On that note, one advantage of PC is that its non-standard nature forces game designers to think about control customization. I'll give you an example:
My SO really wanted a PS3 for Christmas, so I got her one. In exchange, she got me Gran Turismo 5, which I was actually excited about since I'd been wanting to play that game since version 1. I was even more excited when I found out that my Logitech racing wheel that I use for PC racing games will work on the PS3.
I'm pretty disappointed in the game, and not only because I can't seem to convince it that a Veyron hitting a wall head on at 250mph isn't going to just bounce off and keep going down the track, but also because of the utter lack of controller configurability. Sure, I know, my Momo wheel isn't the "official" GT wheel, but so what? It's not the "official" FIA GT2 wheel either, but I can still tell my PC version of GT2 what I want all the buttons to do, and I can adjust control sensitivity. I can't do that with Gran Turismo.
The sensitivity issue is the worst part, because all racing wheels use floating pots for the pedals, and those pots inherently have tiny inaccuracies at the extremes of travel. This translates into the brakes always being slightly applied. On the PC that's an easy one to fix - just calibrate and the problem goes away. At worst you set the dead zone to compensate. On the PS3, that's not an option. You can't calibrate it. You can't set sensitivity. You can't set the dead zone. So I wound up having to rig up an elastic cord to pull up on the brake pedal just to keep from having to drive around while hooking my toe under the brake pedal to keep it from being constantly on.
This isn't a problem that only I am having - the GT forums are full of people bitching about it. Since I got the game, they've pushed 2 updates. Those updates did minor little things that I don't even notice, but didn't add the calibration functionality that's been standard on every PC racer for over 15 years.
Now, that's GT's fault, of course, but Sony could have also implemented a hardware calibration utility, and didn't. I've been able to calibrate joysticks at the OS level since Windows 3.1.
That they take such a "you can't make any changes at all ever" attitude toward controllers really eliminates the "it just works" advantage that consoles have an increasingly unjustified reputation for.
To me the only advantage of a console is that I can go out and buy a game for it and it is guaranteed to work the same on my console as on everyone else's. I didn't have to sit there reading the SMB3 box to find out if my hardware was compatible. I had a Nintendo. It was compatible.
Same with the PS3. I'm not aware of any new games that won't run on the first PS3.
I think Sony actually got it pretty much right with the PS3 - they offer different "levels" of consoles to buy, but those levels involve hard drive space (goes to how many games I can store on it, rather than *what* games I can store on it) and bundled accessories.
If you start offering different levels of console that have different performance numbers, you're going to get into situations where you have to have the "PS4 Gold" instead of the "PS4 Aluminum" or some such nonsense in order to run certain games. At that point you might as well buy a PC.
Huh. Imagine that! Every 4-8 years NASA gets new marching orders that force it to waste the money it spent on the last marching orders by axing those projects.
And every 4-8 years we get a new President.
What an astonishing coincidence!
What really needs to happen is that we need to somehow enact a law that says the President isn't in charge of NASA and can't order them to drop everything in favor of something else on a whim. The history of NASA from the shuttle onward is pretty tragic, and not because NASA or the idea of a national space agency sucks, but because idiots keep screwing with their budget. The shuttle itself was supposed to be a proof of concept - - Let's show that we can build a space plane with this prototype and then go build a production model that's cheaper and works better. But budget restraints canned that.
Then they got new budgets and were going to try for a good space plane again, and then W got into office and decided to go to Mars, so NASA had to drop everything and start working on the Mars trip. Then Obama took office and killed the Mars trip - not that I entirely fault Obama for doing that since the Mars trip was unworkable as ordered, but the point still stands. NASA has become a huge waste of taxpayer money not because of NASA mismanagement, but because of mismanagement of NASA. It really does need some independence, because we've progressed beyond the point where viable programs can be ordered and delivered in 8 years, so all we have is NASA working for at most 8 years on something and then being told to throw everything from that program away because the new President isn't interested in it.
Yep. Using Talk let me drop my txt plan. Not to say others aren't, but considering how much Verizon likes to nickel and dime customers, I'd be surprised if others were doing that and they weren't.
