And Kasparov was trained on a giant library of other masters' games. For some reason, when a human shows fluency in a skill because they have spent 10 years mastering something, we don't say, well that's just because they spent so much time learning through trial and error and from the experience of others, it's nothing special. But when a computer shows fluency because it learned through trial and error and from the experience of others, we say, well of course it appears to be skilled because it's programmers gave it that ability.
All the research [citation needed] shows that master chess players play the way they do by pattern recognition. A decade of playing has built up a huge bank of chess positions. They "recognize" the boards that have won. This is how the experts can play 10 games at once. They don't have to replan each game. They recognize the board they are playing at against games they have experienced. Yet, knowing that doesn't make the feat any less impressive. Why should we be less impressed with machines for the same thing?
As someone close approaching 40, I've been keeping my eyes open more and more for games outside the 18-30 demographic. I'm pretty burnt out on FPS games. I pretend I like RTS games, and I do like learning how to play them, I'm just no good at them past the first few scenarios (maybe because of my tendency to want to build lines of towers for defense).
I enjoy American-style RPG games the most (e.g. Bioware and Bethesda games). Steam has been a godsend with all its classic games offerings. I've picked up things like Monkey Island and Longest Journey that I didn't have the drive to play through as a teen, but have worn well with age. Having played most of Indigo Prophecy, I'm looking forward to Heavy Rain, even though I know it's going to have some frustrating mechanics and I'll probably get stuck 70% through.
So, I think they're out there. Probably not games specifically targeted to 30 - 40-somethings, but that at least include them in their target audience.
I thought you were talking about Linux at first and then noticed you were talking about XKCD instead. I guess Slashdot just caters to enough interests that there's going to be topics some people like and others don't.
I've slowly come to realize this is why I keep popping from MMO to MMO. When I played WoW, I wanted to explore the world and I wanted to explore it with others, but everyone already has 10 alts and the goal is to power-level to the level cap ASAP. Because once you've leveled a "toon" (character, PC, avatar, whatever) up to cap a few times nothing's new. I might be lucky enough to get through a few levels with others before one of us out-paces the other, but then I'm back on my own.
I had an unexpected blast playing the Free Realms beta, because I was experiencing everything fresh with everyone else. You hooked up with groups and said, "what should we do next?" and someone knew this place you hadn't been and you knew a place they hadn't been. There weren't three-letter acronyms for everywhere and tank-dps-aoe jargon in every sentence.
I spent an hour having some kid drag me through the ocean till we got to a part the devs hadn't de-bugged quite right and you could walk on the ocean floor. It felt like we really discovered and shared something new. Even though it was just flat feature-less expanse.
Yes, the primary factor is verifibiality (which is the term I should probably have used over testable, but it's pretty close). In order for something to be science, it has to be verifiable--not verified, just verifiable.
Evolution describes a way that species change that can shown to either match observable data or not. Someday, evolution might be shown to be wrong. But today, the more and more time passes, the more supporting evidence there is that it's correct.
ID--by it's very nature--is not verifiable. It might be true, but I have not heard any ID proponent suggest that we could measure the existence of a designer. Any designer that could be measured would beg the question, "what designed the designer?" Therefore, the designer has to be outside of the physical world entirely and therefore unmeasurable.
All the "evidence" that there is a designer boils down examples of things that are too complex for us to understand. But as we understand more and more, that "God of the gaps" becomes smaller and smaller.
Now if you're asking philosophically, then yes, it is a matter of opinion whether you hold that the world behaves according to rules that can be measured (science) or whether entity/entities outside of the world can influence the world in ways we can't measure (religion). Then it is a matter of opinion and I can never hope to "argue" that science should be chosen over religion because it's more "true", because I can never prove science to be "true" anymore than you can prove there is supreme being.
I have no objection to ID being taught as philosophy. I do object to ID being taught as if it is science.
Social behavior in humans is certainly driven by desires, but that doesn't mean a behavior pattern of enough sophistication couldn't mimic human behavior so accurately that a human couldn't distinguish between it and a real human (although I personally believe the most successful artificial human behavior will use the same drives and desires as real humans). Humans are not unpredictable or antagonistic to programmatic function. What they are is complex. They are seemingly unpredictable because they are more complex than we have the means to explain at this time.
