See, this made me laugh. I've been programming since I was a girl, but for some damn reason, I find remote controls completely terrifying. I once remarked to a guy, "I could write the embedded microcontroller code that runs that little box over there, but the remote control is beyond me."
I think maybe it's all those freaky buttons. I don't know what all the symbols and acronyms are. And the guy -- he's always got, like, eight of the things, for different devices. So, he's in the other room, and he's all, "Hey, could you turn down the volume? I'm trying to make a phone call." And you're like, "AAAAGH, there are eight controllers!" And he's like, "It's the SONY!" And you go digging through the pile of controllers, and find the Sony, and frantically look for the volume adjuster, but instead, it's got some unconventional knob thing. You turn it, and the volume seems to go down, but when you set it back down in the pile of controllers, it bumps some mysterious button on another controller that gets the TV into some state where it's not actually showing TV anymore. And he's all, "Hey, why'd you turn off the TV?" And you're like, "I didn't turn the TV off! I... I, uh, bumped something! I don't know! The TV said something about DVD VCR DISH CABLE ANTENNA TV1 TV2 MOOSEHEAD ORBITAL-MIND-CONTROL-LASERS..." And he's all, "Why were you messing with THAT controller?" Then, he tells you to get the Toshiba or the Samsung, or some other controller, and hit a button with some unfamiliar acronym that you can't find anywhere on the damn thing. Yeah. I hate the things.
As for my media center PC, I mostly used it to get out of buying a bunch of that equipment you'd normally need extra remotes for. Also, playing computer games on a 52" LCD is so delicious that I almost don't care about ever doing anything else with it, anyway.:-)
I have several female friends (non slashdot reading females) who have absolutely no interest in CS.
I'm just hazarding a guess here, but I bet you have several male friends who have absolutely no interest in CS, too. This may seem like a novel concept, but it turns out that most people really aren't that interested in CS.
If it's natural affinity, why has it fluctuated over the years? Whatever the reason for the gap, the real concern expressed in the article is that the gap seems to be getting wider. Obviously, women aren't changing in some way to have less of a natural affinity, so something else must be going on.
I talked in one of my other posts about the fact that because the AP Computer Science course at my high school wasn't part of the normal science curriculum, you had to go out of your way to take the course, and the girls who took the class were exceptional, because a girl was only going to go out of her way to sign up for the class, in the first place, if she was damn confident about her skills. So, yeah, I think your point about confidence is a valid one. I'm not, however, sure if your proposed solution is ideal or not. On the one hand, I had a really good pair-programming experiences when I was a teenager. On the other hand, I've heard a lot of horror stories about group projects gone horribly wrong, at the university level. I seem to recall that my poor sister took a class where she ended up with a weak team, and had to drag the dead weight to the finish line, chained to her ankle the whole way.
I don't buy this at all. I think that most of the "programmers" that fell out after the.com bust weren't career programmers, anyway. There were a lot of people during that period who took up programming for a quick buck. I don't know any true programmers -- male or female -- who involuntarily stayed unemployed, after the dust settled. There are still plenty of programming jobs out there for people with the right skills.
My optimistic theory as to why the widening gap is happening is because there's just too much interesting stuff going on in science right now -- especially in the biological sciences, where women are already numerically well-represented. While I have a CS degree, myself, if I were a teenager today, I'd be sorely tempted to go into genetics or epidemiology. As a science-inclined young woman, there are all kinds of really interesting topics to get into right now, and it's fairly easy for Computer Science to get lost in the shuffle.
The science/math/technology magnet I went to for high school required us to choose one of three tracks to go down: Engineering, Physical Sciences, or Biology. The AP Computer Science course was not on any of these three tracks; it was a bastard stepchild of the math department. You had to go out of your way looking for it, or you never even knew it was there. If it had been offered as an elective on one of the official tracks, I guarantee that there would have been more girls in that class. As it was, there were only two of us, and we put most of the boys to shame. I'd be surprised if any girl ever went out of her way looking for a CS class unless she was already pretty damn confident about her skills.
I think you raise an excellent point. This is purely anecdotal, but when I studied computer science back in the early '90s, I definitely noticed that a disproportionate number of the women in my classes were foreign-born. (Even more interesting, there was a larger proportion of racial minorities among the women than there were among the men.) 100% of the female grad students I encountered in the department were from Russia. If we have fewer foreign-born students going to our universities for some reason, I think it would absolutely affect the male/female ratio in the CS programs.
...increased taxes, less incentive for doctors to be doctors, less medical innovation, etc. etc. etc.
