What some of us just can't understand is how, or why, you can "enjoy" owning a $25K watch. It may look pretty, I suppose - although that's hardly what a watch is for. But mostly it's just a way of taunting other people that you can spend as much money on a watch as they earn in a year. (And, if you like living dangerously, taunting those who would like to steal it that your security is good enough to stop them doing that).
This precisely misses the point. A $1,000 video card is usually far more powerful than a cheaper one - with a faster processor and extra features. A $500,000 house either has more rooms, more space, a better view, or some other valuable characteristics - or maybe it is in a very expensive neighbourhood.
The car example is a lot closer to what Apple does. A very capable (and, if desired, spacious) car can be had for $30,000. Beyond that, you are probably mainly paying for status.
But the iPhone really doesn't do very much that far cheaper no-name gadgets can't do. What it does provide is cachet.
Not because of all its "valuable features", or because it has anything unique or attractive about it. No, such fashion items command high prices because they are rare, identifiable, and expensive.
And that's why the iPhone and other Apple gadgets can be sold for such high prices. They allow their owners to feel that they are (for the time being, at least) one up on other people - especially their family, friends and work acquaintances.
In case it was not already glaringly obvious, consider how amazingly applicable the extract from the Tao Te Ching is to today's USA.
More and more prohibitions... and the people (except for the 1%) have become steadily poorer. The more "sharp weapons" (nowadays mostly guns, although knives are also common), the greater the chaos (mass shootings..., police brutality...) The more clever and crafty the people become (in response to the cleverness and craftiness of politicians, Wall Street, and their pet lawyers), the more "unusual affairs" occur (Enron, Bernie Madoff, pretty much everyone on Wall Street, the Democratic Party, the Republicn Party, the CIA...) The more laws and regulations, the more thieves and brigands. Well, just look at them!
Very true indeed. We don't need laws until people seek to do things that are unfair and unacceptable - then we have to make laws to forbid those acts. However, any societies that has to make laws against X is likely already to be saturated with X; the existence of the laws strongly suggests that they are being broken wholesale.
The following extract from the Tao Te Ching is relevant, especially the final part about "thieves and brigands".
"The more prohibitions that are imposed on people, The poorer the people become. The more sharp weapons the people possess, The greater is the chaos in the country. The more clever and crafty the people become, The more unusual affairs occur. The more laws and regulations that exist, The more thieves and brigands appear".
What horseshit. I'm not interested in your speculation, I'm interested in facts
By the way, who ARE you? I'm not interested in assertions, or even questions, from someone who is afraid to reveal his identity - someone who may not even exist.
Gates DID get a lucky break - there's no question about it. However that "break" was to be born into a well-off and well-connected family.
That's not the half of it. He also had the "good fortune" to pick a mother who could persuade the chairman of IBM to cut her son a ridiculously favourable deal.
"...NCR assigned Watson to run the struggling NCR agency in Rochester, New York. As an agent, he got 35% commission and reported directly to Hugh Chalmers, the second-in-command at NCR. In four years Watson made Rochester effectively an NCR monopoly by using the technique of knocking the main competitor, Hallwood, out of business, sometimes resorting to sabotage of the competitor's machines.[6] As a reward he was called to the NCR head office in Dayton, Ohio.[4]
"In 1912, the company was found guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Patterson, Watson, and 26 other NCR executives and managers were convicted for illegal anti-competitive sales practices and were sentenced to one year of imprisonment".
The skulls and teeth of long-dead hunter-gatherers reveal the same pattern. Very few cavities or lost teeth, excellent jaw bone formations. As soon as farming began, dental health went straight downhill along with general health.
Dr Weston A. Price, a dentist practicing in the USA, travelled widely and examined people of nearly a dozen "native" cultures ranging from the Inuit and Native Americans to the Masai and other East African tribes, inhabitants of New Guinea and Peru, and people living in isolated parts of Switzerland and Scotland. Those peoples all ate traditional diets, of varying composition - some including grain and others not.
Very few of them had any tooth decay or gum disease, and the less grain and sweet foods they ate, the less dental harm they suffered. None of them had ever brushed their teeth, and they didn't need to - except to make their breath sweeter for the sake of others.
