In my experience, you can't teach a person to think.
I don't disagree, but...
I view thinking from a procedural standpoint (what with being a programmer), and the thing that's most obvious to me is that we aren't running a single, primary algorithm; that is, we don't think "How do I move my arm?" and concentrate on that the whole time. It's a tiered system; you decide what to do, and another level of your brain figures out how to do it, and another level actually executes it. However, that's (I believe) the same as what idiots and animals have, in principle; what we get to become higher order thinkers is more or less just better algorithms at the top. Specifically, in the best case, if the algorithm at the top needs to change, it does; if you have to change something else going on below, you do.
However, a lot of people are (or seem to be) held hostage by their minds. They want to do something, but somewhere along the line, something goes wrong, and they sit there dumbfounded. Setting aside the reason why (mental problems, or something highly unexpected happening, or trauma), there is probably still a way ahead, but if they're just expecting things to work without having self-control, they're going to get tripped up.
Unfortunately, there's no way to debug the mind (short of years of meditation and/or therapy). And honestly, until the computing revolution started, there was little in the way of an appropriate training environment. How do you notice faults in a running process? How do you structure your thoughts in such a way as to not hide critical errors? How do you identify which of hundreds of co-mingling processes is the culprit, if any?
And if a person's lived twenty or thirty years without having to think about any of that, how much of their mind is already running bad algorithms, especially in crucial systems? Can they be upgraded in place? Is there any upgrade path at all?
I tend to believe that anyone can improve their mind, technically speaking, but it becomes a nearly infeasible problem after a while. And naturally, it's not something you can do without admin/superuser access, and (unless hypnosis and psychics are real), there is at most one person who can possibly have that, and I suspect in many cases, none do.
This is probably all crazy talk, but I find it interesting anyway.
Literary analysis involves explaining a work of fiction or poetry by means of interpretation based on the specific linguistic expressions or structural tools used by the author.
This is especially useful when the work isn't written in your native language, like converting between English and Old English, or English and French, or French and Russian, or English and Physicist, or Physicist and Management, or Physicist and Chemist, etc. Or, equivalently, when you just aren't on the same wavelength, such as 10 hours of sleep nightly vs 10 cups of coffee nightly.
Completely disregarding how it's (presumably) not possible in this case, etc, it makes me wonder--if intelligent life developed with stars like that, what sort of mythologies would they have to explain their suns' eternal duel?
I mean, hell, we romanticize dawn and dusk, and the moon, and fear the nighttime and eclipses, and we're paranoid about the tiny pinpricks of light that are the stars, thinking they hold great sway over us. They probably wouldn't know that if those two stars actually collided, their lives would all be over--or if they guessed, they wouldn't know why or how--but would they be given personas? What sort of stories would they make up? What would they think the two eclipses symbolized?
I guess as a writer and daydreamer it's just a fascinating idea to toy with.
Both of them use the metric system, as far as I'm aware. The US still uses the imperial system, which is why our butt-loads, ass-tons, and shit-loads are all somewhat larger.
I'm not sure whether that's the cause of, or the result of us being so full of shit.
Behind every sleazy lawyer is a sleazier client. Blame Sony
I disagree. There is no single client which could possibly be the cause of this entire screwed-up sue-happy culture, but as long as the sue-happy culture persists, clients can be enticed to become twisted, sleazy companies.
Blame the country/countries involved. They're the ones who are supposed to be making sure it doesn't happen. The lawyers are within their rights, and that's the real problem.
And if the users don't do anything beyond use the phone more or less as-is - customizing the pre-packaged frontend, installing approved apps from the approved app store - is it really open, or just another brand of the same thing iOS is?
When you need (or want) something to be open and it's not, that's bad. When you don't need something to be open, but it is anyway, that's good. I don't know why you consider these equivalent. (Whether there are times you would want it not to be open is an argument for elsewhere)
Replace "Open" by "Within range of a fire department." Some people never use the fire department, but as long as they can be reached, then if they ever need it, it's there. If they're not in range, and they need a fire truck, SOL.