Australia's universal coverage system is called "Medicare." The Australian "Medicare Levy" is 1.5% of taxable income. (Since you like citations: http://www.livingin-australia.com/income-tax-australia.html) Australians are welcome to buy private health insurance, in addition to Medicare. People who are more wealthy are expected to buy some kind of private hospital insurance, or their Medicare Levy goes up to 2.5%.
The United States has two safety net systems, called "Medicare," and "Medicaid." Medicare is only available to people of retirement age and people with certain disabilities. Medicaid only covers poor people who belong to certain designated eligibility groups. For Medicare, alone, our employers must pay 1.45% of our income, and we must pay an additional 1.45%, coming to a total of 2.9%. Yes, we are already paying more for coverage that most of us don't benefit from. And that's before we even count Medicaid.
So, universal healthcare doesn't necessarily have to cost more. That begs the question: Why are we paying so damn much for Medicare, already? It's probably because our healthcare costs more, across the board. Some folks like to argue that it's because we have the best healthcare in the world. However, our national health stats just plain don't back that up. Worse, some American health insurance companies are starting to look at sending patients overseas for medical procedures, because it's cheaper. I don't know what the hell would be "less incentive for doctors to be doctors" than having their jobs outsourced to India.
Our healthcare in the US is too expensive, but if the insurance industry is now looking at sending people overseas, they have effectively thrown their hands up in the air over the matter. No good answers are forthcoming from our allmighty free market, so far. I'm not holding my breath.
That depends on whether we're talking about the test Turing described, or your interpretation of it.;-)
Just because these silly "Turing prizes" tout dumb chatbots as "almost passing" doesn't mean any of them will actually pass a proper Turing test. To start with, it's perfectly within the rules for a Turing test to give the computer a lesson in anything, including first grade spelling and advanced calculus, then ask it to solve a problem based on that lesson. That tests the machine's ability to learn.
You could also give it a Shakespeare play and ask it to critique it. Or the DCMA and ask how it's opinion. Or give it an entire graduate education and then ask it to produce some novel research in order to get it's PhD.
Perfectly within what rules? A graduate education is well beyond the parlor-game-like scope of Turing's own description of the hypothetical test, and it is certainly beyond anyone's capabilities in the scant 25 minutes that Loebner's rules allow for. The test you're describing is not a Turing Test, in the traditional sense. Besides, even a relatively bright human being is going to have trouble learning advanced calculus over a strictly text-only interface.
My true issues with the test are as follows:
The scope of the traditional Turing Test is inadequate for determining intelligence.
The Turing Test has distracted us from many of the real successes of AI.
Passing as a human is not a suitable test of intelligence, for a machine. Humans are extremely flawed in ways that intelligent machines have no reason to emulate. Typos and other quirks that have been deliberately added to a program to create the illusion of humanity are no sign of intelligence, whatsoever, and should not be rewarded as such.
The design of the Turing Test encourages programmers to create AIs that have text-only interfaces, but that may not ultimately be an optimal environment for cultivating intelligent behavior in a machine.
What I was getting at with my post is that a chatbot is still just a chatbot. While we may have programs that can drive cars, or come awfully close to it, a chatbot can't drive a car. While we have programs that can figure out ways to circumvent electronic circuit patents, chatbots can't do that, either. They just chat. While chatbots do reflect some advancements (and profound weaknesses) in our current knowledge representation and language recognition technology, the ability to engage in small talk is, in general, is a shockingly narrow definition of "intelligence." While a fully Turing Test passing chatbot might be capable of discussing mountains of mindless trivia about the world, it would still probably just be a particularly sophisticated database with an intuitive natural-language interface, and a little bit of silly artifice slapped on, to create the illusion of life. It would arguably have less practical intelligence than a typical three-year-old child -- even if the three-year-old is incapable of carrying on a cogent conversation about the Chinese Room argument.
The Loebner Prize Contest is to AI as a flugtag is to aerospace engineering. The press all shows up to record the event, and everyone holds their breath, hoping that one of these days, one of those beautiful byzantine art machines will really, truly fly.
So far, we've proven that we're pretty good at making domain-specific AI, but not so good at developing machines with general intelligence. The fallacy behind the Turing Test is that if a machine can carry on a conversation well enough to trick a human being, it must have general intelligence. However, the problem is that chatbots are yet another domain-specific AI, optimized for conversation. They aren't even capable of many of the rudimentary intelligent tasks that other types of AIs can perform.
Hmm. This is all quite interesting to me. I'm a caucasian who plays dark-skinned avatars in MMOs about 75% of the time. I'm not even sure why. I think it might be because I grew up in a black neighborhood, and if I'm in a place with 100% white people around, it feels downright creepy, like everyone has been replaced by plastic Stepford robots, or something.