Immediately those same people began eating "civilized" foods - mainly white flour products and sugar - their dental health became dreadful within a few years.
Congratulations on making yourself an outcast. I'm against the whole craze myself but what can one do when the vast majority has already decided?
I am amazed to see such sentiments expressed on/. Here I was thinking that slashdotters were inner-directed, free-thinking, independent minds. But apparently at least one is just a herd animal.
For a start, we can't define "human intelligence".
intelligence n noun 1 the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. 2 a person with this ability. 3 the gathering of information of military or political value. Øinformation gathered in this way. 4 archaic news.
DERIVATIVES
intelligential adjective (archaic).
ORIGIN
Middle English: via Old French from Latin intelligentia, from intelligere 'understand', variant of intellegere 'understand', from inter 'between' + legere 'choose'.
Furthermore, we have no idea how intelligence works. In any case, the intelligent part of the human nervous system (as generally understood) is a small fraction. When we humans think consciously, our thoughts are like the ripples on the surface of an ocean. Computers began as a mechanical implementation of an abstraction - our best understanding of the logical rules by which we reason. Yet, as Hume confessed and even today's philosophers and logicians still admit, there is no wholly logical justification for the basic idea of logical induction. The sun has risen and set countless times, so we are confident that it will rise and set in future. Why? There is no proof.
Expert systems aren't AI, and pattern-matching algorithms aren't AI.
As of today (and the foreseeable future) nothing is AI. There is no such thing, and there are not even any foundations or architectural direction to follow. Why? Because we still can't define what intelligence is. We have it - we arrogantly proclaim - but we don't know exactly what it is, and we have not the slightest idea how it works.
When someone can explain - in detail - how Kekule went to sleep and dreamt the benzene ring's structure, we will be starting to get a handle on what intelligence is.
To my knowledge, nothing written to date is much of an advance on Frank Herbert's astonishing SF novel "Destination, Void", originally published in 1966.
I have an aunt who swears that all the gays and trans are out to corrupt our youth by taking over the education system.
Have you understood that your disagreement with your aunt is perhaps nothing more than a semantic misunderstanding? Surely you would agree that *some* gays and trans people are determined to *enlighten* the nation's youth and *save them from prejudice* through the education system?
So it really boils down to her use of the term "corrupt" rather than "enlighten". Such misunderstandings are very common indeed - for instance, Socrates was condemned for teaching logic and philosophy, which Athenians chose to see as "corrupting the youth".
How about just laying out the facts for young people and letting them make up their own mind? Gay and trans people are neither particularly bad or particularly good. They are just different in some respects.
Are you familiar with the word "supposedly"? As in:
"Why should anyone assume that US citizens - supposedly among the world's healthiest, best educated, and most intelligent - are unable to distinguish between truth and propaganda?"
supposedly n adverb according to what is generally believed or supposed.
I did not say that I think US citizens are among the world's healthiest, best educated, and most intelligent. I said that it is generally supposed in some quarters. In particular, it is generally supposed by the US government. Which makes it inconsistent and hypocritical for the USA government to simulate concern that US citizens are being deceived by propaganda. If US citizens are as clever and well-educated as the US government would have us believe, those citizens would have no difficulty in distinguishing between truth and lies.
Unless, of course, the comments on this thread are representative of US public opinion. In which case, so much the worse for the USA - it is no longer a free country, and the very idea of freedom is no longer understood.
1. As previous comments reminded you, freedom of speech is a fundamental human right - not reserved purely for US citizens.
2. One person's "propaganda" is another person's "truth", and vice-versa. If any nation ever allowed a police department like the FBI to tell its citizens which is which, it would automatically be a police state.
3. Why should anyone assume that US citizens - supposedly among the world's healthiest, best educated, and most intelligent - are unable to distinguish between truth and propaganda? Or, indeed, to exercise their own opinions and judgment about all the many statements that fall in the grey area in between?
In most parts of the world the very idea that any government department or corporations should be allowed - let alone expected - to tell citizens what to believe and what not to believe would be greeted with shocked dismay.
The EU does an enormous amount of harm, and the sooner it is dissolved - like the USSR - the better for everyone except the bloated bureaucrats feasting on its incredible gravy train.