Frankly, I agree that the closing off of handsets is stupid, but if assuages corporate fears, then they'll continue to make that decision. But, all it takes is one device--competently made and on the right network. If there's just one, then the option is still available to you.
Police officers are trained to create a zone of control around themselves, which would include things like threatening random passers-by and generally acting like thugs, its standard crowd control tactics, and while very far from acceptable civilised behaviour, it does work.
If "standard crowd control tactics" doesn't accomplish anything and introduces new liabilities, they should rewrite their playbook.
"Civilized" means "we gave up power so that there would be less evil in the world; we can't be consumed by fear and doubt and in that panic destroy people." As a tradeoff, certain trustworthy individuals must have power to prevent those who remain un-civilized from harming others. The only reason that's okay is because they can be trusted. He showed then, and he's showing now, he can't be trusted. He will be consumed, and he will hurt people, and he doesn't care. Get him off the fucking street.
I have yet to see anyone satisfactorily define "intelligence", let alone propose a plausible algorithm for it.
I use the definition, "a problem solving engine"; that is to say, an engine based entirely on solving any problem presented to it (presumably using an extensible language, internally if not externally). Things like "How do I gather all of my senses into one place for processing" and "given all of this sensory information, what do I do now" and "how do I express my feelings for this person (with or without saying anything)" are problems and so could be understood by such an engine, as could many other facets of intelligence. Or, in other words, once you had an engine like that, making something look intelligent is only about finding the right problems for it to take on... which, in the end, is also something we see in humans.
But yeah, I wouldn't want to try to implement that in code. I firmly believe it could be done, but I don't have the expertise to do it.
Of course not. They don't care, and they don't have any reason to care. Until such time as they have a (personally relevant) reason to care, it will be an academic matter to them. It's like debating whether quantum uncertainty makes the universe non-deterministic in nature. It's okay to make completely bullshit comments, because almost nobody who's doing any of the commentary needs to care.
Intellectually speaking, I know that WikiLeaks is an important resource. However, as someone who's never felt like he had any control over his own life (with family and others nearby the ones who have more power, not the government or corporations), the idea of having a place to turn to when you need to expose something of world-shattering import is foreign. Because the first I've heard of it is when I had no power, I'll probably always be predisposed to say, "Yes, underdogs need protecting." If the first time I heard about it, I had power, I would probably see it as a threat to power. What it is, however, is a (non-governmental) judicial mechanism, designed to only affect people who have, in fact, done something wrong.
If the only commentary we heard on the subject was people who were actually affected by Wikileaks, it would be pretty easy to notice biases--group A was happy that plans to the Death Star leaked, group B wanted to use the existence of the leaked plans to run a smear campaign against the Empire, group C are afraid they'll lose their jobs because it got out (or worse), group D is thinking that this might be very useful for leaking many other nefarious plots which they already sense, but cannot prove, are ongoing.
But we're not hearing only those people. We're hearing a lot of myth and speculation from people who are presumed to be knowledgeable, but who are paid to be less than factual. And we're philosophizing like it doesn't matter, because to most people, it doesn't. For that reason, popular opinion shouldn't matter on the subject, but it does. I guess. For some reason.
In any case, let Wikileaks do what they're there for. If it didn't make sense, to them and the people who use them, it wouldn't be there.
I can appreciate yours and the GGP's point of view, but I personally don't at all mentally connect gay (the pejorative usage) with homosexuality (which I support). I don't tend to use it myself, and I can understand it making people uncomfortable, and frankly it is our bad for not having changed it, but it's also not something you have to jump on people for.
When someone's saying it to be nasty towards gays, it'll more or less be obvious, because they're specifically trying to convey their hatred. A lot more people than that say it for the same reason they say any other swear word--because it's something you're sort of not supposed to say, but fuck it, it adds emphasis.
Just make glow-in-the-dark spider silk with those silkworks from a few stories back. I'm sure that's a perfect material for making cocoons out of! It's like an eternal nightlight. And then you can have your slippers and see them, too.
And shockingly, both controlling and failing to monitor is right up there with the worst things you can do. Crazy I know, but they're really not opposites.
"The world is strict and senseless, so cheat, the fuck do I care?"