If there is indeed bias against dark-skinned avatars, it must be really subtle, because I've never really noticed it, when I've been playing mine. Largely, my reception has been as positive (or negative) as anyone else's. The only time my avatar selection ever seemed to have a negative effect on my social interactions, it was gender-related, and not race-related.
I have definitely noticed inadequate art selections for dark-skinned avatars, in many games. Often, you have only one face option available, or only one hair option (if any) that looks good on your character. In some cases, an entire race of characters who (based on the fiction of the game) should have had medium or dark skin have instead been given light beige skin.
Of course, this is largely due to the perception in the US (and probably in Europe) that there's just no market in brown fantasy characters. Ursula LeGuin has never even been able to get appropriate cover art for her Earthsea books, because of this. It's kind of a self-perpetuating problem, though. Both the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres are big snakes, eating their own tails. Creators are fans are creators. Everything is so very derivative that if you don't break the rules a little, now and then, these genres will just devolve into a sticky, noxious goo of self indulgent fanfic. (Some would argue that we're already there.)
There isn't much between minesweeper and Unreal for non-dedicated PC gamers.
You need to try the indie scene. There's a ton of stuff out there in this range. Check out Manifesto Games, for some examples.
Much of the piracy is simply limited time and money budgets and wanting to try lots of games. They are not priced for casual gamers.
The developer who initiated this thread is an indie developer. Indie games often have free demos, are priced way below $50, and cover a whole range of tastes, from casual to hardcore, and people still pirate their games.
Piracy isn't really about price sensitivity. In fact, almost none of the reasons that I've seen pirates give are really valid. They're usually rationalizations, after-the-fact. Here are some examples:
Games are too expensive. Sorry, people pirate games at every price point.
The games for sale are all too low-quality to pay money for. But they aren't too low-quality for you to play?
Indie games are too low-quality, but non-indie games are too expensive. Why pay for the Focus you can afford, when you can steal a Lamborghini for free?
Information has no value. Then we might as well mothball the United States, because we don't manufacture anything anymore.
I never would have paid for games, anyway, so I'm not a "lost sale." We'll never really know for sure.
This is why people really pirate games:
It's easy to get pirated copies of games -- sometimes easier than getting (or using) the legit copies -- especially if there's particularly onerous DRM on the legit copies.
If people have a working copy of a piece of software, they feel entitled to use it, regardless of where it came from. I'd argue that this is normal, psychologically-speaking. In fact, it takes an unusual effort to rationalize not using software that you have your hot little hands on.
In some countries, the prices are well-and-truly too high. Australians pay way more for video games than Americans do, for example. That's nuts -- especially now that our dollars are almost the same (yikes).
People legitimately want to try games before they buy them. Sometimes, no matter how noble the original intentions, they never get around to buying, even when they like a game. Or, they finish the game before they get around to buying it.
There are usually no personal consequences, whatsoever, for pirating game software. It's not even something kids are punished by their parents for, usually. In fact, their parents may be pirating games, themselves.
The societal consequences for game software piracy aren't easy for most people to understand, or even necessarily believe. The crime feels victimless, even though it isn't.
Here are some lessons:
Legitimate free trial software reduces piracy. Consumers have every reason to want to try your software before buying it, and they're going to be more inclined to buy the retail version, if they don't already have a working pirated copy of the full retail version in-hand.
On a related note, releasing your own free version of your game (whether demo, limited, or what have you) into the wild allows you to have some control over what is out there. There will still be unrestricted versions in the wild, but having an official copy in the pipe means people will find it when they look for pirated copies.
Game prices in foreign countries should be adjusted to account for relative currency changes. Currently, people in some countries really are being ripped off, and the developers are not the ones getting the big payoff.
If people have to fight your DRM to play legit copies of your game, they will look for pirated copies. Don't treat your legiti
I think that open source software would show great usability improvements if open source developers had less contempt for average users. I don't know how many times I've seen people humbly request a much-needed usability improvement, only to be flamed by defensive developers and their fanboys, insisting that the poor requester simply doesn't have enough familiarity with the application (or technical prowess, or intellect, or taste, or sophistication) to appreciate the "genius" of the interface. If we want business people and grandmas using open source software, we need to grow the hell up, and stop treating them like they're a bunch of dimwits. If your software is hard for them to use, your software is hard for them to use, and no amount of elitist BS is going to magically change that.
Usability isn't supposed to be tied to the way you're used to do things, but to how intuitive it is.
That's only true up to a point. I was involved (as a guinea pig) in some research at my University where they determined that familiarity is very important -- not in the sense of "radio dials," but in the sense of knowing-where-to-look-for-things. They were testing menus that re-order entries adaptively based on what selections you make most often vs. menus that had items in fixed positions. Across the board, people found items faster in the menus that kept their items in fixed positions.