That's if you want to do it right, but since Lucas didn't get anything right with the prequels to begin with, he might as well do it in 3d wrong.
There's another way to make a movie shot in 2d into a 3d movie. It doesn't work very well and it looks like crap because a movie actually shot with a 3d camera (which is essentially 2 cameras stuck together at a specific distance) has each camera seeing a slightly different angle of the scene. It's that parallax that makes actual 3d look. . well. . not good, but better than fake 3d, in which they essentially just drag a copy of elements of the scene slightly to the right and then project it through the right-eye filter (either polarized or color depending on what tech they're using). You end up with something that looks almost, but not quite, entirely unlike real life.
I remember back in the mid-80's, Pepsi and Coke sent soda into space and the astronauts drank it. I even have one of the replica Pepsi space cans somewhere. I never heard or read anything about them having "wet burp" issues, and soda is far more carbonated than beer. I tried to find info on whether or not bad things happened when the astronauts drank the sodas, but couldn't. Anyone have info on this?
Plus he forgets that the apps only get 1 or 2 stars, and market reviews along the lines of "malware" AFTER people have already installed it. The free market doesn't take care of the leading edge so well, does it?;)
Tech CEO's are going to look at this and say "holy shit! That could happen to me!" And then they're going to call the politicians who have gotten so much money from them and their companies, and say "You gotta make it harder for people to do what Anonymous just did!"
And then the politicians will pass a law that significantly ups the penalties for "hacking," but because the politicians don't so much as know the difference between a Macintosh and a Nintendo, they'll screw up the definition of hacking to the point that people doing totally legitimate things with their computers, like, say, writing a program to automatically check their bank balance, are now breaking the law. And THOSE people will get the book thrown at them so hard their heads will spin, while still no one knows who the hell Anonymous is, and so the original target of all the CEOpolitical angst will just keep doing business as usual.
Trying to apply logic to the workings of corporations is somewhat like trying to teach calculus to a cat. A totally hopeless endeavor.
I think you can write "hardcore science" fiction without making it a technical manual. As long as whatever you're writing about is physically plausible, you don't have to explain exactly how it works (not to mention that if you can explain exactly how it works you should go build it and make a lot more money than you'd make writing a sci-fi novel). Star Wars is not hardcore science fiction because laser swords and "pew pew" guns on space ships that turn just like airplanes are not physically possible (or at least, not as we understand physics today) - not to mention the whole Jedi thing.
2001 (the movie) was hardcore science fiction without the tiresome technical manual. They gave us just enough info so that we'd understand what was happening (well. . Until the Star Child showed up). They didn't sit there telling you what kind of fuel the engine used, or how it burned the propellant, or how the AE-35 unit kept the transmitter pointed at Earth. It was enough to say "The AE-35 is busted and without it we can't phone home."
I wasn't trying to draw a distinction in merit between registered users and AC's. But when the AC starts yelling, typing in bold, calling people names "lusers, etc," and starts trying to get into a pissing match about who's accomplished more than who, they're living up to the "coward" part of the AC handle.
If you're gonna come on here and fling insults, and jockey about acting as though you're better than everyone else, at least have the guts to register a name so that you have to face the consequences of your words. And no, by consequences, I don't mean getting modded up or down - my signature should have given you the hint as to what I think of that system - but consequences in that if you wish to be heard, you will have to take at least a few marginal steps not to alienate everyone by being a jerk.
Also, you might try getting your facts straight. I never said you were wrong about Linux being less secure than Windows. I said it doesn't matter, because Linux doesn't have even a fraction of the market share that Windows enjoys. In short, regarding the straight facts, I was on your side and in fact adding to your argument in my point about security through obscurity.
First off, you'd probably do better in the credibility department if you stopped posting anonymous.
Second, whether you're right or not about number of bugs in Linux vs Windows doesn't matter one whit. Linux is more secure than Windows because security through obscurity is a real concept. Just as no one is going to rob a house that only has a coffee table and a gallon of spoiled milk in it, no one is going to spend a lot of time and effort designing a Linux theft-malware, because they can steal a lot more money by designing a Windows theft-malware. There are a lot more people using Windows than Linux, and so the criminals are going to target their operations on them.
