There would seem to be a relatively easy solution to this problem - make the raw data available from the article itself, or at least as an attachment. If that requires petabytes of storage, then presumably PLOS will provide the necessary infrastructure. That way they can ensure that as long as the article is being offered, all data used is also available. Does that sound unreasonable considering their requirement?
Everybody dies once. Deaths are typically expensive.
Deaths aren't expensive, long hospital/old folks home care is.
Smokers cost less far health care then health nuts. Cause they live a shorter life.
I'm gonna have to call bollocks on that one. Smokers consume far more healthcare dollars on average than non-smokers. Government pension money, however, is a different story...
You might be able to make a case the old man delayed his super expensive health care period. Not that he saved any money though.
I'm pretty sure the studies show that mental acuity is prolonged, not life expectancy. Someone with Alzheimer's or senile dementia just sits there being dependent, and from my reading, regular study (mental exercises, etc.) delays/prevents both those to some degree in many.
Graduate immigrants pay the school directly not the government. Hence if you're a graduate immigrant then studying in Australia is much like studying in the USA, it's all based on the size of daddy's wallet.
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was talking about immigrants who already have degrees that were paid for by their home countries. Australia (and other net receivers of immigrants with degrees) benefits directly from this without baring any (much) of the cost.
As for the 92 year old paying taxes, who knows the point is the same, the system is open to abuse. Only last year people on Slashdot were laughing how ludicrous it was to spend $40bn on infrastructure in the form of a national broadband network, and now we're shrugging off $23bn as simple figures. And no I don't think that a 92 year old attending university has any bearing at all on his medical expenses.
It may be a stretch to say it would all be money not spent on health/elderly care but I suggest you do some further reading on the matter. The studies I have read say the positive cognitive and health benefits of continued education and activity are marked. Anyway, my point is that simply taking figures or non-representative edge cases simplifies a highly complex situation. Don't get me wrong though - I personally think the HECS scheme is excellent and the government SHOULD work harder to get the money back from graduates. If national governments can come to agreement on this then such schemes can become much more widespread, which I think would be a welcome development.
Oh, you poor Australian you. How about Australia pays the governments who financed young graduate immigrants who won't see any of the benefits they paid for? No? And how many years did said 92 year old pay taxes? Have you heard about the massive benefits of keeping active and intellectually alert in one's old age? The truth be told, him studying is probably going to save as much as what would have been spent by the health system anyway. As always, the situation is far more complicated than simple figures and anecdotes can convey...
First of all, all modern grammar books and descriptive in nature. That means that they *describe* how the language is being used. You may call that "conservative" but that's just linguistics to you and me - it's a descriptive science. As far as "white" is concerned - well, guess what - Indo-European languages are spoken by white folks, since they came up with that whole thing! (An exception being immigrants, of course.) And as to the "men" part, some of the best grammarians I know happen to be female, and they don't appear to be pushing any sort of "conservative male agenda", if that's what you had in mind.
Eh... you misunderstand. You say that Linguistics doesn't say "you can't say 'she' for the neutral pronoun". I know this, I have a first-class honours degree in Linguistics. Linguistics is (supposed to be) about describing "language" and "languages", though in reality it actually does a lamentable job of it (let's not go there...). However, I'm not talking about Linguistics at all. The sort of claim "you can't say/write 'she' for the neutral pronoun" has nothing to do with description - if it did it would be terrible because obviously many, many respected publishing houses allow it. Though with that I am assuming you are allowing "written language" in the study of language... There are, however, (probably) still lots of prescriptive grammar books out there that make this sort of claim, and many English teachers no doubt too. That makes any descriptive claim false and any prescriptive claim outdated (because "languages" change and this change is happening).
And you need some serious updating on your demographics knowledge if you think only white people speak Indo-European languages...
