. In another hundred years we may end up where we started with just as many pathogens killing us as was the case before antibiotics were invented.
Its our grandchildren that may suffer and die because of our irresponsible use of modern medicine. I know my father had to have 6 operations including 3 leg bypass operations and an artificial knee removed and replaced because a strain of bacteria has become antibiotic resistant because we have miss used that technology. He lost 2 years of his life being essentially bed ridden. So I see both sides, the benefit and the cost. If you don't realize there is a cost for unrestrained behaviour, or if you think that modern medicine cures problems for good you had better do some more research.
My point was that modern medicine with transplant patients and other patients on cortical steroids and related drugs have comprimised immune systems which means if a nasty pandemic occures they are at extremely high risk. The avian flue is an example. Just last night in Nightline they talks about the fact that there is "NO" vacine for it as yet and if it mutates to a human to human transmission we could be looking at an epidemic that would rival the 1918 outbreak of Spanish Flu which if I remember right killed about 200,000 in this country alone. The vacine would take about 6mo to create after the pandemic started and they said that no living human has ever encountered this before so there is not natural immunities build up anywhere. They say about a 50% mortality rate from what they have seen.
In the article they talk about a nasty version of Plague, well if is gets out I think no one living has build up immunity for that either, so we could be in for an interesting year.
But on the other hand we may have shot ourselves in the foot with our modern technologies as well as having AIDS so prevalent (esp in Africa) so there are large populations of compromised immune systems. We also have transplant patients and other people on steroids walking around with compromised immune systems. If the plauge (or avian flu) gets out we have some fertile fields for them to grow in that were not present in previous centuries. So things will not be simplier and if antibotic resistant strains appear we are in deep shit. We have seen that already with some of the strep and staf strains getting harder and harder to cure (my father spent 2yrs fightning Mersa (hour whatever the acronym is) and have to be vigilent continuously to prevent an outbreak.
Don't think modern technology is just a solution and not part of the problem.
On the contrary, plauge spreads from the fleas on rats biting other rats and humans and other animals. I think we have a lot to worry about. Especially with other catastorphies on the horizon like the avian flu. Link that with a lot of AIDS compromised immune systems and all those other people on steroids and other medication that compromises the immune system and we have a unique situatation that has not existed before when pandemics were present.
The concensous among scientists is that global warming is occuring and that man-made sources of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is causing this warming.
I think we can all agree that global warming is occuring. The current theories I have heard mention an average increase in global water temperature of only 2-3 degrees as enough to melt the Ice caps. That alone is a more immediate danger, as the cold areas are part of the weather systems dynamic. I suspect that we would see a more dramatic effect from that than hurricanes increasing. But our weather models are crude at this point, and we can't even predict the track they are going to take. I think that even with more complete data we probably wouldn't have the computing power or good enough models still.
When fooling would the entire weather system I would think we would err on the side of conservatism.
" Despite your depressing analysis, things are not getting worse"
Whether the other poster was correct or not your anaylsis that things are not getting worse is incorrect. I think if nothing else the size of the Yearly Ozone hole over tha Antarctic is one of the solid pieces of evidence that that is true.
Some links to back up the connection of Hurricane and global warming (not making judgement of who is politically responible for the situation but if we don't act soon politialy/globally,Kyoto is a start, we will find that we have to move to high ground everwhere.
But then if it really is the Armed services, I would think would want several other features not typical to commercial email systems, like ability to monitor mail for terroist and treason monitoring, to have secure mail for classified communications with mappings of the 20 some clearance levels to email classification levels, and possibly the ability to purge information from the system, but that last requirement would have been added since they found that Corporate Shreading was defendable if there was a policy in place for it.
If it is government there are so many other requirements we usually don't think about for a system like this.
Well I left out the... thinking it too much. You could get into a lispest nomenclature but then it might take away from the central point that there was incompetence, the director of FEMA appears from history and actions to not be the man for the job and Bush appointed him. Someone needs to take some responsibility for our people dying of food and water deprivation. But I know the figure at the top is well greased and any criticism slides off like a it does in a pig wresting contest.