This is why a friend of mine amuses me by constantly trying to get everyone he knows to switch to Ubuntu "because it's more secure." Well, if he gets his way, it won't be anymore, and then the points you make might come in to play.
So now prospective jury members are "friends" with the prosecutor, and are in a position to be grateful (read: beholden) to him for getting them special privileges that they would not ordinarily have access to, yet they're still supposed to be impartial?
I imagine the defense attorney will have a ball with this one.
The argument was that it wasn't used often and therefore it was OK to take it away, even though it was part of the package that you paid for. Airbags qualify, but you do have a valid point about them being essential on rare occasions (namely, wrecks).
So let's look at another example. My Droid is a phone. Its essential function is to make phone calls. If the magnetic sensor were disabled by a software update, its essential functions would still be there. Is it OK for Motorola to disable the sensors as long as they don't directly relate to making phone calls or safety?
Hey wait, I know. My sound card has an optical-out port. Most people probably don't use it, but that port is why I bought it. If it went away, I could hook it up via an inferior analog cable, but I don't want to. Is it OK for the manufacturer to force a driver update which disables the optical port?
Or back to the car, the XM-ready feature in most cars doesn't get used. Is it OK for the dealership to sneak into your garage and swap the radio with one that doesn't have the XM-ready feature?
What about seat heaters? If I don't use the one on the passenger side does that mean I give Acura permission to come and remove it?
The point here is that Sony sold the PS3 advertising that it was capable of doing something that they then bricked, on purpose, and without compensation to those who had bought the machine assuming it would be as-advertised. It doesn't matter if they ever used the feature. There are buttons on my Logitech Harmony that I never use, but that doesn't mean I'm giving Logitech permission to come in to my living room and pry them off with a screwdriver. The thing was sold with a listed feature set, and I expect the company not to send henchmen to forcibly remove any of the features, used or not.
Yes, a computer specifically programmed to play Jeopardy and which has been beefing up for this by playing Jeopardy nearly every day for years, and which has a massive database of solidly-stored information (as compared to our relatively unreliable information storage systems) beat a human who played Jeopardy for a month and was never specifically trained for playing Jeopardy to the exclusion of all other things.
I'm not saying that this feat isn't impressive, any more than I would say that Deep Blue's victory wasn't impressive. But to call it artificial *intelligence* is, I think, a stretch. Neither Deep Blue nor Watson were intelligent. If we tossed either one of them into human society they'd be hopelessly lost in minutes. OK great, Deep Blue's good at playing chess. Now go get a job, hail a cab, and have a meaningful relationship with someone.
Watson is a search engine. Nothing more. Watson didn't take in the leg question and sit there picturing a standard human with legs and then compare it to an image of the guy with only one leg and then deduce that the one-legged man's oddity is that he's only got one leg.
Instead Watson searched through all of its records regarding this human and discovered that the word "leg" was mentioned quite frequently, and therefore correctly deduced that "leg" might have something to do with the search query on this human.
That isn't intelligent. It's database querying mixed with statistics - something computers have been very good at for decades. The only real breakthrough here is in the parser, which is the heart of Watson's ability to answer questions.
But a good parser does not an intelligence make. It just makes it easier to give the illusion of intelligence to humans who don't spend a lot of time learning about parsers. And that is very important and should be lauded on its own without muddying the picture by pretending it's an "intelligence" because this research will lead to easier-to-use computers.
Watson is really Eliza, backed up by an enormous and rapidly-searchable database.
Put another way, if Watson were a true AI, it would be highly unethical to turn it off at the end of the tournament.
Did you miss the part where I said it was simplified? Yes, I know all about the 4 wire phone system and how it works, but I didn't see the need to write a dissertation on it just to get people to see why full duplex over one frequency is *not* comparable to full duplex over the telephone.
Phones are "full duplex" because there are 2 wires involved. One wire coming in to the receiver and going up to the earpiece, and one wire going out from the mouthpiece. (Yes, telco engineers, I know it's not quite that simple, but for purposes of this conversation, it is)
To put it another way, you don't fill the bathtub by reversing the flow of the drain.