Really? To what rules are you referring? To my knowledge very few English-speaking countries have absolute authorities like the Academie Française in France. So we have grammar books, but grammar books are just "motivated opinion pieces" written by people, and most of them are conservative white men. The "motivated" refers mostly to "accepted usage in academic, journalistic and fictional literature". There are many areas (sociology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, political science,...) where it is very common to see edited, peer-reviewed material from highly respected publishing houses using "she" as gender neutral. Obviously they accept it, so the grammar books should too.
Personally, it annoys me, particularly when both are used. Back at varsity I was discussing it with a flatmate (a lesbian feminist English Master's student no less!) one evening and she agreed it was annoying and that one solution would be to simply use one's own gender. This is still the most elegant solution I've ever heard.
Because being able to use logic to write instructions that are correct and unambiguous is a skill that everyone should learn. And basically that's what coding is.
It's like literacy or numeracy or basic understanding of science. You have a problem as a culture if it is culturally acceptable to say "I can't do math" or "I can't understand written language" or "I have no idea about the universe around me or how people go about understanding it" or "I can't read or write logical directions."
The skills that are required for coding are the same skills that are required for numeracy (and real science). Abstraction and creating precise formal models is what coding is really about - the rest is just practice and a bit of wrote learning. In a technological society abstraction and model creation are paramount - everyone should know how to do it, and do it well. Is everyone good at maths today? No. Could they be? I think so, and so do many educators but society has decided that "some people are maths people, most aren't" instead of searching for alternative ways to structure education for people who don't succeed in the traditional formats.
Good statehood means formatting the populace to a defined set of memes and ways of thinking. Can you imagine if everyone actually took responsibility for their own thinking? It would be anarchy! People would actually give a shit because they would understand how things work instead of just delegating power to others and doing what they were told. People would demand transparency. People would demand democracy.
It sounds like that would be a good thing... but I challenge anyone to show me a truly educated society of any more than a few thousand - any more and it just gets unworkable. Society is global today and that makes it completely impossible.
How is it trolling? No one told me slashdot is a US-only site... The point is that different currencies have value in different contexts. Very few of the criticisms levelled at bitcoin can't be levelled at normal fiat currencies. They are all now based on trust. Just like government. We create social constructs that we agree to agree on. These can disappear, just like governments, when most people agree that the constructs are no longer necessary/desirable. Or maybe that's just trolling...
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this. The brains behind Rethink Robotics is Rodney Brooks, a long-time professor and head of MIT's CSAIL. While not as much of a show pony as Kurzweil, he is still quite well known outside academic circles. He was also behind the robotic Roomba vacuum cleaners that are in many people's homes.
While he is definitely a controversial theorist in AI/Robotics circles, no one denies his ability to get things done. His (and his student's) research has been used in a lot of the advanced robotics we see today (military, space, other). I can't help thinking that the basic tenets of his theories are a little difficult to grasp for most people, including AI/Robotics researchers. There are some branches of philosophy, neuroscience and the human behavioural sciences that have long been arguing the sorts of things he does as the basis of human intelligence, though they have not been particularly popular since the 60s. Competing theories are not really getting us very far though, and the key concepts he pushes are starting to get more traction again.
Brooks is still searching for "the juice", as he puts it, the last piece he believes is necessary before we can create truly generative intelligence. He may not live to see it (though he's not even 60 yet I think) but I believe his ideas will form the basis of AGI in the not-too-distant future. Probably around the time I turn 70;).
That is a pretty naive view of things. After all, I can't pay my taxes in USD. I can't pay my rent, utilities, or buy food in USD. Hell, I'm not even sure a beggar would be very interested in USD coins - they're pretty much completely useless where I live. I can use it on certain websites but when I do I always get hit with large surcharges, larger than those (probably about the same number) where I could spend bitcoin. It varies in value and is subject to fluctuations due to speculators and the latest decision by law makers. Can you remind me how that is different to bitcoin again?
However, nothing you say even implies your last statement has validity. I first properly realised "what money really is" less than 10 years ago when I started reading about gold and monetary systems and the parent is completely correct (and already +5!). It is simply an enabler of trade. Anything can be used, as long as the buyer and seller have trust in the tokens used. Clay pellets also work. In today's society we have governments that want their piece of the action but to date there don't seem to have been too many anti-crypto-currency government campaigns, so unless that changes then the future is bright. If a currency can be traded for a particular good or service then the currency is logically and functionally equivalent to any other for the purpose of trade.