Well he did appoint the man in charge, someone who had been on the board of International Arabian Horse Association. He seems to have left there under a cloud about contributions to their legal defense fund and immediately got a job as FEMA director. I think he is highly qualified in disaster planning, unfortunately not disaster releif planning.
I think Bush can take some heat for this kind of miss-use of the public trust. These are not choice political plums to be given to big contributers or supporters but to qualified hard working capable individuals with credentials for the job. Especially when the lives of our mother and fathers and sons and brothers and daughters and uncles and neices are involved.
The buck needs to stop where the fundemental problems stem from, not only where the problems show up.
"they just can't do it online" and if you don't file online you need to find the paper forms, Fill them out (better have the instructions so you dont answer the questions wrong), then find somewhere to mail it or take it in. Which has to then be physically routed to some processing center with a person reading your handwritting and typing it in (hopefully your paper has not gotten wet and the ink ran, or the typest can under your handwritting). Probably that document is verified (if done right), and then and only then can they start to process your claim. Already we have the built in week (minimum) for FEMA to respond.
You don't need javascript at all. You can let your server check your inputs. It is only when you are trying to be too fancy and get outside the bounds of the Standards that you run into trouble.
For an application like a FEMA claim form I would think the most important concern would be access rather than flash.
I have found that the reason you find this kind of nonsense is incompetent programmers or "Web Designers" using proprietary tools that generate non-standard code (so you don't need to hire programmers). I would think that government oversight would have identified this issue before now. I am sure others have complained to them, as I will as a concerned citizen. But not right now, they have other things to worry about for a few weeks/months/years.
"If it has to pass all tests, there's no rational scientific reason to test it against anything but your strongest subjects."
I don't think the Turing test requires passing "All tests". If you look at humans, they come in all shapes and levels of intellegence. You don't day an individual is intellegent or not, absoulutely not, you test them against tests that ranks their intellegence relative to others. So for individuals you don't hit them with a 10 pounder, you slowly turn up the volume until they exhibit hearing as a way to rate how well they can hear. It is not a digital thing nor is the a definition for intellegence, that was Turing's point in the test. Intellegence is what intellegence does but at this point general intellegence is a subjective call. That is why people have to ask questions to try an see if effective general intellegence has been achieved.
And yes it is fooling people given that many would say that intellegence comes from that indefinable human quality. To be human has a whole range of behaviours of which intellegence is one. So in that sense we are talking about maybe building a partial human, maybe one with flattening of affect or autistic, one that is missing much, but it can talk and solve problems. The trick is what standard to use. The Turing test just says that the program has fooled the testers in identifying it as a machine. So in that sense it is yes fooling. Just as the gender test it was copied from where someone has to guess the gender of hidden individual by asking questions to determain if they are male or female. Usually the one that is 'it' is trying to fool the questioner.
Again the Turing test is a subjective test by the questioner. The machine does not have to pass "All" tests. For general intellengence there is too much of a problem state to possibly test everything so the Turing test is designed as a spot check by and individual or individuals to see if things check out.
On the contrary, the Turning test is exactly about fooling some people. That's the whole point or more precisly, to come up with an effective imitation of intellegent behaviour such that it is indistinguishable from a human intellegence.
He was using a black box test. You send a question in and get an answer out, just like the Gender game it was designed around. "Intellegence is as Intellegence does" where we abstract out all but the rational components that we describe as intellegence and not the "stlye" or "emotional" complents we might associate as other characteristics of humans.
As to competency, I think the Turing test does not set a standard for who the questioner is or what questions to ask. If an AI program can act intellegently enough to fool any person then it has achieve some level of not only language capability but some level of problem solving capability.
Now that begs the question, if the said program has some language capability and some problem solving capability, lets say to solve a completely new problem that it has never seen before, then do we say it has understanding?
Which begs the question, what is understanding, that is not just language ability and problem solving? Maybe we are just complicated machines with a big ego and and a software bug that feeds back and makes us self aware.
I think it was Turing that talked about building a machine that passed the Turing test and one that you built to only tell the truth. If you asked it if it actually thought or was self aware and it said "Yes" would you believe it?
