So intelligence is 'doing things the way humans do'? There can't be any other type of intelligence?
If a problem requires intelligence to solve, then any solution to that problem on a computer is artificial intelligence regardless of what 'parlour tricks' are used. And yeah, humans are really good at pattern recognition while computers are really good at arithmetic so I would expect artificial intelligence to differ significantly from human intelligence.
PS: This AI evaluates significantly fewer moves than deep-blue. A brute force search of go is woefully ineffective no matter how much processing power you have.
Pinging a cellphone means setting up a portable cellphone tower. All cellphones within range will report their existence to you, which you can then cross reference against your missing person's IMEI number...Through triangulation/multiple different towers you can work out the location quite accurately.
Of course this is not generally available to the public. For a start you need to have a portable tower (or borrow a few from a local telco) and secondly you'll need to cross-reference his phone number to look up his IMEI.
I'm curious how a bunch of students were able to get past the two restrictions - I can imagine a uni having some portable towers lying around for research purposes, but how would they have found out his IMEI number?
We recently had a situation where the business decided to buy the field force all iPads because they were going to change the whole business process around a new app which happens to only run on iOS. Midway through the project we discovered that a few of the field force have a critical business application which only runs on windows.
We couldn't have used this specific solution since it is Android rather than iOS, but if it had been available then it would have been very attractive.
It's standard sales jargon and so would be well understood at Dreamforce (salesforce's big conference). Leads are people you've met which might want to buy something in the future. If you feel a lead is starting to show meaningful interest then you mark them as an opportunity. Opportunities have sizes (how much can you sell to this person) as well as risk (how likely am I to land this sale).
So "Show me my most at-risk opportunities" makes perfect sense - give me a list of opportunities which have been assigned to me where their risk is is in say the top 5.
Roughly 90% of owners clean up their dog's poo. Requiring the vast majority to pay for the actions of a minority will a) not incentivise the minority to change behaviour and b) punish people that are doing the right thing (e.g. why should I keep being tidy when I'm paying to be untidy).
You'd get much the same effect putting the whole poo pickup tax onto general rates - lots of innocent people paying for the actions of the minority.
I initially thought the idea of using DNA was crazy but as long as the test can be made cheap enough I have decided I support it. Whack the people you catch with a big fine ($500?) and publicise the heck out of what you're doing, and I think the behaviour will suddenly trickle off to the point that the programme becomes cost effective.
Not sure I was quite as strong on 'Greeks are victims' as you make out. That said, I like the idea of using Poland as a comparison country. Let's agree that Poland has been far more sensible than Greece over the last 10 years, and so isn't in anywhere near the same hole Greece is now in.
So, what now? Greece can only pay the creditors if someone gives them more money. You won't, so assuming other people take your stance, that means the creditors won't be paid. After that comes banks being refused cash and the general populace unable to withdraw cash.
Within Greece the next step will be a spectacular depression with unemployment so high it makes the current 25% look like a dream. Eventually the Drachma devalues enough that Greece emerges and everyone left gets on with their lives. Maybe 10 years of that? Outside Greece the cost of the default will be increased interest rates across Europe for a number of years.
If they stay with the Euro that's a little more complicated since they can't devalue their currency. I'm not really sure what would happen there, my gut reaction is the rise of a barter economy / informal currency.
Your family have lived in a house for generations. A few years ago the house needed a bunch of work adding rooms and generally upgrading it to fit your new status as members of the respectable middle class. You didn't have the cash but you had the status and rates were cheap, so you took out a bank loan to cover it. As that loan came due, your husband lost his high paying job and had to take a cut.
So you begged with the banks and eventually they agreed to lend you more money, but at a higher interest rate. Paying more interest on less money is tough, the house continues to need work to keep it in good repair and you continued to not quite make ends meet. You go to the banks and beg for more money so you can keep paying the interest and repairs but the banks say no, they say you need to live within your means.
You promise to do that, and you quickly 'adjust' your finances to show how it's all going to work out. The bank sees through the farce immediately but he's a greedy fellow and with you agreeing to add 200 more basis points onto the rate, it's gotta be good for him. If you default, your cousin will probably cover it anyway so it isn't much risk.