Money doesn't even need to be backed by anything real/physical - almost all of today's currencies are proof of that. Governments/banks can simply create ex-nihilo 10s of billions in $ equivalent every month - as long as trust is maintained then the system continues to work. Rulers long ago realised that controlling the currency was a very, very effective means of controlling the population but it hasn't always been that way and certainly doesn't need to be.
Think for a moment what it means for someone outside of the US (and a few puppet states) to have a US dollar account. They can't withdraw that money and buy a loaf of bread - they can't even buy goods/services from US-owned companies like McDonalds! Does that make it "as worthless as bitcoin"? According to many, yes, but we all know that USD is not (currently) "worthless" and that is because people still have trust in it. You don't get taught this in high school economics though...
Bullshit. Try just using the "most standard" versions of everything (like LTSes, etc.) and not trying every latest gizmo. No software is perfect, and if you want to dabble in fringe stuff then you are going to have problems. I went through a gentoo phase (never got bored enough to try LFS but anyway) but that was long ago, and I now just want to get stuff done. I have given up on Windows for "just getting stuff done".
I need to test out apps now and then so install and uninstall reasonably frequently. Every time I boot to windows 7 it's just horrible, it's ridiculously slow and painful to get anything done. I have removed everything I don't need and manualled services I only need occasionally (like SQL Server). I was sure I had a virus in spite of always updating before doing anything on boot (I boot very infrequently so there are always lots of updates) but recently gave it the once over with a brand new Kaspersky and found only the browser javascript+php exploits from a hack we had at a previous company that I had kept for forensics in my archives (and had certainly never been executed on my machine). I NEVER install software that isn't from a "reputable" source, and never do any browsing of dodgy sites (on windows:-)). While I'm not certified, I've managed production windows servers and know what you shouldn't do, and I don't. I'm sick of it, I just want to get shit done, so I use Linux. Mac might work too but I'm perfectly happy not trying flakey gadget stuff so Linux fits the bill perfectly and I won't have to learn a new way of working (until Ubuntu 14.04 anyway!).
Ecole d'ingénieur are not universities. They often have a "higher quality education", whatever that means, but they are not the same as universities, either in France or what you usually get in Anglo-Saxon countries (though maybe historically something like MIT?). France has a lot of throw-backs from yesteryear and this is one of them - it's prestigious so the rules are complicated! While there may be some exceptions, my understanding is also that you can't do a doctorate in one... Though of course it's not very clear now what that means now with many top research labs being mixes of about 4 écoles d'ingénieur and 7 universities (for placement on European lists).
There are only two ways to eradicate "spam" and both entail giving the robots guns and a licence to kill all members of all digital marketing departments. Spam is almost as nebulous a concept as "intelligence", or even "artificial" in AI (if we create a clone +1 manual gene change of a human, then will that be "artificial intelligence"?). What is spam for some is highly desired news/offers for others.
Not sure many companies would have built their business on iGoogle... But does anyone know of a list of services they have shut down that didn't have "beta" or "technology preview" status?