On my laptop, I vastly prefer "phone home" systems to CD-in-drive style protection. I sure as hell don't want to haul around CDs for every game I have installed on my laptop.
I've had a laptop fall a meter onto a hardwood floor in a foreign country, simply due to a mishap involving a large lacy doily on the top of the dresser in the room I was staying in. Humorously, the fall fixed more things than it broke. Years later, however, I had a laptop as my primary (and only) machine while living abroad, and it went everywhere with me. That was the one that had the hard drive failure, and THAT, above all else, is what makes me long for a hard drive without the moving parts.
One day, at my first salaried job, one of the secretaries was nearly in tears. When I asked her what the matter was, she explained to me that a board member scolded her and told her that a woman should never show up to work without makeup on. I said, "If he EVER says ANYTHING like that to you EVER again, you send him over to my desk, right away. I would LOVE to hear him tell me that in person, so I can quit my job right in front of his face."
I love programming. Do executives get to program? No. So, why the hell would I want to be an executive, and put up with idiots like that guy?
Now, don't go blaming Black Art for the evils of the two-party system. Neither Black Art, nor people like him/her are the reason we are locked into a two-party system. The reason we are locked into a two-party system is because of the way our voting system works. Black Art is merely exposing one of the darker consequences of our flawed system: tactical voting. Tactical voting is inherent in our system, and is not going to go away tomorrow, so if you give a damn about this stuff, settle in with some coffee, and read up.
The United States uses a First Past the Post (FPP) system for voting for presidents. This system is not very expressive. We have one vote, and that one vote is a 100% vote. We have no way to indicate preference (or, for that matter intense distaste) across our slate of available candidates. We have no way to throw our weight behind a beloved long-shot, without giving up the opportunity to also express a preference for a candidate who has a greater likelihood of success, or to express an intense opposition to another. We cast our ballot impotently, able to paint in one color, when really, our will is better expressed with many.
In our current system, the rise of a third (or fourth, or fifth) dominant party is downright dangerous. The more you divide the field, the smaller a percentage of the population needs to support a candidate for that candidate to win. A radical nutbag faction could throw its weight intensely behind one terrible candidate, and win the Presidency, when multiple more reasonable candidates were available. Moreover, even when confronted with the atrocities this terrible president has committed, the majority may find it impossible to unseat him, because the people have chosen disparate candidates to throw their weight behind.
Having two dominant parties masks this flaw, and protects us from it, to a degree. We're still often electing presidents who couldn't even manage to scrape together a majority of the electorate (and, in some cases, couldn't even get the most votes, period), but we haven't seen the worst it can do... yet.
Duverger's Law even goes so far as to suggest that two party systems develop spontaneously, in voting systems such as ours.
If you hate the two-party system (as you seem to), you shouldn't be trying to convince realists like Black Art that they're wrong. Because, well, frankly, he isn't. What you should be trying to do is encourage our country to choose a new system for voting. It's not such a radical idea. There are many countries that use other approaches. Wikipedia has a great article on voting systems, if you want to know about some alternatives.
The last time I used 'net cafes extensively abroad, I was in Portugal, and I found myself sitting next to chain-smokers constantly. A little over a month ago, new restrictions went into effect, but given that the head of the enforcement agency was caught violating the law on the first day, I think it's fair to assume that enforcement is, as of yet, rather lax. I think I encountered 'net cafe smokers in Japan, as well, and I'm told it can be pretty darn smokey in the PC bangs in South Korea. I expect smoking to be less regulated in some developing countries. I don't know where mitbeaver is from, but it can be surprising to Americans, who aren't used to such ubiquitous smoking anymore.
One thing to be aware of, if you take the 'net cafe route, is that in some countries, you need a high cigarette smoke tolerance. This is improving in many countries, but not everywhere. They don't smoke wussy American cigarettes everywhere, either. A lot of places prefer much harsher stuff. If you have allergies, or other problems with smoke, definitely check out the situation wherever you're going, first.
"-you can buy flip-flops when you get there (you will want to hit a beach eventually) and ditch them when you leave. In fact the same goes for just about everything you think you might need for some portion of your trip. Only pack things you'll need for the whole trip, it's worth spending money on the road to save a few kgs."
Agreed on this, as long as you don't contribute too much to waste. Color me weird, but I have a huge amount of fun going on scavenger hunts for travel necessities in foreign countries. The funniest was the time I went into a kusuri in Tokyo, looking for antiseptic for a nasty scrape on my arm. Through a combination of broken Japanese and interpretive dance, the very amused pharmacist gave me something akin to what we call "Bactine" in the US. There was a fair bit of katakana on the bottle, but none of it appeared to be anything even vaguely resembling any language I knew.