You keep struggling, and you have to beg the banks for money every month. This starts to annoy and worry the banker, so he starts taking an increasing interest in your life. Don't do a good repair here, just leave the window broken... Don't send your kids off to uni, educate them at the local community college. These things save a little cash, but they also lead to you having to spend a whole lot more time looking after the house instead of making money. Even worse, your kids having a lower level of education means they can't get such a high paying job to help out which is a real problem since your grandparents have now retired and are moving back in.
You get desperate and crawl to the bank begging for more and more. They look over the situation and say, well, maybe, but you have to cancel all expenditure. House repairs, who needs them? Further education, completely abolished!
You hold a family conference. What to do? Give in to what the bank wants and destroy your family's future? Or default and have the bank potentially take possession of your family home. Put like that, it isn't such a hard call, you tell the bank to f. off and wait too see what will happen.
Who's at fault? You for living beyond your means? Yep. You for lying to the bank? Yep. The bank for accepting such an obvious lie? Yep. The bank for loaning money to someone that couldn't possibly pay it back? Yep. The bank for insisting on austerity measures that will have a negative long term fiscal impact, yep.
I would guess over half the debt has been repaid, depending on how you count. The austerity measures have been running for 7 _years_ now, and the interest rates Greece has been paying are pretty steep compared to what a government would normally pay. The whole situation reminds me of Africa, where the interest rates are set low enough that the country does not default but high enough that the loan is never repaid.
Let's retroactively reset the interest rate at something fair - say what Germany paid over the same period. Then recalculate how much Greece owes based on this more generous interest rate. That way not a cent of Greece's debt is waived and so there's little incentive for Greece to lie next time, but every banker who thought they'd get rich by charging huge interest rates in expectation of a bailout is left with a very modest profit.
Also I agree on prison terms. I think there's plenty of people on both sides that would have acted differently if they'd thought they'd end behind bars. Let's give the upcoming generation of fat cats something to think about
And what, make a whole heap of European bankers really rich?
Those loans were made irresponsibly, to a country that the bankers knew could not afford to repay them. The people who made them didn't expect to get paid back by Greece, they expected to get paid back by another EMF bailout of Greece.
Yeah, some responsibility lies on Greece for taking money they couldn't repay, but I think more lies on European bankers for giving Greece money they knew couldn't be repaid. It's time for Greece to default, have its debt wiped and be left to recover. That will mean some European banks lose a lot of money. If that's your money, then perhaps you should have thought about that before you lent it to someone clearly unable to avoid bankruptcy.
Sure, and delegated authority over an account is a well established process at all banks. It would be technically easy to add your trusted friend to your list of 'authorised users' and have them able to withdraw the money. Or issue your friend with their own card linked to your account.
Yup, SSMS is far, far better than pgAdmin. SSIS is years ahead of any postgres ETL tool. There's a bunch of other awesome features in SQL Server too - from memory merge doesn't work in Postgres, procedures/functions are harder to use and...
I wasn't trying to say Postgres is all-round better than SQL Server. But there are a few things including R integration and spatial queries where Postgres is so far ahead that you are probably better to put up with the weaknesses.
MS SQL has a lot of good things going for it - but what you're asking for is one area where Postgres just runs rings around it. You can achieve similar benefits in MS using a CLR but it will be faster and easier in Postgres. Unless you have some compelling reason to stay MS, I suggest you take the hit and learn a new platform.
OLAP got its stellar retrieval speed through lots of precomputation and that just isn't compatible with where the whole big data stuff is going. I'd guess instead they will bring in a NoSQL database as a per-table query engine and use that as the OLAP replacement.
No - MS will only need to release any changes they make to R.
This sort of thing comes up quite often and largely comes down to coupling. If Microsoft included R code in the binary of SQL Server then they would run into complications. However as long as they keep R on its own and arrange interprocess communication sensibly, they will not be affected by the GPL.
It's quite likely MS will modify R, e.g. writing low level routines for getting data out of SQL without needing to go via ODBC and those sort of changes will need to be released. It's also possible MS will want things like.RData readers for putting into SQL and similar - and they might choose to do a clean-room implementation of such bits rather than calling out to R for the loading code in order to avoid too tight coupling.