You're both right. The term AI originally had much broader scope because (computer) people hadn't tried to implement it yet and realised that it was going to be *very* hard to do. Now people seem to use the terms Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence for trying to get the kind of non-domain-specific "intelligence" humans (are supposed to) have, and "simple AI" just means tech that can adapt within a highly restricted domain (like search, navigation, etc.). The problem, of course, is that until we get an even remotely satisfactory definition of what "human intelligence" is, we aren't going to get very far. Unfortunately, it turns out that attempting to specify exactly what intelligence is ends up involving linguists, psychologists, biologists (neuroscientists, etc.) and worst of all, philosophers. Basically, no one agrees on anything and even when there are areas of agreement, each person seems to have deal-breaker elements that no one else agrees on. It gets messy, and quick. Worse still, it turns out that developmental/cultural factors (so development of an individual in a particular socio-cultural context) radically colours what kinds of definitions of intelligence people come up with, and the sorts of solutions it makes sense to think about (representationism vs enaction/actional theories, etc.). For example, a lot of work has been done on the psychological and cultural/historical effects of literacy (and numeracy) and show that someone growing up in a society in the Western Tradition (this is a specific term) that learns to read/write with an alphabet will often strongly prefer a particular view of the higher mental functions (language, thinking, "intelligence", etc.)(see John Goody, Roy Harris, David R Olson, and many more). If we want to create the tech then we need to go beyond that but it's incredibly hard to go beyond your own intellectual baggage. Researchers like Pei Wang have a bit of an advantage coming from a non-Western Tradition culture and he has some great thoughts on the different solution spaces that opens up. I like the way he uses levels (perspectives?) to look at this and the problem more generally. He talks about a Western bias for creating theories looking for "truth" (which has strong links to representationalist thinking) that he wants to avoid. It's certainly not impossible for someone from the Western Tradition (like Goertzel) to think otherwise but it requires significant amounts of meta-reflection - I have a theory that "works" but does everyone think it works? What kinds of people think it works, and what kind doesn't? Do people from all cultural traditions agree? What would my theory sound like to someone from the middle ages? Ancient Greece? Why would I come up with such a theory? How does it fit in to my view on other things (politics, religion, etc.)? If you scratch the surface you quickly realise that there is a vast world of stuff that affects even what we think it's interesting to think about. It's incredibly hard for us to not just assume that the Western Tradition is simply more advanced, purer and better. We are surrounded from birth with a moral framework (the UN, judeo-christian value system, etc.) and an educational system that promotes a Platonic view of pure forms and pure knowledge ("mathematics is the language of the universe", etc.). This sort of thing can even go completely out of whack, and result in the kind of stuff we saw with the Nazis. So if there is considerable debate on what it means to know something, then defining intelligence is not going to be a simple affair! I personally adhere to the school of thought that thinks that the best way to move forward is simply to re-create a human-like machine that acts/reacts in a way that most people would call "human". Almost everyone agrees humans are intelligent, so if it acts the same way then most of us will agree it's intelligent. This (almost) completely avoids the sort of shit we have to deal with that I mention above. Turns out it's far from trivial though...
Heavy pot smokers that start in teens hit the magic number of "fuck, my alveoli are enlarged and can't function as oxygen exchange all that well any more" (emphysema) around the age of 30 though. Smokers that start around the same time usually hit that about ten years later or so. It's one of those things they don't really advertise because it doesn't sound as scary as "oh god that awful looking cancerous lung" but pretty much any doctor that works with human lungs will tell you that onset of emphysema happens much earlier and is a severely limiting factor to human life.
Are we talking about the active substances involved or the method of delivery here? Both nicotine and THC are consumed in a variety of different formats and ways, and I'd be willing to bet that the phenomenon you are talking about is not particularly prevalent in THC consumers who get it via digestion, for example. Even in smokers of cannabis, there is considerable region variation in preferred methods and formats - leaf/buds, oil, hash, etc., many places around the world mix cannabis products with tobacco and smoke a joint like a normal cigarette, pipes, bongs, vaporisers, etc.
Use different accounts. I have several Google accounts for different purposes. All are connected to chrome where I want them to be. Nothing professional ever gets on my personal accounts, where I look at political stuff and the like that my colleagues have no business knowing. I only use my personal accounts outside work hours, or on my phone. In any case, colleagues only see what I want them to see. It takes a while to get used to (forgetting to do work-related searches in the work browser) but when you do it's really, really handy. Problem solved? Sure, they could get at my accounts if the boss really wanted to but the boss could also install a key-logger and I'm not that paranoid...
Slashdot Mirror
There would seem to be a relatively easy solution to this problem - make the raw data available from the article itself, or at least as an attachment. If that requires petabytes of storage, then presumably PLOS will provide the necessary infrastructure. That way they can ensure that as long as the article is being offered, all data used is also available. Does that sound unreasonable considering their requirement?