As for the technical (in)capacity of the Eurocrats, these cartoons are very relevant:
"Calling on" Hollywood to tweak the outrageous lies and misrepresentations it churns out may not be as important as it sounds. Garbage is garbage, no matter what colour you paint it.
"The problem with the hackneyed stereotype of the socially inept, hoodie-clad white male coder? It does not inspire underrepresented groups to pursue careers in computer science..."
Yeah, because Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Bacon, Newton, Leibniz, and all the groundbreaking mathematicians, scientists and technologists up through Einstein, Turing, Feynman and Berners-Lee took up science and technology because they were inspired by someone they saw on TV.
As someone who regularly hires people, 35 and older folks:
1. Show up on time, every day. 2. *Tend* to focus on the greater good of the company. 3. Engage in education/furthering their careers.
Obviously this is all my personal experience.
In my extensive personal experience, people who regularly do all three of those things are ignored for promotion, discriminated against and often persecuted by management as "misfits".
As H.G. Wells pointed out in his brilliant short story of that name, in the country of the blind the man with perfect vision is diagnosed as psychotic and, presently, blinded "for his own good" to rid him of the persistent delusion that he can "see".
If you can teach someone to speak, read and write a natural language (such as French, German, Arabic, etc.) in an intensive course lasting a few weeks - which is well known to be possible
Starting from not speaking or writing any language at all?
Good point! However, I think that knowing a natural language (such as English) is an essential prerequisite for anyone to learn a programming language. They aren't called "languages" for nothing, you know. Certainly programming languages are very different from natural languages, but they have a common core. How could you understand, let alone say, "Add the number in Register One to the number in Register Two and place the result in Register Three" without knowing what a number, a register, or addition are?
In any case, such a short course is barely going to teach you the rudiments.
The thousand-mile journey begins with a single step.
Slashdot Mirror
What some of us just can't understand is how, or why, you can "enjoy" owning a $25K watch. It may look pretty, I suppose - although that's hardly what a watch is for. But mostly it's just a way of taunting other people that you can spend as much money on a watch as they earn in a year. (And, if you like living dangerously, taunting those who would like to steal it that your security is good enough to stop them doing that).
This precisely misses the point. A $1,000 video card is usually far more powerful than a cheaper one - with a faster processor and extra features. A $500,000 house either has more rooms, more space, a better view, or some other valuable characteristics - or maybe it is in a very expensive neighbourhood.
The car example is a lot closer to what Apple does. A very capable (and, if desired, spacious) car can be had for $30,000. Beyond that, you are probably mainly paying for status.
But the iPhone really doesn't do very much that far cheaper no-name gadgets can't do. What it does provide is cachet.
Exactly so.
Why does a cropped, "distressed" t-shirt sell for GBP 455 (about $600)? https://www.farfetch.com/uk/sh...
Not because of all its "valuable features", or because it has anything unique or attractive about it. No, such fashion items command high prices because they are rare, identifiable, and expensive.
And that's why the iPhone and other Apple gadgets can be sold for such high prices. They allow their owners to feel that they are (for the time being, at least) one up on other people - especially their family, friends and work acquaintances.
In case it was not already glaringly obvious, consider how amazingly applicable the extract from the Tao Te Ching is to today's USA.
More and more prohibitions... and the people (except for the 1%) have become steadily poorer.
The more "sharp weapons" (nowadays mostly guns, although knives are also common), the greater the chaos (mass shootings..., police brutality...)
The more clever and crafty the people become (in response to the cleverness and craftiness of politicians, Wall Street, and their pet lawyers), the more "unusual affairs" occur (Enron, Bernie Madoff, pretty much everyone on Wall Street, the Democratic Party, the Republicn Party, the CIA...)
The more laws and regulations, the more thieves and brigands. Well, just look at them!
Very true indeed. We don't need laws until people seek to do things that are unfair and unacceptable - then we have to make laws to forbid those acts. However, any societies that has to make laws against X is likely already to be saturated with X; the existence of the laws strongly suggests that they are being broken wholesale.
The following extract from the Tao Te Ching is relevant, especially the final part about "thieves and brigands".