There was a time when science couldn't explain the motion of the planets. There was a time when science couldn't explain the functioning of biological organisms. We can explain those now. Yes, humans are the most complex, but to think that we are so special that we are somehow "outside" nature is hubris. Someday we will laugh at the time in our past when people thought that humans were somehow something new in nature that would never be explainable or simulatable.
Accenture, Cingular, Elementis, Altria, I mean, what the fuck is that?
Exactly! It isn't anything the fuck and that is the whole point. Those names could represent companies involved in any activity, whereas Comcast sounds like a shortening of Communications Broadcast and implies a narrow field of interest: cable television, Internet, and telephone. With the new name they can be anything they want: pharmaceuticals, space exploration, weapons manufacture, you name it!
Presumably, they believe they've made steps to improve their service and are at the point where their brand is carrying the baggage of past that isn't true anymore. I'm not claiming that's true, but that could be what they genuinely believe.
It's too bad your post didn't get modded more insightful. You brought up an excellent and very fair point. When I first read this I have to be honest, I have to admit I've taken this on faith.
This is something most atheists/agnostics/scientists don't like to admit to. At some point you have to take certain things on faith. I'm not a scientist and even if I was, I wouldn't be an expert in every field. I'd have to accept the testimony of other scientists. This is faith of a kind.
I had to do some digging, because I really could not think of an example I knew for a fact. The article CA210: Evolution predictions on TalkOrigins describes how evolution has made accurate predictions of the past and how predicting the future is not a prerequisite for science to be useful.
The article also links to another article on CA215: Practical uses of evolution that makes the point that while without evolution you can know a lot of useful things about biology, evolution is what helps you understand it. ID could be said to do the same thing, but you get back to the testability question.
This is the biggest fallacy that ID/Creationists propogate about science. It does not matter if evolution/the big bang haven't been "proven". The question is which of these is a scientific model that can be used to make statements about how the world works and make predictions to some degree of accuracy.
The Ptolemaic model of the universe was shown to be wrong, but it was science, because it claimed to predict the world worked a certain (measurable) way and it was shown to be inaccurate. But for thousands of years it was accurate enough to be useful. Newton developed a model that was more accurate and Einstein a model that was yet more accurate.
Someone will come along some day and develop a model of the universe that is even more accurate than Einstein's, but that will not mean that Einstein's model wasn't science or that the new model is "truth".
On the other hand, you cannot use the Bible to make accurate predictions about when to plant your crops, how the planets move around the sun, or what makes characteristics propogate from parents to children. This is why intelligent design is not an alternative form of science. It's not even a matter of whether intelligent design is true and evolution is wrong. Intelligent design cannot be used to do useful science. Evolution, even if ultimately wrong, can be used to make the most accurate models of the way things work.
If you don't want to treat intelligent design as religion, that's fine. Teach it in philosophy. But it is not science.
Microsoft Office SharePoint includes the capabilities you mentioned (version control, archiving, document permission/ownership and search/indexing) and is on par price-wise with KnowledgeTree (though not free). They also have a hosted model, SharePoint Online.
The capabilities you list actually needing--index, search, collaborate and keep and share notes--might be better fit by Microsoft OneNote. It doesn't do version control and document permission/ownership, but it does what you described doing. At my place of business, there are two categories of people: those who love OneNote and those who haven't tried it.
So, this sentence works, "The scope of RC is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information." But this sentence doesn't, "The scope of DMCA is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information." Weird.
That's the kind of thing you read and there's almost no response. There just has to be something missing here. "Suspend"? Do you mean blocked Gmail? Why Google's email and not Yahoo's, Microsoft's, or AOL's? Censoring the Internet builds trust between people and the government (I know, they don't really believe that)? Why not boost local development of Internet technology by finding projects that weren't already solved 15 years ago?
...but I can remember by father rolling his eyes at Ewoks
This is something I'd really like to hear more of. I frequently hear the argument that as a 30-something, I can't have the same experience watching the prequels as a child does and I believe it. I was watching interviews about Star Wars and they were all 30-somethings and all talking about how great the original was. I wondered what would happen if people who were 30-something when the original Star Wars trilogy came out were interviewed.