To translate that to wireless, you'd need two frequencies for full duplex. Full duplex over one frequency would be like full duplex over one wire instead of two.
BTW re: modems being faster if you turned off the upload channel and used it for download - - that wouldn't work because of the checksum - - the data packets have a checksum which the modem sends back up the upload channel to verify that it's receiving the information correctly. (this wouldn't have been a problem with certain protocols like Ymodem-G, which eliminates the cyclic redundancy checking and therefore does not need the upload channel, but you're then relying on a completely error-free connection which is iffy at best over a standard phone line, hence the fact that such protocols were almost never used in the wild).
What they used to do in the modem days to make them faster was to use a protocol called Shotgun, which linked 2 modems working on 2 separate phone lines together to increase the throughput.
That's better than it used to be. I remember in Civ3 some dude with a spear destroyed my tank. I quit playing that day. I understand that all the units have % points assigned to determine the likeliness of a successful battle outcome, but not having a bronze-age spear thrower have an automatic 0% chance of success against units like a freaking *tank* was an asinine omission.
The point of wanting to live forever is that *I* will live forever. If by downloading me into a computer you don't manage to transfer the *I* that *I* experience, you've failed to meet the goal. I don't care if something that thinks it's me lives forever. I don't want to live forever because I'm an egotist. I want to live forever because *I* want to experience it. If you replace me with a robot, that doesn't work because I will still die, leaving the new robot to have all the fun that *I* should be having.
Presumably by paying their workers crap wages, just like any red-blooded large American private company trims costs.
They could probably also offset the costs by offering very expensive rides into space. You don't need all 7 seats to be filled with crew if you're just bringing up a satellite or delivering food to the ISS. A commander, pilot, and payload specialist would do it. Then sell the other 4 seats at $125million a pop and you've just absorbed half a billion worth of launch costs.
Plus, it's not at all uncommon for government contracts to be bid at one dollar amount and end up being much more costly (see: the B-2). So they might be underbidding at $1.5bn now in order to get the program, and then when it actually comes time to pay for it, the costs will be higher.
The reflection works both ways though. Let's say your prison has the mess hall on the east end, then a bunch of cell blocks, then a guardroom, then more cell blocks, and then the infirmary.
If a guard is in the infirmary and needs to radio for help, the cage/metallic paint could block his radio signal from getting to the guy in the guardroom or the mess hall. There isn't really a good way to block prisoner's radio transmissions without also blocking, or at least potentially blocking, the guards' radios as well.
What we're kind of dancing around here is that no matter what you do, prisoners will generally find a way around it. They have nothing but time, and they're bored, so they sit in their cells all day and think about ways to buck the system. If you somehow blocked cell signals, I guarantee you that within a few months they would somehow get a wire to the outside so that they'd have an antenna outside of the Faraday cage.
You might laugh and think "no way," but some of the crap prisoners come up with is nothing short of genius. No booze in prison? Hey, we can make booze with rotten fruit, a trash bag, and an old sock. No communicating between cells? We'll sit here and practice catching pieces of paper with paperclips on the end of fishing line, which we will have smuggled in for us (look up "kiting.") No drugs? We'll make a bong out of toilet paper (this actually happened). No weapons? We'll sharpen metal from our bedsprings and have a shiv, or we'll make (this also actually happened) nunchucks out of rolled up magazines, tape, and garbage bags twisted tightly together for the chain.
They make tattoo guns out of batteries, a video game controller rumble pack, and sharpened wire. One prisoner made a shotgun out of iron bedposts, with lead bits from curtain rods mixed with match heads ignited by a plunger, that he used in a successful escape.
They've even made bugs which they install in the guardroom so they can listen on a receiver hidden in a book to know when cell shakedowns are about to happen.
In short, you're not going to stop them from figuring out how to get what they want, and if you up the ante in countermeasures, that just means they'll come up with something even harder to police.
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On that note, one advantage of PC is that its non-standard nature forces game designers to think about control customization. I'll give you an example:
My SO really wanted a PS3 for Christmas, so I got her one. In exchange, she got me Gran Turismo 5, which I was actually excited about since I'd been wanting to play that game since version 1. I was even more excited when I found out that my Logitech racing wheel that I use for PC racing games will work on the PS3.