Incidentially, this has been done before. The PgR project gives Postgres (BSD) has tight coupling with R (GPL) without requiring Postgres to be relicenced. Tableau also released similar features, though they don't add much value at this stage.
Because it's just like new for a tidy little discount. Why pay full price when you don't have to?
The $79k car you picked out had a couple options that put it to $91k new, so you're getting a one year old car for 15% off. I think that's about right.
The controls was a bit excessive with 8 movement keys, 8 gun aiming keys plus action and shoot - you certainly got good at contorted finger manipulation in order to wander around a room with your gun always pointing the right way. But very few future games beat the immersion that was created - I think the way that a single bullet sunk you lead to much better immersion.
Er, yes, of course it is. Tesla is not an Iowa company. Iowa customers are. When they buy off Tesla, that's an interstate commercial transaction.
it's pretty damn hard for a state like iowa to tell Tesla what they're doing is illegal when Tesla can point to a federal ruling that preventing car manufacturers selling cars to the public is legal. Until Tesla have that ruling all they can point to is legal opinions which carry a lot less weight.
Not a lot. Say you design a new heuristic for playing chess, you've now built a chess engine.
Say you build a tool which people can load new heuristics into - perhaps a variation of best first with your own pruning algorithm, you've now built an AI engine.
Accountant - agreed, my point was many people refer to 'accountant' where they mean bookkeeper. I do not see computers replacing good accountants - if anything it will make them more important as the better raw data gives them more ability to make a difference.
But I completely disagree on your description of what current accounting software can do. Computers are opening the post (email) for remittance advice, chasing short payments and reconciling the ledger. They flag over-payments but leave chasing them to a person - too much thought required on the communication. They also collate expense receipts and chase staff for the various tasks coded into workflow (singoff from immediate manager, tracking against budget and authorisation limit, flagging suspicious values to appropriate people, etc). Paper invoices are also handled - scan it and it's emailed off to manually assisted invoice creation (too much variation in invoices for risking automated loading). Oh, and all purchases are also directly exported to the bank where you can configure them to either just be paid or require final authorisation depending on how reliable you feel your setup is..
They already integrate with stock tracking systems and so eyes they do depreciate stock, handle damage and lost items. Stock isn't something I have firsthand experience managing, but I haven't heard any complaints. Timesheeting and payroll are also fully integrated and I know they both work well.
Current state... I see an opportunity to help someone out. I create a quote in the accounting software. I email that quote to them and if they decide to go ahead then they create a corresponding PO in their ERP system. That process automatically checks against signoff limits, obtains approval from direct manager, etc. That is then automatically emailed to me where the accounting software automatically matches it to the quote. I then deliver the work and get them to sign it off. Once that's done I click a button to convert the quote or the PO into an invoice, adjust if necessary and click send. Again now their system receives that invoice, matches it to the PO and emails my contact to validate the work was signed off as complete. Then it schedules it for payment and sends remittenance advice. That gets matched by my software which sets the invoice expected date. When the payment is made it reconciles against this invoice. If they don't pay then it automatically kicks off whatever workflow I choose to set up - friendly reminders by email with summary of outstanding and a note to me.
Sure, it's not perfect and there's still a need for bookkeepers. Someone screws up the reference code on the payment, accidentally double pays. Subcontractors who charge a different rate depending on which client they're working on, reversing out declined expense claims, client or supplier correspondence beyond simply sending out statements, etc. But compare it to say 5 years ago - I wouldn't feel very safe as a book keeper.
Computers _are_ replacing accountants. Or more precisely computers are replacing bookkeepers and a lot of so called accountants are actually bookkeepers.
Most of the drudgery is leaving the profession now. What's left will be much more interesting and valuable work, but I suspect there will be a bit of a glut in lower end accountants.
Slashdot Mirror
So intelligence is 'doing things the way humans do'? There can't be any other type of intelligence?
If a problem requires intelligence to solve, then any solution to that problem on a computer is artificial intelligence regardless of what 'parlour tricks' are used. And yeah, humans are really good at pattern recognition while computers are really good at arithmetic so I would expect artificial intelligence to differ significantly from human intelligence.