Pragmatically speaking, I think there are two issues.
For one, most people have experienced someone screwing them over just because they were on top. "Why is that okay?" they wonder, "Why are they getting away with it?" And rather than people saying "No, it's not actually okay, they ought to be stopped," it's just a chorus of "Well, they have power, it's just different for them." If they take that mindset with them when they get power themselves, it's hardly surprising that they find those sort of actions acceptable.
For two, in a way we're all still children until the day we die--and every time we come across something new, which we haven't learned yet, we have to either lead or follow. However, you only really lead when you're sure about what you want to do and what you believe; for all other aspects of suddenly having power, you have to sort out your feelings by looking at legends, and your peers, and history, and any hired advisors, and anything else you currently know about what you're supposed to do. You follow those things because you don't know what else to do, until you've made up your mind.
The "legends" as far as superheroes/villains go are in many cases very noble, but they almost always carry with them a (realistically unacceptable) amount of unintended destruction in order to prove how much power you have. For example, if you see Superman pick up a car or a huge slab of pavement in order to protect the city, you go "oh man, that's awesome". However, the pavement will probably take days or weeks to reset (let alone what happens if he breaks a pipe or ten), and some poor shlub's SOL as far as his car goes--although he'll probably be reimbursed. But you get the idea--as soon as you have power, it's like "oh man, what totally amazing things can I do?" And I'd be really surprised if they didn't get royally pissed when, instead of being impressed, everyone's totally freaked out at their destroyed city.
I've thought about what I would do if I had powers, too--and well, I wouldn't be a villain, probably, but I'd definitely cause problems in that angsty, anti-hero way where as long as someone else starts the fight, I don't pay enough attention to protecting the world around me. I'd love to be able to fly and manipulate matter and all sorts of other interesting things--and I'd want to do lots of good and interesting things with it, like make my own city or protect people--but when you get power, so do your "inner demons." In my case, that's fear, and if you give fear a weapon, it will attack people randomly when they get too close.
Still, if I thought I were going to get that kind of power, I'd probably run off to the mountains somewhere and try to deal with my issues before coming back to kick ass, so maybe I'd do pretty well. But, it's hard to tell.
My definition of "intelligence" (which leads directly to a definition of AI) is "a problem-solving engine;" the fundamental aspect of its design is "take any arbitrary problem, solve it." Computers, nowadays, are logic engines; "take the instruction and data; transform the data as the instruction dictates."
Everything we think of as intelligence--including animal intelligence--seems to boil down to it; the problem of gathering all your bodily senses into one place for analysis, the problem of identifying someone or something using that data, the problem of earmarking and parsing memories such that you can retrieve those related to that identified person, the problem of determining what to say to them... and, when there's nothing and nobody else around, the problem of figuring out what to do next.
I think that if we were able to successfully engineer an AI (as opposed to developing one randomly out of a genetic algorithm or some crap like that), we'd know a lot more about ourselves. But to do that, you have to build an engine of infinite potential, one that thinks in terms of problems and solutions, not operations; once you have a solution, translating it into code is simple(r).
If your choice is steal or die then you steal - that simple. Do not tell me that you would not especially if you have children to feed.
True, but not really important since this isn't the only choice most people on welfare have.
I'm reasonably certain--as much as I can be without actually studying it--that welfare was created for that exact section of the population. I don't know where you imagine this phantom caste of people comes from that would actually prefer to live under welfare unless they either arrived there from below or were born into it.
If they are somehow uninformed of what they can do to improve their lot in life from one of those two starting points, I really, really don't consider that any fault of theirs, especially considering working significantly harder in order to make slightly more may not necessarily improve their life from their own perspective. Although I'm not of their ilk, I've certainly lived under people who wanted me to work harder for something that was never going to make my life better--and who considered it "for my own good." It's an abhorrent viewpoint, especially when there are things I WOULD be willing to work towards that aren't presented as options--once again "for my own good."
Where is it that you have a right to food? Where do you get a right to medical care? No where do you have a right to these things.