I'm pretty disappointed in the game, and not only because I can't seem to convince it that a Veyron hitting a wall head on at 250mph isn't going to just bounce off and keep going down the track, but also because of the utter lack of controller configurability. Sure, I know, my Momo wheel isn't the "official" GT wheel, but so what? It's not the "official" FIA GT2 wheel either, but I can still tell my PC version of GT2 what I want all the buttons to do, and I can adjust control sensitivity. I can't do that with Gran Turismo.
The sensitivity issue is the worst part, because all racing wheels use floating pots for the pedals, and those pots inherently have tiny inaccuracies at the extremes of travel. This translates into the brakes always being slightly applied. On the PC that's an easy one to fix - just calibrate and the problem goes away. At worst you set the dead zone to compensate. On the PS3, that's not an option. You can't calibrate it. You can't set sensitivity. You can't set the dead zone. So I wound up having to rig up an elastic cord to pull up on the brake pedal just to keep from having to drive around while hooking my toe under the brake pedal to keep it from being constantly on.
This isn't a problem that only I am having - the GT forums are full of people bitching about it.
Since I got the game, they've pushed 2 updates. Those updates did minor little things that I don't even notice, but didn't add the calibration functionality that's been standard on every PC racer for over 15 years.
Now, that's GT's fault, of course, but Sony could have also implemented a hardware calibration utility, and didn't. I've been able to calibrate joysticks at the OS level since Windows 3.1.
That they take such a "you can't make any changes at all ever" attitude toward controllers really eliminates the "it just works" advantage that consoles have an increasingly unjustified reputation for.
To me the only advantage of a console is that I can go out and buy a game for it and it is guaranteed to work the same on my console as on everyone else's. I didn't have to sit there reading the SMB3 box to find out if my hardware was compatible. I had a Nintendo. It was compatible.
Same with the PS3. I'm not aware of any new games that won't run on the first PS3.
I think Sony actually got it pretty much right with the PS3 - they offer different "levels" of consoles to buy, but those levels involve hard drive space (goes to how many games I can store on it, rather than *what* games I can store on it) and bundled accessories.
If you start offering different levels of console that have different performance numbers, you're going to get into situations where you have to have the "PS4 Gold" instead of the "PS4 Aluminum" or some such nonsense in order to run certain games. At that point you might as well buy a PC.
That's a pretty hefty flaw when I'm behind you aiming a rifle at your head. . .
Huh. Imagine that! Every 4-8 years NASA gets new marching orders that force it to waste the money it spent on the last marching orders by axing those projects.
And every 4-8 years we get a new President.
What an astonishing coincidence!
What really needs to happen is that we need to somehow enact a law that says the President isn't in charge of NASA and can't order them to drop everything in favor of something else on a whim. The history of NASA from the shuttle onward is pretty tragic, and not because NASA or the idea of a national space agency sucks, but because idiots keep screwing with their budget. The shuttle itself was supposed to be a proof of concept - - Let's show that we can build a space plane with this prototype and then go build a production model that's cheaper and works better. But budget restraints canned that.
Then they got new budgets and were going to try for a good space plane again, and then W got into office and decided to go to Mars, so NASA had to drop everything and start working on the Mars trip. Then Obama took office and killed the Mars trip - not that I entirely fault Obama for doing that since the Mars trip was unworkable as ordered, but the point still stands. NASA has become a huge waste of taxpayer money not because of NASA mismanagement, but because of mismanagement of NASA. It really does need some independence, because we've progressed beyond the point where viable programs can be ordered and delivered in 8 years, so all we have is NASA working for at most 8 years on something and then being told to throw everything from that program away because the new President isn't interested in it.
Yep. Using Talk let me drop my txt plan. Not to say others aren't, but considering how much Verizon likes to nickel and dime customers, I'd be surprised if others were doing that and they weren't.
That's if you want to do it right, but since Lucas didn't get anything right with the prequels to begin with, he might as well do it in 3d wrong.