Sorry, I was not arguing for nor supporting the idea of the exteded copyright, merely that its original purpose had purpose. An example the the Sullivan song "With Cat Like Tread" in its stolen form "Hail Hail the gangs all here" is still credited to Theodore Morse but Sullivan is given co-credit. Here are some links showing that point.
1. Original authors should have copyright for some reasonable period, 35 years sounds good to me (max).
2. It should not be a commodity that can be transferred to a corporation such that a corporation can make big profits after giving a pittance to the creator (the snap on and lettuce crisper examples). Maybe let the creator lease the right but they should maintain the ownership for that period.
I think that will give more individual incentive to create and keep creating to the individual creators not corporations (stock holders, and executives) that get fat profits from someone elses creation.
I think the extended periods only hurt our progress.
A great example of the disinssentives to create work happened with Gilbert and Sullivan on a trip to the U.S. of A with thier new work "Pirates of Penzance". It was s success in England but by the time they opened in New York at least one of their songs had been stolen and was in another show. You may remember the song. It's stolen version is "Hail Hail the Gangs all Hear". You can imagine the economic effect of someone stealing your work. Having it recognized as a hit but someone else getting the rich from it. Where is the incentive of traveling to a country that allows that kind of creative effort theft.
Some nother examples with patents which is the same model for invention as for IP as in copyright was Sears and Snapon tools. They lied to the inventor and cut a cheap deal then reaped enormous profits. Sure sure you can argue but they conciously bilked the guy of his invention and it was proven in court. True it is not a patent violation but my point is the disenssentive of having your creative work stolen.
Another example I heard was from a micro biologist working at the CDC that had an idea for a container that would keep lettuce fresh. He showed it to a plastic container manufacturer before he had a patent and now they have a product that makes them millions and he is just teaching and not getting a cent. The issue for a creator is theft of the idea. It is reasonable that copyright and patent law work to make creators able to benefit from their work, then they can afford to create. I don't think the intent was to create a commodity out of IP such that large companies and large recording labels could own someone elses work and profit, but that is one of its major applications today.
Don't flame me with stupid comments about it serves them right for being dumb. Its the same argument that PC users that get work distroyed because of some worm or virus deserve it or a mugging victim deserves it.
You obvously have not considered the enormity of the landing on the moon for the time. You probably were not alive at the time so you have no life references to go by. It was only about 11 years earlier that we had the technology to launch into space (far behind the Russians because they captured more German rocket scientists after WWII). That was just 10 years after the invention of the transistor (1948). It was because we had small payloads and a space race for national pride that we developed Integrated Circuits to pack more into little satelites.
When you are doing something new. Something extreme and where human life is at stake you tend to do it in careful steps. We don't just throw people into space. The technology and the methodologies to do it carefully take a lot of time. And to do it in 11 years from the time we first put grapefruit sized objects into space is remarkable.
We did not have the computing power to model fluid flows past surfaces or through high velocity nozzles like we do today. It all had to be built and tested and tweeked and retested, but we got it done and got there. Not without some problems but we got there.
Now things are a little easier. We have more materials technologies, we have more sensor technologies, we have more computing power probably in our game boys than was available to be on the Moon vehicles. You have to understand what we had to work with at the time to understand that it was truly cutting edge and done a glorious acheivement of mankind.
But then reguarding Bush's Mar's thing. I think he just wanted to get a foot in the door of having something else to remember him besides the devastation of the Fedral Government and the Federal Budget and the Judical System and the Social Safety net and the Education system in this country. I think he created a war to replace that issue because he was not getting enough traction on that issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, Thats so Old Testement.
"You are NOTHING but a political singularity, and infinitesimal point that emits no light, but plenty of sound and fury signifying nothing."
I think his point is well stated, that credentials don't always express the caliber or qualifications of a person. Your critisim of him chanting next, or the above rant seems to go counter to your critisim of him "You cannot debate."
It seems you can not debate either, given that measuring stick. (pot and black kettle problem).