That's the article's TITLE, not Herbert's quote! The point of a citation is to tell you how to find the reference, not to reproduce the reference itself. But, so that you might easily see it with your own two eyes, here is the link to the full article: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20088153,00.html
And in case you're too lazy to do that, the actual quote:
It's rare to find an author who feels that a director hasn't massacred his work, but after seeing a rough cut of Dune, Herbert is pleased. "They've got it. It begins as Dune does. And I hear my dialogue all the way through. There are some interpretations and liberties, but you're gonna come out knowing you've seen Dune." His reaction to the rock singer Sting, who plays the villainous Feyd-Raucha, "Ah, he can act!" As for those infamous sandworms, created by John (Star Wars) Dykstra and Carlo (E.T.) Rambaldi, Herbert was impressed: "They're realistic and scary. These are no Japanese monsters rising out from the deep to eat Kyoto."
There you go, Herbert's words, in his own words, from the words he used himself. Wish I had thought to take the time to do that to begin with.
Lynch's movie had the "feel" of Dune, but as far as the script goes, it sucked really bad (which is strange, considering Herbert had substantial influence over the final product).
Ironically, Frank Herbert seems to be one of the movie's biggest fans*. Perhaps he understood that a movie is by nature a different form of story-telling than a book and that a direct translation is not always the best solution. If you judge the 1984 version as poor as a movie, so be it. If you judge it as poor for not being a faithful adaptation of the book then you've missed the point of film.
*Citation need? Here's one stolen from Wikipedia: Rozen, Leah. "With another best-seller and an upcoming film, Dune is busting out all over for Frank Herbert." People Weekly. (25 Jun 1984) Vol. 21 pp. 129-130.
I'm guessing you're half jesting, but I see a few problems with that concept. First, even if you could get lucid dreaming perfected, could you keep up a lucid dream for 6+ hours? Second, I have to believe maintaining a constant conscious state couldn't be good for one's health. It just doesn't strike me as likely that either evolution (or God) would have developed a sleep cycle for no good reason. If we could function day and night without sleep, we'd have a major survival advantage and would have almost certainly developed that ability.
For instance, in this case maybe the researchers have the hypothesis that the internet can contribute to depression.
Agreed, but in order to test the hypothesis that the Internet can contribute to depression, you would need to compare these results to the percent of people with addiction as a whole and to percentage of generally addicted people who are depressed. I don't see any of that detail here. If I told you that 1.2% of people who used the Internet were convicted murderers, but failed to mention that 2% of the general population are convicted murderers, would I be right in claiming to have established a correlation between the Internet and murder? The study points out that 1.2% is greater than the.6% of gambling in the UK, but that's not a 1-to-1 comparision, since the study including porn, all forms of gaming, and chat.
I haven't seen the actual study, so I should refrain from jumping to conlusions about the quality of the study. My issue is more with the way scientific studies are presented by the news and the way the media forces scientists to produce little sound-bite-nuggets to be taken out of context.
I'm missing the part where this study has produced anything of value.
"What is clear is that for a small subset of people, excessive use of the internet could be a warning signal for depressive tendencies."
You could just as easily say with just as much truth, "What is clear is that for a small subset of people, excessive *anything* could be a warning signal for depressive tendencies." But of course, that wouldn't produce anywhere near as much alarm and fear of the Internet.
It's as if governments had found a perfect method of preventing people from traveling globally, bringing globalization to a halt, and isolating nations rather than bringing them together. I realize it's actually about stopping terrorists and it's clearly working--we obviously don't have planes blowing up left and right any more. But if I was a government and wanted to keep people from moving around for whatever reason, why, this would seem to be a great way to do that.
No, geeks have LAN parties where they use Madden 10 to simulate the Super Bowl. Nerds have LAN parties where they pit their individually-programmed-in-assembly-Super-Bowl-simulators against each other.
He would have said trademarked, but the sentence "Just don't charge for food, or call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is trademarked." was already copyrighted.