There's another way to make a movie shot in 2d into a 3d movie. It doesn't work very well and it looks like crap because a movie actually shot with a 3d camera (which is essentially 2 cameras stuck together at a specific distance) has each camera seeing a slightly different angle of the scene. It's that parallax that makes actual 3d look. . well. . not good, but better than fake 3d, in which they essentially just drag a copy of elements of the scene slightly to the right and then project it through the right-eye filter (either polarized or color depending on what tech they're using). You end up with something that looks almost, but not quite, entirely unlike real life.
I remember back in the mid-80's, Pepsi and Coke sent soda into space and the astronauts drank it. I even have one of the replica Pepsi space cans somewhere. I never heard or read anything about them having "wet burp" issues, and soda is far more carbonated than beer. I tried to find info on whether or not bad things happened when the astronauts drank the sodas, but couldn't. Anyone have info on this?
Plus he forgets that the apps only get 1 or 2 stars, and market reviews along the lines of "malware" AFTER people have already installed it. The free market doesn't take care of the leading edge so well, does it? ;)
Point taken ;)
That's not how corporations work.
Tech CEO's are going to look at this and say "holy shit! That could happen to me!" And then they're going to call the politicians who have gotten so much money from them and their companies, and say "You gotta make it harder for people to do what Anonymous just did!"
And then the politicians will pass a law that significantly ups the penalties for "hacking," but because the politicians don't so much as know the difference between a Macintosh and a Nintendo, they'll screw up the definition of hacking to the point that people doing totally legitimate things with their computers, like, say, writing a program to automatically check their bank balance, are now breaking the law. And THOSE people will get the book thrown at them so hard their heads will spin, while still no one knows who the hell Anonymous is, and so the original target of all the CEOpolitical angst will just keep doing business as usual.
Trying to apply logic to the workings of corporations is somewhat like trying to teach calculus to a cat. A totally hopeless endeavor.
I think you can write "hardcore science" fiction without making it a technical manual. As long as whatever you're writing about is physically plausible, you don't have to explain exactly how it works (not to mention that if you can explain exactly how it works you should go build it and make a lot more money than you'd make writing a sci-fi novel). Star Wars is not hardcore science fiction because laser swords and "pew pew" guns on space ships that turn just like airplanes are not physically possible (or at least, not as we understand physics today) - not to mention the whole Jedi thing.
2001 (the movie) was hardcore science fiction without the tiresome technical manual. They gave us just enough info so that we'd understand what was happening (well. . Until the Star Child showed up). They didn't sit there telling you what kind of fuel the engine used, or how it burned the propellant, or how the AE-35 unit kept the transmitter pointed at Earth. It was enough to say "The AE-35 is busted and without it we can't phone home."
Relax, we know it's you.
I wasn't trying to draw a distinction in merit between registered users and AC's. But when the AC starts yelling, typing in bold, calling people names "lusers, etc," and starts trying to get into a pissing match about who's accomplished more than who, they're living up to the "coward" part of the AC handle.
If you're gonna come on here and fling insults, and jockey about acting as though you're better than everyone else, at least have the guts to register a name so that you have to face the consequences of your words. And no, by consequences, I don't mean getting modded up or down - my signature should have given you the hint as to what I think of that system - but consequences in that if you wish to be heard, you will have to take at least a few marginal steps not to alienate everyone by being a jerk.
Also, you might try getting your facts straight. I never said you were wrong about Linux being less secure than Windows. I said it doesn't matter, because Linux doesn't have even a fraction of the market share that Windows enjoys. In short, regarding the straight facts, I was on your side and in fact adding to your argument in my point about security through obscurity.
First off, you'd probably do better in the credibility department if you stopped posting anonymous.
Second, whether you're right or not about number of bugs in Linux vs Windows doesn't matter one whit. Linux is more secure than Windows because security through obscurity is a real concept. Just as no one is going to rob a house that only has a coffee table and a gallon of spoiled milk in it, no one is going to spend a lot of time and effort designing a Linux theft-malware, because they can steal a lot more money by designing a Windows theft-malware. There are a lot more people using Windows than Linux, and so the criminals are going to target their operations on them.