It would seem that this Griffin character is possibly a credential collector and if he has been elected to an acedemic society, we know he is also very political. If you want hotbeds of political infighting, go to a university. You would think that the scientific community was of one mind. They in-fight incessantly. The process of science seems to be futhered by one scientist attacking anothers research or defending their own, with hopefully some good stable science being the only thing left. So it is not suprising that Griffin has his own fairly strong ideas about how things have been done in the past and I am sure that he will politically further the cause of science and space exploration stearing the process along his own lines when he can. But it does seem to me that his comments about the historical process and the current state of designs is only self serving. (reguardless of his many many degrees)
Better yet he just Shuts Up. There is that Texas style of management that is very opinionated and has to dis- the past to build up his Management image as a fixer and someone who know the direction to head. Too many times we see this only to find out they don't have a clue. Let's hope that's not the case here.
You know what perfect hindsight looks like?
Exactly my point on Iraq. Faultly logic in, faulty logic to stay.
But the ISS is a different matter. It was the right thing to do to de-millitarize space and have a platform where all the world (well the developed countrys) could work together to start to reap the benifits from that new platform in the sky with micro gravity and a veiw of the stars that we don't have here on earth.
There was a lot of research that went into the ISS but most of it is expressed as the engineering to solve the issues of creating a good stable maintainable manned facility in space. The first work is building the platform that the research can happen on. The goal is to provide the world's scientists and industry a new research facility to develop new and better science and technology for all our futures. It was not a waste, it is not a waste, it will not be a waste.
You build the plane before you load in the passengers to take the trips. You have to do things in the proper order and not be too impatient. This is a long term project. The problem is short term thinking that micro manages scientific research.
What we are really lacking in the current legislative and executive branches is the "Vision Thing". Bush with his Cowboy "Yahoo" lets go to Mars space race mentality is wanting to re-kindle the cold war environment of international competition that just wastes your dollars and my dollars.
Scientists know about the benefits of cooperation. Thats how science progresses. It's the polititians that are greedy and possesive and try to hold back the advances of mankind because they haven't gotten their cut of the process, or their friends in industry that support them haven't gotten their cut.
What we need to do is realize things like there is Global Warming and that we are responsible for it and there are things we can do about it and to listen to the scientist and take real action, not "Well it will adversly effect my business friends so I'll find some detractors and hold them up as reasons for doubt so I can back out of Global Warming treaties, cause I don't want to pay the price for our past mistakes, let our grandchildren do it when were not here anymore". As one clear example where the current politics ignores the facts, and/or the clear advice of the scientific community. Another example of this old "I wish I lived in the Dark Ages again, as a King of course" is the administrations comments on Intellegent Design. Can the inquisition be far behind (seems like they have inquisitors in training right now).
Did you personally sign the Geneva Convention, No well sorry.
AIDS though I don't know that this would cure that. For the others that continue to take steroids or other medication that suppress the immune system, especially in transplant and bypass recoveries, I think kefir would have a hard time fighting up stream because they are continually taking medication that causes the suppression of the immune system. But wouldn't it be nice if it helped.
Very good point. I guess we have come up with our own modern version of a good environment for plague.
Those are very comforting words. If you add international travel and the extreme speed that people can flee an infested area, we may be able to combine the best of both plagues. Say in a crowded refugee camp in Africa with a large number of AIDS victims. Well it would be easier under those circumstanses to quarentine the lot and let the plague die out in that large group quickly.
Not sure which category "slow" of "fast" that particular form a plague falls but the avian flu seems to have a 50% mortality rate among normal people. Can you imagine among AIDS victims?
If you saw the movie with Robin Williams about a doctor that found a treatment for severly autistic patients that brought them back to full life for awhile until the treatment lost its effect and the went back to an unresponsive state. The same can be seen happening with modern antibiotics. The things it used to treat have evolved past and around those treatments so there are more and more desease resistant strains that we have no cure for. In another hundred years we may end up where we started with just as many pathogens killing us as was the case before antibiotics were invented.