Nowhere are there rights to anything. The government gave us "rights"--statutory privileges--in order to prevent (justified) civil unrest. An official stance that "you don't have a basic right to the things you need to survive (but we'll tax you the moment you have enough money, if you live that long)" by the government would be a completely justified reason for civil unrest.
Although it's not quite the same, you might enjoy MS Paint Adventures, along with the fan adventures in the forum, and other similar things around the net. They've mostly given up on actual branching stories, but they're essentially CYOA stories drawn a panel at a time based on user input.
If you have the time to read through it all, Problem Sleuth is an excellent example, if not one of the best.
This isn't flamebait. What the crap is "made for iPhone" supposed to mean if not "we've tested it and it works as advertised"? That means either Apple or the case supplier has a major fault in their QC, or more likely both.
Agreed. Any monitor worth buying is almost certainly going to last thousands of times longer than the delivery time. If you need a monitor NOW, go to a second-hand store and buy the cheapest piece of crap that works for you, and use that to tide you over. There's no point in forcing the decision, not unless you're a business that is going to lose revenue because you don't have it.
It helps to have an icon-only taskbar like 7's or OSX's, plus a non-digital clock (or a widget clock that doesn't go in the taskbar; I was happy to find you can turn off the system tray clock). Mandating the taskbar be as wide as a text string is going to take up waaay too much room, since a single word can easily take up 50+ pixels horizontally, as opposed to, say, a 32x32 icon.
Personally, I'd just like to see a GUI designed from scratch for absolutely plug-and-play additions and removals of monitors, and in particular one where widgets, desktops, and full screen apps are all first class citizens. If you had a small USB touchscreen that immediately and exclusively captured your taskbar and system widgets, that'd not only free up space, but would also get rid of the annoying problem fullscreen apps have with kicking out "always on top" widgets.
I have my own ideas, but I'm unfortunately not savvy enough to really do anything with them... certainly not yet.
He said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
And you think that's better?
Do you think it's in their control? Really?
Google notices things that happen on the internet. They get paid to notice; it's what they do. They are really only saying one thing with that statement: It's actually a pretty easy job. If you look around, you notice lots of things. Lots of people are looking. If it happened, and if anyone makes a record of it, people will find it.
It's only a stupid statement in that people will be examining his words closely for any sign that Google is up to no good. The same words have been said, by people who mean well, for ages.
What happens when you can't buy more land or more seeds, or the cost of more land and more seeds exceeds the return on investment? Or perhaps, more darkly, what happens when you follow more-land-more-seeds iteratively and then the market for beans collapses?
I suspect, without really knowing, that cell carriers have been repeatedly burned by having to put up towers and pay for infrastructure, and then being unable to raise prices to pay for it because of competition. Cell access should be a fairly elastic demand, because there are fallbacks--home phones, home wireless, free wireless from businesses, phone booths (they still have those, don't they?), etc.
It doesn't justify the douchebaggery re: prices and control, but I'm pretty sure that yeah, it is expensive, and if they have a record of being burned, they'll be much less likely to add towers to their network.
I'm not a big iPhone fan (don't own one, probably never will) but complaining about Apple requiring developers to use the APIs as published is just dumb.
A significantly better question is, why don't they have even one programmer-friendly hardware button?
I have had an iTouch for several years now (2G), and the one and only thing that pisses me off about it is that it's functionally limited as a music player (iTouch is an iPod brand, remember) because you have to pull it out, turn it on, and double tap the home button before the next, previous and pause buttons are exposed. The only saving grace is that if you pull out the headphone cord, it will (or can be set to) automatically stop the music, which makes you look slightly less stupid when someone wants your attention now rather than in 30-60 seconds.
I also have an add-on cord that adds play/pause/next/previous buttons that operates through the headphone jack somehow, but that adds like 6" to the cord length and is therefore annoying for regular use.
Minimalist is great, when they don't compromise. They did. In other things, too, but I don't know many, much less off the top of my head.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, you can't teach a person to think.
I don't disagree, but...