PS: This AI evaluates significantly fewer moves than deep-blue. A brute force search of go is woefully ineffective no matter how much processing power you have.
This is a beautiful post, thank you.
Pinging a cellphone means setting up a portable cellphone tower. All cellphones within range will report their existence to you, which you can then cross reference against your missing person's IMEI number...Through triangulation/multiple different towers you can work out the location quite accurately.
Of course this is not generally available to the public. For a start you need to have a portable tower (or borrow a few from a local telco) and secondly you'll need to cross-reference his phone number to look up his IMEI.
I'm curious how a bunch of students were able to get past the two restrictions - I can imagine a uni having some portable towers lying around for research purposes, but how would they have found out his IMEI number?
Yes I was thinking something similar.
We recently had a situation where the business decided to buy the field force all iPads because they were going to change the whole business process around a new app which happens to only run on iOS. Midway through the project we discovered that a few of the field force have a critical business application which only runs on windows.
We couldn't have used this specific solution since it is Android rather than iOS, but if it had been available then it would have been very attractive.
No, they should only store the hash.
It's standard sales jargon and so would be well understood at Dreamforce (salesforce's big conference). Leads are people you've met which might want to buy something in the future. If you feel a lead is starting to show meaningful interest then you mark them as an opportunity. Opportunities have sizes (how much can you sell to this person) as well as risk (how likely am I to land this sale).
So "Show me my most at-risk opportunities" makes perfect sense - give me a list of opportunities which have been assigned to me where their risk is is in say the top 5.
I don't agree with this.
Roughly 90% of owners clean up their dog's poo. Requiring the vast majority to pay for the actions of a minority will a) not incentivise the minority to change behaviour and b) punish people that are doing the right thing (e.g. why should I keep being tidy when I'm paying to be untidy).
You'd get much the same effect putting the whole poo pickup tax onto general rates - lots of innocent people paying for the actions of the minority.
I initially thought the idea of using DNA was crazy but as long as the test can be made cheap enough I have decided I support it. Whack the people you catch with a big fine ($500?) and publicise the heck out of what you're doing, and I think the behaviour will suddenly trickle off to the point that the programme becomes cost effective.
Not sure I was quite as strong on 'Greeks are victims' as you make out. That said, I like the idea of using Poland as a comparison country. Let's agree that Poland has been far more sensible than Greece over the last 10 years, and so isn't in anywhere near the same hole Greece is now in.
So, what now? Greece can only pay the creditors if someone gives them more money. You won't, so assuming other people take your stance, that means the creditors won't be paid. After that comes banks being refused cash and the general populace unable to withdraw cash.
Within Greece the next step will be a spectacular depression with unemployment so high it makes the current 25% look like a dream. Eventually the Drachma devalues enough that Greece emerges and everyone left gets on with their lives. Maybe 10 years of that? Outside Greece the cost of the default will be increased interest rates across Europe for a number of years.
If they stay with the Euro that's a little more complicated since they can't devalue their currency. I'm not really sure what would happen there, my gut reaction is the rise of a barter economy / informal currency.
That's my guess, what's yours?
Let's continue whoever57's analogy.
Your family have lived in a house for generations. A few years ago the house needed a bunch of work adding rooms and generally upgrading it to fit your new status as members of the respectable middle class. You didn't have the cash but you had the status and rates were cheap, so you took out a bank loan to cover it. As that loan came due, your husband lost his high paying job and had to take a cut.
So you begged with the banks and eventually they agreed to lend you more money, but at a higher interest rate. Paying more interest on less money is tough, the house continues to need work to keep it in good repair and you continued to not quite make ends meet. You go to the banks and beg for more money so you can keep paying the interest and repairs but the banks say no, they say you need to live within your means.
You promise to do that, and you quickly 'adjust' your finances to show how it's all going to work out. The bank sees through the farce immediately but he's a greedy fellow and with you agreeing to add 200 more basis points onto the rate, it's gotta be good for him. If you default, your cousin will probably cover it anyway so it isn't much risk.
