There was a time when a lot of diseases were thought incurable... and then they became so. Claiming that anything is impossible (which is what you're doing) is a bit foolish, since that puts an upper bound on human ingenuity. You almost invariably get proven wrong.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but a quick glance at the Google Scholar search results for Kurzweil don't show a whole lot of research from him. I do see a lot of books, articles and fluff, but that's not being active to me.
Compare, as another poster said, to Peter Norvig, who has his own Scholar page and the difference is rather striking.
You're showing your fundamental misunderstanding of current machine learning algorithms. Chess computers aren't smart: they simply have enough brute force power to go through all plausible moves in the entire set of possibilities and run the results in advance, thus giving them exact accuracy as to what can happen. They're not perfect, which is why they can lose to grandmasters, but there's nothing intelligent about them. If we could somehow design a computer that could beat a grandmaster WITHOUT just spanning the whole possibility space, now that'd be something!
Watson's not intelligence either, it's big data. It's about parsing a question (natural language processing, which does not necessarily involve any machine learning) and then answering it by cross-linking sufficient amount of data such that the likelihood of an answer being correct is greater than a set threshold. You could see that at Jeopardy, where the other possible answers Watson would give were listed below, and only when the best answer reached a threshold did it answer.
None of this shows any form of intelligence, of ability to reason and think. This is the goal of AI and it's also what people usually mean by it.
This isn't the case though. People want Microsoft to keep supporting XP forever while not paying a cent for it. It's entirely logical for Microsoft to drop support, and I don't quite grasp the uproar here. If you don't want to upgrade, don't. Just don't say Microsoft didn't warn you when your OS and entire network gets infected by a shitton of crap.
You do realize that Windows 8's failure doesn't really change anything for Linux, right? As usual, Microsoft is fighting against its own past: people are choosing between sticking to 7 or moving to 8, Linux almost never enters into the equation.
Have you ever dealt with a municipal transportation system? A lot of them, especially when you're trying to cross between city and suburbs, suck horribly. Moreover, actually getting them to fix things is akin to talking to a brick wall.
In that context, it was probably easier for Google to take care of its own employees by putting up their own circuits which service areas where Google employees live. The only alternative was for the employees to live in the suburbs, which would give the city fewer taxes (since they're very much above the average salary in their neighborhoods) and wouldn't otherwise solve the transportation problem for anyone else.
I also don't quite grasp "appropriate public space, pay little to no tax and do whatever it wants with no accountability". That's like saying a taxi cab is appropriating public space by stopping by a person to take them in. They used the existing stops system because it was more efficient and DIDN'T require them to actually appropriate public space in the form of adding their own bus stops. The only thing they use is the roads, and I'd rather have a bus than 30 cars. I don't see why giving buses to employees would imply paying more or less taxes. I also don't see where accountability comes into question; if they had drunk drivers or disrespected the law, sure, bring the hammer down. There's been none of that.
Now, they're giving to another, completely unrelated system which they take no benefit from. Is it a PR move? Absolutely. Does that mean we should dismiss it? Hell no. They could've spent the money on lobbying, on disrupting the protests, on advertising against them, on pretty much anything else that would have given them more immediate gains. They chose not to. Good for them, and good for all those students who'll be able to get cheaper bus passes.
That Google hides its profits in a tax haven is tangential. All the big corporations do it. If one of them decided not to, they'd probably get lambasted by their shareholders. It's not illegal, so they'll do it. Close the loophole, simple as that.
I don't see anyone asking for mentally ill people to be let free to roam around and stab people or something. If you don't grasp the difference between "solitary confinement" and warding aggressive people off, you need a big reality check.
It's only a well-established fact for people who do not understand what "fact" means. Show me the studies and the medical opinions saying that, then we'll talk.
The science of punishment is like the science of evolution: there's been consensus for an incredible amount of time, but the US still likes to think their viewpoint has weight behind it.
Until you manage to produce undeniable proof that someone is physically unable to be cured from mental illness, we should always, as a society, strive to cure them.
Let's take an analogy that's perhaps closer to home: some people in hospitals have neither the money nor the physical wellness to get cured. Should we simply abandon them, or should we strive to the very end to attempt to cure them, even (and especially) if it ultimately fails?
I doubt it back then, but those sudden showings of kindness from Google and co sure look a bit suspicious. After all, they keep harping on STEM shortages, but when you dig a little deeper you tend to find out it's just that they want high paid workers for cheap, and the best way of doing this is by driving offer up so prices go down. Women just happen to be the most logical target: nobody will ever criticize them for it, they might even get some govt support for getting girls in tech, and theoretically it's a solid 30-40% gain in workforce if we aim for the mythical 51% split.
It's funny because what you're describing, to me, sounds like another planet. I'm at university in computer science. What I see is a bunch of guys (and a few girls) doing maths and programming, learning computer science, and geeking out along the way. We'll play card games, computer games, make jokes about whatever you can imagine (but largely about computers and science, obviously) and just have a good time. I don't see anything socially inept or sexist about it. I see people.
I can tell you that there's a good subset of people who are shy, much more so than average, and who look awkward in social situations. They're not sexist either.