This is why a friend of mine amuses me by constantly trying to get everyone he knows to switch to Ubuntu "because it's more secure." Well, if he gets his way, it won't be anymore, and then the points you make might come in to play.
So now prospective jury members are "friends" with the prosecutor, and are in a position to be grateful (read: beholden) to him for getting them special privileges that they would not ordinarily have access to, yet they're still supposed to be impartial?
I imagine the defense attorney will have a ball with this one.
The argument was that it wasn't used often and therefore it was OK to take it away, even though it was part of the package that you paid for. Airbags qualify, but you do have a valid point about them being essential on rare occasions (namely, wrecks).
So let's look at another example. My Droid is a phone. Its essential function is to make phone calls. If the magnetic sensor were disabled by a software update, its essential functions would still be there. Is it OK for Motorola to disable the sensors as long as they don't directly relate to making phone calls or safety?
Hey wait, I know. My sound card has an optical-out port. Most people probably don't use it, but that port is why I bought it. If it went away, I could hook it up via an inferior analog cable, but I don't want to. Is it OK for the manufacturer to force a driver update which disables the optical port?
Or back to the car, the XM-ready feature in most cars doesn't get used. Is it OK for the dealership to sneak into your garage and swap the radio with one that doesn't have the XM-ready feature?
What about seat heaters? If I don't use the one on the passenger side does that mean I give Acura permission to come and remove it?
The point here is that Sony sold the PS3 advertising that it was capable of doing something that they then bricked, on purpose, and without compensation to those who had bought the machine assuming it would be as-advertised. It doesn't matter if they ever used the feature. There are buttons on my Logitech Harmony that I never use, but that doesn't mean I'm giving Logitech permission to come in to my living room and pry them off with a screwdriver. The thing was sold with a listed feature set, and I expect the company not to send henchmen to forcibly remove any of the features, used or not.
Yes, a computer specifically programmed to play Jeopardy and which has been beefing up for this by playing Jeopardy nearly every day for years, and which has a massive database of solidly-stored information (as compared to our relatively unreliable information storage systems) beat a human who played Jeopardy for a month and was never specifically trained for playing Jeopardy to the exclusion of all other things.
I'm not saying that this feat isn't impressive, any more than I would say that Deep Blue's victory wasn't impressive. But to call it artificial *intelligence* is, I think, a stretch. Neither Deep Blue nor Watson were intelligent. If we tossed either one of them into human society they'd be hopelessly lost in minutes. OK great, Deep Blue's good at playing chess. Now go get a job, hail a cab, and have a meaningful relationship with someone.
Watson is a search engine. Nothing more. Watson didn't take in the leg question and sit there picturing a standard human with legs and then compare it to an image of the guy with only one leg and then deduce that the one-legged man's oddity is that he's only got one leg.
Instead Watson searched through all of its records regarding this human and discovered that the word "leg" was mentioned quite frequently, and therefore correctly deduced that "leg" might have something to do with the search query on this human.
That isn't intelligent. It's database querying mixed with statistics - something computers have been very good at for decades. The only real breakthrough here is in the parser, which is the heart of Watson's ability to answer questions.
But a good parser does not an intelligence make. It just makes it easier to give the illusion of intelligence to humans who don't spend a lot of time learning about parsers. And that is very important and should be lauded on its own without muddying the picture by pretending it's an "intelligence" because this research will lead to easier-to-use computers.
Watson is really Eliza, backed up by an enormous and rapidly-searchable database.
Put another way, if Watson were a true AI, it would be highly unethical to turn it off at the end of the tournament.
The vast majority of people don't use their car's airbags. Are you saying it's OK for Ford to sneak into your garage and remove them?
Did you miss the part where I said it was simplified? Yes, I know all about the 4 wire phone system and how it works, but I didn't see the need to write a dissertation on it just to get people to see why full duplex over one frequency is *not* comparable to full duplex over the telephone.
Phones are "full duplex" because there are 2 wires involved. One wire coming in to the receiver and going up to the earpiece, and one wire going out from the mouthpiece. (Yes, telco engineers, I know it's not quite that simple, but for purposes of this conversation, it is)
To put it another way, you don't fill the bathtub by reversing the flow of the drain.