You keep struggling, and you have to beg the banks for money every month. This starts to annoy and worry the banker, so he starts taking an increasing interest in your life. Don't do a good repair here, just leave the window broken... Don't send your kids off to uni, educate them at the local community college. These things save a little cash, but they also lead to you having to spend a whole lot more time looking after the house instead of making money. Even worse, your kids having a lower level of education means they can't get such a high paying job to help out which is a real problem since your grandparents have now retired and are moving back in.
You get desperate and crawl to the bank begging for more and more. They look over the situation and say, well, maybe, but you have to cancel all expenditure. House repairs, who needs them? Further education, completely abolished!
You hold a family conference. What to do? Give in to what the bank wants and destroy your family's future? Or default and have the bank potentially take possession of your family home. Put like that, it isn't such a hard call, you tell the bank to f. off and wait too see what will happen.
Who's at fault? You for living beyond your means? Yep. You for lying to the bank? Yep. The bank for accepting such an obvious lie? Yep. The bank for loaning money to someone that couldn't possibly pay it back? Yep. The bank for insisting on austerity measures that will have a negative long term fiscal impact, yep.
Does that help?
I would guess over half the debt has been repaid, depending on how you count. The austerity measures have been running for 7 _years_ now, and the interest rates Greece has been paying are pretty steep compared to what a government would normally pay. The whole situation reminds me of Africa, where the interest rates are set low enough that the country does not default but high enough that the loan is never repaid.
Let's retroactively reset the interest rate at something fair - say what Germany paid over the same period. Then recalculate how much Greece owes based on this more generous interest rate. That way not a cent of Greece's debt is waived and so there's little incentive for Greece to lie next time, but every banker who thought they'd get rich by charging huge interest rates in expectation of a bailout is left with a very modest profit.
Also I agree on prison terms. I think there's plenty of people on both sides that would have acted differently if they'd thought they'd end behind bars. Let's give the upcoming generation of fat cats something to think about
*shrug* You can't? I'm pretty sure it was bankers doing it.
And... do you really believe the bankers lending them the money didn't know?
And what, make a whole heap of European bankers really rich?
Those loans were made irresponsibly, to a country that the bankers knew could not afford to repay them. The people who made them didn't expect to get paid back by Greece, they expected to get paid back by another EMF bailout of Greece.
Yeah, some responsibility lies on Greece for taking money they couldn't repay, but I think more lies on European bankers for giving Greece money they knew couldn't be repaid. It's time for Greece to default, have its debt wiped and be left to recover. That will mean some European banks lose a lot of money. If that's your money, then perhaps you should have thought about that before you lent it to someone clearly unable to avoid bankruptcy.
Sure, and delegated authority over an account is a well established process at all banks. It would be technically easy to add your trusted friend to your list of 'authorised users' and have them able to withdraw the money. Or issue your friend with their own card linked to your account.
Yup, SSMS is far, far better than pgAdmin. SSIS is years ahead of any postgres ETL tool. There's a bunch of other awesome features in SQL Server too - from memory merge doesn't work in Postgres, procedures/functions are harder to use and ...
I wasn't trying to say Postgres is all-round better than SQL Server. But there are a few things including R integration and spatial queries where Postgres is so far ahead that you are probably better to put up with the weaknesses.
Yeah exactly.
MS SQL has a lot of good things going for it - but what you're asking for is one area where Postgres just runs rings around it. You can achieve similar benefits in MS using a CLR but it will be faster and easier in Postgres. Unless you have some compelling reason to stay MS, I suggest you take the hit and learn a new platform.
I'm guessing they'll slowly phase out OLAP.
OLAP got its stellar retrieval speed through lots of precomputation and that just isn't compatible with where the whole big data stuff is going. I'd guess instead they will bring in a NoSQL database as a per-table query engine and use that as the OLAP replacement.
No - MS will only need to release any changes they make to R.
This sort of thing comes up quite often and largely comes down to coupling. If Microsoft included R code in the binary of SQL Server then they would run into complications. However as long as they keep R on its own and arrange interprocess communication sensibly, they will not be affected by the GPL.