I used to travel extensively with one of the old HP Pavilion laptops with the rubber corners (man, I miss those!). The optical drive was starting to get quite dodgy, after a number of years, until one day in Portugal, when it fell from a dresser onto the hardwood floor of my room in the pensão where I was staying. I thought for sure the machine was a goner, but it worked just fine after that. In fact, miraculously, the drop fixed the optical drive.
I think the EeePC/XO advice is solid. These are great machines for just chucking in a bag and hitting the road. Every time I go through an airport with my current boat-anchor of a laptop, I kick myself, and wish I had something smaller.
Notation != Engineering. It is a tool of engineers, but it is not a methodology, and it does not ensure quality work. O-notation, in particular, is useful for describing the efficiency of an algorithm, and thereby discussing the relative tradeoffs of various approaches. That is, it has a value in analysis and communication. Notation can be used to justify your design choices, and it can be used to communicate your design to others (such as your programming team). However, it has no way to guide you the way that the laws of physics guide traditional engineers.
When I was in high school, I was required in one of my engineering classes to build a floating concrete structure. Most of the kids addressed the problem with meek iteration, crafting tiny things that were barely thick enough to stay in one piece. I came into class with a mold I had built, and set about making a large, thick, heavy concrete bowl. All the others swore up and down that it would never float, but I just laughed, and told them to wait and see. On the day we had to demonstrate our designs for our teacher, I marched up with my monstrous concrete salad bowl, and I set it upon the water for the first time. It floated, marvelously. The other students asked me how on earth I did it. I said, "I did the math."
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See, this made me laugh. I've been programming since I was a girl, but for some damn reason, I find remote controls completely terrifying. I once remarked to a guy, "I could write the embedded microcontroller code that runs that little box over there, but the remote control is beyond me."
I think maybe it's all those freaky buttons. I don't know what all the symbols and acronyms are. And the guy -- he's always got, like, eight of the things, for different devices. So, he's in the other room, and he's all, "Hey, could you turn down the volume? I'm trying to make a phone call." And you're like, "AAAAGH, there are eight controllers!" And he's like, "It's the SONY!" And you go digging through the pile of controllers, and find the Sony, and frantically look for the volume adjuster, but instead, it's got some unconventional knob thing. You turn it, and the volume seems to go down, but when you set it back down in the pile of controllers, it bumps some mysterious button on another controller that gets the TV into some state where it's not actually showing TV anymore. And he's all, "Hey, why'd you turn off the TV?" And you're like, "I didn't turn the TV off! I... I, uh, bumped something! I don't know! The TV said something about DVD VCR DISH CABLE ANTENNA TV1 TV2 MOOSEHEAD ORBITAL-MIND-CONTROL-LASERS..." And he's all, "Why were you messing with THAT controller?" Then, he tells you to get the Toshiba or the Samsung, or some other controller, and hit a button with some unfamiliar acronym that you can't find anywhere on the damn thing. Yeah. I hate the things.
As for my media center PC, I mostly used it to get out of buying a bunch of that equipment you'd normally need extra remotes for. Also, playing computer games on a 52" LCD is so delicious that I almost don't care about ever doing anything else with it, anyway. :-)
I'm just hazarding a guess here, but I bet you have several male friends who have absolutely no interest in CS, too. This may seem like a novel concept, but it turns out that most people really aren't that interested in CS.
If it's natural affinity, why has it fluctuated over the years? Whatever the reason for the gap, the real concern expressed in the article is that the gap seems to be getting wider. Obviously, women aren't changing in some way to have less of a natural affinity, so something else must be going on.
I talked in one of my other posts about the fact that because the AP Computer Science course at my high school wasn't part of the normal science curriculum, you had to go out of your way to take the course, and the girls who took the class were exceptional, because a girl was only going to go out of her way to sign up for the class, in the first place, if she was damn confident about her skills. So, yeah, I think your point about confidence is a valid one. I'm not, however, sure if your proposed solution is ideal or not. On the one hand, I had a really good pair-programming experiences when I was a teenager. On the other hand, I've heard a lot of horror stories about group projects gone horribly wrong, at the university level. I seem to recall that my poor sister took a class where she ended up with a weak team, and had to drag the dead weight to the finish line, chained to her ankle the whole way.
I don't buy this at all. I think that most of the "programmers" that fell out after the .com bust weren't career programmers, anyway. There were a lot of people during that period who took up programming for a quick buck. I don't know any true programmers -- male or female -- who involuntarily stayed unemployed, after the dust settled. There are still plenty of programming jobs out there for people with the right skills.