Damn, why do my points always expire just before I see a comment that really needs modding up?
Everybody dies once. Deaths are typically expensive.
Deaths aren't expensive, long hospital/old folks home care is.
Smokers cost less far health care then health nuts. Cause they live a shorter life.
I'm gonna have to call bollocks on that one. Smokers consume far more healthcare dollars on average than non-smokers. Government pension money, however, is a different story...
You might be able to make a case the old man delayed his super expensive health care period. Not that he saved any money though.
I'm pretty sure the studies show that mental acuity is prolonged, not life expectancy. Someone with Alzheimer's or senile dementia just sits there being dependent, and from my reading, regular study (mental exercises, etc.) delays/prevents both those to some degree in many.
Graduate immigrants pay the school directly not the government. Hence if you're a graduate immigrant then studying in Australia is much like studying in the USA, it's all based on the size of daddy's wallet.
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was talking about immigrants who already have degrees that were paid for by their home countries. Australia (and other net receivers of immigrants with degrees) benefits directly from this without baring any (much) of the cost.
As for the 92 year old paying taxes, who knows the point is the same, the system is open to abuse. Only last year people on Slashdot were laughing how ludicrous it was to spend $40bn on infrastructure in the form of a national broadband network, and now we're shrugging off $23bn as simple figures. And no I don't think that a 92 year old attending university has any bearing at all on his medical expenses.
It may be a stretch to say it would all be money not spent on health/elderly care but I suggest you do some further reading on the matter. The studies I have read say the positive cognitive and health benefits of continued education and activity are marked. Anyway, my point is that simply taking figures or non-representative edge cases simplifies a highly complex situation. Don't get me wrong though - I personally think the HECS scheme is excellent and the government SHOULD work harder to get the money back from graduates. If national governments can come to agreement on this then such schemes can become much more widespread, which I think would be a welcome development.
Oh, you poor Australian you. How about Australia pays the governments who financed young graduate immigrants who won't see any of the benefits they paid for? No? And how many years did said 92 year old pay taxes? Have you heard about the massive benefits of keeping active and intellectually alert in one's old age? The truth be told, him studying is probably going to save as much as what would have been spent by the health system anyway. As always, the situation is far more complicated than simple figures and anecdotes can convey...
First of all, all modern grammar books and descriptive in nature. That means that they *describe* how the language is being used. You may call that "conservative" but that's just linguistics to you and me - it's a descriptive science. As far as "white" is concerned - well, guess what - Indo-European languages are spoken by white folks, since they came up with that whole thing! (An exception being immigrants, of course.) And as to the "men" part, some of the best grammarians I know happen to be female, and they don't appear to be pushing any sort of "conservative male agenda", if that's what you had in mind.
Eh... you misunderstand. You say that Linguistics doesn't say "you can't say 'she' for the neutral pronoun". I know this, I have a first-class honours degree in Linguistics. Linguistics is (supposed to be) about describing "language" and "languages", though in reality it actually does a lamentable job of it (let's not go there...). However, I'm not talking about Linguistics at all. The sort of claim "you can't say/write 'she' for the neutral pronoun" has nothing to do with description - if it did it would be terrible because obviously many, many respected publishing houses allow it. Though with that I am assuming you are allowing "written language" in the study of language... There are, however, (probably) still lots of prescriptive grammar books out there that make this sort of claim, and many English teachers no doubt too. That makes any descriptive claim false and any prescriptive claim outdated (because "languages" change and this change is happening).
And you need some serious updating on your demographics knowledge if you think only white people speak Indo-European languages...
Really? To what rules are you referring? To my knowledge very few English-speaking countries have absolute authorities like the Academie Française in France. So we have grammar books, but grammar books are just "motivated opinion pieces" written by people, and most of them are conservative white men. The "motivated" refers mostly to "accepted usage in academic, journalistic and fictional literature". There are many areas (sociology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, political science,...) where it is very common to see edited, peer-reviewed material from highly respected publishing houses using "she" as gender neutral. Obviously they accept it, so the grammar books should too.