I view thinking from a procedural standpoint (what with being a programmer), and the thing that's most obvious to me is that we aren't running a single, primary algorithm; that is, we don't think "How do I move my arm?" and concentrate on that the whole time. It's a tiered system; you decide what to do, and another level of your brain figures out how to do it, and another level actually executes it. However, that's (I believe) the same as what idiots and animals have, in principle; what we get to become higher order thinkers is more or less just better algorithms at the top. Specifically, in the best case, if the algorithm at the top needs to change, it does; if you have to change something else going on below, you do.
However, a lot of people are (or seem to be) held hostage by their minds. They want to do something, but somewhere along the line, something goes wrong, and they sit there dumbfounded. Setting aside the reason why (mental problems, or something highly unexpected happening, or trauma), there is probably still a way ahead, but if they're just expecting things to work without having self-control, they're going to get tripped up.
Unfortunately, there's no way to debug the mind (short of years of meditation and/or therapy). And honestly, until the computing revolution started, there was little in the way of an appropriate training environment. How do you notice faults in a running process? How do you structure your thoughts in such a way as to not hide critical errors? How do you identify which of hundreds of co-mingling processes is the culprit, if any?
And if a person's lived twenty or thirty years without having to think about any of that, how much of their mind is already running bad algorithms, especially in crucial systems? Can they be upgraded in place? Is there any upgrade path at all?
I tend to believe that anyone can improve their mind, technically speaking, but it becomes a nearly infeasible problem after a while. And naturally, it's not something you can do without admin/superuser access, and (unless hypnosis and psychics are real), there is at most one person who can possibly have that, and I suspect in many cases, none do.
This is probably all crazy talk, but I find it interesting anyway.
Literary analysis involves explaining a work of fiction or poetry by means of interpretation based on the specific linguistic expressions or structural tools used by the author.
This is especially useful when the work isn't written in your native language, like converting between English and Old English, or English and French, or French and Russian, or English and Physicist, or Physicist and Management, or Physicist and Chemist, etc. Or, equivalently, when you just aren't on the same wavelength, such as 10 hours of sleep nightly vs 10 cups of coffee nightly.
It's not quite that estranged as a topic.
/Joking?
Completely disregarding how it's (presumably) not possible in this case, etc, it makes me wonder--if intelligent life developed with stars like that, what sort of mythologies would they have to explain their suns' eternal duel?
I mean, hell, we romanticize dawn and dusk, and the moon, and fear the nighttime and eclipses, and we're paranoid about the tiny pinpricks of light that are the stars, thinking they hold great sway over us. They probably wouldn't know that if those two stars actually collided, their lives would all be over--or if they guessed, they wouldn't know why or how--but would they be given personas? What sort of stories would they make up? What would they think the two eclipses symbolized?
I guess as a writer and daydreamer it's just a fascinating idea to toy with.
What do you mean, African or European buttloads?
Both of them use the metric system, as far as I'm aware. The US still uses the imperial system, which is why our butt-loads, ass-tons, and shit-loads are all somewhat larger.
I'm not sure whether that's the cause of, or the result of us being so full of shit.
Behind every sleazy lawyer is a sleazier client. Blame Sony
I disagree. There is no single client which could possibly be the cause of this entire screwed-up sue-happy culture, but as long as the sue-happy culture persists, clients can be enticed to become twisted, sleazy companies.
Blame the country/countries involved. They're the ones who are supposed to be making sure it doesn't happen. The lawyers are within their rights, and that's the real problem.
And if the users don't do anything beyond use the phone more or less as-is - customizing the pre-packaged frontend, installing approved apps from the approved app store - is it really open, or just another brand of the same thing iOS is?
When you need (or want) something to be open and it's not, that's bad. When you don't need something to be open, but it is anyway, that's good. I don't know why you consider these equivalent. (Whether there are times you would want it not to be open is an argument for elsewhere)
Replace "Open" by "Within range of a fire department." Some people never use the fire department, but as long as they can be reached, then if they ever need it, it's there. If they're not in range, and they need a fire truck, SOL.
Frankly, I agree that the closing off of handsets is stupid, but if assuages corporate fears, then they'll continue to make that decision. But, all it takes is one device--competently made and on the right network. If there's just one, then the option is still available to you.