Slashdot Mirror
And Kasparov was trained on a giant library of other masters' games. For some reason, when a human shows fluency in a skill because they have spent 10 years mastering something, we don't say, well that's just because they spent so much time learning through trial and error and from the experience of others, it's nothing special. But when a computer shows fluency because it learned through trial and error and from the experience of others, we say, well of course it appears to be skilled because it's programmers gave it that ability.
All the research [citation needed] shows that master chess players play the way they do by pattern recognition. A decade of playing has built up a huge bank of chess positions. They "recognize" the boards that have won. This is how the experts can play 10 games at once. They don't have to replan each game. They recognize the board they are playing at against games they have experienced. Yet, knowing that doesn't make the feat any less impressive. Why should we be less impressed with machines for the same thing?
As someone close approaching 40, I've been keeping my eyes open more and more for games outside the 18-30 demographic. I'm pretty burnt out on FPS games. I pretend I like RTS games, and I do like learning how to play them, I'm just no good at them past the first few scenarios (maybe because of my tendency to want to build lines of towers for defense).
I enjoy American-style RPG games the most (e.g. Bioware and Bethesda games). Steam has been a godsend with all its classic games offerings. I've picked up things like Monkey Island and Longest Journey that I didn't have the drive to play through as a teen, but have worn well with age. Having played most of Indigo Prophecy, I'm looking forward to Heavy Rain, even though I know it's going to have some frustrating mechanics and I'll probably get stuck 70% through.
So, I think they're out there. Probably not games specifically targeted to 30 - 40-somethings, but that at least include them in their target audience.
I thought you were talking about Linux at first and then noticed you were talking about XKCD instead. I guess Slashdot just caters to enough interests that there's going to be topics some people like and others don't.
I've slowly come to realize this is why I keep popping from MMO to MMO. When I played WoW, I wanted to explore the world and I wanted to explore it with others, but everyone already has 10 alts and the goal is to power-level to the level cap ASAP. Because once you've leveled a "toon" (character, PC, avatar, whatever) up to cap a few times nothing's new. I might be lucky enough to get through a few levels with others before one of us out-paces the other, but then I'm back on my own.
I had an unexpected blast playing the Free Realms beta, because I was experiencing everything fresh with everyone else. You hooked up with groups and said, "what should we do next?" and someone knew this place you hadn't been and you knew a place they hadn't been. There weren't three-letter acronyms for everywhere and tank-dps-aoe jargon in every sentence.
I spent an hour having some kid drag me through the ocean till we got to a part the devs hadn't de-bugged quite right and you could walk on the ocean floor. It felt like we really discovered and shared something new. Even though it was just flat feature-less expanse.
According to Yahoo! Answers, H.264 is proprietary.
Yes, the primary factor is verifibiality (which is the term I should probably have used over testable, but it's pretty close). In order for something to be science, it has to be verifiable--not verified, just verifiable.
Evolution describes a way that species change that can shown to either match observable data or not. Someday, evolution might be shown to be wrong. But today, the more and more time passes, the more supporting evidence there is that it's correct.
ID--by it's very nature--is not verifiable. It might be true, but I have not heard any ID proponent suggest that we could measure the existence of a designer. Any designer that could be measured would beg the question, "what designed the designer?" Therefore, the designer has to be outside of the physical world entirely and therefore unmeasurable.
All the "evidence" that there is a designer boils down examples of things that are too complex for us to understand. But as we understand more and more, that "God of the gaps" becomes smaller and smaller.
Now if you're asking philosophically, then yes, it is a matter of opinion whether you hold that the world behaves according to rules that can be measured (science) or whether entity/entities outside of the world can influence the world in ways we can't measure (religion). Then it is a matter of opinion and I can never hope to "argue" that science should be chosen over religion because it's more "true", because I can never prove science to be "true" anymore than you can prove there is supreme being.
I have no objection to ID being taught as philosophy. I do object to ID being taught as if it is science.
Social behavior in humans is certainly driven by desires, but that doesn't mean a behavior pattern of enough sophistication couldn't mimic human behavior so accurately that a human couldn't distinguish between it and a real human (although I personally believe the most successful artificial human behavior will use the same drives and desires as real humans). Humans are not unpredictable or antagonistic to programmatic function. What they are is complex. They are seemingly unpredictable because they are more complex than we have the means to explain at this time.