So really, I think there's often some massively wide brushes being used here. You're basically taking your bad experiences and branding the entire field with the same stroke. That's a gross generalization. By saying this, you're basically doing the same thing that the sexist machos (who do exist, I'm sure, what I'm not sure is whether they're representative) do when they put all women in the same basket.
I'd also often be curious to actually read those sexist jokes and innuendos. Perhaps I'm just not noticing them and they permeate the culture as you say, but thus far I've only seen them referenced, but never really documented and dissected.
I fully agree with this, but there's a problem: we have this whole bunch of questions and no way of answering. You and I and everyone else can conjecture for all we want, but at the end of the day that's all it is: conjecture. There needs to be actual research done on a much wider level to attempt to answer these questions. As it is now, I'm largely seeing a lot of people flailing at what they think is the problem with what they think is the solution, and I can't say that it's worked. At the very least, we still have only 10-20% women at university in comp sci despite a lot of women-only grants and loads of advertising aimed at getting girls into computer science. This is compared to 40-50% in chemistry, >50% in medicine and biology, around 30-35% in physics, etc.
I'd love to see more girls in tech, but until we have actual data to attempt to understand what's going on to me the obvious answer is that they're just not attracted to it. Since there are quite a few "hard" sciences where women have taken over men in attendance and graduation, I'd say the remaining fields are either hostile to them or less attractive, and hostility is something I can most assuredly say is not a problem where I'm at (it may be an issue elsewhere, but all of my experience thus far tells me it's not much of an issue anymore, if at all).
Therefore, the questions that we just can't answer right now are: is this difference intrinsic to women, or something to do with upbringing and society? If the latter, how can we change it and should we change it? If the former, what do we do?
"Brogrammers" aren't hostile to women, they're hostile to intelligence. Anyone with more than a few brain cells left, man or woman, would flee the fucking place as fast as possible.
From what I've read Thief was developed in parallel by a different team (and also entered development hell with numerous rewrites and changes). I think this has definitely impacted the quality of the final product, but the marketing for the game was also absurdly bad. People had already the opinion that the game sucked before they played it.
Slashdot Mirror
I call it "likely to be shut down in six months".
Sorry, I don't know about you, but one big point of cloud storage is reliability.
You should be thankful most school administrations have never heard of Faraday cages...
There was a time when a lot of diseases were thought incurable... and then they became so. Claiming that anything is impossible (which is what you're doing) is a bit foolish, since that puts an upper bound on human ingenuity. You almost invariably get proven wrong.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but a quick glance at the Google Scholar search results for Kurzweil don't show a whole lot of research from him. I do see a lot of books, articles and fluff, but that's not being active to me.
Compare, as another poster said, to Peter Norvig, who has his own Scholar page and the difference is rather striking.
You're showing your fundamental misunderstanding of current machine learning algorithms. Chess computers aren't smart: they simply have enough brute force power to go through all plausible moves in the entire set of possibilities and run the results in advance, thus giving them exact accuracy as to what can happen. They're not perfect, which is why they can lose to grandmasters, but there's nothing intelligent about them. If we could somehow design a computer that could beat a grandmaster WITHOUT just spanning the whole possibility space, now that'd be something!
Watson's not intelligence either, it's big data. It's about parsing a question (natural language processing, which does not necessarily involve any machine learning) and then answering it by cross-linking sufficient amount of data such that the likelihood of an answer being correct is greater than a set threshold. You could see that at Jeopardy, where the other possible answers Watson would give were listed below, and only when the best answer reached a threshold did it answer.
None of this shows any form of intelligence, of ability to reason and think. This is the goal of AI and it's also what people usually mean by it.
That would imply that people here RTFA.
He could definitely take some collage courses though, those don't require high SAT results!
This isn't the case though. People want Microsoft to keep supporting XP forever while not paying a cent for it. It's entirely logical for Microsoft to drop support, and I don't quite grasp the uproar here. If you don't want to upgrade, don't. Just don't say Microsoft didn't warn you when your OS and entire network gets infected by a shitton of crap.
especially with how Windows 8 is doing.
You do realize that Windows 8's failure doesn't really change anything for Linux, right? As usual, Microsoft is fighting against its own past: people are choosing between sticking to 7 or moving to 8, Linux almost never enters into the equation.
Huh? mAh is a unit of charge, not current. It's a bit like kWh that's generally used for electricity costs.
Have you ever dealt with a municipal transportation system? A lot of them, especially when you're trying to cross between city and suburbs, suck horribly. Moreover, actually getting them to fix things is akin to talking to a brick wall.
In that context, it was probably easier for Google to take care of its own employees by putting up their own circuits which service areas where Google employees live. The only alternative was for the employees to live in the suburbs, which would give the city fewer taxes (since they're very much above the average salary in their neighborhoods) and wouldn't otherwise solve the transportation problem for anyone else.
I also don't quite grasp "appropriate public space, pay little to no tax and do whatever it wants with no accountability". That's like saying a taxi cab is appropriating public space by stopping by a person to take them in. They used the existing stops system because it was more efficient and DIDN'T require them to actually appropriate public space in the form of adding their own bus stops. The only thing they use is the roads, and I'd rather have a bus than 30 cars. I don't see why giving buses to employees would imply paying more or less taxes. I also don't see where accountability comes into question; if they had drunk drivers or disrespected the law, sure, bring the hammer down. There's been none of that.