Police officers are trained to create a zone of control around themselves, which would include things like threatening random passers-by and generally acting like thugs, its standard crowd control tactics, and while very far from acceptable civilised behaviour, it does work.
If "standard crowd control tactics" doesn't accomplish anything and introduces new liabilities, they should rewrite their playbook.
"Civilized" means "we gave up power so that there would be less evil in the world; we can't be consumed by fear and doubt and in that panic destroy people." As a tradeoff, certain trustworthy individuals must have power to prevent those who remain un-civilized from harming others. The only reason that's okay is because they can be trusted. He showed then, and he's showing now, he can't be trusted. He will be consumed, and he will hurt people, and he doesn't care. Get him off the fucking street.
I have yet to see anyone satisfactorily define "intelligence", let alone propose a plausible algorithm for it.
I use the definition, "a problem solving engine"; that is to say, an engine based entirely on solving any problem presented to it (presumably using an extensible language, internally if not externally). Things like "How do I gather all of my senses into one place for processing" and "given all of this sensory information, what do I do now" and "how do I express my feelings for this person (with or without saying anything)" are problems and so could be understood by such an engine, as could many other facets of intelligence. Or, in other words, once you had an engine like that, making something look intelligent is only about finding the right problems for it to take on... which, in the end, is also something we see in humans.
But yeah, I wouldn't want to try to implement that in code. I firmly believe it could be done, but I don't have the expertise to do it.
Of course not. They don't care, and they don't have any reason to care. Until such time as they have a (personally relevant) reason to care, it will be an academic matter to them. It's like debating whether quantum uncertainty makes the universe non-deterministic in nature. It's okay to make completely bullshit comments, because almost nobody who's doing any of the commentary needs to care.
Intellectually speaking, I know that WikiLeaks is an important resource. However, as someone who's never felt like he had any control over his own life (with family and others nearby the ones who have more power, not the government or corporations), the idea of having a place to turn to when you need to expose something of world-shattering import is foreign. Because the first I've heard of it is when I had no power, I'll probably always be predisposed to say, "Yes, underdogs need protecting." If the first time I heard about it, I had power, I would probably see it as a threat to power. What it is, however, is a (non-governmental) judicial mechanism, designed to only affect people who have, in fact, done something wrong.
If the only commentary we heard on the subject was people who were actually affected by Wikileaks, it would be pretty easy to notice biases--group A was happy that plans to the Death Star leaked, group B wanted to use the existence of the leaked plans to run a smear campaign against the Empire, group C are afraid they'll lose their jobs because it got out (or worse), group D is thinking that this might be very useful for leaking many other nefarious plots which they already sense, but cannot prove, are ongoing.
But we're not hearing only those people. We're hearing a lot of myth and speculation from people who are presumed to be knowledgeable, but who are paid to be less than factual. And we're philosophizing like it doesn't matter, because to most people, it doesn't. For that reason, popular opinion shouldn't matter on the subject, but it does. I guess. For some reason.
In any case, let Wikileaks do what they're there for. If it didn't make sense, to them and the people who use them, it wouldn't be there.
I can appreciate yours and the GGP's point of view, but I personally don't at all mentally connect gay (the pejorative usage) with homosexuality (which I support). I don't tend to use it myself, and I can understand it making people uncomfortable, and frankly it is our bad for not having changed it, but it's also not something you have to jump on people for.
When someone's saying it to be nasty towards gays, it'll more or less be obvious, because they're specifically trying to convey their hatred. A lot more people than that say it for the same reason they say any other swear word--because it's something you're sort of not supposed to say, but fuck it, it adds emphasis.
Just make glow-in-the-dark spider silk with those silkworks from a few stories back. I'm sure that's a perfect material for making cocoons out of! It's like an eternal nightlight. And then you can have your slippers and see them, too.
And shockingly, both controlling and failing to monitor is right up there with the worst things you can do. Crazy I know, but they're really not opposites.
"The world is strict and senseless, so cheat, the fuck do I care?"
Pragmatically speaking, I think there are two issues.