Personally, it annoys me, particularly when both are used. Back at varsity I was discussing it with a flatmate (a lesbian feminist English Master's student no less!) one evening and she agreed it was annoying and that one solution would be to simply use one's own gender. This is still the most elegant solution I've ever heard.
Because being able to use logic to write instructions that are correct and unambiguous is a skill that everyone should learn. And basically that's what coding is.
It's like literacy or numeracy or basic understanding of science. You have a problem as a culture if it is culturally acceptable to say "I can't do math" or "I can't understand written language" or "I have no idea about the universe around me or how people go about understanding it" or "I can't read or write logical directions."
The skills that are required for coding are the same skills that are required for numeracy (and real science). Abstraction and creating precise formal models is what coding is really about - the rest is just practice and a bit of wrote learning. In a technological society abstraction and model creation are paramount - everyone should know how to do it, and do it well. Is everyone good at maths today? No. Could they be? I think so, and so do many educators but society has decided that "some people are maths people, most aren't" instead of searching for alternative ways to structure education for people who don't succeed in the traditional formats.
Good statehood means formatting the populace to a defined set of memes and ways of thinking. Can you imagine if everyone actually took responsibility for their own thinking? It would be anarchy! People would actually give a shit because they would understand how things work instead of just delegating power to others and doing what they were told. People would demand transparency. People would demand democracy.
It sounds like that would be a good thing... but I challenge anyone to show me a truly educated society of any more than a few thousand - any more and it just gets unworkable. Society is global today and that makes it completely impossible.
Nice! Trolling by calling someone a troll. You almost had me.
How is it trolling? No one told me slashdot is a US-only site... The point is that different currencies have value in different contexts. Very few of the criticisms levelled at bitcoin can't be levelled at normal fiat currencies. They are all now based on trust. Just like government. We create social constructs that we agree to agree on. These can disappear, just like governments, when most people agree that the constructs are no longer necessary/desirable. Or maybe that's just trolling...
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this. The brains behind Rethink Robotics is Rodney Brooks, a long-time professor and head of MIT's CSAIL. While not as much of a show pony as Kurzweil, he is still quite well known outside academic circles. He was also behind the robotic Roomba vacuum cleaners that are in many people's homes.
;).
While he is definitely a controversial theorist in AI/Robotics circles, no one denies his ability to get things done. His (and his student's) research has been used in a lot of the advanced robotics we see today (military, space, other). I can't help thinking that the basic tenets of his theories are a little difficult to grasp for most people, including AI/Robotics researchers. There are some branches of philosophy, neuroscience and the human behavioural sciences that have long been arguing the sorts of things he does as the basis of human intelligence, though they have not been particularly popular since the 60s. Competing theories are not really getting us very far though, and the key concepts he pushes are starting to get more traction again.
Brooks is still searching for "the juice", as he puts it, the last piece he believes is necessary before we can create truly generative intelligence. He may not live to see it (though he's not even 60 yet I think) but I believe his ideas will form the basis of AGI in the not-too-distant future. Probably around the time I turn 70
That is a pretty naive view of things. After all, I can't pay my taxes in USD. I can't pay my rent, utilities, or buy food in USD. Hell, I'm not even sure a beggar would be very interested in USD coins - they're pretty much completely useless where I live. I can use it on certain websites but when I do I always get hit with large surcharges, larger than those (probably about the same number) where I could spend bitcoin. It varies in value and is subject to fluctuations due to speculators and the latest decision by law makers. Can you remind me how that is different to bitcoin again?
Interesting point about the MJ suppliers.
However, nothing you say even implies your last statement has validity. I first properly realised "what money really is" less than 10 years ago when I started reading about gold and monetary systems and the parent is completely correct (and already +5!). It is simply an enabler of trade. Anything can be used, as long as the buyer and seller have trust in the tokens used. Clay pellets also work. In today's society we have governments that want their piece of the action but to date there don't seem to have been too many anti-crypto-currency government campaigns, so unless that changes then the future is bright. If a currency can be traded for a particular good or service then the currency is logically and functionally equivalent to any other for the purpose of trade.