My optimistic theory as to why the widening gap is happening is because there's just too much interesting stuff going on in science right now -- especially in the biological sciences, where women are already numerically well-represented. While I have a CS degree, myself, if I were a teenager today, I'd be sorely tempted to go into genetics or epidemiology. As a science-inclined young woman, there are all kinds of really interesting topics to get into right now, and it's fairly easy for Computer Science to get lost in the shuffle.
The science/math/technology magnet I went to for high school required us to choose one of three tracks to go down: Engineering, Physical Sciences, or Biology. The AP Computer Science course was not on any of these three tracks; it was a bastard stepchild of the math department. You had to go out of your way looking for it, or you never even knew it was there. If it had been offered as an elective on one of the official tracks, I guarantee that there would have been more girls in that class. As it was, there were only two of us, and we put most of the boys to shame. I'd be surprised if any girl ever went out of her way looking for a CS class unless she was already pretty damn confident about her skills.
I think you raise an excellent point. This is purely anecdotal, but when I studied computer science back in the early '90s, I definitely noticed that a disproportionate number of the women in my classes were foreign-born. (Even more interesting, there was a larger proportion of racial minorities among the women than there were among the men.) 100% of the female grad students I encountered in the department were from Russia. If we have fewer foreign-born students going to our universities for some reason, I think it would absolutely affect the male/female ratio in the CS programs.
Australia's universal coverage system is called "Medicare." The Australian "Medicare Levy" is 1.5% of taxable income. (Since you like citations: http://www.livingin-australia.com/income-tax-australia.html) Australians are welcome to buy private health insurance, in addition to Medicare. People who are more wealthy are expected to buy some kind of private hospital insurance, or their Medicare Levy goes up to 2.5%.
The United States has two safety net systems, called "Medicare," and "Medicaid." Medicare is only available to people of retirement age and people with certain disabilities. Medicaid only covers poor people who belong to certain designated eligibility groups. For Medicare, alone, our employers must pay 1.45% of our income, and we must pay an additional 1.45%, coming to a total of 2.9%. Yes, we are already paying more for coverage that most of us don't benefit from. And that's before we even count Medicaid.
So, universal healthcare doesn't necessarily have to cost more. That begs the question: Why are we paying so damn much for Medicare, already? It's probably because our healthcare costs more, across the board. Some folks like to argue that it's because we have the best healthcare in the world. However, our national health stats just plain don't back that up. Worse, some American health insurance companies are starting to look at sending patients overseas for medical procedures, because it's cheaper. I don't know what the hell would be "less incentive for doctors to be doctors" than having their jobs outsourced to India.
Our healthcare in the US is too expensive, but if the insurance industry is now looking at sending people overseas, they have effectively thrown their hands up in the air over the matter. No good answers are forthcoming from our allmighty free market, so far. I'm not holding my breath.
You're missing the point of the Turing test.
That depends on whether we're talking about the test Turing described, or your interpretation of it. ;-)
Just because these silly "Turing prizes" tout dumb chatbots as "almost passing" doesn't mean any of them will actually pass a proper Turing test. To start with, it's perfectly within the rules for a Turing test to give the computer a lesson in anything, including first grade spelling and advanced calculus, then ask it to solve a problem based on that lesson. That tests the machine's ability to learn.
You could also give it a Shakespeare play and ask it to critique it. Or the DCMA and ask how it's opinion. Or give it an entire graduate education and then ask it to produce some novel research in order to get it's PhD.
Perfectly within what rules? A graduate education is well beyond the parlor-game-like scope of Turing's own description of the hypothetical test, and it is certainly beyond anyone's capabilities in the scant 25 minutes that Loebner's rules allow for. The test you're describing is not a Turing Test, in the traditional sense. Besides, even a relatively bright human being is going to have trouble learning advanced calculus over a strictly text-only interface.
My true issues with the test are as follows:
What I was getting at with my post is that a chatbot is still just a chatbot. While we may have programs that can drive cars, or come awfully close to it, a chatbot can't drive a car. While we have programs that can figure out ways to circumvent electronic circuit patents, chatbots can't do that, either. They just chat. While chatbots do reflect some advancements (and profound weaknesses) in our current knowledge representation and language recognition technology, the ability to engage in small talk is, in general, is a shockingly narrow definition of "intelligence." While a fully Turing Test passing chatbot might be capable of discussing mountains of mindless trivia about the world, it would still probably just be a particularly sophisticated database with an intuitive natural-language interface, and a little bit of silly artifice slapped on, to create the illusion of life. It would arguably have less practical intelligence than a typical three-year-old child -- even if the three-year-old is incapable of carrying on a cogent conversation about the Chinese Room argument.