"The more prohibitions that are imposed on people,
The poorer the people become.
The more sharp weapons the people possess,
The greater is the chaos in the country.
The more clever and crafty the people become,
The more unusual affairs occur.
The more laws and regulations that exist,
The more thieves and brigands appear".
- Tao Te Ching
What horseshit. I'm not interested in your speculation, I'm interested in facts
By the way, who ARE you? I'm not interested in assertions, or even questions, from someone who is afraid to reveal his identity - someone who may not even exist.
Gates DID get a lucky break - there's no question about it. However that "break" was to be born into a well-off and well-connected family.
That's not the half of it. He also had the "good fortune" to pick a mother who could persuade the chairman of IBM to cut her son a ridiculously favourable deal.
"...NCR assigned Watson to run the struggling NCR agency in Rochester, New York. As an agent, he got 35% commission and reported directly to Hugh Chalmers, the second-in-command at NCR. In four years Watson made Rochester effectively an NCR monopoly by using the technique of knocking the main competitor, Hallwood, out of business, sometimes resorting to sabotage of the competitor's machines.[6] As a reward he was called to the NCR head office in Dayton, Ohio.[4]
"In 1912, the company was found guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Patterson, Watson, and 26 other NCR executives and managers were convicted for illegal anti-competitive sales practices and were sentenced to one year of imprisonment".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, emulate Watson by all means. But make sure you have some good lawyers - and, above all, invest in some legislators.
The skulls and teeth of long-dead hunter-gatherers reveal the same pattern. Very few cavities or lost teeth, excellent jaw bone formations. As soon as farming began, dental health went straight downhill along with general health.
Dr Weston A. Price, a dentist practicing in the USA, travelled widely and examined people of nearly a dozen "native" cultures ranging from the Inuit and Native Americans to the Masai and other East African tribes, inhabitants of New Guinea and Peru, and people living in isolated parts of Switzerland and Scotland. Those peoples all ate traditional diets, of varying composition - some including grain and others not.
Very few of them had any tooth decay or gum disease, and the less grain and sweet foods they ate, the less dental harm they suffered. None of them had ever brushed their teeth, and they didn't need to - except to make their breath sweeter for the sake of others.
Immediately those same people began eating "civilized" foods - mainly white flour products and sugar - their dental health became dreadful within a few years.
https://www.westonaprice.org/h...
My understanding was that "everything is permitted in Italy, whether it is forbidden or not".
E.g. "In Milan, traffic lights are instructions; in Rome, they are suggestions; in Naples, they are Christmas decorations".
All rook endgames are drawn.
Congratulations on making yourself an outcast. I'm against the whole craze myself but what can one do when the vast majority has already decided?
I am amazed to see such sentiments expressed on /. Here I was thinking that slashdotters were inner-directed, free-thinking, independent minds. But apparently at least one is just a herd animal.
Try visiting
https://thoreau.eserver.org/
For a start, we can't define "human intelligence".
intelligence
n noun
1 the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
2 a person with this ability.
3 the gathering of information of military or political value. Øinformation gathered in this way.
4 archaic news.
DERIVATIVES
intelligential adjective (archaic).
ORIGIN
Middle English: via Old French from Latin intelligentia, from intelligere 'understand', variant of intellegere 'understand', from inter 'between' + legere 'choose'.
Furthermore, we have no idea how intelligence works. In any case, the intelligent part of the human nervous system (as generally understood) is a small fraction. When we humans think consciously, our thoughts are like the ripples on the surface of an ocean. Computers began as a mechanical implementation of an abstraction - our best understanding of the logical rules by which we reason. Yet, as Hume confessed and even today's philosophers and logicians still admit, there is no wholly logical justification for the basic idea of logical induction. The sun has risen and set countless times, so we are confident that it will rise and set in future. Why? There is no proof.
Expert systems aren't AI, and pattern-matching algorithms aren't AI.
As of today (and the foreseeable future) nothing is AI. There is no such thing, and there are not even any foundations or architectural direction to follow. Why? Because we still can't define what intelligence is. We have it - we arrogantly proclaim - but we don't know exactly what it is, and we have not the slightest idea how it works.