Now, they're giving to another, completely unrelated system which they take no benefit from. Is it a PR move? Absolutely. Does that mean we should dismiss it? Hell no. They could've spent the money on lobbying, on disrupting the protests, on advertising against them, on pretty much anything else that would have given them more immediate gains. They chose not to. Good for them, and good for all those students who'll be able to get cheaper bus passes.
That Google hides its profits in a tax haven is tangential. All the big corporations do it. If one of them decided not to, they'd probably get lambasted by their shareholders. It's not illegal, so they'll do it. Close the loophole, simple as that.
Maybe the spellchecker is in beta?
I don't see anyone asking for mentally ill people to be let free to roam around and stab people or something. If you don't grasp the difference between "solitary confinement" and warding aggressive people off, you need a big reality check.
It's only a well-established fact for people who do not understand what "fact" means. Show me the studies and the medical opinions saying that, then we'll talk.
The science of punishment is like the science of evolution: there's been consensus for an incredible amount of time, but the US still likes to think their viewpoint has weight behind it.
Until you manage to produce undeniable proof that someone is physically unable to be cured from mental illness, we should always, as a society, strive to cure them.
Let's take an analogy that's perhaps closer to home: some people in hospitals have neither the money nor the physical wellness to get cured. Should we simply abandon them, or should we strive to the very end to attempt to cure them, even (and especially) if it ultimately fails?
The only governments following this train of thought happen to be the ones with the higher crime rates. Funny how that works eh?
When I see companies bitch about not getting enough qualified people, I can tell you that it's their hiring practices.
Nah, they just want your father-in-law but at half the price. Then they'll claim there's a shortage when nobody shows up.
I doubt it back then, but those sudden showings of kindness from Google and co sure look a bit suspicious. After all, they keep harping on STEM shortages, but when you dig a little deeper you tend to find out it's just that they want high paid workers for cheap, and the best way of doing this is by driving offer up so prices go down. Women just happen to be the most logical target: nobody will ever criticize them for it, they might even get some govt support for getting girls in tech, and theoretically it's a solid 30-40% gain in workforce if we aim for the mythical 51% split.
It's funny because what you're describing, to me, sounds like another planet. I'm at university in computer science. What I see is a bunch of guys (and a few girls) doing maths and programming, learning computer science, and geeking out along the way. We'll play card games, computer games, make jokes about whatever you can imagine (but largely about computers and science, obviously) and just have a good time. I don't see anything socially inept or sexist about it. I see people.
I can tell you that there's a good subset of people who are shy, much more so than average, and who look awkward in social situations. They're not sexist either.
So really, I think there's often some massively wide brushes being used here. You're basically taking your bad experiences and branding the entire field with the same stroke. That's a gross generalization. By saying this, you're basically doing the same thing that the sexist machos (who do exist, I'm sure, what I'm not sure is whether they're representative) do when they put all women in the same basket.
I'd also often be curious to actually read those sexist jokes and innuendos. Perhaps I'm just not noticing them and they permeate the culture as you say, but thus far I've only seen them referenced, but never really documented and dissected.
I fully agree with this, but there's a problem: we have this whole bunch of questions and no way of answering. You and I and everyone else can conjecture for all we want, but at the end of the day that's all it is: conjecture. There needs to be actual research done on a much wider level to attempt to answer these questions. As it is now, I'm largely seeing a lot of people flailing at what they think is the problem with what they think is the solution, and I can't say that it's worked. At the very least, we still have only 10-20% women at university in comp sci despite a lot of women-only grants and loads of advertising aimed at getting girls into computer science. This is compared to 40-50% in chemistry, >50% in medicine and biology, around 30-35% in physics, etc.
I'd love to see more girls in tech, but until we have actual data to attempt to understand what's going on to me the obvious answer is that they're just not attracted to it. Since there are quite a few "hard" sciences where women have taken over men in attendance and graduation, I'd say the remaining fields are either hostile to them or less attractive, and hostility is something I can most assuredly say is not a problem where I'm at (it may be an issue elsewhere, but all of my experience thus far tells me it's not much of an issue anymore, if at all).
Therefore, the questions that we just can't answer right now are: is this difference intrinsic to women, or something to do with upbringing and society? If the latter, how can we change it and should we change it? If the former, what do we do?
"Brogrammers" aren't hostile to women, they're hostile to intelligence. Anyone with more than a few brain cells left, man or woman, would flee the fucking place as fast as possible.
Oh my goodness, an honest to god PC Master Race person. How does it feel?
From what I've read Thief was developed in parallel by a different team (and also entered development hell with numerous rewrites and changes). I think this has definitely impacted the quality of the final product, but the marketing for the game was also absurdly bad. People had already the opinion that the game sucked before they played it.
It's also funny how TFS manages to portray the RPS review as negative when in fact it's lauding the game as being rather fun.
This really does feel as though the internet had already decided to hate the game before the game even came out.