The Loebner Prize Contest is to AI as a flugtag is to aerospace engineering. The press all shows up to record the event, and everyone holds their breath, hoping that one of these days, one of those beautiful byzantine art machines will really, truly fly.
So far, we've proven that we're pretty good at making domain-specific AI, but not so good at developing machines with general intelligence. The fallacy behind the Turing Test is that if a machine can carry on a conversation well enough to trick a human being, it must have general intelligence. However, the problem is that chatbots are yet another domain-specific AI, optimized for conversation. They aren't even capable of many of the rudimentary intelligent tasks that other types of AIs can perform.
Hmm. This is all quite interesting to me. I'm a caucasian who plays dark-skinned avatars in MMOs about 75% of the time. I'm not even sure why. I think it might be because I grew up in a black neighborhood, and if I'm in a place with 100% white people around, it feels downright creepy, like everyone has been replaced by plastic Stepford robots, or something.
If there is indeed bias against dark-skinned avatars, it must be really subtle, because I've never really noticed it, when I've been playing mine. Largely, my reception has been as positive (or negative) as anyone else's. The only time my avatar selection ever seemed to have a negative effect on my social interactions, it was gender-related, and not race-related.
I have definitely noticed inadequate art selections for dark-skinned avatars, in many games. Often, you have only one face option available, or only one hair option (if any) that looks good on your character. In some cases, an entire race of characters who (based on the fiction of the game) should have had medium or dark skin have instead been given light beige skin.
Of course, this is largely due to the perception in the US (and probably in Europe) that there's just no market in brown fantasy characters. Ursula LeGuin has never even been able to get appropriate cover art for her Earthsea books, because of this. It's kind of a self-perpetuating problem, though. Both the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres are big snakes, eating their own tails. Creators are fans are creators. Everything is so very derivative that if you don't break the rules a little, now and then, these genres will just devolve into a sticky, noxious goo of self indulgent fanfic. (Some would argue that we're already there.)
Knowing the mobile companies, they probably charge you for that text message, too.
You need to try the indie scene. There's a ton of stuff out there in this range. Check out Manifesto Games, for some examples.
The developer who initiated this thread is an indie developer. Indie games often have free demos, are priced way below $50, and cover a whole range of tastes, from casual to hardcore, and people still pirate their games.
Piracy isn't really about price sensitivity. In fact, almost none of the reasons that I've seen pirates give are really valid. They're usually rationalizations, after-the-fact. Here are some examples:
This is why people really pirate games:
Here are some lessons:
I think that open source software would show great usability improvements if open source developers had less contempt for average users. I don't know how many times I've seen people humbly request a much-needed usability improvement, only to be flamed by defensive developers and their fanboys, insisting that the poor requester simply doesn't have enough familiarity with the application (or technical prowess, or intellect, or taste, or sophistication) to appreciate the "genius" of the interface. If we want business people and grandmas using open source software, we need to grow the hell up, and stop treating them like they're a bunch of dimwits. If your software is hard for them to use, your software is hard for them to use, and no amount of elitist BS is going to magically change that.
That's only true up to a point. I was involved (as a guinea pig) in some research at my University where they determined that familiarity is very important -- not in the sense of "radio dials," but in the sense of knowing-where-to-look-for-things. They were testing menus that re-order entries adaptively based on what selections you make most often vs. menus that had items in fixed positions. Across the board, people found items faster in the menus that kept their items in fixed positions.
That would be fine by me. Choice is good.
On my laptop, I vastly prefer "phone home" systems to CD-in-drive style protection. I sure as hell don't want to haul around CDs for every game I have installed on my laptop.
I've had a laptop fall a meter onto a hardwood floor in a foreign country, simply due to a mishap involving a large lacy doily on the top of the dresser in the room I was staying in. Humorously, the fall fixed more things than it broke. Years later, however, I had a laptop as my primary (and only) machine while living abroad, and it went everywhere with me. That was the one that had the hard drive failure, and THAT, above all else, is what makes me long for a hard drive without the moving parts.
One day, at my first salaried job, one of the secretaries was nearly in tears. When I asked her what the matter was, she explained to me that a board member scolded her and told her that a woman should never show up to work without makeup on. I said, "If he EVER says ANYTHING like that to you EVER again, you send him over to my desk, right away. I would LOVE to hear him tell me that in person, so I can quit my job right in front of his face."
I love programming. Do executives get to program? No. So, why the hell would I want to be an executive, and put up with idiots like that guy?
Now, don't go blaming Black Art for the evils of the two-party system. Neither Black Art, nor people like him/her are the reason we are locked into a two-party system. The reason we are locked into a two-party system is because of the way our voting system works. Black Art is merely exposing one of the darker consequences of our flawed system: tactical voting. Tactical voting is inherent in our system, and is not going to go away tomorrow, so if you give a damn about this stuff, settle in with some coffee, and read up.