When someone can explain - in detail - how Kekule went to sleep and dreamt the benzene ring's structure, we will be starting to get a handle on what intelligence is.
To my knowledge, nothing written to date is much of an advance on Frank Herbert's astonishing SF novel "Destination, Void", originally published in 1966.
I have an aunt who swears that all the gays and trans are out to corrupt our youth by taking over the education system.
Have you understood that your disagreement with your aunt is perhaps nothing more than a semantic misunderstanding? Surely you would agree that *some* gays and trans people are determined to *enlighten* the nation's youth and *save them from prejudice* through the education system?
So it really boils down to her use of the term "corrupt" rather than "enlighten". Such misunderstandings are very common indeed - for instance, Socrates was condemned for teaching logic and philosophy, which Athenians chose to see as "corrupting the youth".
How about just laying out the facts for young people and letting them make up their own mind? Gay and trans people are neither particularly bad or particularly good. They are just different in some respects.
Are you familiar with the word "supposedly"? As in:
"Why should anyone assume that US citizens - supposedly among the world's healthiest, best educated, and most intelligent - are unable to distinguish between truth and propaganda?"
supposedly
n adverb according to what is generally believed or supposed.
I did not say that I think US citizens are among the world's healthiest, best educated, and most intelligent. I said that it is generally supposed in some quarters. In particular, it is generally supposed by the US government. Which makes it inconsistent and hypocritical for the USA government to simulate concern that US citizens are being deceived by propaganda. If US citizens are as clever and well-educated as the US government would have us believe, those citizens would have no difficulty in distinguishing between truth and lies.
Unless, of course, the comments on this thread are representative of US public opinion. In which case, so much the worse for the USA - it is no longer a free country, and the very idea of freedom is no longer understood.
1. As previous comments reminded you, freedom of speech is a fundamental human right - not reserved purely for US citizens.
2. One person's "propaganda" is another person's "truth", and vice-versa. If any nation ever allowed a police department like the FBI to tell its citizens which is which, it would automatically be a police state.
3. Why should anyone assume that US citizens - supposedly among the world's healthiest, best educated, and most intelligent - are unable to distinguish between truth and propaganda? Or, indeed, to exercise their own opinions and judgment about all the many statements that fall in the grey area in between?
In most parts of the world the very idea that any government department or corporations should be allowed - let alone expected - to tell citizens what to believe and what not to believe would be greeted with shocked dismay.
The EU does an enormous amount of harm, and the sooner it is dissolved - like the USSR - the better for everyone except the bloated bureaucrats feasting on its incredible gravy train.
As for the technical (in)capacity of the Eurocrats, these cartoons are very relevant:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...
http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...
"Calling on" Hollywood to tweak the outrageous lies and misrepresentations it churns out may not be as important as it sounds. Garbage is garbage, no matter what colour you paint it.
"The problem with the hackneyed stereotype of the socially inept, hoodie-clad white male coder? It does not inspire underrepresented groups to pursue careers in computer science..."
Yeah, because Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Bacon, Newton, Leibniz, and all the groundbreaking mathematicians, scientists and technologists up through Einstein, Turing, Feynman and Berners-Lee took up science and technology because they were inspired by someone they saw on TV.
As someone who regularly hires people, 35 and older folks:
1. Show up on time, every day.
2. *Tend* to focus on the greater good of the company.
3. Engage in education/furthering their careers.
Obviously this is all my personal experience.
In my extensive personal experience, people who regularly do all three of those things are ignored for promotion, discriminated against and often persecuted by management as "misfits".
As H.G. Wells pointed out in his brilliant short story of that name, in the country of the blind the man with perfect vision is diagnosed as psychotic and, presently, blinded "for his own good" to rid him of the persistent delusion that he can "see".
Starting from not speaking or writing any language at all?
Good point! However, I think that knowing a natural language (such as English) is an essential prerequisite for anyone to learn a programming language. They aren't called "languages" for nothing, you know. Certainly programming languages are very different from natural languages, but they have a common core. How could you understand, let alone say, "Add the number in Register One to the number in Register Two and place the result in Register Three" without knowing what a number, a register, or addition are?
In any case, such a short course is barely going to teach you the rudiments.
The thousand-mile journey begins with a single step.