There was a time when science couldn't explain the motion of the planets. There was a time when science couldn't explain the functioning of biological organisms. We can explain those now. Yes, humans are the most complex, but to think that we are so special that we are somehow "outside" nature is hubris. Someday we will laugh at the time in our past when people thought that humans were somehow something new in nature that would never be explainable or simulatable.
Accenture, Cingular, Elementis, Altria, I mean, what the fuck is that?
Exactly! It isn't anything the fuck and that is the whole point. Those names could represent companies involved in any activity, whereas Comcast sounds like a shortening of Communications Broadcast and implies a narrow field of interest: cable television, Internet, and telephone. With the new name they can be anything they want: pharmaceuticals, space exploration, weapons manufacture, you name it!
Presumably, they believe they've made steps to improve their service and are at the point where their brand is carrying the baggage of past that isn't true anymore. I'm not claiming that's true, but that could be what they genuinely believe.
It's too bad your post didn't get modded more insightful. You brought up an excellent and very fair point. When I first read this I have to be honest, I have to admit I've taken this on faith.
This is something most atheists/agnostics/scientists don't like to admit to. At some point you have to take certain things on faith. I'm not a scientist and even if I was, I wouldn't be an expert in every field. I'd have to accept the testimony of other scientists. This is faith of a kind.
I had to do some digging, because I really could not think of an example I knew for a fact. The article CA210: Evolution predictions on TalkOrigins describes how evolution has made accurate predictions of the past and how predicting the future is not a prerequisite for science to be useful.
The article also links to another article on CA215: Practical uses of evolution that makes the point that while without evolution you can know a lot of useful things about biology, evolution is what helps you understand it. ID could be said to do the same thing, but you get back to the testability question.
The one that has never been proven.
This is the biggest fallacy that ID/Creationists propogate about science. It does not matter if evolution/the big bang haven't been "proven". The question is which of these is a scientific model that can be used to make statements about how the world works and make predictions to some degree of accuracy.
The Ptolemaic model of the universe was shown to be wrong, but it was science, because it claimed to predict the world worked a certain (measurable) way and it was shown to be inaccurate. But for thousands of years it was accurate enough to be useful. Newton developed a model that was more accurate and Einstein a model that was yet more accurate.
Someone will come along some day and develop a model of the universe that is even more accurate than Einstein's, but that will not mean that Einstein's model wasn't science or that the new model is "truth".
On the other hand, you cannot use the Bible to make accurate predictions about when to plant your crops, how the planets move around the sun, or what makes characteristics propogate from parents to children. This is why intelligent design is not an alternative form of science. It's not even a matter of whether intelligent design is true and evolution is wrong. Intelligent design cannot be used to do useful science. Evolution, even if ultimately wrong, can be used to make the most accurate models of the way things work.
If you don't want to treat intelligent design as religion, that's fine. Teach it in philosophy. But it is not science.
Microsoft Office SharePoint includes the capabilities you mentioned (version control, archiving, document permission/ownership and search/indexing) and is on par price-wise with KnowledgeTree (though not free). They also have a hosted model, SharePoint Online.
The capabilities you list actually needing--index, search, collaborate and keep and share notes--might be better fit by Microsoft OneNote. It doesn't do version control and document permission/ownership, but it does what you described doing. At my place of business, there are two categories of people: those who love OneNote and those who haven't tried it.
So, this sentence works, "The scope of RC is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information." But this sentence doesn't, "The scope of DMCA is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information." Weird.
That's the kind of thing you read and there's almost no response. There just has to be something missing here. "Suspend"? Do you mean blocked Gmail? Why Google's email and not Yahoo's, Microsoft's, or AOL's? Censoring the Internet builds trust between people and the government (I know, they don't really believe that)? Why not boost local development of Internet technology by finding projects that weren't already solved 15 years ago?
...but I can remember by father rolling his eyes at Ewoks
This is something I'd really like to hear more of. I frequently hear the argument that as a 30-something, I can't have the same experience watching the prequels as a child does and I believe it. I was watching interviews about Star Wars and they were all 30-somethings and all talking about how great the original was. I wondered what would happen if people who were 30-something when the original Star Wars trilogy came out were interviewed.