For one, most people have experienced someone screwing them over just because they were on top. "Why is that okay?" they wonder, "Why are they getting away with it?" And rather than people saying "No, it's not actually okay, they ought to be stopped," it's just a chorus of "Well, they have power, it's just different for them." If they take that mindset with them when they get power themselves, it's hardly surprising that they find those sort of actions acceptable.
For two, in a way we're all still children until the day we die--and every time we come across something new, which we haven't learned yet, we have to either lead or follow. However, you only really lead when you're sure about what you want to do and what you believe; for all other aspects of suddenly having power, you have to sort out your feelings by looking at legends, and your peers, and history, and any hired advisors, and anything else you currently know about what you're supposed to do. You follow those things because you don't know what else to do, until you've made up your mind.
The "legends" as far as superheroes/villains go are in many cases very noble, but they almost always carry with them a (realistically unacceptable) amount of unintended destruction in order to prove how much power you have. For example, if you see Superman pick up a car or a huge slab of pavement in order to protect the city, you go "oh man, that's awesome". However, the pavement will probably take days or weeks to reset (let alone what happens if he breaks a pipe or ten), and some poor shlub's SOL as far as his car goes--although he'll probably be reimbursed. But you get the idea--as soon as you have power, it's like "oh man, what totally amazing things can I do?" And I'd be really surprised if they didn't get royally pissed when, instead of being impressed, everyone's totally freaked out at their destroyed city.
I've thought about what I would do if I had powers, too--and well, I wouldn't be a villain, probably, but I'd definitely cause problems in that angsty, anti-hero way where as long as someone else starts the fight, I don't pay enough attention to protecting the world around me. I'd love to be able to fly and manipulate matter and all sorts of other interesting things--and I'd want to do lots of good and interesting things with it, like make my own city or protect people--but when you get power, so do your "inner demons." In my case, that's fear, and if you give fear a weapon, it will attack people randomly when they get too close.
Still, if I thought I were going to get that kind of power, I'd probably run off to the mountains somewhere and try to deal with my issues before coming back to kick ass, so maybe I'd do pretty well. But, it's hard to tell.
My definition of "intelligence" (which leads directly to a definition of AI) is "a problem-solving engine;" the fundamental aspect of its design is "take any arbitrary problem, solve it." Computers, nowadays, are logic engines; "take the instruction and data; transform the data as the instruction dictates."
Everything we think of as intelligence--including animal intelligence--seems to boil down to it; the problem of gathering all your bodily senses into one place for analysis, the problem of identifying someone or something using that data, the problem of earmarking and parsing memories such that you can retrieve those related to that identified person, the problem of determining what to say to them... and, when there's nothing and nobody else around, the problem of figuring out what to do next.
I think that if we were able to successfully engineer an AI (as opposed to developing one randomly out of a genetic algorithm or some crap like that), we'd know a lot more about ourselves. But to do that, you have to build an engine of infinite potential, one that thinks in terms of problems and solutions, not operations; once you have a solution, translating it into code is simple(r).
If your choice is steal or die then you steal - that simple. Do not tell me that you would not especially if you have children to feed.
True, but not really important since this isn't the only choice most people on welfare have.
I'm reasonably certain--as much as I can be without actually studying it--that welfare was created for that exact section of the population. I don't know where you imagine this phantom caste of people comes from that would actually prefer to live under welfare unless they either arrived there from below or were born into it.
If they are somehow uninformed of what they can do to improve their lot in life from one of those two starting points, I really, really don't consider that any fault of theirs, especially considering working significantly harder in order to make slightly more may not necessarily improve their life from their own perspective. Although I'm not of their ilk, I've certainly lived under people who wanted me to work harder for something that was never going to make my life better--and who considered it "for my own good." It's an abhorrent viewpoint, especially when there are things I WOULD be willing to work towards that aren't presented as options--once again "for my own good."
Where is it that you have a right to food? Where do you get a right to medical care? No where do you have a right to these things.
Nowhere are there rights to anything. The government gave us "rights"--statutory privileges--in order to prevent (justified) civil unrest. An official stance that "you don't have a basic right to the things you need to survive (but we'll tax you the moment you have enough money, if you live that long)" by the government would be a completely justified reason for civil unrest.