Its our grandchildren that may suffer and die because of our irresponsible use of modern medicine. I know my father had to have 6 operations including 3 leg bypass operations and an artificial knee removed and replaced because a strain of bacteria has become antibiotic resistant because we have miss used that technology. He lost 2 years of his life being essentially bed ridden. So I see both sides, the benefit and the cost. If you don't realize there is a cost for unrestrained behaviour, or if you think that modern medicine cures problems for good you had better do some more research.
My point was that modern medicine with transplant patients and other patients on cortical steroids and related drugs have comprimised immune systems which means if a nasty pandemic occures they are at extremely high risk. The avian flue is an example. Just last night in Nightline they talks about the fact that there is "NO" vacine for it as yet and if it mutates to a human to human transmission we could be looking at an epidemic that would rival the 1918 outbreak of Spanish Flu which if I remember right killed about 200,000 in this country alone. The vacine would take about 6mo to create after the pandemic started and they said that no living human has ever encountered this before so there is not natural immunities build up anywhere. They say about a 50% mortality rate from what they have seen.
In the article they talk about a nasty version of Plague, well if is gets out I think no one living has build up immunity for that either, so we could be in for an interesting year.
But on the other hand we may have shot ourselves in the foot with our modern technologies as well as having AIDS so prevalent (esp in Africa) so there are large populations of compromised immune systems. We also have transplant patients and other people on steroids walking around with compromised immune systems. If the plauge (or avian flu) gets out we have some fertile fields for them to grow in that were not present in previous centuries. So things will not be simplier and if antibotic resistant strains appear we are in deep shit. We have seen that already with some of the strep and staf strains getting harder and harder to cure (my father spent 2yrs fightning Mersa (hour whatever the acronym is) and have to be vigilent continuously to prevent an outbreak.
Don't think modern technology is just a solution and not part of the problem.
On the contrary, plauge spreads from the fleas on rats biting other rats and humans and other animals. I think we have a lot to worry about. Especially with other catastorphies on the horizon like the avian flu. Link that with a lot of AIDS compromised immune systems and all those other people on steroids and other medication that compromises the immune system and we have a unique situatation that has not existed before when pandemics were present.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
The concensous among scientists is that global warming is occuring and that man-made sources of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is causing this warming.
I think we can all agree that global warming is occuring. The current theories I have heard mention an average increase in global water temperature of only 2-3 degrees as enough to melt the Ice caps. That alone is a more immediate danger, as the cold areas are part of the weather systems dynamic. I suspect that we would see a more dramatic effect from that than hurricanes increasing. But our weather models are crude at this point, and we can't even predict the track they are going to take. I think that even with more complete data we probably wouldn't have the computing power or good enough models still.
When fooling would the entire weather system I would think we would err on the side of conservatism.
" Despite your depressing analysis, things are not getting worse"
,Kyoto is a start, we will find that we have to move to high ground everwhere.
l
8 1
Whether the other poster was correct or not your anaylsis that things are not getting worse is incorrect. I think if nothing else the size of the Yearly Ozone hole over tha Antarctic is one of the solid pieces of evidence that that is true.
Some links to back up the connection of Hurricane and global warming (not making judgement of who is politically responible for the situation but if we don't act soon politialy/globally
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hrd_sub/dynamics.htm
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=181#more-1
But then if it really is the Armed services, I would think would want several other features not typical to commercial email systems, like ability to monitor mail for terroist and treason monitoring, to have secure mail for classified communications with mappings of the 20 some clearance levels to email classification levels, and possibly the ability to purge information from the system, but that last requirement would have been added since they found that Corporate Shreading was defendable if there was a policy in place for it.
If it is government there are so many other requirements we usually don't think about for a system like this.
And I thought it was just Bush's incompetence.
Well I left out the ... thinking it too much. You could get into a lispest nomenclature but then it might take away from the central point that there was incompetence, the director of FEMA appears from history and actions to not be the man for the job and Bush appointed him. Someone needs to take some responsibility for our people dying of food and water deprivation. But I know the figure at the top is well greased and any criticism slides off like a it does in a pig wresting contest.