That's the article's TITLE, not Herbert's quote! The point of a citation is to tell you how to find the reference, not to reproduce the reference itself. But, so that you might easily see it with your own two eyes, here is the link to the full article: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20088153,00.html
And in case you're too lazy to do that, the actual quote:
It's rare to find an author who feels that a director hasn't massacred his work, but after seeing a rough cut of Dune, Herbert is pleased. "They've got it. It begins as Dune does. And I hear my dialogue all the way through. There are some interpretations and liberties, but you're gonna come out knowing you've seen Dune." His reaction to the rock singer Sting, who plays the villainous Feyd-Raucha, "Ah, he can act!" As for those infamous sandworms, created by John (Star Wars) Dykstra and Carlo (E.T.) Rambaldi, Herbert was impressed: "They're realistic and scary. These are no Japanese monsters rising out from the deep to eat Kyoto."
There you go, Herbert's words, in his own words, from the words he used himself. Wish I had thought to take the time to do that to begin with.
Lynch's movie had the "feel" of Dune, but as far as the script goes, it sucked really bad (which is strange, considering Herbert had substantial influence over the final product).
Ironically, Frank Herbert seems to be one of the movie's biggest fans*. Perhaps he understood that a movie is by nature a different form of story-telling than a book and that a direct translation is not always the best solution. If you judge the 1984 version as poor as a movie, so be it. If you judge it as poor for not being a faithful adaptation of the book then you've missed the point of film.
*Citation need? Here's one stolen from Wikipedia: Rozen, Leah. "With another best-seller and an upcoming film, Dune is busting out all over for Frank Herbert." People Weekly. (25 Jun 1984) Vol. 21 pp. 129-130.
You know, until you put it that way, it really wasn't so transparent to me. Now, it's like, duh!
I'm guessing you're half jesting, but I see a few problems with that concept. First, even if you could get lucid dreaming perfected, could you keep up a lucid dream for 6+ hours? Second, I have to believe maintaining a constant conscious state couldn't be good for one's health. It just doesn't strike me as likely that either evolution (or God) would have developed a sleep cycle for no good reason. If we could function day and night without sleep, we'd have a major survival advantage and would have almost certainly developed that ability.
For instance, in this case maybe the researchers have the hypothesis that the internet can contribute to depression.
Agreed, but in order to test the hypothesis that the Internet can contribute to depression, you would need to compare these results to the percent of people with addiction as a whole and to percentage of generally addicted people who are depressed. I don't see any of that detail here. If I told you that 1.2% of people who used the Internet were convicted murderers, but failed to mention that 2% of the general population are convicted murderers, would I be right in claiming to have established a correlation between the Internet and murder? The study points out that 1.2% is greater than the .6% of gambling in the UK, but that's not a 1-to-1 comparision, since the study including porn, all forms of gaming, and chat.
I haven't seen the actual study, so I should refrain from jumping to conlusions about the quality of the study. My issue is more with the way scientific studies are presented by the news and the way the media forces scientists to produce little sound-bite-nuggets to be taken out of context.
I'm missing the part where this study has produced anything of value.
"What is clear is that for a small subset of people, excessive use of the internet could be a warning signal for depressive tendencies."
You could just as easily say with just as much truth, "What is clear is that for a small subset of people, excessive *anything* could be a warning signal for depressive tendencies." But of course, that wouldn't produce anywhere near as much alarm and fear of the Internet.
It's as if governments had found a perfect method of preventing people from traveling globally, bringing globalization to a halt, and isolating nations rather than bringing them together. I realize it's actually about stopping terrorists and it's clearly working--we obviously don't have planes blowing up left and right any more. But if I was a government and wanted to keep people from moving around for whatever reason, why, this would seem to be a great way to do that.
No, geeks have LAN parties where they use Madden 10 to simulate the Super Bowl. Nerds have LAN parties where they pit their individually-programmed-in-assembly-Super-Bowl-simulators against each other.
He would have said trademarked, but the sentence "Just don't charge for food, or call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is trademarked." was already copyrighted.
Which is your first hint this has nothing truly to do with piracy prevention.