Although it's not quite the same, you might enjoy MS Paint Adventures, along with the fan adventures in the forum, and other similar things around the net. They've mostly given up on actual branching stories, but they're essentially CYOA stories drawn a panel at a time based on user input.
If you have the time to read through it all, Problem Sleuth is an excellent example, if not one of the best.
This isn't flamebait. What the crap is "made for iPhone" supposed to mean if not "we've tested it and it works as advertised"? That means either Apple or the case supplier has a major fault in their QC, or more likely both.
Oh man, you mean lawyers can be made cheaper overseas? I smell money...
I was gonna say 'lawyers' instead. Or hey! Settle disputes both legal and political with marijuana and fire them all. Problem solved.
Disclaimer: I don't actually smoke marijuana, or practice law, or politics.
Double disclaimer: You probably don't want to set legal precedents, etc, while on mind-altering drugs.
Agreed. Any monitor worth buying is almost certainly going to last thousands of times longer than the delivery time. If you need a monitor NOW, go to a second-hand store and buy the cheapest piece of crap that works for you, and use that to tide you over. There's no point in forcing the decision, not unless you're a business that is going to lose revenue because you don't have it.
It helps to have an icon-only taskbar like 7's or OSX's, plus a non-digital clock (or a widget clock that doesn't go in the taskbar; I was happy to find you can turn off the system tray clock). Mandating the taskbar be as wide as a text string is going to take up waaay too much room, since a single word can easily take up 50+ pixels horizontally, as opposed to, say, a 32x32 icon.
Personally, I'd just like to see a GUI designed from scratch for absolutely plug-and-play additions and removals of monitors, and in particular one where widgets, desktops, and full screen apps are all first class citizens. If you had a small USB touchscreen that immediately and exclusively captured your taskbar and system widgets, that'd not only free up space, but would also get rid of the annoying problem fullscreen apps have with kicking out "always on top" widgets.
I have my own ideas, but I'm unfortunately not savvy enough to really do anything with them... certainly not yet.
Dust! I had to scrap together a ball out of ice, while spacefaring barefoot--going against the gravity gradient, both ways!
He said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
And you think that's better?
Do you think it's in their control? Really?
Google notices things that happen on the internet. They get paid to notice; it's what they do. They are really only saying one thing with that statement: It's actually a pretty easy job. If you look around, you notice lots of things. Lots of people are looking. If it happened, and if anyone makes a record of it, people will find it.
It's only a stupid statement in that people will be examining his words closely for any sign that Google is up to no good. The same words have been said, by people who mean well, for ages.
What happens when you can't buy more land or more seeds, or the cost of more land and more seeds exceeds the return on investment? Or perhaps, more darkly, what happens when you follow more-land-more-seeds iteratively and then the market for beans collapses?
I suspect, without really knowing, that cell carriers have been repeatedly burned by having to put up towers and pay for infrastructure, and then being unable to raise prices to pay for it because of competition. Cell access should be a fairly elastic demand, because there are fallbacks--home phones, home wireless, free wireless from businesses, phone booths (they still have those, don't they?), etc.
It doesn't justify the douchebaggery re: prices and control, but I'm pretty sure that yeah, it is expensive, and if they have a record of being burned, they'll be much less likely to add towers to their network.
I'm not a big iPhone fan (don't own one, probably never will) but complaining about Apple requiring developers to use the APIs as published is just dumb.
A significantly better question is, why don't they have even one programmer-friendly hardware button?
I have had an iTouch for several years now (2G), and the one and only thing that pisses me off about it is that it's functionally limited as a music player (iTouch is an iPod brand, remember) because you have to pull it out, turn it on, and double tap the home button before the next, previous and pause buttons are exposed. The only saving grace is that if you pull out the headphone cord, it will (or can be set to) automatically stop the music, which makes you look slightly less stupid when someone wants your attention now rather than in 30-60 seconds.
I also have an add-on cord that adds play/pause/next/previous buttons that operates through the headphone jack somehow, but that adds like 6" to the cord length and is therefore annoying for regular use.
Minimalist is great, when they don't compromise. They did. In other things, too, but I don't know many, much less off the top of my head.