Its not right
Well he did appoint the man in charge, someone who had been on the board of International Arabian Horse Association. He seems to have left there under a cloud about contributions to their legal defense fund and immediately got a job as FEMA director. I think he is highly qualified in disaster planning, unfortunately not disaster releif planning.
http://www.denverpost.com/katrina/ci_2999761
I think Bush can take some heat for this kind of miss-use of the public trust. These are not choice political plums to be given to big contributers or supporters but to qualified hard working capable individuals with credentials for the job. Especially when the lives of our mother and fathers and sons and brothers and daughters and uncles and neices are involved.
The buck needs to stop where the fundemental problems stem from, not only where the problems show up.
"they just can't do it online" and if you don't file online you need to find the paper forms, Fill them out (better have the instructions so you dont answer the questions wrong), then find somewhere to mail it or take it in. Which has to then be physically routed to some processing center with a person reading your handwritting and typing it in (hopefully your paper has not gotten wet and the ink ran, or the typest can under your handwritting). Probably that document is verified (if done right), and then and only then can they start to process your claim. Already we have the built in week (minimum) for FEMA to respond.
You don't need javascript at all. You can let your server check your inputs. It is only when you are trying to be too fancy and get outside the bounds of the Standards that you run into trouble.
For an application like a FEMA claim form I would think the most important concern would be access rather than flash.
I have found that the reason you find this kind of nonsense is incompetent programmers or "Web Designers" using proprietary tools that generate non-standard code (so you don't need to hire programmers). I would think that government oversight would have identified this issue before now. I am sure others have complained to them, as I will as a concerned citizen. But not right now, they have other things to worry about for a few weeks/months/years.
No thats having advanced incompetence in the White House.
Sorry I'm lost here in a maze of twisting little passageways.
"If it has to pass all tests, there's no rational scientific reason to test it against anything but your strongest subjects."
I don't think the Turing test requires passing "All tests". If you look at humans, they come in all shapes and levels of intellegence. You don't day an individual is intellegent or not, absoulutely not, you test them against tests that ranks their intellegence relative to others. So for individuals you don't hit them with a 10 pounder, you slowly turn up the volume until they exhibit hearing as a way to rate how well they can hear. It is not a digital thing nor is the a definition for intellegence, that was Turing's point in the test. Intellegence is what intellegence does but at this point general intellegence is a subjective call. That is why people have to ask questions to try an see if effective general intellegence has been achieved.
And yes it is fooling people given that many would say that intellegence comes from that indefinable human quality. To be human has a whole range of behaviours of which intellegence is one. So in that sense we are talking about maybe building a partial human, maybe one with flattening of affect or autistic, one that is missing much, but it can talk and solve problems. The trick is what standard to use. The Turing test just says that the program has fooled the testers in identifying it as a machine. So in that sense it is yes fooling. Just as the gender test it was copied from where someone has to guess the gender of hidden individual by asking questions to determain if they are male or female. Usually the one that is 'it' is trying to fool the questioner.
Again the Turing test is a subjective test by the questioner. The machine does not have to pass "All" tests. For general intellengence there is too much of a problem state to possibly test everything so the Turing test is designed as a spot check by and individual or individuals to see if things check out.
On the contrary, the Turning test is exactly about fooling some people. That's the whole point or more precisly, to come up with an effective imitation of intellegent behaviour such that it is indistinguishable from a human intellegence.
He was using a black box test. You send a question in and get an answer out, just like the Gender game it was designed around. "Intellegence is as Intellegence does" where we abstract out all but the rational components that we describe as intellegence and not the "stlye" or "emotional" complents we might associate as other characteristics of humans.
As to competency, I think the Turing test does not set a standard for who the questioner is or what questions to ask. If an AI program can act intellegently enough to fool any person then it has achieve some level of not only language capability but some level of problem solving capability.
Now that begs the question, if the said program has some language capability and some problem solving capability, lets say to solve a completely new problem that it has never seen before, then do we say it has understanding?
Which begs the question, what is understanding, that is not just language ability and problem solving? Maybe we are just complicated machines with a big ego and and a software bug that feeds back and makes us self aware.