The United States uses a First Past the Post (FPP) system for voting for presidents. This system is not very expressive. We have one vote, and that one vote is a 100% vote. We have no way to indicate preference (or, for that matter intense distaste) across our slate of available candidates. We have no way to throw our weight behind a beloved long-shot, without giving up the opportunity to also express a preference for a candidate who has a greater likelihood of success, or to express an intense opposition to another. We cast our ballot impotently, able to paint in one color, when really, our will is better expressed with many.
In our current system, the rise of a third (or fourth, or fifth) dominant party is downright dangerous. The more you divide the field, the smaller a percentage of the population needs to support a candidate for that candidate to win. A radical nutbag faction could throw its weight intensely behind one terrible candidate, and win the Presidency, when multiple more reasonable candidates were available. Moreover, even when confronted with the atrocities this terrible president has committed, the majority may find it impossible to unseat him, because the people have chosen disparate candidates to throw their weight behind.
Having two dominant parties masks this flaw, and protects us from it, to a degree. We're still often electing presidents who couldn't even manage to scrape together a majority of the electorate (and, in some cases, couldn't even get the most votes, period), but we haven't seen the worst it can do... yet.
Duverger's Law even goes so far as to suggest that two party systems develop spontaneously, in voting systems such as ours.
If you hate the two-party system (as you seem to), you shouldn't be trying to convince realists like Black Art that they're wrong. Because, well, frankly, he isn't. What you should be trying to do is encourage our country to choose a new system for voting. It's not such a radical idea. There are many countries that use other approaches. Wikipedia has a great article on voting systems, if you want to know about some alternatives.
The last time I used 'net cafes extensively abroad, I was in Portugal, and I found myself sitting next to chain-smokers constantly. A little over a month ago, new restrictions went into effect, but given that the head of the enforcement agency was caught violating the law on the first day, I think it's fair to assume that enforcement is, as of yet, rather lax. I think I encountered 'net cafe smokers in Japan, as well, and I'm told it can be pretty darn smokey in the PC bangs in South Korea. I expect smoking to be less regulated in some developing countries. I don't know where mitbeaver is from, but it can be surprising to Americans, who aren't used to such ubiquitous smoking anymore.
One thing to be aware of, if you take the 'net cafe route, is that in some countries, you need a high cigarette smoke tolerance. This is improving in many countries, but not everywhere. They don't smoke wussy American cigarettes everywhere, either. A lot of places prefer much harsher stuff. If you have allergies, or other problems with smoke, definitely check out the situation wherever you're going, first.
Agreed on this, as long as you don't contribute too much to waste. Color me weird, but I have a huge amount of fun going on scavenger hunts for travel necessities in foreign countries. The funniest was the time I went into a kusuri in Tokyo, looking for antiseptic for a nasty scrape on my arm. Through a combination of broken Japanese and interpretive dance, the very amused pharmacist gave me something akin to what we call "Bactine" in the US. There was a fair bit of katakana on the bottle, but none of it appeared to be anything even vaguely resembling any language I knew.
I used to travel extensively with one of the old HP Pavilion laptops with the rubber corners (man, I miss those!). The optical drive was starting to get quite dodgy, after a number of years, until one day in Portugal, when it fell from a dresser onto the hardwood floor of my room in the pensão where I was staying. I thought for sure the machine was a goner, but it worked just fine after that. In fact, miraculously, the drop fixed the optical drive.
I think the EeePC/XO advice is solid. These are great machines for just chucking in a bag and hitting the road. Every time I go through an airport with my current boat-anchor of a laptop, I kick myself, and wish I had something smaller.
Notation != Engineering. It is a tool of engineers, but it is not a methodology, and it does not ensure quality work. O-notation, in particular, is useful for describing the efficiency of an algorithm, and thereby discussing the relative tradeoffs of various approaches. That is, it has a value in analysis and communication. Notation can be used to justify your design choices, and it can be used to communicate your design to others (such as your programming team). However, it has no way to guide you the way that the laws of physics guide traditional engineers.
When I was in high school, I was required in one of my engineering classes to build a floating concrete structure. Most of the kids addressed the problem with meek iteration, crafting tiny things that were barely thick enough to stay in one piece. I came into class with a mold I had built, and set about making a large, thick, heavy concrete bowl. All the others swore up and down that it would never float, but I just laughed, and told them to wait and see. On the day we had to demonstrate our designs for our teacher, I marched up with my monstrous concrete salad bowl, and I set it upon the water for the first time. It floated, marvelously. The other students asked me how on earth I did it. I said, "I did the math."
Software engineering does not feel like that.