Money doesn't even need to be backed by anything real/physical - almost all of today's currencies are proof of that. Governments/banks can simply create ex-nihilo 10s of billions in $ equivalent every month - as long as trust is maintained then the system continues to work. Rulers long ago realised that controlling the currency was a very, very effective means of controlling the population but it hasn't always been that way and certainly doesn't need to be.
Think for a moment what it means for someone outside of the US (and a few puppet states) to have a US dollar account. They can't withdraw that money and buy a loaf of bread - they can't even buy goods/services from US-owned companies like McDonalds! Does that make it "as worthless as bitcoin"? According to many, yes, but we all know that USD is not (currently) "worthless" and that is because people still have trust in it. You don't get taught this in high school economics though...
Bullshit. Try just using the "most standard" versions of everything (like LTSes, etc.) and not trying every latest gizmo. No software is perfect, and if you want to dabble in fringe stuff then you are going to have problems. I went through a gentoo phase (never got bored enough to try LFS but anyway) but that was long ago, and I now just want to get stuff done. I have given up on Windows for "just getting stuff done".
:-)). While I'm not certified, I've managed production windows servers and know what you shouldn't do, and I don't. I'm sick of it, I just want to get shit done, so I use Linux. Mac might work too but I'm perfectly happy not trying flakey gadget stuff so Linux fits the bill perfectly and I won't have to learn a new way of working (until Ubuntu 14.04 anyway!).
I need to test out apps now and then so install and uninstall reasonably frequently. Every time I boot to windows 7 it's just horrible, it's ridiculously slow and painful to get anything done. I have removed everything I don't need and manualled services I only need occasionally (like SQL Server). I was sure I had a virus in spite of always updating before doing anything on boot (I boot very infrequently so there are always lots of updates) but recently gave it the once over with a brand new Kaspersky and found only the browser javascript+php exploits from a hack we had at a previous company that I had kept for forensics in my archives (and had certainly never been executed on my machine). I NEVER install software that isn't from a "reputable" source, and never do any browsing of dodgy sites (on windows
Ecole d'ingénieur are not universities. They often have a "higher quality education", whatever that means, but they are not the same as universities, either in France or what you usually get in Anglo-Saxon countries (though maybe historically something like MIT?). France has a lot of throw-backs from yesteryear and this is one of them - it's prestigious so the rules are complicated! While there may be some exceptions, my understanding is also that you can't do a doctorate in one... Though of course it's not very clear now what that means now with many top research labs being mixes of about 4 écoles d'ingénieur and 7 universities (for placement on European lists).
There are only two ways to eradicate "spam" and both entail giving the robots guns and a licence to kill all members of all digital marketing departments. Spam is almost as nebulous a concept as "intelligence", or even "artificial" in AI (if we create a clone +1 manual gene change of a human, then will that be "artificial intelligence"?). What is spam for some is highly desired news/offers for others.
I think that qualifies as a whoosh...
I'd rather have shoes running on sharp rocks. Not you?
Depends on what you're running on...
Not sure many companies would have built their business on iGoogle... But does anyone know of a list of services they have shut down that didn't have "beta" or "technology preview" status?
It's the large black, red and yellow house on a cabbage farm just off the M20. You can't miss it. I'll tell Klaus you're coming.