It's quite likely MS will modify R, e.g. writing low level routines for getting data out of SQL without needing to go via ODBC and those sort of changes will need to be released. It's also possible MS will want things like .RData readers for putting into SQL and similar - and they might choose to do a clean-room implementation of such bits rather than calling out to R for the loading code in order to avoid too tight coupling.
Incidentially, this has been done before. The PgR project gives Postgres (BSD) has tight coupling with R (GPL) without requiring Postgres to be relicenced. Tableau also released similar features, though they don't add much value at this stage.
Because it's just like new for a tidy little discount. Why pay full price when you don't have to?
The $79k car you picked out had a couple options that put it to $91k new, so you're getting a one year old car for 15% off. I think that's about right.
The controls was a bit excessive with 8 movement keys, 8 gun aiming keys plus action and shoot - you certainly got good at contorted finger manipulation in order to wander around a room with your gun always pointing the right way. But very few future games beat the immersion that was created - I think the way that a single bullet sunk you lead to much better immersion.
Er, yes, of course it is. Tesla is not an Iowa company. Iowa customers are. When they buy off Tesla, that's an interstate commercial transaction.
it's pretty damn hard for a state like iowa to tell Tesla what they're doing is illegal when Tesla can point to a federal ruling that preventing car manufacturers selling cars to the public is legal. Until Tesla have that ruling all they can point to is legal opinions which carry a lot less weight.
Not a lot. Say you design a new heuristic for playing chess, you've now built a chess engine.
Say you build a tool which people can load new heuristics into - perhaps a variation of best first with your own pruning algorithm, you've now built an AI engine.
Yes, they've 'solved' it. Basically when you hit the start button you take liability.
First it lost its planetary status, and now the moon is classed as a planet for this competition.
Accountant - agreed, my point was many people refer to 'accountant' where they mean bookkeeper. I do not see computers replacing good accountants - if anything it will make them more important as the better raw data gives them more ability to make a difference.
But I completely disagree on your description of what current accounting software can do. Computers are opening the post (email) for remittance advice, chasing short payments and reconciling the ledger. They flag over-payments but leave chasing them to a person - too much thought required on the communication. They also collate expense receipts and chase staff for the various tasks coded into workflow (singoff from immediate manager, tracking against budget and authorisation limit, flagging suspicious values to appropriate people, etc). Paper invoices are also handled - scan it and it's emailed off to manually assisted invoice creation (too much variation in invoices for risking automated loading). Oh, and all purchases are also directly exported to the bank where you can configure them to either just be paid or require final authorisation depending on how reliable you feel your setup is..
They already integrate with stock tracking systems and so eyes they do depreciate stock, handle damage and lost items. Stock isn't something I have firsthand experience managing, but I haven't heard any complaints. Timesheeting and payroll are also fully integrated and I know they both work well.
Current state... I see an opportunity to help someone out. I create a quote in the accounting software. I email that quote to them and if they decide to go ahead then they create a corresponding PO in their ERP system. That process automatically checks against signoff limits, obtains approval from direct manager, etc. That is then automatically emailed to me where the accounting software automatically matches it to the quote. I then deliver the work and get them to sign it off. Once that's done I click a button to convert the quote or the PO into an invoice, adjust if necessary and click send. Again now their system receives that invoice, matches it to the PO and emails my contact to validate the work was signed off as complete. Then it schedules it for payment and sends remittenance advice. That gets matched by my software which sets the invoice expected date. When the payment is made it reconciles against this invoice. If they don't pay then it automatically kicks off whatever workflow I choose to set up - friendly reminders by email with summary of outstanding and a note to me.
Sure, it's not perfect and there's still a need for bookkeepers. Someone screws up the reference code on the payment, accidentally double pays. Subcontractors who charge a different rate depending on which client they're working on, reversing out declined expense claims, client or supplier correspondence beyond simply sending out statements, etc. But compare it to say 5 years ago - I wouldn't feel very safe as a book keeper.
.
Computers _are_ replacing accountants. Or more precisely computers are replacing bookkeepers and a lot of so called accountants are actually bookkeepers.
Most of the drudgery is leaving the profession now. What's left will be much more interesting and valuable work, but I suspect there will be a bit of a glut in lower end accountants.