To translate that to wireless, you'd need two frequencies for full duplex. Full duplex over one frequency would be like full duplex over one wire instead of two.
BTW re: modems being faster if you turned off the upload channel and used it for download - - that wouldn't work because of the checksum - - the data packets have a checksum which the modem sends back up the upload channel to verify that it's receiving the information correctly. (this wouldn't have been a problem with certain protocols like Ymodem-G, which eliminates the cyclic redundancy checking and therefore does not need the upload channel, but you're then relying on a completely error-free connection which is iffy at best over a standard phone line, hence the fact that such protocols were almost never used in the wild).
What they used to do in the modem days to make them faster was to use a protocol called Shotgun, which linked 2 modems working on 2 separate phone lines together to increase the throughput.
That's better than it used to be. I remember in Civ3 some dude with a spear destroyed my tank. I quit playing that day. I understand that all the units have % points assigned to determine the likeliness of a successful battle outcome, but not having a bronze-age spear thrower have an automatic 0% chance of success against units like a freaking *tank* was an asinine omission.
The point of wanting to live forever is that *I* will live forever. If by downloading me into a computer you don't manage to transfer the *I* that *I* experience, you've failed to meet the goal. I don't care if something that thinks it's me lives forever. I don't want to live forever because I'm an egotist. I want to live forever because *I* want to experience it. If you replace me with a robot, that doesn't work because I will still die, leaving the new robot to have all the fun that *I* should be having.
Presumably by paying their workers crap wages, just like any red-blooded large American private company trims costs.
They could probably also offset the costs by offering very expensive rides into space. You don't need all 7 seats to be filled with crew if you're just bringing up a satellite or delivering food to the ISS. A commander, pilot, and payload specialist would do it. Then sell the other 4 seats at $125million a pop and you've just absorbed half a billion worth of launch costs.
Plus, it's not at all uncommon for government contracts to be bid at one dollar amount and end up being much more costly (see: the B-2). So they might be underbidding at $1.5bn now in order to get the program, and then when it actually comes time to pay for it, the costs will be higher.
The reflection works both ways though. Let's say your prison has the mess hall on the east end, then a bunch of cell blocks, then a guardroom, then more cell blocks, and then the infirmary.
If a guard is in the infirmary and needs to radio for help, the cage/metallic paint could block his radio signal from getting to the guy in the guardroom or the mess hall. There isn't really a good way to block prisoner's radio transmissions without also blocking, or at least potentially blocking, the guards' radios as well.
What we're kind of dancing around here is that no matter what you do, prisoners will generally find a way around it. They have nothing but time, and they're bored, so they sit in their cells all day and think about ways to buck the system. If you somehow blocked cell signals, I guarantee you that within a few months they would somehow get a wire to the outside so that they'd have an antenna outside of the Faraday cage.
You might laugh and think "no way," but some of the crap prisoners come up with is nothing short of genius. No booze in prison? Hey, we can make booze with rotten fruit, a trash bag, and an old sock. No communicating between cells? We'll sit here and practice catching pieces of paper with paperclips on the end of fishing line, which we will have smuggled in for us (look up "kiting.") No drugs? We'll make a bong out of toilet paper (this actually happened). No weapons? We'll sharpen metal from our bedsprings and have a shiv, or we'll make (this also actually happened) nunchucks out of rolled up magazines, tape, and garbage bags twisted tightly together for the chain.
They make tattoo guns out of batteries, a video game controller rumble pack, and sharpened wire. One prisoner made a shotgun out of iron bedposts, with lead bits from curtain rods mixed with match heads ignited by a plunger, that he used in a successful escape.
They've even made bugs which they install in the guardroom so they can listen on a receiver hidden in a book to know when cell shakedowns are about to happen.
In short, you're not going to stop them from figuring out how to get what they want, and if you up the ante in countermeasures, that just means they'll come up with something even harder to police.
Adding to the already massive expense to drape the building in faraday nets. How will you pay for it? Prison budgets are tight as it is.