You're both right. The term AI originally had much broader scope because (computer) people hadn't tried to implement it yet and realised that it was going to be *very* hard to do. Now people seem to use the terms Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence for trying to get the kind of non-domain-specific "intelligence" humans (are supposed to) have, and "simple AI" just means tech that can adapt within a highly restricted domain (like search, navigation, etc.). The problem, of course, is that until we get an even remotely satisfactory definition of what "human intelligence" is, we aren't going to get very far. Unfortunately, it turns out that attempting to specify exactly what intelligence is ends up involving linguists, psychologists, biologists (neuroscientists, etc.) and worst of all, philosophers. Basically, no one agrees on anything and even when there are areas of agreement, each person seems to have deal-breaker elements that no one else agrees on. It gets messy, and quick. Worse still, it turns out that developmental/cultural factors (so development of an individual in a particular socio-cultural context) radically colours what kinds of definitions of intelligence people come up with, and the sorts of solutions it makes sense to think about (representationism vs enaction/actional theories, etc.). For example, a lot of work has been done on the psychological and cultural/historical effects of literacy (and numeracy) and show that someone growing up in a society in the Western Tradition (this is a specific term) that learns to read/write with an alphabet will often strongly prefer a particular view of the higher mental functions (language, thinking, "intelligence", etc.)(see John Goody, Roy Harris, David R Olson, and many more). If we want to create the tech then we need to go beyond that but it's incredibly hard to go beyond your own intellectual baggage. Researchers like Pei Wang have a bit of an advantage coming from a non-Western Tradition culture and he has some great thoughts on the different solution spaces that opens up. I like the way he uses levels (perspectives?) to look at this and the problem more generally. He talks about a Western bias for creating theories looking for "truth" (which has strong links to representationalist thinking) that he wants to avoid. It's certainly not impossible for someone from the Western Tradition (like Goertzel) to think otherwise but it requires significant amounts of meta-reflection - I have a theory that "works" but does everyone think it works? What kinds of people think it works, and what kind doesn't? Do people from all cultural traditions agree? What would my theory sound like to someone from the middle ages? Ancient Greece? Why would I come up with such a theory? How does it fit in to my view on other things (politics, religion, etc.)? If you scratch the surface you quickly realise that there is a vast world of stuff that affects even what we think it's interesting to think about. It's incredibly hard for us to not just assume that the Western Tradition is simply more advanced, purer and better. We are surrounded from birth with a moral framework (the UN, judeo-christian value system, etc.) and an educational system that promotes a Platonic view of pure forms and pure knowledge ("mathematics is the language of the universe", etc.). This sort of thing can even go completely out of whack, and result in the kind of stuff we saw with the Nazis. So if there is considerable debate on what it means to know something, then defining intelligence is not going to be a simple affair! I personally adhere to the school of thought that thinks that the best way to move forward is simply to re-create a human-like machine that acts/reacts in a way that most people would call "human". Almost everyone agrees humans are intelligent, so if it acts the same way then most of us will agree it's intelligent. This (almost) completely avoids the sort of shit we have to deal with that I mention above. Turns out it's far from trivial though...
Heavy pot smokers that start in teens hit the magic number of "fuck, my alveoli are enlarged and can't function as oxygen exchange all that well any more" (emphysema) around the age of 30 though. Smokers that start around the same time usually hit that about ten years later or so. It's one of those things they don't really advertise because it doesn't sound as scary as "oh god that awful looking cancerous lung" but pretty much any doctor that works with human lungs will tell you that onset of emphysema happens much earlier and is a severely limiting factor to human life.
Are we talking about the active substances involved or the method of delivery here? Both nicotine and THC are consumed in a variety of different formats and ways, and I'd be willing to bet that the phenomenon you are talking about is not particularly prevalent in THC consumers who get it via digestion, for example. Even in smokers of cannabis, there is considerable region variation in preferred methods and formats - leaf/buds, oil, hash, etc., many places around the world mix cannabis products with tobacco and smoke a joint like a normal cigarette, pipes, bongs, vaporisers, etc.
Use different accounts. I have several Google accounts for different purposes. All are connected to chrome where I want them to be. Nothing professional ever gets on my personal accounts, where I look at political stuff and the like that my colleagues have no business knowing. I only use my personal accounts outside work hours, or on my phone. In any case, colleagues only see what I want them to see. It takes a while to get used to (forgetting to do work-related searches in the work browser) but when you do it's really, really handy. Problem solved? Sure, they could get at my accounts if the boss really wanted to but the boss could also install a key-logger and I'm not that paranoid...