I think it was Turing that talked about building a machine that passed the Turing test and one that you built to only tell the truth. If you asked it if it actually thought or was self aware and it said "Yes" would you believe it?
Sorry, I was not arguing for nor supporting the idea of the exteded copyright, merely that its original purpose had purpose. An example the the Sullivan song "With Cat Like Tread" in its stolen form "Hail Hail the gangs all here" is still credited to Theodore Morse but Sullivan is given co-credit. Here are some links showing that point.
a ilthegangsallhere.shtml
a sp?exhibitId=249
http://207.44.240.63/~lyricsp/alpha/songs/h/hailh
http://www.songwritershalloffame.org/exhibit_bio.
I really have several points.
1. Original authors should have copyright for some reasonable period, 35 years sounds good to me (max).
2. It should not be a commodity that can be transferred to a corporation such that a corporation can make big profits after giving a pittance to the creator (the snap on and lettuce crisper examples). Maybe let the creator lease the right but they should maintain the ownership for that period.
I think that will give more individual incentive to create and keep creating to the individual creators not corporations (stock holders, and executives) that get fat profits from someone elses creation.
I think the extended periods only hurt our progress.
A great example of the disinssentives to create work happened with Gilbert and Sullivan on a trip to the U.S. of A with thier new work "Pirates of Penzance". It was s success in England but by the time they opened in New York at least one of their songs had been stolen and was in another show. You may remember the song. It's stolen version is "Hail Hail the Gangs all Hear". You can imagine the economic effect of someone stealing your work. Having it recognized as a hit but someone else getting the rich from it. Where is the incentive of traveling to a country that allows that kind of creative effort theft.
Some nother examples with patents which is the same model for invention as for IP as in copyright was Sears and Snapon tools. They lied to the inventor and cut a cheap deal then reaped enormous profits. Sure sure you can argue but they conciously bilked the guy of his invention and it was proven in court. True it is not a patent violation but my point is the disenssentive of having your creative work stolen.
Another example I heard was from a micro biologist working at the CDC that had an idea for a container that would keep lettuce fresh. He showed it to a plastic container manufacturer before he had a patent and now they have a product that makes them millions and he is just teaching and not getting a cent. The issue for a creator is theft of the idea. It is reasonable that copyright and patent law work to make creators able to benefit from their work, then they can afford to create. I don't think the intent was to create a commodity out of IP such that large companies and large recording labels could own someone elses work and profit, but that is one of its major applications today.
Don't flame me with stupid comments about it serves them right for being dumb. Its the same argument that PC users that get work distroyed because of some worm or virus deserve it or a mugging victim deserves it.
I know I am going to switch browsers so my browsing habits are easier for law enforcement and other hackers to track. Yah right.
Now you must be from Australia. Stand on your head and it will appear correct.
You obvously have not considered the enormity of the landing on the moon for the time. You probably were not alive at the time so you have no life references to go by. It was only about 11 years earlier that we had the technology to launch into space (far behind the Russians because they captured more German rocket scientists after WWII). That was just 10 years after the invention of the transistor (1948). It was because we had small payloads and a space race for national pride that we developed Integrated Circuits to pack more into little satelites.
When you are doing something new. Something extreme and where human life is at stake you tend to do it in careful steps. We don't just throw people into space. The technology and the methodologies to do it carefully take a lot of time. And to do it in 11 years from the time we first put grapefruit sized objects into space is remarkable.
We did not have the computing power to model fluid flows past surfaces or through high velocity nozzles like we do today. It all had to be built and tested and tweeked and retested, but we got it done and got there. Not without some problems but we got there.
Now things are a little easier. We have more materials technologies, we have more sensor technologies, we have more computing power probably in our game boys than was available to be on the Moon vehicles. You have to understand what we had to work with at the time to understand that it was truly cutting edge and done a glorious acheivement of mankind.
But then reguarding Bush's Mar's thing. I think he just wanted to get a foot in the door of having something else to remember him besides the devastation of the Fedral Government and the Federal Budget and the Judical System and the Social Safety net and the Education system in this country. I think he created a war to replace that issue because he was not getting enough traction on that issue.